Weapon Discussion Thread

[Surrealistik]

More seriously I think Gauss should be overhauled to be the definitive 'armor penetrating' weapon.

Namely it ignores 50% armour (and maybe some Piercing resistance), but deals less damage.

If possible it would also be able to penetrate walls in the following manner:

#1: Gauss projectile connects with wall.
#2: Effective HP for purposes of determining whether or not it is destroyed is reduced by armour pen % (50). Gauss projectile damage is then applied to the wall.
#3: If the Gauss projectile destroys the wall, the post reduction HP per #3 is deducted from its damage. The projectile then continues on its merry way until all of its damage is absorbed by walls/targets.

The same process is applied versus a target: If the Gauss projectile overkills the target, it continues to travel after deducting the target's remaining health from the damage.


For example, a Gauss Musket deals 70 Piercing. It encounters a 60 HP wall. The wall's effective HP is reduced by the Gauss Musket's armour pen of 50% to 30 HP. The wall takes 70 damage and is destroyed. The wall's effective HP of 30 is deducted from the Gauss Musket projectile's power, reducing it to 40, and the projectile continues moving until it strikes and kills a Researcher with 30 remaining HP. The projectile's power is reduced by the Researcher's HP from 40 to 10, and continues to move until it hits a brick wall with 40 HP and fails to penetrate its effective 20 HP with 10 power remaining.


Basically you have Gauss weapons not unlike those awesome ones from Eraser, that are effectively inverse shotguns: most effective against low HP, heavily armoured targets, least effective against high HP low armour targets.

[Dioxine]

Gauss weapons should have Gaussian damage, normal weapons should not.

Rather than being a higher tier of weapons, Gaus weapons are just weapons for people who like Gaussian distributions. There everyone is happy. 

Thinking about it, I see that if any weapons should follow gaussian distro, it should be plasma weapons, due to plasma's explosive nature. I'm reluctant to beef them in such a way, but I see no principled obstacles against it. Do we do gaussian plasma?

[ohartenstein23]

And make it even more scary when it shows up before you have appropriate armor ready?  Of course.

[Arthanor]

Gauss weapons should have Gaussian damage, normal weapons should not.

Rather than being a higher tier of weapons, Gaus weapons are just weapons for people who like Gaussian distributions. There everyone is happy. 

That was lol worthy, thank you.

Gaussian Gauss weapons

Thinking about it, I see that if any weapons should follow gaussian distro, it should be plasma weapons, due to plasma's explosive nature. I'm reluctant to beef them in such a way, but I see no principled obstacles against it. Do we do gaussian plasma?

Plasma weapons would be a great candidate for this conceptually. Doesn't matter if it's your foot or your head that's hit by plasma, the incredible heat/shock-wave generated by being point blank where the containment field fails and releases the plasma should be deadly. Having your head a body-length away shouldn't be enough. It would also help high-end armor stand up to it by reducing the odds of tail-end high damage killing gals outright.

I do agree with ohartenstein23 though, that this would make hideout defences even more deadly until proper plasma protection is developed. But that might not be a bad thing, force-field type armors are quite undervalued currently due to the low armor value and how common piercing type weapons are, so making plasma more reliably deadly would make these more attractive as base defense outfits. I used to value the enhanced smokey armor with some shooting buff and forcefields for base defenses on my first playthrough, but now assassin armor has replaced it since smoke isn't as much of an issue and assassin has much better stats. If you kill them first, they can't kill you, usually.

As for Gauss getting buffed, I disagree. Lasers are the designated armor piercers already (with ~ -30% armor) and Gauss is the "high damage, brute force, unrefined" weapon (thus fitting well with Mercs).

[Surrealistik]

As for Gauss getting buffed, I disagree. Lasers are the designated armor piercers already (with ~ -30% armor) and Gauss is the "high damage, brute force, unrefined" weapon (thus fitting well with Mercs).

That's more the purview of plasma.

I get that laser kind of has this niche with several of its weapons, but that said, gauss is going to tread on either plasma's toes, or laser's toes, and in balance it makes more sense for gauss to lean towards armour pen than brute force. Laser is early-mid game armour pen (excepting outliers like the Lascannon), gauss is mid-late game armour pen, just as plasma is the mid-late brute force counterpart to early-mid shotguns and conventional heavy weapons.

[Dioxine]

Lol your reality-bending skills are getting rusty it's ridiculous to claim that Gauss is any kind of counterpart to Plasma, with Plasma requiring a ton of research to use, while Gauss being equippable off the first dead enemy who was carrying it. Gauss is a direct counterpart to laser, actually (well you can't make gauss ammo but you can farm it perhaps even easier than laser ammo).
There is a niche for solid slug armor-piercers, but it's not the Gauss that will fit that bill.

[Surrealistik]

Lol your reality-bending skills are getting rusty it's ridiculous to claim that Gauss is any kind of counterpart to Plasma, with Plasma requiring a ton of research to use, while Gauss being equippable off the first dead enemy who was carrying it. Gauss is a direct counterpart to laser, actually (well you can't make gauss ammo but you can farm it perhaps even easier than laser ammo).
There is a niche for solid slug armor-piercers, but it's not the Gauss that will fit that bill.

I didn't say anything remotely like Gauss was a counterpart to Plasma; I said that Gauss/Railgun style weapons make more sense as a step up from lasers as mid-late armour penetrating weaponry, than a step down from Plasma as mid-late brute force weaponry.

That said, Gauss/Railgun weaponry as is definitely cleaves closer to Plasma than Lasers in terms of power and overall effectiveness.

[KateMicucci]

Rippers, chainsaws autoax and fusion torches should have the highly random damage property so that they can still get through walls on TFTD settings.

[Dioxine]

Afaik the global tftd setting does nothing now. Also, 'highly random damage' only means that the weapon uses UFO, not TFTD setting, despite being a melee weapon.

[KateMicucci]

Ok. I thought that highly random damage attribute meant that it used the UFO formula even if the player had set the game to TFTD damage. I haven't played the newest version yet but noticed that rippers could cut through mansion walls on UFO settings but not TFTD settings.

[Dioxine]

So I was wrong, but I'm only repeating hearsay - I never tested the global TFTD damage setting as it holds no interest to me. It goes down like this: weapons which are intended to use UFO damage have the damage roll undefined (no extra line), to use default rules, so probably the TFTD global rule changes it. Melee weapons in general have forced TFTD damage rules. I could also force UFO damage rule on all weapons with undefined damage rule, but that's a lot of, I think unneccessary, work.

[KateMicucci]

Do the 1 tile range weapons like ripper count as "melee" weapons for the purpose of applying the TFTD formula by default?

[Dioxine]

These all are using the default damage formula (which normally is UFO), while real melee weapons (like swords) always use TFTD damage formula.