Equipment/Proposed/Poison rounds(for rifles,bolters etc.)
Poison rounds
A proposition, which may be a little challenging for the coders, but is not absolutely unrealizable, and would surely make the game more interesting.
There exists a whole lot of various poisons, some of them so strong, that they only 0.00000003 mg per one kg of specimen weight is enough to kill them. Unfortunately, effectiveness of a poison depends strongly on specific species metabolism. For example, only 0,6 mg of Dioxin is required to kill a Guinea Pig, whereas one would require 3000 mg to kill a Hamster with it.
The way the poison rounds would work:
They are loaded like normal ammunition, and inflict a bit lower amount of direct damage. If a bullet manages to pierce through armor though, target gets poisoned and will meet its inevitably doom in one to three turns.
But for the poison to be effective, an autopsy of an alien specimen should be earlier conducted (conducting research on live aliens may be required instead, should poison rounds prove too powerful). Ineffective poisons would have lower (or none) impact on aliens.
There are three matters, that should be concerned:
1. Maybe instead of poison rounds for shell firing weapons, there should be only one or two versions of dedicated dart-gun?
2. Maybe also tranquilizer rounds could be used, but these would require more (4-5) turns to knock aliens unconscious. To don't make capturing live aliens too easy, tranquilizer rounds would require to have another live specimen captured and researched earlier.
3. Should there be only one type of universal poison bullet, which would have all the types of toxins, which could work on every specie of aliens we have effective poison researched against, or there would be a one type of poison rounds for every specie?
Both solutions have their drawbacks and benefits, both affecting game-play (universal poison bullet is a bit less realistic, whereas a lot of various poison would require a lot of storage space) and implementation difficulties.