Piercing bullets are overpriced

[KDR_11k]

Piercing bullets are stupidly expensive for what little they do. 5 iron, 5 copper for a total of 50 damage (and you churn through a magazine in 2/3rds of a second with an unupgraded SMG). If bullet weapons are intended to be low tier weapons then they probably shouldn't be this expensive to fire. For comparison the shotgun piercing shells (which are too cheap IMO) cost 10 iron, 2 copper for a total of 960 damage (plus a bonus from the combat shottie?) and take five seconds to use up with an unupgraded combat shotgun. The shotgun would still be worth it even with fewer shots per shell item but the bullets would need a massive clip size increase to get a half-way reasonable cost.

Of course it's probably well known that the shotgun is OP and bullets UP even without cost considerations (SMG slows you down much more than the shotgun despite lower damage output, shotgun rips buildings up while SMG would take a minute to break even one) but the cost just adds insult to injury. It makes more sense to skip from standard clips straight to standard shotgun shells without ever using piercing bullets.

[ssilk]

Makes sense for me.

[Khyron]

I tend to agree. Although there is a big difference between the weapons you use personally vs your base defenses. Obviously you can't load shotgun shots into a turret. And the SMG is useful in that it auto-aims at biters while you can't easily focus shotgun fire on a single biter.

Using 5x more materials for a 2.5x damage increase is pretty harsh.

Where the problem really comes in is how it interacts with the evolution of biters. Medium biters simply soak up loads of damage thanks to their physical damage reduction. Even after factoring in the multiplicative bonus from turret damage + bullet damage, bullets struggle to keep up.

Turret damage & bullet damage upgrades each give:

1. +10%
2. +10% (20% cumulative)
3. +20% (40% cumulative)
4. +20% (60% cumulative)

... And beyond that you need alien artifacts!

So if you balance researching both you get:

1. 1.1 * 1.1 = 1.21 = +21%
2. +44%
3. +96%
4. +156%

Which makes piercing bullets do:

1. 5+1.05 = 6.05
2. 7.2
3. 9.8
4. 12.8

Which after damage reduction on medium biters means you need (after rounding):

1. 75/(6.05-4) = 37 bullets
2. 24
3. 13
4. 9

So you can get it down to manageable levels if you're willing to spend 900 red science packs, 850 green and 200 blue... but once big biters come on to the field, gun turrets are once again redundant. It's a no brainier to switch to lasers at that stage because they don't suffer from damage reduction and they don't consume resources. And of course by that stage you can have unlimited, non-polluting energy via solar panels and accumulators.

So really the only question is will you switch to lasers before medium biters come in to play? Pretty much the only time you wouldn't switch before is if you were starved of oil. In any other situation the resources that went in to the expended piercing bullets are better invested in to solar arrays and accumulators for your inevitable laser defenses.

I think it would be great if bullets had some niche role for the mid or even late game. Then you might have a compelling reason to set up logistics for them. As it currently stands, there's just too much benefit to making an early switch to lasers.

[ysor123]

Get 2x magazines instead of one, so the price is halved.

Additionally:

Normal bullets should do about 6 phys damage base (current: 2)
Piercing bullets should do about 12 phys damage base. (current: 5);

Having a base speed (SMG) of 15, you would have 90 DPS* with normal bullets and 180 DPS* with piercing.
Currently we have 30 DPS* and 75 DPS*, which is a joke for the price!

Normal shells do 48 phys damage base.
Piercing shells do 96 phys damage base.

Having a base speed (combat shotgun) of 2, including 20% bonus:

Normal: 115,2 DPS
Piercing 230,4 DPS

Since there are research updates for all types of weapons kind of equally, i'l take the base damage because having all upgrades raise the dmg more or less equally, but the proportions should stay the same.

Don't forget the advantage of the SMG: You can use it save in your base. Try to shoot armor piercing shells in your base...

*Not taking in account the absolute phys resistance which bitters might have. It has a larger impact on the bullet damage because of its lower per-shot-damage than on shells. In case they have absolute resistance the DPS of bullets would go further down. To give some calculation: the absolute resistance impact in bullets in my example would be 8 times larger than on shells. Although I'm not sure whether the damage of shells is split in fragments or not, if yes, this difference gets smaller

[Rahjital]

Combat shotgun shouldn't be compared to the SMG, since it is a superior weapon to the submachine gun in pretty much every way. Instead, we should compare the SMG with the standard Shotgun. A shotgun shell fires 12 pellets doing 4 damage each, while piercing shells fire 16 pellets doing 6 damage each. Coupled with the fact that many of the pellets miss when shot at any longer distance than point blank, they are actually pretty well balanced. It's the Combat Shotgun that's so overpowered, and there's no bullet shooting weapon similar to it.

I agree that bullets are overpriced, too. Each shotgun shell gets as many shots out of it as a bullet magazine does, but since shotguns shoot at one tenth the rate, the difference is humongous. Especially since a combat shotgun standard shells is easily more powerful than any bullet weapon. The magazine size should be at least 30, I think, while each shotgun shell should fire no more than five times, ideally even less.

[KDR_11k]

Shotgun spread matters less against crowds and buildings where every pellet is guaranteed to hit SOMETHING. But yeah, bullets have some advantages. Unfortunately they are completely useless against big biters and buildings.

Making them useful late game seems impossible since all common targets at that point are heavily armored. It'd either need a heavy bullet gun (e.g. a rifle and heavy machine gun replacing the pistol and SMG, respectively) that just shoots bigger bullets or enemies that have low armor and high HP. Alternatively special bullets that deal different damage types...

[Wynillo]

Shotgun spread matters less against crowds and buildings where every pellet is guaranteed to hit SOMETHING. But yeah, bullets have some advantages. Unfortunately they are completely useless against big biters and buildings.

Making them useful late game seems impossible since all common targets at that point are heavily armored. It'd either need a heavy bullet gun (e.g. a rifle and heavy machine gun replacing the pistol and SMG, respectively) that just shoots bigger bullets or enemies that have low armor and high HP. Alternatively special bullets that deal different damage types...

You mean like
- burning bullets (adds burning effect -loosing x health each second for x seconds, may jumps to near structures/creatures, dont use inside your factory!),
- shocking bullets (lightning jumps from x times enemy to enemy dealing x damage),
- freezing bullets (chance to freeze enemy, if they get dmged while freezed, they break),
- explosion bullets (when an enemy dies of it, they explode, dealing x% of their life as splash dmg)
- acid bullets (leaving a trail of poison on the ground for x seconds, dealing low dot dmg, weakens armor by x% per tick, max xy%)
- (new) piecing bullets (pierces to x enemys, ignores x% enemy armor)

gosh i want to mod it now.

[Align]

Or an Assault Rifle, with superior range and like +200% damage?