Removes .357 Speed Loaders from Autolathe, replaces with .357 Ammo Boxes

[Coolrune206]

What Does This PR Do

This PR removes the recipe for the .357 revolver speed loader from the hacked autolathe and instead replaces it with an ammo-box of .357 ammo for the same price. The ammo-box contains the same amount of .357 ammo (seven shots) but cannot be directly loaded into the gun or speed loader. This means you have to either individually load bullets from the ammo box to the gun or speed loader or dump all the bullets on the ground and scoop them up into the speed loader. Lastly, this ammo box is bigger than most (the speed loader remains tiny) and cannot fit into boxes, so you can't just carry a million ammo boxes and invalidate the point of this PR.

Why It's Good For The Game

The Syndicate .357 revolver is in a really powerful position right now. It can deliver 60 damage per bullet, 7 bullets per clip, very rapidly, which is capable of nearly instantly dropping anyone hit by it into hardcrit regardless of armor. Now, it seems this was originally balanced around the rather steep price of .357 bullets - 3 TC per Speed Loader from the uplink... except they can just be printed from the Autolathe. As a result, this gun far eclipses the Stetchkin, offering a massively increased damage output and far easier to obtain ammunition, as if you want extra clips of the Stetchkin you need to buy them individually - you can print boxes of the ammo, but this has to be individually loaded into the clips which requires inventory fiddling, and somewhat helps to limit how much you can fire at once - buying more clips means you can reload quickly until you need to refill your clips. The .357 revolver does not suffer from this. With this change, you will still be able to obtain more ammo on-station, but you will be limited on how much revolver-based death you can distribute in each killing spree, being forced to take some time to disengage and either reload your speed loaders from the boxes or acquire more boxes from a lathe.
Do note that you can click a stack of loose .357 bullets on the ground/autolathe with an empty/semi-filled Speed Loader to instantly fill the speed loader, so you're not entirely forced to sit there pulling bullets out of the ammo box and slapping them into the speed loader one at a time - you can dump them all and pick them all up at once.
Lastly, the revolver comes with the spare speed loader so that it's not useless on its own, and you always have at least one loader to help you refill.

Images of changes

In a fully upgraded autolathe

In an un-upgraded autolathe

Thank you Syndie Cat

It's like Christmas came early

Misclicks be damned.

Testing

See above. Confirmed everything worked as intended.

Changelog

🆑
tweak: The Autolathe can no longer print whole .357 speed loaders, and instead now prints .357 ammo boxes which must be individually loaded into speed loaders or the revolver
tweak: The Syndicate Revolver now comes in a box with a spare speed loader
tweak: The .357 revolver and its speed loader can no longer be recycled in an Autolathe, so you don't accidentally recycle it
/:cl:

[ItsMarmite]

Personal request.

If you're going to do this.

Make this imposssible. Please.

[roarbark]

probably important nerf. lethals have never been this strong and traitors have never had winrates this high.

[Stokes52]

Seems like a really good nerf, and it also has the benefit of making the uplink speedloader worth something.

However, I'm worried that printing individual bullets is a little too clunky. It also makes it different from every other gun, since every other gun has ammo boxes. What if instead, you made the 357 the same as the stechkin and other guns, where the autolathe prints ammo boxes, rather than speed loaders? There is already an existing sprite you can use for the 357 box:

[roarbark]

gonna go out on a leg and say that the intention was to complicate the reload and to nerf the storage efficiency, which this would kinda undo.

Seems like a really good nerf, and it also has the benefit of making the uplink speedloader worth something.

However, I'm worried that printing individual bullets is a little too clunky. It also makes it different from every other gun, since every other gun has ammo boxes. What if instead, you made the 357 the same as the stechkin and other guns, where the autolathe prints ammo boxes, rather than speed loaders?

[Stokes52]

gonna go out on a leg and say that the intention was to complicate the reload and to nerf the storage efficiency, which this would kinda undo.

Seems like a really good nerf, and it also has the benefit of making the uplink speedloader worth something.
However, I'm worried that printing individual bullets is a little too clunky. It also makes it different from every other gun, since every other gun has ammo boxes. What if instead, you made the 357 the same as the stechkin and other guns, where the autolathe prints ammo boxes, rather than speed loaders?

Actually I just realized that this change also gives an extra speed loader, which I think is a fair trade off. You have to print bullets individually, but you still get one speed loader to play with. Overall great change I think.

[AzuleUtama]

Good change, it's a bit too easy to mass print speed loaders and have near-infinite ammo to deal with security right now. The extra speedloader included also means the revolver is still a good buy even without using a lathe.

[Mitchs98]

Absolutely great and needed change. It's presently way too easy to just fill up a bunch of storage containers and then fill up your bag with them, especially if you have an upgraded lathe.

I would go so far to say as to lower the TC cost of spare mags to 2TC maybe alongside this? Maybe?

But I'm personally fine with it as is. A compromise such as that might increase the odds of it getting merged however.

[Denthamos]

Not really a fan of how clunky it is to print off a single bullet at a time. Just make it a small box of the number of bullets a speedloader holds and that metal cost.

[Coolrune206]

Not really a fan of how clunky it is to print off a single bullet at a time. Just make it a small box of the number of bullets a speedloader holds and that metal cost.

The point of this is to make it so you can't carry so many bullets at once for the .357, and are instead motivated to actually buy ammo if you want more at once. I feel like ammo boxes would end up just replacing the ninety speedloaders in someone's BoH with one speedloader and eighty nine ammo boxes.

[OctusGit]

This is an actual good balance change to a weapon that is already cracked. It pretty much forces people who wanna game with it to spec into buying the gun, and speedloader for most of their TC. Little wiggle room after that but you bought the damn revolver. Your pretty much set.