[MOD] Eddie's Idea Lab

[Eddie]

--  Update april 24th: version 1.2 --

Made compatibel with Piratez 0.98D1
Added old Battleflag and Pipes
Some minor balance updates
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Hey folks!

I've been toying around with the ruleset for a bit and came up with some ideas I want to share with you. Try them out, play a mission, see if you like them or not. Modfile attached at the bottom, extract it to your Piratez base folder. Then you also need to enable it in the "Mods" section in options.


Spicing things up
Some ideas to make items more interesting

- Blackmarch SMG
Damage changed from "30" to "18 + FIRING*0.2". Thats 4 more damage than the Officer's Pistol. I felt an early game skill based rifle would spice things up and the Blackmarch SMG is the perfect candidate for that. The description says it's a somewhat special gun and quite rare. Also, it has just one ammo type.

- Tommy Gun and Manstopper (Colt .45)
They now fire .45 hollow tip bullets. That means they do more damage vs unarmored but less vs armored. Power is unchanged, but they get ArmorEffectiveness: +10%, ToHealth: 1.8, 50-150% damage range. Firing at reticulans, you would need about one shot for the hybrids, two for the sirens and three for the sectogre. It is more powerful than other guns, but the Tommy Gun is not that easy to get and the Manstopper is not that accurate.
How does that spice things up? Without this, the Tommy Gun becomes obsolete (in my opinion) once you get plastersteel ammo for the Autogun. The Manstopper is very similar to the Snubby (well, not anymore!). Now these guns are more distinguished.

- Light Machine Gun
Not so much spicing things up, but improving (again, my opinion). I was a bit disappointed by the LMG as I couldn't figure out what role I should use this weapon in. For an assault weapon (frontline) I would compare it to the Autogun, but for medium range combat where you move in and out of cover, the Autogun gets 8 shots vs 5 for the LMG, negating the higher damage of the LMG. Also, the Autogun is more accurate at medium range. As long range firesupport (vantage point, not moving to shoot, target usually 20+ tiles away), the LMG is not accurate enough. So I decided to improve the LMG in the machine gun direction (having the Heavy Machine Gun in mind) and gave it an increased autofire range of 22 and a slower dropoff of 1% per tile. I did not playtest this much but the LMG should be usable as long range fire support now. Not sniper distance though, there is still a dropoff.

-Shotgun Rubber Shells
Minor thing here. The Military Shotgun (and it's upgrade) can now use these. I like the idea of the rubber shells, but the Domestic Shotgun is just not accurate enough that I would use them. I tried it, it was a pain. The Military and the Domestic share the normal shotgun shells, it is reasonable that the Military can also fire the rubber shells. The Domestic is not obsolete with this, as you cannot buy the Military and the Domestic still has acid shells as unique trait.


More dangerous early game
I increased the damage on some frequently encountered lowtech enemy weapons. Your armor is so good that more often than not you take no damage from these weapons, so this damage increase makes them a little more dangerous.

Damage increases
- SMG: 20 -> 23
- Spraygun: 24 -> 26
These two are probably still not much of a threat as they are just not that accurate.
- RCF Carbine (M16): 26 -> 27
- Homefront (AK47): got -10% armor effectiveness. AK47 rounds are said to have good performance vs armor
- Assault SMG: got -20% armor effectiveness. Here I have the P90 in mind, which has ammo designed to be armor piercing.
- Shotguns: buckshot is 22x8, Domestic/Military shells are 22x8 as well, Heavy is 24x8 and Combat is 23x6. Sawed Off and Doublebarrel got increased reload time (20) to prevent them from firing faster (reload included) than the Heavy. Blunderbuss ist still better than all of these with it's 4 shot auto for 24x6 damage (unchanged).
Heavy Slugs are 32x4, but I'm not too happy with that. No idea ho to properly balance the Heavy Slugs.


Other balance tweaks
Now this is just my personal taste. You could also call it my personal vendetta vs bows and fuso knives. I still use them alot, so they are still quite good. I just don't want them to be armor busters. Hunting Bow, Combat Bow, Fuso Knives and Trowing Stars get 50-150% damage range and a little less scaling.

- Hunting Bow: got a snap for 25 tu and aimed for 35 tu, max range reduced to 32. Damage 5 + THROWING*0.4
- Combat Bow: aimed for 40 tu. Damage 10 + THROWING*0.4 + STRENGTH*0.1
- Fuso Knives: stack size 4, Damage 15 + THROWING*0.5
- Throwing Stars: Damage 10 + THROWING*0.4

- Attack dog: Increased energy regeneration rate.
- Battleflag and Pirate Pipes: don't reduce energy on target (pre 0.98D state). The energy cost was just too much to make them useable. To compensate I would like to restrict use to one flag/pipes per craft but the engine doesn't give me that option yet. You have to follow that rule yourself.

[Eddie]

Just noticed the file was downloded two times the second after I posted this. WTF? Some bot checking our files here???

[sabrecat]

Fuso knives nerf yesssss

I'll put this in my game for sure, and post here if anything seems odd!

[sabrecat]

Played a bit with this today. Not bad! A pogrom that had been going well went pear-shaped when knives and bows utterly failed to stop a determined Humanist MP. I think he even soaked a cannon ball...

One issue: I seem not to be able to load a military shotgun with Shotgun AP shells. Accidental side effect of the rubber shells change?

It's also odd that a bow vanishes entirely after shooting all its arrows. Maybe create a "quiver" ammo item for them instead?

[Eddie]

Updated file in the first post.

Good catch with the shotgun. That was me not fully understanding how a modded ruleset is implemented. Fixed now.

The vanishing bow is a limitation of my implementation, I made the bow behave like the fuso knives. I didn't want to include a seperate quiver of arrows because you would need to have a different one for every bow (damage is tied to ammo), and then you would need to manufacture them too. I've removed the arrows for now until I find a way to avoid the vanishing.

New addition: higher energy regen for dogs. Was 32 per turn, now 45 per turn.

[Eddie]

Updated to be compatible with 0.98D1. Bows got arrows and that needed to be accounted for.

[Hazard]

Homefront Rifle/AK - 7.62x39mm is not particularly good at penetrating armor. Faster rounds like 5.56x45 tend to perform better against hard armor plates, though the difference between these two cartridges is fairly minor in that regard: both are stopped by NIJ level III armor.

Same thing with the Assault SMG/P90. The 5.7×28mm (and other similar PDW cartridges) used in the P90 has good performance against soft body armor, and while this might've been relevant in the 90s when the PDW "concept" was developed and marketed, it's just as useless against modern rifle-grade plates as any other pistol round.

[legionof1]

well the majority of armor in UFO verse outside the new XCOM 2 is not hard plate armor at least up until power armor. Mercs for instance. Their armor is a fibermesh type which small fast rounds are quite good against. A true simulation of real world conditions would need another ballistic damage type besides peirce. Or maybe the high caliber stuff becomes concussive since those are more about brute energy transfer.

[Hazard]

Who knows, maybe the worst soft body armors of 2601 are just as good at stopping conventional firearm projectiles as the best rifle plates of today. That's 600 years of advances in materials science after all.

[Dioxine]

Well, advanced fibermesh can be effective too, for example if it hardens on impact. Or it can have properties of a sandbag, where bullet's energy gets dispersed. It's not only +600 years, it's +600 years of humans dabbling in tech of a civilization old beyond imagine. Realism is hard precisely because there are too many unknown factors. And there's little incentive to go overcomplicated if there's no telling if more complex = better in this case.

[Eddie]

Homefront Rifle/AK - 7.62x39mm is not particularly good at penetrating armor. Faster rounds like 5.56x45 tend to perform better against hard armor plates, though the difference between these two cartridges is fairly minor in that regard: both are stopped by NIJ level III armor.

I was thinking about that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuwR4LLvoc4
At 4:20 is the relevant part.

[Hazard]

That's a concrete block, it's not the same as a ceramic or steel ballistic plate. 7.62x39 does have more muzzle energy than 5.56x45, and in the video probably transfers more of it into that block (though I don't know how much the corner vs. middle shot placement affected the extent to which the block was damaged) but that doesn't automatically equal better performance against armor. Now, my understanding of physics and/or ballistics is very poor, so properly explaining it would be very difficult for me...

[Dioxine]

It depends on the type of the target. Raw penetration, as in artillery's tables, depends on momentum, which AK's projectile has more due to higher mass (the best penetrators for a given energy input are slow & massive). It also carries a bit more energy. However 5.56 NATO causes less friction, so it wastes less energy while penetrating. Also both projectiles are built differently - standard 5.56 NATO is a full-metal-jacket ball ammo, while standard 7.62 mm has a steel core as well, which again might lend to higher penetration. However, that's today's standard ammo... and that's only my theorizing. I've seen no definite proof of better penetration in that video either, just AK making more mess.
Also penetration of what? Concrete? Flak jacket? Wood? Flesh? Ballistic plate? These can vary, and mostly depend on projectile construction when we weigh two so close contestants. Eg. 7.62 WP rounds easily go all the way through a man, without stopping, due to those steel cores; while 5.56 NATO has a tendency to sometimes spin or even shatter, leading to really nasty wounds. It certaily changes direction much more easily on an obstacle due to lower momentum...
We can go on and on like this... and it's not even clear if M-16 and AK derivatives in Piratez are of the same callibre as today, or even if they are, what kind of ammo are they using. It's probably some hand-manufactured crap more often than not.

[Eddie]

In the end it's all just a game, and you can do what you want with it.

What I wanted to do was to have more diversity in weapons. I have found for myself that I would never use the homefront rifle when I had RFC carbines available because they are more accurate. So I tried to find a use for the homefront and thought more penetration power but less accurate might do the trick and fits the weapon (higher bullet energy vs 5.56x45). Kind of like the handcannon.
But you cannot do that much without upsetting the whole balance so changes have to be small. When you have so many weapons they cannot all be that different.

[Rince Wind]

And I hardly use the RCF one either if I can use the Assault Rifle.

Also the AK could be of a 5.45mm variant, or whatever. And I doubt any of these rounds would do good against plaststeel enhanced bodyarmor. Even 7.72x51 NATO should have trouble with that.