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I've been trying out the new bionic weapons and i'm not sure i agree with how they're balanced.
Firstly: they add attacks to the "melee pool", which is weighted in favor of stronger attacks.
An unarmed pawn with an elbow blade / knee spike / hand talon will have a 80% chance to use them, or 20% chance to use regular melee attacks.
Adding more than 1 augment is useless, as they deal the same dps and will thus not increase the chance of a pawn using them.
An unarmed pawn with 1 elbow blade is equally powerful as an unarmed pawn with 2 elbow blades, 2 hand talons and 2 knee spikes.
On top of that, the power claw is strictly better than any of the above options, which is fine since it's a bit cheaper to make, but a let-down nonetheless as the extra cost is fairly low and can actually replace a lost hand unlike the rest.
Next are venom-type weapons: venom fangs and venom talon.
The venom-type weapons deal half dps and they'll usually incur in the target losing 5-10% consciousness, which does not justify their use, ever.
In my tests i had two identical colonists fight 10 times, then 10 more times but with armor.
The power claw always won.
The venom fang lost 18/20 times, winning only twice in the armored test.
In conclusion:
- These bionic weapons are bad for melee pawns as they interact with the melee attack pool, a normal quality steel longsword heavily out-performs all these bionic weapons in every way
- They can however be fine for all gun-wielding pawns, except miniguns
- Power claw is strictly better over elbow blade, knee spike and hand talon
- Venom weapons suck, avoid using them. No redeeming quality beyond occasionally reducing consciousness by 5-10%
If i were in charge of balance i would:
- buff the knee spike, hand talon and elbow blade to the same damage output as the power claw.
- Buff the damage of venom weapons to the current damage output of the hand talon.
- Diversify them: knee spike could have more armor penetration. The hand talon could be faster with lower damage. While the elbow blade would have much higher damage and significantly slower attack speed (enough to out-perform the minigun's melee attack). Power claw remains the same as a balanced middle ground.
- Make them a bit more expensive to make as a result (50 steel instead of 15, same as power claw)
With those changes melee pawns could be compelled to pick some of these augments: elbow blades deliver devastating attacks but will slow down your next strike, hand talons let you land a quick attack in between strikes, knee spikes pierce armor making it better against tough targets.
Ranged pawns could specifically go for the elbow blade to kill melee attackers in a single strike (ideal if the pawn is in a group) or with the hand talon for less downtime between strikes (less overkill, can resume firing in less time).
edit
Adding melee augments can be useful: the best attacks available share a common 80% chance to occur, then the other 20% is split among all other attacks and the worst attack never occurs.
Adding melee augments improves odds in case you roll the 20%.
Though if you have a melee weapon, a power claw and a knee spike, the melee weapon will (most likely) have 80% chance, then the claw and spike have the same 2-4% chance despite one dealing more damage than the other.
It's not much but it's something at least.
This also means that a pawn with a longsword and a venom talon only has 4% chance of using the talon...
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