Technological Disciplines Improved

I really have no major qualms with the Long Range Pistol. It's a useful firearm, which makes it better than most. It's just typical Firearms madness though, that it's so much more difficult to get a LRP than it is to get a Hand Cannon.

 

Compared to the cost and hassle involved with making a Long Range Pistol, using a Fate Point to steal a Hand Cannon starts seeming like a better way to go.

It doesn't really make sense that the ideal scenario for making a LRP is.. being able to make a Hand Cannon. Otherwise, you're going to need at least one tech manual on top of everything else. But if you could make a Hand Cannon, then you don't really need a LRP unless you want to make a Pyrotechnic Gun.

Part of me gets why having a gun that good sooner would make some of the earlier parts of the game (arguably) too easy. But the "why can't gun fighting be as awesome as using explosives?" part of me wonders why the LRP couldn't be made from stuff you can just buy (i.e., combining the Marksman's Rifle with a Gun Chassis and skipping some steps in the process) or be something you could make out of a Repeater Rifle.

On a totally different subject, how cool would it be for backstabbers to be able to use an Envenomed Dagger? Or even a Charged Dagger?

 

Being able to add a scope to the LRP would have been neat. Perhaps gaining it a +10 to TH or something.

 

That would certainly help tone down the "builder's remorse" of wondering why I went ahead and "ruined" a couple of perfectly good Looking-Glass Rifles.

Losing the TH bonus is a major drag. That's fine for followers, since you don't want them getting all the kills. But it's kind of silly to deliberately handicap yourself when the main benefit is a little more speed.

I'm a huge fan of the Tesla Rod now. It's as great as everybody has been saying. If you want a faster weapon, that's the way to go since it also does better damage sometimes and it fires neat looking spheres of energy at people.

 

I'd say stealing the Hand Cannon as soon as you get to Tarant makes the game about equally as difficult as it is normally if you take Throwing or Melee or just use certain Magick colleges. For a few levels, anyway.

Kind of unnecessary since Expert level backstabbing allows you to use swords and axes. I don't know whether the "elemental" damage of say, the Charged Sword, is affected by the backstab modifier though.

I agree, but we're starting to talk about changes that would require massive reconstruction of the entire Firearms system. Personally, I would love to have a Jagged Alliance 2 system with multiple gun attachments, different types of ammo, the ability to use extra action points for aiming, variable sized magazines, and that sort of thing. Unless the Arcanum source code gets released, it just ain't going to happen.

No reason you couldn't have a scoped pistol though. The Gunsmith in Tarant has something like that.

 

The kind of upgrades you're talking about would be really cool. Armor piercing bullets (for example) would be a nice way to upgrade the Fine Revolver.

It would be tempting to go the Bio-Shock route and add things like Charged or Pyro ammo, but that might end up "breaking" the game.

On the other hand, explosive bullets are a staple of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Carter of Mars books, so one could argue that bullets that do fire damage are reasonably steampunk.

I have this image of things like special shells that only work in a shotgun so that A.) you would still have a reason to explore Gunsmithy and Explosives and B.) there would finally be a reason to use a shotgun. But that might just be visions of Bio-Shock dancing in my head.

Still... how cool would it be to have "less lethal" stun or paralysis shells? Or incendiary shells as an alternative to using a Bronwyck's Gun?

 

It isn't, nor is the normal damage, really. Bonus damage from Backstab doesn't care about the weapon used, it depends purely on the Backstab skill & training and awareness of the enemy.

To be exact:
for aware enemies, Backstab bonus damage = Backstab skill (max 20)
for unaware enemies, Backstab bonus damage = 5 x Backstab skill (max 5 x 20 = 100)

 

To me it seems pretty obvious that firearms like the Acid Gun exist to add synergy between the Firearms discipline and other tech disciplines. If you take Firearms and Chemistry, you can get the Acid Gun. Firearms and Electricity, you can get the Tesla Gun. It's a reasonable approach, but considering how it worked out, I'd rather have fewer "fantastic" guns (a gun that shoots acid?), and more technological-seeming add-ons. Different ammo types would be one way to go. Maybe with Firearms and Chemistry you could make incendiary rounds. Mechanical might let you make a silencer or a scope. Electricity might give you a night-sight that works in darkness. These would all just be attachable in some way to the base firearms - a decent selection of fairly mundane pistols and rifles.

Personally, I don't need a firearm that shoots acid or electricity.

Cool. Thanks for the info. Seems generally advantageous to use the fastest weapon, in that case. More strikes will outperform higher damage at some point...although I can think of a few possible exceptions.

I can see why the sword from the pit on the Isle of Despair is such a superb backstabbing weapon for most of the game.

 

You might start thinking otherwise once you remember the Black Mountain Mines.

 

Or Vendigroth, for that matter. Or the Iron Clan.

For some reason, the Charged Accelerator Gun works really well on Automatons. With my current gunsmith character, I got better results against hostile robots with that thing than either my trusty Looking-Glass Rifle or my Tesla Rod.

And it's definitely nice to have an electrical weapon when you're fighting Ore Golems and other similar creatures. There is nothing quite like nailing a rock sprite with a Tesla Rod, but something else like the CAG would be cool too.