I would call the Uzi overpowered when compared to more expensive guns. It's quick discharge of 22 wounds will drop almost any actor instantly, meanwhile a tommy gun will have to go "ratatat" for considerably longer before killing anything.

Not a bad thing though, if anything the other guns need a beefing up.

The Bullet Based Guns

Pros:
The look they have is defining of the factions that use them.

Cons:
I think many of them are a bit overpowered and overpriced compared to the guns that originally came with the game in the earlier builds. The original AK-47 is powerful, but it doesn't eat into terrain very much and it's cheap. I believe that if the current assault rifle's rounds were edited around the rounds that the AK fires the guns would be better balanced and more fun to use.

Additional Notes:
It was nice when 200oz of gold would buy you more than one soldier with a decent assault rifle, and it really let you jump into the thick of a battle without having to constantly mine more gold. I still find equipping my expendable troops with the base.rte weapons just because they're cheaper, and there isn't much of a damage drop-off compared to the newer ones.

For God's sake, please do not do this. If you want to name the weapons, number-and-letter serials will look a lot more pro.

From the CC Gameplay Survey thread.

A mistake, I think.

Dummy Weapons:
Need to do more stuff like the impulse grenade, less shitty particle sprayers. Rely on kinetic weapons; crash test-dummies, geddit?

Coalition Weapons:
Need to be less generic, and there need to be way the ♥♥♥♥ less of them. Why give me a rocket launcher and a homing rocket launcher, when I should be able to use the same rocket launcher and toggle functionality. If this makes Data officially support alt-fire, then ♥♥♥♥ hooray. Official content is how new stuff gets introduced; I expect non-current functionality.

Ronin Weapons:
Christ, get the ♥♥♥♥ out of here. Drop the antecedent "00" entirely, because ♥♥♥♥ numgun. Make the guns actually behave differently from one another, because ♥♥♥♥ numgun. Make everything better, because seriously, ♥♥♥♥ numgun.

Grenade launchers need to toss about a standard sized screen; that is, >600 pixels but <700 when fired at a 45 degree angle. I don't much care if the explosives are less powerful than hand-thrown grenades; make the trade worthwhile, and reward my accuracy.
Similarly, grenades need a bit of a range buff. Not much, but if a toss a grenade square into a scrum of 4-5 troops, I expect them dead, because they're all within a 100px square.

All bullet spraying guns need to be longer range, and moderately more accurate. Nerf power if needed, but a magazine is about twenty five more bullets than it should take to kill someone I'm aiming at, and I should be not killing them due to armor, rather than not killing them due to accuracy.

Sniper rifles need a much more visceral knockback effect. Kick the mass way the ♥♥♥♥ up, and get rid of the regular coa sniper rifle altogether. I'm willing to bet virtually nobody uses it over the heavy. Alternately, make the heavy sniper rifle fire no faster than one round per second, and have an alternate sniper rifle capable of much faster semiauto fire, with degraded accuracy. Make the two guns sufficiently different that I might want a different one based on what I'm shooting at. Keep in mind that the average combat distance in CC is as far as you can see without sharpaiming; and that ranged combat doesn't work well with unpredictable AI and very, very slow bullets.

Shotguns need way the ♥♥♥♥ less spread, and I'm talking way the ♥♥♥♥ less. The old base.rte shotty is actually pretty great in this respect, it can reach out and touch someone right in the head across 2/3 to a full screen, and not really hit the torso. Some shotties can have more choke, others less. I don't really care, but make them better, in general.

Give me dedicated AA weapons. Not super dedicated, because it's always fun to wreck unarmored people with a MANPAD, but something obviously originally intended to take down DSes/rockets, rather than people. Proxy based flak cannons are a fun idea.

Though this isn't really what you're asking: Buff the ♥♥♥♥ out of actors, buff the ♥♥♥♥ out of craft, and make worthwhile base defences. Combat in CC doesn't work nearly well enough with multiple actors to warrant buying more than the following: one you buy for yourself, and a bunch you put in your base to hold guns and switch to when your actor inevitably dies.

I'm going to follow Paul's example here and go a little more general than "This gun is lame because blah blah blah"; you're the content developers, I shouldn't have to set out the implementation detail for you.

Conveying where bullets are going and where they came from
IRL we'd be looking for flash and listening for noise, maybe smoke if we were bloody close, but mostly just the first two, for identifying where we were getting shot at from. We'd look for debris getting thrown up around us for hints of where not to step.
In CC, we don't have directional audio, just dampening based on distance, and looking out for a flash against the walls of the bunker our enemies are in is a little bogus as we aren't seeing from our unit's viewpoint, we're seeing a box of the area around him.

• MOPixel trails are nice.
• Particle trails are nicer on larger bullets, especially when they aren't just flame smoke dots on every position that heavy sniper bullet has occupied in my shitty deltatime, but interpolated trails. Punching Dan and making him interpolate emission at the AEmitter level itself would be awesome, guys. >500 particles a second, I'd like to see a pretty well populated line following my emitter, not massive blobs along the trail.
• Some smoke upon collision couldn't hurt for larger rounds. Cast a really short ray ahead if you must, get some cool things happening on impact. Terrain sensitive debris would be nice on a per-bullet level, but what would be nicer would being able to declare some particles to be thrown up when the terrain is disturbed - per material. Dust clouds for dirt and concrete, sparks and debris chunks for metal, heck, leaf splashes for grass. That kind of stuff would add a lot to the TERRAIN ENGINE side of things.
• Some smoke at the muzzle is pretty nice for sniper rifles and shotguns too.

I think instead of ramping up the mass on the heavy gun rounds (bar the revolver cannon, as that's the best thing to come out of "modern" Cortex Command, though better when it didn't explode imo) to use Lua or a new engine var to apply extra force to any MOs they hit. Sniper rounds that tip units over with the sheer force are fun, but I think it'd be a lot nicer to keep the mass sensible and start forming some standards in the vanilla content, there.

As Paul said, the shotgun spread is ridiculous. Limit the effectiveness by adding air resistance and therefore more drop, not by making it fire a fan of shot everywhere.
Taking drop into consideration would be a price I'd be willing to pay to be able to hit someone from forehead to upper chest from a screen away and have them drop.
It'd be nice to see more of this kind of thing:


Gun residue is a nice thing sometimes, not just discarded magazines (We're suspending disbelief here, right? It's kind of badass, I suppose) but smoking casings, shells, wadding from shotguns perhaps, discharged electrical cells or EPFCG cases.

Lifetime should never, ever be used to limit a bullet's travel.

Ever.
Just no.

Consider having some "wildcard" type guns.
It could be interesting to make purchasing ronin guns literally a chance event: you buy "Assault", it gives you M16/4 or AK47/74/101 or maybe if you're unlucky a Thomson or w/e. It would make the Ronin feel a lot more ramshack, I think, but I'm not sure how well it would play.

Beh it's late I'll write more later.



Oh oh actually, make alternate fire for guns happen. Bug dan. Make him see how goddamn handy that would be. A switch that gets added to the pie menu will do nicely. Actually, just being able to add things to the pie menu and selecting an icon would be lovely, we can script everything else from there if Lua starts working on attachables.

Being able to Attach things to MOs without causing crashes because the variable gets destroyed but still exists Lua-side would be oh so handy, it'd allow us to do the whole custom wound thing we've been wanting SINCE ABOUT 5 BUILDS AGO OR SOMETHING STUPID.

Arms that take attachables and don't rotate the damn things as they would a firearm.
Wounds that spin properly.

Lua on Attachables. Lua on Attachables. Lua on Attachables.

okay done ranting, more criticism later.

Whilst I agree on hard time-based lifetime limits, I believe that having particles deleted dependant on certain conditions can still look natural and decent.

I think Geti's more referring to a trend in a certain (ex) content-developer's weapons to, say, shoot about 300 pixels and then just utterly disappear.

Yeah bullets dissapearing without any velocity loss at all look pretty bad, it's something I'm avoiding.

about the whole rant goin' on there: unless I misunderstood you suggest lua being used to affect damage instead of simply mass, wouldn't that make things more complicated for modders?

Lua affecting damage is already pretty easy. You can make your round lighter as it flies or otherwise make it change its values based on speed, time and other factors.

I agree with giving dummies more impulse-based weapons. I made a prototype impulse shotgun once, and it seemed to suit them better.

Where do we stand on using air resistance to limit effective ranges of rounds?

General: Guns with super long reload (circa numgun era) or really slow fire rate (ex: Heavy Coalition Sniper is fine- provided it makes lots of nice clunking and stuff for us to listen to while its stalling. Pistols need to be better. They shouldn't match assault rifles but they should almost be as good at super close range. They should fire fast and reload fast. Shotguns are fine with super short range or more realistic long range idc. I think we should have both for the sake of variety- but they should never approach the versatility of assault rifles. Some recoil script could really make guns more interesting and have a higher skill ceiling but it might be a little unintuitive without a visual representation of recoil. Snipers are a little bit of a problem to balance here. I think they should get a short wind up time lag like miniguns and maybe if possible make it impossible change where you're aiming while winding up. Then they'd still be good for taking out guys in cover but they wouldn't be so dominant. Miniguns are cool but we need some good old slow firing 100 round LMGs. Make base building stuff cheaper and stronger, dropships more expensive and stronger, actor's bodies tougher but leave their heads as they are and maybe make them more expensive. Weapon weights need to be tweaked to match the new weaker jetpacks. Make additional crap not have such a humongous effect on your weight. Grenades need to be seriously reworked. I like the idea of grenade belts, but they need some sort of spam countermeasure. Or grenade packs of like 3 is probably good enough. Gold digging needs to be tweaked. A lot slower I reckon. Make actors worth healing and guns worth salvaging. I'm fine with ♥♥♥♥ disappearing in midair. It's better than bullets falling to the ground like snowflakes. I think you definitely need a nice combo of the two. Diggers are too strong against actors, I wouldn't make them do no damage though.

Coalition: I don't mind them having so many weapons. They just need to all be unique and viable, which has more or less been accomplished. I dunno I think the gap could be widened though. Pump up the SMG fire rate a tad while lowering the accuracy, and do the opposite to AR. I think this applies to all but even more so to the Coalition- they are the Ryu and should be fairly deliberate and transparent in weapon design and usage I think. You could widen the gap between light and heavy actors more. I don't think people ever use light when cost isn't important. Probably the easy/obvious one is to give light a better jetpack.

Ronin: I think that their weapons should not be different so much in role like the coalies as in small quirks like clip size or reload or whatever. I think a fairly good job has been done. I like both AK and M16, both Thompson and Uzi (my favourite gun). M1600 is total ass of course, though. Give us duel wield, but for Ronins only. Needs healthpacks or some sort of healing thing.

Dummy weapons: Needs to figure out what they really want to use. Short range glowy lasers? Heavy nailer bullets? I don't care, just make it consistent. Though I hope at least one faction will use short range glowy laser ♥♥♥♥. I think it would be fine to make Dummies more of an attrition-y disposable race. They would make better main antagonists that way. Dreadnought rocks against some weapons but gets shredded by others. It would be nice if it could be tweaked to be really strong against bullets but weak against explosives while weakening explosives against actors.

Other: Don't touch the laser rifle. Unique, balanced, high skill cap. Best design of all guns.

I don't know if this should go here but the switch between actors needs to be absolutely instantaneous. The blip blip is cute and all but its irritating having such a stupid thing stopping you from micromanaging effectively.

Amen.
The best gun in all CC.