Shotgun vs. Submachinegun

[thereaverofdarkness]

This is a suggestion about game balance, so I'm not sure if it should go in suggestions or balancing.

It is neat to have two very different weapons, however depending on your tech level, either one may outperform the other to such a great extent as to make the other weapon useless. I think perhaps a few techs should be moved around, and maybe more upgrades added, in order to keep the submachinegun and shotgun in the same ballpark at any tech level.

Military 1: this is where you first get the shotgun and submachinegun and is perhaps where they are most closely balanced relative to each other.
Submachinegun: 30 DPS, 2 damage/hit
Pros: attacking with precision at range, not damaging your buildings
Shotgun: 48 DPS, 4 damage/hit
Pros: high DPS, piercing spawner armor


Military 2: here you get a huge upgrade to the submachinegun ammo, but the shotgun is unchanged and thus left in the dust. Now the submachinegun gets 75 DPS with 5 damage per hit, along with having a greater attack precision. The only minor advantage the shotgun retains is slightly higher range, but it's not really effective past the submachinegun's range because the shots spray out so far.
Military 3: now you get the combat shotgun, which doubles the shotgun's DPS, so now it's 96 DPS with a per hit damage of 4. It's pretty even with the submachinegun at this point, not quite as good for piercing armor, but similar, and has higher overall DPS if you can get all the pellets to hit your targets. Even at this point it could maybe use a slight buff, but it's of similar power to submachinegun with piercing rounds.


Military 4: piercing shells for the combat shotgun, no upgrade for the submachinegun. Now the shotgun is the undisputed champion weapon with a whopping 192 DPS and 6 damage per hit. You might find yourself using the submachinegun to fend off biters in your base although poison capsules are better for that, and the shotgun is far better at attacking enemies when you're not worrying about hitting your structures.



I want to hear your guys' suggestions here, but here's what I thought of doing to fix it:
1.) Move combat shotgun down to military 2 alongside piercing rounds.
2.) Add a third ammo type to the submachinegun on military 4. I was toying with the idea of explosive rounds: they cost an explosive plus other materials, and deal 8 damage of explosive type (no explosion radius). The submachinegun's DPS would be 120, much lower than the combat shotgun but particularly effective against medium and big biters which have a strong physical damage reduction but only weak explosive resistance.

[BlakeMW]

Apparently combat is being rebalanced in 0.13

At the moment there is an overarching balance between bullets and shotguns which takes quite some playing to recognize. Most of the end game power of weapons comes from researching upgrades.

The Bullet upgrades apply to a very wide range of things, they boost the SMG, Gun Turrets, Tank/Car Machine Gun and Defender Capsules.

That is the power of bullets, you get personal defense (SMG), Base Defense (Turrets), a vehicle firepower upgrade and offensive power (defender capsules). Furthermore several of these are better than the alternative, gun turrets have higher DPS than laser turrets even when firing regular magazine, the Defender robot has higher DPS than the Destroyer robot against unarmored targets and is far cheaper.

The alternatives to all these things use single-purpose upgrades:
Laser turret upgrade only effects laser turret.
Shotgun shell upgrades only effect shotgun.
Robot Damage upgrades only effect Distracter/Destroyer
And there are no alternative upgrade path for vehicles.


So basically you can invest only in bullets and use things which fire bullets for all your biter eliminating needs, or you can skip over bullets asap and go with the more powerful (in the long run) options but need to get 3x as many upgrades. The bullet line is generally much more powerful in the early game, before resistances come into play gun turrets are better than laser turrets and defender capsules are much better than destroyer capsules. So you actually have some serious incentive to invest in bullets, and once you've invested fully into bullets the SMG will kick the ass of the unupgraded shotgun. The limitation of the bullet line is everything which fires bullets eventually becomes basically obsoleted by resistances.

So if there were improved versions of the bullet-firing things it would defeat that overarching balance. Bullets are balanced as a stop-gap measure, a cheap and effective defense and offense in the early-mid game, that cheapness and effectiveness comes at the price of eventually becoming obsolete.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I don't understand how it's balanced for them to be better at first and then worse later. Balance is when it's not necessarily better than an alternative option. Why should my gun turrets inevitably become all but useless? People can do all the math they want and say the gun turrets have higher DPS than laser turrets, but it doesn't change the fact that laser turrets easily have every target dead before they even get into gun turret range. My laser turrets are what's dealing all the damage, and they easily deal all the damage I ever need. Maybe I'll want gun turrets to take out behemoth biters quickly, but they won't pierce that armor very well without several damage upgrades.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I couldn't help but notice that big and behemoth biters have very low percentage resistance to physical damage; it is only the amount reduction which makes the SMG and shotgun weak, but gun turrets can take them down very easily as long as they have a high enough base damage, because the gun turrets have that 100% damage bonus. That bonus is already extremely useful for saving ammo, I think perhaps these biters should have their armor rebalanced a bit to weight more heavily toward percentage reduction, so that maxed out gun turrets aren't way more powerful than laser turrets while not-quite-maxed-out gun turrets just suck. This would go well along with a new bullet ammo type, to help keep the gun turrets from becoming overpowered when fully upgraded, and to also keep them from becoming obsolete when not upgraded.

Big biter physical resistance: 8/0%
Example physical resistance: 5/30%

SMG w/ piercing rounds: negligible damage in either case
Combat shotgun w/ piercing shells: about 11 DPS in either case
Gun turret w/ piercing rounds, no damage upgrades: 2 damage per hit in either case
Gun turret w/ piercing rounds, 40% damage upgrade: decreases damage from 6 per hit to 4.8 per hit

It still makes a huge difference to have those damage upgrades, but now it's slightly less life-defining.

[BlakeMW]

While it's true that Gun Turrets firing AP ammo (or even regular ammo) make extremely short work of Behemoth Biters, it is also extremely costly. It costs something like 160 iron/copper per Behemoth, something like firing an entire laser turret's worth of materials to kill each biter :/. You don't need to be a genius to see it's a terrible deal compared with building a laser turret with that material.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Yeah, so all the more reason to give a final damage upgrade to bullets. Provided your power grid holds up (and it will when your defenses are set up well), their higher DPS than lasers is their one saving grace, perhaps they should SHINE at that rather than barely scrape by.

[BlakeMW]

Yeah, so all the more reason to give a final damage upgrade to bullets. Provided your power grid holds up (and it will when your defenses are set up well), their higher DPS than lasers is their one saving grace, perhaps they should SHINE at that rather than barely scrape by.

It still wouldn't compare with just building twice as many laser turrets. The only thing which would really help is making each bullet a lot cheaper, at least in the end game. Possibly a "magazine capacity upgrade". I mean the magazines currently hold 10 bullets, there's nothing wrong with a magazine of 30 or 60 or even 100 bullets. While it'd be strange to have existing magazines suddenly hold more bullets, it's not really any stranger than bullet damage upgrades (and heck, the upgrade could even be stingy and not add any new bullets to ammo stacks, so an existing 10 round magazine becomes a 20 round magazine with 10 bullets in it).
Another more slight benefit would be if productivity modules could be used on ammo, then at least you could get +40% for your resources.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I think it's less a problem of gun turrets being an expensive draw on resources, and more that laser turrets are too easy to power. Energy should take a greater infrastructure to provide in the high amounts needed for lasers. I'd like to see energy generally more difficult to provide and store, and lasers energy cost increased.

[bobucles]

I think it's less a problem of gun turrets being an expensive draw on resources, and more that laser turrets are too easy to power. Energy should take a greater infrastructure to provide in the high amounts needed for lasers. I'd like to see energy generally more difficult to provide and store, and lasers energy cost increased.

That's not something which can be solved with raw numbers. No matter what the solution to laser turrets is to have more or less energy infrastructure. Making turrets use more power just means you need more energy infrastructure. It will not change any aspect of building the turrets themselves.

An idea from a while back is to give laser turrets an ammo item just like anything else. Energy cells get recharged, placed into the gun, emptied, and recharged again. While regular turrets are easy to supply as they only work one way, a laser ammo system would have to return to base as well. That increases the challenge significantly.

[thereaverofdarkness]

It can be solved with numbers. When the energy infrastructure needs grow high enough, it starts to become an issue of land space and resources to build the solar panels and accumulators and power poles. Gun turrets are a resource issue as well. If you have a feeder belt going around your perimeter supplying gun turrets with ammo, you can keep them supplied for days. It's not really all that expensive unless you're under constant siege from several nearby enemy bases. At that point you'll be spending a lot of time and resources on repairing the walls and turrets, and you might as well just get rid of the base.

My point is that you can square away your gun turrets with enough resources. Sure, lasers are theoretically infinite, but you can wind up with so much ammo you'll never run out before you finish the game. That's why it can be solved with numbers. Right now it's trivial to power your base completely on solar power and accumulators.


In Total Annihilation, you start with solar panels as your primary source of energy, though you're also using very little of it. As you progress, you get more powerful weaponry but your energy costs go up drastically. Eventually you just can't power everything with solar panels unless you build an absurdly large solar farm. That's why there's higher energy options that you can explore as the game progresses. Also, the game had various conditions: day/night cycle affects solar panels, wind speed affects wind generators, geothermal vents fluctuate, and these values vary a lot by the planet and terrain, or you can set them when you build the map. The only steady and reliable source of energy is the late-game fusion reactors.