Since Chapter 7 was announced and it was revealed that FJ is interested in removing the function cap on guns, I've been thinking about what could be done to prevent people from building bots that are 95% guns - or more specifically, to prevent that kind of build from being the only viable one. I already think it's a shame that we're obligated to have 6 guns as it limits creativity and makes it virtually impossible to design a viable small ultralight bot (or at least one that doesn't look like a robot sea urchin with guns sticking out everywhere).

Here's a concept that I thought would be interesting to run by the community: how about a damage "set point" based on the gun type you are currently using, and divided evenly among the number of that gun that are on your bot at 100% HP?

For instance:

Suppose the damage number for a given size plasma is 100 (arbitrarily for the sake of example; obviously the real number would be much higher).

If your bot has one plasma on it, then that one plasma's shot would do 100 damage. But if your bot has five plasmas on it, each one's shot would do 20 damage.

This way, you could build a viable bot with only one or two guns. But there would still be a redundancy advantage to adding more. A one-gun bot would be much easier to de-gun since there's only one gun to shoot off, but it would also be possible to make it smaller and more maneuverable, so you might have a better shot at avoiding hits in the first place. It would also make it possible to create bots designed to better protect their small number of guns from attack, since they wouldn't require as much clearance for other guns as do bots in the current meta.

It would also potentially play nicely with the idea of having part choice limited mainly by CPU load, as is one of the goals of flattening the tech tree. For example, if a single mega SMG costs as much as half a dozen smaller SMGs, it could still be viable due to having a higher damage number based on its size. In this way, it would become viable to make things like single-turret siege tank bots.

What would be even better is taking advantage of this mechanic to introduce weapons that have built-in energy plating the way mech legs do, are even bigger than mega weapons, and are limited to 1-2 per bot. So you could choose to make a gunship with lots of small guns, similar to the present meta, or a destroyer with one or two gigantic slow weapons that are harder to destroy, compensating for the lack of redundancy.

I can imagine, for example, a platoon of support craft defending their team's big, heavy bomber from enemy robots attempting to take it out as it bombards the reactor. On that note, maybe a super 1-per-bot weapon could even be given a partial damage component that pierces shields, but only from a certain range - allowing heavy assault craft to attack the reactor while its shield is still up, but not from all the way across the map so as to not be crazy overpowered.

...anyway, I'm going off on tangents so I'll just leave it there. Simply an idea or two floating around in my head. :)