Minor melee mechanics mystery

[Not an octopus]

Hi everyone
Can someone shed some light on a question about melee weapons?  Some weapons have a statistic listed as "Stun x number". 
How does this work?  For example, the hammer says "Stun x 3".  Does this do additional stun damage over the base attack?  Looking at the ruleset, and at some people's calculations, it seems a little different to this. 

[Dioxine]

It does more additional stun damage over the lethal damage. Base additional stun damage for most weapons is x0.0-x0.5 of the HP damage they dealt to the target. The hammer does x0.0-x1.5.

[Nygmus]

It took me a while to figure out that this didn't necessarily make those weapons ideal for capture use.

Oh, the number of people I killed with bats to the skull before I got prods and batons in my first campaign...

It did make hammers real good for live capturing Lobstermen, though.

[Not an octopus]

Thank you for the replies - that is good to know.  (Also thank you Dioxine for the incredible Piratez mod!)

Heh heh, yes, I also killed a few dudes with the baseball bat before I figured that wasn't the best plan for captures.

[Dioxine]

Bats should be a little bit more useful for captures in the next ver., since their base damage is Stun and it will be governed by a single 50-150% damage roll, without a second *0...100% roll reducing the final damage. Same with Small Launchers & Stun Grenades. Knuckles, handles and shields will probably have to be reduced in power/scaling, as they will become far more fail-safe. Electric stun weapons, I plan to keep highly random as they are now.

[Nygmus]

How do you feel about the earlier ranged stun options right now?

I get that they're almost certainly intentionally undertuned to a degree, but both domestic shotgun rubber slugs and harpoon tranqs feel like more of a waste of time right now than anything else. Rubber slugs do so little stun damage that it seems to take two to four hits to down a Neophyte or civilian on low difficulty, and stun grenades seem to compete hard against harpoons for the same spot on a squad.

Every time I've tried to use rubber slugs or harpoon tranqs, I've gotten girls killed in situations where the enemy wouldn't have been up to retaliate if I'd been bumrushing them with melee options. But this could just be me being inept at the game, since you've got lots of players better at the game than I am.

[ivandogovich]

How do you feel about the earlier ranged stun options right now?

I get that they're almost certainly intentionally undertuned to a degree, but both domestic shotgun rubber slugs and harpoon tranqs feel like more of a waste of time right now than anything else. Rubber slugs do so little stun damage that it seems to take two to four hits to down a Neophyte or civilian on low difficulty, and stun grenades seem to compete hard against harpoons for the same spot on a squad.

Every time I've tried to use rubber slugs or harpoon tranqs, I've gotten girls killed in situations where the enemy wouldn't have been up to retaliate if I'd been bumrushing them with melee options. But this could just be me being inept at the game, since you've got lots of players better at the game than I am.

I also quickly gave up on rubber slugs and tranqs.  It seems like they should be effective against the unarmored twinkies, but all they really seem to do is provide accuracy training. 

I did have a bit of success with the leather whip early on.

The first real ranged option, imo, is the Seductress.  Until the Small Launcher is viable she's the best.  Probably better than the zapper, too.  Even before knowing voodoo power ratings, you can toss this on a gal with 80 bravery and go to town.

[Drasnighta]

Urgh, I seem to have NO LUCK with the Small Launcher and Stun Bombs...  4-5 to drop anything of value...  Even when I've switched up to the one handed Shoulder Launcher in my late-time game.... 

[legionof1]

Alot of the issue with stun weapons comes from how dmg works. First dmg roll(50-150% or 0-200%). Resistance comes before armor. Lots of things have stun resistance, sometimes quite substantial. Then need to exceed armor. By the end of the sequence usually very little is actually done. And then natural stun recovery. Some foes are just too difficult to stun to make it worth the effort beyond the first capture for tech.

[Arthanor]

That's where chem munitions become very interesting for softening up. Things like an advanced blunderbuss with chem munitions can entirely strip a target of it's armor (on the facing hit, remember which one!), making it easier to handle them after (if not outright killing them...). That doesn't work for stun launchers since explosions hit under armor and that's hard to damage, but it's great for melee or directional stuns (like harpoons or .. whatever the stunpistol thing is).