LMG idea.

[Chaos Marine]

The LMGs are very TU resource intensive and are able to deal out severe damage to one guy or perhaps a guy behind or to the target's side. But the machine gun should be allowed to strafe across multiple squares with an accuracy penalty the more squares involved.

Say, as an example, each bullet has a base twenty-percent chance to hit with each bullet. If you spread the bullets left to right or visa-versa across five squares, the LMG would strafe fire across the five squares and then back to the original square. Three squares, it does three passes and one square back towards the original. Or one really long ten square strafe. For each additional strafe, a single percent of your base accuracy diminishes.

As your guys gain ranks, their base accuracy increases of course so that would be the base accuracy and any bonuses your guys get for crouching or crouching behind cover.

[StellarRat]

Originally they worked that way and everyone hated them for a variety of reasons. It might be possible to reintroduce the spread now because other coding changes have "fixed" many of those problems. But, I personally, don't really care too much.

[silencer]

I always loved them - and I want others to love them by lowering the TU% to maybe 70% ?

[Chris]

LMGs are currently the most powerful weapons in the game, I'm not sure they need any more buffs

The "spread" idea is cool but it's too late to make that big a change right now.

[Chaos Marine]

It's not so much a buff but more along to giving the player the option to control how they're fired. There is plenty disadvantages to using it because it's a massive waste of all those bullet as usually a few will be enough to slaughter one solitary guy when it would make more sense to spread the love, so to speak. And if you want it to behave like it is, simply double click the square you want it to fire on.

[StellarRat]

I prefer it like it is. Spreading the fire would mean less hits on the intended target. Of course, if the spread also increased the suppression radius that would be a possible offset. It would be nice if you could choose "area" or "precision" for an MG, but it's way too late in development for that.

[TacticalDragon]

The LMGs are very TU resource intensive and are able to deal out severe damage to one guy or perhaps a guy behind or to the target's side. But the machine gun should be allowed to strafe across multiple squares with an accuracy penalty the more squares involved.

Say, as an example, each bullet has a base twenty-percent chance to hit with each bullet. If you spread the bullets left to right or visa-versa across five squares, the LMG would strafe fire across the five squares and then back to the original square. Three squares, it does three passes and one square back towards the original. Or one really long ten square strafe. For each additional strafe, a single percent of your base accuracy diminishes.

As your guys gain ranks, their base accuracy increases of course so that would be the base accuracy and any bonuses your guys get for crouching or crouching behind cover.

Thats the real funtion of MGs actually, plus automatic weapons it's not necessary High TU comsumption weapon, I don't understand why Devs put this kind of heavy weapons. The main reason is that you need 2 rounds to setup your heavy weapon to fire, traduced as a high TU% of this weapon and high fire relation.

There are a lot of mods that show different mechanics for this weapons, I remember a comunity member that put heavy machinegun as 98% TU to fire and fire about 20 scattered bullets accross the way with high spread.

The problem with the current game is, as the player progresses, you get MG weapons precise and more harmful, adding high aiming of veteran soldier, resulting in a shot where all the bullets fall into the target boxes ... something really dull.

I personally preffer a MG that fire a lot of unaccurated and less harmfull bullets.

[Troublechuter]

I'm happy with the MGs as they are. They're lethal at close range, and inaccurate but good for suppression at mid/long range, as intended. I wouldn't mind if they had an extra fire mode though, maybe a short burst of 5 rounds with a slightly lower TU cost; it seems a little odd that its 10 rounds or nothing at all.

[Gauddlike]

The machine guns were suggested to be less accurate and less damaging at one point but some forum members shouted the idea down stating realism reasons why it shouldn't be the case.

Then they were too accurate so those suggestions got shouted down as well.

Then they were too damaging, or not damaging enough, then too much suppression, or too expensive to fire, or not enough ammunition, or bursts were too short or too long and so on.

The reason the heavy weapons work as they currently do is that the community have basically designed them by committee.

The game is not coded to allow more than one burst fire type.

It would require recoding the whole burst fire mechanic which Chris stated earlier in development he was unwilling to do and will certainly not have changed his mind about now.

The best you could do would be to give it a single shot mode in addition to the current burst.

[Chris]

Note that LMGs are currently not Strength Limited - i.e. they're meant to use the lower of Strength and Accuracy for the accuracy calculation, but they currently don't actually do that because I forgot to enable that option.

It'll be active in the next build and may make them slightly better balanced.

[TacticalDragon]

The machine guns were suggested to be less accurate and less damaging at one point but some forum members shouted the idea down stating realism reasons why it shouldn't be the case.

Then they were too accurate so those suggestions got shouted down as well.

Then they were too damaging, or not damaging enough, then too much suppression, or too expensive to fire, or not enough ammunition, or bursts were too short or too long and so on.

The reason the heavy weapons work as they currently do is that the community have basically designed them by committee.

The game is not coded to allow more than one burst fire type.

It would require recoding the whole burst fire mechanic which Chris stated earlier in development he was unwilling to do and will certainly not have changed his mind about now.

The best you could do would be to give it a single shot mode in addition to the current burst.

Secondary burst fire mode can be implemented using "pellet" mechanism. Is not burst fire but can ... simulate other multiple fire mode.

In other hand other burst fire mode is not necesary at all, if you put a fraction of TU equivalent a some amount of bullets the scalation do the trick.

20% TU for 4 Bullets

40% TU for 8 Bullets (Shot 2 burst)

60% TU for 12 bullets (Shot 3 burst) .... and so on up to 20 bullets fire in a round.

[StellarRat]

Changing the machineguns for dual burst mode would require changes to the GC UI. I think it's way too late for that. And if you use the burst button as the "spreader" than it's got the wrong symbol and requires a non-intuitive bit of knowledge on the players part. Having the same button perform two entirely different functions is generally considered bad UI design. The only way it could work with the same button is if the button symbol changed when you were on a character holding an LMG. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea and other people have suggested it, but I think Chris has already said there will be no further major "features" added to the game. The only thing that's supposed to be happening now is fixing problems and balance changes. If the LMG spread were a problem or a balance issue it might get fixed, but it's not.

[Gauddlike]

Secondary burst fire mode can be implemented using "pellet" mechanism. Is not burst fire but can ... simulate other multiple fire mode.

In other hand other burst fire mode is not necesary at all, if you put a fraction of TU equivalent a some amount of bullets the scalation do the trick.

20% TU for 4 Bullets

40% TU for 8 Bullets (Shot 2 burst)

60% TU for 12 bullets (Shot 3 burst) .... and so on up to 20 bullets fire in a round.

You cannot have a different number of pellets on different shots either.

Your suggested progression wouldn't work as it still relies on having different numbers of shots on different aim levels which is impossible.

Single shot can have multiple aim levels but can only ever fire a single bullet.

Burst fire can fire multiple bullets but can only have a single aim level.

Pellet count is set on the ammunition so cannot be varied between shots.

The only thing that would work would be to have a single shot with five pellets and a burst mode that fired two shots, so two lots of five pellets.

I haven't tested burst fire and pellets together though so I don't know if that is possible.

If it was possible then it would give the equivalent of a five round burst and a ten round burst on the same weapon.

As Stellar says the icons on the UI would look a little misleading and ammunition counts would also be different and potentially inconsistent.

Edited April 11, 2014 by Gauddlike

[Gauddlike]

Having just tried my suggested alternative I can say it does work but as expected looks a little odd.

To rectify the oddness of a machine gun that fires multiple simultaneous shots pellets would need a delay between them, set on an individual weapon basis.

Then machine guns could have pellets that appear one by one while shotguns continue to have pellets that are all part of the same shot.

Ammunition counts only go down by one per shot, despite the weapon appearing to fire five bullets per shot.

Not a massive problem but does not work in the same way as other weapons, for example the assault rifle burst.

[TacticalDragon]

I haven't tested burst fire and pellets together though so I don't know if that is possible.

If it was possible then it would give the equivalent of a five round burst and a ten round burst on the same weapon.

As Stellar says the icons on the UI would look a little misleading and ammunition counts would also be different and potentially inconsistent.

What about a system like the Medipack? where you can choose the amount of TU wasted per turn?

[Gauddlike]

That wouldn't allow you to select the number of bullets you fire.

I am not sure but that mechanic is also likely restricted to melee weapons or hard coded specifically to the medikits.