Do you mean, for example, reducing AoE from current 3.5 tiles to 3 or to 2.5?
Personally, I’m warming up to this idea because in Phoenix Point there is no drop off in damage the further the target is from the explosion. The way blast damage works is that each body part that gets hit by the explosion receives the same damage, regardless of distance from it - so it comes down do the angle at which the target is to the explosion and whether there are any obstacles between the two. This is what makes explosives devastating when they land in the open between 2 or more enemies even when they are quite some way apart.
Reducing the AoE would be a way of abstracting the expected drop off in damage.
I think it’s a design choice to avoid randomness when it comes to damage with all weapons in PX.
A different issue would be making explosives less accurate, particularly hand thrown grenades, which currently have 100% accuracy. This is, in fact, connected to my main gripe with Boom Blast - when combined with Quarterback it doubles the range of hand thrown grenades, turning them into 100% accurate artillery.
However, I think that many players (particularly the more casual ones, or the ones coming from Firaxis XCom) would not react favorably to explosives being less accurate and doing things like friendly fire damage…
This is definitely a thing in PX. For example, look at the cost of GL magazines: (IRRC) 110 Gears, which is comparable to the cost of armor (and actually higher than some armor pieces). However, should it be even more? I’m inclined to say no, because resources are already scarce for many players, but at the same time there are ways to play where resources are much less of an issue (for example, equipment sharing between the teams using the ‘tedious teleportation technique’). So, it’s there but it’s not enough on its own.
My favorite approach currently is:
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Stop Explosives from working with Sneak Attack
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Make all weapons cost at least 1AP to fire (so Boom Blast doesn’t reduce cost of using mounted rocket to 0AP)
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Take away the +50% to range from Boom Blast, but increase range of GL to 32 and reduce its AoE to 2.5 or to 3 from the current 3.5.
EDIT: After @MadSkunky kindly pointed out that Quick Aim also works with GL and mounted rockets, instead of removing the 50% bonus from Boom Blast, I suggest reducing it to 25% and reducing the bonus from Quarterback from 50% to 25% as well.
MadSkunky on Quick Aim and Boom Blast
Long term it would be nice if the GL could be modded (before each mission, like in Xcom2) to fire munitions with different properties, if modding weapons becomes a thing one day… Then the different munitions could become gradually available to the player and that way the GL could be made weaker at first, and much stronger in the late game.
And on top of all that it would be great imo if some enemies developed a partial resistance to explosives, but I don’t think you can, or should address obvious balance issues through reactive evolution. I see it as something that will make the game more fun though.
To address the OPness of explosives purely through reactive evolution would be something like saying “if on average the player causes 30% or more of all damage using explosives, all Pandorans progressively develop a higher resistance to blast damage (starting at 20%, and going up to 80%, for example).”
This is simple and relatively easy to do. (Other stuff involving new AI behaviors is not).
Thoughts?