Combat Balance

Ranged Combat Balance

Damage types

Ballistic

Lasers

Lasers are accurate long ranged weapons whose reduced projectile damage is compensated by their fast fire rates, lack of recoil and the ability to set foes on fire.

Another important factor to consider is that lasers are the principal 'renewable' weapon type, they require only energy to be fired and their power cells might be recharged using vehicles or by visiting active settlements.

Plasma

Plasma is short range very high damage weapon type, aditionally they might produce low range explosions or fireballs. Plasma weapons should be bulkier and heavier compared to their counterparts and have relatively shallow magazines with slow reload times, and thus requiring well planed reloading . The high AOE damage should make them dangerous to use during close combat.

They excel at efficiently dispatching powerfull or massed foes.

Voltaic-Electroshock

Voltaic projectiles might arc between close targets and produce clouds of electric fields. The electric fields generated by voltaics offer high utility AOE effects: they slow and stun targets that pass through them while also inflicting low amounts of damage, all without risking the item or terrain destruction of traditional explosives or plasma weapons. This utility comes at the cost, compared to other damage types, they have the lowest damage per projectile and the rarest ammunition.

They excel at dispatching groups of weak foes, robots or at slowing foes to create better escape/combat oportunities.

Weapon Categorization

For ease of balancing, all aftershock weapons are separated into three abstract and gamified categories: light weapons, medium weapons and heavy weapons. Where a weapon belongs among these three categories principally depends on its raw damage output per 100 moves, measured before any armor reductions.

Light Weapons

Light weapons have an average damage output of less than 25 damage per 100 moves

Medium Weapons

Heavy Weapons

Ranged Test cases

The balance of new weapons and monsters is best judged against these three test cases:

Start as an espatier (for the ranged bionics) set 6 to all skills and keep your stats at 8. The weapons to test are the following:

• ight weapon: Ump45 (25 round mag) .45 fmj
• Medium weapon: RM88 (50 round mag) 8x40mm
• Heavy Weapon: Milkor MLG with 40x46mm m433/ alien lune.

Each of these represents the strongest weapon that would be admissible in each categorry