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« on: September 09, 2015, 07:42:35 pm »
In 2.6 I have had many interesting experiences with both shotguns. First, the standard one with slugs. The standard shotgun with slugs can on occasion one hit kill a Taman in alien armour - if you can hit him. It will stun them quite often, and even one hit kill or stun a Sheevar if you are lucky, though a few hits will be needed to take down an un-armoured Ortnok or a Taman in heaver armour. They even really hurt robotic enemies, and can put down a hovernet in one hit, if you hit it. The combat versions of robots take more than one hit, of course. They wont dent an armoured Ortnok. The accuracy is horrible for soldiers of low skill and accuracy stat. Despite the incredibly short range of the Flamethrower, it is potentially a better choice on maps with little open space as it does not suffer from the highly erratic accuracy of the standard shotgun. This accuracy increases with some mission experience, but by the time their accuracy or skill is good enough to hit things reliably with the shotgun, you are going to be better off giving them a plasma blaster if the strength stat has grown along with others. To be fair, the plasma blaster is a bit OP, as it will take nearly anything down - I have lost more soldiers to it than any other weapon by far. Standard shotguns with slugs are also very, very useful as a defensive weapon - hide a tile or two back from a corner in ambush, and they fire very reliably as a close range reaction fire weapon. Now... the microshotgun. I love that weapon. I have emplyed it mainly as a secondary weapon for snipers to use if they need to go into close combat mode - storming a building or UFO, say. I have also used it for low strength, low accuracy CQ recruits who do not have a high enough accuracy to be given an SMG in order to pewpewpew away from distance. These act as forward scouts. As with the standard shotgun, they are great as a defensive weapon in terms of generating reliable close range ambush reaction fire, and will 1 hit kill or stun un-armoured organic foes of all types if within 4 tiles or so. Any further might stun or badly wound organic foes if you are lucky. They simply do not hurt robotic enemies enough to justify using against them, nor are they much good against armoured aliens. Similar applies to the flechette grenade rounds.
So, yes, early game the CQ weapons are a fun tactical choice, essential at times in keeping soldiers alive in close quarters defensive combat. However, the tech tree kind of forgets them a little, with the slightly OP plasma blaster a fairly obvious choice for all circumstances. Yes, the plasma pistol is a nice sidearm, or useful for grenade flingers (who I generally give the automatic pistol early game, to keep one hand free for grenade lobbing), and so is the laser pistol (or even particle pistol) - but the pistols are secondary weapons to me, and not to be relied on. I would love to see some variety brought in - I have previously posted about how I would love to see the Particle Blaster be a CQ weapon, seeing as how it behaves like one anyway in terms of its sub par accuracy. Its MASSIVE damage and high TU cost could balance it in that class nicely. I have also seen others suggesting some kind of "alien material" slug to replace standard slugs to give CQ recruits something worth shooting at armoured aliens., and "needler flechette" derived techs for the micro shotgun (which could of course be fired from the standard one too) and the flechette grenades. Heck, there even exists a mod for a "plasmathrower", which could act as a nice step up in terms of damage from a flamethrower (though this might mean the flamethrower needs a damage nerf or more TU's added to its use cost to make it a viable option) and sit alongside the plasma blaster.
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