** Assault Rifle **

The Rifle is the baseline for all other weapon design. It is the jack-of-all-trades and can do every job reasonably well. Most importantly, by bringing an assault rifle, you don't load up on any drawbacks like limited range or cumbersome reload mechanics.
Rifles are simple and rifles are customizable. They gain an additional modslot that you can use to tweak them a bit further to your likings.

Strengths: Simplicity, Customizability
Weaknesses: none


** Shotgun **

Shotguns, Cannons and Snipers are all damage dealers. They only differ in how their damage increase is balanced. Shotguns are very limited in range, the short range aim table for shotguns has actually been made worse than they are in vanilla to make this more prominent. They come with a cumbersome reload mechanic that has one primary goal: Making it unattractive to take pot shots. Where assault rifles (and cannons and snipers) can be used to take speculative shots at 60% chance all day long without much opportunity cost attached, shotguns force the player to make sure to actually set up his shots, because each shot effectively costs 2 actions in the long run. This encourages flanking, risk taking and similar interesting behavior and rewards it with a large damage ceiling.

Strengths: Damage, Chance to hit
Weaknesses: Opportunity cost, range


** Cannon**

Where shotguns try to enforce taking carefully set up shots for maximum impact, the cannon does the exact opposite. The "Spray" ability enables you to take multiple shots per turn, but adds an aim penalty. Just firing with full aim requires a full turn. High environmental damage means even missed shots have a high chance to still do something relevant, taking out the targets cover. They have high ammo counts.
All these attributes mean the cannon is unreliable to deal its damage potential, but will usually at least do *something*

Strength: Firesupport, Demolition
Weaknesses: Unreliable


** Sniper **

The sniper rifle already had a clear defined role in vanilla and ABB largely just builds on that without changing much. Snipers make you less mobile, needing two actions per shot. They have a unique engagement range, not only because of the long range aim table, but also because they have Squadsights built in.

Strenghts: Long range
Weaknesses: Unflexible, pigeonholed into one role

** Scout Rifle **

Scout Rifles have Snap Shot built in, don't have Squadsight, but use the long range table. Their damage is a lot lower than regular sniper rifles. The intention for them is to offer a less extreme option for classes that can use the sniper rifle.
In many regards, the Scout Rifle works similar to an assault rifle with a long range aim table.

Strengths: Long Range, Mobility
Weaknesses: Damage


** SMG **

A light version of the assault rifle. It uses the short range table and has lower damage than even the regular assault rifle, but makes up for it with the ability to move after shooting. This makes it very good in close quarters to take easy flank shots without opening up yourself.
The SMG is meant to provide a short range option to assault rifle users.

Strengths: Short Range, Mobility
Weaknesses: Damage

<reserved>

After trying out four of the six weapons I've these thoughts:

The Assault Rifle might not need the extra mod slot to be worth it: its very high action efficiency and battlefield versatility means it's the default choice for most of my troops.

I really like the Shotgun: it's like a short range Bolt Caster that can bank ammo now. Given its similar expense in actions it may be worth trying it with the same damage as the Bolt Caster: given it's meant to not be fired every turn it's got to count when you do.

Strafing Shot is a really nice ability but only two ammo and reduced damage mean it pays a heavy price for it. It'd benefit from either a normal ammo clip or normal damage in my opinion.

The Cannon is an interesting one. I really liked how it was a weapon you had to think ahead with. The cannon appropriately enough reminded me a lot of the Heavy Machine Guns in the Company of Heroes games. You set those up to cover an area and they're very good at it but if you want to move them they have to pack up, move, and set up again.

This got me thinking and I thought of an alternative proposition to the upcoming Spray: rather than giving the cannon back the ability to fire on the move why not double down on its move or shoot behaviour? Let the cannon fire twice if it doesn't move but /only/ if it doesn't move.

Give the Cannon a Momentum-like ability that allows the Cannoner to use Fire Heavy Weapon, Overwatch or Suppression after firing the primary weapon for the first time in a turn.

To pair with this ability I'd make Cannon Suppression cost two actions if you don't have Advanced Suppression and reduce the damage of a single shot from the cannon to that of the Assault Rifle. This makes the superior weapon depend on how much you move: if you move every other round they have the same damage potential but if the cannon stays put for multiple rounds in a row it takes more shots.

Why exactly are the SMG and Scoutrifle drop-limited? I know you mumbled something about not cluttering our weapon select, but I'm not buying it. That menu is cluttered as soon as you have more than one unique weapon.

Looked up the exact quote: "For now, let me just say that i think it's more interesting that way and that it allows me to do more variations without cluttering up all your weapon select menus."

Sounds to me like there may be a lot more variant weapons later on. Given they're salvaged from dead ADVENT I wonder if DerBK plans on using Total ADVENT Weaponry's models for some of them: they're already used in A Better ADVENT.

@Lago:

What i like about the Spray ability how i am going to implement it now is how it offers me several ways of balancing the cannon now until i find that sweet spot. I could go after the damage, but it's already behind both sniper and shotgun. Instead i can tune that aim modifier to make the Spray option more or less powerful. Making it require two ammo per use could also severely limit how often it can be used if it ends up being a problem. On a final note, Spray does intentionally not register as a headshot against Lost.
What i don't like is how many abilities already stack up on the cannon. It's supposed to be one of the four baseline weapons. Removing Suppression again will make it be a little less cluttered, but i am wary of how much it has going on right now.

@Type1Ninja:

I want to reduce the number of choices you have to do to find a middleground between the non-choice of vanilla and the insane timesink that Long War 2 and Spectrum throw at you when equipping your guys. I don't want you to open the inventory for your first soldier, first having to decide between rifle and cannon, and then further decide between 3 rifles and 4 cannons. And then having to do the same for the other 5-7 soldiers.

The main game should still happen on the tactical layer and i think that LW2's (and to a lesser, but still notable extent, Spectrum's) biggest downfall is how much time it spends durdling in random menus clicking through boring junk i don't care about. The ideas and choices behind their systems are good, but the XCOM UI is simply not up for it, especially not without robojumper's Squad Select mod.

With what i am doing, things change a bit to the better while still keeping some interesting decisions alive. Like with customized weapons (your scoped and named rifle, the cannon with the autoloader, etc etc) in vanilla, the extra weapons in ABB are limited in number and most importantly, they are added during the campaign. So the complexity ramps up over time instead of just stonewalling from the beginning. If you find a Scoutrifle and have only one of them, you don't have to do that sniper vs scoutrifle decision for each soldier again and again. Instead, you will ask yourself the other way round: "Now which soldier can get the scoutrifle?" That's a much easier and cleaner choice to make.

This reduction of time ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around in menus is the main reason for why i am doing new weapons the way that i am. But there are some other smaller things, too. Like being able to use the scarcity of an item as a balancing factor. Getting to use weapons as a reward for missions or tough enemies. It's much more fun to get a new weapon by finding it in a supply raid crate or on the wreck of a Sectopod Prime than just clicking "Research" in Tygan's lab. Like with the randomized perks, i don't want you to be able to just put the same thing on every soldier, i want you to built individual ones. I simply think it's interesting to do it that way and it offers me the best ways to add more and more content to it over time without having to rebalance everything else whenever i add a new gun.

Come to think of it that's exactly my experience of it: one decision as to who gets the SMG rather than a choice per soldier. I kind of wish it was like that for items too: one default item such as the Smoke Grenade and then the others all have to be built.

On the matter of weapon clutter what do you think about removing Overwatch from the Cannon instead of Suppression? They're both reaction fire abilities and laying down a huge volume of fire to pin down a target is what that sort of big fully automatic weapon excels at. Taking quick reaction shots at anything that moves makes a little less sense with a big cumbersome machine gun with a spin up time. It'd keep Overwatch (Concealed) as that represents lying in ambush rather than quick reaction.

I'd also like to suggest a change to the Shotgun's Overwatch: replace the standard Overwatch ability with one that targets a small cone. With the shotgun's reduced range most Overwatch shots it could take are near certain misses which plays against the ABB Shotgun's make-your-shots-count design. A small cone would allow the shotgunner to overwatch one or two nearby targets it can actually hit.

Changes to the Overwatch ability have too many implications for other perks. If i were to remove the Overwatch ability from the cannon, that'd mean i would also need to remove all the Overwatch-related perks from half of the classes. If i then also change it for the shotgun that would leave me with just 2 out of 8 classes where a perk like Ever Vigilant or Guardian could pop up in the perk tree without being invalid on at least half the weapons the class can use. I don't like that at all, even if the idea behind the change would be sound.

I feel like Overwatch is one of those core concepts that the game is built upon and that shouldn't be altered too heavily.

Would it be something you'd consider if it didn't cause problems with perks? The conflict with straight up buffs like Guardian can be resolved by making them trigger on reaction fire rather than on exclusively overwatch shots. Given ABB has a suppression class it may be worth making that change to Guardian anyway. The one ability that doesn't work is Ever Vigilant but it already conflicts with shotguns (Deep Cover) and is it an ability you'd want to give heavy weapons access to?

I agree with Lago on removing the additional mod slot on the rifles. All of the weapons except for the rifle has a weakness. There is no incentive NOT to take the rifle as it good at everything and has an extra mod slot.

I disagree on removing removing the additional mod slot. Yes the Rifle doesn't have any glaring weakness, but it also doesn't have any particular strength except that additional modslot and I really like that it sets the rifle apart and even makes sense lore-wise (rifles are the most common firearms in the world, quite simple in comparison to snipers and cannons, and it's conceivable that they are the easiest to modify).

I think the modslot is nice because it's no big deal early on, but a nice incentive later on.

They don't have an explicit weakness, but their weakness is having the lowest damage of the weapon categories.

I don't think the mod slot needs to go, I just think the rifle's good enough that I'd still use it heavily without it.

What makes the rifle so good is that it can reliably move and shoot every turn and the other weapons can't. The vanilla shotgun was a short range assault rifle that dealt a little more damage and has high aim bonuses at short range. The ABB Shotgun is more like a hybrid of the Sawn-Off and the Bolt Caster: you don't want to fire it unless you're sure it'll count and it only counts when flanking at very close range. This means the shotgunner makes heavy use of the integrated Deep Cover ability, dashing to a safe-ish position where they can point-blank flank next turn.

I love that design and playstyle but the current iteration of the shotgun doesn't reward it. It only does slightly more damage than the highly versatile vanilla shotgun and in return loses the ability to shoot freely and the range profile to take medium range flank shots. It plays like a reloadable version of the Infantry's Sawn-Off but its damage is only slightly better than the more versatile assault rifle. For the current range, reload and playstyle the shotgun feels like it should do the same damage as the Sawn-Off.

But why not do both? Tone down the infinite shotgun to be slightly more like its old version: it gets its old damage, its old forgiving range profile (which would also restore that profile to the pistol and autopistol) and an ammo capacity of two (one for each barrel) instead of the single reload. If someone really wants a vanilla shotgun they can use their expanded magazines on it.

Then add a new variant weapon to the random drops: the Trench Gun. This goes all in on the two-actions per shot but they count design: single reload, grants Deep Cover, has Sawn-Off damage, the new shorter range profile, high environmental destruction and an ammo capacity of two or maybe even one.

Neither has the Full Reload option: the standard shotgun no longer needs it and the Trench Gun is fully committed to two actions per shot.