Early Firearms

[Slaughter]

Favorites? Like? Dislike? Useless??

Thoughts:

Flintlock Pistol: I always give one to gals who can shoot somewhat but are good at melee too (pair with a melee). Nice damage for a pistol, can stun with swings. Most early enemies - cultists, ratlings, bandits - are unarmored. Flintylock and Cutlass is a classic.

Musket: Great for sniping ratlings. I often field one or two in missions. Harpoon Gun would be a better version if not for the accuracy penalties. They're also great softeners on some tough targets to stun (like Cultist Zealots).

Rusty Niner: I considered it useless at first, but I saw a good use for weak gals with top sniper skillz. Place lots of aimed shots from afar with it, and it does good killing and trains well. Also better vs armor than flintlock, and hits better too. Assault Pistol obsoletes it tho.

Ol' Shotgun: Not a fan, I prefer domestic with rubbers.

Domestic Shotgun: Great for stunning, decent-ish otherwise.

Spraygun: Good if you can get close, but if you can, why not just hit people instead?

RCF: Useful if you're fighting armored people early on, otherwise stick with flintlock.

Ol' Carbine: RCF + 5. Can stun people with melee gunbutt, so improvement. Also, nice and relatively light.

[Meridian]

Favourite: CAWS (slugs only)

Like: the old Cutlass (before it was renamed and before it got +xx % to armor)

Dislike: Harpoon stun gun

Useless: most of it

[Eddie]

Best early pistol for me is the Blackmarch. High bullet output thanks to 2-shot auto and still quite accurate at longer range. And you get alot of them.

[Solarius Scorch]

Blackmarch products are generally very good, the SMG is my favourite early 2-handed firearm.

[ohartenstein23]

Assault SMG for gals with chainmail and a melee weapon. The decreased 2 handed penalty is offset by kneeling, making it as good as any early handgun for mid range, and the extra autoshot is great at close range when I want to conserve energy.

Heavy shotgun all day for ratman villages.

[KateMicucci]

Early rifles are generally too slow and weak to be useful.

Guns that put out the most lead the fastest tend to perform the best, excepting the ones with crap accuracy like the spraygun. The early guns that get the most use from me are the tommy, heavy shotgun, boarding gun and AMG.

The best sidearms are magnums for long-ranged gals (high accuracy) and sawed offs for melee gals.

None of the early guns are good against decent armor(osiron and up). Use a melee weapon or javelin instead.

On the other hand, the flak cannon, ES lasers, and big ben are all early guns if you're lucky enough.

[ivandogovich]

The first couple months are filled with the delight of loot lust!

My first mission I got a Silver Snake and quickly appropriated it.  Nice aim, but ran out of ammo quick. 

Not a huge fan of the flintlock.  Love the new damage (40), but never tried it as a stun thumper.  Thats a great idea. Usually, I grab handles for that.

I'll shove niners and black march pistols in, and even pack a hold out pistol or two, for gals with one slot in low inventory.

My upgrades in pistols that I move to as soon as possible are Clockwork guns.  (60 Acc! Amazing 3Xrds of 40 damage).  My one melee tank gal, carries a techblade and clockwork with about 10 reloads.  She can fire off 6 rds per turn.  Very nice.

Smart pistols are terrific too, and I store up assault pistols from loot to crank these out when available.  They remain QD reaction side arms on gals for quite a while.

I'm a believer in the vanilla SMG, and the Spikey.  I use them all the time for firing training, and once I get incendiary ammo, I use them for alternate light generation for night missions.  The fire damage also makes them useful against even some armored enemies, so they retain utility for quite a while.

I did grab a tommy early, but it quickly went out of use.  Autoguns are great with Snap for Reaction training and a nice rate of fire.  They've suffered a bit against armored enemies, but I've kept them around even for melee gals.

For rifles, I'll use an ol carbine, then Battle/Assault rifles early on (BR with PS ammo is sweet for long range fire).  I've lost my affinity to the boarding gun, because of unreliable distance fire.  I probably should have it on some melee gals, but just haven't been happy with it.

I skipped hunting rifles this time. 

Shot guns are a very hard sell for me as well.  I've read the analysis on the Double Barrel for dealing with Ninjas and it makes terrific sense.  I've stocked up on those and sawed offs, but still, haven't really employed them. 

One my SharkBike gal, I've cut over to the Domestic Shotty with Rubber slugs.  This craft follows targets of interest and shoots down and solos civilian craft.  It is primarily a sniper training craft, designed to train up a gal's accuracy.  The multiple hits required to down civs, makes it great for reaction and firing training. One of my Looted Defender Minus suits goes here to give the gal virtual impunity.  Before this, I've used SMGs and Blackmarchs for basic firing training.

[legionof1]

Got alot of mileage off Linux SMG line in my most recent playthrough. The bravery scaleing lets it beat most rifles and smgs for dmg even with PS ammo in play, provided gal has 70-80 bravery. Also pretty low TU costs compared to other guns. Does fall behind in aimed accuracy but not by a sufficient margin considering the improved aimed range of 22 on the later models.

Considering i've gone almost purely night ops needing more then 20 effective range is a rarity.

[Asheram]

I have good experience with the heavy shotgun.  You kind of have to haul ass in order to get into proper range with it though.

[Starving Poet]

Early on when stamina was a high commodity, I really liked having a blackmarch pistol on my melee girls - it was really nice being able to get in a hit or two and if they were still up, use the double-tap to finish them off.

I used the carbines a ton - damage was low, but shot volume was great.  The shotgun fix was put in after I had some better weapons, but any auto-shotguns are just fantastic for unarmored enemies now.

Until the tommy gun, I never used SMGs - in hindsight, that was probably a mistake.  If you get an early ratling villiage, that skorpion with the API ammo would be super useful.  Anything that lights enemies on fire is super useful if you can't reliably kill enemies.

I JUST got my first CAWS... almost two years into the game, that would have been great to have earlier

[Cristao]

Not sure if CAWS is early ... I rate it highly tho and Blunderbuss as well.

[BetaSpectre]

I usually like using shotguns early game, a single pellet can down most opponents. By the time anything pops up that can't be taken down by the sniping shotguns I just toss in a few nades/frags.

[khade]

So far, keeping in mind I don't usually get too far before my short attention span ruins things for me, shotguns have been very useful, the starting one is good with the capacity to aim or snap, though damage is crap.  I usually try to keep a few of whatever shotgun I currently like and/or have ammo for available for my gals.

On non shotgun weapons, I usually upgrade my handguns as quickly as possible, mostly the far greater number of bullets of the shop guns trump the musket/pistol 40 damage +20 armor, except against armored stuff, which I wouldn't want the +20 armor anyway.  I prefer the Homefront rifle mostly because it's cheap, of the early guns, though if I can get a good supply of battle rifles or assault rifles, I generally use those.  For sniping, I've usually used the ol' carbine, good accuracy combined with lots of bullets and the ability to aimed shot twice a turn are very useful for early sniping, damage sucks, but it's good training.

I usually save guns that do heavier damage for those targets who can soak the other options, but I do have them available and distributed.

UAC Carbine is absolutely worthless, loses the only advantage the spraygun has for mediocre accuracy, while the spraygun is sometimes useful until the SMGs start showing up in good numbers.

UAC Carbine could maybe be useful if you were able to apply a scope to it, slightly better damage than the Ol' Carbine, boost the accuracy and it might not be shit.

[KateMicucci]

Any chance that sprayguns had of equipping my team disappeared the second time it missed every shot from two squares away and hit a random gal instead.

[khade]

Spraygun only seems to be useful for the situation where you absolutely want the target right next to you dead, and you don't have a good lethal melee weapon available, but it is useful in that situation.

An option for making that one slightly more likely to be used could be lowering the costs related to firing the thing, if you can literally put up a wall of lead, as long as there aren't any allies visible, you'll probably kill something useful.