[B18] ARMORY ENHANCED (Formerly LewisDTC's Weapon Expansion)

Shurp · February 17, 2018, 03:07:22 PM

OK, I dug a bit deeper, and I think I am going to have to do some editing to make this work. Based on my calculations, the DPS for the Assault Rifle is 14.4/s. The Gauss Rifle is by comparison a sad 6.15, the Rail Rifle 6.4, and the Laser Rifle 18.7. Only the Electro Charge Precision Rifle gets a notable improvement at 26.7.

(I didn't review the plasma weapons because they all have "forced_miss_radius" set which is a game mechanic that annoys me endlessly)

I think the progression of lethality needs to be substantially improved to make it more worthwhile to invest in the advanced weapons.

Harry_Dicks · February 17, 2018, 04:55:38 PM

Shurp, if you end up modifying the defs yourself, would you mind sharing them?

Shurp · February 17, 2018, 05:41:34 PM

Sure, although I'm going to play test it first and make sure my changes seem balanced.

I guess while I'm at it I'll modify the Advanced machining table to require Advanced Machining to make. (Not that it makes much without it - ?)

Harry_Dicks · February 17, 2018, 06:41:19 PM

Are you going to rebuild all of the damage related values, and for all weapons, or just the ones you think are imbalanced?

Also, I've been considering turning off the flicker, I haven't decided yet, though. If I do, I'll probably want combined textures. For example, on any random plasma weapon, on any one texture, I don't think all of the areas that flicker are "on". I haven't gone through and looked at every weapon, but I'm guessing it's like this for most of them.

Shurp · February 18, 2018, 10:43:15 AM

I'm just tweaking some of the values and leaving everything else the same. So far I've modified the AR and LMG damage and fire rate and doubled the damage for all Gauss weapons. Once I see how the Gauss and Laser weapons behave I'll adjust the Rail and Electro Charge weapons. But I'm new to this mod, I haven't actually used any of these, so my mods could be seriously OP. More to follow when I have some actual experience.

Harry_Dicks · February 19, 2018, 10:15:20 AM

Well I've got a little bit of time today so I think I might make this a project myself as well. I've got a map with one of every weapon on normal quality. Going to screenshot all of them, because it will be easier for me to have the stat pages pulled up side by side than looking at all of the xml stats, not side by side. Going to then possibly make a spreadsheet and try to balance them out. Argh, was hoping to not have to do this, but I think my brain isn't actually ready to play RW yet, just tweak it some more

Also considering taking off the glow from all of the weapons.

Lewis, do you think in the future you might include a version that does not have the flicker or animations? Also I didn't know that some weapons give off heat, I think this might be worth mentioning in the OP. Well, it's probably not too big of a deal, but I thought it is at least interesting knowing weapons give off heat, and it's something I would have liked to have known, but would have never seen it had I not looked at the defs

Anyway, I have gone through and removed most of the heatpushers out of my defs for other things too, hoping that it will help cut down on some lag late game, because the game won't have to be calculating so many little things creating different amounts of heat.

About the visuals, I sometimes like the glow and/or flicker, but being able to turn this feature on or off in maybe the mod options would be great. I understand that would require C#, and you may or may not understand it. I certainly do not, but maybe a kind soul would come along to enable this in my dream world

Do you think having a lot of these (flicker, vibrating, glow, headpusher) could add a significant load to the CPU?

EDIT: Well, I've got all the screenshots and a save file setup. However, just getting all of the pistols stats up on only one monitor and trying to compare them is proving rather difficult. I know I could plug all of the info into a spreadsheet, but that would require work.

I feel like I'm getting quickly overwhelmed. If someone were to want to just do the "balancing" and coming up with numbers themselves, then I would be more than happy to plug them into the xml. It's just sitting here and balancing them all out is not how I really want to spend today, the more I think about it $:-\$ So if anyone wants to do that, or Shurp, I guess just try to post here for others, or send them to me in a PM and I'll plug em in. I guess I would rather sit here and already have my goal of just working away at xml rather than sit around and try to balance about 4-6 types of weapons across 6 tiers, and that's just for ranged!

I'm betting Lewis might have some sort of balance sheet saved somewhere on his PC, that would make it super easy to compare weapons and numbers.

I made an imgur album of the screenshots of all of the weapons stats if anyone would like to give it a shot https://imgur.com/a/ByG2R
The only things not included were melee weapons that could be made "stuffed" out of a certain material (gold club, sandstone knives, etc.) which I think is a total of 6 weapons, so not a big deal.

Shurp · February 19, 2018, 06:38:52 PM

Well, I'm an Excel god, so attached is the spreadsheet I already created with my in-house calculations of what this mod is doing. It's not terribly self-explanatory unfortunately

But it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. The left side is the weapon names ("RL" is rail lance, "GR" is Gauss Rifle, etc.). Lots of stats are to the right. It's not comprehensive, just the weapons I imagine I'd might use. The "V" section is my own funky calculations as to how good weapons are under various range assumptions. And the brown columns to the right are calculation helpers.

Note that the Assault Rifle is a fantastic ass-kicking weapon on default settings. The long-range gauss rifle (sniper) by contrast sucks because it is so slow.

[attachment deleted due to age]

Harry_Dicks · February 20, 2018, 06:32:57 PM

Shurp, thank you so much for making the spreadsheet. When I was glancing over it and the stats from AE, they all looked the same. Were you just creating the spreadsheet, but didn't put any changes in to the weapons? I wasn't sure, because the ones I looked at still seemed the same.

Were any stats changed, and/or did you need me to plug these into xml for you?

Shurp · February 21, 2018, 07:02:08 AM

Oh, I thought you were looking for the pre-change spreadsheet. I can attach another with the changes I've made so far later today. But if you want to make your own changes you can plug numbers in there and see what happens. Doubling the damage on the Gauss weapons has nice results, for example.

Note that the "V" series columns are logarithmic, so an increase of 0.7 indicates a doubling of effectiveness.

Harry_Dicks · February 21, 2018, 10:32:08 AM

That makes perfect sense. I wasn't sure if that's what you were posting it for. I really appreciate it, thank you so much, honestly

With the formulas and everything this would have taken me seriously way too long.

Shurp · February 21, 2018, 06:54:20 PM

OK, here you go, a simple zip file for your enjoyment! Note that these changes are untested... I think they'll work well but I won't know until I research everything. I will update as I playtest if anything seems grossly unbalanced.

From about.txt:
---------------------------------
Enclosed are three modified .xml files for Armory Enhanced which I think will improve the sense of progression with the weapons. My motivation for this modification was that that Assault Rifle seemed far too powerful compared to the rest of the items.

To use: backup your original copy of Armory Enhanced Then copy these files into the .\Mods\ArmoryEnhanced\Defs\ThingDefs_Misc folder. Everything should work properly.

The enclosed .xls documents the differences between the original and modified weapons on two seperate worksheets. I highlighted the rifle comparisons to show the progression.

--Shurp

[attachment deleted due to age]

Ruisuki · February 21, 2018, 07:26:59 PM

beautiful looking weapons

Harry_Dicks · February 21, 2018, 10:56:41 PM

Even better. Thanks again, Shurp!

Shurp · February 23, 2018, 08:38:39 PM

So I can now confirm that Forced Miss Radius weapons absolutely suck.

Two raiders jumped over my barricades and started shooting at my colonists. The one with the gauss scattergun pumped plenty of shots into one of my pawns and took her down. The one with the gauss cannon fired plenty of shots at another... and fired more... and more... and hit him only once before my pawns finally killed him.

Forced miss radius weapons will only hit pawns near their target, and a radius of only 1.5 won't hit much of anything. Bigger is better.

Oh, btw, I changed my modification on the gauss weapons to only a 50% increase, and it seems to have worked well. The gauss scattergun is a dangerous weapon without being brutal.

Shurp · February 26, 2018, 04:57:36 AM

Oh my... why why why?

Minigun original damage: 8 Revised damage per mod: 6
Minigun original fire rate: 900 rpm Revised: 360 rpm

Miniguns have been seriously nerfed... dps down from 36 to 16. Which means centipedes carrying them are now trivial to kill.

[edit] OK, I take back my "Rimsenal" comment. One thing this mod has going for it is that there's a very nice sense of progression from lower tier to higher tier weapons. I guess I just need to put in the work to fix the weapons. I don't know why the fire rate has been cut own so much. But I'll fix this... especially since I don't want to abandon the colony that's using them!