First, let me say I’m loving this game, despite all the bugs it’s a really well done game, and I believe it has the potatential to go head to head with fallout given time. But let’s move on to the topic.
Of all the features in this game that are off, I think the ammunition types is the one that is the biggest problem, atleast, it’s the one that bugs me the most. While I respect the devs for trying to make the ammo types diverse and intuitive, I think they went a little bit over board and made them a little too intuitive, in order to use them as designed you’d have to carry hundreds of each type and change ammo types regularly during battle, which wouldn’t make for much fun or pheasabilit given the weight system. First of all, softpoints and hollowpoints shouldn’t even be a thing, these are hunting and self defense round designed to do maximum damage to flesh targets by mushrooming on impact, which means they wouldn’t have a whole lot of armor or metal pematrating ability. So useless. Fmj should be, and are, the staple go too ammo type to use for general purpose, so good going there.
Here’s where we hit the real issues.
Armor peircing rounds, irl, are designed to bypass Armor and damage whatever is under it, so it makes no sense that it does increase Armor damage but decreased component damage. It should, if anything, simply increase the amount of damage done, without a drawback, because frankly there is none.
Easy fix to the above is to eliminate soft/hollowpoints, make fmj the standard and make armor pricing the next step up in damage, the make AP ammo a little more rare to make finding AP crafting plans more worth the time and effort.
Now we get to special ammo types.
Explosive: it doesn’t feasibly make sense how a bullet would have proximity bombs inside of it, not to mention when being used in game, the explosives don’t always deploy, and barley ever actually explode. Therefore explosive ammo should just explode upon impact. Not to mention with the experimental .50 cal its totally useless cause the rounds over penetrate
HEAT: saying that it only affect components and not armor is beyond inaccurate. It’s literally High Explosive ANTI TANK. it’s purpose is to destroy armored targets via a shaped charge that penetrates armor and deals internal damage on a large scale. This in game limitation of it not affecting armor makes it useless, and contradicts its own name.
TAR: nothing wrong here, just not particularly useful.
Radioactive: nothing wrong here, just not particularly useful.
Corrosive: now I’m assuming this is corrosion via acid given the visual affects. So again it wouldn’t make any sense that it only really affects armor instead of component’s. It should affect both equally, if not more to componants, but honestly just simply making it do damage over time would be enough.
Healing rounds: bullets don’t usually heal you so…not gonna touch that one xD.
Shock: works as the game intends from what I can see, though I’d love to know what kinda power source it’s using lol.
NOTE: having HEAT and explosive rounds is kinda redundant given they’re purpose IF they were fixed, so I’d suggest removing explosive rounds entirely OR replacing them with thermite rounds. Thermite rounds would be Damage over time rounds. But unlike corrosive they do more damage over a much shorter amount of time.
Honorable mention: the AG4 shooting fire rounds is pretty pointless unless it was to actually catch the robot on fire…which it doesnt. If you were to change that to thermite rounds though, having innate bonus DOT damage via that perk would make it a truly good experimental weapon, and worth using.
Now let’s say you, the devs, actually make these changes. You’d have an issue of overpowered guns running around. Imagine, a experiment kpist shooting the equivalent of grenades for bullets lol. The obvious solution would be to limit what guns could use what special ammo types. My suggestion would be this.
Assault rifles: corrosive, shock, tar.
SMG: corrosive, tar, radioactive
Shotgun: explosive, tar, medical
Sniper: HEAT
Rocket launcher: HEAT, corrosive
Handguns: HEAT, corrosive, shock, tar
And before someone asks “why HEAT on a handgun?” Because after a certain point in the game play, pistols arnt particulate viable anymore, given them HEAT rounds would prolong they’re usefulness.
Now I don’t know how much work it would be to make these changes, but I feel like these changes would simplify the ammunition mechanics in the game and actually make the majority of the special ammo types useful vs they’re current state.