Critical Juncture -- L-G Rifle, Handcannon, or Elephant Gun?

Not yet, but it's something I'm working on.

 

Wow. I'm quite impressed. Thank you for your work.

 

Its times like these you scare me Muro.

 

Very nice, Muro. I hope to see more of this, hopefully with melee and other weapons, too. Especially with magickal weapons and their magickal affinity.

 

If that table have an average damage per bullet it would be even more useful.

 

Please also factor in that he's using vanilla Arcanum. Blade Launcher and Mechanized Gun are not viable alternatives with their ammunition usage (my all time favorite being the Mech. Gun when it is viable). Also add in the apprentice speed bonus, since it is unimaginable for a fighter character to not have at least apprentice training at the main combat skill.

Oh, and the Tesla Gun will have even better criticals. However, some creatures being outright electricity resistant forces you to carry a pistol with it anyways. The good thing is that most humanoids and all of late game have zero electrical resistance, last I checked.

 

He already does, as the mechanized gun and tesla gun have a standard speed of 20 and 1, respectively.

I'm really curious about that, actually. I tend to think that the tesla gun is good not only because of its damage (and because you shoot lightning) but also because resistance to electricity is rather rare, which makes it even more superior to guns using standard physical damage. I've never tested it though.

 

And you shoot freakin' lightning.

 

An intensive game of Read Aura does show electrical resistance to be the rarest of all.
Muro, what does your table reveal about the Tesla Rod? Every tech I play makes every weapon for fun, but ends up just using the Tesla Rod. It seems unbeatable.

 

That it's bested by the Hand Cannon in terms of sheer damage dealing.

The damage-per-ammo-unit factor will be included in the final version.

I've got big plans - I plan to include every single weapon from Arcanum. Also, I want this to be as perfect as possible, and since Strength often affects damage dealing more than the weapon's damage itself, the table will include data for characters with all available Strength values.

Don't expect it to be out anytime soon, though. We're talking dozens of thousands Excel cells filled with information, which needs to be gathered, typed in and edited. A quick calculation based on how much I've done so far and an estimation of how many weapons are available in Arcanum shows me that if I'll spend half an hour daily on this, it won't be finished before the end of the year. But it will be done, eventually, and when it will, it will answer a lot of questions.

As in what's the magick complexity of an weapon?

Better, because...?

Those are valid points, which sadly are impossible to include in my table. What I'm dealing with is pure damage, some simplifications will be unavoidable. It will up to the player to, say, look at the Hand Cannon's ADPAP, Tesla Rod's ADPAP and decide for himself which option does he prefer - slightly higher normal ADPAP paid in bullets or slightly lower electrical ADPAP paid in charges.

EDIT:
"Answer a lot of answers". Funny that.

 

I say, that is quite a bold move, sir. Let us consider a strictly theoretical situation:

• Muro accepts the Scientist's challenge and - while the Scientist spends his time working on the project - plays video games, has a good time with his lady, reads books, studies, browses porn and does all sorts of fun things. Then, when the Scientist eventually releases the final version, Muro downloads it and simply refuses to fulfill his part of the bet. That way he would:
  
  • 1) have the database he wanted for years
    2) sooner than he would be able to create it himself
    3) without having to invest even a single minute in it anymore.
  A triple win for Muro.

Why should I not act exactly like that, again?

 

Thanks for the answer, Muro. Great scholarship, sir.

I'm inspired to record a survey of arcanum fauna and personages with the read aura spell.

Would the house be interested in such a record?

 

Ah, you flatter my endurance. You are all too kind.

Still, since my last post in this thread I already have experienced a bit of all of the activities I mentioned in the time that could theoretically be spent on working on the database, so I would argue whose point stands.

That sentence of yours, it would be a good way to motivate someone to work on something in an enjoyable and non-committal time-frame, but not to work on something in a hurried manner with investing more time that he finds pleasurable to and more than he can afford to because he would be constantly aware that all of the hours invested in the project can to go waste. Hell, carnal activities of life by far beat that.

Can't say I'm really sure what is your motif in suspending the progress of your own mod in order to have the time to work from scratch on a project that's already being done by someone else and is ~25% finished. It's not like you really need the tool that badly, otherwise you would have made it yourself years ago.

The way I saw it, it has been nine years since the game's release and not a single person was bothered enough to create this database so I figured that if I won't do it myself, no one ever will. Nine years of silence, then a volunteer for the work appears and all of a sudden a couple of months is way too much time to wait.

 

Well then, you'll have to pardon my previous suspiciousness. I admit, I have suspected darker motives.

The good news is I have plenty of motivation. The bad - time is a whole different thing. The project would be moving forward significantly faster if it were summertime, but the way it is now, it's being slowly pushed in the right direction whenever some time during finding balance between pleasures and duties is found. Not much that can be done about that, I'm afraid.

Your offer to help is much appreciated, but I would rather do it all myself. I have no doubts in your abilities, mind you, I simply prefer to work solo on projects in which I get really involved. Probably has something to do with my perfectionism. Not like there's much of a need to be in a hurry right now anyway, so it's quite harmless in this particular case.

 

Muro, what I meant by magickal affinity is including the damage bonuses available from magickal aptitude on magickal weapons. A serrated chackram might be worse than a balanced boomerang for a tech character, but completely surpasses it in ADPAP for an even slightly magickal one.

If my suspicions are correct and your list auto-sorts after ADPAP, you could include a cell column with magickal aptitude, and have magickal weapons calculate their final damage and ADPAP using that. The same could be done with the strength bonus, by the way.

Though, I am not even sure if automatic sorting like that is possible, it might need to become a separate program.

 

Critical hit = Maximum Damage x 2, and Tesla Gun has an insanely high maximum damage?

I meant that hitting a creature for "zero" eletrical damage would be frustrating, while normal bullets will do damage no matter what. Normal damage is more widely resisted (I believe), but it is never completely resisted.

On the other hand, when you have the Void, for example, electrical damage comes in quite useful as nobody has complete electrical resistance there.

 

I didn't know that. That's the formula? What's the source of this information?

Making a smaller dynamic database instead of a larger static one? When I first read this, I though that it would be impossible to make, what with all the different Min and Max Dmg weapon caps, different weapon behaviours, Excel's limits and whatnot.

Still, the idea seemed grand, so yesterday I decided to give it a go. Mistakes were easy to make and while their results were easily noticeable, the causes was hard to find, so sometimes writing the formula anew was quicker, even though demotivating.

Also, some of the formulas were in fact so complex that Excel decided to ignore part of them when there were too many functions one in another, but I eventually found a workaround for that. Some tests are still in order, but it all seems to work like clockwork now.

The way I'm making the database, it's the user who decides how is the info sorted. He can have it display all weapons in an alphabetical order, show only swords from highest ADPAP to lowest, display only pistols and rifles from slowest to fastest, etc. There's a lot of possibilities.

We are humans. Nothing is too trivial for darker motives.

Having the gather the info myself, I actually learn new things. For example, I had to learn how to make custom backgrounds in order to gather the info of some of the weapons. Wouldn't want to miss any such learning opportunities, you see. Finding the weapons is probably the most fun part of doing the project, too. I have a special character created for that. With an actual background.