Talk:Sonic Pistol vs. Gauss Rifle

Great article! On looking at your data, which is solid, I would draw the slightly different conclusion, which is to arm with a Gauss Rifle early in the game, when Aquatoids and Gill Men are prevalent, and arm with Sonic Pistols later in the game. Later in the game you also tend to have Transmission Resolvers, and thus you know the race and mission type. In which case you could in theory still elect to use Gauss Rifles for an Aquatoid mission or maybe Gill Man mission, if it's worth the hassle of changing your transport loadout and (if remembered by XComutil or Seb76 Loader) your troop loadouts.

One other aspect to consider is the economics of obtaining and operating the weapons. On a pure ammo basis, the cost of Sonic Pistol ammo is $4440 per clip if you are scavenging it (in foregone revenue). However, once you Research Sonic Pistol, the aliens apparently quickly stop using it. I'm not 100% convinced of this but they do eventually stop using it, regardless. At that point, or if you need more ammo than can be supplied by scavenging, the all-in manufacturing cost is about $9160 per clip, including $5000 for the Zrbite. And $5000 probably significantly undervalues the Zrbite, which you need to keep your ships flying and to build other essential things. Manufacturing a Gauss Rifle clip costs about $3620, including the Technician Time.

Per clip, the SP ammo is about 22% more expensive if you can scavenge it, 2.5x as expensive if you need to manufacture it. However the SP clip is 2.66x longer lasting than the GR clip, so this nets out to 45% of the cost per turn of firing if you are scavenging ammo, about the same (95%) if you are manufacturing it.

Of course there are also the Research costs to factor in, over the lifetime of the weapon. The total average research time is 660 research-days on Gauss weapons for the GR (450 specifically on the GR), versus 1600 for the SP. As a rule of thumb you can cost research-days at $1K each (best case, $50K per Lab-day, assuming a full Lab). So that's $1,600,000 for the Sonic Pistol technology vs $450,000-$610,000 for the Gauss Rifle technology. Of course you might consider the Sonic Pistol research to be a free windfall benefit of the indispensable need to research Sonic Oscillators. A similar argument (not as strong IMHO) could be made about Gauss weapons being a free windfall benefit of researching Gauss Cannon, in order to turn your bases into self-supporting Gauss Cannon Factories.

Spike 13:51, 10 August 2009 (EDT)

As you agreed, the Sonic Oscillator and Displacer/Sonic are indispensable, so researching the Sonic Pistol isn't any extra cost. Researching Gauss, however, can be, since I didn't really find the cash injection to be THAT necessary. I left out costs on purpose because I didn't consider money important, as well as because of these sort of free/not free dilemmas (decent thing to mention though, kudos).

It's worth mentioning that even against Gill-men the Sonic Pistol will likely end up in front in the non-point-blank stats due to armour.

There's also the reaction-fire issue, which I'm adding right now.

Magic9mushroom 21:59, 11 August 2009 (EDT)

The sonic pistol is quite the handful, you have to give it that much. To round off the Sonic Pistol vs. Gauss family, we'll have to add a Gauss Pistol comparison before long. Perhaps even expand to the other two sonic weapons vs. the Gauss family as well.

By the way, can I propose the discussion be moved to the talk page? -NKF 03:13, 12 August 2009 (EDT)

You can.

To be honest, I'm not sure comparisons between wildly different weapons are entirely appropriate. The Sonic Pistol, Gauss Rifle, Gauss Pistol, and to some extent the Sonic-Blasta Rifle, can all be viewed as assault weapons, so comparisons are appropriate between GP/GR, GR/SP, GP/SP, SP/SBR (my view, obviously, is that the Sonic Pistol's the best, but the comparison is at least worth doing). But the Sonic Cannon is really obviously not an assault weapon, it's a sniper rifle. Comparing it to the Sonic Pistol, Gauss Rifle, and Gauss Pistol is like comparing wine and lasagne. A comparison between it and the Sonic-Blasta Rifle as a sniper rifle may be a good idea however (I think we know who's going to win that, but it's worth putting it up). The Heavy Gauss is a pile of fail, so comparing it to ANYTHING is really unnecessary (it's noted on the page itself that it isn't very useful). Magic9mushroom 05:20, 12 August 2009 (EDT)

It's possible that the Heavy Gauss's failure as a weapon is driven mainly by opinion (so says the one who compared it to the sonic pistol). But I guess it's not an opinion too many would disagree with after you factor in things like the alien damage resistances.

Regarding the Sonic Cannon, I don't disagree with it being an entirely different class of weapon as the other two. But I think it's for that very reason that a comparison with its near polar opposite would be worthy of consideration. Because they are so different, there certainly isn't as clear cut an outcome as the Sonic Pistol vs. the Heavy Gauss. A good way to explain how each weapon isn't perfect. A very similar comparison would be the Virboblade vs. Heavy Thermic Lance.

Somewhat glad to see the pistols are starting to get a bit more attention than just being glorified paper weights. -NKF 03:40, 13 August 2009 (EDT)