The base type is more likely to be the lasgun than the bolter, it would be the lasgun and not the bolter. Bolters are almost heavy weapons.
Find, then your tac marines are going to have to be strength 0+5heavy, and then 0+3heavy+3plasma. Same problem.
But if you limit any particular weapon to 2 unit types, its probably going to be ugly but not too bad.
It was an example. And besides, considering that a space marine costs at least 2x or 2.5x more than a guardsmen unit it will make sense.
3.5 + cover from a city, a hill or something (at least 50%) is 5.25
Strength differentials that are this large might still be too much, but thats easy to tweak with testing.
50% is probably too much bonus from hills.
Possibly you could give Guardsmen the Fortification promotion, where they gain double bonuses from fortification?
Seems reasonable that IG should be good at digging in.
They could also possibly get a boiling blood-type spell "bayonet charge". Maybe this could be a spell granted by a Commisar promotion or something? Its easy to see squad leaders as promotions.
(the test was on a fire elemental)
I forget; are fire elementals strength 0+X fire strength?
If so, cool, no problem.
I have not seen such effects in FF. The AI seemed to work fine with most promotions there.
But promotions in FF are not mutually exclusive. You can have the cover *and* shock promotions. But you shouldn't be able to get both the missile launcher and plasma gun promotions.
Its the fact that getting the first promotion prevents you from getting the second that is the problem.
Maybe it won't be a huge problem if you're building enough new units over time, since new units won't be locked by the old weapon promotion you picked.
Making them promotions that cost a levelup slot rather than being free will probably help this.
Another thought:
You can take advantage of weapons being promotions and armor being promotions by using multiple chassis' for serious veterancy/elite upgrades.
So, you can have an early game tec that lets you build tactical marines at strength 0+5heavy, that start with power armor promotion and can get 1 weapon promotion.
And then you could have another promotion late game that lets you build veteran tactical marines at 0+6heavy (maybe a national limit cap?).
And then you have another tech even later that lets you build terminator squads (again with a national limit hardcap?) that start with the terminator armor promotion, and are strength 0+7heavy.
Are melta guns, missile launchers and tank shells all going to be the same damage type? Is a melta gun going to just be a more powerful missile launcher? Should light infantry have some damage resistance to this weapon type?
* * *
On an entirely different note; you could make the mod more interesting (and different) by eliminating terrain improvements from the game entirely. As in; no race gets Worker units (or can pillage).
Improving the output of the planet doesn't really make sense with the scale that you're thinking about; an existing planet with a bunch of forces landing and fighting a war.
Make map generation scripts that place a bunch of map features and improvements over the map; a city here that generates commerce, a forgeworks there that generates hammers, roads linking the cities (but no new roads buildable), a spaceport here, a power plant there, farmland here etc.
No new roads will make a huge difference in how things play, making movement much more strategic. one of the big problems with civ is that everywhere ends up getting covered in roads, and so terrain movement costs become less interesting.
So, each race is going around building hq bases for their faction, but they are competing over the existing resources and planetary infrastructure. So, if you build a base (ie a city in civ terms) next to a "city" improvement, then you get a big advantage, because that tile has a high resource output.
You could even have really big metropolises that filled multiple tiles, these will be big focuses for players to get near.
Maybe remove food entirely from the game, and replace it with "manpower".
So your 3 resources are manpower (normal food), hammers and commerce. When your base accumulates enough manpower, it grows to the next population level level (you now have more manpower to police the surrounding terrain and force them to work for you).
Maybe make each city size only eat 1.5 manpower, rather than 2, so you can still grow a little without much nearby.
You get beakers and gold as normal for paying upkeep and researching techs, and influence replacing culture. Like in the Fury Road mod.
You could still have a few improvement types that had increasing outputs over time as you worked them more like cottages in normal civ (or depletable resources that had *lower* output over time as you worked them out; so an improvement that initially a high yield was converted into one with a lower yield after 10 turns, and then a lower yield again after another 40 turns, etc.).
I gotta say, I like this idea
Make you feel like you're actually landing on a planet and fighting a war there, rather than doing a standard civ-style slowly build up an empire and develop the world.
