Ranged Weapon Balance

[John_Candlebury]

Well personal experience says that of the casings in game and in reality tend to get slightly deformed after you shoot, so it kinda makes sense unless you use the stacks that you sometimes can find in gun stores, so It does make some sense.

But yeah, ammo numbers are well balanced right now for as long you don’t count basements or zombie soldiers.

Now most weapons, except shotguns loaded with buckshot, losing accuracy at very close range (3 tiles or less is a good number I think) makes perfect sense, because of stress and the erratic and fast movement of zombies (cata zombies are of the running type), shooting moving things is generally easier when they are a short distance away from you that when they are almost over you. Also being hit should harm your accuracy by a turn or two.

[Binky]

If you feel ranged is too overpowered, stop using it. No one is forcing you to use ranged weapons, no matter how easy or convenient they are to use. I’ve only played 2-3 characters (out of scores) as ranged w/guns. Most of the time I either do martial arts, melee or archery.

I’m really not trying to be rude or confrontational or anything, but I really, really wish people would stop using that as an argument against balance. This is about balancing the game, and saying ‘just don’t use it’ doesn’t address the balance in the game. If I was just complaining about it then fine, but I’m actively trying to fix it.

As far as close ranged penalties, I’m only talking about if something is next to you - with a zombie grappling you it’s going to be a lot harder to get an accurate shot off, even with just a pistol. I think any further away than that would be annoying tactically, as you’d have to keep them outside of a certain range and try to remember where the range is. After playing m&m legacy (admittedly a very different game) which has a 50% reduction I think that’s far enough balance wise.

Ammo on the whole is fine, just as John says, for basements and zombie soldiers it gets massive boosts which completely skew the balance. I’d imagine any soldiers would try to get every shot they could off at least. Basements just need to be massive nerfed, even at the cost of some realism.

[macrosblackd]

Being hit used to increase your by an amount which also affects your accuracy.

Regarding deformed brass, that is a common issue, but one of the things people do is reform the brass using a template. I’m not sure if it currently does this, but making it so there a chance for brass to be lost after firing would be a good way to simulate unrecoverable brass. Then again, it might not, since we now have to ability to forge items now and it would be simple to create and use a mold to create new brass after melting down old brass.

[Slax]

For now an easy solution would be the addition of a ranged weapon/ammo spawn penalty factor.
Default is 0, max is 100.

Set it to 10 and there’ll be a 10% chance that any ranged spawn will… oh, let’s say… just disappear or get a reduced quantity.

[Nickboom]

My 2 cents is that remember a lot of people died suddenly with out much of a chance fight back. Ammo would be fairly common (Where you should find ammo.) But it could stand to have a reductions of about 50 percent, also make sure its only civilian variants of ammo and guns.

[Zireael]

What I would support is making sure that the weapons found in gunstores and residences are are civilian model weapons (no fully automatic, etc) as well as civilian rounds (none of the penetrating ammo).

Very good point.

I don't think 'dirty' ammo should be the only option, but it would be interesting to have it as an additional option. It doesn't make sense from a realism perspective, and I think crafting vs scavenging is fairly balanced, ammo-wise.

I like more content. The more, the merrier.

One of the things that needs to be adjusted is the formula for getting a hit with a ranged weapon. It is currently too easy to get a hit.

Go ahead and adjust it, macrosblackd. And check the recoil increase by hits, too.

EDIT: I don’t play gunmen, but I play archer types almost exclusively. Unless I mutate, then I go melee/unarmed depending on whether I have a good melee weapon or not.

[Binky]

Civilian variants other than in military/police stations (and highly locked up/guarded by robots) makes a lot of sense, and would certainly make it a lot more worth while raiding such places. I’d also say that books/skills should be limited to civilian based weapons, other than extremely rare books in military compounds.

Again, not 100% realistic, but better for gameplay. Similarly, I’d say that a blunt reduction of 50% for ammo and weapons would make it more of an exciting challenge, as at the moment there’s no reason (other than sound which can easily be negated with silencers/drawing enemies away) not to constantly use ranged.

[Inadequate]

Well, it makes sense that mansions and, once they’ve been toned down, gun basements would have the books for military-grade weaponry. After all, those would probably be in demand with collectors and survivalists. Same with LMOE shelters, although really, once you find one of those you’ve basically got it made. And I’m not really a fan of a blunt approach like simply cutting ammo in half, especially when the item spawn option seems to cover it. Gun basements and military corpses could stand to be looked at, but I think anything beyond that point should be evaluated once that stuff has been merged in. And really, even if everything you suggest gets merged in, I don’t think there’s going to be a significant reduction in ranged users, only more of them complaining that the game is now much more tedious. Human history has always moved from melee weapons to ranged weapons for a reason, and no amount of nerfing is going to change that.

[ted]

I’m also against any kind of penalty for shooting at close range, with certain weapons anyway. No one should miss a target standing 5-15 feet from them with a pistol or shotgun, you don’t even really have to aim that much. Pistols do lose effectiveness quickly beyond that range for unskilled shooters though. But with a shotgun, you can just load a slug or something similar to keep effective at longer ranges. SMGs and to a lesser extent, rifles, are also supposed to be effective at shorter ranges.

It’s hard to miss someone simply standing 5 feet away with a melee weapon, but that happens much more often in game. It’s good to assume, like with melee, that the attacker is under various pressures that make accuracy uncertain, even at close range. In a dangerous situation, that makes attacking less reliable and encourages less obvious solutions. It also makes you miss in easy situations, but that doesn’t matter because very little is stopping you from making another attack. It does mean you use more ammo every time you use guns, but I don’t think that is a problem.

[Uneron]

I support both the ranged penalty when enemies are very close and the civilians having only civilian weaponry.

[ZombieTermite]

Like Inadequate has been saying: instead of removing the ability to craft sci-fi weapons and ammunition should not be banned, because the search for the recipes should be what drives the player to venture out of his or her fortress in the first place.

Also instead restricting the player to only crafting dirty ammo; why not have they players skills and stats affect the chance to craft non dirty ammo. Kind of like installing bionics, the more experienced with firearms, fabrication, and mechanics the better, or closer the ammunition is to to the real deal.

The opposite would also be true: the lower the character is in the required skills, there would be a greater chance that the character would make lower quality munition.

[John_Candlebury]

You know I think ill introduce several more components for electronic/high tech weapons that you can only get from disassembling other high tech stuff and lab finales, Things like:

-Micro Capacitors (for everything electric)
-Hight temperature superconductors (for magnetic weapons)
-Free electron laser emitter (for laser weapons)
-And quite some more probably

[kevin.granade]

A few things that would nerf guns by making them more realistic rather than less:
Add/Bring back* increased recoil from being hit, if something smacks you when you’re trying to aim it tends to interfere.
Make reload times realistic. Currently the move or two taken to reload corresponds to a “tactical reload”, merely swapping out an empty magazine for a full one. Reloading a magazine can easily take upward of a minute, even for a skilled individual. This makes it basically impossible in a combat situation, and means you have to either fully disengage from enemies after running out of loaded ammo, or carry a bunch of magazines/guns that are pre-loaded, or switch to melee.
Impose some significant time to aim properly, especially for someone of low to moderate skill, they can consistently hit targets at a decent range, but not at a high rate of fire. Especially at low skill levels, time between accurate shots is fairly high.
I have a WIP PR for this that I ran out of time to fully polish: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/2194
Basically it adds an “aim” stat that you have to accumulate by taking wait actions while aiming at a target, and is reset when you switch targets, move, or do anything else but aim. It works, but it needs a better UI, for example hotkeys to “aim and fire” to different degrees of precision**, and feedback on your confidence level of the current shot. This means while you’re aiming, you’re burning time, and enemies are closing in. Also this nerfs kiting with a gun since moving resets your aim.

One particualr point is rarity, I think this is a bit of a non-starter. It’s wildly unrealistic to make guns and ammo rare enough that it’s really hard to find and use some gun or another***. Guns in particular are really problematic, because you have to make guns rare enough that you NEVER find one, because once you’ve found one, you have it and that’s done. Ammo is a bit better, but it’s still quite unreasonable to make it rare enough to seriously impede usability.
Regardless, if you loot a decent chunk of a town OR a gun store, I’d expect you to be able to find a decent civilian weapon, and if you run across military content (dead soldiers, military base, etc) I’d expect you to come out of it with a couple of high-grade military weapons. A better approach for the military weapons at least is to restrict them to just military encounters, and spawn a lot of dangerous stuff around them to make the risk match the reward.
Side issue, craftable guns are kind of pointless for precisely the reason that in reality it would be FAR easier to loot a gun than to make one. I’m not willing to warp reality by making gun crafting easy and/or making manufactured guns rare enough that gun crafting is worthwhile. This limits gun crafting to gunmods, which is a fairly reasonable thing to do.

• I don’t recall this being removed, but there have been a LOT of changes, so I could have missed it somehow.
  ** Think “snap shot” vs “aimed shot” etc from x-com.
  *** Frequency of military guns could use a nerf though, additionally some of the really good hunting rifles are likely more common than they should be.

[infectedmochi]

The aiming PR is pretty cool and it would solve a good chunk of the Gun being op problem. I know you have many other priorities Kevin but having that PR revived and landed will help tremendously. Just my 2 cents.

[system]

I also highly support on the aiming thing.

On the dead soldier squads:
There needs to be something in range that killed those guys. I am aways wondering when watching zombie movies: How did the army get defeated by those?! And why are the survivors still living?

So I think it’s a good idea to spawn a mob (or more?) that could possibly kill a squad of soldiers around their dead bodies so it’s actually a challenge to get military equipment.

[Uneron]

Implementing that PR after 0.A would be great! Not only does if nerf guns realistically but it introduces a whole new set of tactical play.

[Ferodaktyl]

[quote=“Rookie, post:35, topic:4938”]I also highly support on the aiming thing.

On the dead soldier squads:
There needs to be something in range that killed those guys. I am aways wondering when watching zombie movies: How did the army get defeated by those?! And why are the survivors still living?

So I think it’s a good idea to spawn a mob (or more?) that could possibly kill a squad of soldiers around their dead bodies so it’s actually a challenge to get military equipment.[/quote]

like an armored Jabberwock Or maybe a badass mother of worms. I can very well imagine one of those taking on a squad of soldiers. Though i don’t really know how will one avoid it once seen

[Zireael]

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:32, topic:4938”]You know I think ill introduce several more components for electronic/high tech weapons that you can only get from disassembling other high tech stuff and lab finales, Things like:

-Micro Capacitors (for everything electric)
-Hight temperature superconductors (for magnetic weapons)
-Free electron laser emitter (for laser weapons)
-And quite some more probably[/quote]

That’s a very good idea.

[Binky]

Really great ideas

I agree with all of those things and think they’d help balance no end. I also agree with mochi, I feel it’d be a really good addition if you could merge it. I don’t think it should be that you never/incredibly rarely find matching guns and ammo that match or anything, just that it shouldn’t be that you can pick up enough ammo to last you for ever in the first town/area. Relegating gun making skill to pretty much ammo crafting and gun mods sounds sensible, other than a few pipe guns.

However, limiting military weapons to high risk areas/ compounds would fix a lot of balance issues, as I don’t even bother going to gunstores until I find some good mil.spec hardware. Making high end civilian weapons very rare would help a lot as well, this is easily rationalised, as the good civilian weapons would have probably been taken on evacuation by those that did, and they’d be quite rare anyway (even if we need to bend reality somewhat).

John, high end components would be most welcomed as well, I think Soy mentioned that, and I think it’s a fine alternative.

[Morrigi]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:33, topic:4938”]Really great ideas

I agree with all of those things and think they’d help balance no end. I also agree with mochi, I feel it’d be a really good addition if you could merge it. I don’t think it should be that you never/incredibly rarely find matching guns and ammo that match or anything, just that it shouldn’t be that you can pick up enough ammo to last you for ever in the first town/area. Relegating gun making skill to pretty much ammo crafting and gun mods sounds sensible, other than a few pipe guns.

However, limiting military weapons to high risk areas/ compounds would fix a lot of balance issues, as I don’t even bother going to gunstores until I find some good mil.spec hardware. Making high end civilian weapons very rare would help a lot as well, this is easily rationalised, as the good civilian weapons would have probably been taken on evacuation by those that did, and they’d be quite rare anyway (even if we need to bend reality somewhat).

John, high end components would be most welcomed as well, I think Soy mentioned that, and I think it’s a fine alternative.[/quote]

Generally speaking, high-quality civilian weapons are pretty much everywhere in the U.S. with the exception of the inner city where cheap revolvers are quite common. While a lot of people may have taken their weapons when they evacuated, a lot of them would have died anyway.