OP updated. If you're going to separate the parts into compatibility groups, it doesn't matter whether or not the midsections look the same (and they won't, launch tubes tend to not look like sniper rifle receivers). Both ways can be rationalized in-universe, so I guess it really doesn't technically matter aside from which one bugs who more. I'm aware of how it works. The potential equipment and combat decisions it can create are exactly why I brought it up. Adjusting DPS and accounting for differences between weapon types, I hope. Letting a cowardly sniper out-DPS a shotgun every day of the week just won't do. I wouldn't hold it off until the very end of the game, but make it one of a series of mechanics 'unlocked' by finding increasingly valuable materials. That way, players have the game open itself up to them at a manageable pace as they progress, learning gun recombination after they learn crafting, mining, building, space travel, etc instead of being overwhelmed with options early on or grinding away to earn an interesting mechanic that could have been useful for the vast majority of their playtime.
I made a basic stats system for a play-by-post role-playing forum a few years ago, and I designed every single combat mechanic off of trade-offs. I basically extended the mathematical complexity behind geometric and linear reductions to every element of the combat. The idea was to give each new player character so many options that they would all create a unique combat style that was more or less effective against other characters of the same strength level. It worked really well, even better than I had hoped. Some players would give up flat-reduction elemental defenses in favor of evasion (it worked like a health buffer against non-AoE attacks, blocking X amount of damage until your next turn), while others would favor percentile-reduction elemental resistances. Because I designed the system so that they were well rewarded for choosing a niche (like bonuses to damage on elemental attacks), we ended up with a lot of variety. You might be able to dig it up in the Giants in the Playground Homebrew Design forum, but it's probably archived by now. I really hope they don't end up using the same flat damage reduction that was used in Terraria. Flat just isn't fun. I mean, who likes to drink flat soda? [/logic] Any type of weapon that deals bonus damage at a certain range should be balanced according to the average damage at all ranges. A sniper rifle that gets a bonus for shooting something far away while being weak against enemies nearby might have comparable maximum and average DPS to a shotgun, though. Consider that a sniper is rather defenseless in close range, so they could be considered brave to have such a big weakness. Since a melee fighter is probably going to take more hits, they should have higher defense, not higher DPS. Long ranged specialists use distance for their defense, so they can be more squishy. In other words, instead of shotguns being a high-risk high-reward sort of weapon, you should just lower the risk by wearing better armor.
I like what I see here. I'd definitely invest a huge chunk of time and pixels into finding the best weapon combinations, if they'd implement such a system. I have a couple ideas, actually. "Ho Hum Beam" - This laser doesn't know what to do with itself, really. It pierces foes, has a high energy cost, and yet does lower damage than what you'd like. What's more, you can't right click with it equipped, or even aim it. Unless you fire it. When you right click when the beam is out, it immediately changes directions based on the cursor's position. Higher levels of this alter the functions and the number of times it can change direction in the air. Some require two right clicks; one to stop it, then one to go. Others may seek out foes, but make sure you're not the only sadsack in its line of sight, or you're next. (The 'no aiming' thing is sort of like the old Mega man games, when I think about it) "Danger Wrap" - A grenade that wouldn't be out of place in a playground. When it makes contact with an enemy without touching the ground, the enemy is encased in a bubble, along with the frag, and the bubble will carry them away for a short time. Then it ends like you'd expect. With good timing, you can juggle enemies; throw right before the bubble pops, then catch the sucker in the air. However, when it touches the ground, it turns into a landmine that will hurt you as well, and deals low damage to everything (except vehicles). If you prefer bubble action, the grenade weighs a lot more, and deals less damage. If you prefer the boom, the bubble becomes easy to escape, and all you get is a boring old grenade. (Mega man yet again, what is wrong with me) "Power Wall" - A chemical / energy throwing weapon. It deals good damage for low energy, sure, but its range is lacking. But what's this? When you run and gun, suddenly things stop hurting you. The spray of your weapon covers you up almost completely! Run at enemies without fear! Run through enemies without fear! You're no sitting duck with this stuffthrower. However, this weapon does not immolate and has poor knockback with its normal spray. A defensive tool is what this is.
Risk-free long-range dominance is incredible bull. Snipers have a lot more time to soften or kill whatever they fight because they can fire from extreme distances. Fighting back is difficult when you have to close the distance under accurate fire and he's still got a shotgun waiting for you. Not that the AI would do that, but live players have no excuse. Telling the shotgunners to go armor-heavy just makes them try to fill a niche melee characters already have while depriving the shotgunners of energy and their own special niche. Energy-enabled evasion (let's say, a jetpack) and high-risk/reward distinguish them from and make them more actively moving than melee facetanking characters in general combat. Rather than trying to tank a sniper, just be as prepared as the hypothetical sniper and bring a sniper rifle to fight back with. An appropriately equipped character even has the energy to use it, what with being a gun specialist. On the topic of sniper rifles at close range: I'm not a fan of the pure always-on damage rampup. Having to stand still, crouch, and not be taking any damage to shoot straight is a more interesting and authentic price to pay than having your bullets bounce off of armor at close range. Or I guess you could just penalize damage for not zooming automatically vent gas/lower energy output to reduce accidental injury when firing sniper rifles from a non-zoomed position. For good measure, throw in a delay between clicking the mouse button and the gun actually firing (see: Soldat) and call it 'trigger pull weight'. Good lord, how to explain how it works to the player who finds one? Other problem is firing downwards in tight spaces. (Y U NO POINT GUN DOWN?) Interesting, but the ease of controlling enemy movement is concerning. I suppose it's tradeoff for hitting single targets at a time. It's too easy if you can negate damage that well. None of the defense modules are any good for killing things, either; they're toggled on and off as the player advances, reacts, or retreats. Incidentally, if it's a defensive tool, shouldn't it cause knockback? You want them flying when you're up against a corner and need breathing room, not when you're running right into them. Also, OP update!
I more or less mean 'defensive' as 'not useful for offense like that kind of weapon would normally be'. What I had in mind is that it's useful for dealing with/running from large numbers of enemies, but not for a few. Maybe my idea of 'small' knockback is still pretty large.
Why's the number of enemies matter? You're still blocking all the damage by holding down a mouse button.
Idk, I feel like you are thinking about snipers in certain poorly balanced FPS games, honestly. In Gang Garrison 2 and King Arthur's Gold, the long range characters are pretty bad. Starbound probably won't have headshots, and even snipers won't be able to see that much further than the length of one screen away, maybe two at most. They'll also probably be less accurate over extreme ranges, and because of the 2D side-view it will be way easier to tell where the attacks are coming from. On top of all that, it will be fairly easy to block with shields or find/build cover using blocks. Don't assume that all gun users have to go for energy and all melee users have to go for armor. The whole reason Chucklfish is going for an energy/armor choice instead of just bonus damage to melee or ranged weapons is so that hybrids are possible, to make the line between the "classes" more gray. There is no reason a melee fighter can't be designed for energy usage and pack a shield and jetpack so they can approach ranged enemies easily, but then they'd be more vulnerable against other melee fighters who use heavier armor, for example. If you are using a shotgun, you can use any armor you want. Since it is close-range you will benefit from higher defense. Since it uses energy you will benefit from higher energy as well. You can also create a build that mainly uses ranged weapons and falls back on melee when out of energy. I want to restate that most of the features of a sniper rifle would not be unique to sniper rifles. There will probably be other weapons that have scopes, or accurate long-range projectiles, or bonus damage over distance. Considering that, penalties and drawbacks like a trigger delay or losing accuracy when taking damage don't make much sense (why wouldn't other guns have these same drawbacks?). While I wouldn't mind the damage bonus being applied while zoomed if you can't move at the same time, you have to consider that Starbound does zooming differently than an FPS-- it's probably easy to be zoomed in even at very close range. Back on the topic of Shotgun DPS, compared to melee weapons, guns get a trade-off of getting long range at the cost of energy. Since shotguns don't get as much of the advantage of long-range, they require some other advantage (I don't think being able to pepper a large area with low-intensity spray is an adequate advantage). That other advantage could be higher DPS at close range compared to melee weapons, since melee weapon attacks are sustainable while shotguns use energy that has to recharge. On the other hand, you could consider the increased flexibility of the shotgun as the advantage-- a melee weapon has a maximum range, while a shotgun can always be used from just outside the melee range of the opponent. Anyway, instead of giving quantitative advantages like higher DPS in exchange for qualitative disadvantages like higher risk, Chucklefish needs to design the combat so that the risk is relatively even for all combat styles (and same for the reward). Adding shields and having boss arenas does a great deal towards achieving that. Each style will be unique, but there won't be any style that is the "pro" style, with the highest difficulty and risk in exchange for the highest reward in terms of DPS or whatever.
Going off of Luvdisc's comment, you really ought to lose accuracy when taking damage for any weapon.(Because seriously, are you going to keep a rifle steady when you've just been shot?)
Also, I do have to notice that the interdictor drone is under the flamethrower category, which really doesn't make since. I'd think it'd make more sense to get a flying drone "chasis" and mount a small force-field on it, then program it to be in front of you (All in game, mind.)
The game's purpose is to be fun, not to be realistic. Just because it is realistic to lose accuracy when taking damage doesn't mean it's fun. It would probably create a strategic bias towards aggression that leads to fast-paced PvP like in Terraria, where strategy is less about positioning and cover and more about who hits faster and harder.
I'd thought it'd put an emphasis on suppression, not aggression. If there's no accuracy loss due to damage, someone could just pop up out of cover and shoot you even if you're spraying him with bullets.
Either way he should just wait for you to run out of energy and then attack while you are recharging. After all, he should be trying to avoid damage, right? The reason I say it benefits aggression is that if you hit the enemy first, then lowering enemy accuracy becomes your defense, instead of having to find cover, use a shield, or dodge his attacks. If offense is also a form of defense, then why use regular defenses in the first place? If the shields and energy mechanics aren't enough to put the emphasis on suppression and defense instead of aggression, I'm not sure what I would do to solve it. Perhaps making cover an easier mechanic to use, but I guess being able to crouch does that to some degree as well, and you can place blocks just about anywhere.
I myself suggested something like this-- only my version was that you could turn into a cat or penguin to crawl inside ducts and such. I think being able to crawl would work just fine as well. Of course, this is a bit off-topic. Here's an idea related to shotmodules = In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, you could equip a weapon called the Shield Rod. If you used this item and a shield equipped on the other hand at the same time, it would produce some special effect. My idea is similar-- A shotmodule (or some other kind of weapon, maybe a shield) that turns the weapon in your other hand into a shield or defensive effect of some kind, depending on the stats and mods already present on that weapon. For example, if you used it with a flame thrower, you might get a buff that prevents all fire damage for a couple minutes, but it prevents your energy from regenerating as quickly during the duration of the effect.
None of this prevents them from effectively dictating the engagement. They have the range and sight advantage to get the first shot and make you react to them. The fact it's a 2D side-view game simplifies aiming when he effectively only has to account for how far up or down you are. If you have to slow down to put up some kind of barrier, he has the freedom to back up or change weapons. If you've ambushed or very aggressively closed the distance with him, he still has another gun. Maybe this is why they're thinking about hotbar dedicated weapon slots. Won't completely eliminate BS weapon switching but it'll buy some time for an aggressive player to ruin his day. You could definitely wear heavy armor but you're losing gun damage from the energy loss and pushing yourself towards melee. That's fine, except it's less shotgun (and not a solution to snipers). Firing off guns before continuing the fight in melee isn't reliant on your energy. You're just throwing javelins out to soften them up before you attack. That heavier armor helps you with soaking the hits, but again it's not what you need to handle the snipers. Being able to easily retreat while dealing damage is a huge thing against melee enemies. Melee weapons need some way to get the damage out if melee combat hurts them enough to really require good use of shields, but that's not say higher raw DPS. They have counters to make up for time spent blocking within the Killbot 9000's death radius and shotguns can't swing, hit, and knock back a whole stack of enemies. Multi-hit damage would have to be reduced or single-target damage increased with stacking bonuses of some kind. Also, dual-wield melee. Basically the same philosophy as a shotgunner but with less range, more damage, and no enforced downtime. Would have much better armor penetration than shotguns too unless there's special armor-piercing mechanics for pellets. Playstyles that have to get close without the benefit of easy damage reduction will be tougher simply because they can't take hits. It's simple enough to kite with a gun but having to dodge projectiles inside dual-sword range is trickier. Long-range riflemen will have less to worry about unless enemies flat out sprint and teleport. If you intentionally forsake safety in exchange for something else, it has to be worth it. Gun specialists automatically get range. If a gun specialist gives up much of his range, what's he get in return? If a melee specialist gives up the shield to dual wield, what's the point unless he gets a significant damage return? It sounds workable with a flamethrower, preventing stubborn pyros from being utterly worthless on volcanic planets by helping the vanguard on defense instead of offense, but I can't imagine how it would work with anything else. Passive defense on actual guns a bit... iffy. Perhaps I'm just fixating too much on your example's wording, but preventing all damage (even of one type) for a set amount of time seems a bit much. It reduces the effect of using different flamethrowers and makes hugging lava golems super easy. What if it used the flamethrower's damage as a threshold and used another stat to determine how much all of the damage dealt above that is divided? Hell, what if it basically functioned as a built-in energy-sucking shield button for flamethrowers? Flamethrowers could be the gun equivalent of a tank, making dual-sword:sword-and-shield analogous with shotgun:flamethrower. EDIT: I FOUND THE VOTE LINK. YAAAAAAY.
On one hand, someone could say that ranged fighters are controlling the engagement because they force melee fighters to chase them, but on the other hand someone could also say that the melee fighters are controlling the engagement because they force ranged fighter to flee from them. Normally the difference is that the ranged fighter is dealing damage while the melee fighter is not. However, being able to use shields while moving (confirmed) allows you to prevent that damage without yielding your ability to force the ranged fighter to flee. Melee without shields needs some other options to select from, like a teleport or some sort of dash that renders you immune to projectiles during the animation. Adding melee DPS doesn't change the fact that ranged fighters would control the engagement. Your burst DPS would still be the same, but your sustained DPS would be lower. Melee doesn't use energy at all, but doesn't have the advantage of being able to pepper an area with light damage at a distance (minor crowd control? less accuracy required? out-range melee fighters?). I think the differences are still pretty big, and I consider the shotgun to be something like a hybrid between melee and ranged combat. Since a slower-paced tactical PvP focuses more on defense, DPS matters a lot less than player skill and accuracy anyway. The advantages the shotgun gives in flexibility are more important than raw DPS in my opinion. So you have two obvious solutions: make it harder to retreat, or make it harder to deal damage. Adding in a projectile-proof air-dash or something would make it harder to retreat, and shields already make it harder to deal damage. At least, that's how I would approach the problem. I'm sure there are many other solutions. It's hard to say how these will actually end up working, honestly. If we end up with geometric damage reduction, then shotguns won't have any problem with higher armor that isn't an issue for any other type of weapon. However, if I were to guess it would be that dual-wield-melee and shotguns would both be strongest against shield users-- shotguns can out-range them while still being close enough to jump/jetpack around and try to get behind the shield, and dual-wielders can use the raw DPS to deplete the energy of the shield user. Both types are weaker against long-ranged types like snipers, but shields are effective against those. It actually creates a sort of rock-paper-scissors effect. Shotgun/jetpack and 2-hand melee styles would have the advantage against shields which would have the advantage against snipers, which in turn have the advantage against the first two. Mid-range/DPS > Shield/Defense > Sniper > Mid-range/DPS. Also consider that shotguns and dual-wielding means more hits, which in turn means more chances to proc with status effects. Defeating the enemy and preventing the enemy from defeating you are two sides of the same coin. Safety is the coin itself. If you sacrifice safety, you lose. You might trade defense values for offense and hope to defeat your enemy first, but that is still a kind of safety. However, for the sake of creating highly strategic slow-paced combat, you can't allow DPS to become your defense. Finding a way to give every play style a way to defend is key, and that's why I made a thread about hands-free defense options for melee fighters (which I can't seem to find at the moment). It includes the air-dash I mentioned before, and a hands-free buckler that allows dual-wielders to shield (but is less effective than a regular shield), and I think something else, too. It was quite a while ago. I don't believe that high risk should always mean high reward. Calculated risk, maybe, but not recklessness. It doesn't necessarily have to be passive defense buffs. It would just turn the weapon into something non-lethal. Examples: Rocket/Grenade Launcher = Fires a canister that explodes at short-range, releasing quick-dry foam that creates weak blocks. Assault Rifle = Creates a matrix-style barrier that stops bullets from reaching you. Adds resistance to ballistics. Laser Beam = Places a vertical force field in front of you that has a chance to reflect energy attacks like a mirror. These are just prototypes; I'm not really considering game balance yet. The effectiveness would be tied to the weapon's original stats. Yeah, you are. It was just a prototypical idea. You gave good examples of how it could work in practice.
Blocking's a losing battle if you're slowing yourself down. Tools for aggressively closing the distance without being dead at the end sounds like a great candidate for getting their own slot or button. Perhaps a SCIENCE bubble that rapidly shoots you in the direction you're pointing, going farther with two weapons because pointier bubbles and weak justifications for game mechanics. If you're putting that much on active defense, shotgun/dual swords could frontload damage through gaps in defense more effectively than other weapons. The shotgun's damage especially falls under the extremes of either being blocked or not blocked, instead of half-blocked as you momentarily drop your defense under an extended burst of gunfire or flurry of blows to strike back. The downside is every block is a complete block and pellets probably don't move nearly as fast as a sniper round. It'd be quite silly not to have distance-closing tools like projectile-proof air-dash quantum displacement bubbles. As far as I can tell, forward and backward walking speeds are currently the same but this could be changed universally or depending on armor type. I haven't seen any explicit confirmation one way or the other on damage reduction, but with the reduction of differences between weapon types and lack of precedent from Terraria, I doubt it. Sounds concerning for the solo-minded player up against armed individuals, even AI-controlled ones. I suppose it's fine since these are far from being hard counters. Hadn't considered those. It'll get nasty if they stack. It reduces the safety margin. Running straight into danger and out-DPSing it doesn't work for long if you still get hit. I'm not calling for the damage to effectively win a fight if it enters close range but when you're fighting in a way that puts you in a dangerous place to push others into a dangerous place, you need the strength to capitalize on their mistakes before they can get the momentum to capitalize on yours. Interesting stuff about the secondary defenses. Would love a link if possible. Only real concern I have is everything we're piling up here is going to raise the skill floor massively this is more relevant in pvp where everyone has to be good anyways, the ai isn't half as good and probably shouldn't be given their numerical advantage and how many of them prefer tusks and rainbow vomit None of these weapons are short-ranged brawlers. I like it on the flamethrower because it expands the flamethrower's function to be the shield to the shotgun's dual-wield. These examples are basically shoot-and-go. What about making the resist fields project out of the player's backpack? You could meet a foe with your resist field projected, rapidly face away just before a shotgun blast hits you, shoot back, face away while 'reloading' (slower, with the penalized energy recharge rate), and run away with the resist field facing incoming fire. It could make catching runners a little annoying, but the crippled energy regeneration cripples energy-based escape and reduces sustained damage dealt in retreat.
