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[WYD] Primitive Firearms

Allows crafting of 4 primitive firearms, the flintlock pistol, the musket, the blunderbuss ans flintlock rifle.

Sort of a spiritual successor to Primitive Firearms by Nemo . I was already working on an early stage firearms mod but when I started the calculations for reload time, range, damage etc - I realised that vanilla firearms defy logic. That in mind, I shopped around in the Steam Workshop to find other weapons mods and see how the authors tackled the nonsense, only to stumble on Nero's mod.

In any case, it still felt "wrong" to me to blindly follow vanilla's design, and went with a fudged mix of realistic and gamey-wamey. For reference, I used the revolver, bolt-action rifle and pump-shotgun as examples, and then tweaked the results accordingly to what I wasn't too unhappy about turning a blind eye to:

IRL, on average it takes 5 secs to reload a revolver, a bolt action refile and about 5-10 seconds for a pump-action shotgun. The range of a revolver is around 50m (assuming high calibre), a bolt action rifle is about 500m (with accuracy) while the shotgun is anywhere from 30-50m dependant on design and ammunition. In game, therefore these weapons should correspond accordingly, with revolver and shotgun around the same distance in tiles, and the bolt-action rifle much further; while the reload time should be the same for revolver and bolt-action rifle, and either the same, or twice as long for the shotgun. What we actually get is:

Revolver: 25.9 tiles, 1.6 sec reload (strong for close quarters, and short range)
Shotgun: 15.9 tiles, 1.25 sec reload (strong at close quarters, average elsewhere)
Bolt Action Rifle: 36.9 tiles, 2.3 sec reload (aver at close quarters, strong elsewhere)


Yup, zero sense made here. That same kind of nonsense applies to every vanilla weapon, so there's that. In the case of this mod, I have tried to be a little more realistic, but not so much as to make the weapons unattractive. Bear in mind however these are all early firearms relying on flint lock mechanics and manual (ramrod) reload:

Pistol: 10 tiles, 2.5 sec reload (strong for close quarters, and short range)
Musket: 26 tiles, 4.5 sec reload (average for close to medium range)
Blunderbuss: 14 tiles, 3 sec reload (very strong for close quarters)
Rifle: 38 tiles, 8 sec reload (very strong for medium to long range)

Naturally a new tech is required to unlock these weapons - Black Powder which as per Nero's original mod is situated between Smithing and Machining. Unlike Nero's mod, these weapons are a little cheaper to craft than their industrial counterparts, in compensation for their weaker statistics.

Since IRL a flintlock pistol, and blunderbuss would take about 10-15 secs to reload, a musket around 20-30 secs, and a flintlock rifle a whopping 60-120 secs, I have been somewhat lenient in the reload time coz of the gamey-wamey factor - especially considering the classical pila is an early game (free if using Primitive Research) ranged weapon with strong damage, and a reload time faster than the flintlock rifle - albeit with garbage accuracy and range.

Essentially, these new firearms are a step up from the neolithic ranged weapons, but are inferior, to those of the industrial age. Which is how it should be really. Great for tribal, or zero tech scenarios, but prolly not worth bothering with in the default spacer tech starts.

Referenced Mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2044362430&searchtext=primitive+fire

Now with This is my Boomstick! achievement! (requires Vanilla Achievements mod)



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