| Trashloot |
How do you feel about the price of ammunition? It feels a bit like Paizo doesn't know what to do with it. Im interested in how you guys feel about it.
A Battery has 10 charges and costs 10 credits. If you have a charging station around, you might get free refills. You could also get 10 Projectiles for 1 credit which means it is cheaper per "bullet" but you have no chance of getting free refills.
You can buy some ammunition at the start of the game and depending on the enemies you are fighting you either run out of ammo at some point or you can loot enough ammo from enemies to keep going.
But ammunition doesn't weigh anything and you automatically get rich in SF2e. If we assume you get roughly 100 credits during Level 1 then you can buy 1000 Projectiles. This only gets crazier on higher levels. So rather quickly you are swimming in Bullets.
Grenades on the other hand have a scaling price. I know they are not technically ammunition but they are still a ranged weapon in some sense. If you don't want to throw fire crackers at the enemy you need to spend more and more money on more powerfull grenades. Grenades also have a weight so you can't carry infinite grenades with you.
To me this doesn't make sense. Either the devs want uns to never worry about ammunition or they want us to care about it. The reusable grenade shell could be a baseline feature of how grenades work.
In my perfect world we would all care about ammunition and the cost of ammunition would stay relevant throughout the game. I think bullets and batteries should have a baseline weight like arrows. A "stack" of Bullets (10/20) could count as 1 Light Bulk and a Battery should always weigh at least 1 Light Bulk. Just to prevent you from carrying infinite ammunition.
My next fix would be to have ammunition prices scale with a weapons level or tier. (Just like grenade prices). This way you could still have affordable ammunition for the early levels and the price could scale with the SF2e Credit Economy.
The only problem this would introduce is the fact that enemies now need to carry "leveled" ammunition as well because otherwise you would run dry during a mission. But i think thats a worthwile tradoff. I really like the feeling when you find ammunition for your favorite weapon in a video game. I would love to see this mentality in SF2e.
But i could also see a world were people hate the idea of "buying enough ammunition". There are plenty of games like Mass effect 1 where your guns have infinite Ammunition and you only reload to cool down the weapon. But i think that it would only be fair to make grenades cooldown based if we move in to this direction.
Edit: Can somebody please tell me what the point of the cantrip Recharge Weapon is after a few levels? I think this is a nice idea. But it becomes a pure fluff choice once you have enough money to buy large quantities of ammunition.