Maybe a controversial view? Armor and weapon interactions are needlessly complex - and a proposal for a new scheme for weapons

[Vitruviansquid]

A point of difference between laser and accelerated weapons is that accelerated weapons have a bit of armor penetration and lasers have a bit more Armor destruction.

And I can't work out why it matters.

Let's say there's some alien with a lot of armor, like a Mentarch. How do I defeat a Mentarch? Well, I could destroy its armor and then kill it with a laser. I could also penetrate its armor and kill it with an accelerated weapon. So what's the point of both stats existing if they do not imply separate use cases?

And then after the point in the tech tree with lasers and accelerated weapons, gauss weapons and the upcoming fusion weapons seem like they are hierarchal. Gauss weapons are meant to be better than both laser and accelerated, and then fusion will be meant to be better than gauss. There is, then, no point in stats to differentiate weapons.

If you wanted to, you could kinda just roll armor penetration and armor destruction into a single stat and be done with it. Or you could even eliminate anti-armor stats entirely and the game would kinda feel the same as currently. But instead, I'd double down on complexity.

Here's a proposal for how weapons should work:

Tier 1 is ballistic weapons and they are basically the worst at everything, but they kill Sectons, Psyons, early game Cleaners, and Sebilians just fine. Mentarchs are pretty dicey because of their high armor.

Tier 2 is accelerated weapons and laser weapons. There is already pretty good differentiation between accelerated and laser weapons in their other criteria, such as laser weapons' ease of use and terrain destruction while accelerated weapons have better ammo capacity but is out-of-the-way in research. Both weapon types should be good against armor (moreso than currently) for the purpose of defeating Mentarchs, which start to appear, and accelerated weapons achieve this by having a decent penetration stat (as they currently do) and lasers achieve this by having a good armor destruction stat (as they currently do). Players are to be pushed to move on from Ballistic to Accelerated and Laser weapons (moreso than they are right now) to be able to fight Mentarchs without taking casualties. There is, after all, usually one Mentarch per crash site.

Tier 2.5 is stun weapons, and is used to capture aliens and later on to efficiently defeat Robotic enemies.

Tier 3 is Gauss, but Gauss itself gets split up between Gauss weapons that shoots a solid ammunition (shotgun, sniper rifle, machine gun) that is very strong at dealing damage but doesn't have particularly good armor-destroying or penetrating capability and other Gauss weapons (rifle, pistol) that shoot a specialized ammunition that for some ginned up in-lore reason, is very destructive to armor, but is not particularly good in some other aspect, like maybe give a penalty to accuracy or costs more TU to fire or doesn't do as much of just normal damage. Then you'll roughly calibrate it so a new role for primary alien species (Sebilians, Psyons, etc.) should show up about a bit before players have Gauss weapons called "Shock Troopers," and they wear heavier armor than their brethren (perhaps at a cost of something else, or just to be mean and screw with players). The idea here is that you need the Gauss weapons to challenge Shock Troopers the same way you needed accelerated and laser weapons to challenge Mentarchs, but now Shock Troopers appear in way greater proportion than Mentarchs. You need to coordinate between different types of soldiers carrying specialized weapons to destroy Shock Troopers' armor and kill them. At this point, players should need to phase out accelerated weapons because their amount of armor penetration should no longer really be cutting it against Shock Troopers (though they are still useful against alien soldiers and support roles), but if you didn't have armor-destroying Gauss weapons, laser weapons will still give you a bit of a mediocre performance against Shock Troopers, though no better than non-specialized Gauss.

Tier 4 is Fusion weapons and Fusion weapons are all better at everything than Gauss weapons except a small percentage of aliens will now show up with energy shields that hard counter Fusion weapons. They take greatly reduced damage "thermal" damage type (literally, I want something like -75% damage) which Fusion shares with Laser. So yes, you would want a lot of Fusion weapons to have the best weapon type available to kill most aliens, but you should probably not kit out ALL of your soldiers with Fusion weapons because then you're vulnerable to aliens with energy shields. 

 

To get away from specifics, here are the takeaways for the proposal:

Weapons come in 4 tiers and each tier is an advantage over the tier before.

As you tech up and increase in tiers, different tiers demand different strategies and punish players more and more severely for failing to meet those demands.

The higher tech you go, the more weapons have specialized roles and the more you need to mix and match soldiers and even weapons from different tech levels.

[DaviddesJ]

More complicated is better than simple.

[doubleskulls]

Using the Mentarch example, IIRC 25 armour, 50 HPs? 

Accelerated rifle is doing 40 damage, with 5 penetration and 2 destruction. 5 penetration effectively reduces the armour by 5, meaning that on average its doing 20 points of damage on the first hit, 22 on the 2nd and 24 on the 3rd. 

A laser rifle is also doing 40 damage, with no penetration and 8 destruction. On the first hit it will do 15 damage, on the 2nd 23 points and on the 3rd 31 points. 

Its important to note that means on the first two hits the accelerated rifle is doing 46 points of damage - on average - and the laser 38. That's a big difference in the probability of a 2 shot kill. Especially if you then think about other weapons being used. 

In practice accelerated rifle / laser do even damage at 44 armour, and everything below that the accelerated rifle is better or equal. I'm not sure how much frontal armour a Cyberdrone has, but I think that's the level you are looking at. 

The difference overall is small, so I'd tend to look at the manufacturing costs (much lower for accelerated) vs the research costs (you can skip magnetic weapons research until you want Gauss Blasters for your interceptor).   

IMO the differences between accelerated weapons and laser weapons are too small, but the jump to advanced lasers too big, so personally I'd like to spread it out a bit more. Accelerated doing a bit less damage, lasers doing a bit more and advanced lasers staying the same. Laser research would need to be pushed back a little to make it 

[Vitruviansquid]

15 hours ago, DaviddesJ said:

More complicated is better than simple.

Yes, exactly.

Double down on complexity, but make the complexity matter.

14 hours ago, doubleskulls said:

Using the Mentarch example, IIRC 25 armour, 50 HPs? 

Accelerated rifle is doing 40 damage, with 5 penetration and 2 destruction. 5 penetration effectively reduces the armour by 5, meaning that on average its doing 20 points of damage on the first hit, 22 on the 2nd and 24 on the 3rd. 

A laser rifle is also doing 40 damage, with no penetration and 8 destruction. On the first hit it will do 15 damage, on the 2nd 23 points and on the 3rd 31 points. 

Its important to note that means on the first two hits the accelerated rifle is doing 46 points of damage - on average - and the laser 38. That's a big difference in the probability of a 2 shot kill. Especially if you then think about other weapons being used. 

In practice accelerated rifle / laser do even damage at 44 armour, and everything below that the accelerated rifle is better or equal. I'm not sure how much frontal armour a Cyberdrone has, but I think that's the level you are looking at. 

The difference overall is small, so I'd tend to look at the manufacturing costs (much lower for accelerated) vs the research costs (you can skip magnetic weapons research until you want Gauss Blasters for your interceptor).   

IMO the differences between accelerated weapons and laser weapons are too small, but the jump to advanced lasers too big, so personally I'd like to spread it out a bit more. Accelerated doing a bit less damage, lasers doing a bit more and advanced lasers staying the same. Laser research would need to be pushed back a little to make it 

Meh. This thread isn't meant to be about comparing accelerated weapons and laser weapons - there are plenty of other threads for that. Plenty.

I don't care that much about current balance because this thread is about future balance.

[Skyfire]

19 hours ago, Vitruviansquid said:

A point of difference between laser and accelerated weapons is that accelerated weapons have a bit of armor penetration and lasers have a bit more Armor destruction.

And I can't work out why it matters.

Let's say there's some alien with a lot of armor, like a Mentarch. How do I defeat a Mentarch? Well, I could destroy its armor and then kill it with a laser. I could also penetrate its armor and kill it with an accelerated weapon. So what's the point of both stats existing if they do not imply separate use cases?

They DO imply different use-cases. The difference isn't super-important currently, because the only place it really shows up is in the accelerated-vs-gauss comparison and there's not a huge amount of differentiation in alien's defensive stats that would make it more relevant, but it still exists.

Short version: penetration > destruction for kill-shots, destruction > penetration for softening up targets.

There is no level of armour destruction that will ever give you a one-shot-kill. Period. If there's an alien with 40HP, 1 armour, and your gun does 40 damage, then if you have 0 destruction it's two shots to kill. 5 destruction, two shots to kill. 10 destruction, two shots to kill. A million destruction, still two shots to kill. On the other hand, 40 damage with even 1 penetration drops that down to one shot.

On the flip side, if/when we get an enemy with serious armour (something like 50-100 - basically, anything that can just no-sell a rifle shot completely), that's going to boost the value of destruction a lot. Against a 100 armour target, it'd take an accelerated rifle 29 shots to even get the first point of actual HP damage - it only takes a basic laser 9 shots to do the same.

(All calculations here are ignoring damage randomisation and misses, but neither of those will make a huge difference to the current issue)

19 hours ago, Vitruviansquid said:

other Gauss weapons (rifle, pistol) that shoot a specialized ammunition

If they make an assault rifle into a specialist support tool, I will riot.