More Interesting Mod Choices

-Description-
More Interesting Mod Choices modifies most of the gun mods in the game to give the player more choice in how guns fit into their playstyle.  

The intention of this mod is to make each gun mod change the way the gun plays in noticeable ways and to give each gun have a stronger identity. The changes to the gun mods also work to rebalance a number of aspects of the game such as shotguns, which have had their range buffed quite a bit, and hipfire shooting which should now be a much more viable playstyle.

This mod achieves this by giving most gun mods bigger buffs but more trade offs, and by reducing how many mod types can effect different stats. For example instead of splitting accuracy bonuses across sights, barrels, grips, muzzles and receivers you can now only increase your accuracy with barrels and grips and you need to deal with the drawbacks they come with.

-Why-
Fallout 4's gun mechanics and weapon modding systems are incredibly well made from a design standpoint but in execution most of the interesting aspects of these systems have been hidden by the way the games weapons have been balanced.

The game gives too much importance to increasing damage numbers with other aspects such as accuracy and recoil taking a back seat. This leads to a lack of real choices made by the player on what gun mod to choose because there's usually a flat out best mod with other mods only providing small situational bonuses.

-In Depth Description-
--Receivers--
I reduced the amount of receivers by a lot because I didn't think they added much. A lot of them were just kind of useless or only had one version which then got out ranked by the higher levels of damage mods. In More Interesting Mod Choices, players choose between lighter receivers which have high fire rates but also higher uncontrolled recoil and heavy receivers which lower the fire rate but are much more controllable. On top of that there's also fully automatic versions of light and heavy receivers. Fully automatic receivers have had their damage reduction removed making them waste a lot less ammo.

--Capacitors--
Similar to receivers I've cut a lot of these because they felt repetitive. The main trade off that felt worthwhile with capacitors was damage for ammo capacity. You can decrease the base damage to get a large magazine boost or you can cut down to only a few rounds to create a high powered rifle. The extra effects like fire damage and critical hits have been moved to the muzzles.

--Stocks/Grips--
I wanted to make a bigger difference between Stocks and Grips because in Vanilla it feels like grips are worse than stocks in almost every way. All they get is minor buffs to hip fire accuracy which is still way too inaccurate to be of any use. So to make a bigger divide between the two I made grips much faster in aiming down sights alongside a buff to hip fire accuracy. I also made the non standard stocks/grips fit more unique niches as opposed to just being higher level mods.

--Barrels--
Making shorter barrels more relevant was one of the main reasons I made this mod. I really hated that sawing guns off just made them so much worse. Range is a much more important stat than most players realise, when a bullet hits something outside of it's range it does half the damage so increasing range can in many cases just double your damage output. In vanilla a lot of the barrels had long range alongside a few buffs but now most barrels are mid range aside from dedicated long range barrels. Also the very short barrel gives a much larger hip fire accuracy boost than before.

--Magazines--
I made bigger magazines a fair bit slower but also I removed all of the mods that would give you both quicker reloads and more ammo. This way the player has to choose between which they want instead of just having a 100% best mod which was the case in vanilla.

--Sights--
I haven't changed a lot about sights other than removing all accuracy bonuses from them and making glow sights function the same as holographic sights. I find that sometimes I prefer the ironsights to holosights and it seemed annoying that I would be punished for that.

--Muzzles--
I removed the range reduction from all muzzles because I feel like understanding the range values was confusing and so if I kept range changes to only one mod I could just tell the player the mod was Long, Medium or Short range. I always found it hard to tell what the muzzle brake and compensator where supposed to do so I made it more clear. Compensators reduce recoil and increase the number of shots before your recoil becomes uncontrolled and the Muzzle Brake doesn't reduce recoil it just forces the direction to be straight up, making it easier for the player to control. Compensators are more for short bursts of fire and Muzzle Brakes are to give the player more control. Also I added a new muzzle for shotguns called a Choke, it reduces the spread of the shotgun.

-Bugs/Issues-
I've removed some mods from the game but it's kind of hard to just straight up delete things from a pre-existing save, so instead I've added [OLD] to the names of all the mods I've removed. You can either just remove all of these mods from your guns/inventory when you first load the game up or you can just start on a new save file and you shouldn't see them at all.

-Installation-
Unzip the .esp file to your fallout 4 data folder and activate the esp in whatever mod manager you're using.