The bridge techs are a really neat idea to smooth progression, but they do introduce one small problem: upgrading weapons is now only a +1 damage boost, but it's still priced like a +2. That makes it potentially economical to skip Mag entirely.

That may be desirable, but if not, how about this?

Each weapon improvement tech does something different.

Improved Conventional Weapons gives all Conventional weapons a flat +X aim.
Improved Magnetic Weapons gives all Magnetic weapons +1 Pierce.
Improved Beam Weapons still gives all Beam weapons +1 damage.

These bonuses are more in line with the bonuses given to armour: they're good and smooth the progression, but they're not as big a jump as upgrading the guns to new models.

» Improved Conventional weapons get extra aim, which smooths aim progression in the early game when your soldiers are terrible shots. It's also thematic in that these tried and tested firearms are easier to handle than the unstable prototype slugthrowers and plasma cannons XCOM is developing.

However, the damage stays at Conventional, so they get scaled out as Force Level goes up and aren't much good for stacking aim later on. You'll still want Magnetics by Force Level 7.

» Improved Magnetics get 1 Pierce, which is +1 damage against armoured units only. It's definitely helpful, but only versus armoured units and not as much as upgrading to actual Plasma weapons.

» Improved Plasma gets the +1 damage, because there's nothing above it to compete with.

This is something I'll be watching closely and one of the reasons I wanted to get a beta version out for playtesting as I needed more feedback from actual players. I've already cut upgrade prices once, but maybe they are still too high for the benefit received, or as you are saying, the benefits are not big enough.

Couple pricing things first, you do still get your ~+2 per upgrade, just part of it comes upfront and part later. Maybe you don't want to buy everything initially, and just pay the same price later when it's boosted for some things - I'm okay with that. But for schematic builds, you will still have to buy it eventually (MG schematic is a requirement for BM), and with single-build items you can have hand-me-downs, so you will probably want to buy *some* as soon as you can afford them to get some of those benefits going early.

If some extra incentive is needed, I do like this approach, but I'm more in-favor of adding this extra bonus to the baseline weapons alongside the +1/+1 damage model rather than +2 damage upfront. Then you really just need 2 "perks" for base Mag and Beam, preferably two that can persist and stack up from Mag to Beam: In addition to the damage boost, Mag weapons also get ___This___, then Beam weapons get ___This___ AND ___That___ ...like the upgrade slots in the base game. Melee secondaries actually already have this going on with scaling status effects alongside their damage.

The trouble comes in finding a small bonus that fits into this model - Shred and Pierce are too strong (and already well-represented among different weapon types), +Aim doesn't make sense in this regard...

+1 Crit Dmg could work perfectly at BM, but what can MG get that BM keeps without being too powerful? +1 Crit Dmg against Mechanicals (harder to achieve with no flanking bonus) that upgrades to +1 Crit Dmg against everything with Beam? Though I don't want to have to use another ability on the items to convey this.... Hmm - I'll think about it some more, but so far, that's the best idea I have.

Started a new campaign with the mod and after After researching Alien Alloy integration tech TLE armors and Resistance warrior kevlar armor do not provide extra utility item slot, only vanilla armors do.

Thanks, good catch - I didn't consider them. I'll note for a future fix.

Looked at changelog and I think that resistance warrior kevlar armor template name is - ArmorTemplate="KevlarArmor_DLC_Day0".

Great, thanks - I'll add it in next update.

I'm really enjoying the changes to weapon upgrades you've made so far. Since you've already integrated +1 damage/health breakthroughs into the tech tree in the form of alloy and elerium integration, do you think it would be a good idea to integrate the removable weapon upgrades breakthrough as well? It's always so frustrating trying to roll such a crucial breakthrough and never getting it, plus there's more use to swapping out upgrades now that some of them have downsides.

So I did some more analysis on the weapon damage progression, and I think it's actually a little more skewed in favour of the bridge techs than I first thought.

The issue with the +1 damage/+1 damage split is the tier upgrades aren't actually +2 damage: they're (generally) +1 min, +2 max, +1 crit.

If you treat the upgraded variant of each weapon as a Tier .5, then you get this progression for the Assault Rifle:

CV: 3 - 5 damage, +1 crit
CV+: 4 - 6 damage, +1 crit
MG: 4 - 7 damage, +2 crit
MG+: 5 - 8 damage, +2 crit
BM: 5 - 9 damage, +3 crit
BM+: 6 - 10 damage, +3 crit

Each bridge tech gives +1 min damage, +1 max damage, whereas each tier upgrade give +1 max damage, +1 crit. The expensive tier upgrades are actually a smaller upgrade than the bridge techs.

As you said, this isn't as much of an issue for the schematics as you can't skip the magnetic weapon schematics, but it's still a little dissonant that the smaller upgrade is that much more expensive.

So what if the bridge techs give +50 PlusOne instead of +1 damage? That'd give you this progression:

CV: 3 - 5 damage, +1 crit
CV+: 3 - 6 damage, +1 crit
MG: 4 - 7 damage, +2 crit
MG+: 4 - 8 damage, +2 crit
BM: 5 - 9 damage, +3 crit
BM+: 6 - 10 damage, +3 crit

That makes the tier upgrades a +1 damage, +1 crit upgrade over the bridge tech below it.

Beam Mastery stays as an outright +1.

small problem ive run into; I'm running Musashi's Axe Mod as its listed as a mod with updated values (so i looked it as integrated compatibility)... however, after buying the upgrade to bump the sword to the Arc Blade, both the Axe and the Hatchet have completely disappeared from my loadout menus. I've checked both in squad select and through the armory just to be thorough.

something else i've come across, Inside Knowledge doesnt seem to be applying bonuses to mods as far as the description goes... ill attempt to find more detailed information in combat to see if theres any application there.

Inside Knowledge should be disabled, but if you already had it in an existing game, it won't do anything for these upgrades.

Okay, I figured out the issue with the Axes - one of their attributes that I use to filter between CV/MG/BM is not set correctly in the Axe mod itself, so I'll have to handle them by template name. Should be corrected tonight. I'm still testing the fix to the armor to make sure it works as expected.

Thanks Paladinsas - issue has been resolved.

@Lago, I would be on-board with just having the bridge techs increase min damage only, but unfortunately, I don't think that's easy to do across the board. The flat +1 was very easy to implement, but anything more granular would require a much more complex implementation.

I think there is only one situation where min = max damage that would require a general +1 boost instead, but I'm not sure how modifiers would start throwing things all out-of-whack. Doing it with the PlusOne / 50% chance would probably be even more difficult to manage. The idea is sound, just problematic to implement.

I'm definitely interested in beefing up the boost(s) from a new tier a bit, just have to find something that I can manage to fit in and make work.

@shiremct, thank you for the rapid fix to the Axe Mod :D in regards to inside information, i had started a fresh campaign after doing a config wipe. (i tend to wipe my configs before each new campaign out of habit) So the resistance order populated naturally.

I had a poke through the code myself and yeah, it'd be difficult to nerf the breakthrough itself cleanly.

So, trying to think of a solution that's interesting, clean, and not too difficult to implement:

What if it's tied to Force Level?

» Tier 2 ADVENT units get the Reinforced Plating passive, which reduces the damage they take from Conventional tier weapons by 1.
» Tier 3 ADVENT units get the Anodized Plating passive, which reduces the damage they take from Conventional tier weapons by 2 and Magnetic tier weapons by 1.

The benefit of Magnetics over upgraded Conventionals against Tier 1 ADVENT remains pretty marginal, making it a questionably cost-effective choice in the early game.

But once ADVENT starts upgrading to Tier 2, that breakthrough starts getting cancelled out.