Attack Attributes ideas

PowerDrain is only allowed on EnergyWeapon/MeleeWeapon. If it hits, it also drains significant amount of power (say 4x to 6x the power cost of a BeamWeapon attack of equivalent damage, or 5 damage) from the target mecha (if it has any) and regenerates half (or 1/4?) the amount drained to the attacker.

IgniteAttack replaces BurnAttack on EnergyWeapon/MeleeWeapon (BurnAttack remains but is only allowed for ranged weapons/ammo). Ignite has the same Burning enchantment effect, but also has a chance that a random selected BallisticWeapon/Missile (and maybe Chem as well?) on the target will lose between 1 to remaining - 1 ammo. No effect (beyond Burning) if the target has no appropriate weapons/missiles. For back-compatibility with older savefiles we can upgrade BurnAttack to IgniteAttack when we see it on an EnergyWeapon / MeleeWeapon.

More generally, I am thinking of advancement possibilities for melee mecha vs ranged mecha.

The major advantage that ranged weapons have is the possibility of BurstFire5/VariableFire5, While it's true that they are limited by ammo/power, in general ammo and power limits are high enough that the burst value doesn't matter. For example the Daum's Bolt Cannon has a whopping 250 shots, and with BurstFire5 it can fire 50 times in combat without switching ammo (and there seems to be no way to switch ammo in combat?). A ranged weapon with BurstFire5 damage 5 can theoretically do up to 25d6 damage, if my understanding of the code is right.

The best melee weapons can do would be 10d6 due to only having FastAttack which is equivalent to burst value 2. That is only 40% of the maximum theoretical damage a ranged attack can do, and melee weapons are short-ranged.

On the other hand, melee is much less affected by cover (though that is a bit of a wash, since cover is mostly symmetric unless using Take Cover / Spot Behind Cover) and sensor and too far/near issues. Another advantage is that a melee weapon can get Flail (ignores Parry and Block at the cost of losing Parry for that specific weapon only) and Smash (ignores evade at the cost of spreading out the damage among multiple modules). A Flail, Smash weapon like Wrecking Ball gets 100% chance to hit even against ridiculously mobile targets like Chameleons.

So perhaps how melee weapons can advance would be to add some fairly interesting, and tactically-significant, effects on melee weapons, which apply when they hit, and having weapons that do not deal a lot of damage but instead cause some fairly interesting effects. For example a Shock Rapier can instead be a 1-5-1 weapon (low damage and penetration, but high accuracy) with a further Accurate modifier and PowerDrain modifier (instead of the existing OverloadAttack modifier); it would be quite useful against agile mecha with tons of energy and beam weapons, but not much else. Similarly a Heat Axe would now potentially make BallisticWeapon-heavy mecha quickly useless by igniting their ammo, instead of just being an interesting alternative to a Mecha Sword (and obsoleted by an Ironbreaker Longsword or Wrecking Ball).

Thus, I propose the above attack attributes, which I think are interesting enough that a minmaxer might go for them (and might even field more than just a charge + melee weapon, they might have a charge weapon+PowerDrain weapon+IgniteAttack weapon).

Thoughts? Also, other ideas on interesting effects we can have on melee weapons?

jwvhewitt / gearhead-caramel

Attack Attributes ideas #160