[Feature] Expand Impulse Cannon Augmentation

[M-W-K]

First off, great mod. Bringing elements of tc4 into tc6 while being its own thing has felt amazing to play around with, I'm only sorry I didn't encounter this addon sooner.

Yesterday I played around with the Impulse Cannon for the first time, and I have to say it felt a bit... empty. The name of the mod is Thaumic Augmentation, yet despite allowing you to augment caster's gauntlets heavily, you get just two incompatible options to choose from for the cannon. The fact that the cannon underperforms compared to gauntlets, despite being leagues more expensive, is also notable.

So I brainstormed for a bit and came up with ideas for more augments to make the cannon more customizable and more powerful. I am willing to put in the work to open a pull request for this and code it all myself (though any textures I make will be highly questionable); I'm looking for the green light, advice on how to make my ideas fit in more with the mod, and ideas for more augments.

Conversions:

• Charge Rifle Conversion: Cannon is charged like a bow, slowing movement, firing a single beam on release. Range is proportional to charge time; damage and cooldown time are proportional to the square root of charge time.
• Thermal Accelerator Conversion: Think classic minigun. As the cannon 'heats up', aka the more you fire it, the faster it fires up to a limit. Once it reaches the limit, the player is set on fire every time the cannon fires.
• Crystal Diffuser Conversion: Attaches intact Strange Crystals to the cannon, continuously firing random spreads of impetus beams in a cone in front of the player. Each crystal the conversion is crafted with increases the number of beams, but increases the size of the firing cone and reduces range. (2-5 crystals).

General augments:

• Impetus Charger: By routing impetus through an onboard impetus drainer, impetus can be further charged before release. Increases magic damage by 50%, but halves normal damage.
• Impetus Disrupter: By siphoning a small amount of impetus to an onboard impetus generator and injecting the mundane energy back into the firing system, impetus can be destabilized before release. Increases normal damage by 50%, but halves magic damage.
• Impetus Solidifier: By integrating a void siphon into the cannon's systems, impetus can be partially converted into solid state before release. Doubles impetus drain, but allows the cannon to break blocks and deal heavy knockback.
• Primordial Purifier: By reacting impetus energy with a complete primordial pearl, it can be infused with devastating primordial energy. Magic and normal damage is reduced to 20%, but 40% of the original damage amount is also dealt as non-magic, armor-ignoring damage (non-magic so entities that are resistant to magic damage are no longer resistant to this damage). Impetus drain is doubled.
• Augment Mount: Allows an experience, frenzy, or biome modifier to be attached to the cannon's greater focus and operate at reduced effect. Focus power increases damage, vis discount reduces impetus consumption, cast speed reduces cooldowns or improves tickrate for continuous fire types. Only one augment mount can be attached.
• Underclocking Unit: Halves impetus drain, but damage is reduced by 10%
• Overclocking Unit: Doubles impetus drain, but damage is increased by 25%
• Gyroscopic Adjuster: Introduces aim assist, moving the beam slightly off crosshair if it would otherwise just miss an entity. (extra raytraces, basically)
• Hyperion Amplifier: Triples impetus drain. When firing, all impetus in the cannon is used at once (or over 5 ticks for continuous fire types), but damage is increased proportionately.
• Auxiliary Cell: Quintuples impetus capacity.

[TheCodex6824]

I'm going to make a more detailed response with my thoughts on your suggestions, but in general - the impulse cannon unfortunately didn't get as much put into it (along with other impetus things) as it should have. Making it better would be very much appreciated.

It's worth noting that there are plans to deprecate and then remove the crafting grid approach for adding augments and switch to a dedicated GUI instead, so you have some more options for making combinations / reserved slots without it being confusing like they are today. There is a rough version of the augment station block in the experimental branch if you want to look at it.

[TheCodex6824]

First, the conversions:

1. Charge rifle: This is probably a better version of what the railgun conversion ended up being. The only thing I'm not sure about is the range, as I imagine it will be very frustrating to charge a shot and then have it be 1 block too short to hit your target. Maybe there will be a visual beam that grows and extends as you charge it?
2. Thermal accelerator: I like the concept, but I feel like being set on fire isn't enough of a deterrent due to how powerful the armor the player would probably have on is. Maybe it can start sparking or something, which means it can do half magic damage like the actual impetus damage. See also the bottom of this really long comment for some design concerns.
3. Crystal diffuser: This is probably my favorite one - I don't have any ideas for making this better, and I like how it gives another use for the strange crystals.

For the augments:

1. Charger and disrupter: I think both of these make sense, although I expect the charger to be much more popular. The only mob I can think of where magic damage will do less damage are witches, which aren't very threatening at the point you would get the cannon. Maybe I should change that...
2. Solidifier: We originally had an idea for a placeable (like the crossbow turrets) version of the impulse cannon that could break blocks like this. I'm not sure if we're still interested in doing that or not, but if not this augment might make sense.
3. Primordial purifier: I think the idea is fine, but I'd have to see how the numbers play out against armored players, as ideally I don't want it to be possible to get one shot by the cannon.
4. Augment mount: I also really like this. We'll just have to make it very clear which augments are supported and which aren't.
5. Under/Over-clocker: If we go with some of the other augment ideas, I feel like I'd want to steer players towards those, since they have a bit more depth to them than a flat damage / drain rate change.
6. Adjuster: I'd be ok with this, although the raytracing might get tricky. I don't think the builtin stuff would work, since there might be extra blocks and such that would block it.
7. Hyperion amplifier: I don't understand the "triple impetus drain" part combined with "all impetus in the cannon is used at once". Do you mean that only the continuous type has the triple drain?
8. Aux cell: A capacity augment makes sense, although I'd have to see the drain rates of the different conversions to get a feel for how much it should contain.

From a design perspective, the only concerns I have are with the charge rifle and thermal accelerator. The charge rifle mechanically is fine, I'd just probably want a different name to not make people think of futuristic space rifles or something. The thermal accelerator feels a bit too much like just a minigun. We're trying to balance the magic and gun parts carefully with the impulse cannon, and I've already heard from some people that the impulse cannon is too gun-like for their liking.

If you're still interested in working on this, we can come up with a shortlist of things we're 100% ok with and give you the green light to start working on those.

[M-W-K]

Oh yeah I'm still interested in working on this. I don't know if you want to communicate through github for the rest of this, or discord, or some other method. As you can see it takes me several days to notice a github notification...
To clarify the hyperion amplifier - whenever I mention increases to impetus drain, I'm implying a corresponding reduction in impetus efficiency. For the hyperion amplifier, this would effectively reduce the final output by a factor of 3, since all impetus is discharged at once.
Also unironically my thought process with the thermal accelerator was minigun, but coming up with a more magic-themed "gets stronger the longer you use it" idea would be reasonable.
Oh and my target mob with the impetus disruptor was actually eldritch guardians, since they have magic resistance last I checked.

[TechnoMysterio]

This is very good detailed feedback on the Impulse Cannon; we were looking into improving it at some point, so this is very handy. I’ll provide my own thoughts on each point.

Conversions:

• Charge Rifle Conversion: the range thing might be a bit annoying as Codex said, but otherwise it’d be a better version of the railgun conversion so maybe it can be merged into that.
• Thermal Accelerator Conversion: I mostly agree with what Codex says again, while the idea is cool it might be a bit too… I dunno, Boomer Shooter for a magic mod. Would there be any particular difference between this and the regular continuous beam, outside of the heating up system?
• Crystal Diffuser Conversion: shotgun conversion that uses Strange Crystals, which I think is a good two-for-one design solution. Strange Crystals don’t have much use currently, and we were thinking of a shotgun conversion too, so this works well in my mind.

Augments:

• Charger/Disrupter: these are good, both in function and lore (though maybe the names ought to be tweaked a bit). Codex does make a good point about the charger probably being more popular, so maybe physical damage needs more use in Minecraft as a whole.
• Solidifier: honestly kinda makes me think of the Arcane Bore a bit, or maybe like the TC3-5 break wand/focus. Knockback would be more useful than the block breaking though I think, and yes we were thinking of a type of Impetus Turret for breaking blocks.
• Primordial Purifier: this might be a bit overpowered, but I suppose one way to mitigate that outside of juggling the numbers would be that it gradually drains an attached Primordial Pearl to function.
• Augment Mount: this is good, but I kinda wonder if the Modular Augment should be attachable by itself, without the need for an intermediary augment. Ideally the plans we had for an Augment Station would make it clearer what augments would work for a given device though.
• Underclocker/Overclocker: not sure how useful lesser impetus drain would be for the cannon overall, it’s meant to be a bit of an impetus sink anyway.
• Adjuster: Counter-Strike aimbot for Minecraft magic mod? Count me in.
• Hyperion: would this just make the cannon have one single enormous blast then? Sounds interesting, though it’d need a corresponding OTT visual effect I reckon.
• Aux Cell: depending on how many augment slots the Cannon will have in future, might be worth making this a gradual upgrade instead, like one cell doubles impetus amount but you can add three instead.

Overall though these ideas are really good, although they would need corresponding sprites (mind you I was thinking about polishing the art for the cannon stuff anyway). And apologies for the delay in responding myself, I’ve been a tad occupied and/or forgetful.