I am still using Fuso Knives for close range work. In fact, I don't see how they could completely drop off my inventory. Little, especially as easily accessible, beats ~1% of throwing^2 once throwing is 70+ (ie 49+ damage), especially since that's also more than 100% accuracy! But I'm not here to say they're too good (although I think they were balanced for a version of Piratez where 70+ throwing was MUCH harder to achieve than now.. let alone 90+). The knives made me think about throwing weapons in general.
Ninja Stars, Fuso Knives and Javelins all have a maximum range. Either they work 100% or they don't. Which seems odd. For some reason, I often find myself in situations where, if the enemy were one tile close, I'd destroy them with a few 100% snapshots of 50+ damage, but since they are one tile too far, I can't do anything. Most weapons have accuracy drop offs so the transition is smoother, but not these. It'd even make sense to have the current ridiculous accuracies you can get off 70+ throwing skill: You can hit better further!
But.. since these weapons are really good (well, actually.. only the knives are) and I am suggesting to buff them further, we need to consider some balance. And here comes another function of OXCE that, to my knowledge, is little used: Range based power decrease. Yup, you can hit a fly on the head half the map away, but air drag slowed down the knife so much that the fly shrugs it off... So I'd suggest:
1 - Change maxRange to aimRange and add a snapRange which is a bit lower
2 - Add accuracy dropoff of 5%/tile
3 - Add power dropoff of ... well I don't know.. since I don't understand how OXCE does it. It says: "power RangeReduction: 0.0 #how much power a bullet loses per tile". So that's an absolute number? Or a %? In other words, if I set it to 1, is the weapon loosing: 100%/tile? 1 damage/tile? 1% per tile? Either way, I think something like 5-10%/tile, depending on weapons, would work pretty well. Given #2, it would still be possible to hit more than the current range, but the weapon would stop being good (drop to 50% of damage) at about 10-5 tiles beyond the effective range, regardless of the owner's skill.
As a balance factor for bows (which scale WAY too well compared to guns), something similar could be good too.
Edit: Another thing that bugs me: Bladed weapons and added armors. For the cutlass, it makes sense to get increased armor affect since it is a slashing weapon, however, longswords should fare better since they are able to stab and there are techniques to deal with an armored opponent when using them (they are weapons of the knight era, not of gunfire and low armor like the cutlass) and techblades, being a further development, should suffer even less. For a cutlass at +20% armor, I'd suggest +10% for longswords and 5% for techblades.
