Whilst close combat troops are useful early in the game (Shotgun, Microshotgun and SMG are all highly useful against unarmoured enemies, and the flamer is great for ambush kills), by midgame they are far less useful (the shotguns are too innacurate to land multiple shots on an armoured enemy to kill it and the flamer just invites reaction fire from plasma rifle and blaster armed troops for point blank range) unless armed with the plasma blaster. Then, for the rest of the game, the close combat tech tree sees little progression. Granted, laser pistos are a good weapon, but are far from a go-to choice in combat. Plasma blades are deadly but much more a weapon of circumstance to use if you happen to end up next to an enemy. I know from forum discussions that H-Hour is thinking about an EP shotgun round (and maybe even an EP SMG round, which to make makes sense as an EP AR lite version) and wondering how to differentiate it from the plasma blaster. As I see it, there are 2 options - either having the round contain "shot" consisting of small parcels of contained plasma to sower the target upon impact (so poor accuracy, very short range, low damage per individual projectile but loads of projectiles - more damaging than the PB if enough of the "shot" hits but shorter range and more innacurate at range, fired from riot shotgun due to large shell size), or some kind of APFSDS plsama slug, less damaging than a PB ball, but slightly more accurate with a low TU cost to fire, again fired from the riot shotgun due to shell size. IIRC AntJam has a small mod that offers some kind of plasma thrower weapon as a upgrade to the flametrower - is such a thing planned for inclusion or is that too close to the Plasma blaster in function?

The second issue is the PB Blaster. Discussion on the forum has shown that people choose to use the Laser rifle, PB rifle or EP Assault rifle depending on play style, with stronger troops using Heavy Lasers, Needlers or HMG's, but nobody uses the PB Blaster due to its horrible accuracy. To me it seems to fit the profile of a close combat weapon far more than an assault weapon. Having it reclassified as one would offer a late game upgrade to the Plasma blaster, though the Plasma blaster may need its damage tweaked down (so it would not kill heavily armoured Ortnok soldiers in one shot) to make this a worthwhile upgrade.