I love this mod, but it's just ended up being … completely the driving factor of my last few playthroughs. I really don't think I expected a mod one or two items to have more effect on the playstyle and difficulty than Rimfeller, Rimatomics, or even Run 'n Gun.

Here's some clear balance issues, at least from my perspective — and I offer this feedback with hopes that it'll help you *improve* things, not as mean criticism!


1. This mod, currently, *completely* removes all of the hunting mechanics from the game. A single hunter with a taser can hunt endlessly, with no danger, even up to and including Thrumbos and the Galatross from Alpha Animals. It's absolutely ridiculously O.P. for hunting!

Solutions: I doubt any of these would be easy to implement, unfortunately (is this mod on GitHub, btw? It should be!); but: best would be causing the "Tased" debuff to trigger attack-hostility against the tazer-user, just like a normal weapon; second-best would be preventing the hunting work-type while a taser is equipped, like melee weapons.

2. Higher-tech enemies seem to spawn with taser waaaaaaaaay too often. This is bad enough with the built-in Outlander factions (even very early-game, I usually get *at least* one free taser without any research; and I had no less than *three* taser-sniper-rifles — which should be 6,000 research points! — before I even had a single chain-shotgun or assault rifle. Yikes.); but becomes completely ridiculous when a mod adds higher-tech-level factions. (For me, i.e. with the Android Tiers mod, which is *supposed* to be spawning high-tech raids full of Charge Rifles and similar, I'm instead getting 15-man raids of which 13 are holding some form of taser weapon.)

Solutions: I don't know if you have the ability to tweak this, but if you do, the spawn chances of Tasers need to be *decimated*. Literally, drop them to 1/10th their current level, or less — I feel like I should see a low-level Taser every second or third raid, at most; and I really don't ever want the 6,000-research-point stuff like the rifles showing up as drops … you only really need one, you know? And that negates the point of pursuing an entire research tree, for that entire playthrough, when it drops. )=

3. There needs to be some mechanic to balance the *innate* power of tasing somebody. Even if all of the above were fixed, a taser assault-rifle is still pretty game-ending — it'd still be more “powerful,” once you got it, than a Charge Lance, or More Vanilla Weapons' Charge Minigun. Personally, I think they should probably have their range majorly slashed: if you want lots of tiers of items, then make the early tasers require absurdly many hits to take someone down (so you need to equip like six colonists with them, get in to close range, and hit somebody over and over); then scale up the *effectiveness*, but keep the range short. Even the Taser Assault Rifle should have its range slashed to half or so of what it currently is, IMO.

4. This is maybe just me, but the sniper-rifle is silly. Again, even with all of the above taken care of; no matter how much you nerf it … a reasonably-long-range full-health takedown is just gonna be kinda game-breaking.

Now, all of the above can be addressed by RP / headcanon / self-control — "Oh, too many rifles spawned, and I'm game-years away from that research tier, I'm just gonna throw them in a fire”, or "I won't use tasers for hunting"; but at least personally, I find that a lot less fun. Those restrictions should be built-in, so the player has some mechanics to, well, game! The player should be trying to find *new* ways to make things more useful, not trying to find ways to make them *less* useful, y'know? :P


Finally, one final nerf that would synergize well with a lot of the above: the built-in game has a hard-coded percentage chance (I think 50%?) to kill any pawn you down. This is to control and balance players' access to new pawns, and really adds to the depth of the game (i.e. that complicated, difficult, but above-all *interesting and fun* Pyromaniac pawn looks a lot more attractive when you don't know where your next surviving pawn is coming from …). Tasing, obviously, tweaks that knob hardcore.

My thought is this: if you take into account my above suggestions, and hard-nerf their range ... but want to keep using all that excellent art you made, and want to add some depth to the mod beyond “well here's one gun. it's a taser. have fun.” … then you could add a (slightly-better-than-vanilla) chance for lower-tech, primitive industrial-tech tasers to apply an "over-tased" effect that ranges from damaging the pawn's heart, permenantly, all the way up through permanent brain-damage or coma-inducing. Then, higher-tech level taser-pistols and the (hopefully now standalone! :P) Taser Rifle could have gradually-decreased chances of permanent side-effects.

This returns some of the pawn-restricting mechanics to the game ("You want that Industrious, Light Sleeper passionate crafter? Well, yeah, throw your taser-pawns at it, but you're still gonna need some luck.”); *and* it adds a motivation to research those (hopefully now-hard-to-come-across :P) higher-level tasers: "♥♥♥♥, I just tased that Industrious Light Sleeper to death. Crap, I should probably get around to researching the more-reliable tasers …”


I hope this didn't come across too demanding or holier-than-thou — I really, really like A. the art, and B. the mechanical concept (making it a medical debuf is perfect! and I love that it wears off before you get into melee range, if you're not careful! yesss!); it'd just be nice if these were a little more situational, instead of the perfect choice for all combat ever … and a lot, lot harder to come across.