[2 Dismissal] Make the Lawgiver only accept specialized ballistic ammunition + other changes

[Scheveningen]

A major balancing issue at the moment with the Lawgiver is that it is treated as an energy weapon in how it recharges its ammunition. Shoot it some times, stick it into a charger, voila, you get all of the ammo back. This doesn't take someone like me to write multiple paragraphs in order to understand how problematic that is.

Thus, I have a couple suggestions to go about this.

Lawgivers spawn with an empty magazine. For consistency sake it might be worth it to also force all of the other prototype ballistics to spawn with nothing, too. Make the rest of the magazines 15% cheaper than they are now to compensate.

Unlike the other ammunition magazines, Lawgiver mags should be pretty expensive and bulky to carry. Lawgiver mags can have a w_class of 2, as in-canon of the judge universe they carry up to 50 rounds of ammunition that can be converted to other munition types also stored in the same magazine. And of course, make them eat a lot of diamonds and steel.

Total ammunition in a magazine should be 30 standard rounds (sourced from single shot/burst fire modes and tracked appropriately), 15 stun shot, 15 Armor Piercing (use the bulldog rifle bullet) 10 hot-shot and 5 explosive shots. It might be a bit tough to have a single magazine contain and track usage of separate ammunition in one magazine, but I might be wrong. 75 various rounds in a single magazine may seem a bit much but in the Dredd canon a MkII had a total of 120 in a single bulky magazine.

Make incendiary rounds actually act like projectile molotovs. By this I mean upon contacting with any surface they should detonate and light either between a 3x3 or a 5x5 area on fire. 7x7 would be true to canon but perhaps a bit extreme considering how in-game molotovs don't behave like that.

Make explosive shot a little more explosive. It'd be neat if the explosive shot could be used for "architecture rearrangement" in terms of usefulness rather than what it is currently, and that's just a stunlocker. Reducing its available usage to 5 rounds per magazine would also help fulfill its niche better.

Examining magazines or a lawgiver MkII loaded with them should have exact indicators of how much of each ammo type is available. QOL reasons.

[Kaed]

There are not enough general purpose chargers on the station that this change is largely necessary, and I feel you are somewhat trivializing the fact that most people with a lawgiver need to run back to security to recharge their gun.

This is also a top-tier highly advanced item from science that shows up maybe one and every 20 rounds at best. Why it can't self fabricate its own rounds from its power source I don't know. For a weapon that has so many different firing modes, it's much tidier to just have it run off an energy source than five different ammo types. Having to switch between ammo types because you ran out of one by verbally commanding the lawgiver in the middle of combat is an awful idea, additionally. That would work in real life, but here we have to stop, stand still, and type out our commands.

Requiring it to have expensive rounds just to arbitrarily nerf it feels like it would just make the weapon be even less used.

Nor does just trying to counteract the nerf by making the shots more powerful seem like a wise choice. The lawgiver is in a very nice place right now as a high-powered weapon. Giving it magazines and upping its power would also give the potential for people to hold a whole bunch of the magazines in their bag (even if they're more bulky than regular magazines), completely negating the need to go back and recharge it after using it a bunch.

I also want to comment that just because something is a reference to another piece of media (judge dredd) it does not mean that we need to follow the same internal logic as the source material. Our lawgiver aside from functioning very similarly on the surface is not the same thing.

[Scheveningen]

There are not enough general purpose chargers on the station that this change is largely necessary, and I feel you are somewhat trivializing the fact that most people with a lawgiver need to run back to security to recharge their gun.

 

Brig equipment room, armory, security firing range, library, primary tool storage, bridge, science firing range, engineering sub-level. There are some others I've missed but don't commonly use aside from the ones I mentioned. The rechargers that are not wall-mounted may be unwrenched and moved from their initial location to another one for convenience's sake, drawing on the room's closest power source.

Yes, I will trivialize it, because weapon rechargers are not uncommon or inconvenient to get to. Assistants, as an example, can open the library slide door and not only hijack the librarian's computer but also steal the recharger to either charge their laptop or the AEG they nicked from R&D.

 

Why it can't self fabricate its own rounds from its power source I don't know.

 

It doesn't really make sense as to how a weapon is chambering its rounds from an energy capacitor. It is unintuitive and uninteresting.

 

For a weapon that has so many different firing modes, it's much tidier to just have it run off an energy source than five different ammo types.

 

Or lazier.

 

Having to switch between ammo types because you ran out of one by verbally commanding the lawgiver in the middle of combat is an awful idea, additionally. That would work in real life, but here we have to stop, stand still, and type out our commands.

 

Not really an issue to me, it seems balanced that someone would struggle in running out of their dedicated ammunition type that's intended to be sparse to begin with. Being able to recharge it instantly seems to be the opposite of having any kind of tradeoff and does not seem intuitive. One would probably better off not spamming away with the low-capacity ammunition types and people should be cognizant of how much ammunition they have left instead of pretending they'll never run out. People have to do this for changing magazines for ballistic weapons and it requires more input than simply pressing "T" and typing out whatever fallback ammunition they have left to use.

 

Nor does just trying to counteract the nerf by making the shots more powerful seem like a wise choice. The lawgiver is in a very nice place right now as a high-powered weapon. Giving it magazines and upping its power would also give the potential for people to hold a whole bunch of the magazines in their bag (even if they're more bulky than regular magazines), completely negating the need to go back and recharge it after using it a bunch.

 

I have not been one as of recently to suggest to outright remove the power of something without giving counterbalanced buffs in turn to make it still strong. Exceptions being in cases where a feature is so overwhelmingly strong that it'd be arbitrary to suggest it needs any more power than it already has.

I prefer making balance suggestions that still keep certain features in a nice place that would make them particularly good at a few things that they were intended to be good at and weaker or irrelevant in using in other situations. I'm even fine with flexible features as long as their versatility is not so overwhelmingly strong in the versatility it possesses that it becomes the go-to because using anything else would be gimping yourself. Such as what I did with the laser rifle in dropping its overall capacity.

The ability to hold at most 2-3 lawgiver magazines is a decision someone needs to be cognizant of (provided they don't have a bag of holding) because the tradeoff is holding more ammunition at the cost of heavily reduced utility in storage space. Deciding to dump a medkit and a crowbar in favor of a large magazine is not a decision I would make, but to me, that's entirely fine if someone thinks they can get away with playing more aggressively but they'll need to accept the consequences in having reduced survivability or utility. Also note that the lawgiver itself does not fit in holsters and can only fit on an armor slot or in the bag. If put on an armor slot that isn't a hardsuit, you sacrifice having a reliable light source mounted and cannot traverse the dark in a reasonable fashion without NVGs.

 

I also want to comment that just because something is a reference to another piece of media (judge dredd) it does not mean that we need to follow the same internal logic as the source material. Our lawgiver aside from functioning very similarly on the surface is not the same thing.

 

I don't believe that was what I was arguing for so sorry if that's how it came off, but that was definitely not how I intended to phrase my reasoning.

[Kaed]

Anyway, I had a talk with one of the devs, and your idea doesn't really work.

You can't have more than one ammo type in a clip, at least not without writing some entirely new code. It would be more feasible to give it a specific number of shots, and make the shots universal purpose.

I can kind of get behind that idea, because it's roughly the same, you're just swapping energy for a clip that you can use as you see fit. The gun itself provides the different firing types with its magical bluespace science.

Not really a big fan of the multi ammo type clip anyway, it would just lead to a lot of ammo being wasted because no one uses that shot type.

I also want to say now, that if you can make a lawgiver, you most certainly can also make a bag of holding. So aside from resource concerns, holding a lot of ammo really is trivial with this change.

I still advocate for keeping it as an energy weapon because even if there's a charger sitting right next to you cause you dragged it with you, the gun still only holds one battery at a time and you can't change it out for instant reload.

I feel like it would be more reasonable to change the energy values for the weapon (its energy cap, and how much energy each shot takes), so that it charges slower, rather than changing it to a clip.

[Arrow768]

Voting for dismissal for the points presented:

If you can make a lawgiver, you can make a bag of holding, which would allow you to carry more than enough ammo.

I dont like the idea of that nerf-buff. The lawgiver is powerful enough as is and also has enough drawbacks as is.

[Faris]

Yeah, agreeing with Arrow here.

I feel the pros and cons balance the weapon putting into consideration it's not a thing you can get early on. Assuming you reach its levels RnD wise, you can make the bag of holding as well. There's also major coding hurdles from what I hear that make the effort outweigh the work.

Voting for dismissal but not binning yet due to the 1 week grace period.