Most of these ideas have been suggested elsewhere, but this thread is about my ideas for implementing them.

1. Battle Rifle:
One thing I've noticed is that there's a bit of a capability gap between the rifle and the SMG. The rifle is excellent for long-range shots but so slow to fire that at close range, missing your first shot is invariably fatal; I could live with it being usually fatal, but that seems a bit much. The SMG, on the other hand, is brilliant at ranges up to about 30-40 tiles but a complete waste of ammunition beyond that.* Rather than buffing or nerfing one or the other, I'd like to see a fourth weapon added that sits neatly in between the two in terms of damage, recoil and range. It could even have a historically accurate 20-round magazine. I'm somewhat ambivalent about giving it automatic fire, and I'd certainly want a toggle between full-auto and single shot.

2. Heavy Weapons:

a. Machine Gun:
This one would be extremely tricky to balance. I'm thinking it'd fire rounds about as powerful as the rifle -possibly with severely nerfed damage to blocks- in 100-round belts, but would have utterly uncontrollable recoil unless fired while either crouched or standing in front of a two-block wall. (Not sure how practical the latter would be to code.) It should also have fairly low-zoom iron sights; the purpose of a squad automatic weapon is to force the enemy to keep their heads down, and hitting anyone is a bonus.
b. Grenade Launcher:
This one's a bit easier. Single shot, long reload time, basically a way of launching an ordinary grenade about half as far again as the current standard. A minimum arming distance would probably be a good idea, as properly placing one's shots would likely take some practice.

3. Sidearms:
Yeah, I know. But hear me out. First, I think sidearms should only be available by default to players who select one of the above heavy weapons and maybe the rifle, instead of grenades. I envision three pistol types:
a. High-capacity semi-automatic with mild recoil and fairly low damage. (Example: Browning High-Power, Beretta M9 or most other service automatics.)
b. Lower-capacity semi-automatic that trades greater stopping power for added kick. (Example: Colt M1911A1 and its many imitators.)
c. Revolver of equal stopping power to the second semi-automatic, but with a still-smaller magazine and a longer reload time. (Example: Webley .455 series, Colt M1917.)
If the revolver sounds like it has several drawbacks and no real advantages over the two semi-automatics, that's because it does. I include it for a specific purpose I'll go into shortly, and also because some people just like revolvers better, so why not? Each pistol's range should be about one-third to half that of the SMG.

4. Satchel Charges:
An item the player can choose instead of grenades that does considerable damage to blocks, but very little to other players and can't be thrown very far. Ideally suited for taking out the bunker with a particularly skilled sniper, or flattening your own defensive line once it's breached to deny the advancing enemy the use of it. Also ideally suited for griefing, but that's what votekicks are for.

5. Melee Attacks:
There's several different ideas for these, but I think the simplest way is having a melee attack for everything with varying degrees of effectiveness. With the melee attack triggered by pressing Alt or something, for preference; I'm sure everyone's accidentally clobbered a squadmate who spawns on top of them while digging a tunnel with the pickaxe!

6. Serverside Weapon Tweaks:
Now this is the biggie. Not just skins, in fact I really don't care if those stay handled clientside. There's two main elements tro this.
a. Limits on how many weapons of each type per team, or disabling some weapons completely. Half the players on the server picking machine guns would make for an extremely boring game, so maybe limit them to two per side for example, or you could even try some sort of Cops and Robbers scenario with pistols only for a change.
b. Custom weapon ROF, damage, magazine size and reload time for each team. This would enable server owners to do all kinds of interesting stuff. For example, suppose someone wanted to run a War of Southern Aggression-themed match on their server. They could disable every weapon except the rifle, set the magazine size to a single round each and make the reload time take ages. A World War One-themed scenario could have one side's rifles less accurate but faster to fire and only let the green side pick revolvers while the blues had a semi-automatic with only eight rounds per magazine. Someone wanting an ultra-realistic scenario could make a single hit to the head or torso with any gun instantly fatal. The possibilities are limitless.

The sidearm? *ahem* use search function next time.

http://ace-spades.com/forums/topic.php?id=5012

Easy way to balance the machinegun - make it only able to fire when deployed.
I like the handgun idea, but perhaps just keep a mix of the first two instead of having three to choose from.

I think an idea for an mg would have to have a block on the ground, a window, and a block above. You would basically have to place it down to use it.

*Ahem*
His ideas for sidearms are different than yours.

1. I believe it would be more effective to just reduce the recoil (50-60%) on the SMG to give it a larger range, but it keeps its efficiency at shorter ranges as well, negating the need for a Battle Rifle.
2. SMG already fulfills this role. A small group of people using SMG can charge in and rape the enemy's (or allied) terrain and defensive structures.
3. No. Situations for a sidearm in this game are rare, if not nonexistent.
4. Too much griefer potential.
5. Sure, pyspades does a good job of implementing this, would like to see it in vanilla too. justforthehelluvit
6. Sure, that way we can force shotties only on a small CQB map, or other such gametypes.

@DE
He clearly said
"Most of these ideas have been suggested elsewhere, but this thread is about my ideas for implementing them."
leav nao

I am heavy weapons guy, and this, is my weapon.
I agree with 3-5.

Also, i completely agree with 2-6.
I am heavy weapons guy, and this, is my weapon

@Tool:
1. I believe it would be more effective to just reduce the recoil (50-60%) on the SMG to give it a larger range, but it keeps its efficiency at shorter ranges as well, negating the need for a Battle Rifle.
Personally, I like the SMG's recoil just fine; it's manageable as long as you fire short bursts. If I have a problem with any weapon in-game it's the rifle, which I've mostly stopped using because it makes kills on several popular maps feel too cheap. An intermediate weapon between it and the SMG would also play into my suggestion about limiting the number of certain weapons per team.

2. SMG already fulfills this role. A small group of people using SMG can charge in and rape the enemy's (or allied) terrain and defensive structures.
That's a point actually, though I think that's more of a reason to nerf the SMG's block-breaking power a bit.

3. No. Situations for a sidearm in this game are rare, if not nonexistent.
With the current weapon setup, maybe, but in conjunction with heavy weapons they make a bit more sense. I'd rather walk into a possible CQB situation with a pistol than the current rifle as well.

4. Too much griefer potential.
This wouldn't be a problem if we had a more robust banning system; bans initiated by votekick are currently nickname-based, and changing nicks takes all of thirty seconds. Some of the better public servers already have this covered thanks to the admins being willing to unilaterally ban for much longer periods if they witness griefers in action.

YOU FORGOT MORTAR!
HOW DARE YOU SIR!

I like the sound of the Satchel Charges.

I'm actually not that keen on the idea of artillery in-game, except possibly as an optional environmental hazard that drops more or less randomly on certain areas of the map. It would be very difficult to find a middle-way between player-operated mortars being utterly useless or insanely overpowered, and in any case I like AoS better as a somewhat realistic simulation of small-unit infantry combat.

Why not moratrs?
They would not be overpowered and would have to be planted.
The player would also have to aim at an angle and an Icon on the map would show where the projectile landed.

That's actually not a bad idea, but I can still see them all too easily going the way of the airstrikes mod; some bugger would end up spawn-camping the other team with indirect fire and rack up a ludicrous kill-count with minimal effort until they got bored or were votekicked.

satchel charges would be good and yeh i clobbered a ton of squadmates just by digging a tunnel it was kinda funny me killing all of them but not them killing me.

they should add the grenade luanchers and mortars i realy want to have more explosives on the game. and if ben reads this heres a tip dont unbalance this game like if u make this into a cod game ill just rage jut balance the game.

No it isn't. At short range, ie. ideal shotgun range, the recoil doesn't matter. However, when you start engaging mid to long range targets, the recoil starts to become annoying, even if you single shot or burst fire, mostly because it takes so many shots to kill an enemy with the currently underpowered, weak SMG.
The way you describe an 'intermediate weapon between the rifle and SMG' would make it a much more accurate, fully automatic SMG with only a slightly smaller clip, so instead of implementing a new weapon, we just descrease the SMG's recoil by 50%, which increases its effective range and can decrease the rifle's dominance at mid range.
The current situation has the SMG being outperformed by the shotgun and short range, and just dominated by the rifle at long and mid range, may I remind you.

SMG's structure raping power is just fine. At the most, you can only break 40 blocks, and that's if you hit every block and don't miss once, putting it on average as a 25 blocks until you run out of ammo, which means it pays to use the SMG in groups to destroy the enemy's defensive structures, encouraging teamwork.

I'd rather walk into a possible CQB situation with a pistol than the current rifle as well.
Are you nuts? With the rifle you just but a bullet through his head, without resorting to a crappy, low powered backup that would take mutliple bullets through his head.

I agree that the SMG is currently underpowered, but I think it would be better to buff the damage a bit -at the very least make headshots a one hit kill- and leave the recoil as-is. I still like the idea of a fourth weapon as an all-rounder while making the rifle and SMG very good at one specific combat role, but then I'm slightly more hung up on realism than most AOS players.

And I take your point about the rifle, but a pistol's higher effective rate of fire gives you more margin for error if you miss the first shot.

I'm going to agree with 1, 3, and 5.

1) A battle rifle would be nice, with lower ammo and fire selector capability, but in my opinion, it should be weaker than the semi, yet stronger than the SMG.

3) Sidearms, I MUST agree with. No exceptions. It is a great backup weapon, and important to use in case of emergency. Lower damage than the SMG for balancing, maybe?

5) Yes, I'd like a VANILLA melee attack, and one that reacts instantly, maybe, like Call of Duty (I don't like it, however). Make it realistic, and not 1HKO on the foot. 1HKO on the chest, head, and 3KHO on the limbs?

A deployable machinegun would really change the tactics in the game, for better and for worse. Realistically a heavy machinegun would be on par with the rifle in terms of range, precision and damage, but with a firing speed around that of the SMG.

That can very easily unbalance the game unless you really play up the two major disadvantages of a HMG. It's bulky and heavy (definitely needs to be deployed) and it chews up ammo.

Those games I've seen that have implemented HMGs well have had them split up in two bits for transportation, but I'm not sure if this is very practical in this game.

I'm also not sure if it would be possible to let people carry ammo and deposit it for the machine gun crew, which is a requirement to make a deployed HMG practical.

The only other alternative is to make it carryable and useable by a single person, but to tone down the damage and precision, which would make it rather pointless, much like in other FPS games I could mention where it's even weaker than a rifle.

omg you guys write to much im not reading that

I figure you could make a generic object. If you place it on the ground, it becomes a tripod. If you place it on a tripod, it becomes a machinegun. Hmm.

Rambo you disgust me with your illiteracy -_-