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I wasn't planning on it, but we *are* trying to expand the tech tree and weapon options - and creating a couple of melee weapons isn't going to be much trouble. So yeah, I'll put it on our to-do list and hopefully we'll get round to adding them before the game ships

Pardon if this has been said before, but it sounds like you want to tie laser damage to accuracy. I think that would be a really neat way to make the weapon tier feel distinct from others. Higher accuracy means the beam is landed on the alien for longer, dealing more damage. This could be communicated to the player by a "Time to Kill" calculation. If the door is opened to soldier stats boosting weapon damage, some weapons could deal damage based on strength/ability to counter recoil. I am not sure what other stats could benefit combat like that though...

All I'm getting out of this thread as that a lot of people really don't understand how real lasers work. Considering this thread is titled with 'realism' in it, I find that extremely baffling. Correct, we do not currently have legitimate weaponized lasers (though some people have made some really powerful ones on Youtube) and so there is a certain amount of suspension of disbelief required to use them in a game. But the technology is real and theoretically possible to make real weapons with them based on that tech. Did you know that a common laser pointer has an effective blinding range of almost 50 feet, and can be SEEN up to 2.2 miles? That's just a rinky-dink little keychain laser pointer. A 500mw (half a watt) laser can do serious damage at over 500 feet, and can be seen up to 22 miles away. That's HALF a watt. Imagine one powerful enough to be used as a weapon. Something say around 5 watts. That would probably be strong enough at 50 feet to punch a hole in solid steel with little effort. Games seriously downplay the power of a laser weapon, mostly for balance purposes, but sometimes because they didn't bother doing any research on the subject. My point is, a laser weapon strong enough to deal actual damage to something just be being hit with it is not going to lose any effectiveness on a map the size of the ones ingame. If you want something that loses effective damage over range, look no further than plasma weapons. Deadly up close, useless at range.