Weapon Balance

[Deadly-Bagel]

I can't find much on the subject of overall weapon balance, just random snippets in other threads. In fact it seems it's just generally agreed that "use the combat shotgun" is just how it is.

Endgame, armour piercing rounds are only ever worth using in lots of turrets but due to the hassle of feeding them and their short range compared to laser, I don't bother. It is handy to have a stack in a submachine gun for when the biters are near your structures so you don't just destroy everything, but once you get walls up this isn't a problem.

Before you get your power armour the tank is okay. It's faster than walking and has excellent range with its cannon, but bases can be unassailable if near trees or water, and cannon ammo is very expensive and you burn through it very quickly. I only use this to get the artefacts necessary to build mk2 power armour and then it becomes a relic. Explosive cannon shells are a joke as they blow up on the first biter so you can't hit the bases.

The combat shotgun is currently the only weapon worth using, period, and once you get the mk3 power armour with a few shields you're just unstoppable. It's ludicrous that a single pellet of the shotgun does more damage than a shot of armour piercing rounds, and it shoots SIXTEEN of them per shot. Spawners go down in two shots and you can hit two at once.

Okay, to be fair the new flamethrower is pretty good too and is actually better at taking out hordes of big biters, but it's unwieldy, ammo is expensive and you're liable to burn down all your forests so some good pros and cons. Best paired with another weapon (combat shotgun).

Rockets are just pathetic, there is literally no reason to use them. They are very expensive to make, take up lots of room as you get one shot per item, range is only barely better than other handheld weapons, and at the end of the day you don't end up with any extra firepower. I actually just took some rockets to a spawner, one rocket and one explosive rocket didn't even take it below half health. (EDIT: Explosive rockets do even less damage than normal rockets! And it takes four rockets to kill a spawner.)

Here are my suggestions (numbers are assuming all research is completed, I know some of them have been suggested):

• Rockets need way more AoE, way more damage and way more range. Should be able to take out at least two spawners (see below) with 2 shots from well outside biter aggro range. While this may seem OP, keep in mind the cost in making them and that once you hit the base the biters will be after you anyway. Perhaps limit stack size to 50 to compensate. (Added) Suggest making rockets start at max damage, and the damage research is replaced with range and AoE boosts.
• (Edited) Spawners need to be harder to take down with guns. To keep the early game balanced this may need to be scaled with biter evolution. High physical and laser resistances, but no fire or explosive resistances. Grenades, rockets or cannon shells should almost be a requirement and take them down with ease.
• (Edited) Bullets need a higher clip size, perhaps affected by research, and shotgun shells maybe need to go down to 5 shots per clip (though considering the below this may need revision).
• (Edited) "Armour piercing" rounds should actually pierce armour, this would keep them relevant late but still balanced early. Turrets would be very strong late game but their short range offsets this. Armour piercing shotgun ammo should perhaps be replaced with shotgun slugs, very high damage skillshot that at max research just annihilates a few big biters in a line similar to the tank's cannon, especially effective against worms?
• Modular components in vehicles. Equip a fusion reactor (or perhaps it can burn the internal fuel?) and a few shields to increase the use you get out of your trusty old friend. Do you make an indestructable rhino or sacrifice some defense for lasers? You could even equip your car with a roboport for some better portable robots before you get mk2 armour, or permanently use it as a construction vehicle and have your own armour purely kitted out for combat. Such a simple addition (that doesn't even require any extra content) opens up a lot of decisions and customisation. Perhaps boost some stats such as roboport range.

Other suggestions:

• (Photoloss): Discharge defense needs tweaking for vehicles to become a powerful tool, mitigating the car/tank from becoming blocked in by biters to offset their low manoeuvrability.
• (Photoloss): Flamethrower revision, currently too powerful
• (Photoloss): Biter and nest behaviour revision (definitely agree with this but it's another topic altogether)

Similar topics:

• Rocket damage - Rockets definitely need an overhaul, as above.
• Shotgun ammo efficiency - This is a good point, it takes forever to get through a whole stack, but 1 shot per clip is drastic. Perhaps 3-5 would be better, and still boost rounds clip size.

[Photoloss]

• Rockets need way more AoE, way more damage and way more range. Should be able to take out at least two spawners (see below) with 2 shots from well outside biter aggro range. While this may seem OP, keep in mind the cost in making them and that once you hit the base the biters will be after you anyway. Perhaps limit stack size to 50 to compensate.

AoE sniper with little to no close quarters viability sounds okay, and since you need alien tech to get rockets up to scratch killing individual spawners uncontested doesn't sound too bad.

• Spawners need more health, more physical resistance, and less explosive resistance. Explosions should do the most damage as they are structures, a shotgun would only poke holes in it. Something like 5 shots of piercing shotgun ammo should be required compared to two rockets.

That sounds too simple and would seriously mess up the early game. I'd rather see them scale up over time and adapt to the weapons you use. They definitely need some laser resistance though, and explosives have always been garbage for a number of reasons.

• Bullets should do more single-target damage compared to shotgun shells. Strange that the AoE ammo that costs the exact same materials to craft (even has the same clip size???) does significantly more damage.

The shotgun isn't really AoE, but rather a kind of multi-hit skillshot. Each projectile has a limited amount of damage it can deal before stopping (not sure if they even keep going on overkill) while a true AoE like grenades or the flamethrower actually deals more total damage the more enemies it hits. Like the other "nerf shotgun" topic you're also forgetting the added cost of seperate upgrades and production lines for your turrets. The SMG definitely needs a lategame upgrade if it should stay relevant, and the combat shotgun could deal a little less damage to anything that isn't a big or behemoth biter.

• More an aesthetic change, "armour piercing" is nonsense as it doesn't pierce anything. Normal rounds should perhaps be called "hollow point" instead, not sure about shotgun ammo. Maybe it can stay armour piercing, but do less damage and actually pierce armour?

They do technically "pierce" armour in the sense of dealing more damage to armoured enemies. They also deal more damage to "unarmoured" enemies which doesn't fit perfectly, but perhaps you could argue the biters are naturally tough so the "armour" piercing effect also affects the ability to damage organs. (on top of the obvious copout of keeping the mechanics simple, the additional damage to small enemies doesn't matter much since they die so quickly anyway)

• Modular components in vehicles. Equip a fusion reactor (or perhaps it can burn the internal fuel?) and a few shields to increase the use you get out of your trusty old friend. Do you make an indestructable rhino or sacrifice some defense for lasers? You could even equip your car with a roboport for some better portable robots before you get mk2 armour, or permanently use it as a construction vehicle and have your own armour purely kitted out for combat. Such a simple addition (that doesn't even require any extra content) opens up a lot of decisions and customisation.

YES!!! Some components should probably have seperate stats for vehicles though, in particular the Discharge Defense system should be massively more potent as a means of escaping when surrounded as vehicles are much more sluggish than players even without exo-legs.

Oh, and since you don't really mention it: the new flamethrower is a tad too strong since the biters willingly walk into their fiery death. Also a little strong against spawners especially once you have exo-legs.

You fail to address one very important factor though: enemies. Biters are dumb, so there's not much depth to the combat. They spawn infinitely and for free, so at equal numbers balance renewable combat techniques and quick spawner kills are favoured massively. Enemy resistances are very limited and this only gets more lopsided later on, making non-physical/explosive weapons much stronger in practice than the raw output numbers would suggest. Combat is also fairly mobile since facetanking the biters takes quite some investment, so any delayed/DoT attack that doesn't work well against spawners is next to useless.
The only "simple" suggestion I have in this regard is to make the biters evolve resistance against the attacks that kill them rather than always stacking up physical/explosive resist, but if something more is to be done this will massively affect weapon balance.

[Deadly-Bagel]

AoE sniper with little to no close quarters viability sounds okay, and since you need alien tech to get rockets up to scratch killing individual spawners uncontested doesn't sound too bad.

Attacking anything close to you would deal massive damage to yourself so yeah, not really viable in close quarters. Perhaps the research could also improve the range from just under biter aggro to well above it, and perhaps AoE too. In fact maybe the damage should start high and the research only affects range and AoE, that would work.

The shotgun isn't really AoE, but rather a kind of multi-hit skillshot. Each projectile has a limited amount of damage it can deal before stopping (not sure if they even keep going on overkill) while a true AoE like grenades or the flamethrower actually deals more total damage the more enemies it hits. Like the other "nerf shotgun" topic you're also forgetting the added cost of seperate upgrades and production lines for your turrets. The SMG definitely needs a lategame upgrade if it should stay relevant, and the combat shotgun could deal a little less damage to anything that isn't a big or behemoth biter.

I know it's not AoE in the true sense of the term but the point is it deals significantly more damage to multiple targets. And I'm more talking endgame stuff here, the point you start needing to wade through huge nests to build mining outposts. You typically don't care about research costs at this point, and anyway my endgame lab setup burns through even the last tier shotgun researches in a little over five or six minutes. Besides, you need some decent power armour to really be able to use the combat shotgun to its potential which is fairly endgame in itself.

They do technically "pierce" armour in the sense of dealing more damage to armoured enemies. They also deal more damage to "unarmoured" enemies which doesn't fit perfectly, but perhaps you could argue the biters are naturally tough so the "armour" piercing effect also affects the ability to damage organs. (on top of the obvious copout of keeping the mechanics simple, the additional damage to small enemies doesn't matter much since they die so quickly anyway)

In practice they "pierce" armour but technically they do not.

Perhaps to make the shotgun more varied, there should be a "scattershot" ammo and a "slug" ammo (no armour piercing). This would work well to balance everything, armour piercing rounds can actually be armour piercing which keeps them balanced early but relevant late game, and the shotgun has an option of less damage in a spread (useful for large waves of small and maybe medium biters) or a single slug that just annihilates one biter, like at max damage it would just outright kill a big biter.

Couple this with a generous boost to the number of shots in a clip of SMG ammo and this would pretty much balance everything out nicely. The extra clip size might need to be part of research to keep the early game balanced.

Some components should probably have seperate stats for vehicles though, in particular the Discharge Defense system should be massively more potent as a means of escaping when surrounded as vehicles are much more sluggish than players even without exo-legs.

I was thinking the roboport should have a better range in a vehicle too, not only does it have the size, weight and structure to boost the signal but a vehicle is unwieldy so more range makes sense practically too. Honestly I've never even used discharge defence, this is the problem, there's no reason to do anything other than fill your armour with reactors, exos, shields and roboports. Anything else is a waste.

Oh, and since you don't really mention it: the new flamethrower is a tad too strong since the biters willingly walk into their fiery death. Also a little strong against spawners especially once you have exo-legs.

It's kind of in an okay spot for me since the ammo is expensive, especially in large quantities and you burn (no pun intended) through it pretty quickly. It does have its downsides, if it's nerfed it just won't be an attractive weapon.

You fail to address one very important factor though: enemies. Biters are dumb, so there's not much depth to the combat.

I would put this discussion under another topic... I did a similar post somewhere about improving biter behaviour, but let's be honest, biters -are- dumb. It's not like they can, even if the technology permitted, launch a strategy game against you. There is a LOT I could say on the matter (could probably easily fill a five page essay) but this topic is about weapon balance, not biter behaviour.

[Photoloss]

I know it's not AoE in the true sense of the term but the point is it deals significantly more damage to multiple targets. And I'm more talking endgame stuff here, the point you start needing to wade through huge nests to build mining outposts. You typically don't care about research costs at this point, and anyway my endgame lab setup burns through even the last tier shotgun researches in a little over five or six minutes. Besides, you need some decent power armour to really be able to use the combat shotgun to its potential which is fairly endgame in itself.

If you just hold the "shoot nearest enemy" button you can melt half a screen of small biters almost instantly, so I would rather argue the shotgun wastes most of its potential damage against single targets. Which is why its raw stats are so overtuned as calculated in the other thread.
Any complaints if you interpret the combat shotgun as the lategame upgrade to the SMG rather than a seperate weapon type? It seems to work quite well in that regard, with the multi-target capacity being more of a bonus.

In practice they "pierce" armour but technically they do not.

Perhaps to make the shotgun more varied, there should be a "scattershot" ammo and a "slug" ammo (no armour piercing). This would work well to balance everything, armour piercing rounds can actually be armour piercing which keeps them balanced early but relevant late game, and the shotgun has an option of less damage in a spread (useful for large waves of small and maybe medium biters) or a single slug that just annihilates one biter, like at max damage it would just outright kill a big biter.

Couple this with a generous boost to the number of shots in a clip of SMG ammo and this would pretty much balance everything out nicely. The extra clip size might need to be part of research to keep the early game balanced.

The combat doesn't have nearly enough depth to support resistance-piercing mechanics, what with several damage types not being resisted at all in the first place. If someone comes up with a better naming scheme for the current mechanics I don't mind, but having access to the more advanced and specialised "hollow point" ammo at the start makes no sense.
Your shotgun suggestion sounds interesting, but it doesn't match the current design of simply increasing power and running cost (no research currently has any intended negative effect, which is why the "upgraded" shells are an item unlock rather than a pure tech). Manual aim and bodyblocking would make it rather cumbersome to use with the shotgun though.
I'm not too keen on yet another bullet upgrade, plus you'd have to be very careful about the effect on gun turrets.

I was thinking the roboport should have a better range in a vehicle too, not only does it have the size, weight and structure to boost the signal but a vehicle is unwieldy so more range makes sense practically too. Honestly I've never even used discharge defence, this is the problem, there's no reason to do anything other than fill your armour with reactors, exos, shields and roboports. Anything else is a waste.

Well, there isn't much else to choose from anyway. The buffed batteries might be worth a try depending on playstyle/map layout, but discharge and lasers are simply bad. Actually you could argue for better vehicle stats on all modules, or a much bigger grid except for maybe exo legs causing too many issues when stacked.

It's kind of in an okay spot for me since the ammo is expensive, especially in large quantities and you burn (no pun intended) through it pretty quickly. It does have its downsides, if it's nerfed it just won't be an attractive weapon.

The ammo isn't that expensive, plus it's hard to compare a trickle of renewable oil to copper+iron. The important point is to fire in short bursts, a single flame will tear down a spawner/worm and the biters gleefully run right into the patches of fire. Fire-avoiding AI or an initial launch cost (possibly with lower drain for continuous fire) would be enough to balance it out, as would adding some fire resistance to at least one enemy type.

I would put this discussion under another topic... I did a similar post somewhere about improving biter behaviour, but let's be honest, biters -are- dumb. It's not like they can, even if the technology permitted, launch a strategy game against you. There is a LOT I could say on the matter (could probably easily fill a five page essay) but this topic is about weapon balance, not biter behaviour.

You can't discuss weapon balance in a vacuum without considering the intended targets of these weapons though. What use is a 1k dps flamethrower if all targets are rocks with 100% fire resistance? What's the drawback to the shotgun's spread and bodyblocking if biters naturally line up for perfect hits? What's the point to any advanced weaponry like robots, landmines, rockets etc. if in the end a stack of turrets gets the job done quicker and cheaper?

[Deadly-Bagel]

The combat shotgun -is- a direct upgrade, in every single way. Yes okay having a separate research tree and ammo production it should be stronger, but over sixteen times stronger AND piercing enemies is a bit much. I would prefer the option of using grenades instead for large waves and cleaning up with the SMG as its more accurate, but it takes several clips to take out a single big biter so it's just not worth it.

Yeah turrets might be a problem if buffing AP rounds, though they burn through ammo a bit quicker than seems balanced. Currently I just don't see any reason to use them over laser towers which have better range, damage and logistics, and with 0.13 the biter aggression comes so much later I always seem to have lasers before the serious attacks start. I don't see increasing clip size, especially as a late-game option, having any real negative effects but instead you could consider increasing the stack size to 200. This would at least cut down on the inventory requirements which coupled with the damage are my only problems.

If you use armour piercing rounds on a target with no armour, the piercing has no effect. This is why it remains balanced early because it does no extra damage.

And you wouldn't program a flamethrower and then only give it rocks to kill. Where do you stop with this? We can't discuss the economics of crafting costs without discussing the components themselves. And the components of course build from resources so let's discuss smelting and map generation while we're at it. The entire game is a mass of interlinked components that all affect each other and biter behaviour is too big a topic to share with weapon balance. We already have combat in place and those systems and enemies aren't likely to drastically change. They might be tweaked and become more interesting but that will only affect the strategies in dealing with them, not the tools for doing so.

[Photoloss]

The combat shotgun -is- a direct upgrade, in every single way. Yes okay having a separate research tree and ammo production it should be stronger, but over sixteen times stronger AND piercing enemies is a bit much. I would prefer the option of using grenades instead for large waves and cleaning up with the SMG as its more accurate, but it takes several clips to take out a single big biter so it's just not worth it.

The SMG has three advantages: auto-aim, hitscan/instant-hit and no wasted damage. Talking about mechanics here, the sheer power of the shotgun makes these things mostly irrelevant. Do shotgun pellets actually pierce, i.e. a single pellet keeps traveling if it overkills an enemy? I never paid any attention to that to be honest.
Grenades are terrible, to me the current flamethrower fills exactly the same niche but feels much better to use.

Yeah turrets might be a problem if buffing AP rounds, though they burn through ammo a bit quicker than seems balanced. Currently I just don't see any reason to use them over laser towers which have better range, damage and logistics, and with 0.13 the biter aggression comes so much later I always seem to have lasers before the serious attacks start. I don't see increasing clip size, especially as a late-game option, having any real negative effects but instead you could consider increasing the stack size to 200. This would at least cut down on the inventory requirements which coupled with the damage are my only problems.

Gun turrets actually deal higher dps, and I think that calculation was even done with Big Biter armour levels. The break-even point was around lvl3-4 upgrades. If you're aware of the turret buff that's alright then, it's hard to put a proper cost on non-renewability when comparing to lasers.

And you wouldn't program a flamethrower and then only give it rocks to kill. Where do you stop with this? We can't discuss the economics of crafting costs without discussing the components themselves. And the components of course build from resources so let's discuss smelting and map generation while we're at it. The entire game is a mass of interlinked components that all affect each other and biter behaviour is too big a topic to share with weapon balance. We already have combat in place and those systems and enemies aren't likely to drastically change. They might be tweaked and become more interesting but that will only affect the strategies in dealing with them, not the tools for doing so.

We don't need a full discussion of everything, but should always look for easier solution in other areas of the game. For example part of the reason explosives are utter garbage is the fact enemies have resistance to them but not to any of the "viable" damage types besides physical.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Do shotgun pellets actually pierce, i.e. a single pellet keeps traveling if it overkills an enemy? I never paid any attention to that to be honest.

I'm pretty sure it does, thinking of when I use it on a lone spitter the spread doesn't seem to have any gaps in it afterwards but I could be wrong.

Grenades are pretty good even mid-game, and now they've got a cool upgrade for insane AoE. They're almost even viable for taking out large nests as I think one cluster grenade can kill a spawner, might be two, and they're effective on large mobs of biters chasing you. It's not directly replaced by the flamethrower, it's quicker to deal damage, available much earlier, has much more AoE, etc. The main problem with them now is there are more effective options late-game so you're better off sinking the research into the shotgun instead. Having spawners significantly more vulnerable to explosions than regular damage gives you more reason to make them at every stage of the game.

Okay, if all you want to mention is resistances then that's fine as that's part of a weapon's balance. I think I've mentioned spawner resistance in every post plus there's the armour piercing suggestion, so I should point out if you're mainly talking resistances then I didn't "fail to address" it. I think biter resists are okay where they are if the buff to rockets and armour piercing magazine are implemented, just modify spawner stats.

[Photoloss]

Well, grenades are still more cumbersome to use (though acting as consumable items might be an advantage too since you can keep your main weapon equipped)
They're also insanely expensive, costing over 135 resource units for a single one compared to 10 units for a whole can of fiery goodness. Tech is a little more for the flamethrower compared to regular grenades, but the cluster upgrade requires alien science...
All of that doesn't even bother me that much though, and the larger AoE certainly is a major advantage. What really puts me off is the lack of incentive or reward in going for explosives production at all. Meanwhile oil processing is something you're inclined to rush anyway, the necessary iron can be grabbed off the battery line and using up some light+heavy oil to overproduce flamethrower ammo can even keep your petroleum flowing a little longer. That's my personal opinion though.

Resistances are only one very obvious interaction to consider, though many things would take a lot of coding to get right. For another conceptually simple idea, what if biter nests had to "consume" pollution to produce biters and could eventually run out? We would have a very sollid case for declaring solar+laser OP. That would be a rather drastic change to the game, but even smaller changes can have massive effects on certain playstyles like the removal of victory poles or biters avoiding active lines of fire (i.e. trying to path away from corpses, bullets and fire patches, landmines would become even more useless...)

[BlakeMW]

I consider grenades to be very good. They basically offer the highest dps of any early weapon, being capable of one-shotting a large number of small biters or small spitters. They can be thrown while shooting and throwing doesn't incur a run speed penalty, they can be thrown from vehicles. Their damage is high enough to wipe out biters but not so high as to carry any real risk of killing yourself or a vehicle or building, you can even use them to blast away a heap of biters nomming on your buildings - you'll need to do repairs, but only a badly damaged machine will be destroyed. In sum, grenades are great for personal defense and also for offense if abstaining from offensive turreting, and they're absolutely brilliant for scouting since you can wipe out swarms chasing you with ease. I almost always make at least a dozen in the course of a game.

The cluster grenade is a bit of an oddball, the damage output is obscene but they are rather costly. They seem to be best thrown from the Tank which can help protect from the self-damage. You can use them to cluster bomb nests out of existence but they are far from the most economical way to do so and by using cluster grenades you can't use robots because they'll nearly instantly get wiped out by collateral damage. Poison capsules seem to be generally much more cost-effective and go perfectly with the tank and combat robots since they don't damage machines - generally speaking, a much better use of resources is to use combat robots (your choice) to wipe out spawners and poison capsules to eliminate worms and inflict heavy damage on enemies. Or of course, the OP flamethrower. Basically cluster grenades don't really synergize with anything (in fact quite the contrary), and aren't all that worthwhile using on their own, and they are more or less unable to deal with the tougher enemies like Behemoths making the upgrades a poor investment due to obsolescence.

[Deadly-Bagel]

I'm pretty sure I tested robots and grenades, I don't think the grenades damage them (EDIT: confirmed grenades do not damage robots). They may have done previously as I think remember destroying my own robots with the combat shotgun but that doesn't seem to happen now either. However when you've got 4 assemblers pumping out a constant supply of destroyers, personal weapons become somewhat obsolete, which is fine as it's a step in the direction of automating base destroying. You're basically just running around collecting artefacts at that stage.

As for cluster grenades, they would be a bit of an odd tool... With the proposed changes to spawners, grenades will be pretty much a requirement for taking out spawners in the early game, at least to get your first few artefacts - there are a few options such as the tank or just going after small nests with a lot of ammo but grenades would be the cheapest and available sooner. Maybe you dump some research into grenade damage and combine with the tank for medium nests. Then you get oil, ideally you go to rockets to deal with nests but... there is no but. You've probably not got more than 2-3 grenade damage researches done so the switch to rockets isn't big. Cluster grenades are actually more expensive so not like you're saving yourself anything by using them. To balance this they might need to require one explosive instead of five, so they offer better economics and slightly more AoE at the expense of risk due to much lower range.

[Timothy King]

Nice to meet you. This is my first post.
I think Factorio is a truly innovative game.

I believe that many of the current weapon balance problems
(especially there are a lot of weapons not used)
come from the fact that only 1 type of nest's life (350) exists.

The fact narrows the range of the power of weapons.

Because, it forces the following conditions.

Early weapons (e.g. shotgun) CAN break the nest.
Meanwhile, strongest weapons (e.g. tank cannon) CANNOT
break the same nest in one shot.

As one solution, for example,
What if there is also difference in size in the nest?
There are Small, Medium, Big, and Behemoth Nest.

For example,

• Small Nest's life is 150
  Medium Nest's life is 350
  Big Nest's life is 1800
  Behemoth Nest's life is 5000

(All numbers are completely provisional ones.)

In this world, the damage of the tank cannon
can be 1500, not current 150.

If the range of the power of weapons is wide,
We will be able to divide the role of weapons.

For example, one scenario is as follows.

Flamethrower is best to burn small and medium nests.
But Behemoth Nest has a high natural recovery,
it takes time to destroy by just burning with a flamethrower.

So, to destroy Behemoth Nest,
we need a tank cannon or cluster grenades.

What do you think?

[Deadly-Bagel]

I think this is a very old topic and the upcoming weapon balances in 0.15 will hopefully address most if not all these points anyway. Also lay off the line breaks a bit, you barely hit 1/5 of the width of my screen and it's a very odd way to lay out a post.

But welcome to the forum =)

[fillipyang7]

Nice to meet you. This is my first post.
I think Factorio is a truly innovative game.

I believe that many of the current weapon balance problems with professional essay writer. So you can ask for help at this link. It will save your time
(especially there are a lot of weapons not used)
come from the fact that only 1 type of nest's life (350) exists.

The fact narrows the range of the power of weapons.

Because, it forces the following conditions.

Early weapons (e.g. shotgun) CAN break the nest.
Meanwhile, strongest weapons (e.g. tank cannon) CANNOT
break the same nest in one shot.

As one solution, for example,
What if there is also difference in size in the nest?
There are Small, Medium, Big, and Behemoth Nest.

For example,

• Small Nest's life is 150
  Medium Nest's life is 350
  Big Nest's life is 1800
  Behemoth Nest's life is 5000

(All numbers are completely provisional ones.)

In this world, the damage of the tank cannon
can be 1500, not current 150.

If the range of the power of weapons is wide,
We will be able to divide the role of weapons.

For example, one scenario is as follows.

Flamethrower is best to burn small and medium nests.
But Behemoth Nest has a high natural recovery,
it takes time to destroy by just burning with a flamethrower.

So, to destroy Behemoth Nest,
we need a tank cannon or cluster grenades.

What do you think?

If you use armour piercing rounds on a target with no armour, the piercing has no effect. This is why it remains balanced early because it does no extra damage.

[Deadly-Bagel]

If you use armour piercing rounds on a target with no armour, the piercing has no effect. This is why it remains balanced early because it does no extra damage.

Necro aside, no, AP rounds just do more physical damage. It does do significantly more damage against armour because of the flat resist, but it also does more damage to entities without physical resists.