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« on: December 13, 2012, 12:18:45 am »
@maackey: the main reason we have the damage weights (spray, light, medium, heavy, etc.) is to be able to model armour. The SMG, for instance, uses normal_light, and can be effective on Tamans early in the game. But as soon as armour is introduced it becomes pretty obsolete, because armour's protection against normal_light drastically reduces the damage potential. Having separate damage weights allows us to model the effectiveness of armour differently for different weapons. Assault rifles (normal_medium) get a lot weaker against armour, but the sniper rifle (normal_heavy) still packs a powerful punch. If we tried to do this just with higher damage values, we'd end up under-powering or over-powering weapons in the distribution.
As I said, I'm not entirely happy with the damage weights system, but I'm not in any position to change it at this time. I've also just finished a pretty comprehensive rebalancing of the weapons. I'm interested in riding the system we've got for a while and seeing how it plays out.
Personally I like the idea of modelling more abstract weapon parameters which define the interaction with armour and the wounding process, but I'm only half-way through my campaign with the new weapon balance and I'm really happy with the weapon balance we've got (pre-Needler, though, this could get rough!). Maybe the system does work, even if it doesn't appear as elegant under the hood, and I'm not going to beg a coder to rewrite a system that works unless I'm really convinced the benefits will be worth taking their time away from other features.