Evaluating suggested weapon upgrades

We had a suggestion last month about raising the number of shots on weapons. Here’s a draft of what weapons would look like if we moved everything up to base 5 shots or higher.

• Machine gun R24 Shots 8 RF+4H DMG200
• Beam machine gun 24 Shots 6 RF+4H P4 DMG200
• Beam Pistol 16 Shots 5 RF+1H P5 DMG300
• Beam Cannon 48 Shots 5 RF-2 P5 DMG400
• Beam Sniper 48 Shots 5 RF-2 P6 DMG300
• Beam rifle 32 Shots 5 RF+1 P6 DMG300
• Beam carbine 24 5 RF+3 P5 DMG300
• Railgun 48 Shots 5 RF-2 P3 DMG400
• Artillery 48 Shots 5 RF-2 P1 DMG500
• Bazooka 32 Shots 5 P3 DMG 700
• Missile pod 32 Shots 6 RF+3H P2 DMG300
• Missile Salvo 48 Shots 5 RF+1H P3 DMG400
• Fire support 48 Shots 10 RF-4 P2 DMG300
• Micromissiles 40 Shots 10 RF+6H P2 DMG100
• Needle Missiles 16 Shots 10H RF+10 P2 DMG100
• Grenades 16 Shots 5 RF+3H P3 DMG300

There are a lot of things to like about having that bonus shot. It makes playing long range games a lot more viable and makes rapid fire not as huge an increase in overall shots. The downside is that the lethality of the base game gets high enough that a lot of things are being immediately one shot, including higher point units like the Hyaku Shiki. So there are three options to fix this.

1. Return Critical Hits down to 1s on shooting and 10s on Melee
2. Rebalance HP and give each unit additional HP
3. Do nothing and keep weapons balanced the way they are

For #1 this would definitely solve the lethality issue in most cases. The downside of removing this is that it makes cross era play more difficult. To use Hyaku Shiki as an example again, it has an extremely large Evade value (higher with an Ace pilot) where 1s and 2s are essential for a grunt unit to threaten it.

For #2 this isn’t super hard to do but it doesn’t solve the problem for all weapons, for instance a bazooka is still likely to accidentally one shot some units with a base of 5 shots.

For #3, well, things are working well as they are but I know there are still some issue where long range fighting runs into some issues when shooting at units with shields and decent evade.

As someone who likes crits, and how those can influence the narrative, I’m leaning towards #3 or #2 myself.