/tg/Station 13

So we have a lot of different kinds of bullets and ammunition types in the game. A lot of these are unbalanced, overpowered, useless, redundant, or unfun to play against. On top of that, it just makes ammo compatibility an absolute nightmare as there are so many guns which can only use one kind of ammunition. I don't expect magazines to be interchangeable, but come on, some of these really don't have a reason to exist.

List of all the projectile shells and casings in the game, used by pistols, submachine guns, rifles, shotguns, and grenade launchers: What do you guys think? You see any of these that are redundant, need buffing/nerfing, have pointless extra properties, or could just removed/merged with existing ammo types with no one noticing or caring?

I agree, we shouldn't focus on adding content but removing content.

Who the hell needs "Guns" or "Ammo" anyways?

Incendiary bullets setting people on fire is dumb, though phosphorous-laced incerndiaries can be quite toxic.
Pseudo "elemental" bullets (tox/sleep/stun) don't sit well with me either, any bullet-shaped object travelling at bullet-like velocities should pack a punch.
Heamo-bullets just removing blood once hitting the target speaks volumes on just how shallow our medical system is.

Different calibers being a thing isnt really the issue, it is all the sub-types of the calibers that dont ever get used that are kinda shit.

For example, the reason 9mm and 46x30mm are two different calibers with the same stats is that one is a standard pistol round and the other is special NANOTRASEN PROPRIETARY TECHNOLOGY that is required to use the projectile guns you order from cargo. Because nanotrasen needs dat money. That adds world flavor.

and the real life nagant revolver for example, actually uses a patented cartridge that allows it to press into the barrel when firing, creating an airtight seal. This makes the nagant the only revolver design that can use a silencer, I dont know if it can use one in game however.

In summary, keep the different calibers, as real guns have a variety of calibers. get rid of the stupid special versions of every caliber that rarely get used.

Perhaps meteor shot can be axed if breaching has the same purpose and the lowered damage and name keep it in it's niche.

Tech shells are fun and fine leave meteor shot alone.

maybe if you added more guns that used the ammo types the ammo wouldnt seem so redundant

gee, that reminds me of someone who tried doing that.

gee wilikers that also reminds me of multiple people who tried doing that then everyone screamed about balance, when there's hyperlethal ammo in the game already that can be fired out of common guns on the station.


gee. motherfucking. wilikers.

the calibres are all weird because people end up making a single calibre for their own weapon to balance it properly.

it's shit, toss it all out and introduce a small scoped set and refuse any pr's adding more without justification

>someone changed the L6 freedom distributer from glorious surplus 7.62x51mm to lol 5.56 to some gay pencil shaped bullet
>but other 21st century rounds like 9mm, 10mm, .45, .357 are ok

So 1.95x129mmHP is just superior to the regular ammo? Good to know.

Also how strong are those Haem bullets? How much is 35 or 100 blood loss?

There are too many guns and amm on tgstation.

All of them should be removed and replaced with tazers. Then we would have balance.

Haem is terrible. A human starts with 560 units of blood (can be overfilled to 600 through injections with no negative effects), and will die at around 60% of their blood contents, so around ~340/560 blood. Now you CAN make them unconscious without killing them at a higher value, like at around maybe 400. The problem is that haem rounds from the l6 saw only deal 20 brute and 35 blood removal, so you'd have to shoot them a ton for them to VERY SLOWLY start suffocating to death due to lack of blood, when you could just use HP rounds and kill anyone in 2-3 shots, depending on if they have armor or not. Sniper rounds also fire much weaker killing projectiles that remove 100 blood. Again, just use the standard rounds that knocks them down long enough to hit them again, or use xray to hit them behind walls where they have no way to see this coming and dodge it (great gameplay there).

Energy weapons is cooler

I don't like elemental damage ammo because it deviates too much into the "fantasy" setting, if anything we should add more specialized flavour ammo like APHE, HEF-SAPI, HVAP-T, AP-I cermet core and so on

"elemental ammo" is pretty tame considering we have literal wizards and magic in the game imo.

they should only be for the shotgun and in forms that make sense like dart forms

ExcessiveCobblestone wrote:"elemental ammo" is pretty tame considering we have literal wizards and magic in the game imo.

Wizard and cult magic is fairly restricted to its own users, at least.

I wonder what Wizard vs Cult looks like.

The 46x30mm ammunition type was added as a balance decision for the Sec Auto Rifles to limit a player's ability to print off ammo for the gun. Standard 9mm rounds can be made from a autolathe thus at the time it was a major point of contention. Unless you want to dip your toes into the balance hell of autorifles then that's not going to change.

I think we should remove the Hemorrhaging ammo, maybe if we had a good medical system then the gun could cause massive internal bleeding that would need surgery to fix, but at this moment its objectivly inferior.

CosmicScientist wrote:How do fire stacks work?

They just put you on fire, the amount of fire stacks is linearly proportional to the time on fire and how hard it is to extinguish yourself .

The amount of DAMAGE you take from fire stacks however is not. The longer you've been on fire, the faster you'll take damage. Being on fire for 5 seconds is close to harmless. Being on fire for 10 seconds is much, much more dangerous, and being on fire for 20 seconds will kill you.

0.5 fire stacks will typically do about ~15 damage, while 1 full fire stack will deal closer to 50.

@Steelpoint, why not just make the magazines non-refillable? That way you can get rid of the extra ammo type that otherwise doesn't exist outside of the magazine used for specifically one gun? Remove 7.62x38mmR as it's only used for specifically the nagant revolver which is almost never seen (and make the nagant revolver simply use .357 like all other revolvers). We could then use a generic 7.62 round (currently in use for the mosin nagant rifle) for very powerful assault rifles in the future, like an FN SCAR or something as a deathsquad equivalent to a pulse rifle.

Making the mags non-refillable would be snowflaky but in balance terms it would be fine since the best way to get more ammo for the auto rifle is to get science to print off magazines for metal.

We can work on trimming the fat significantly, but the feature freeze would seemingly prohibit this.

Like, here's one perspective. We split calibres into the following FUTURE calibres. All guns will have to fit into one of these calibres aside from special cases where a gun NEEDS a special snowflake calibre for balance reasons that cannot be solved any other way.

1x0- 10 brute
2x0 - 20 brute
3x0 - 45 brute
4x0 - 60 brute

If you add a number after the 0 you increase its damage by 5, so...
1x5 - 15 brute
4x3 - 75 brute

But those would be reserved for edge case weapons or special ammo types.

All weapons would need to fall into the above category.

So instead of this.
We go to this

All ballistics except those used by Syndicate should be removed, period.

Just make the auto rifle use caseless 9mm ammo, empty magazines disappear and no casings are spawned. It would also explain why science is needed to print them.

InsaneHyena wrote:All ballistics except those used by Syndicate should be removed, period.

but i like my double-barreled

Iatots wrote:Just make the auto rifle use caseless 9mm ammo, empty magazines disappear and no casings are spawned. It would also explain why science is needed to print them.

fits with Nanotrasen's FUTURE style as well. I like it.

ballistics should be crazy good and rare so they're a cool thing to find

Problem is that a lot of these aren't very good, and the lack of compatibility between most guns and their ammo types means even if you do find a gun, you're not likely to be able to print any ammo for it or take its bullets out for your other gun. Like why do we have a .357 revolver and a 7.62x38mmR revolver that do the exact same damage and have the same size clips? Why have toxin versions of 9mm rounds that are strictly inferior to regular rounds? Why have haem rounds at all when you could simply use more powerful standard rounds that cost fewer telecrystals and kill in far fewer shots?

I'm all for ballistic guns, but we could definitely trim a lot of fat here and tweak a lot of numbers, they're really not well thought out according to our armor values, their rarity and cost, versatility etc.

If you start by first removing the ability for the autolathe to shit out bullets for next to nothing, then you can start merging bullet types without major balance issues (hell being able to print infinite revolver ammo is a balance issue unto itself). You can argue in the distant future that most ballistic firearms are very standardised despite external appearances thus justifying why guns that, in our era, are of a different calibre or type can use the same bullets.

Also I would agree to remove most of the fluff alt ammo types sans Armour Piercing, most alt ammo types need a actually effective medical system to be viable.

I had a big post but the forums ate it. Probably just as well.

Basically, probably a good idea to get rid of excessive ammo types and consolidate, except where it serves a purpose. Syndicate revolvers are meant to be used somewhat discreetly on the station, so it makes sense that they'd use an ammo type that's relatively easy to find/make on it. However, would make sense for Nuke Ops weapons to often use ammo types that aren't usually easily found on the station, so they're of limited use to the station staff in case they get their hands on them.

Shotguns I think have taken a fun niche as the weapon type with varied ammo and I think they can stay that way, given they're often relatively easy to get a hold of and different staff have different ways of getting ammo. (The bartender and the autolathe, science's stun and custom shotshells, security's armory, etc)

Otherwise, I think best to reduce ammo types by weapon type. Pistols/SMGs, revolvers, rifles, shotguns and heavy weapons (sniper rifles, machine guns). And weirder stuff can have its own special types but those should still be consolidated where it makes some sense.

Alt ammo types should be less sidegrade gimmicks, more rarer and more powerful/fucking crazy. Exploding bullets and whatnot.

The only people on the station even authorised to use guns are those with gun permits on ID and or either intrinsically connected to security or command. People laugh at gunlathe (understandable), but purpose built ammolathe is reasonable for security's limited stock since science already tests weapons but security exercises them.

Consider this.

• Science produces ammunition for the security rifles in different calibers and shells, but doesn't actually (anymore after the NT machine gun was removed) supply bullet based weaponry, manufacturing bog standard laser guns from science is sensical, ballistics are not.

• Better items and products that aren't contraband at all (improved welders & RCD's) are thrown in with typically lethal weapons like lethal rounds inside the autolathe, this can be seperated out or the non-illegal items removed and ported elsewhere

• You can't store unique ballistics weapons because you will run out of ammunition for them if points above don't apply, therefore the armory is mundanely useless for actually keeping guns compared to a 100 greyshits/traitors having a gun in their bag breaking into cargo to print ammo

In both cases they are mis-placed i would argue and nobody enjoys crafting ion ammunition or special ones (AI murdering as it may be) out of super high tech parts 1 shell at a time even after the crafting screen got a clean-up, and a more formalised set of ammo types from a defined source is cleaner, easier to manage and will encourage ballistics to not be over-used as they are currently and more of a

If the halls have titanium walls, cargo is out of commission/exploded and scientists traitors have took over RnD and began a supply line of energy weapons with emagged pins, you need a moderate sustainable counter of ballistics to clear out the threat without waiting ages to order more guns or stand around a public autolathe draining public resources.

If you add more guns that use the calibers it'll appear that every gun doesn't have a snowflake caliber.

You can give security, instead of energy guns, SCARs with stamina rounds and space california accepted 10 round magazines, then have normal magazines for lethal.

Make it do the same damage as lasers, and the same stamina damage as disable bolts, have the same ammo capacity, but take 7.62.

9mm, 10mm, 5.7mm, 357, 357-R (rubber), 12 gauge buckshot, slug, beanbag, and dart, 44. , 50 AE, 5.56, 7.62, and 50 BMG are the only rounds you need.

All pistols that aren't a revolver and aren't a desert eagle take 9mm, if they are syndicate or admin spawned pistols they take 10mm, which do 10 more brute.
P90's, and autorifles fire 5.7mm
Traitor revolvers fire 357 and the detectives revolver fires 357 rubber, the detectives revolver cannot be changed to fire 44 magnum and can accept standard 357 but has a chance of exploding, as per usual.
Nuke op revolvers and revolvers found in events or away missions fire 44 magnum which does slightly more bleeding and brute than 357.
Desert eagles fire 50 AE.
C20's, boarding rifles, and any other mid range rifle, syndicate or not, fire 556.
SAW's, nagants, and any other heavy rifle fire 762.
The sniper rifle fires 50 BMG

All elemental ammo is removed, all of these calibers have armor piercing and hollow point variants, AP ignores armor, hollow points do +10 bleeding damage and 10 more brute against unarmored targets and -10 bleeding damage and -10 brute against armored targets.

done now shut your shit niggers

No, Oxford.

Can we just remove caliber's please? sprite wise there is visually no difference and while it does help identify the specific gun, is only a meta-knowledge reaction for people to scream out "Its a double tap!/syndicate revolver!" and encourages the gun nuts to make specialsed ammunition nobody can work out without prior knowledge what it even belongs to.

Ambiguous spent shells on the floor and sharing generic ammunition types between the det & syndicate revolver would be a better story/paranoia element, or least restricting the information of caliber etc to the description rather than the name of the object.

FantasticFwoosh wrote:Can we just remove caliber's please? sprite wise there is visually no difference and while it does help identify the specific gun, is only a meta-knowledge reaction for people to scream out "Its a double tap!/syndicate revolver!" and encourages the gun nuts to make specialsed ammunition nobody can work out without prior knowledge what it even belongs to.

Ambiguous spent shells on the floor and sharing generic ammunition types between the det & syndicate revolver would be a better story/paranoia element, or least restricting the information of caliber etc to the description rather than the name of the object.

I am not a gun owner, but dont real life rounds have the caliber stamped on the bottom of the casing?

I mean, it isnt hard to read, even if you arent a detective.

it's ten times more irritating on the coder end, because of the fact that bullets and casings are seperate. the ammo types in the op are all casings, each of which contains an actual bullet, which are often named super undescriptively and used in even more snowflakey balance-related ways

Other then hem, this whole situation seems to be a nonissue

calzilla1 wrote:Other then hem, this whole situation seems to be a nonissue

Agreed, it really is quite a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. But, in this community, firestorms are started over a feature to let someone pat another player on the head. Erro's Law dictates that the less important an issue is, the bigger deal it is in the community!

DemonFiren wrote:

InsaneHyena wrote:All ballistics except those used by Syndicate should be removed, period.

but i like my double-barreled

the bartenders? I'd put that with the Det's revolver:
some kind of personal heirloom they brought on board, not NT standard issue, thus they'd get to keep them.

tacolizard wrote:it's ten times more irritating on the coder end, because of the fact that bullets and casings are seperate. the ammo types in the op are all casings, each of which contains an actual bullet, which are often named super undescriptively and used in even more snowflakey balance-related ways

bullet refactor when

Well, if a combat rework ever does happen that largely or completely removes stun as a mechanic in the game, we'd need to tweak bullet, armor, and weapon values a lot since we won't have stupid crutch insta-win items handed out like candy to everyone anymore.

Gun Hog wrote:

calzilla1 wrote:Other then hem, this whole situation seems to be a nonissue

Agreed, it really is quite a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. But, in this community, firestorms are started over a feature to let someone pat another player on the head. Erro's Law dictates that the less important an issue is, the bigger deal it is in the community!

The entire point of this subforum is to discuss game features.

And I don't see the salt, I see a discussion about the need for certain ammo types to exist.

So what you said is dumb and you should feel bad.

CPTANT wrote:

Gun Hog wrote:

calzilla1 wrote:Other then hem, this whole situation seems to be a nonissue

Agreed, it really is quite a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. But, in this community, firestorms are started over a feature to let someone pat another player on the head. Erro's Law dictates that the less important an issue is, the bigger deal it is in the community!

The entire point of this subforum is to discuss game features.

And I don't see the salt, I see a discussion about the need for certain ammo types to exist.

So what you said is dumb and you should feel bad.

Is it really? When I mention salt, I am talking about patting, not bullet types. My post was meant to convey the community's tendency to pay strong attention to insignificant things. I have clearly not communicated that properly, but I do not feel that my point is "dumb".

It is dumb because you're derailing a conversation about ballistics and its effect in coding and gameplay to bitch about a feature that did not improve or worked for the betterment of the game in any way and was just added as a meme for the catpeople users.

If you are so salty about your metafriend feature being removed for being functionally useless and tied to a shitty intent system then take your head out of your ass and make your own thread to bitch about it.

Good post D&B

D&B wrote:It is dumb because you're derailing a conversation about ballistics and its effect in coding and gameplay to bitch about a feature that did not improve or worked for the betterment of the game in any way and was just added as a meme for the catpeople users.

If you are so salty about your metafriend feature being removed for being functionally useless and tied to a shitty intent system then take your head out of your ass and make your own thread to bitch about it.

I am saying that this particular change to ballistics is not as important as people make it out to be. I do hope you are simply attempting to nullify my opinion using tangential accusations rather than simply failing to understand my actual point.

Gun Hog wrote:

D&B wrote:It is dumb because you're derailing a conversation about ballistics and its effect in coding and gameplay to bitch about a feature that did not improve or worked for the betterment of the game in any way and was just added as a meme for the catpeople users.

If you are so salty about your metafriend feature being removed for being functionally useless and tied to a shitty intent system then take your head out of your ass and make your own thread to bitch about it.

I am saying that this particular change to ballistics is not as important as people make it out to be. I do hope you are simply attempting to nullify my opinion using tangential accusations rather than simply failing to understand my actual point.

I very much disagree, I think removing completely useless ammo types or rebalancing them improves the game.

And if you think a particular subject that is being discussed in this forum (that is meant for discussing subjects such as this) then you always have the option of not participating in the discussion.

I think that the best course of action right now is to take a critical look at the ammo types in game, and view them not as how much damage they deal, but how many hits it takes for them to kill an unarmored person (and afterwards tweak armor values according to how many hits it should take to kill those). After this, we redesign the guns so they fit these kinds of ammunition types.

9x19mm: 5 hits -- 20 damage, should be the MINIMUM any bullet could conceivably do. It's a bullet, they're extremely deadly.
10x25mm: 4 hits -- 30 damage, basic and widespread from pistols to submachine guns. (C-20r which is likely some variant of a Steyr AUG will need to be changed to this type)
5.56x45mm: 3 hits -- 40 damage, (buffed from 35) should be highly reliable source of damage, requires good armor to survive more than 3 shots. (L6 SAW which is likely an m249, M-90gl which is likely a kind of FN P90)
7.62x51mm: 2 hits -- 60 damage, largely inaccessible super high end bullet type. Reserved for very powerful assault rifles and light machine guns (FN SCAR, G3, FN FAL etc).
9x33mm (.357): 2 hits -- 60 damage, Unique to revolvers because 7.62 is a freaking gigantic cartridge, and if we don't actually get rid of ammo printing then this will prevent people with access to monster guns from making super deadly calibers for their burst-fire 30-round (or bigger) magazines.

The problem here is the detective's revolver. .38 (9x29.5mm) is unique to his revolver and his revolver ALONE. Wouldn't it make more sense to simply have it be a regular .357 revolver (although with its own skin), the same 7 round capacity, and instead just use a stunning variant of .357? The autolathe printing ammo needs to go TBH. Force cargo to ORDER it instead of just printing it infinitely.

Sniper rifles, at least their projectile variant (not the beam gun), need to be removed (or at least made inaccessible to anyone but admins). It's not fun being hit from offscreen with a round so deadly that you instantly lose a limb, and are knocked down long enough to be hit again. It's also not fun to have this happen THROUGH WALLS (AI literally can't do anything about this if ops go this route). Also, they're buggy and broken as hell.

Shotguns can probably have a toooon of their ammunition types reworked, removed, or merged. Overloaded improvised is broken OP, remove breaching because it is directly stated to be inferior meteorshot (or vice versa), remove laser because pulse rounds are better and actual laser guns exist, remove dart because syringe guns exist and god forbid we have even more sources of being injected with the nightmare dice roll that is chems, beanbag rubber and stun need to be combined into just one because they all do the same shit, remove incendiary because dragonsbreath is far more viable and spectacular, remove ion because ion guns exist and holy shit we do not need more sources of THOSE.

I don't mind that shotguns have a lot of versatility, but there's a point where they're TOO versatile and are pretty much impossible to figure out what they'll do to you. Will that spread shot do stamina damage or brute damage? Is he going to fire an explosive round that instantly kills me? How the hell do you even survive that when he doesn't have to aim at all to kill you? Oh, he can shoot ion rounds that instantly screws over cyborgs with no way to see it coming? Oh, he has chem filled darts that could do literally anything imaginable to whoever it hits because there's hundreds of different redundant chems? etc. etc.

Variations on base ammunition types may need to be removed besides the .38, as it's impossible to tell whether someone has a gun, and how much damage their gun can do to you (AP and HP vary greatly, especially on the l6 saw). Like with shotguns, it's not fun to suddenly be set on fire by a pistol round, and objectively weaker 9mm toxin rounds that are totally worthless but throw in an annoying to heal damage type.


These numbers are all subject to change with your suggestions. I think it's better than the complete nightmare of bullets we have now.

>Hey why do we have these ammo types that are redundant, our ammunition needs to be revised to get rid of this clutter
>Here is my proposed revised ammunition list, it includes a redundant ammo type because having revolvers and rifles firing the same caliber is nonsensical and it allows for the ability to keep auto-lathes from printing ammo for rifles while still being able to print revolver ammo.
Really gets the ol' noggin joggin'

It would be really nice if damage wasn't determined solely by the fucking bullet. Right now the reason for not having a revolver take 7.62 is that 7.62 does a shitload of damage.