When you can get one, gauss rifles take care of that worry. Gauss ammo is immune to ammo explosions. They have the added benefit of really great range and accuracy, plus the bonus armor piercing structure damage. Nothing better than causing an ammo explosion on, say, a King Crab without actually pounding through the armor first.
I don't know what the problem is but that mech can be built so (as a one mech lance) in most types of missions you can consistently run circles around the opfor while having one UAC and low armor.
A lance made up of four heavy/assault of any type can't be built to avoid anything it cannot easily beat.
The ammo cannot explode but the Gauss itself can. The armor piercing is only really useful against Turrets. You may get some ammo explosions once in a while but you cannot rely on that, as you only get one try and the hit must hit the mech, then must hit the location, then pass the crit roll and then hit the actual internal slot with the ammo.
That is not correct. I understand it could in the lore, but there's no mechanic for it happening in this game.
Which is the same mechanic for a crit after the armor is destroyed. This just gives additional chances for the crit to occur before the armor is removed.
I have no idea if that's the case in the lore but it is in this game. The ammo cannot explode but the weapon itself can. As a curiosity another weapon that also can explode, and in this case it uses no ammo at all, is the Coil.
Yes, it is the same mechanic, but the Gauss has no "additional" chances to crit if there is armor present. I mean, other weapons just can't at all and the Gauss potentially can because it bypasses armor, so technically it has more chances than zero (if there is actually something to crit, because you can crit on an empty slot). But... only has one hit per weapon-salvo (armor removed or not), only one try from a very heavy weapon, vs potentially lots of tries for some other weapons once the armor is removed, and some of those weapons also have a bonus to the crit roll.
Yes, it's a unique mechanic put in place for a COIL to balance the potentially game-breaking nature of its variable damage. (I spent a good portion of a max-difficulty career running a Cicada with a COIL-M dealing 100-125 damage per shot depending on terrain.) I tend toward sniper builds on a lot of mechs and use gauss rifles frequently. I've had them receive crits, I've had them destroyed by crits. I have never, since beta or in the 2185 hours of game play since, had a gauss rifle explode. The possibility isn't mentioned in the weapon description or any online listing for the vanilla game. I hate to put it this way, but:
This is not something new I've come up right now. It has been commented a few times in this and other forums. Also this mechanic iirc exists only since the Gauss was buffed (that, a bit earlier or a bit later) with the 5 extra piercing damage. And the description not mentioning it doesn't mean anything. There are many mechanics also not mentioned in the description nor any online listing for the vanilla game, some of them with an impact on the game far greater than the ability of the Gauss of exploding on crits.
OK. For some reason I can't seem to find those threads on this forum or others. Can you please link one?
Posting external links is not allowed but google searching a bit found a couple, one in reddit and another one in the steam forum. Also don't forget that for a very long time Gauss ammo actually could explode and was complained about, I think just until that was reversed around the HM release.
I said it like that because your comment sounded to me like there was a base chance to crit with all weapons and the Gauss just had a higher chance than usual.
I did some similar searches when you first commented (as I'll admit when I'm wrong when presented with evidence to the effect.) Oddly, my Google searches earlier today turned up the complaints about the ammo exploding, as well as the bug reports, but all I saw in the reddit and steam forums had were people going back and forth with one saying "Gauss rifle explodes!" and the other saying, "No it doesn't." Image searches for screenshots only turned up modded gameplay images with any indication of the weapon exploding. When I search the Paradox forum with "gauss rifle explodes", I get no results found. I'm just not seeing what you say is there. Can you provide anything more than your statement that the weapon explodes?
I don't remember exactly how I founded but the one from Steam is titled ´My Phoenix build´ and the one from reddit ´Am I reading this right? UAC/2 vs Gauss´. And have you looked into the json files?, because that alone I think settles it.
I do not understand this statement. In my experience, four Highlanders can avoid anything they cannot easily beat, ( when playing against the AI. ) . When playing against a human opponent all bets are off, but I though we were discussing playing against the computer.
