HelmetHair is right on one thing: If we have time/energy to waste in arguing about games, we have pretty decent lives. First world problems and all that. It is funny to see how us privileged people can get riled up on such little things. I think his comment was mostly to poke fun at the situation
A kind of "I stepped back, realized it's a minuscule problem and how lucky we are to be able to consider it as something worth spending time on. This is all just fun and nothing personal/life affecting. Let's be chill." with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Back "on topic": Realism in physics and realism in story are two different things. Striving for one does not necessarily imply striving for the other. There's plenty of stories with unrealistic physics upon which great, sort of believable, entertaining stories are built. (ex.: Dune Lasgun-Shield interactions: why the hell would the gun blow up from hitting the shield? The shield is sending something back it it in a directed way?! And they both have in them power sources as powerful as nuclear bombs yet man portable?
Please It's done because the author needed it to tell his story and wanted knife fights. Also, why not spears/swords? Anyhow.. this isn't about Dune sorry). There are also unbelievable stories in which the physics are totally fine, or any other combination.
Solarius has a story he wants to tell and does it with this mod. Whether you think it's a realistic one or not (and whether you enjoy it) is up to you and should have little bearing on the story because it's Solarius' to tell (since it is a work in evolution, fair, constructive criticism should be, and I feel is, welcome). If you don't want to experience the struggle of a secret organization trying to fight the alien invasion and terran bureaucracy at the same time, and obviously that's the story Solarius wants to tell, then just go to another story: Either lead the rebellious girls of the dystopian future, the poor soldiers fighting aliens with a hard-on, or the heroic soldiers fighting for the council and the good of Earth, something else, or just vanilla with some extra stuff. There's quite some choice!
Now in any XCom mod, the experience relies on combat and trying to achieve believable combat is a universal goal because nobody is interested in the story of "and everyone has wonky guns" (which includes both "guns that do nothing most of the time" and "guns that always kill" as both are ridiculous). Of course, there are different philosophies about what believable combat is and how it should be approximated using the current engine. The discussion has already occurred in an already lengthy thread for Piratez. I, for one, have been convinced a while ago by Dioxine that the flat distribution works best given the engine's fighting mechanics as a whole (it makes low armor still valuable, high armor less impervious, for one thing, which I consider good). Should we use a different distribution if the engine was better? Of course! But the engine is not better, it's the engine we have. Using it, many, including two of our foremost modders of which one is the author of this mod, believe that the 0-200% distribution is best. If the actual argument of how it works better
given the engine doesn't convince you, at least the fact that it is a reasoned decision should placate you from complaining too regularly about it instead trying to support their really outstanding, entertaining and
free work.
Also, luckily, it's a single player game and you can mod their master mod without affecting anyone else's experience, so there's an easy (a fraction of the work Dioxine and Solarius have put in their mod) way to "fix" guns to improve your own experience.
