So, we all know that armor-piercing autocannon ammunition as it stands by the official rules basically sucks because in order to compensate for its potential to inflict the occasional extra lucky hit it's been hit with the nerf bat not just once, but three times in rapid succession: only half the shots per ton (or less), each shot is less likely to connect on top of that, and if one should happen to hit there's an excellent chance that it won't actually perform any better than standard ammo anyway. Lately I've been thinking about and spending a bit of time testing a potential fix for that.
-- First, the halved number of shots per ton rounded down stays. However, this is now the main balancing mechanic.
-- Second, the to-hit penalty is waived. AP shot is no more and no less accurate than standard.
-- Third, the caliber-dependent TAC checks also stay, but a +1 modifier is applied to each. So an AC/20 hit using AP results in a bog-standard critical hit check even if armor isn't breached; an AC/10 rolls for TACs at -1; AC/5, at -2; AC/2, at -3. (My first draft simply had -2 regardless of caliber as per tandem-charge SRMs, but it didn't take long to discover that that made designs with multiple small autocannons a bit nastier than I'd intended while at the same time not doing enough for the big guns.)
How does this stack up next to standard ammo now? Well, so far I'm happy to report that it looks like an interesting alternative without apparently having turned into a game-breaker. While AP ammo looks strictly better than standard purely on a per-shot basis, per bin and thus ultimately per unit it represents a clear tradeoff -- to get those extra crit chances, a unit has to risk going Winchester earlier than normal (remember that AP shots still miss just as well as standard ones) and ultimately gives up some of its overall damage potential as measured terms of raw points over time. On the other hand, the chances of that gamble paying off at least once per game have just significantly improved.
The jury is still a bit out on the effect of all this on the aforementioned multi-small autocannon designs, especially those with deep enough ammo bins to potentially let them just absorb the hit to their shot count. Then again, on those and in just about any timeframe where armor-piercing special munition is even an option I'm arguably competing more against precision ammo than against standard in the first place...and by and large precision still looks to have the edge in that match, so I suspect I should be mostly in the clear.
