So, how will you mod the weapon tiers?

It seems a lot of the forumites would like the various weapon tiers to be differentiated from each other. So do I! However, we all have our own way in which we'd like the tiers to be differentiated and those differences become very clear whenever the subject is broached. I'd like to solicit your opinions on how you would make each tier it's own special someone within the bounds that current modding allows us to do. The reason I'd like to do this is that I've seen a lot of very interesting ideas for modding weapon tiers but they're split up all over the forums and I think it'd be kind of neat to see them all in one place, so we can riff off each others ideas.

Shall I go first? Thank-you, silent audience, I shall.

I'm working on the following concepts:

1) That each tier has a special weapon. Something unique to that tier that you can't replicate anywhere else, and adds significant value to the team.

2) That each tier has changes that can't be easily number crunched to calculate exactly which weapons provide the "best" (for a given definition of "best").

3) That each new tier impresses the hell out of the player (so they are sutibly rewarded for putting in all the work researching it), but at the same time doesn't not automatically obsolete existing tiers.

Special weapons

For the laser tier, I already have a special weapon: the Firewall Area Denial Weapon. Basically, all it does is suppress, but it's very good at what it does!

For the plasma tier, I'm working on a weapon similar to the aliens' plasma cannon. Like the plasma cannon, it'll do incendiary damage. The intention is for it to be very good at destroying cover and it will also have a good chance of setting fires in the area where it detonates.

The MAG tier was tricky, but what I'm going to make is the MAG equivalent of a

. It'll fire compressed pellets of alienum. What this will do is give squaddies the option to have a rocket in their pocket, quite litterally. While it won't be as good at the actual rocket launcher, it will provide a one-handed AOE weapon that you can't get anywhere else.

Changes

For each tier, I focussed closly on what I could provide that would make it unique without making it easy to number crunch. After a lot of experimentation, I think this is what I'm going to do.

For lasers, I'm going to make it slightly cheaper to shoot and reload, dropping the cost of shooting and reloading by 5pts per weapon. 5pts doesn't sound much, but it adds up very quickly, especially in the hands of experienced soliders who have plenty of AP to spend.

For plasma, I'm going to have the human-copied plasma tech follow its alien brethern. Autofire for everything! Autofire for pistols, autofire for plasma shotguns, autofire (2 shots) for the precision rifle! And those things that have autofire will get an extra shot - 4 shots for the rifle, and 6 for the 'caster.

For MAG, I'm going to tag each one with the diasable damage scaling flag, so it doesn't matter how far out of range they are, they will never suffer damage drop.

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Well, that was me. How about you?

Once upon a time I was working on a weapon mod that never got released; primarily focusing on ballistic weapons.

I love the ideas you have, and I'm thinking, if I ever do a more general weapon overhaul mod, I'll be adding in something along these lines:

Ballistics - Not really sure what to do about them yet...but like the idea of giving them a high RoF designed not to suppress but to chew up enemies in a confined space (say bring up a minigun - I know rather unrealistic, but still! - and put it near a door...open it up and let the bullets fill the hallway and make breaching a little bit safer.

Laser - Bulky, but incredible accuracy - very low ammo/magazine, even for assault weapons; no burst fire, merely power settings that increase the strength of a beam. Suppression/heavy weapons use a scatter effect and low-damage pulses or multiple barrels in order to properly suppress an enemy. The energy involved means that the re-fire rate is quite low (expensive in terms of TUs).

Plasma - ALL weapons are incendiary. The weapons themselves are of minimal weight and of impressive power; however magazines are limited in their capacity (not as low as Laser however) but extremely bulky, both in size (2x2 and up for each magazine) and weight (2 mags will probably be average). Accuracy will be decent at combat ranges but a relatively low-velocity projectile speed means accuracy is very spotty at longer ranges making it a terrible sniping weapon (though one can certainly try using a precision plasma rifle if they wanted I suppose).

MAG - Though larger and bulkier than most weapons, the fact that the propellant (the magnetic coils/rails) are integrated into teh weapon itself means that ammunition is lightweight and has minimal space requirements. A hypersonic projectile speed, like you suggested Max, means no damage-drop-off and near laser-like accuracy. Due to its speeds, I imagine that anything of assault rifle size or larger can easily cut through almost any cover with minimal collateral damage to other wall pieces on either side while still going through whatever's immediately behind the cover?

I have read your ideas before Max and I really do think you are heading in an interesting direction.

My only real change would be to make plasma all have an area of effect and a chance to cause fire if possible.

Maybe slightly lower initial damage to balance out the damage over time of the flames.

Oh the area would be small for all weapons, I am not suggesting they all be rocket launchers.

Maybe 1.5 to 2 tiles so there is just enough space to start a fire.

I haven't tried for a while but the area effect used to be non functional on normal bullets so it probably wouldn't work

I like the idea of special weapons per tier! It'll help with the lack of game changers around; psionics and blaster bombs were a big deal in the OG. The only thing kinda similar in Xenonauts is the stun gas stuff.

The tweaks I'm mooting are:

Ballistics: They're free and they have more ammo, that's good enough for me.

Laser: More accurate, and the shotgun now is burst fire and not scattershot. Laser guns also have a small bonus to armour penetration. My laser weapons are meant to be the guns you pass on down to your fresh rookies.

Plasma: Same deal as Gaud, although the chance of mine causing fire would be low and mainly there for visual effect. I'm been wondering how to pull this off with burst fire modes not supporting explosions, and I think I've settled on the route I'm gonna take - all burst fire modes now become scattershot. Scattershots can be explosive, it turns out, which is exceedingly cool. Plasma weapons also have +1 suppression radius.

MAG: I was planning on giving all MAG guns hypervelocity, but I'm not sure it's coming back. It's never really worked right and it was hard to balance, to boot. So I'm not sure what to give to MAGs. I'd like to give them all burst fire/scattershot, but that doesn't fit with the "feel" of MAGs. I might give them buffs to suppression value, accuracy, damage, range and armour pen., while slapping on severe recoil requirements/heavy weapon status for all MAG weaponry. The very best guns, but hard to use. Rookies stay away!

Basic ballistics - cheap, reliable.

Advanced ballistics - RoF. They don't pack the punch of other weapons, but are usefull due to the sheer volue of fire. Good at surpressing.

Lasers - Highly accurate and great damage. Slighly worse armor migation compared to ballistics.

Plasma - tons of damage and splash damage. Inaccurate. Heavy. short ranged.

MAG - best armor penetration, but prone to overpenetation (less damage compared to plasma)

Alien weapons will be re-balanced, as well as alien armor (expect aliens with normalized HP, but buffed armor). The HP difference between basic troops and elites will be minimal, the difference will mostly be in other stats and equipment.

Also, alien numbers will be re-balanced.

Expect aliens that are tougher and deadlier, but there's fewer of them.

Is it possible to mod the enemies to be resistant to a particular type of damage? I think there was plan for that but I'm not sure if that made it in or got scrapped?

I'd love to be able to mod in parallel ballistic and energy weapon tech trees (possibly where one excludes the other) that together with the above allows you to pick which half of the aliens will be easier to deal with. (or if you're still able to research both requires you to mix and match weapons from both tech trees)

There's four types of damage and four types of armour to mitigate them - kinetic, energy, chemical, incendiary, and heart. For example, vehicles have 100 armour against chemical attacks. So you could do resistances to some extent. The type of damage doesn't have to match the visual, so you can change all plasma blasts to kinetic and things would still look the same to an unwitting player, giving you a bit more wiggle room.

Edited January 7, 2014 by Ol' Stinky

4 types? awesome. that's potentially 4 parallel tech trees!

4 types? awesome. that's potentially 4 parallel tech trees!

One thing to bear in mind (that I forgot to mention, whoops) is that incendiary stuff does 4x damage to the environment. But really, that's not too hard to work with. I don't think kinetic/energy/chemical have inherent properties like incendiary does. Now get out there and mod those tech trees, champ! (Inspiring montage music plays as Gorlom turns his dreams into reality.)

Oh I would like too but I'm far to lazy to actually do it!

Ballistics, MAG - kinectic

lasers - energy

plasma - energy OR incendiary? (curretnly energy IIRC)

rockets, explosives - incendiary.

The problem with this is if you want to take away the tiered approach to weapons, you should probably also take away the tiered research requirements and re-balance all enemies for hit points and armor values. Changing weapons means changing everything they're connected to. However, I don't like changing fire modes or number of shots fired overly much.

I do really like the idea of a specialty weapon for each weapon category. What I think would be ideal above and beyond just that is having each tier perform a specific feature more effectively than others.

Laser Weapons: Should essentially be a straight upgrade from ballistics. When compared to ballistic weapons, they should:

1. Have increased accuracy.
   
2. Have increased damage and mitigation values, and do energy damage.
   

This makes Laser weapons a sort of generic standard from which other weapons can range out and diversify.

Plasma Weapons: Under a non-tiered system Plasmas should no longer act as a direct upgrade over laser weapons. Which means they need to provide trade-off incentives, such as:

1. Having the same accuracy and range as ballistics. One could argue for LOWER accuracy and range.
   
2. Double the damage increase when compared to Lasers (but offer no mitigation value).
   
3. Deal INCENDIARY damage instead of energy damage (the reason for this will be provided shortly).
   
4. Change the tech tree requirements to the assault and heavy plasma.
   

Fluff-wise, Plasma weapons are now throwing balls of projectile fire (super-heated gas really). They don't really provide much armor piercing potential, but they deal a lot of damage as they spread out over the whole target on impact. These changes would make the Plasma Carbine the star weapon of this set.

MAG Weapons:

1. Have the same accuracy as laser weapons but greater range.
   
2. Have the same damage as ballistic weapons.
   
3. Double the mitigation value increases given to Laser weapons.
   
4. Deal the Ballistic damage type.
   
5. Change the tech tree requirements to just the alien battle rifle and precision rifle.
   

This makes the MAG Precision Rifle the star weapon of the set, as Precision Rifles have the highest penetration to start with and now this one will have the highest of any of the rifles.

Next, aliens need to have their armor and hit points systems totally reworked.

In general, the aliens should have armor values which are ranked as follows: Energy, Incendiary, Ballistic.

They're aliens! They don't consider our quaint little slug-throwers to be serious weapons, they're used to dealing with more advanced enemies who use "real" weapons like they do. Energy weapons. So that's what they should protect against. Incendiary Armor rates second because have you seen how many times their space ships caught fire? This isn't Plan 9, they know high tech stuff catches fire when you crash it into a planet.

Now! Specific aliens should have different armor ratings and preferences. Androns should have the highest armor against Ballistic and lowest against Incendiary. Hard to punch through it and do damage, but easier to melt or blow up.

These are some concept numbers which give a vague idea of what I'd be looking at for alien armor values. HP values are conspicuously absent (they would require the most math and rebalancing). Keep in mind I threw those together in the span of about 15 minutes. I don't feel overly committed to them, and they would very possibly be subject to change.

All that said, I don't know if de-tiering the weapons would be the right move for the game. But I can see some interesting potential for if it were done.

You continiue to rise the dead

I hopefully bring this dream to reality.. i would answer this but not here...

Keeping informed!

And this was an interesting thread that I could write something about.

This is much along the lines of what my regional weapons revamp is growing into as well

I realise I'm late for this party, but I like the subject. In this game, and even more so in Firaxis' game, it bothered me that the weapon tiers are so obvious and so gamey. Same weapons in different flavours that get progressively better. I would mix it up by not necessarily having all classes in all tiers and all tiers having something unique. Also, while the next tier should be overall better, the previous tier should have some unique ability that can make you take few of those weapons with you even if you have access to the higher tier.

Ballistics - As the starting tier and easily available, I don't think they need any advantages.

Lasers - Should be very accurate, good range but steady damage drop by range instead of sudden at the end if it can be modeled. Lasers could also blind targets that don't have protected vision. The simplest way to model this might be simply giving them the best supression values.

Pistol and precision version should be available first and maybe rifle, but with no burst option. The fluff could be that the cooling methods limit them to single shots. The second research level would then allow rapid fire, giving the scatter laser and burst option to rifle, if that's doable. I find the concept of "laser shotgun" very silly, so no carbine unless it is made to behave more like the rifle.

The unique weapon would be the dazzle laser, which would be very much like Max's Firewall. Does no or neglible damage, but blinds (supresses) targets very well. I'd envision it as a SMG sized weapon that fires 10 shor bursts.

Another, probably not doable, idea for lasers I had is external power packs. The clip sized power packs wouldn't be powerful enough to be practical for other weapons than pistol, so larger packs on the belt or backbag connected to the weapon by cable would be used.

The clip-sized power pack would be good enough for 6 shots for pistol, about the same for carbine (2 3 round bursts), 3 shots for rifle, 2 shots for precision and scatter laser (1/5th of a full burst). Dazzle laser would use less energy, so the clip would give 1 or 2 10 round bursts.

The 3x2 belt power pack would have 10 times the energy and the 5x3 backbag power pack 5 times that, 50 times total.

Plasma - Should be the king of raw damage, but have poor range.

The initial weapons should be the "plasma shotgun" carbine and the human version of alien plasma cannon. The fluff would be that humans are struggling with the gravitic focusing technology and the early versions of human plasma weapons try to work around it. The former weapon just shovers the target with plasma at close range and the latter tries to give that plasma bolt more range by making it real big. The vehicular version could also be available with the initial tech. The second tech would then represent a refinement in the focusing technology, allowing the rifle and maybe the scatter and pistol as well. No precision, though.

MAGs - Overall should be more of an sidegrade than straight upgrade to plasma. Their strength should be that they don't really have any weaknesses.

All weapons available by the standard tech pattern. The only thing I might change is not to make the MAG ammo so interchangeable. At least separate the pistol/carbine calibre from the rifle/precision/storm calibre.

The special weapon could be the "payload rifle", a rifle sized weapon that shoots grenades with rifle AP costs. If doable, it should have 4 or 6 grenade clips that are same size as the machine gun belt. The explosions should be little smaller than hand grenades. The defining feature is the ability to fire any sort of grenade that is available as hand grenade. If that is not doable in clips, then single shots like the rocket launcher and normal grenade size explosions. If not any grenade type, then at least explosive and stun like the rocket launcher, but then it'll just basically a replacement for rocket launcher and not as interesting,

welcome to forum..

They are nice ideas. Some are doable some not.. but first you need to know damage mechanisms.. you didnt mentioned any damage types so i guess that u dont know them. I advise you to learn them first and then start your plans..

I'm lukewarm about modifying the tiers, but I'm a big fan of the idea of adding unique weapons for each tier and adding advanced grenades for each tier. Flashbangs and stun grenades just become obsolete after a while, and running the same basic set of shotgun/rifle/sniper/machine gun/shield/rocket makes the ground combat a little repetitive.

I want a long-range grenade launcher for each tier, some sort of long range artillery, and lower-tier armour that adds more mobility so players don't have to wait for buzzard jump-suits.