Talk:Megapol Laser Sniper Gun

30 Charges?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Laser Sniper Gun clip only capable of storing 10 charges? It's the Plasma Gun that's got 30+ charges. -NKF 09:07, 13 June 2011 (EDT)

30 shots for the sniper. I often use it as an equivalent alternative to the machine gun in the early game, as ammo is still quite scarce then (one-shot kills are no where near as common as in the earlier games). -  Bomb Bloke (Talk/Contribs) 18:29, 13 June 2011 (EDT)

Underappreciated?

I had retired these fairly quickly, as dual wielded plasma pistols offered acceptable accuracy and excellent power. I had some very uncomfortable fights though - between the introduction of Devastator Cannons and my ability to use them myself - where the poor underpowered sniper was the only way to deliver any kind of damage at medium/long ranges before incoming fire killed someone. There's a gap where devastator cannons are (eventually) deadly, and lawpistols, autocannons, plasma pistols, and disruptors rarely score hits at all. The targets weren't armoured or shielded so a sniper could do the job, they were just too hard to hit and too dangerous to approach.

--Phil 11:51, 30 July 2012 (EDT)

(10 years later...) Ran the numbers; there is a niche for the LSG in those nasty long-range firefights (I know the ones you're talking about - stuff like the Corporate HQ with a helipad, or the top floor of a Procreation Park, or open areas of slums, or the main room of a Destroyer UFO), but to surpass the Plasma Gun (and Auto Cannon) you need really-accurate soldiers (50+ accuracy) and the prone position.

The reason it only works for accurate soldiers is that the inaccuracy from your soldier (modified by shot speed, dual-wielding penalty and firing position) and the inaccuracy from your weapon are added in quadrature (i.e. square both, add, and take the square root), so if the soldier's inaccuracy is high (or he's not using aimed shot/prone) then his final inaccuracy isn't going to be too different between the LSG and Plasma Gun (and the penalty-free dual-wielding and higher base DPS of the Plasma Gun will tell), whereas if the soldier's inaccuracy is low and further lowered by the prone and aimed shot bonuses then the Plasma Gun's inaccuracy will make a much bigger contribution to hit rate.

It is a pretty small niche, though, as many maps don't have any long-range firefights (almost every indoor map, and most UFOs) and even on the ones where there are likely to be firefights in open areas, there are often ways of advancing under cover or luring the aliens into a doorway/corner trap. And it's only really relevant in the midgame - early on you don't have highly-accurate soldiers so the LSG's not useful, and the niche mostly disappears when you get Devastator Cannons (I say "mostly" because the Devastator Cannon's weapon inaccuracy is still five times that of the LSG) and completely disappears when aliens start using cloaks (it is impossible to get good accuracy against cloaked aliens, because there's a separate inaccuracy term for "shooting at a cloaked unit", which makes the LSG's low weapon inaccuracy useless - and that's aside from the whole "you can't usually see cloaked aliens at long range" problem). Magic9mushroom (talk) 14:26, 30 October 2022 (CET)