[MaxWilson]

Here's one more thing: a comparison of death and fire weapons. Again ignoring attack/defense rolls, here are the (Monte Carlo) break-even points. That is, in general fire weapons do more damage than death weapons, but for a given Protection there is a certain MR at which death weapons becomes a better bet. Here's the breakdown for Prot 1-20 and how much expected damage is dealt per-hit at each level. (For Prot 9 and below, fire weapons are always better but I show the expected damage for MR 10 for comparison's sake.)

Prot 1 MR 10 Fire dmg 6.40 Death dmg 1.44
Prot 2 MR 10 Fire dmg 5.70 Death dmg 1.46
Prot 3 MR 10 Fire dmg 5.70 Death dmg 1.42
Prot 4 MR 10 Fire dmg 4.70 Death dmg 1.62
Prot 5 MR 10 Fire dmg 4.65 Death dmg 1.48
Prot 6 MR 10 Fire dmg 4.08 Death dmg 1.46
Prot 7 MR 10 Fire dmg 3.81 Death dmg 1.45
Prot 8 MR 10 Fire dmg 3.20 Death dmg 1.41
Prot 9 MR 10 Fire dmg 3.19 Death dmg 1.51
Prot 10 MR 5 Fire dmg 2.68 Death dmg 2.57
Prot 11 MR 6 Fire dmg 2.68 Death dmg 2.38
Prot 12 MR 8 Fire dmg 2.21 Death dmg 2.15
Prot 13 MR 9 Fire dmg 1.99 Death dmg 1.88
Prot 14 MR 10 Fire dmg 1.63 Death dmg 1.54
Prot 15 MR 10 Fire dmg 1.66 Death dmg 1.53
Prot 16 MR 11 Fire dmg 1.44 Death dmg 1.14
Prot 17 MR 11 Fire dmg 1.40 Death dmg 1.15
Prot 18 MR 13 Fire dmg 0.97 Death dmg 0.82
Prot 19 MR 12 Fire dmg 1.06 Death dmg 0.91
Prot 20 MR 14 Fire dmg 0.71 Death dmg 0.66

Again, take these numbers with a grain of salt since they're empirical. Nevertheless, "he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense," and number-crunching is an old tradition for wargamers. For instance, it's apparent that death weapons are a better bet in LA than in EA.

One thing this doesn't take into account is that it's *possible* that death/fire weapons still take effect on shield-hits. Fire weapons will do negligible damage on a shield-hit, but death weapons are AN, so it's possible that death weapons are a better bet against shielded units. Maybe I'll test this if I learn enough about modding to create a low-def, heavily-shielded unit.

-Max