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« on: November 01, 2012, 06:26:53 pm »
Welcome to the forums, Martin. If you aren't playing 2.5-dev, you might want to switch over to that sometime. All of the weapons have been heavily rebalanced during this development cycle, though not in the way you suggest.
You've obviously put a lot of thought in, so I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but I think you've misunderstood the size parameter. It only effects how much space an item takes in base storage capacity. There is currently no weight/encumbrance mechanism. Darkrain is in the final stages of implementing this, but we will use a separate parameter to define the weight of each piece of equipment.
Your suggestions about range are interesting, but I don't find them very compelling. I'm not sure what the motivation is. If the motivation is to add a sense of realism, then I would say that implementing this will only call attention to the stylised scaling of the battlescape. We have assault rifles that are only effective out to 20-30 meters and sniper rifles that have a hard time hitting passed 50 meters. Real combat takes place across miles, but our battlescapes are small recreations of tactical combat. Implementing damage fall-off at range for all weapons would just exacerbate the problem, since most rifles are highly effective out to 300 meters.
If the motivation is to introduce a new game mechanic -- an additional tactical layer -- I'm not sure it would bring anything new to the table. Managing range, exposure and closing with the enemy are already vital parts of the battlescape through the use of close and sniper weapons (this is something that has been improved in 2.5-dev). The player already benefits from putting the right weapons with the right troops in the right tactical situations -- long-range, mid-range and close-range. Introducing a range fall-off rate for each weapon would significantly increase the complexity, but I'm not convinced it would make the combat more interesting.
You're right that our combat damage model is, IMHO, a little bit too simplistic. This is particularly the case in how it deals with armor. There is currently no solid mechanism for handling an individual ammo's "penetration" capability, for instance (we hack it in a bit with the dmgtypes/resistances).
To be honest, it seems to me like you've got into the numbers a bit too much. To suggest that one weapon could dominate because it has the highest damage-per-some-parameter is to miss the fact that the Battlescape is not really a number crunching game, despite its turn-based, chess-grid design. How you cultivate different soldier strengths, then distribute and utilize these in a 3D environment, is far more important than basic damage-output. Don't get me wrong. Numbers matter and by the end of the game you'll have a very tough time if you're still fighting with the start-of-game weapons. But in any space with at least a certain level of complexity (and not all of our maps meet this criteria), TU costs, chance to hit at various ranges and indirect fire capabilities are far more influential than sum-total stats.
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