Nukie balance

[Katzen]

This initial post is FACTSX

New nukie balance PR: https://github.com/goonstation/goonstation/pull/2292

assault rifle full power burst, faster singleshot, less accurate burst
grenade launcher power decrease
engineer crate has SPES-6 instead of SPES-12
Heavy LMG gets fullauto enabled

This will make assault rifle more effective (40% more damage at the cost of 4.5 degrees more second and 100ms decrease in fire rate), grenade launcher nerfed (HEDP 38% ish? HE, 20% more or less) and shotgun less effective (40% weaker, no limb removal).

Nukies have also recently gotten a boost up to a max of 8 operatives and a bomb teleporter for a one time shot to get the bomb back after it gets lost.

Nukie good? Nukie bad? What needs changing?

[vampirate]

Nukies are not meant to be balanced. They're meant to be beat through organization and numbers. If you lose to nukies rn they deserve the win

[GORE]

There are a lots of things that can happen during a Nukie round; if anybody underestimates a clown fighting the Nukies they are dastardly mistaken.
Clowns are fucking horrifying but even worse; the damndest mime snuffing out the Fluke-Ops.

Lots of variables; lots of players.

If at all - Nukies is one of these things currently in one of the best positions in terms of game balance and fun ways a round can go.

Nukies are not too strong and not too weak.

[Drago156]

I absolutely disagree, as it stands now I believe nukies are incredibly powerful, a bit too powerful, in comparison to the overall station, partly from a decrease in overall station armaments and in an increase in the amount and power of nukie gear. I will say that I am very happy and very much in support of the grenade launcher getting nerfed because that thing was absolutely broken, but I also think the LMG should be nerfed as well, because currently, and especially now that the grenade launcher is nerfed, it stands as possibly the most powerful nukie gun, able to drop an unarmored opponent to negative 830~ health before the person has a chance to die or to account for bleed, shrapnel, or organ damage in anyway. I would say decreasing or limiting the LMG's overall rate of fire or dropping each bullet's damage by a point or a few could fix this and make it overall more balanced.

Organ damage is something that you absolutely have to account for now in combat, and is a very serious factor for one's health now. Organ damage is very slow and can be difficult to heal, and getting hit a good few times by just about any nukie weapon, despite wearing armor or not, can completely shred the health of your organs and leave you dying or dead despite a lower overall and initial health loss.

It's also to important to consider that any losses or flukies you may see isn't necessarily representative of any other given nukie round, because the robustness of the crew and of the nukie team changes each and every round, as well as the circumstances. Nukie gear is also incredibly easy to use, there are few caveats to being a nukie and using your equipment aside from an RPG, sarin nades, or firebrands, and often times someone will yell about any other person taking the first two. Often times I hear about nukies losing more than winning, and often I hear that the cause is that the given nukie squad was comprised almost entirely of new players. I would guess from my own experiences in witnessing teams of at least semi-robust nukie members, that any half decent team could actually quite easily beat the station, and due to a lack of overall station armaments or security personnel, there wouldn't be many people who could actually do anything against the nukies.

Finally, one last thing to consider is that the nukies often times don't really have to do much. In most cases the nukie team breaches directly to the plant site, throws a few tables around the nuke, and plants it and just sits in one spot for 10 minutes, able to just gun down anyone at range and have almost zero concern about anyone not wielding a gun, and even those wielding weapons aren't very much of a threat unless it's something incredibly broken or powerful, due to the nukie armor negating a lot of the damage. It also doesn't help that a nukie can take any single group of crewmembers and just suicide to effectively disable or kill most of the people of that group, who can then be very easily picked off by another nukie.

Tl;dr: Nukies is still very imbalanced, with a lot of the power weighing on the side of the nukies, and that fluke rounds can mostly be caused from almost an entire team of new players.

[zjdtmkhzt]

I don't really have any strong opinions on the balance of nukies right now, not even that they are balanced.
I just wanna take a second to complain about the lack of a shitpost/joke option in the poll, we usually always have one of those. >: (

[Katzen]

Competence is such a big variable it's almost not worth considering.

It's a bit dismissive to assume that no parts of the kit can be tweaked.

Medics for example have no free space and both hands full after taking everything from their box not including the poison bottle. They can't carry a sidearm without ditching something. They also only get six shots from their syringe gun and then have to find more reagents. I'd ditch their health analyser and give them unique prodoc glasses that can analyse syndicate agents for a start.

[Sundance]

I agree that competence is a hard thing to nail down, but that doesn't mean we don't stop tweaking. Its better to close the gap instead where a fluke team will lose but not badly, and a competent team will win but not dominate. 

Id also ask peeps to please be objective when it comes to reviewing PRs. Look at what's been coded, does it work? If not why not. 

Are syndies in a good place right now? They have up to 8 players now, theyre in a pretty good place imo. Could deffo use some work in certain places. 

Assault rifle /LMG change
What's the ammo like on this thing? I feel someone with full auto should waste their bullets like no tomorrow. This spray n pray method I would imagine would be akin to a hallway area denial, but it should come at a significant ammo cost. 

Grenade launcher
Good change, much needed nerf. This eviscerates far too easily. 

Shotgun
40% weaker is pretty massive reduction. It still does organ damage so I'm not too sure, but perhaps as a caveat you give it more chamber capacity or just more ammo in general?

Further thoughts
One henious offender is the Stealth RPG combo. I've used it. It's fun, but OP af. if you're looking into changing things I might recommend looking into it. Not sure how'd it work, my recommendation would be to give the rpg a 1-2 second action bar before shooting, which would disable the cloak prior to the action bar. Still strong, but avoidable.

[Mouse]

I'm gonna run some numbers because I have the feeling that the LMG isn't nearly as powerful as Drago thinks it is. (the big problem IMX is the massive lagspike from message spam from getting shot with one while wearing armor)

LMG deals 12 damage per bullet, fires 8 bullets per volley, has 100 ammo capacity and two belts, for a total of 300 bullets.  This translates to, with perfect accuracy and the target having no armor, 96 damage per volley, 12 volleys per full belt (with four shots left over - using all of your ammo will give you another volley and have four shots unused but will require a minimum of four reloads [100,100,100 -fire1-> 4,100,100 -reload1-> 100,4,100 -fire2->4,4,100 -reload2->8,0,100-reload3-> 100,0,8 -fire3-> 4,0,8 -reload4-> 12,0,0 -fire4-> 4,0,0], 1152 damage per full belt, and 3352 damage for all your ammo.

Now, there's a second delay between all combat clicks - I don't know if that starts counting when the volley starts firing or when the volley ends - in either case that means it takes a minimum of 12 seconds to use a full belt, in the latter it means the minimum is significantly higher, so one belt gives you, assuming a perfect scenario, 96 dps.  You have 37 volleys, so that's 37 seconds, plus 4 seconds for 4 reloads, for a total of 41 seconds minimum to use all your ammo.

This gives us the following results:
LMG shot damage - 96
LMG full belt damage - 1152
LMG full loadout damage - 3552
LMG dps (shot) - 96
LMG dps (belt) - 96
LMG dps (loadout) - ~86.6

Now, my personal experience seems to suggest that the second delay starts counting when the volley finishes firing.  For any single-shot gun this is negligible, for the LMG that's around another second.  If this is, in fact, how it works, then it could potentially be 23 seconds to use up a belt instead of 12, and 74 seconds to use all your ammo.  That would put the best-case dps values at:
LMG dps (shot) - 96
LMG dps (belt) - ~50.1
LMG dps (loadout) - 48

First set is very good.  Second set is a pretty significant downgrade.  Incidentally, I initially misremembered nukies as getting three spare belts, which would let them use all their ammo at the cost of two additional reloads.  I caught it before posting but it's possible I forgot to fix some of the numbers, so if anything's wrong it's probably here.  I may also have fucked up with how long it would take to spend all your ammo here.  Now let's look at some other weapons.

CPA Predator Mk. II stats - 60 damage per shot, 7 ammo, two spare speedloaders (21 ammo total), and you can use all the ammo at once so you only need two reloads, so 23 seconds to spend it all.

Predator shot damage - 60
Predator full speedloader damage - 420
Predator full loadout damage - 1260
Predator dps (shot) - 60
Predator dps (speedloader) - 60
Predator dps (loadout) - ~54.8

M1992 stats - 25 damage a shot, 15 shots a magazine, 3 spare magazines (60 ammo overall), three reloads, total firing time 63 seconds.

M1992 shot damage - 25
M1992 full magazine damage - 375
M1992 full loadout damage - 1500
M1992 dps (shot) - 25
M1992 dps (magazine) - 25
M1992 dps (loadout) - ~23.8

I did the sidearms first because I misremembered how much damage the LMG did at first and it ended up being solidly beat by the Predator until I fixed it.  Let's look at the main weapons.

M19A4 - 30 damage (single shot), 18 damage (burst X3), 30 ammo, 5 spare magazines (180 ammo in total), five reloads.  30 seconds to empty a magazine on single shot, 10 seconds to empty a magazine on burst (best case), 13.75 seconds to empty a magazine on burst (worst-case, assuming that the bullets on burst come out at the same rate as the value I guesstimated for the LMG), 185 seconds to use all the ammo on single shot, 65 seconds to use all ammo on burst (best-case), ~87.5 seconds to use all ammo on burst (worst-case)

M19A4 shot damage (semi/burst) - 30/54
M19A4 full magazine damage (semi/burst) - 900/540
M19A4 full loadout damage (semi/burst) - 5400/3240
M19A4 shot dps (semi/burst (bestcase)/burst (worstcase)) - 30/54/54
M19A4 magazine dps (semi/burst (best)/burst(worst)) - 30/54/~39.3
M19A4 loadout dps (semi/burst (best)/burst (worst)) - ~29.2/~49.8/~37

S90A1 sniper rifle - 70 damage, 4 shots per magazine, 5 spare magazines (24 shots total), 5 reloads, 29 seconds to use all ammo.

S90A1 shot damage - 70
S90A1 full magazine damage - 280
S90A1 full loadout damage - 1680
S90A1 dps (shot) - 70
S90A1 dps (magazine) - 70
S90A1 dps (loadout) - ~57.9

SPES-12 shotgun - 70 damage, 8 shells per ammo box, 5 spare boxes (48 shells total), 5 reloads, 53 seconds to use all ammo.

SPES-12 shot damage - 70
SPES-12 full box damage - 560
SPES-12 full loadout damage - 3360
SPES-12 dps (shot) - 70
SPES-12 dps (box) - 70
SPES-12 dps (loadout) - ~63.4

In summary:  Best case scenario, the LMG is the best weapon at doing damage quickly, although if the click delay works how it has seemed to work for me it becomes much, much worse at it, being beaten by the Predator, the SPES, and the goddamn sniper rifle.
Best-case scenario, the most damage overall goes to the assault rifle on semi.  After that it's the LMG, shotgun, and assault rifle on burst fire.  The sniper rifle, in comparison, barely manages to dish out more damage in total than the damn sidearms.

Of course, this again is assuming no armor and perfect accuracy.  IIRC the sniper rifle and the shotgun also have variable damage depending on range, but I don't know how that works so I can't run the numbers there.

why is the sniper rifle one of the best DPS options that makes no sense whatsoever

---

As for the particular suggestions in the PR, separated out to another post because holy hell that one was tl;dr incarnate: guess the forum won't let me do that

The assault rifle is, by the numbers, one of the best nukie weapons around. I'm not convinced it needs a buff, at all.
The grenade launcher is stupidly overpowered but since I don't know how explosions actually deal damage I can't really say how much your change helps.
I didn't run the numbers on the SPES-6, but base 30 damage with 8 shots fully loaded and 48 shots in total is a hell of a nerf, and would probably put that in sidearm territory damage-wise. It's about a 57% decrease in damage. As good as the SPES-12 is, that's an enormous nerf.
The LMG already runs out of ammo ridiculously fast, although enabling full auto might actually let you use all the ammunition instead of it forever having four rounds it can't fire. If we're gonna move the LMG to true full auto I'd rather see something like the firebrand's new back item for it. You store your ammo on your back and don't need to reload, but you can't fire the LMG unless you're wearing the back item. It is, after all, belt-fed. Or give the heavy a pouch for their ammo belts because Christ inventory management as a heavy is hell.

[Gannets]

Small note: the engineer was always meant to have this weapon, it was reverted to the full powered version presumably by mistake at some point.

[Katzen]

Sorry should clarify, not my PR and I don't know if they were after feedback.

I will say the shotgun was actually an existing thing specifically made for nukies and seems to have not been properly put in place.

[Mouse]

Small note: the engineer was always meant to have this weapon, it was reverted to the full powered version presumably by mistake at some point.

I was wondering why the SPES-6 was on the wiki when I had never seen it in-game.

Guess I should run the numbers on it.

[TheRealFlapJackson]

let me attach the heavy's smg to my arm.
i'm also desperate for more nukies to play because i havent got nukie in forever

[KikiMofo]

Cogs had said years ago that the shotgun was made for Syndies only but was added to the normal traitor PDA list at some point and was never removed.

[Lady Birb]

on the topic of shotgun rounds: if engineers are gonna get weak buckshot, then rename regular buckshot to magnum buckshot and make weak buckshot the new standard buckshot; and as such replace the buckshot from hacked ammovends with weak buckshot while adding magnum buckshot to the listening post merchant.

[Mouse]

The buckshot from hacked ammovends was supposed to be replaced with weak buckshot already, although I'm not sure it actually was.