I just made a summary of the new changes for NMA and I might as well post it here too:
1: Crit damage multipliers are out; instead, what damage you do is now governed by a bell curve which shifts based on your crit chance. What this means is that, suppose a weapon does 0-60 damage, you're very likely to do around 30 damage and very unlikely to do close to 0 or 60 damage (
see here for a graph of the example). If you have a high crit chance, then this curve moves to the right, so you'd get, e.g. around 35 damage the most on avarage. I like this system because it makes crit builds more interesting: you become on the lookout for weapons with wide damage ranges (like knives and rifles with light ammo, but more on that in a bit). It also makes balancing easier because you always know the weapon's max damage and don't get the insanely divergent outcomes you'd have with a *6 crit.
2: To make this new crit system interesting, I had to have a non-arbitrary way of determining width of damage range. For melee weapons, this is easy to imagine: a sledge is all about brute impact, so an attack with a certain amount of force will generally do the same amount of damage. Knives do their damage based on what they puncture precisely, so vary more widely. With firearms more or less the same principle applies: heavy, big rounds create big wounds based on their force (and, especially when JPH, their expansion), while light, small rounds either go through the target relatively harmlessly or hit bone and fragment, pierce a vital organ, or "yaw" into place inside the body. Based on this I've made a formula for the damage range I've become pretty happy with: the lower range is determined by the
Taylor KO Factor which determines a round's "stopping power" and thus privileges heavy, big rounds. The upper range then gets stretched up based on a round's velocity (so the Gauss round, which is by far the fastest and smallest round - even as I made it twice as big into a 4mm round - has the widest range, ideal for crit builds). Here's the resulting changes to the calibers; because different weapons fire rounds at different speeds, this will also effect the resulting damage, but not by much):
.44 magnum: (14.95)+(1350/200) =
15-22
9mm: (7.3)+(1250/200) =
7-14
.45 cal: (11.15)+(830/200) =
11-15
4.7mm caseless=(4.08)+(3030/200)=
4-19
12 ga., 1500fps, 300 grains, 0.570 cal=(22.1)+(1500/200) =
22-28
12 ga. (alternative), 800fps, 400 grains, 0.65 cal=(19.9)+(800/200) =
20-24
4mm EC=(14.14)+(8000/200) =
14-54
10mm Auto=(11.6)+(1400/200) =
12-19
5.56: (5.78)+(3300/200) =
6-22 (all original 5mm weapons use this + the LSW)
7.62: (14.8)+(2580/200) =
15-28 (all original 7.62mm weapons use this + the Hunting Rifle and the Sniper Rifle)
14mm=(19)+(1000/200) =
19-24 (I've based this round on
this beaty only upped from 12.7mm to 14mm and a bit heavier and slower)
.338 Lapua Magnum: (21.8)+(2950/200) =
22-37 (this round is used by the Bozar, which is now a big gun sniper rifle like it was supposed to be, and the .223 Pistol, which is now the .338 Pistol)
3: I've decided to decouple DT from damage. I already discussed this with Glovz a while ago, and decided to do it because (a) the DT+DR combo is just too brutal and (b) I want a weapon's damage range to represent wounding potential, not simply kinetic force or whatever (if a bullet can do 4 damage because it's tiny and passes through the opponent without expending much of its energy, then it makes no sense for 4 DT to reduce it to 0: it should still wound the opponent more or less the same way). So now DT is really just a threshold: if an armor's DT is lower than a value based on a weapon's upper damage range, then it gets ignored; else, it reduces damage (and any possible effects) to 0. So if your weapon's damage is higher than the threshold, it just gets reduced based on the DR (so, e.g. where a 20 damage round against 4 DT and 40% DR armor would originally do (20-4-4=)12 damage, now it does (20-5=)15 damage).
4: Various other changes to accomodate this new system are that (1) like I said, the upper damage range determines penetration along with ammo type (small, fast and heavy is best for penetration), (2) the lower range, being stopping power, determines chance of knockdowns and knockouts along with crit chance, (3) crit damage increasing bodyparts (head, eyes and groin) now simply stretch up the upper range as they increase potential damage - so, again, good for crit builds.
