Damage falloff with distance for AoE ammo

[chaosvolt]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

In short, #6027 removes widespread use of AoE for shotgun ammo AGAIN, because the damage balance is just absolutely terrible for AoE ammo. The attack deals full damage to everything in the cone of effect, with zero regard for distance nor what was hit on the way to the target.

When combined with the multiple cases where a shot completely stops despite all sanity and logic (see #5981 and #6018), the result is a terribly inconsistent experience.

Describe the solution you'd like

There are a couple ways to do this:

1. The big one is simply to just reduce the damage of the AoE impact with distance. This is how Doom: The Roguelike does its AoE shotshells. This NEEDS to be sanity-checked to scale based on percentage of total range (also factoring in bonuses from gun if AoE ammo gains no benefit from weapon range bonuses #2793 ever gets fixed), not a fixed damage reduction per X tiles.
2. Scrap the AoE code entirely and just make it shoot multiple projectiles. Sadly we can't take the easy way out and port DDA's version because their implementation is hacky in its own unique way, one that completely negates the only reason we'd ever want it: it still fires a single projectile and can't hit more than one target at a time, instead the multi-projectile behavior is just faked to divide the damage across multiple hit roles against a single target.

Additional context

No response

[acssimpson]

I just did a fair amount of testing for solution # 2 and I don't have a lot of faith that its the right answer. It feels bad, it will be quite annoying to get it to animate properly, and it sort of just makes the shotgun a weird smg. There are other problems with simulating the "blast" that firing multiple projectiles doesn't fix. It could be the solution, but its not a simple or satisfying one from my testing. Gonna see about doing # 1 now, maybe with the addition of a fixed number of targets.

[acssimpson]

welp I guess this is no longer relevant since aoe shotguns are getting reverted I guess. I got distance falloff working - its a pretty simple change, and I'm gonna drop it here for future reference if we ever move back towards this/want to add falloff for birdshot if that sticks around:

This is the for loop at the end of execute_shaped_attack()

//if(source_weapon is a shotgun) <- Didn't finish this, but should be able to pull weapon cat off of source_weapon double falloff = 0.4 + 0.6 * (1-(trig_dist(sh.get_origin(), atk.end_point) / atk.proj.range)); atk.proj.impact.mult_damage(falloff);

[chaosvolt]

I still would not mind it being added, and I would be willing to push for more use of AoE ammo if the major issues with it get fixed.

[Coolthulhu]

The idea was to keep it simple and just make it an AoE cone, with no modifiers for distance or bodyblocking.
I recall Wasteland 2 shotguns working this way.
Having shotguns work this way addresses lack of safe AoE, gives shotguns a niche, is easily understandable, and is easy to show to the player.

Multi-projectile sounds like a burst with some extra quirks. Not very creative, certainly not effective as AoE without some weird math, possibly hard to convey to player (if weird math is used to make it work as AoE).

Damage falloff sounds more sensible, but it would be good to have a sane UI for it. For example, have different icons for different multipliers (in the cone preview) - this is already supported, we just don't have the sprites to show it.

But then, why exactly is it bad to have un-falloff-ed cones? Are they really that good/hard to balance or is it just for realism?

[chaosvolt]

But then, why exactly is it bad to have un-falloff-ed cones? Are they really that good/hard to balance or is it just for realism?

Because it hits everything in the cone for high damage. Damage falloff at least makes it so the number of monsters that get tagged for max damage is limited to only the first few right in front of the line of fire.

Avoiding "I destroyed an entire horde in one shot" type situations is why spells in Arcana tend to split the damage up into the main AoE and a "spike" AoE with a much smaller radius/width, for example.

[acssimpson]

It is very strong. Since it hits everything for like 3x as much as a pistol, it means basically any number of low armor enemies get turned to paste.

I think after all the deliberation I'm still in favor of having an aoe cone be the default for shotguns, because it does add characterization that makes them feel very different, and I'm always in favor of making designs more divergent/unique. I think Fox had more to say about the problems with 00 being aoe from a design perspective, but I wasn't privy to all of her reasoning so you'll have to ask her for details.

@chaosvolt should I keep looking into damage falloff and telegraphing of said falloff for birdshot/the other aoe ammos?

[Ignaramico]

couldnt be made like a explosion with the shrapnel stuff? or that works entirely different?, like instead of shooting, it makes a cone explosion that shoots shrapnel, but without damaging the player, and damage based on ammo

[acssimpson]

It isn't quite that simple, but I think scarf found a very good compromise where its still an aoe but portions of the cone are blocked by hit targets.