The same caliber, big damage difference

[Carmine]

21 VS 42 ?

This is not Dragon and Dungeon ！

 

[Solaris_Wave]

I am not sure what you mean about "Dragon and Dungeon". Do you mean Dungeons & Dragons?

That aside, looking at those damage ratings does reveal arbitrary 'game balancing' instead of realistic balancing (or an attempt towards as such). The damage values shouldn't be that far apart for two weapons firing the same cartridge!

[Carmine]

4 minutes ago, Solaris_Wave said:

I am not sure what you mean about "Dragon and Dungeon". Do you mean Dungeons & Dragons?

Yes, I made a wrong typing. In our country's translation, the word 'dragon' comes first.

Weapon parameter balance is even more outrageous than original JA2，but better than Wasteland2.😂

[Solaris_Wave]

If I was going to alter the stats on those guns, the M14 would be cheaper and need modifications to gain the best performance and characteristics (like the real M14).

Meanwhile, the PSG1 would have slightly better range, better accuracy and slightly higher damage.

[MateKiddleton]

Definitely done for game balancing. You can fire the M-14 roughly twice as fast so they halved the damage of the PSG-1. There needs to be a good reason to pick a one-shot-per-turn sniper rifle over an assault rifle, so they upped the damage.

[Hendrix]

Ouch... that difference just hurts me logic wise. JA2 had much closer stats for those guns, damage 33/38, AP 7/8, range was wild though 33/80.

I guess this is the decided path for weapon progression. Wich might as well have been +1, +2 etc. guns.

[Solaris_Wave]

1 hour ago, MateKiddleton said:

Definitely done for game balancing. You can fire the M-14 roughly twice as fast so they halved the damage of the PSG-1. There needs to be a good reason to pick a one-shot-per-turn sniper rifle over an assault rifle, so they upped the damage.

The M14 was never very good as a automatic battle rifle, due to its recoil. It has served far better as a semi-automatic rifle (especially in its modernised form or its derivatives such as the M1A and M21). It is certainly cheaper than the PSG1 but if in the case of both being semi-auto only (which the PSG1 certainly is), I can't see why the M14 would fire faster. The PSG1 can probably fire just as fast unless the trigger has a heavy pull.

[Solaris_Wave]

4 minutes ago, Hendrix said:

Ouch... that difference just hurts me logic wise. JA2 had much closer stats for those guns, damage 33/38, AP 7/8, range was wild though 33/80.

I guess this is the decided path for weapon progression. Wich might as well have been +1, +2 etc. guns.

I agree. The difference is too extreme. Both guns have the same calibre and long barrels (although the PSG1 has a longer barrel).

I can see a damage reduction of up to 5 points for the M14 but no more than that. If we were talking the difference between a full length assault rifle and a compact carbine, I would expect (and insist) on a damage difference. A notable calibre here would be the 5.56x45mm round. Out of an M16 barrel, you will get optimal damage. Fire it from a lighter and handier carbine and the velocity reduces enough to lessen the bullet's ability to fragment, which is where most of its damage capability comes from. There is modern ammunition that helps get around shorter barrels and other things like stronger gas pressures (which will require sooner maintenance) but that is still a general rule.

For two guns firing 7.62x51mm and at a similar length, such a large damage decrease doesn't make any sense.

[Uncle Nick]

Haha, are you triggered over the game balance? My own OCD just says to me M-14 is battle rifle, with a field upgrade to enhanced battle marksman rifle, maybe 2-4 MOA. Whereas, the HK PSG-1 is factory made in Germany, to precision sniper rifle standards, fine tuned to  0.5 MOA. I can sleep peacefully at night thinking of this made-up logic story.   

[Hendrix]

55 minutes ago, Solaris_Wave said:

I can see a damage reduction of up to 5 points for the M14 but no more than that.

Sure, something like that. I don't believe anyone here is calling out for a simulation game and some liberty has to be given for balancing purposes.

But halving/doubling the damage between these 2 guns just defenstrates the realistic feeling of the game to me.

I hoped for a balancing approach were a gun such as the PSG would be a supreme marksman (no not sniper) rifle and nothing else. Whereas the M14 would have the moddability to be set up as everything between a close support weapon to a decent/good marksman rifle.

I kinda blame the lack of a weight system for this. It doesn't matter what caliber a gun uses since the merc spawns ammo from the "bag of holding". Neither does a guns weight seams to affect a merc in any substantial way. I would have liked to see a minimum strength requirement for guns to be used effectively.

[Hendrix]

1 minute ago, Uncle Nick said:

Haha, are you triggered over the game balance?

Nope nowhere near triggered I'm afraid. Just dont like it.

[Solaris_Wave]

54 minutes ago, Hendrix said:

I hoped for a balancing approach were a gun such as the PSG would be a supreme marksman (no not sniper) rifle and nothing else. Whereas the M14 would have the moddability to be set up as everything between a close support weapon to a decent/good marksman rifle.

The M14 has proved to be quite a moddable platform in its own right. The US military services have taken a stop-gap battle rifle that was very much of its time and not all that great, and given it a new lease of life with its modernisation. For JA3, I can see how the M14 fits in well with the modding system in the game. You can take a cheap, powerful rifle and over the course of time, upgrade it over and over, into something more accurate, more adaptable and with a sturdier body.

Meanwhile, the PSG1 is premium money and premium performance out of the box. It doesn't need any modification because it was already fine tuned as far as it could go, before it left the building. It already comes with a dedicated scope (with built-in red dot) and a tripod. Adding or changing anything to it seems silly and done just for the sake of it. I don't know how rugged it is but I don't think it was ever designed to be a rifle that you drag through the elements. Its application was more for counter-terrorist scenarios rather than going out into the battlefield. They certainly aren't rifles you buy in bulk.

JA3 could make the PSG1 be a highly accurate rifle that will never miss due to any spread. As long as the shooter is good enough in terms of accuracy, the shot will hit the intended target. It could need to be maintained regularly but not allow for any mods. It would squeeze the most out of 7.62x51mm and unless you go for a more powerful calibre, the PSG1 would give you the best stats for any single fire rifle in that particular calibre.

 

54 minutes ago, Hendrix said:

I kinda blame the lack of a weight system for this. It doesn't matter what caliber a gun uses since the merc spawns ammo from the "bag of holding". Neither does a guns weight seams to affect a merc in any substantial way. I would have liked to see a minimum strength requirement for guns to be used effectively.

That is really one of the biggest flaws that JA3 has. Very few, if any of us, seem happy with the shared inventory system and everything associated with it. For the sake of simplification, it seems to cause more problems than it solves. Not only that, were there problems that needed solving anyway?

 

55 minutes ago, Uncle Nick said:

Haha, are you triggered over the game balance? My own OCD just says to me M-14 is battle rifle, with a field upgrade to enhanced battle marksman rifle, maybe 2-4 MOA. Whereas, the HK PSG-1 is factory made in Germany, to precision sniper rifle standards, fine tuned to  0.5 MOA. I can sleep peacefully at night thinking of this made-up logic story.

I'm not sure how to answer that one. Being 'triggered' and having OCD doesn't really fit in with this non-sensical game balance. Also, we aren't just talking about two guns having different accuracy. We are talking about one gun causing half the amount of damage per bullet. It is as if the M14 was firing an entirely different calibre.

If I had a rifle that caused that much of a drop in lethality performance, I'd throw the bloody thing off a cliff and get myself something better.

Edited June 28, 2023 by Solaris_Wave

[Jaywalker]

While I understand that this is an RPG title and some exemptions from realism are a practical necessity, it pains me to see "conservation of ninjutsu" being applied to guns an ammo.

Firing more bullets does not make them weaker, at an absolute worse it means the shooter is going to be less accurate.

If there is one thing 1.13 did right, was their addition of a simulated bullet trajectory and accuracy: in actual combat, a large volume of ammo is expended just to suppress the enemy and get into position to push them away. The U.S. Army can expend as much as 250,000 rounds of live ammunition fired in combat conditions to actually kill a single person. We don't need that kind of numbers, but part of the charm of even the baseline JA2 titles was that for every hit you scored, several shots would miss and the only advantage of precision weapons was that in optimal conditions (prone, enemy in range, spent the AP to aim) they would cut that ratio (as far to always hit in the late game).

[Solaris_Wave]

I agree. I have said countless times from the beginning of joining the forum that there needs to be more motivation for automatic fire, and to remove the precise accuracy and benefits of single shot fire. I don't mean bullets should just be wasted but single shot fire was the optimal way to play JA2. You could aim for the head, you saved ammo and there was no real penalty to shooting a moving target. Full auto fire was only really useful to wound multiple enemies at once (especially when their armour got too strong) or, if close enough, to kill an enemy in one go due to every bullet hitting.

There should be a limit to when you can choose to aim at a body part (close ranges only. Outside of that you just aim at a general target and each bullet randomly hits a body part), accuracy penalties to hit a moving target (especially with magnified scopes) and no damage reduction on full auto. Also, the greater the amount of bullets, the higher the suppression and effect on morale.

[Claudius33]

Although I do agree with what @Solaris_Wave, I think they want the player to close more the enemy when using an AR as compared to a sniper rifle. In Vanilla JA2 what was the point to use a slow, heavy, 5 rounds M24 when you could use a scoped FN-FAL, 20 rounds, 5AP (even 4AP with rod & spring) delivering heavy damage at a respectable range?

It's a balance of play issue. The important feedback after release might lead the devs to tweak some weapons specs. Besides the basic mod support available from release includes weapons stats tweaking. So I rely on you, weapons expert, to try it.

As for burst damage reduction, I honestly have to play a bit before I form an opinion.

[Xeth Nyrrow]

One important clarification about, "burst" fire because most people seem to get it wrong. There are 3 fire modes for automatic weapons: single, burst (3-5 rounds?), and full auto (half the magazine about). It's only the full auto mode that has the damage reduction. The devs insisted on adding it to the game to allow suppression fire to be a mechanic but instead of just adding an ability to do this, they added full auto which has other balance issues.

Back to the OP, differing weapon damages like the guns shown above has more to do with item progression than realism. It's usually not an issue in fantasy RPG type games because it's not obvious why Sword of X does more damage than Sword of Y. Here it sticks out like a sore thumb so it's obviously done for game balance reasons. JA2 balanced weapons by mostly making sure the high caliber weapons didn't come in to the game until later on with a roughly 9mm -> 5.56mm -> 7.62mm progression. JA3 instead gates item progression with the guns and not the ammo type. I'm guessing this is because they wanted inferior quality weapons that have high caliber rounds to be used earlier in the game.

[Grim]

To play the devil's advocate, I guess the M14 is an assault rifle, whereas the PSG1 is a sniper rifle (ingame). They balanced the weapons more around their "type" and less around their ammo.
Moreover, in the dev stream, they chose those weapons to explain the mods, and here both weapons are modded around a totally different playstyle.
The M14 is modded for overwatch, the PSG1 for sniping.
From what I've seen in the previews, overwatch can be quite deadly. It's possible the AR with more damage would be too powerful, I don't know.

I'm not liking it too much, like you, but there might be explanations for this balance, and I'm trying to find them, rather than just grumbling.

[Raeven]

For whatever it's worth, my opinion is, make the guns stats whatever they have to be for the best game balance and progression. 

I could not care less whether it bears any resemblance to real life or not. Gameplay is king, the guns are just set dressing... Just like swords and axes in dungeons and dragons. 

But hey, everyone likes different things, and that's ok. Realism is just not remotely important or interesting to me.

[Raeven]

1 hour ago, Xeth Nyrrow said:

One important clarification about, "burst" fire because most people seem to get it wrong. There are 3 fire modes for automatic weapons: single, burst (3-5 rounds?), and full auto (half the magazine about). It's only the full auto mode that has the damage reduction. The devs insisted on adding it to the game to allow suppression fire to be a mechanic but instead of just adding an ability to do this, they added full auto which has other balance issues. 

This is interesting, thanks for clarifying this. So by this metric, JA2 vanilla didn't actually have "auto fire" at all. This makes me more optimistic about the balance of burst fire in the game. 

6 hours ago, Solaris_Wave said:

I agree. I have said countless times from the beginning of joining the forum that there needs to be more motivation for automatic fire, and to remove the precise accuracy and benefits of single shot fire. I don't mean bullets should just be wasted but single shot fire was the optimal way to play JA2. You could aim for the head, you saved ammo and there was no real penalty to shooting a moving target. Full auto fire was only really useful to wound multiple enemies at once (especially when their armour got too strong) or, if close enough, to kill an enemy in one go due to every bullet hitting.

Y'know, I gotta say... I'm replaying JA2 right now and finding myself using burst fire more than single shots. 🤷‍♀️ I believe you, though. Maybe the difference is that I'm only attacking at night, which cuts the range of encounters down by quite a lot.

[D13]

1 hour ago, Raeven said:

For whatever it's worth, my opinion is, make the guns stats whatever they have to be for the best game balance and progression. 

I could not care less whether it bears any resemblance to real life or not. Gameplay is king, the guns are just set dressing...

 

I agree with you. We can even "zoom out" from relative gun damage to absolute gun damage: in JA2, and seemingly JA3, guns are never as lethal as they are in real life. Soldiers or mercs can be shot in the head multiple times and still return fire. We may explain it away with "armor" or "must have grazed the earlobe", but overall, JA guns are just not as dangerous as in reality.

I used to think that was to make the game more forgiving. So I changed 1.13 settings to increase gun damage to a more realistic level where it takes only 1-2 hits to kill. I had hoped that would make the game more challenging, but it actually made it easier.

AI compensates for its lack of intelligence with numbers (more soldiers -> more firepower). With default (low) damage, you often cannot deal enough damage fast enough to avoid being shot at by multiple enemies, and their bullets' minor impact adds up quickly. Your position can be overrun and you can be flanked even by wounded enemies. With high damage however, one merc can kill one or even two enemies during the initial turn, and a second merc can easily cover the first during the enemy's turn. Sure, mercs also die more easily, but it's usually the human who gets to decide on setup and tactics, as a result to initiate combat and to fire the first round at will, and as a result of that, to control momentum. I think that's all fine because JA2 wants to reward smart cover and a more defensive or even passive approach when compared to AI behavior (defensive AI would be boring), but it just doesn't work with realistic damage.

So, to summarize: when experimenting with 1.13 settings, my biggest lesson was that overall, JA2 Vanilla was really well balanced. Lack of total realism is a small price to pay, because after a while, the game universe becomes the reality of the player.

 

[Jaywalker]

8 hours ago, D13 said:

I used to think that was to make the game more forgiving. So I changed 1.13 settings to increase gun damage to a more realistic level where it takes only 1-2 hits to kill. I had hoped that would make the game more challenging, but it actually made it easier.

It's still very much possible to see triple digit damage numbers in JA2, HP ammo exists, as do LMG's that can fire at 5+ rounds at a time.
Most enemies having around 50-70 HP makes this kind of firepower redundant (and armor makes some of it unreliable to deploy), but there is absolutely no need in JA2 for there to be higher damage numbers to achieve OHKO's. Your mercs survive more because the enemy generally only shoots center mass with basic ammo, once the elites start rolling in those hits of 50 with AP to the chest do start hurting just as much as you were accustomed to hurting the enemy, but by then you hopefully learned to play the game.

The name of the game here isn't realism, it's "authenticity": if I can get the enemy in range to still land all of my burst accurately, I deserve to see them obliterated, that's what an automatic weapon does at close range. Firing a burst from an AR shouldn't be a "3 for 2 discount" on paying for my ammo with HP.

[5Cents]

I totaly agree with your opinion, that some gun stats just dont feel right. For me its NOT so much about realism, i dont think Jagged Alliance is the right game for any kind realistic gameplay. Its rather about plausible and rational and kind of "semi-realism", you could also call that "multiverse-reality" 😅
For me JA is (or was?) based on reality at last, something like a cartoonished Version of IT.

BUT f.e. If a weaker calibre weapon has doubled powerd damaged compared to a stronger calibre weapon thats odd, strange and feels just not plausible for me 🤷🏼‍♂️ (and perhaps for anyone who played games which weapons in it, which are based in real ones, or even people who have wpn experience). Weapon ranges of devs consideration could make it even worse.

Another point is new concept of armor-penetration. Which is another elefant in the room, imo.
Why? Said exaggerated: If you could shoot paper-ammunition with an Anti-Material rifle, would it be penetrante amor? Dont think so..😜 Otherwise, if there were pistol rounds made of uranium-wolfram, would they do? I guess probably yes.😆

So..how can a weapon penetrante Armor, per se? Actually not at all.

Apparently, Jagged 3 armory was constructed in a irrational way, we are not really able to understand? And it wouldnt change a displeased feeling with facts.

But, i dont wont bash the Game, before i played through, and also not blame the programmers, who did it.
And allegedly its like everywhere. There is someone, who makes the desicions, the rest have to follow. 😆

I also think its not too decisiving. Certainly can be fixed,..meaning modding.😉

Edited July 6, 2023 by 5Cents