Variety in "human" weapon types or "we don't all use the M16"

"per class"? Would you mean elaborating on this? What class are you referring too?

It's someting that will likely be modded in if not released by Chris, so I dont really see the reason of buying DLC.

If Chris releases the soviet weapon pack DLC he has been suggesting then the modders can take over and do whatever they want with them.

Even if the released weapons keep the same stats as the originals that won't be the case for long.

What is the point of wanting those weapons anyway , really? It's not like they'll see use much more than a very very short time in the game

Honestly there might be a point for a mod with varying ballistic (and other tier) weapons. You could easily have certain aliens very vulnerable to certain human weapons, thus you'd still be using... say flame throwers, even in late game because there is one race that is particularly vulnerable to them. Additional weapons in a DLC/mod might be along the same lines, something specific vs one type of alien or a certain situation that makes it still valid in the late game

I am not sure that you can have vulnerabilities to damage types in the game as it stands.

That may be something else Chris would be able to add though, even if he doesn't use it himself.

Being able to mod aliens and human gear to be weaker against some damage types would allow modders more freedom to change the game after all.

If so I'd suggest a more general 'vulnerability'. IE not just taking excess damage. It could be some weapons are inherently more accurate vs some targets, some weapons cause special effects vs some targets etc. Basically I'd leave it as some kind of open trigger effect that someone could mod later rather than as a fixed damage modifier.

IE 'if target 'A' is hit with damage type 'B' then run trigger 'C'

Trigger C can be pretty much any effect the game can normally generate including instant death, secondary explosions, vision effects etc. Not sure how practical that would be, or if it would be possible to leave any kind of linking system there for someone to add this sort of system in a later mod

I am not sure that you can have vulnerabilities to damage types in the game as it stands.

That may be something else Chris would be able to add though, even if he doesn't use it himself.

Being able to mod aliens and human gear to be weaker against some damage types would allow modders more freedom to change the game after all.

If you look at the assets file for armour_gc, you can see that there is some variation in how resistant the human armours are to certain damage type. As for the aliens, in the aiprops file, it currently looks like there is a single armour parameter for each of the aliens classes so no incentive for using different weapon types against them.

Yeah the armours_gc file only lists one type of alien armour with weaknesses, that is why I am unsure if that is a set of vulnerabilities all aliens will share or if you will be able to add different armour types for them to use.

I haven't seen anywhere that you could attribute that armour to the aliens though.

Simply having the aliens armour type able to be set to one of the types in that file would probably be enough.

It would allow you to alter the vulnerabilities of each race and rank individually if you wished to add new armour types.

Obviously this would not alter the look of the enemy, just how they reacted to certain damage types.

Hmmm. You're right. Aliens only have one armour type (although it is set in aiprops.xml rather than armour_gc.xml). I should probably get that fixed up so they can be vulnerable to different types of weaponary.

So was the alien armour from the armours_gc just a placeholder that got left behind then?

It would be nice to have that option.