Weapon Pierce Tweaks
A very simple mod that gives the Chimera Squad shotgun -1 pierce and the Chimera Squad assault rifle +1 pierce.
From watching pre-release streams and with my own limited experience, it’s clear that the shotgun is the best weapon out of the starting four. It has the highest damage and its only disadvantage is its poor accuracy at range. Given that X:CS is a very close range game, it’s natural for the shotgun to shine. With the -1 pierce from this mod, the shotgun will deal -1 damage to any armoured enemy, be that with natural armour or cover armour. This means that the shotgun will rely more on flanks to bypass cover armour and it will have to focus more on unarmoured or shredded enemies to be effective.
Digging around the code, the SMG and the Assault Rifle are very similar. The only differences is that the SMG is medium ranged and gets the Spray and Pray ability, and the AR is long ranged. Again, because X:CS features mostly close range combat, the AR is essentially a direct downgrade from the SMG. To buff it up a bit and counterbalance the shotgun changes, it gets +1 pierce. This essentially means that against armoured enemies it gets a +1 damage buff.
Anyone has permission to reuse or repurpose anything in this mod. I left a few helpful comments if you want to learn what’s going on inside. All the magic happens in Config/XComGameData_WeaponData.ini
