H&K UCP - Probably Too Good

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

So my current world has “No Rivtech Guns” and “No Laser Guns” on because reasons but I did enable every mod I thought would add new guns that were REAL because I’m a gun nut in real life. (I fucking hate the NRA and think they’re racist and evil, sorry, I don’t want to make anything weirdly political but I feel like I have to clarify that whenever I say that I like guns I really DO NOT like their advocates, if you disagree maybe PM me?).

Anyway, the H&K UCP. Not sure if in vanilla or added by Icecoon’s weapon pack. It’s got a 20 round magazine, ammo is found in 100 round stacks, it has virtually no recoil until after like the fifth round fired, and its armor penetrating capability against everything organic up to and including the Zombie Hulk might best be described as “total”? I know that these are all properties of the real life weapon (small caliber rounds designed to penetrate armor with low recoil), but for basically the Survivor’s entire life I was carrying an SKS rifle (with the good 7.62x39mm ammo) and the UCP. Whenever I encountered a scary situation or serious threat in my face, I immediately stopped using the SKS rifle and “quick”-drew the UCP because the truth was the SKS would miss more often and do less damage against virtually every enemy at virtually any range (I never tried super-long range plinking with the UCP because I immediately realized how awesome it was at medium-to-short range and tried to conserve ammo).

If you look in real life at a 7.62x39mm cartridge and at a 4.6x30mm cartridge, just as physical objects, it is very hard to imagine the tinier bullet always being better in every situation. But like I said, the SKS missed twice as often even when I tried to manage my recoil, and seemed to have a damage floor of 15 and a damage ceiling of 40ish (not counting grazing shots or criticals), whereas the UCP basically never missed and had a damage FLOOR of around 40ish. I know that not all guns are supposed to be equal (or we wouldn’t have .22s in the game lol), but considering that the SKS (random point of comparison, btw, chosen just because it was the longarm my survivor found and held onto) holds half the ammo as the UCP, has three times the recoil, and weighs much more and takes up much more space…it feels a bit egregious.

Tl;dr I feel like the H&K UCP might be too good. It’s only real drawback seems to be that it is HARD to gather a stack of 100 small pistol primers for reloading, but IME getting all the materials to reload any round worth firing is usually pretty hard.

2

There is currently a bit of a problem with accuracy (if you’re playing the experimentals - there’s a whole thread about it over in the Bunker), so that could be part of the problem.

But also, organic targets generally don’t NEED big nasty bullets to kill them. Heck, even a single good shot with Ye Olde .22 is occasionally sufficient to kill a human (IRL). If you aren’t worried about penetrating hard cover or armor (which very few zombies have in any significance), at the ranges this game generally works at (especially with the recent accuracy issues), an SMG is probably the best weapon for the job.

That said, those larger rounds should be doing more damage when you hit with them, it’s just that it should be wasted overkill damage a lot of the time.

3

The UCP’s ammo is a bit weaker than 9mm ammo, at least in terms of raw damage. However, as I recall, it has less recoil, better accuracy, and far better armor piercing. That said, it’s armor piercing only matters against zombie soldiers. Like, you’re better off using 9mm or other ammo on most zombies, but against zombie soldiers 9mm will only do like 10 damage.

Also, thanks to its armor piercing, the UCP ammo can destroy a tank drone. It’ll take a lot of shots, but compared to other low-power ammo it’ll actually do some damage instead of bouncing away.

4

Based on actual play experience, it seems that things like tough zombies, zombie brutes, zombie hulks, jabbarwocks, shocker brutes, etcetera, had some degree of armor. Because the character I last played could kill those enemies with a UCP and not with an SKS even though if the game’s gun stats make any sort of sense (and I assume they do) the SKS should do more raw damage.

5

Maybe a bug? Tested out the SKS vs a modded UCP. UCP did 65 damage on a hulk on a headshot, while the SKS did up to 100+ damage. Debugged it so my survivor’s handgun and rifles skill matched.

What’s your rifles and handguns skill? Perhaps the difference in skill level could explain things…