Hey everyone, I've done several rewrites for this guide, and I frankly need an editor. I'll do my best to sort through it as I get more experience with the different factions, but I'm planning a proper rewrite of this in a way that's actually concise. Please bear with me as life gets in the way of everything.

The intent of this guide is to help players at a glance understand what to do with each faction and the weapons that are available to them categorically while also sharing information on how to think about which faction/squad to deploy and when/why.

...You've probably already noticed how long the guide is. I'll clean it up sooner or later, promise, just use the first set until you see the tag [OBSELETE] in the section title, everything else from the start up to that point should be good to go

There are three factions (there's a planned 4th but that's not out yet) in Door Kickers 2: Task Force North. Rangers, Nowheraki SWAT, and CIA.

At least during the beta, about 90% of the content in the game is explicitly designed around Rangers. They have a few niches:

• Up to 7x Frag (or Flash) grenades per trooper - you don't even have to enter rooms to clear them if you don't want to bother, just chuck enough frags to cover the whole room.
  
• Fastest engagement times post-release, so frontal confrontations are completely viable if you don't feel like throwing grenades everywhere
  
• Wide selection of optics and ammo types, enough weapons to cover nearly every niche you can think of in-game (minus silenced shotguns, but no one has those in this game)
  
• Accurate Burst-fire with a single doctrine choice for close quarters, and can push burst-fire out to midrange with a second
  
• They have access to single-use wall breaching charges as well, and can stick one on every ranger. While this takes up the Large Equipment slot, that's still a lot of walls you can carve your own path through.

The 'Hammer' option.

Nowheraki SWAT is the challenge class in all honesty. They're slower to engage and don't have a ton of interesting tricks they can do that the Rangers can't do better, but they do have a few interesting details:

• Their APC9 submachine gun is probably the best SMG in the game
  
• Their Assault class troopers can carry M249s - since you get 8 of them, you can have up to 8 light machine guns spraying bullets. Or PKMs if you're into that
  
• They have 12 Militia dudes - while pitiful by themselves, they're useful for things like carrying an extra set of grenades, opening doors for your dudes, pushing in with someone with more armor and supplying suppressive fire, etc
  
• They also get molotovs but I haven't found them to be particularly useful excluding the Zombie mod, and even then they're underwhelming
  
• Their Sapper class also get access to 3x Demolition charges that can be used to breach walls, giving this unit a niche in item slot efficiency that they lose otherwise by only getting access to 1x frags in the small equipment slots.

The 'Bulldozer' option.

The equivalent of picking The Spy in Team Fortress 2. You only get 4 troopers, but they have the ability to 'Play Civilian' and on the majority of maps (not all - watch for those red No-Sneaking zones) can get into the map and take their time picking enemies off one by one. During the beta, it wasn't uncommon to consider them the faction that let you solve the map in reverse, but with the nerf on release of their attackTypes, they take longer to engage and are better described as the class that will have you carefully maneuvering your dudes in ways that lets you 'backstab' enemies (or at least shoot them when they're not looking). Doctrines also don't help much, but at least you can unlock close-range burst-fire with them through a doctrine.
Their niche is:

• Being effectively invisible via 'Playing Civilian' - Undercovers can do this at will, Black Ops need a Poncho item to do this and can only uncover themselves once before going loud. They can use gadgets while still playing civilian as well, and they can slip
  
• Wide variety of suppressed weapons with questionable effectiveness trading off for potentially very low sound radius
  
• Highest number of ammo types, for what it's worth

The 'Scalpel' option. You have to play smart with these guys, but at least it's a fun kind of 'playing smart'. You get immediate dopamine when you successfully clear half the map with one dude.

When you first start the game, you'll more or less immediately be thrown into the two starting missions in the Path To Suck Less. This guide isn't a total walkthrough, but when you're done with those two missions, you'll have access to the ability to alter your kit mid-mission.

The two missions being completed is also important because then you can play the two campaigns from the Armadillo PMC mod. You do those, and you'll earn enough Battle Honor points to unlock the Rangers' MP5SD6 smg. I'll talk about that in a moment, but here's the mod:
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3441851058
It comes with a faction and two campaigns. I highly recommend you do Baijidu South first, then Gilded Shadow - Gilded Shadow has a number of maps that require longer ranges of engagement and the additional stars from clearing the first set of maps will let you have the gadgets you'll need to have a better time.

Since I'm mentioning Battle Honor unlocks, the items that can be unlocked through Rangers are:

• Helmet: Next-Gen Helmet, 2 Battle Honor points (blocks AK bullets)
  
• Vest: All-around ESAPI plates, 1 Battle Honor point
  
• Sidearm: Mk27 Mod 2 Pistol, 3 Battle Honor points (not a bad choice tbh, but pistols on Rangers are of less importance than primaries)
  
• Assault Primary: MP5SD6 SMG, 4 Battle Honor points (should be your first priority)
  
• Assault Primary: XM7 NGSW-R, 8 Battle Honor points (this can wait)
  
• Support Primary: XM338 LMMG, Battle Honor points
  
• Support Primary: XM250 NGSW-AR: Battle Honor points

Out of these, the only major item to watch for is the MP5SD6 due to it being the only primary that can get a suppressed sound radius of less than 5m - you'll need that in a few maps.

You'll separately want to save up for the PVS-31 Dual-Tube optic when you can - 10 points is a lot if you're going mission by mission and adjusting to the demands of each mission, but it comes a lot faster than you'd think once you're doing campaigns. The PVS-14 Single-Tube NVG is good enough for that early night map, but you'll have a narrower field of view.

Right, so when you have a Ranger unit, it's possible that you're like me when I first started playing, and you get overwhelmed with option overload. Allow me to help guide your thinking through a few concepts, first:

There's largely two modes of engagement to consider when you're playing this game: room-clearing levels of CQC, and the longer sightlines that one could consider the 'midfield', to use a Soccer/Fútbol term. Regardless of distance, it'd be best to have the fastest weapon to engage so that your trooper starts shooting before the enemy, potentially suppressing them and otherwise not letting them deal damage first (assuming no utility items being used to put things in your favor, naturally). As such, you don't want cumbersome weapons with slower attackTypes for roomclearing (Sniper rifles, LMGs [with a notable exception]) and you don't want to be using SMGs at longer ranges (where snipers or other long-range weapons shine). Hence the CQC vs Midfield split.

Please note that there are multiple ways to fill the role of 'CQC unit' or 'Midfielder', so if I use that term, please know that I am suggesting a trooper that's set up for a general role.

Rangers have 4 classes: Assault, Support, Marksman, and Grenadier.

• You get 8 of them. When playing campaigns, this is usually more than enough to tackle all maps at once, and if you're utilizing other troopers as well, this is usually enough to work with as troopers get injured. For normal maps, this is genuinely an excellent go-to class for virtually any task needed
  
• Assault benefit from not having to sling their weapons over their backs when using utility - they lower their rifles onto a sling and the weapons hang off the front of their bodies, making manipulating objects (jumping over windowsills, working doors, using utility items) much faster
  
• Assault get SMGs, Assault Rifles, and Battle rifles, all of which raise and lower faster than the other Ranger-classes' weapons...with a few exceptions, especially when it comes to mounting weapons and dealing with longer ranges. They have an exclusive weapon between the other classes in the MP5A5 and MP5SD6, which are excellent room clearers and are ultra short on top of that.

It therefore can be concluded that Assaults are an excellent CQC class and should be your go-to group of troopers for room clearing. They additionally have some excellent longer-range weapons in their kit to allow them into a midfield role.
There is a significant exception for the two prior sentences, but Assault can be largely thought of two roles or subclasses, chosen based on primary weapon choice: 'CQC units' and 'Midfield units'. I'll cover the exceptions shortly. - let me cover the other classes first.

In short, though, Assaults can handle almost every situation well enough, and the situations they can't, they have the utility or other weaponry they can trade in to solve issues another way.

• Support almost exclusively use belt-fed LMGs. They take a year-and-a-half to reload, but come with belt capacities of at least 100 (the XM338 is the only one that has a 50 box, mind), and innately shoot with full-auto attackTypes.
  
• Mind you, those attackTypes are significantly slow to engage verses the Assault's weapons, but this can be mitigated in two ways - putting them behind cover in which they can mount their weapon on (the LMGs switch to Mounted attackTypes) or manually selecting 'Suppressive Fire' (which still takes a manual action - it's actually faster to engage than even the Assault's attackTypes by 50 milliseconds, but the tradeoff is reaction time + inaccuracy)
  
• LMGs are also quite long, so bumping into walls causes them to lower their weapon at notably earlier / further distances, and it takes them a while to bring it back up (also important if suppressed)
  
• Their weapons are largely two-fold: 5.56 LMGs or heavier GPMGs, and their two subclasses can be largely considered divided in this manner.

It therefore can be concluded that Supports aren't so good at CQC due to their weapons being slower to fire and slower to manipulate. Don't get me wrong, LMGs are excellent...once they start firing, but unsupported they're either middling or player-attention/-action intensive, and not every map has a spot where you can place them on suitable cover that allows them to comfortably hold a sightline
Supports have two subclasses: the lighter LMG/SAW gunners that move with the squad, serving as a hybrid cqc/midfield unit equivalent, and the heavier GPMG gunners that move to a mounted location and sit there, watching a longer angle.

It isn't wise to leave a Support gunner alone. IMO I would highly recommend having a supportive Midfielder shooting along with them. This is largely because the AI will only target one enemy at a time but also helpful in case of flankers - the support midfielder with a rifle can spin around and aim/engage faster than the LMG dude can.

• There's largely two roles you can play with Marksmen: Mk17 LB Midfielder or Sniper. There's only 4 sniper rifles, so while I'll cover the other class's weapons in a later section, I'll cover the Marksman's options super quick:
  
• The Mk17 LB is notable for gaining full auto with the Close Range and Medium Range Burst Fire doctrines, and is the only Marksman primary to benefit from this change. This gives the Marksman a notable and significant flexibility in being able to handle enemies attempting to flank - while the SCAR rifles are sluggish in CQC compared to other options, the LB has the highest base crit chance (45% per bullet flat) of all the automatic rifles, so it has an excellent chance at killing a flanking enemy in up to 3 bullets (the rifle is a 3-shot-kill anyway, but may crit before reaching that third bullet)
  
• Otherwise, the M14EBR has the highest crit chance and engagement speed past 15m, but can't be suppressed
  
• The Mk20 SSR and the M110A1 SDMR are roughly equivalent and can be suppressed.
  
• Don't use the Marksman with the Squad DM Rifle. It's bad. Literally buy anything else and use that instead.

• Their weapons are slightly more sluggish (drawTime/holsterTime, lowerTime/raiseTime) versions of Assault's rifles, but they get underslung grenade launchers as their primary gimmick.
  
• 40mm grenades can be detonated either in mid-air or otherwise when they collide with something (hopefully a wall rather than an enemy rushing you through a door). This gives you essentially 5 free frag grenades with 0ms detonation time with the penalty of needing line-of-sight verses where you're lobbing the frag. There's also a degree of error in aim...and it's a projectile, so you can't shoot it between pixels and expect with 100% reliability that the explosion will make it to where you want it to go. They're great as a way to quickly open flimsy doors from afar, though.

Grenadiers therefore are an excellent all-around Midfield unit that can be pushed into a pseudo-CQC role - their 40mm grenades make them moderately less desirable to have them literally be the first trooper into a room, but they make up for their ability to (almost) instantly throw out an AoE of death. They should be second (or later) when breaching rooms if you push them into a CQC role, but otherwise serve very well as a Midfielder

The last major exception to my comment above with the Assaults being the best class for general use outright and specifically for CQC is the Faction-wide weapons of the sidearms and the M1014 Shotgun. With the shotgun, you can make any unit into a shotgunner CQC unit instead of whatever main weapon they have. It shreds, but in practice it's really only a good idea to use this on your Supports or Marksmen to give them a chance to level up - not every map needs an LMG or a Sniper rifle, and the shotgun is ultra fast to engage.

Handguns, meanwhile, are largely irrelevant with how good the Rangers' primaries are, but there's a few niches for them:

• Handguns have impercievable lowerTime/raiseTime, so if they have to lower their aim because of another trooper or a wall, they will raise their weapon back up nearly instantly. This is also important in case you need someone to open a door - if it's not possible to open a door from a safe side, then having someone with a longer weapon swap to their pistol and get the door for your CQC units to then push in (or to use their utility items like grenades) means that you still have your CQC units ready to engage immediately. Even if the dude with the pistol has to holster their pistol to manipulate the door (or gadgets), their longer primary means they'd have to likely holster that weapon anyway before doing things, so at least the faster drawTime/readyTime will get them engaging faster
  
• Handguns share with shotguns the fastest engagement time of 200ms at optimal range.
  
• Handguns unfortunately only shoot semi-auto, but at least they start shooting fast.

I'll talk about specific pistols (and frankly weapons) the Rangers get later.

Right, so let's briefly define what some of the roles you'll encounter in the game.

A CQC Unit has a weapon optimized to destroy enemies in room-to-room clearing scenarios. Their weapons are most effective within 7m (though this can extend out to 15m in a pinch)

• Assaults were made for this role with the majority of their weapons.
  
• Grenadiers can make this work if you micromanage them so their weapons don't bump into a wall. 40mm underbarrel launchers make this a bit odd to work with
  
• Supports can press into this, but require more attention to their weapons so that they don't bump into a wall - their main niche is that you can activate suppressive fire to let your Supports' LMGs start shooting quickly.
  
• Marksmen really only have the Mk17 LB to work with, and that's only if Burst Fire doctrines are selected.
  
• The M1014 shotgun is a prime CQC weapon for any trooper to press into a CQC role. It fires faster than all the Assault's primaries, though requires attention to ammo management with frequent reloading - at least the reloads can be interrupted.

Midfielders can be summarized as units whose primary weapon is not optimized for CQC clearing, and therefore will be holding longer angles while your CQC guys clear rooms. Set them up to hold hallways or use them to slice-the-pie regarding an alley or open door to check a long sightline before sending your CQC guys in to check blind spots.
Of note, Midfield weapons are explicitly to be thought of as unsupported fire with engagements generally past 7m.

• I find it wise to consider your last two units (bottom row, right 2) to have Midfield weapons such as the M4 Carbine (Normal or URGI) or even just leave them with the default M16A4 (the burstfire from the M16A4 is fantastically lethal and quick on top of that, but the rifle is kinda long).
  
• Support's LMGs are usually too cumbersome for this role, only consider it if there's at least one spot to mount their weapon
  
• Marksman rifles generally start to shine here, but the Mk17 LB with its burst fire is still king
  
• Grenadiers' default M16A4/203 is perfect for this role - not only do they need some range anyway (to keep themselves from being hit in 40mm splash damage), but they come with M16A4's off the rip anyway, making these units an ideal candidate for midfield coverage.

Firing from cover is a good idea, but not always viable due to map layout - there will be opportunities to take advantage of this, however, and it's generally a necessity for the units that can benefit from it.

• Spoiler alert, neither Assault nor Grenadiers have access to this. It'll only be Support and Marksmen doing this role.
  
• Support's machine guns should be ideally used from cover where they can benefit from mounting for attackTypes with faster readyTimes (they also shoot more bullets!). The 5.56 LMGs should be used in closer engagements while the 7.62 and heavier GPMGs should be used from further back
  
• For Marksmen, the Mk17 LB gets benefit from mounted use from roughly past 4m, but switches to semi-auto only; the other sniper rifles exclusively use semi-auto. Spoiler alert, the 5-25x scope grants effective 100% crit rate past 15m for all the other sniper rifles past 15m, making the weapon a one-shot kill for the other snipers. It's slow to engage individual targets, but should at least be able to take a few out.

There's also some subroles/tasks to keep in mind when equipping/selecting your troopers for a level that should be considered:
Pretty simple, if there's a door that needs to be opened, someone's gotta open it. You have a few options:

• Just open the door - Do this from the side if you can so you don't get shot by the enemies inside. Try to do this with someone who isn't going to be first in to the room - having a midfielder (or Support/Marksman that switched to a sidearm) open the door for your CQC units is a good call
  
• If the door's flimsy, a thrown grenade or a grenadier's 40mm will blow the door open - this will require your troopers to be far back enough to not get stunned, but also will give your troopers the ability to immediately act once the door's open.
  
• If the door's reinforced, a Slap-Charge can blow the door open for you, allowing the trooper to back up and have his
  
• Locked Reinforced doors are going to require either manually breaching with the crowbar-looking thing that the Rangers have or a slap charge.

If it is unsafe to open a door from the side, consider blowing the door clean off instead of risking damage. If no tools are available. at least have a second trooper right on the door too, ready to shoot once your trooper gets the door open (you can aim through a fellow trooper if close enough)

You get access to rockets and wall breaching charges. Don't like a room layout? Make your own entrance. Once consumed, your trooper has the weight penalty removed as well.
I personally recommend you have 2x (bottom row, left 2) Assault and all your Grenadiers have wall breaching charges - put it on there and just leave it there so you always have the option available to you.

You're not always going to want 7x frags on your troopers, sometimes you'll want slap charges for a door or want to use a spy camera to figure out if you want to use frags or flashes (say for rescuing hostages, or if there are civilians in play).
I personally recommend that whoever you give a shotgun to, you also give them triple slap charges. Gone are the days where the M1014 can breach locked doors (though there's a mod for that), and breaching charges for busting doors are a good call anyway, so since shotguns shred in CQC, you can pretty safely combine the two concepts together.
Otherwise, yeah, someone with a Spy Camera as your gadgeteer is a good call - I would recommend you give them a Midfield weapon instead of a CQC weapon, though that's a matter of preference.

Here's that shotgun lock breach mod by the way:
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3454673734

Therefore, I recommend you strongly consider the following:

• Top Row: 4x CQC Optimized
  
• Bottom Row, left 2: CQC Breachers (really they're the same as above, they just get rockets or wall breaching charges)
  
• Bottom row, right 2: Midfielders
  
• You can get away with your Assault troops not having sidearms, but you can equip whatever one you want - I'd pick one that's lightweight though

Equip your CQC dudes all with MP5A5's or Mk18 CQBRs.
Equip your two Midfielders with the default M16A4 or M4 Carbines (normal or URGI when you unlock it)

While the grenadiers essentially make for more versatile midfielders, the Assaults still have faster animations for drawing/holstering and raising/lowering weapons, so having a few Assault Midfielders assisting your Assault CQC units isn't an unwise move.
The two SCAR variants aren't enough of a bonus to be worth unlocking in my opinion, but feel free to check them out.
The XM7, meanwhile, has a faster fire rate than the SCARs, giving it a DPS edge over the SCARs and might be worth looking into. I'll put a note to check it out later.

M249 LMGs with any sidearm of your choice across the board.
Adjust to using shotguns to help them level up or in case you want more CQC guys

I recommend defaulting them to the Mk17 LB and use them as Midfielders, or equip them with M1014 shotgunners (I do 2x Mk17LB's and 2x shotguns, personally). If you want to use a better sniper for range, you're welcome to swap it out.

Honestly the default M16A4/203 is good enough for general purpose use. You don't want to be pushing them into a CQC role anyway with the 40mm explosion radius, but they're flexible enough to use as pseudo-assaults.
I always give them wall-breaching kits as well and try to find ways to slap one into every mission I can.

If you really want a sidearm upgrade over the M9, either go M1911 for raw power (fewer rounds) or G22 for a slightly more modest crit crate increase but more ammo. G22 does the same damage as the M1153 ammo that 9x19mm get and also get a better crit chance.

While this is just my opinion for setting the dudes up, your mileage may vary on some of the individual weapons, and as such I welcome you to experiment - however, having to equip 20 troopers is a bit overwhelming, so this is why I made this guide. Huge shoutout to this guide for helping me get this level of focus and optimization going:
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2900410474

5.56x45mm and 9x19mm weapons get a number of choices between ammunition types, but I'll just let you know it's best to use the 3rd option available for the Rangers, the Mk318 62gr SOST Ball for 5.56x45mm weapons and the M1153 147gr JHP for 9x19mm weapons - this includes the HK MP5SD6, as the heavier rounds have the smallest sound radius.
The ammunition type does more damage but has a lesser critical chance - while the reduced critical chance sucks, it brings all weapons that use it into a 3-shot-kill damage threshold within something like 18 meters (varies depending on the weapon) for normal enemies, making a lot of the auxiliary primary choices (notably the battle rifles) obsolete/obsolescent due to faster engagement times, fire rates, and capacity.

SAPI plates are good enough against AK weapons. Some weapons use armor piercing rounds (SR-3M or SVD, etc), and that's where you want to break out the ESAPI plates.
Don't ever use Soft Armor Only, or any armor that uses anything less than III plates (will be relevant with the CIA faction), enemies almost exclusively use AK weapons, there's VERY few SMG or pistol enemies and it's not worth under-equipping yourself (with some exceptions, namely CIA's ability to sneak past enemies, but that's not now)
CQC units can get away with using Raid vests, and I personally recommend it to keep them light.
Consider the Extended Vest / SAPI vest for anyone that will be shooting stationary - Supports or Marksmen, namely, especially if they're going to be sitting behind cover. To compensate for their lack of mobility, have them sprint from cover to cover - the mobility penalty doesn't have notable effect on sprinting.

For Assault, the Holo Sight is the fastest CQC optic and surprisingly gives good speed increase out to even 50m, making it good enough for range use, but consider a LVPO if you need to have your midfielder shoot past 20m - that's roughly the distance where the Holo Sight becomes slower than the longer range optics. If weight is a factor (there's some 8 mobility spawns), then your Midfield Assaults should use a Combat Optic 4x.
Grenadiers don't get the higher level optics, so either pick the Holo Sight or the Combat Optic 4x - it's unlocked by default, and in fact I recommend you slap it on everything; there's no penalty for using it, though there's no bonus within 7m either.
Supports again should either choose the Holo Sight if expected to take engagements within 20m, or the MG Optic 6x if expecting to take on targets past 20m. If you can keep the enemy between 5m and 30m, though, the M145 MG Optic 3.4x is an option too. Considering you have either 5.56x45mm SAWs or heavier GPMGs, i'd personally pair the M145 optic with the SAWs and the 6x with the GPMGs.
Marksmen optics largely depend on your choice of rifle - for the Mk17LB, the default Combat Optic 4x is good enough, though consider a Dual Role Optic 1/4x if you want some better engagement times within 7m. The dedicated sniper rifles should always take the LR Optic 5-25x, as it gives a MASSIVE critical chance buff past 15m, enough to make all the snipers a one-shot no matter what (100% Critical hit).
Shotguns should obviously pick the Holo Sight.

One final note before going into the next class is suppressor use. Some times you'll need to slap on suppressors for certain maps (for example, Stop Execution maps), and unfortunately the Rangers don't get many options, but the most important option is the Assault's MP5SD6 they get (costs 4 Battle Honors). You can suppress their primaries, but enemies can still largely hear the weapons if they're fired within 45m (most of the maps are smaller than this).
Your real only other option on the Rangers is the Mk27 Mod 2 handgun, but that costs Battle Honors as well and is a sidearm so it's not exactly... the best of ideas to work for first.

In terms of priority, I would recommend:

• First purchase with stars should be the MP5A5 SMG for Assault
  
• Second and Third priority should be either the M1014 or the Mk17 Long Barrel, put the Mk17 on Marksman to help them be useful, and the shotgun can be used on anyone but I recommend Support/Marksman units to help them have something to do.
  
• Buy the Holo Sight when you can. Red dot is fine for 1 star too
  
• Save up for the 10 point PVS-31 Dual-Tube NVG, it's 10 stars
  
• Wall breaching charges, Spy Camera, and Bolt Cutter are decent options as well as the 3x throwables
  
• Everything else is more or less giving you more options that already fill the niches you want.

So now we're getting into the territory of theory crafting for how to move your troopers around to clear maps. This will be an acquired skill once you have more experience with the game, but let me at least give you the strategy that I know works.

In order from closest range to furthest, here's what I recommend you mentally categorize your units, followed by in what situations to use them.

CQC Units have SMGs, Shotguns, or other short-barreled weapons that engage faster than the enemy can react (300ms is the shortest amount of time enemies have - Rangers can match this, though handguns and the M1014 is superior at 200ms). Their role is to eliminate enemies within 7m as fast as possible.
Midfielders have longer weapons and can effectively engage enemies past 7m. This is useful for watching hallways or the sides of buildings. Their role is to provide accurate and fast fire between 5m and 15m, but can also effectively engage out to 45m - they're not the best at these extended ranges, but they can engage. More importantly though they can do this without being forced to mount on cover.
Mounted units require cover to be effective, and even then their engagement speeds are slow enough that they can't be effective vs the closer-quarters weapons until the 15m threshold. These are your LMGs and Sniper units. Mounted units are limited to whatever cover they can find, but once they get there they can lock down an angle/alley/hallway with the best of them.

In buildings, use midfielders to engage chokepoints first, then push rooms with your CQC units until you have the room cleared. You can keep your Midfielders in the back, watching closed doors in case anyone decides to investigate all the noise.

When outdoors, use Midfielders to assist your Mounted units into position - Midfielders can fire effectively when not mounted, so use them to cover the mounted units, then use them in conjunction with the Mounted units in order to clear an area. They can then maneuver with your CQC element(s) to clear buildings while your mounted units hold the extended lines of sight.

In terms of distance, I'd recommend you think in terms of:
CQC Units - Midfield Riflemen - Mk17LB Marksmen/M249 Supports - Snipers/GPMG Supports
...with the special note that the M249 is actually light enough to bring into buildings or serve as pseudo-Midfielders (or even help clear rooms!) thanks to suppressive fire - just keep in mind you have to manually activate suppressive fire, and that's a level of manual control that might be too cumbersome.

In terms of selecting units for a match, it's always best to start with picking out units with dedicated roles that need to be filled first:

• If there's nearby mountable cover, consider bringing in a Support unit and putting him on that cover so that they can lay waste to anything they see.
  
• Consider any walls that can be breached that you'd really like to bust through to carve your own path, and pick units that you might want to bust through
  
• Check for locked doors and make a plan on whether you want to use a breaching tool (the Rangers get that crowbar-looking Halligen bar), a slap charge, a 40mm explosive, a rocket, etc.
  
• When in doubt, Grenadiers make good Midfielders
  
• When all your supportive roles are picked out and you still have room for more people, you can safely fill the rest of your go-team with Assaults.

Allow me to offer an example of 'Fire and Maneuver' in a way that might help explain what I'm talking about.
We will be using the mission 'Killing Time' from the 'FNGs Welcome' mission group.
Here we have four troopers, each selected to perform certain roles.

• Immediately south of spawn is a locked door. After the initial volley of fire, I know that enemies will kick that door open and pour in, so leaving someone behind to stare at that door (in case of further flankers) is a good call. I have the trooper with the cyan outline with an LMG - i'm going to back him up around the other side of the car, as I don't know if the specific angle he's looking at will be mounted if he shoots at the soon-to-be-opened door.
  
• In the middle of the map out in the open are 3 enemies. Anyone can kill them.
  
• In the bottom right room, there's a flimsy door - inside it is an enemy with great reaction time, so I need to be careful busting the door open. There's also a flat wall that can be breached through, but on this save, I don't have enough star points to purchase a wall breach - one can breach through the northern wall.
  
• The darkest room on the map is going to have its windows get busted open in the shooting (Yellow trooper) so my idea is to breach into there. A CQC Assault trooper would be ideal for jumping through the window.

As such, the 4 troopers I've chosen are:
1x Support M249 (Cyan Outline)
2x Assault MP5A5 (Yellow, Orange Outlines)
1x Grenadier M16A4/203 (Salmon-colored Outline)
As expected, with the three enemies now having been dealt with, the yellow trooper shot the curtain out, and there is now a visible enemy in the dark room. He's not facing us, as he's pointed towards the door that he'd have to path through in order to get to the 'noises' he's hearing. This doesn't change our strategy in who we choose to bring into battle, but who doesn't like a little bit of commentary, eh?
Yellow deals with the enemy in the dark room, and Cyan is now pointing his weapon over the car (getting the mounted bonus) right in time for the garage-area door to open.
Cyan eliminates the first enemy that was curious enough to open the door, followed by a second one that pushes immediately after (marked 1 and 2).
Orange is first in position to the Dark room, only to see another enemy (marked 4) in the same dark room where we shot the other guy (marked 3)
At this point a 3rd guy (marked 5) has rushed out and Cyan eliminates it.
I'm intending to move Orange over to the room on the mid-right (marked with a question mark) when the door suddenly opens.
My intentions are to have Salmon the Grenadier aim down both the circled door that's being opened and the door south from there - he's got a longer accurate rifle, so he can hold the longer angles just fine.
Orange will check the question mark room, while Yellow moves in from the now cleared dark room.
Good thing I didn't push! There's another enemy in that room, and Salmon Grenadier saw that the room I previously marked with a question mark has its door open, so the enemy must have came through the open door (marked with an X) and then opened the door leading outside.
This is a primary point for why the concept of Midfielders holding lines of sight is important - Salmon Grenadier was watching the door that Yellow is in front of, and an enemy opened the door for me/Yellow. Salmon was ready to engage and immediately does so at the enemy in the south room.
Orange meanwhile confirms the room I labeled with a question mark is indeed empty, confirming my theory.
This is mostly just to show the line I would draw when moving a CQC unit up. Here, I'm moving orange inside the south room - I'm intending to clear towards the west (towards my LMG guy) and get those rooms cleared before dealing with the southeast room.
In this case, our Salmon Grenadiercan't see the angles east or west of the door frame, so that's where a CQC unit comes in handy - move them in to clear those blind spots.
Here we get two pieces of important information.
First, the dead enemy on the ground was in our blindspot - good thing we sent in a fast-acting CQC unit in there.
Second, the door is open into the next room. That has a longer sightline, one that can be even longer if the door's open. It would sure suck if that door was open and there were three enemies to deal with.

We could throw a few grenades in there, but a cheaper solution would be to maneuver our Salmon Grenadier Midfielder into position to cover the sightline.
I also moved Yellow into the room. See how Yellow and Orange are not in the 'fatal funnel'? They're pointed towards the door and can handle any enemy that charges through - and speak of the devil, another enemy pushed right on through and ate lead.
You'll also notice bullets being shot at the door from inside the door on the southeast. That's typical behavior, they typically stay in there...they have tougher attackTypes to outcompete, but we'll deal with that later.
Salmon is now in position to look into the longer room...and we see an enemy with an AKS74U in there. That's a Veteran Insurgent, and is likely to-
...outshoot us, but luckily our trooper was faster on the trigger pull. That usually doesn't go so well if you have inexperienced troopers - troopers with low 'Assault Shooting' may shoot slower than enemies, and that typically means damage or death.
My next move is to prepare for the next room. Salmon will be able to see out the window from the location i stopped him at (I didn't input an order for him to look that way), while Yellow will push into the next room and stop at the door.
Orange stays back in case I'm wrong about enemies busting through that door.
Turns out there was an enemy just outside Cyan's line of sight.
And he's swiftly dealt with. Luckly the angle Salmon ended up with had the enemy in his line of sight. If I angled his movement path wrong, he could be facing the wall - and facing death.
Yellow gets into position and notices the far door open. And look what we have here, an enemy has rushed into the room alongside Yellow.
He gets a face full ot buttsock and 9x19mm for his trouble.
After checking the rest of the parking area, I decide checking that small room isn't worth my time and chuck a frag.
No hits...that means the last enemy is in that room.
Immediately before taking this picture, I commanded Salmon to use a 40mm at the door. Orange is within range of the stun radius, so he runs back.

One of the few times saying 'Oops' doesn't lead immediately to death. That's another thing about 40mm though, if you don't feel like going up to it and kicking it, a 40mm grenade (or a hand grenade) will blow doors open for you. Mind the splash.
I've highlighted the enemy in the right, as he's visible - you can see a second enemy in the smoke as well.
Haha, the Veteran got suppressed.
First enemy dead.
A split second later, Orange shoots a second volley of his SMG and kills the Veteran. Mission complete.

The moral of this section is to maneuver your dudes into situations where they're optimal. Rangers are generally better on the draw at range than enemies, but you will have to clear rooms too, so make sure you minimize exposure to range for your CQC guys, and keep your Midfielders at a suitable range where they can work their magic.

I also highly recommend you alter names to match their roles - for example, name your Assaults CQC1, CQC2, CQC3, CQC4, Breacher1, Breacher2, Midfield1, Midfield2; name your supports LMG1, LMG2, etc; Marksmen: Mrksmn1, Mrksmn2, etc; based on their intended role.

This one took me a while to consider, but I figured I'd at least cover it. There's another person that did an entire guide on it, let me link it:
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3442650842

[he]Handgun Section:[/he]
Lowest priority. Select Short Range drills followed by Shot Placement if you're going to be pushing a LMG Support or DMR/Sniper Marksman into a CQC role and want to mess with handguns.
Technically, Controlled Pair is pretty good too due to faster fire rates and higher crit chances, but it's not worth it in my opinion.

While technically the Burst-Fire doctrines aren't mandatory, they're incredibly helpful in mowing down enemies faster - by default, Rangers shoot non-LMG weapons semi-auto, so shooting full auto is a neat change that gives all weapons a bit more oomph. Notably, the Marksman's Mk17 Long Barrel rifle gains access to Burst Fire through these doctrines too, so they go from liabilities in close quarters to being actually quite decent with it.
Surgical Shooting is otherwise the thing to get, as it boosts crit chance by a flat +20% up to 15m and +10% from there out to 25m. Regardless of semi-auto or burst-fire, this is the Doctrine to get. Please note that this only applies to 'Rifles and DMRs' - the equivalent for pistols is 'Shot Placement' (only out to 7m)

Everything else is pretty self-explanatory, pick what sounds good.

We'll cover specific weapons for different roles next, starting with the Rangers.

The Assault class are troopers that will be your bread and butter for most missions - 90% of the game is built for Rangers to be suitable for, and 90% of those can be cleared without any of the weapons the other classes offer. Still, there's a degree of flexibility in how you can equip your Assault troopers, and there's roughly two niches that their weapon choices fall into: CQC and Midfield.

Now I've glossed over this several times, but a CQC weapon is optimized for room clearing in that the weapon is short (less chance to bump into a wall when rounding a corner, has fast raise/drop times (in case you bump into something, it'll come back up quickly - also helps vs suppression), fast aimTimes (slower means the enemy has a chance to shoot first after all).

The options for CQC weapons on Assault include:

• Handguns, notable as an option for Marksmen/Support when moving within a building - handguns get the fastest CQC aimTimes (200 ms with 'EmergencyFire' and 'ControlledPair')
  
• M1014 Shotgun, which shoots modestly faster than SMGs or rifles (300ms)
  
• MP5A5 and MP5SD6
  
• Mk18 CQBR
  
• M4 Carbine is a good 'flex' weapon between CQC and Midfield

I wouldn't go any heavier than this unless you wanna mess with the SCAR-H CQC, but regardless of what you pick (excluding handguns and the M1014), they'll all start shooting 350ms after your trooper spots an enemy, not accounting for the penalty or bonus that their Assault Shooting stat offers.

In this case, let me share all the speed and accuracy stats of the Assault Class's primaries:
Now I didn't bring it up before but the URGI is roughly a modest upgrade over the M4 Carbine. It has a slightly slower fire rate but is modestly quicker on semi-auto fire and with other handling stats.

Aside from the handguns and the M1014 being modestly faster to begin attacking within its fastest attackType, what matters for CQC weapons is its readyTime and guardTime - how fast the weapon is raised and lowered in case there's an obstacle in the way. Handguns have readyTimes and guardTimes in the sub-100ms range, so they're lightning quick to draw back out in case you turn around and the game detects that something's too close or in case you're rounding a corner and are pre-aiming an enemy and the like - your trooper pays the readyTime and guardTime in milliseconds every time the weapon is lowered and then raised - this also applies when the trooper is suppressed too, so a lighter weapon is important.

This makes the Mk18 CQBR almost a complete upgrade over the base MP5A5 on paper, being more accurate and faster to deploy.

Allow me to compare the MP5A5 and the Mk18's attacktypes together - I'll throw in the Mk17CQC as well.

When you have no points, all three shoot with the attackType Rangers_RapidFire, with the MP5A5 and the Mk18 shooting to 7m and the Mk17CQC shooting this out to 5m. This attackType always engages after 350ms and shoots at least 2 shots and continues shooting until the target is downed at 7 shots per second. Technically this is the one point where the Mk17CQC shines, as its base damage and crit rate is the highest.

From 7m to 12m for the MP5A5 and from 7m to 15m for the Mk18, both weapons use Rangers_RapidFireMed; the Mk17CQC is using Rangers_RapidFireMedHeavy from 5m to 14m. _RapidFireMed and _RapidFireMedHeavy start shooting at its closest range at 350ms and at its upper range at 600ms, and will fire 2-4 shots at a rate of 6 shots per second for the MP5A5 and Mk18, while the Mk17CQC will shoot at 5 shots per second and will shoot 1 to 4 shots. If the programmed number of shots isn't enough, the game will wait the amount of time dictated by 'resetTime' (150ms) before rolling another number of shots and shooting again. There's a notable +20 crit chance for this attackType as well, making it an reasonable option to not to take the Medium Range Burst Doctrine, incidentally.

From there, all three weapons are using Rangers_CarbineAimedFire - the MP5A5 out to 20m, the Mk18 out to 35m, and the Mk17CQC out to 39m. This shoots after 600ms to 900ms of aimTime at a rate of 2 shots per second in groups of 1 or 2 shots.

Suffice it to say, don't be using the MP5A5 (or the MP5SD6 past 12m if you can help it.

Things change a bit if we add in the Short Range Burst doctrine, as now we're comparing weapon fire rates against bullet damage - DPS now applies a lot more.

The MP5A5 will use _SMGAutoFire out to 4m and _SMGBurstFire out to 7m.
The Mk18 will use _CarbineAutoFire out to 3.5m and _UnregBurstFire out to 7m.
The Mk17CQC will use _CarbineAutoFireHeavy out to 4m, followed by _UnregBurstHeavy out to 5, then again to 7m (It's listed twice for some reason idk why)

_SMGAutoFire shoots 3-9 rounds, _CarbineAutoFire shoots 2-6 rounds, and _CarbineAutoFireHeavy shoots 1-4 rounds after 350ms (same time as the base semi-auto version) before enacting a resetTime in case that wasn't enough rounds in the first volley - this makes the MP5A5 unique in that with the right ammo (M1153) it is very likely to not only snag a 1-spray kill against its first target, but it may continue to shoot enough rounds to transfer to the target behind what it's aiming at. It's a bit of a toss-up for the Mk18 (even with the best ammo, SOST, having a possible 2 round burst may mean your trooper needs to fire again too), but the Mk17CQC might only shoot one bullet and need to roll the dice for another volley of rounds.

Things get a bit more interesting, so i'll include the next set along with the medium range burst modes.

For the MP5A5, _SMGBurstFire shoots at 350ms regardless of distance (4m-7m), and then switches to _SMGBurstFireLong, where the maxAimTime is 600ms at 12m. It shoots 3 round bursts regardless of distance. In case _SMGBurstFireLong needs to shoot again, the reset time is 200ms, which is blisteringly fast.

For the Mk18, it shoots 2-3 rounds at similar aimTime constraints and has a 450ms resetTime (13m max this time)

For the Mk17CQC, it shoots 1-3 shots and has a whopping 550ms resetTime

In summary, the Mk17 CQC or STD (modest improvement in damage range and 5% crit chance buff at the cost of being slightly more cumbersome) is probably your best rifle for CQC until you activate the BurstFire Doctrines. Once you have that online, the MP5A5 holds its own as being something of a bullet hose - even if it doesn't kill in one burst, it'll start shooting again super quick. The Mk18 CQBR seems to be a slightly more agile sidegrade - with SOST ammo it becomes a 3-shot kill as well, whereas the MP5 with M1153 ammo is only a 4-shot kill.

Or just use the shotgun lol

The M1014 uses Rangers_SAShotAimedFire out to 7m and _SAShotAimedFireLong out to 14m.

_SAShotAimedFire shoots after an aimTime delay of 300ms to 400ms (which is notable because it becomes slower than the other rifles past 3.5m), fires once with a reset time of 100ms (not long enough to matter, as its base firerate is slower than this, effectively making this a 'shoot until it drops' attackType).

_SAShotAimedFireLong shoots after an aimTime delay of 400ms to 900ms (The rifles don't get this slow until roughly 40m or so, give or take), and will fire once every other second if the first shot doesn't kill.

Mind you, the M1014 as a 12% crit chance from just its ammo alone PER PELLET (it has 9 of them!) at 0m - slap an optic on it and you've got yourself a one-shot kill weapon almost out to 12m.

Now look, I don't recommend putting the M1014 on the Assaults specifically, I instead recommend giving it to a Support or Marksman to act as a pseudo-cqc unit / breacher, and save your Assaults for using automatic weapons instead.


I should also separately note the MP5SD6 - it's the only real option your rangers have for a suppressed weapon with any notable degree of quietness (ignoring the M9 sidearm - just don't, please), and it benefits from the same burstFire doctrines / attackTypes that the other automatics use.

Otherwise, the M4 Carbine and the URGI do more or less what the Mk18 does, just being slightly slower to pull back up if you bump a wall while also being significantly better at midrange. If you want to just equip one gun for all your Assaults, you won't be too worse for wear giving them all M4 Carbines.

The last option is the default M16A4. It's notable for shooting 3-round bursts at lightning speeds (Burst Fire doctrine required), and with the SOST ammo, it's a VERY reliable one-burst kill out to like 18m (i did the math elsewhere in the guide). It's agonizingly slow to bring back up, however, but will serve you very well as you learn the game. I generally leave the Grenadiers with the default M16A4/203's and use them as my midfielders whereas I optimize my Assaults for CQC, though.

Let's talk about optimizing your troopers for the Midfield next.

So assume for a moment that you've decided to go with MP5A5s for your CQC Assault dudes for a specific map, or maybe you've got a shotgun in there too for good measure.

They're gonna get outgunned at ranges past 7-12m, right?

Well that's where you're going to want to bring a trooper with a longer-range weapon to cover the longer sightlines. This is where the 7-25m range is important to have a weapon with good effectiveness.

Now don't get me wrong, 12m is quite a ways away - you'll still be doing good work with even the MP5A5's.
As you can see, the majority of distance here from the trooper on the left is well within reach of the dead enemy by the center of the map (see the 8-point star fountain?).

There will be situations however where maps will ask of longer sightlines than this, and it's best to have a weapon that isn't degrading to 900ms (M1014) or even 600ms (MP5s) before beginning to shoot.

Here's an example of a map where you might want to consider attacking at longer ranges:
This is 'Tuff Nut Crackers' from the mission set 'LEAD THE WAY'. There's a number of enemies around the sandbags and cars in the middle-right portion of the map, and as you move troopers to the northern building, you'll have to take on enemies behind the barrels to the top-left and more showing up from inside and from the far-left outside of the building, not to mention enemies reinforcing from the southern building - there will be multiple chances to engage enemies past CQC range.

Ranger rifles universally switch to variants of _CarbineAimedFire from roughly 15m to 45m, dependent on the rifle, but you also have to consider accuracy - too inaccurate of a weapon and you'll actually start missing shots. I personally believe the Mk18 to be the minimum amount of accuracy needed for roughly 15m, as I've witnessed it missing entirely against targets even further out.

Rangers_CarbineAimedFire looks like this:

Put into words, the trooper shoots twice a second, and the attackType is rolling either 1 or 2 rounds per volley (which means the trooper might accidentally shoot one round too many before switching to the next target) with a massive accuracy penalty - but if the trooper doesn't score the kill, the next shot will be slightly more accurate.

At these ranges, the M4 Carbine might not even be enough, but the M16A4 you start with certainly is.

You also have the Marksman weapons to consider - I typically don't because they do much better when mounted, but I'll throw them in for comparison too.

Lots of random thoughts for the previous section, but in short: Midfielders use weapons that have better accuracy than the CQC weapons and are meant to hold longer sightlines from hallways to the length of a building - 5-20m or so.

This section covers what to do past 15m, and the answer is more cowbell more or less maneuvering your Midfielders and CQC units closer to the enemy as best you can, and using utility from cover to blind or kill enemies.

Or you could utilize any possible cover to mount weapons like Light Machine Guns or Marksman rifles to grant them benefits.

The Marksman's DMRAimedFire and DMRAimedFireMounted attackTypes were mentioned briefly in the previous section, let me show you a typical LMG next for comparison, the M249 SPW:

As you can see, for each range increment, there's a mounted variant. While at close quarters, even the mounted variant is slower than the standing rifles' aimTimes (an M16A4 will start shooting after 350ms - the M249 here will shoot at 450m unmounted, 400m mounted), but if I may summarize, shooting an LMG off of cover/somewhere to mount it makes them shoot faster AND they'll shoot more bullets per volley (DMRs get aimTime, resetTime, and critChance bonuses).

It is therefore my recommendation to only deploy your Supports when they would have suitable cover to shoot from...with three notable exceptions:

• Shotgun use for CQC fill / gaining EXP
  
• Having them switch to a sidearm until they get to said cover and can switch back to their LMG, say, if there's a place inside a buildng and you don't wanna micromanage the next point:
  
• Manually selecting Suppressive fire will make them shoot after 250ms in whatever cone you tell them to - they're notably more inaccurate than they would be attempting to simply kill anyone, but if you NEED to get them shooting at something 'right there' and they have their LMG out, this will get them shooting

Marksman are similar to above, but engage faster than the other rifles roughly past 20m (give or take depending on what the scope bonuses are - I don't wanna look at that right now)

It can therefore be roughly concluded that with the Rangers:

• Use CQC units within 7m, say to clear buildings
  
• Midfielders are useful between 5m and 20m
  
• DMRs start coming into play past 15m and will engage enemies reliably past that
  
• LMGs unsupported are sluggish, but you can manually tell them to shoot out a suppressive fire cone

And you definitely should be trying to move your DMRs and LMGs to cover so they benefit from the Mounted attackTypes.

I was gonna recap the roles for each class, but then I noticed that one of the new LMGs gets Mounted status when not in cover.

That would be the LAMG, but let me cover the LMGs conceptually real fast.

LMGs, like the Marksman's rifles, benefit from entering a Mounted state. In the section Rangers - Mounted Weaponry and Longer Ranged Combat I briefly covered the M249 SPW and its attackTypes.

For reference, the M240L uses attackTypes when unmounted that use a GPMG prefix:

GPMGStrafe attackTypes are universally slower to engage and fire fewer rounds per volley. This universally doesn't apply if the weapon is in cover, as none of the Ranger LMGs have anything other than LMGStrafeMounted variants, so what matters at that point is fire rate and damage (and technically magazine size is important too).

The M249, Mk48, and XM250 use LMGStrafe attackTypes, while the M240L and XM338 use GPMGStrafe attackTypes.
The LAMG uses some LMGStrafeMounted attackTypes while unmounted, pretending to be a mounted LMG out to 14m, making it a wonderful Midrange option for the Support class, as it will engage at roughly the speed that Midfield rifles will at that range (Ranger M16A4 as an example).

Let's talk Damage and fire rate though, for a moment, since every one of these weapons can theoretically be set to Suppressive Fire anyway and start chugging away after 250ms.

As you can see, the M249 is a 4-shot kill out to 75m and shoots at a whopping 13.3 rounds per second, which ties any LMG that can reach a 3-shot kill at 10 rounds per second, and it does so with 200 rounds. Any other LMG that is to compete with the M249 needs to have some niche that it can do better to be viable. Assuming all the belt guns fire at the same time, the M249 will kill in the same amount of time as the Mk48, M240L, and XM338 will, and will outshoot the LAMG.

Mind, the LAMG will start engaging faster than the M249 unmounted, but only up to 14m. This isn't nothing - I did mention that this would allow the Support a Midfield option while allowing it to be flexible enough to move on and off cover. Both it and the M249 have a crit rate of 15% per bullet, ignoring attackTypes (there's really only one that grants bonus crit, but it's only for like a spread of 4-7m, and it's only +3%, so really, DPS counts a little more). You also get some mobility back, so it's something of a lightweight alternative to the M249, so trying to min-max for those '8-mobility spawns' gives you a little more leeway here.

The XM250 is roughly the only straight upgrade that you can look forward to unlocking after you get your MP5SD6 via Battle Honors. It's got a modestly reduced fire rate, notably smaller belt size, but has a damage increase in close quarters and retains it out at range. On top of that, the XM250 enjoys longer effective range for its Mounted attackTypes, being effective out to 65m while the other 7.62x51mm/338 LMGs taper off at 60m. You enjoy a 24-20% crit chance as well.

The XM338 enjoys a guaranteed 3-shot kill...at the cost of a 50 belt. You at least get a 30\-25% crit chance,

The Mk48 a lighter M240L with shorter damage falloff before it becomes weaker than the M249. The Mk48 has its damage dropoff at around 23m while the M240L has a damage dropoff around 32m. The Mk48 doesn't weigh you down any more than the M249 does, but the M240L will slow your trooper down.

With the exception of the LAMG's notable Midrange role, all these LMGs do roughly the same thing - you get to spray a bunch of bullets at your enemies, for better or for worse. This isn't all that useful when the enemies are shooting back - you have to deal with being suppressed yourself, after all, but there is a mod that genuinely gives LMGs a practical use-case:

https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3295504824
Yes, a zombie mod. It's a nice change of pace, to be honest, it emphasizes using longer engagement ranges and weapons with heavier calibers, as it invites weapons with innately high critical rates to instantly kill the zombies as an equally if not more effective method than just DPS'ing the enemies down.

I noticed that the heavier LMGs in particular do well against the zombies - my brief time with the Nowheraki SWAT has led me to believe that the PKM machine guns they get are notably more effective than the M249's in chewing through zombies - likewise, with the Rangers, the Mk48 (22% crit), XM250 (24-20% crit rate), M240L (22% crit rate) and XM338 (30-25% crit rate) might have their time to shine while using this mod.

For general gameplay though, I'd stick with the M249 for mounted use or the LAMG for Midfield use.

Right, so now that I've defined the three 'Roles' [CQC, Midfield, Mounted], how do you use these units to clear maps?

Well certainly you point your troopers towards the enemy, don't get me wrong, the game teaches you that well enough.

Allow me to share an example of a map where all three sets would very easily come into play.

This is 'A PAIR OF EIGHTS' from the mission pack 'DECK OF CARDS'.

As you can see, there's a VERY long line of sight - in the dark on top of that - where it is certainly viable to set at least one Support with an LMG and/or one Marksman with a DMR and scoot them up to one of the vehicles and have them face to the right of the map - enemies will reinforce from the center of the map or the top-right corner, which means your LMG Supports/DMR Marksmen will have something of a shooting gallery to engage with.

Meanwhile, you move your Midfielders and CQC guys into the two homes in the southern half of the map (I personally recommend a breacher to bust open the wall on the extreme bottom of the map to get from one backyard to the next). Use your midfielders to hold longer angles while you push into the individual rooms with the CQC guys. Pretty simple, so long as you watch potential flankers.

Just remember, you peek doorways ('slice-the-pie') with your midfielders before clearing rooms / blindspots with your CQC guys whenever possible - and also the Rangers' handgun options begin engaging faster than any of the primaries, so you're welcome to consider that as well.

I already did a deep-dive on the weapons later on in the guide, but I might erase that in a later revision. Enjoy the braindump through the prior versions...or don't, I'll summarize here. Bolded weapons are my personal suggestions.

You really should be using these guys for CQC, but there's enough of them to have flex for Midfield use if you want.

CQC Weapons: M1014 Shotgun, MP5A5, Mk18 CQBR, M4 Carbine works as an All-Arounder
Midfield Weapons: M4 Carbine/URGI, M16A4, Mk17 STD could work since it has a base 40% crit chance

Notes:
MP5A5 is my pick the best CQC weapon due to bullet count per spray. Mk18 CQBR can work with SOST ammo but I've had it far too many times only shoot 2 rounds before and the enemy survives, only to shoot back.
I prefer the M16A4 for Midfield work, but you can save that for the Grenadiers, so that gives the M4 Carbine or Mk17STD as Midfield options - I personally think the M4 is 'good enough' for midfield use, and is agile enough to be used to clear rooms in a pinch.
Mk17CQC is more or less a straight downgrade to the Mk17STD in every way that matters, and while it matches the M4 carbine in agility, it shoots fewer rounds and I run into the situation that matches my disappointment with the Mk18 CQBR. At least with the Mk17 STD it has a better damage range and better crit chance. UPDATE: XM7 is roughly on par with 5.56 rifles using SOST ammo but has better penetration, and outclasses the Mk17 CQC in every way that matters.
The MP5SD6 is notably more sluggish on readyTime/guardTimes, but if you're needing a suppressed weapon, there's really not another choice, so it's at least worth mentioning that it exists.
M1014 Shotgun is best used with Support/Marksman due to the exclusivity of automatic rifles on Assault.

Use their default M16A4/203, give them SOST ammo, and enjoy 1-bursting enemies within 15m. You got 40mm otherwise.
Their other weapons are mobility and raiseTime/guardTime downgrades to Assault's equivalents, but notes regarding those weapons also apply if you really wanted to switch off the best overall weapon in the game.

Use past 20m if you can't get them into cover.

Pseudo-Midfield Weapon: Mk17 Long Barrel due to autofire up to 10m
DMR Loud: M14EBR due to longer range
DMR "Suppressed": Mk20 SSR - it is otherwise mostly identical to the M110A1 but has a sound radius of 37m when suppressed vs the M110A1 having a sound radius of 47.

They can be pressed into CQC roles if you give them a M1014 shotgun.

Psuedo-Midfielder: LAMG
General Purpose LMG: M249

LAMG has statistically lower DPS than the M249, but requires less micromanagement while pushing rooms - by this I mean you can tell the LMG dude to use Suppressive Fire to start shooting faster than the LMGs would normally be able to shoot - it outshoots all attackTypes excluding handguns as is, but requires the trooper to stand still...and is moderately inaccurate. The LAMG pretends to be mounted up until 14m though, so you as long as you can keep your LAMG from getting lowered (by bumping into walls or troopers), it makes for a great bullethose while indoors.

Otherwise just use the M249 if you want a belt gun.
Everything else is essentially sidegrades with downsides. The XM250 is almost a pure upgrade over the M249 for normal use though, buy it when you can.

You will unlock the Nowheraki SWAT after completing 10 single mission maps. I personally recommend downloading the Spiny Stubbles mods, the first few maps are pretty simple and will let you have a larger set of options that aren't just the FNGs Welcome section.
Here's the steam workshop page for Spiny Stubbles.
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3424828428
They also have a number of CQC-only campaigns you could check out - it's helpful for grinding EXP for different factions without getting too complicated.
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3428359734

Once you have the 10 single missions completed, you get access to the Nowheraki SWAT faction.

I've heard the Rangers be called the 'Hammer', and the CIA the 'Scalpel' approach to the game. If that's the case, the Nowheraki SWAT are roughly the 'Bulldozer' approach - slow, clumsy, inaccurate, but if you absolutely feel the need to bust open every wall possible, they have the tools to make it happen, and immediately following that, they can unleash a hail of bullets against their enemies.

Nowheraki SWAT are something of a weaker faction verses the Rangers, using volume of fire, wall breaches (and rockets), and a unique Militia class (half deployment cost, though notably worse) to have even more troopers shooting bullets downrange.

Once you unlock the Nowheraki SWAT, just click the SQUADS button on the top right of the main menu.
Once you have your second faction, you'll have to click on the faction (it'll highlight in white) in order to check the different factions' troopers out.

You get 1x Leader, 8x Assault, 2x Sappers, and 12x Militia.

The Nowheraki SWAT faction is...underprivileged. See anything missing in the starter kit?

They don't start with armor. It costs 4 Stars from clearing single missions for everyone to get Front-plate only ('Single SAPI Plate') for the Leader/Assault class, and you have to pay AGAIN for Militia - and for THAT one you need 2 Battle Honors!

Actually, since I mentioned Battle Honors first for Rangers, let me go over the Battle Honors options for SWAT too:

• Leader can get an AK-47M SF Carbine for 3 Battle Honors - it's mediocre at best
  
• Assaults can get a G3 Battle rifle for 3 Battle Honors
  
• Assaults can get a HK21E MG for 4 Battle Honors
  
• Assaults also get shields, and a LvIV Shield is 8 Battle Honors
  
• All non-militia classes can get a HS-45 Pistol for 4 Battle Honors
  
• All non-militia classes can get Martyr's Armor, which gives a speed boost for 1 Battle Honor
  
• All non-militia classes can get ESAPI / SAPI Combo for 5 Battle Honors
  
• Low Cut Helmets are available for the Leader and Assaults for 8 Battle Honors
  
• Head Rig / PVS-7 NVG is a head option for 3 Battle Honors
  
• Apparently there's multiple ammunition types that can be bought with Battle Honors as well. 9x19mm has M1153 147gr JHP as an example, giving the Nowheraki SWAT a base damage and crit bonus to the APC9 K as well as letting them get subsonic ammo for suppressor use

It's not looking great off the bat for SWAT, but if you think about it, do you really need to have full plates? One in front is enough, right? At least it's only 4 stars...

So with the Rangers, there's essentially two weapons that could be largely considered the best weapons in the game (if played right):

The M16A4 with SOST ammo was as fast to engage as all the other CQC weapons (minus the shotgun and handguns) and killed in one 3-round burst. I cannot emphasize enough how good this weapon is - in fact, I have earlier incarnations of this guide later on that glorify this weapon quite well.
The M249 (when mounted) makes the majority of weapons obsolete once it gets firing, and can even shoot faster than the M1014 shotgun if you tell the trooper to use Suppressive Fire. The XM250 is almost a straight upgrade, but 200 rounds takes a lot longer to chew through.

Both weapons are available to the Nowheraki SWAT, as well as a new contender for overall best weapon in the game, the APC9 K.

Admittedly its damage is kinda lame, going from 21 to 19 (at 50m - crosses to the 6 shot threshold at 25m), but its fire rate is a blistering 18.3 rounds per second.

Its attackTypes are excellent too (So long as you don't select the Fast Fire doctrine]

Ignoring the _Rifle556FastFire, _smgAimedFire, and _CarbineAimedFire for now, since they all are semi-auto:

Enabling Burst Fire doctrines improves the SMG from using _SMGUntrainedAutoFire to _SMGControlledBurst. Up until 25m:
And then from 25-31m

Let me put it to you this way: within 25m, by default your APC9 K dude is shooting out the required 5 bullets to kill no matter what, and if he misses a bit, he's likely doing a good deal of suppression to the enemy. If you don't invest in the Burst Fire doctrines, they'll just keep shooting until the enemy's dead (within 25m i mean), and with it activated, you're getting accuracy buffs and reduced aimTimes - 2 points brings _SMGControlledBurst to 350ms, which is on par with the Rangers, a much-needed upgrade considering the default minAimTime for Nowheraki SWAT is generally 400ms.

I noticed that the APC9 K had effective full auto out to 25m, and then I briefly glanced at the G3 rifle that was released recently and noticed it has some good effective range too, so I really ought to do them some justice and go through all the guns, and I can't do that in one hour

Instead of typing it all out here, i put it into a Notepad. Let me share you my findings:

So super quick, the Rapid Fire doctrine available kinda ruins the point to Nowheraki SWAT, I'd highly recommend you ignore that one. You want bullets and lots of them.

To that effect, while I haven't explicitly gone through the different attackTypes for anyone yet, allow me to remind you of, for example, the M4A1 on the Rangers' side of things:

The major point is 'UnregBurstFireMed' ending at 14m. This is roughly congruent with all the other Rangers' automatics (sans the machine guns).

In contrast, you'll find the first...okay, second weapon to stop shooting full auto does so at 25m, and that's on a SMG anyway (Militia's Mini Uzi), you're likely to still be shooting full auto out to 40-45m depending on the weapon!

...Mind, you need multiple doctrine points to make that autofire actually accurate, but that's still a drastic change to how you want to consider maps - instead of providing support with your midfielders and moving in with your CQC units, you'll be doing both with the SWAT troopers - they will engage with full auto at midrange, and you can always just move closer to make your dudes' inaccuracy eventually not really matter much.

And if you're missing, you're likely suppressing enemies anyway.

It's a good time. Just know that they'll probably be engaging enemies a little bit slower than you would expect with the Rangers, but at least they'll shred anything they're aimed at.

Due to the relative homogenaity of the attackTypes, what matters more is bullet damage and automatic fire rate to optimize your choices for your troopers.

The APC9 K's default ammo (M882) shoots at a blistering 18.3 rounds per second, but only does 21-19 damage (drops below 20 damage at 25m - coincidentally that's where it switches to NWS_RifleUntrainedAutoFireLong or the other super long semi-auto attackType).
It gets M1153 ammo with 5 Battle Honors - it lowers the fire rate to 17.5 rounds per second (still stupid fast), but damage is raised to 32-26 damage, making it a guaranteed 4 shot kill, ignoring armor.

The bar is super high, and on top of that, the APC9 K is available to all of your non-militia troopers, making it an excellent all-around weapon.

You know what else makes an excellent all-around weapon?
The M16A4, whether it's used by the Militia or the SWATAssault troopers shoots (at least) 3-round bursts out to 45m. Even if the bullets aren't a 3-shot kill, the M16A4 has a surprisingly decent crit rate, and one burst is likely to kill, and if not, the enemy's likely suppressed enough to not shoot back before your trooper can send another volley downrange. Honestly it's probably more useful on your Militia since your Assaults would rather be using the APC9 K or the next weapon I'm about to suggest:

The M249 is the other weapon I'd suggest you use for your Assaults whenever you can - it's actually MORE effective on the Nowheraki SWAT than your Rangers due to the respective attackTypes being further out:
Rangers' _LMGStrafeShort goes out to 4m, whereas the Nowheraki SWAT use that attackType out to 7m
_LMGStrafe goes out to 10m for Rangers, and Nowheraki SWAT use it out to 15m
_LMGStrafeMed goes out to 19m for Rangers, where NowherakiSWAT use it out to a whopping 35m!
...Nowheraki SWAT kinda go off a cliff from there, whereas the Rangers get a few additional attack types until 40m, but they're engaging slower and with fewer bullets!

And there's not many maps that need you to shoot past 35m anyway so no worries, just move closer when you can

It's because of effective engagements out to 30m or so that I recommend not worrying about trying to snipe - your only real option is the SVD, which you really need to be using while mounted - you'll get some good use out of it, don't get me wrong, but it's not a guarenteed one-shot-kill like with the 7.62x51 rifles the Rangers get. At least you'll be engaging faster in those longer engagement ranges than the Rangers would.

Don't use the shotgun or AKs, and you'll have a good time.
For reference, the AKs shoot 24-21 damage (always a 5 shot kill) at roughly 10 rounds per second - the M4 shoots 28-20 damage (threshold to 5-shot-kill at roughly 37.5m) at 12 rounds per second and is roughly equivalent anyway
RPK has same fire rate and damage as the AKs

The shotgun is inconsistent at best and takes a year to fire, and another to pump the shotgun. You NEED to switch to the 00 Buck ammo as well, so that's 10 stars you could be use for literally anything else

The G3 rifle is essentially a SCAR that shoots a little slower - the only upside is that within its first autofire attackType, it's guaranteed to shoot at least 4 rounds per burst, so anything it attacks is going down, whereas that's not true with the any of the Mk17's. You have a chance not to get that one-burst kill past 15m, but it's still 3-6 bullets with the training.

I think that covers everything but the PKM and the HK21E
The PKM is a guarenteed 4 shot kill and shoots at slightly more than 10 rounds per second (depending on ammo type you use - 7n13 shoots slightly faster and has a lslightly higher crit rate). Shoot it from a mounted position whenever possible.

The HK21E shoots 1-3 round bursts regardless of distance. Unless you're going to manually tell the dude to use Suppressive Fire, it's pretty much not worth it. Mind, it shoots at 13.3 rounds per second and does 40-30 damage (dropoff is roughly 22.5m), so it's almost like a XM250 for the Nowheraki SWAT - you just have to do that extra bit of player input.

So in short:

Sniping: SVD if you can get him to a mounted location - SVU otherwise is good enough
Grenadier: M4/203 is superior
DPS: APC9 K

LMG: M249, though PKM is a viable alternative if you're doing zombies or whatever
Otherwise: APC9 K
Shield Use: Mini Uzi sidearm

APC9 K is really your only choice here lmao

M16A4 is pretty much their best option overall honestly

To reiterate, the Nowheraki SWAT shine from 7m to about 40m. They're slightly more sluggish than the Rangers in CQC, but will continue using full auto out well past the Rangers' maximum full auto ranges, and that means enemies are being suppressed and not shooting back. Your SWAT troopers will be slightly less efficient per-bullet at killing than the Rangers, but they make up for it with volumes of fire and some other tricks like efficient inventory use when it comes to wall breaching charges.

They come into their own quite quickly, I highly recommend giving them a go!

Just don't forget you need Battle Honors for militia armor plates and some upgrades like the APC9 K M1153 ammo (not necessary imo since the APC9 K shreds so hard as is) and other options.

CIA changed a lot since the beta, mostly for the worse. They've gone from 'Fewer but better' to 'Fewer and worse'.

CIA units unlock after a whopping 30 single missions are completed, which means you can almost instantly unlock the important tools their kit offers immediately.

You get:

2x Undercover units
2x Black Ops units.

Now I'm not here to teach you how to CIA. This guy did it pretty well, though, go take a look at his guide:
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2611806579

The 4 man CIA unit is simultaneously easier to wrap your head around and a lot more complex than the other classes.

Rangers had about two niches per class with a number of tools that serve a similar purpose.
Nowheraki SWAT had about three or four niches per class, but a lot of chaff between it all, effectively making the choice pretty obvious for what to do.

CIA, inversely, has a very large number of tools but very few troopers to kit out, meaning you have to make do with fewer troopers. Luckily they can slip behind enemy lines and 'solve the map in reverse' if that's how you want to play the map. You can 'start going loud' anywhere, really, and even mix it up and go silent and move to another section of the map before continuing to cut away at your opposition.

CIA has a choice between multiple weapons, and the choice of said weapons become critically important, as sound radius becomes a critical factor between all your choices - there's a 'sneak attack' bonus crit chance that is imperative to keep alive, after all.

For Battle Honors, there's a things to consider:

• The LAMG is 6 battle honors if you so want it
  
• The Raider PDW is 5 battle honors
  
• When suppressed, you can buy 7U1 80gr Subsonic ammo for the AKS74U.

I'll have to go through the list of items, watch this space, I suppose.

There's only two units per the two classes that CIA gets, but there's still some variation on how you can kit your dudes up that's worth mentioning:

• One Suppressed Weapon, i.e. 'The Spy'
  
• Kitted-up Rifleman aka Pseudo-Cleaner Black Ops

• Psuedo-Undercover (Poncho, pistol assassination)
  
• Cleaner (use Poncho to get into position, then toss it off to 'clear the map backwards')
  
• No Poncho (Loud and Proud...or not)

Your decisions regarding CIA are significantly different than the other classes - you can afford to 'set-and-forget' loadouts with the other factions, but for CIA you have far fewer units and therefore MUST pay attention to what you want to be doing, especially since once your Black Ops dudes dump their ponchos, they can't go quiet again.

The concept of CQC vs Midfield vs Mounted weapons still apply though, but because your CIA dudes have to be ready to perform to a higher level of flexibility (since you get fewer troopers), you can't afford to have hyperspecialized offensive tools.

Mind, you can hyperspecialize your armaments, but it's antithetical to the point of CQC vs Midfield that I'm trying to emphasize for this game.

What you do with your Undercover is largely dependent if you're going to go loud or not - they get LvIII Raid Vests and an M4 Carbine, so they can play frontline soldier if you're going loud and proud with the CIA units and not worrying about stealth, but otherwise the idea is to sneak them behind enemy lines of sight and shoot the enemies from their blindspots. The game has an invisible sneak attack bonus that I don't know how it works, but supposedly it's a little bit extra to ensure your dude actually kills the dude he's supposed to - during beta, I remember a map attempt where I had an Undercover dude with the Mk IV Hush Puppy fail to kill in 4 shots, only for him to get mowed down by the guy he was supposed to be shooting.

All the same, unless you're kitting him for combat, the different suppressed pistol options are a matter of trading off sound radius for raw damage and capacity, and you'll likely find yourself switching between options depending on how badly you specifically need to land a shot vs how quiet you need to stay - they still all do roughly the same thing, being suppressed pistols. I'll of course cover weapons in greater detail later in the guide, but suffice to say 'Spy using Suppressed Weapon to Assassinate' is a niche that the Undercover gets plenty of options to choose between.

Because you only get 2 of them, using the argument of CQC vs Midfield vs Mounted weaponry is missing the forest for the trees - you have the ability to maneuver your Black Ops dudes into many more positions with Poncho use (or just using your Undercovers as mobile cameras to watch for blind spots) in order to make anything work, really - however, even with doctrine points, you're limited in what you can bring into a match, so your tactics largely fall into two categories - Poncho use or 'Loud and Proud', and that Poncho category could either be acting as a Pseudo-Undercover, reversing the role of 'Mobile Camera' and spotting for your Undercovers, only pulling out their weapon when a third enemy must be eliminated at the same time. Otherwise, bringing a heavier primary means sacrificing on gadgets or possibly even armor, so that means ensuring you get the most efficient use out of your weapon and gadget choices as possible.

You do get a few sniper rifles, a few LMGs oddly enough, and a number of rifles and SMGs, but unless a map specifically calls for it, you're likely to find two or three you particularly like and will stick to those when you can, or swap those out for a Pseudo-Undercover when you need that third quiet pistoleer doing pistol things.

Again, the CIA unit is far smaller in unit count, so it's very difficult to recommend setting-and-forgetting loadouts like what can be done easily with the other factions.

Like with the Nowheraki SWAT, it'd be better if I group the weapons up visually. I had a request for me to check out the AK105, so showing what it directly compares to might be worthwhile

The weapons can be largely consolidated into similar roles, but the biggest thing to realize is that your CIA troopers are shooting their automatic weapons in semi-auto past roughly 6m for most of their weapons that can shoot full auto - the exceptions being the PM63, Mini Uzi, and LMGs.

There's a time and a place to go loud, naturally, but because your CIA dudes are all shooting semi-auto anyway, it's best to look at raw damage for the weapons if you do go loud.

On that note, the weapons that do the most damage are the VSS Vintorez at 50 damage a shot out to 15m (SP5 ammo), the M110A1 and M1A Scout shoot at 43 damage, the Mk17STD is a 3-shot kill out to about 20m or so and shares this damage range with the Rattler unless you're using the supersonic ammo, which is a base 35 damage (3-shot kill, but ruins the stealth capabilities). You get Mk318 SOST ammo for the 5.56 rifles otherwise, which is a 3 shot kill to about 16.5m and more ammo for the rifles as well.

Pick your poison: the M110A1 is suppressable (for what good that'll do ya) and has 20 rounds, the VSS is more a CQC assassination weapon, and the Rattler, M4 carbine, and Mk17STD all lose a good amount of accuracy at range, 40 for the rattler and 50 for the M4/Mk17STD. The M1 Scout is modestly better, but only has an accuracy between 150 and 100 - doable in close quarters at least, but it's essentially a reskin of the Mk17STD that trades full auto in close quarters for crit rate past 15m.

Your CIA boys are therefore NOT marksmen...but it's worth mentioning that the M110A1 is notable for being the only real option for extended ranges - not only does it have accuracy that stays at 450, but it can equip the 5-25x scope, giving it 100% crit chance past 15m.

The SVD, by the way, has accuracy that drains from 200 at 30m down to 100 at 70m - doable for range, but don't bother.

Between roughly 6m and 15m, you'll be relying on the CIA_RifleAimedFire or either CIA_FastFireMed and CIA_FastFireHeavyMed attackTypes.

_RifleAimedFire shoots 4 rounds per second, _FastFireMed shoots 5 rounds, and FastFireHeavyMed at 4.5 rounds per second, a modest increase in speed, as well as uncapping the number of shots to be 'shoot until he dies' whereas _RifleAimedFire shoots 1 or 2 rounds before waiting a bit to shoot again.

As for close range, BurstFireClose and BurstFireHeavyClose shoot 2-4 rounds at full auto in short bursts, whereas FastFireClose shoots continuously at 6 rounds per second and FastFireHeavyClose shoots at 5 rounds per second. This is simllar to how the Rangers shoot their Rangers_RapidFireMed and _RapidFireMedHeavy attacks based on speed, but are attacking that fast only within 5-ish meters. I personally believe that shooting more bullets is better than faster semi-auto since the Fast Fire stuff only grants +4% crit chance - better to just DPS the enemies down...but even then that's only viable within roughly 5 meters.

Mind you, that's good enough for what the CIA is supposed to be doing - assassinations in extreme close quarters with suppressed weapons.

Your mid-range guns going loud, though, are at least covering. Again, M4 Carbine is pretty much your only option for your Undercover dudes, and for your Black Ops troopers you've got the Mk17STD and M1A Scout to consider as well - again, the Mk17STD gets autofire out to 5m, and the M1A scout gets questionable effectiveness with DMR attackTypes for a bonus 30% crit chance past 15m - pick whatever is suitable for your mission if you must go loud.

But I don't recommend you go loud by default. Let's talk about your suppressed options next.

Before we do, best loud pistol is the M1911 or the G22. The G22 does everything the 9mm pistols can with roughly 10% bonus crit chance, and the M1911 even better base crit and an increased damage profile and has better range than the HK45.

Also worth mentioning is the Mini-Uzi and the PM63, since they shoot full auto past 5m regardless of doctrines. I mean it's alright, but you'd be basically using them like you would a Militia with the Mini Uzi - doable, but you've got better things to be doing with your trooper. Between the two, the Mini Uzi shoots faster and doesn't fall below a 5 shot kill.

Edit: Actually the LAMG looks a whole lot better, being able to shoot as if it was mounted out to 15m. If you need to go loud with the CIA, having two dudes with these running around actually isn't a bad idea - just remember that 15m is kind of a moderately-hard limit for your dudes.
It also costs 6 Battle Honors to unlock.

For suppressed options, there's a number of options to work with, honestly:


For the ABSOLUTELY MOST QUIET WEAPON, the MkIV has a sound radius of 2m - but must be within that 2m to get its 55% crit chance.
The runner-up for most quiet weapon is the MP5SD6 with M1153 ammo at 2.5m sound radius - luckily it's a burstfire weapon, which means you get to use it to mow enemies down within 6m

Otherwise, Undercovers kind of need to pick their poison between kill-chance vs sound radius:

• The PPK only has 6+1 rounds, but has the next smallest sound radius at 3.5m while still being a pistol. With concealment doctrines, you get to carry extra kit
  
• The VSS Vintorez is a longarm with a sound radius of 3.5m - it positively wrecks, only needing 2 rounds to kill within its burst radius
  
• The G19 is otherwise an all-around handgun - 4.5m sound radius and 15 rounds go a long way.
  
• The Mk24 has an effective 68% crit chance per shot between 1.5m and 4.5m (don't get too close), but has a sound radius of 5.5m
  
• The MP5K otherwise is a surefire kill weapon, shooting more bullets than is necessary per burst, and has a sound radius of 5.5m

The Rattler is the only other reasonably effective weapon that's still super quiet when suppressed, being a 3 shot kill in close quarters, though its sound radius is 5m - somewhat of a toss-up compared to the MP5SD6 - at least the fire rate's good (13 rounds per second vs the MP5SD's 11.5)

I suppose for a midrange suppressed rifle, your only real choice is either messing with the Vintorez or pulling the AK-105 out - while average in stats, it (and the AKS74U) are the only rifles that can equip quiet subsonic rifles that the CIA gets. Someone suggested I take a look at it - you need Battle Honors for the ammo (2 of em) though.

Right, to quickly recap, CIA's firearm choices are largely to be chosen based on need of the individual mission - you have 4, so you have to stretch them to make them count.

Your loadout depends if you're going loud or not.

M4 Carbine with Mk318 SOST ammo, Raid Vest LvIII

You get a few options depending on engagement range:

• M4 Carbine with Mk318 SOST ammo is still a good go-to for indoor room clearing - 7m full auto.
  
• If you need a bit more range for your full auto, the LAMG shoots full auto all the time and gets Mounted attackTypes out to 14m!
  
• For all your sniping needs, the M110A1 is the only weapon with accuracy upwards of 200 and mimics the Rangers' rifles.

M1911 as sidearm (unless you like the G22 or whatever)

Sliding scale of lethality vs quiet, pick your poison, honestly.

• MkIV Hush Puppy has a 55% crit chance within 2m, but you'll be relying on that
  
• PPK also needs to be within 2m and you need the DoubleTap doctrine, but you get 45% crit rate with it and 3.5m sound radius regardless
  
• G19 Suppressed needs to be outside of 1.5m but within 5m to get DoubleTap9mil to bring crit rate to ~45%.
  
• The Mk24 has an effective 68% crit between 1.5m and 4.5m, but a sound radius of 5.5m.
  
• Or just use the MP5K and mow em down with like 5 bullets of full auto, lol. 5.5m sound radius
  
• The VSS Vintorez does 50 damage and shoots in burst fire within 5m, but is a rifle and doesn't take advantage of the concealed holster doctrine; it makes up for it by having a 3.5m sound radius.

• For absolute quiet, the MP5SD6 has full auto and a sound radius of 2.5m. Full auto out to 6m.
  
• Otherwise, the AK 105 Alpha gets a 4m sound radius, full auto out to 8m and decent semi auto fire out to 24m for your more midrange attacks.

Regarding Poncho use, you'll have to experiment with what keeps you concealed, as the amount of kit you can bring with you before becoming suspicious changes depending on your gear/doctrines.

This should get you started, though.

Factions - brief overview and when to use which
Factions - Briefly cover each trooper class and introduce subclasses
For Each Faction - Divide weaponry up into niche and compare within each niche

Rangers: 1st Pass is done. Considering writing a Weapon Deep-Dive, especially with the weapons that were released with the 1.0 version like the XM7 and XM338/XM250. I'll do that in the gear deep-dive section, whenever I get around to that.

Nowheraki SWAT: 1st pass is done. Surprised at how effective the M4 is with SWAT, might reconsider my weapon suggestions. Should look into that.

CIA: Just unlocked, gonna go through it

Overhaul the outdated sections of the guide as well

Prelude: I am currently adding information regarding the full release [v.1.09 upon editing], but earlier version is included for sake of reference. A lot of the information was relevant during the last beta version [v.36] and the fundamentals of how the game works still applies, with the only major difference being the addition of Doctrines and the edits to guns' attackTypes. Those topics will be explored later.

Hey, I'm a bit of a gun nut and I used to be into coding, and after some playing, I figured it might be wise to have a guide that focused on highlighting the different tools this game gives you (the guns, namely), as well as wanting to help you guys out with general mindsets for how to play your different Squads [Rangers, CIA, SWAT]. There are other guides for specific tactics, but I'll also go over the gadgets briefly and give suggestions for loadouts.

What this guide is:

• Primarily geared towards Beginners to Door Kickers 2: Task Force North
  
• Helps you sort out how to use all the guns and in what roles they should be used
  
• Tells you briefly the difference in playstyles (and some basic tips on how to play into them)
  
• Gets you basic loadouts for your crew and tells you how to use em - you're openly welcome to experiment after you unlock more gear
  
• Hopefully a way to sort through dozens of gun names by thinking about the game in terms of engagement ranges

What this guide isn't:

• I don't intend to hand-hold you for tactics for individual maps.
  
• I don't intend to give specific tactics for playing the game outside of when to use specific gun types
  
• This guide isn't mandatory to follow. Bro, play the game how you want - this should at least help you get started with your first few purchases
  
• I don't have everything unlocked, but I worked with the more obvious weapon choices and figured out what's good and what's not good - this guide doesn't cover every toy, but i'll try to update when I can as I learn

Please note that after doing research on the ammo types, I desperately need to go back through the CIA guns...however, Rangers and Nowheraki SWAT should be good to go for reading purposes.

Did you know the M16A4 is the best overall rifle in the game?
Because oh my god did I just come out of a rabbit hole.
I'll explain later, but here's what you wanna do for each class:

Assault:
The starting M16A4 is the best at every range that matters. It's highly advisable to give it Mk18 SOST ammo. I'll explain why in later sections. You're welcome to experiment, but everything the shorter carbines do is insignificant, while the M16A4 is excellent in every way that matters.

The only other guns to consider are:

• MP5SD6 is a special case since it's the only Primary that Rangers get that can get to 2.5m sound radius. It's a tool, and it's not perfect, so it doesn't directly compare - great out to 8m, and can reach a little further, but it's not designed for heavy range fighting.
  
• M4 URG-I is an okay sidegrade to the M16A4 for range use [past 5.5m], its claim to fame makes it better than the M4 overall, but for 20 bloody stars I had to grind for this after playing through all the maps. This weapon gets its own section in the guide.
  
• M1014 is best CQC weapon in the game, but the Assault class would rather be using the more flexible rifles

I used to do 4x Mk18 Pointmen, 2x M4 Pointmen, 2x Mk18 Breachers based on suggestions from another guide, but since the M16A4 is the best rifle, I might just adapt that as:

• 4x Pointmen - Holo Sights with MP5/M16A4's
  
• 2x Midfielders - M16A4 or Mk17 Carbines with LVPO 1-8x - buy the Dual Role Optic 1/4x since it's the best option on your Grenadiers, and upgrade to the LVPO 1-8x when you can
  
• 2x Breachers - 2 more Holo Sight guns and Wall Breaching Charges

Support:
The starting M249 is the only LMG you'll need.

Did you know you could use Suppressive Fire to make your machinegunner start shooting faster than the Assault Class's Rifles? It's only by 50ms but the gunners will shoot full auto and likely suppress the enemy! It's a bit taxing to micromanage that much, but damn if it aint effective.
4x M249's. More on this class in its own section.
Swap in shotguns for sake of training.

Grenadier:
M16/M203. The grenadier rifles share the same properties (ammo, which dictates damage, damage range, crit chance and crit falloff; attackType, which dictates how fast, how accurate, and how much the weapon is fired; same optic selection) as the base M16A4 rifle, so since that's better at all ranges, no need to unlock anything else.
2x CQC Grenadiers with Holo Sight 1x and have them go inside buildings with your Pointmen
2x Midfield Grenadiers that stay outside with Dual Role Optic 1/4x's [best they can equip, should be your first optic purchase since you can slap it on LMGs and your Midfielders too]

Marksman:
DO NOT USE SQUAD DM RIFLE. If you need a Marksman, just use M16A4 until you can save up for a sniper rifle.
Only two Sniper rifles for you to consider

• M14EBR does everything with better range values - 30% crit bonus with the DMRAimedFire AttackType, and the M14EBR has the best range values. Can't attach a suppressor, but it's whatever, the Rangers don't really care.
  
• M110A1 is the most maneuverable rifle that can attach a suppressor., while Mk20 SSR starts using the 30% crit bonus AttackType sooner

Whatever you pick, LR Optic 5-25x is a guaranteed 100% critical hit past 15m. LR Optic 3-18x is a better pick for ranges within 50m, though.
You never need 4 snipers, so having Marksmen be your first set of guys to use shotguns is a good call for training or long-term use

All Class:

• M9 is fine, M1911 is best handgun. Handguns are MUCH faster to initiate combat within 7m. Other handguns are insignificantly different sidegrades with generally worse ranges than the M9
  
• M1014 Shotgun is an all-class gun that shoots faster than rifles and has like a 90% chance to kill in one blast and a very fast follow-up shot. Its magazine size isn't big, but its reload can be interrupted in case something happens. Superior to MP5 in practice.
  
• Raid Vest is a decent speed upgrade over the basic armor.
  
• IV plates slow you down
  
• Extended Vest / SAPI exists... I never used it.
  
• High cut helmet will give you some speed back.
  
• Dual Tube NVG's are better than single
  
• M1553 is best 9mm ammo type. Mk318 SOST is best 5.56x45mm ammo type. REMEMBER TO EQUIP IT
  
• 2x Frag, 2x Flash should do for everyone.
  
• Holo Sight for anyone pushing a building
  
• 1-8x LVPO for anyone that'll stay outside, though Combat Sight 4x's are faster around 15m
  
• Grenadiers can't use anything higher than the Dual Role 1/4x, so make that your first purchase
  
• LR Optic 3-18x for Marksmen, consider 5-25x for extreme ranges [>25m exclusively]
  
• Everyone gets access to M136 AT4 Launchers!!! I typically don't use them since the Rangers are accurate enough, but it's an option

Final Suggestions:

• I tend to use 2x Marksmen as shotgunners - I give them Holo Sights and specifically give people running the shotguns 3x slap charges so they can prep a breach and then move onto another task
  
• I tend to give my Grenadiers 1x Wall Breach Charges and use them to breach walls as a first pick rather than Assault Breachers. If i need more than 6 walls breached, just give someone a rocket or something idk

CIA play so crazy different than the rest of the game, it needs its own guide. Here's a brief summary of guns for them, though:

Undercover don't get LvIII Armor - you probably noticed this. If you want to stay Covert, my suggestion to you is to stick with no armor and take one of the following:

• Mk24 suppressed has >80% Crit out to 10m. JHP 185gr has a slightly larger sound radius but gets up to 89% crit within 5m, and it's a pistol, so if you need to attack offensively, it'll outshoot rifles vs enemies already aiming at you. 8 round magazine, but that's fine. 5.5m sound radius with FMJ, 6.5m with HP185gr. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
  
• If 8 rounds for the Mk24 isn't enough for some reason, try the Mp5K suppressed. Guaranteed kill within 5m thanks to a 5-8 round burst; between 5-11m, it's shooting at 6 rounds per second with about a 50% crit chance, and will kill by the 4th bullet. Don't use past 11m.
  
• Not-serious runs can have fun with the Double Barrel shotgun. Enjoy laughing maniacally while everything you blast dies. It's surprisingly effective, but obviously loud.
  
• For a more serious suggestion, the G19 Pistol (not Custom) is only 2 stars and can accept a suppressor - it's a cheap option if you need a suppressed gun first time you CIA, but it's strictly inferior to the Mk24. It still got me through the game easily enough, even if it's slightly slower in overall kill times. 15 rounds will be easier to manage as well for anyone just starting out.

Undercover units are unique due to their ability to Play Civilian, so you want to focus on suppressed weapons with an excellent chance to kill, and are preferably supremely quiet.

The VSS Vintorez is...a double-edged sword. It's best case scenario is naked on the Undercover, and can reach out to 15m with it doing 50 damage per shot. The PSO-1M2 4x scope gives it another 10m where it'll get a whopping 90% crit chance, but the problem is that your units will raise this weapon back up slowly if they get shot, as opposed to the pistols which lose little time if they get suppressed - the scope makes it even worse. I've tried a few times to engage an enemy only for us to shoot at the same time, and my Undercover agent promptly gets shot at 6 times and dies cuz he could only get the first shot off.
The Vintorez has the best sound radius out of my suggestions for the Undercover's weaponry at 3.5m. It draws/holsters faster than secondaries, so transitioning in and out of Playing Civilian is significantly faster, but this shouldn't be a deciding factor to use it. ...Just remember it IS NOT to be used as an offensive tool. If an enemy sees you with this out, your agent WILL be attacked first and WILL be suppressed, and your Agent WILL die.
Also it prevents you from taking one of your two gadgets and still be Covert, so in hindsight the juice isn't worth the squeeze - stick to the Secondaries. Your two best choices are the Mk24 and the Mp5K.
If you end up taking the Vintorez, use it like an MP5SD6 that you can holster and please don't hate the game if it gets you killed - yeah, it's...it's not fast to engage. That's why I say use the pistols instead.

Note: Don't engage with either secondary past 10m. Unless it's the double barrel on joke runs, that thing's crazy good out to 15m.

As for equipment, 2 frags let you play "Catch the Potato" with stubborn groups of enemies. Essentially, get behind some hard cover and chuck a frag into a group of enemies that are problematic to take out quietly - just be sure to walk away from the newly created suspicious zone where you threw it. The following guide explains it a little better than I am:
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2611806579

To work on

There's a few ways to use the Black Ops.

For starters, if you want to give your Black Ops Agent a Poncho, you could either take a pistol and armor or take a loud primary - you can't take a suppressed primary and armor and still be Covert.

• Mk24 Suppressed is the best choice.
  
• If you can't afford 5 stars, then the G19 Pistol [NOT customized] is a decent alternative.

You can't Play Civilian once you Go Loud as a Black Ops dude though, so at that point you've got a single Pointman [reference to the Door Kickers 1 class - they get pistols only, but are fast to engage and have good movement speed] and you can switch your two Undercover units to be mobile cameras to spot enemies for your Black Ops dude
This should be your general use for the Undercover Agents once you get all the easy kills taken care of. Babying a Black Ops agent who's already Gone Loud becomes a fun playstyle in itself as enemies try to charge the dude - too bad their rifles are slower than your pistol!

I wouldn't recommend Poncho use with out Armor.

For Armor + No Poncho, you're going loud from the outset, but with the exception of single digit numbers of maps where you'll be engaged right away, that's fine - it's a matter of using your Undercovers as cameras to ensure you can get your Black Ops units in as close as they can get.
There's only 2 primaries to consider:

• M110A1 isn't quiet, but the LR Optic 5-25x gives it a 100% crit chance past 15m. It's 6 stars...
  
• MCX RSAR has the stats of the Mk17 Carbine [3-4 shot kill, 35% flat crit chance] while having a sound radius of 3m for subsonics and 30 rounds. Supersonics make this always a 3 shot kill. Need I say more? Use with LVPO 1-6x since that's the best you get. It's 10 Stars, but this is your go-to weapon once you get it - unlike the M4 URG-I, this is absolutely the CIA's best primary in the game.

If you can't afford the MCX RSAR, you still need 2 Stars to buy a suppressor for the starting M4. It's alright, I guess, but you'll attract enemies. Either buy the G19 pistol for 2 stars or just spend 5 stars for the Mk24 and get used to 'backstab kills' with it until you clear enough maps for the MCX RSAR. If you really want another primary though, the MP5SD6 is decent enough as a budget primary - just note that CIA DOES NOT SHOOT FULL AUTO!!!
Mk24 should be your first purchase for this class, and using it exclusively on small maps is a viable strategy.

You also get LMG's as well for some reason. I wouldn't; out of them, the M249 is the best LMG in the game, but you'd really rather be doing other things than holding a single angle with your CIA Agents.

Where the Rangers have excellent accuracy, options to great 3-4 STK weapons and good critical hit chances, and the CIA get access to the superior VSS Vintorez and MCX RSAR, the Nowheraki SWAT get subpar weaponry...but can still get by if you expand your mindset out a bit.

Before you do anything, go to the Militia dudes and buy the following weapons and equipment:

• Single SAPI Plate - equip to everyone [Sappers and Leaders can use Sappers Combat Vests, if you want]
  
• Mini Uzi

I cannot stress enough that while weak and easily suppressed, your Militiamen will be a fantastic asset for you.

First, they cost half a deployment slot, so you get a lot of them
Second, their weapons are deceptively good.

• Mini Uzi Militia are quicker to engage than the only other SMG, the APC9 K, and they will shoot bursts up to 25m away, so you're going to either kill or suppress whatever they start shooting at.
  
• M16A4 Militia will shoot 3-round bursts out to 45m, but keep them within 30m so they shoot faster. While unlikely to kill in a single burst, these weapons suppress very easily!
  
• FAL Militia are coded to act as Iron-sight Mk17 Carbines - yes, the very same one from the Rangers! It'll even start shooting faster than your other Militia weapons!

I recommend 4x Mini Uzi, 6x M16A2, 2x FAL, but you can mix it up. If you don't know how to use them, you could:

• have one tag along with another SWAT trooper as a second rifleman and enjoy your free suppression
  
• stick 5 muzzles into a doorway, blow it open, and then watch the firing squad melt everything
  
• Mini Uzi is good enough to clear a room, though i would send 2
  [*[ Any time you want someone pulling security, you can put an M16A4 dude or 2 to hold - they're pretty good at defense since they always shoot 3 round bursts out to like 45m
  
• FAL as pseudo sniper - they use Ranger DMR attackTypes!

From there,

• Buy the M249 for the Assault class. You can have up to 8 of them. OH MY GOD THIS IS SO MUCH FUN, even if it's a bit high-maintenance.
  
• M16A4 on SWATAssault has Ranger AttackTypes! This means they'll start engaging faster than all the other guns (unless you're using handguns or the M249 Suppressive Fire)
  
• Also, RPG-26, give one to each Assault. You get 8 of these as well. Enjoy.
  
• APC9 K is S-Tier - FULL OUTO OUT TO 18m!
  
• M500-MEK shotgun (get the alternate ammo for the shotgun) are decent choices for Sappers - equip them with 2x Door Breaching charges and 3x Demolition charges.

Buy the M4/203 if you want to use a grenadier rifle, it's faster and hits harder than the AKM.
Speaking of which, dont use AK's. They're terrible and generally are 24-20 damage...lower than 5.56x45

Leader

• Grenadier Rifle: M4/M203 is strictly better than AKM/GP34. It has one fewer shot to kill out to 18m or so. Similar crit rates thanks to attack types. The rifle's mediocre otherwise since it's stuck to M855. Probably the best route due to being the only 40mm unit on the team.
  
• Sniper: You get the Dragunov, but honestly, let your Militia use their FALs for ranged attacks, they'll attack faster and with >55% crit at mid-range even without optics. The SVU-A is like a Vintorez from the CIA - it gets full auto fire out to 3m. 203gr ammo is a 2htk out to 50m, while everything else always requires 3 shots. It's not bad, but for snipers i prefer one shot kills. Look, just because it's an option doesnt mean it's very good...
  
• My preferred route is to use the APC9 K for another person breaching interiors, it shoots full auto out to 18m! Like bro this does everything the Rangers WISH they could achieve with the MP5A5! If it did any better at range it'd be my top pick for a weapon
  
• You get Sappers Combat Vest as an armor option on the Leader, and that synergies with the APC9 K exceptionally well. The reduced movement speed is negligible because you can just tell your Leader to run.

Assault

• Have you ever tried 8x M249's in a mission? There's no alternate AttackTypes to make the M249 shoot more slowly, so aside from suboptimal optics, they will handle the same as on the Rangers. ...And CIA, if you're crazy like that.
  
• Otherwise, APC9 K is an excellent close-midrange weapon. It's a little slow to start shooting, but is full auto out to 18m. Obviously don't use it at range, but it can slap harder than the MP5 can
  
• M16A4 is probably the Assault's best rifle otherwise. The M16A4 is coded to be the same as it is for the Rangers, and is a 4stk out to 50m. It is the fastest to start shooting and past burst fire rang Assaults are better off using the M249, though.e 15m gets >50% crit chance; >65% with an ACOG!

Assault troopers get RPG-26's as their large attachment option (aside from dynamic hammers, which...ew), so have fun blowing stuff up.

Sapper

• Probably best off using M500-MEK shotguns. purchase the 00 buckshot ammo - idk how math works with percentages, but it's 12% per pellet out to 7m. That's, what, 96% chance for one of them to be a crit? 9 damage per pellet within that range as is, so you only need 2 shots.
  
• Otherwise, they get APC9 K SMGs. Given that the shotgun's a pump action, this becomes a better pick overall.

Sappers get Door Breaching Charges and Demolition charges for busting holes open in walls, so by process of Absolute Advantage, I recommend 2x Door Breach and 3x Demo charges for their equipment.
As for Armor, Sappers get...Sappers Combat Vests. I never use them personally but it couldn't hurt if you're using them to push rooms. Remember you can tell your trooper to Run if they move too slowly.

SWAT is a different way of thinking over the map. See that wall? It doesn't exist anymore, and now you have upwards of 8 angry men shooting and suppressing anything on the other side. ...That's your mentality.

Oh, Molotovs are useful for blocking off pathways so you can't be flanked, but I just prefer giving everyone frags.

Don't forget pistols are fast for indoor clearing too.

• M9 is fine
  
• G17 is a modest equip speed/magazine size upgrade over the M9.
  
• The .45 pistol is cringe, the SWAT team can't shoot it faster than once a half-second past 2.5m...do not use

Final note: Aside from APC9 K, Mini Uzi [Militia and otherwise], the M16A4 [Militia and otherwise], and the M249, all guns are fired semi-auto. You're gonna need to plan around that...

Because there's a little too much going on.

Remember, 5.56 gets Mk318 SOST ammo, 9mm gets M1153 ammo

RANGERS
Priority 1

• Holo Sight 1x ASAP, put on everything it can. Don't bother with Combat Sight 4x unless you can control enemies to be within 15-25m. Red Dot is strictly worse
  
• I'd say a different rifle for the Marksmen but early maps don't require one so you can wait on that a while

Then, In Any Order:

• Dual Role Optic 1/4x is the best optic Grenadiers can use, and it's usable on Support LMGs and Assault rifles. It's not as good as Holo Sight or the Combat Sight 4x, but your LMGs need something flexible. Consider it for your Midrangers if you plan on having them push inside - you can't change optics mid-mission after all, so if they'll for some reason be seeing 0-7m fighting and 15+m fighting (not impossible), this'll at least give them an edge. It's worth it to specialize, though.
  
• M1014 Shotgun whenever you want to see the power of God slapping your enemies
  
• Pick one: M14EBR or M110A1 for your Marksmen. M14EBR is better from 8-15m, M110A1 can equip a suppressor.
  
• LR Optic 3-18x and 5-25m for your M110A1 Marksmen. 3-18m is good all-around past 7m, save the 5-25m for maps you'll be dedicated to shooting past 25m.
  
• Raid Armor, both Lv III and IV
  
• MP5SD6 will solve all your suppressor needs

Lower Priority Purchases

• M1911 is best sidearm
  
• XM338 as an alternate LMG. Be aware, it only has 50 round capacity.
  
• MG Optic 4x or 6x depending on range: 4x between 7-25m, 6x past 15m. The Dual Role Optic 1/4x is a good intermediary in the meantime but these two will give better boosts - they're slower though, so I'd use this if you're just going to mount up in a single location and can control for distance.
  
• M4 URG-I is probably best summarized as a weak upgrade, sacrificing range for faster semi auto fire rate. That's not nothing, but it isn't a priority.
  
• LVPO 1-6x is superior to Dual Role 1/4x sight past 15m if you need a better optic for Assault Midfielders/Pseudo-Snipers, but its best range is >15m and you're sacrificing some CQC speed. LPVO 1-8x is even more exaggeratedly better at long range - it's worth it if you can keep enemies out in the 25-50m range. Low priority purchases
  
• There are some night vision maps - you start with single tube, but the dual tube won't slow you down and gives you better vision. It's worth the purchase but you might not be there when you first get a night map.

And from there it's a matter of taste

CIA
Budget

• MP5SD6 will work as a primary if you're saving up for the MCX RSAR [and you absolutely should!!!!]
  
• Buy the G19 Pistol [NOT Custom] instead if you're going to buy anything cheap.
  M4 Suppressor is 2 stars - just don't use it. I cannot put into words to you how important suppressors and quiet guns are for the CIA, and the M4 is just too loud.
  
  Priority 1
  
  • Mk24 Handgun, comes with suppressor. If you can't afford it, G19 is 2 points, comes with suppressor.
    
  • MCX RSAR is also a Priority 1 purchase, but it's 10 stars - pretty expensive. You can buy up to an LVPO 1-6x. This is going to be your workhorse, so you're going to want the more flexible optics since you'll be in and out of buildings and extreme distances. Use the LVPO for maps where you know you'll need to make 25-50m shots, Holo Sight out to 15m; Dual Mode 1/4x is an ok middle-ground, since a single CIA Black Ops agent is going to need to be very flexible.
  
  In Any Order:
  
  • Lockpick Machine
    
  • M110A1 - You'll want it eventually, but the first few missions you can use the CIA are all smaller maps and it's not so necessary
    
  • LR Optic 3-18x for the M110A1. 5-25x is pretty good too but only use it for cross-map shots - you slow down significantly withn 25m.
    
  • Raid Vest Lv IV. III is ok too
  Lower Priority:
  
  • RPG-26 to bust a hole open in a wall in a few maps, best used by Black Ops when it's clear
    
  • Bump or Ballistic Helmet and Night Vision for Black Ops units for night maps.
  
  NOWHERAKI SWAT
  Priority 1:
  
  • Mini Uzi for Militia, and while we're at it, get all the Militia off that damned ak47 underfolder. I recommend 4x Mini Uzi, 6x M16A4, 2x FAL.
    
  • Single SAPI Plate, put it on everyone
    
  • It's already unlocked, but until you get better weapons, the M16A4 uses the same attackTypes as the Rangers and is therefore the fastest primary for Assault and Sapper troops (sans M249 use)
  In Any Order
  
  • M4/M203 GL for Leader. It's good, but not great - still, only the Leader gets a grenade launcher
    
  • M249 for Assault
    
  • RPG-26, put it on everyone you can (minus Sappers, since they can get 3x Demolition charges)
    
  • Red Dot 1x/Combat Sight 4x, put them on relevant troopers
    
  • APC9 K is an excellent SMG and can accept a red dot
  Lower Priority
  
  • M500-MEK, and ABSOLUTELY buy the ammo upgrade for the M500-MEK
    
  • G17 Pistol is a modest swap speed/magazine capacity upgrade over the M9
    
  • Non-Militia get Mini Uzi SMGs for a sidearm choice. Not a bad idea.
  There's also Shields, but they're whatever imo, use em if you like them

Before I continue, DONT USE THE SQUAD DM RIFLE. I DO NOT MEAN THAT ONE. Buy another sniper rifle ASAP [M14 EBR, Mk20 SSR, or M110A1] and just use that.

Allow me to take you down a rabbit's hole.

The weapons in this game are three parts:

• Optics [which can be ignored to an extent for sake of individual weapon comparisons]
  
• Ammunition Type [specific to each weapon, but generally pretty similar between weapons of the same caliber / using the same ammo type. There's a few nuances, though]
  
• AttackType [Usually one CQC, one mid-range, one long-range, one extreme range out to 9999m]

Firstly, let's go over the ammunition types that the M16A4 can use.

The last two - Mk262 - is match-grade ammo, and it is pretty much inferior to the other amo types you have access to for two very important reasons.

• First, you have the ammo's damage value of 30; while that's pretty good, the other ammo types match this, and you have a worse critical hit chance [except out past 45m]. Mk318 SOST ammo has a significantly higher damage value of 36 at 0m (which immediately becomes 35m, but that's a tangent), which means within 24m the M16A4 with Mk318 SOST ammo requires one fewer shot to kill at all ranges vs its other ammunition types. And that's significant because of the first AttackType, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
  
• The second reason is the roundsPerSecond being just 6. In essence, it's shooting about as fast as the average person can click/pull a trigger. It's also the fire rate of the most important mid-range AttackType, but again, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Mk318 SOST ammo has a roundsPerSecond value of 16, so whenever the M16A4 is shooting its burst fire attackType [details coming up, promise] at its natural fire rate, it's getting those three bullets off super fast - faster than virtually any other weapon - and with enough damage that the 3-round burst will kill an enemy, pending IV armor or a missed bullet for some reason.

Now, by itself, roundsPerSecond being only 6 isn't terrible. In fact, it's on par with the semi auto attackType called "Rangers_RapidFireMed". It's probably the most important attack type, as it shoots semi-auto the fastest and has the highest critical hit chance. Let's go over that now.

Allow me to share the attack types that the M16A4 uses to designate how your Troopers use it.

The way this works, the game takes the AttackType that starts with the lowest rangeMeters value and applies that from 0m out to the designated maximum range [in this case, 5m]. Outside of this range, the game is essentially running "if-then statements" (or hopefully something a bit more efficient, code-wise) to calculate the the appropriate AttackType based on distance.

Let's take a look at BurstFire first, since it's the first one - and the most important one for my general argument.
The .xml document is nice enough to supply details. Quick note, the game lists these as: "<ModifiableParams> - all of these can be modified by abilities"

• min/maxAimTime = This is the time it takes from when the weapon is ready&aimed at the enemy and until we shoot. The final aim time is interpolated between min/max distance to the target (minDistance = minAimTime, maxDistance = maxAimTime).
  
• roundsPerSecondOverride = if defined (!= 0), it will overwrite the "roundsPerSecond" parameter listed in the weapon's ammunition stat block.
  
• minShots = greater or equal to 1. if greater, then the min number of shots will be fired, even if the target is dead. The fire rate is either based on what's listed in the Ammunition block or the roundsPerSecondOverride
  
• maxShots = number of shots before waiting "aimTime" again. A value is chosen randomly between min/maxShots, -1 to shoot continuously
  
• resetTime = once a shot sequence has finished, we wait for this amount of time before the next shot sequence begins. Essentially means the amount of time the trooper spends assessing whether or not he killed the dude before shooting again
  
• accuracyAdd = modifier for the base accuracy of the weapon. 0 = exactly the weapon's base accuracy
  
• followupShotAccuracyAdd = simulates recoil by adding to accuracyModiferPercent for each subsequent shot after the first one
  
• critChanceAdd = percent to add to the base critical chance of the ammo

Rangers_BurstFire has an aim time that's the same at min and max distance, so you'll get a consistent amount of time once your trooper is actually aiming at the target before he fires. This is influenced by Assault Shooting stat and any optic they have - Holo Sight 1x gives the best bonuses.

Then, they shoot. For BurstFire, it's coded to shoot no less and no more than 3 shots - a perfect number to kill with the Mk318 SOST ammo within this damage range; we might even get an unnecessary critical hit, but that's not too likely since we're losing 5% crit chance with this AttackType on every shot.

After shooting, if the first target is alive, your trooper will wait 300ms (influenced by Assault Shooting and Optics) before attacking with another burst. ...With SOST ammo, this is highly unlikely to happen with the 3-round burst (~35 damage*3 rounds = 105 damage), but I've seen it happen where somehow the trooper misses, and even less frequently when your targets wear armor.

accuracyAdd and followupShotAccuracyAdd modifies how accurate your ranger is. To be fair, -100 accuracy penalty is a little rough, and in hindsight explains why you'll occasionally have a burst not kill, and you lose 5% accuracy with each shot, so that last bullet has a -110 accuracy, turning the base 300 accuracy down to 190. That's a bad accuracy cut, but we're still within 5m so that's fine. This kind of accuracy cut matters more for the longer ranges obviously, but I'm mentioning it now since I'm trying to be thorough.

There are brief summaries of each stat in the .xml, minus this last point with accuracy.

Anyway let's take a look at a full auto carbine's equivalent AttackType, "Rangers_CarbineAutoFire"

Please note, this is the same AttackType between the Mk18 and M4. The M4 URG-I uses a slightly different AttackType, i'll go over that later.

So far the only difference between CarbineAutoFire and BurstFire is the number of shots - you have randomly a 2-6 shot spread.
Let me emphasize that point again:

• You have a chance to NOT SHOOT ENOUGH BULLETS
  
• You have an even GREATER chance to SHOOT TOO MANY BULLETS, which wastes time

It's even worse on the Mk17 battle rifles!
One to Four! You have a 1/2 chance to not shoot enough bullets to kill in CQC!
And on top of that the Mk17 rifles have a base fire rate of 10 roundsPerSecond.

Also, spoiler alert, Mk18 and M4 have reduced full auto fire rates with Mk318 SOST ammo compared to the M16A4 too! ...Well, they do in general - Mk318 actually speeds up the fire rate a little for these weapons, but that's yet another tangent...see the rabbit hole I'm crawling out of?

We also have to take the range of this AttackType into account but I'll explain the importance to that in a bit. After the CQC full auto/burst range, the 5.56x45mm uses "Rangers_RapidFireMed", while the Mk17 uses the Heavy variant.

This is the code for Rangers_RapidFireMed. Oops, wait, that's RapidFireMedHeavy. Here's RapidFireMed:

...Did you spot the difference?
minShots and roundsPerSecondOverride.

Let me explain what this AttackType does:

• roundsPerSecondOverride sets the fire rate to something that a human would be able to reasonably match (or even beat) if simply clicking a mouse or if holding a firearm in a way so that you are just pulling the trigger as fast as you can.........as opposed to using the weapon's natural fire rate.
  
• They're shooting 2-4 rounds...though with the resetTime being 150ms, if the target's still alive, they'll continue to attack without much pause.
  
• slightly less important, but maxAimTime is now larger, which means the Rangers are taking notably longer to begin engaging at whatever the maximum range is for this attacktype. For the Mk18, M4, M16A4, and even the Mk17's variant, it's out to 15m for all of them
  
• You're getting +20% crit chance on every shot vs the ammo type's natural crit rate, on top of whatever your optic is adding

So what does that mean?

• At this range there is no significant difference between the 5.56x45mm rifles.
  
• Other stats like Damage Range begin to matter, since we want to make sure we're staying above that >33.34 damage threshold in order to 3-shot-kill
  
• We have a notable but insignificant boost to critical chance that means we might kill on the first or second bullet instead of needing all three - This might make a difference if you're not using Mk318 SOST ammo, like with Nowheraki SWAT, but two things: the SOST ammo guarantees the 3 shot kill, and we're likely to keep attacking anyway, whether the game didn't RNG us to attack enough times in the first volley (and have to wait for resetTime) or if we rolled a 4 shot volley
  
• Side note, the Mk17 Carbine (both, honestly) continues to be noncompetitive with its lower fire rate, with its only advantage being a better base critical chance, a flat 35%. That's not nothing, as the 5.56 rifles are degrading, but it's at best ~12% more likely than 5.56 rifles in this AttackType... And it's also shooting slower anyway. (CQC has 30% flat crit which is why I don't recommend it at all)

This is the specific point at which fire rate no longer matters, and instead the damage and crit chance of the ammo type and optics matter most - And the 5.56 rifles all do the same damage and crit.

Actually I'm slightly off - the 3rd attackType for all of the 5.56x45 rifles and both Mk17 rifles is when Fire Rate no longer matters. See, all of them use the Rangers_CarbineAimedFire attackType.
Before I go into that, I need to share the damage ranges for the weapons with you.

Assuming Mk318 SOST ammo:

Mk18, M4, and the previously unmentioned M4 URG-I has a damage drop-off of about ~16.64m - past this point, the weapon is dealing sub 33.33r damage, which makes it a 4 shot to kill. It drops to 25 damage at 100m, but you won't be taking shots that far out.
Mk17 CQC has a damage drop-off at 9.94m. It also has a crit chance of 30, which is strictly worse than the Mk17 Carbine. Just don't use it.
Mk17 Carbine has a damage drop-off of ~20m
M16A4 has a damage drop-off of about ~24.25m

All of these weapons have a 3htk within this damage drop-off, and a 4stk past it. That didn't matter in the previous AttackTypes - CarbineAutoFire/BurstFire, or CarbineRapidFire. Now it does.

Another thing that didn't matter so far is the ranges of the AttackTypes. CarbineAutoFire has different range values, but the M16A4's BurstFire range was 5m; the Mk18's Auto Fire was 3.5/4.5m, the M4 and Mk17 Carbine's was 4/5.5m - there's a / between the numbers to account for the increased range with a suppressor.

This next attackType, CarbineAimedFire, starts at 15m for all weapons (a little further out for the suppressed versions of the Mk18, M4, and Mk17 Carbine at 18m, but we'll be here all day if I keep adding the split; this is the last attackType that goes out based on suppressor use, incidentally. Also the URG-I has its own type but I promise you I'll share more details later).
Mk18 shoots this out to 35m, M4 out to 40m, Mk17 out to 43m, M16A4 out to 45m:
We're getting even slower to engage, and now we're at 2 shots per second.
We additionally are losing innate accuracy to actually hit things - the M4 especially the Mk18 are going to be a harder time actually hitting things out this far.
On top of that, as stated before, we're starting to push into 4 shot-to-kill range.
On top of that, we've lost 10% crit rate from CarbineRapidFireMed/-Heavy.

Incidentally this is the ideal range for the Mk17 Carbine at this rate due to:

• Its innate flat 35% crit chance from ammo
  
• Attack type grants +10% further crit chance [45%]
  
• If we give it the LVPO 1-8x, we get a further boost - +20 up to 25m, and +25 from 25-43m [technically 50m, but the attackType changes to a worse one], bringing it up to 65-70% crit.

...which makes the Mk17 have a niche as being a Pseudo-sniper. Critical hits kill the instant one is rolled and lands.
5.56 rifles' Crit damage is dependent on the weapon type - Mk318 SOST ammo goes from 25% crit at 0m to 20% at the maximum range: Mk18 at 35m, M4 at 42m M16A4 at 60m, though we're talking single digit differences between the 5.56 rifles - all the more reason to pick the M16A4 since it's still doing the best.

Now look, given the same scope on both rifles, we're still dealing with a 10-15% increased crit chance taking the Mk17 over the 5.56 rifles - I don't think it is worth it over reduced performance within 15m - not for the Ranger Assault units. You could use other units for longer ranges.

One of the classes is the Marksman.

Now if you don't mind, I want to tell you about why you should NEVER use the Squad DM Rifle that the Marksmen start with.

• You only get one ammo type - Mk262. It does 30 flat damage, and 20% flat crit chance [Flat means no increase or decrease over distance]
  
• It's only shooting semi auto

Let me share the CQC AttackType: "Rangers_DMRRapidFire".
500ms to start shooting!
5 rounds per second!!
-30% Crit Chance!!!

Oh, the -1 for "maxShots" is coded to mean "just shoot until target is dead, no excessive bullets". We won't have to worry about shooting a dead body.

So yeah, the Squad DM Rifle is shooting single shots in CQC range and is doing it at the same rate the Mk17 shoots semi auto. At least it's always a 4 shot kill, but come on!

Things get better past 4m with the Squad DM Rifle (well, DMRs in general, but we'll get to that) with the "Rangers_DMRRapidFireMed" AttackType
Look familiar? This is approximately the same values for RapidFireMedHeavy, with a few exceptions

• Aim time is longer - minAimTime especially.
  
• We're still taking longer to switch targets/resassess thanks to that resetTime
  
• No Crit Bonus

The range for DMRRapidFireMed on the Squad DM rifle is 4-10m, but then the real magic starts happening for the sniper rifles with the next AttackType: "Rangers_DMRAimedFire"
Compared to Rangers_CarbineAimedFire, the DMRAimedFire gets:

• Faster maxAimTime by 150ms
  
• No Accuracy penalty
  
• A whopping 30% critical chance! Our paltry Squad DM Rifle is now getting baseline 50% Crit before the optic! We can take better optics like the LR Optics, but with the LVPO 1-8x, we're getting 70% crit from 15-25m and 75% crit from 25-40m, where this attack type goes away.
  
• With the LR Optic 5-25x, crit chance becomes 72% from 15-25m, 100% from 25-40m, and 70% from >40m

So even this feels like a sidegrade to the Mk17, right? Even worse in CQC, but that 100% crit chance from 25-40m?

Well, what if i told you that there was a weapon that uses the same attackTypes as the Squad DM but does so with 100% crit past 15m?

Well to be honest, the Marksman rifles [M14EBR, Mk20 SSR, M110A1] all are similar except for a few critical stats, but I'm going to go over the M110A1 since it's the best choice the CIA team gets:

It uses the same attackTypes as the Squad DM Rifle - all the Marksman rifles do. Let me show you the ammo data:
...See anything interesting? Here, I'll point it out to you:

• 50 Damage at all ranges. If you don't crit, you only need a second hit.
  
• Crit chance increases over range, very rapidly to 50% chance at 10m. Mind you, the M110A1 is using DMRRapidFIreMed at this range, so it's not getting a crit chance bonus.

So long as you can use it only past 15m, the M110A1 is a 100% crit weapon past 15m.

• No bonus from 0-7m
  
• 7-15m: Minor aimTime bonus, 13% crit chance (63% crit chance past 10m, not bad)
  
• 15-25m: +22% Chance, and we're now using DMRAimedFire for another 30%; add the rifle's base 50% chance and we have 100%
  
• >25m: +50% Chance on top of rifle's base 50% chance, we have 100%

Look, don't fully rely on Marksmen to kill everything at extreme ranges since they're still only shooting one bullet at a time, but anything they hit with this thing past 15m is going to die. Might take them a while, and that means enemies might score lucky hits - especially if you have more than one enemy to kill. At least you'll be hitting back.

I swear, writing this guide has been a series of like 4 to 6 nested thoughts at any given time.

I need to talk to you about the Marksman Rifles for a moment.

The M14EBR has shorter minimum ranges for its AttackTypes: DMRRapidFire is 3m while DMRRapidFireMed is 8m...and extends out to a whopping 60m!! The other snipers top out at 48m! Wow!
This means the M14EBR gets to the 30% crit chance just after the MP5 stops shooting full auto - a suppressed M110A1 gets there at 15m, which is why up until now I've been emphasizing that gun - it's still great for the CIA but ho baby! You know what that means?
...Okay it's not 100% by itself, as the ammo reaches 50% crit at 10m, but once you're at that 10m, the DMRAimedFire AttackType is active and you're getting another 30% crit - 80% before taking scopes into account! You've got something with the crit chance of a M1911 (and a 2 stk anyway!) out past door kicking range!

I never considered this until now, but "best scope on the M14EBR" is a bad thing to ask, as the starting range for Rangers_DMRAimedFire starts at 8m rather than, say, the M110A1 starting at 12m [14m suppressed].


On the other side, the M14EBR's +30% bonus crit from the Rangers_DMRAimedFire AttackType extends out to 60m, so the AimSpeed not reduction makes the M14EBR engage super quickly.

It's flexible enough to actually be useful whether you're going midrange or >15m, but it'll be slower to engage, so picking a scope for your optimal firing range becomes a little more necessary.

In the past I was suggesting the M110A1 with a LR Optic 5-25x and just saying to be done with it:
And let's look at the DMRAimedFire and DMRAimedFireXX Fire Types

The differences in sniper rifles become more nuanced than just explicitly saying "The M14EBR is strictly better because the DMRAimedFire starts at 8m rather than the M110A1 starting at 11/12m." While you're getting a spicy 30% crit, you're already at 650ms to start shooting.

Before we cover mid-range scope options, indeed, the LR Optic 5-25x is important on the M110A1 since it's granting 22% crit starting at 15m - there's only a 3-4m difference depending on suppressor use on whether or not you're getting 100% crits. So long as you keep your sniper at a decent distance, the scope by itself is giving you 100% crits past the 48m AttackType maximum range.

But on the M14 EBR? You've got 8-15m to worry about too. You're already at 80% crit from DMRAimedFire coming online earlier, so we might as well consider making aimTime faster in midrange.

The weakest scope you can apply is a Combat Sight 4x [ACOG], which has the following stats:
-120 ms between 15-25m until we engage is pretty good, certainly, but we're losing out on that guaranteed critical hit - we need 20% in order to get the confirmed kill - we can get that by Mounting the rifle on some cover, Rangers_DMRAimedFireMounted gives +35% crit.

Anything Larger than the Combat Optic 4x is losing out on 7-15m AimTime bonuses, so if you absolutely know you're engaging past 25m for certain, bring anything heavier. LVPO optics and heavier grant 100% crits past 15m, though, so at that point optimizing for engagement range is important.

LR Optic 3-18x is a good middle ground between the 5-25x. It has the same speed bonuses the Combat Sight 4x has at 15m (weaker initial bonus for 7m), but grants even stronger bonuses and gets you that guaranteed critical hit.
The LR Optic 5-25x gets faster than the 3-18x past 50m, but theres only a few maps where that's worth anything.

In conclusion, for optics:

• ACOG loses 100% crit but if you mount, you get it back [15-25m]. Mounting has faster engagement profiles anyway. It's only recommended if you need to get some Mobility back - it'll give you back 2% move speed, but if you need a Sniper out of a 8 Mobility spawn you gotta do what ya gotta do. Remember, 95% crit aint bad outright; it's just that your rifle 2-shots anyway.
  
• LR Optic 3-18x is excellent all-around since you have similar 7-15m engagement speed bonuses as the ACOG and similar speeds as the LR Optic 5-25x out to 50m
  
• LR Optic 5-25x exclusively for >25m, cross-map sniping.

Right, so where does that leave us.

Assuming Mk318 SOST ammo:

• All 5.56x45mm rifles have the same number of shots to kill and crit chances, though they have different damage dropoff and crit ranges - the M16A4 has the best range in these regards [minus the Mk17 Carbine having a flat 35% crit chance, but it's all it has going for it]
  
  
• M16A4 has the best non-suppressed range with its BurstFire at 5m, making it surprisingly useful in CQC. Other unsuppressed weapons are at 3.5-4m.
  
• So long as all weapons are fully raised up, Rangers will engage with CarbineAutoFire or BurstFire at the same time - 350ms
  
• The burst is a clean 3 shots [105 damage], whereas the auto rifles might shoot too few and have to shoot again, or too many, therefore potentially wasting valuable milliseconds while they shoot at nothing.
  
  
• The rifles all use similar RapidFireMed ranges. The Suppressor gives a negligible increase to range
  
• RapidFireMed makes the shorter rifles' auto fire not matter since they're all shooting semi auto anyway, and at the same fire rate of 6 rounds per second
  
  
• CarbineAimedFire's maximum range matters less since maps rarely go that far anyway, but the M16A4 has the longest range at 45m
  
• The penalty for CarbineAimedFire is enough to make the Mk18 unusuable past 15m, but the M16A4 is still usable

I know that M4 Suppressed has better ranges for CarbineAutoFire and RapidFireMed, and you'll feel that difference between RapidFireMed and CarbineAimedFire, but that's not enough of a reason not to have a more consistent weapon.

What's a good reason to not use the M16A4 for the Rangers is if you're using a heavier Marksman Rifle, a shotgun, or an LMG, but for the former two, you're specializing in a range, and for the latter, you're not allowed M16A4's on the Support class anyway.

The M16A4 in Door Kickers 2 is a fine weapon, and I daresay it's the best overall weapon, and should be considered the Ranger's best rifle.


You wanna know who else considers the M16A4 their best rifle? My mom Nowheraki SWAT!

...Now while the M16A4 is the overall best rifle for the Rangers, it most certainly is the best rifle for the Nowheraki SWAT.

Now look, you saw the M4 URG-I, shotguns, and LMGs mentioned, I'll get to that, promise.

But first I need to talk to you about parallel universes why the AKM is so bad.

First, let's talk ammo.
Ouch.

• 5 shots to kill without any other ammo types to improve this
  
• Inferior crit chance, too
  
• 10 Rounds per second, which SPOILER ALERT isn't even used!

The Nowheraki SWAT AKM (and the Leader's AK-47M SF Carbine, and AK-47 Underfolder on Assault/Sappers, frankly) uses the following AttackTypes:

• "NWS_RapidFire" out to rangeMeters="5"
  
• "NWS_RapidFireMed" out to rangeMeters="10"/>
  
• "NWS_AKAimedFire" out to rangeMeters="25"/>
  
• "NWS_CarbineAimedFireLong" out to rangeMeters="45"/>
  
• "Rangers_CarbineAimedFireXX" out to rangeMeters="9999"/>

See something missing?
Try not to think too hard on this, I'll just share the first attack type's code
I'll break this down for you, since it's a few pages up since we talked about the M16A4's Burst Fire.

• aimTime is 400ms, which is 50ms longer than the Rangers' rifles
  
• minShots is 1 while maxShots is -1. Huh, that's strange, isn't it?
  
• No crit chance either, it's almost like...
  
• roundsPerSecondOverride="6" means we're shooting semi auto, oh no...

Yep, that's right. Nowheraki SWAT shoot their AK's semi auto. At least the non-militia troopers do, anyway. Same goes for the M4 Carbine on the SWAT team.
Just quickly glancing through the primaries on the non-militia teams here, here's a few notes:

• Leader's Grenade rifles use semi-auto as well, but the AKM/GP34 uses the "RapidFireMed" type out to 12m, it's missing the faster CQC semi-auto fire type
  
• Militia members use a differently coded set of AK47 Underfolders, Mini Uzis, M16A4's, and have a FAL as an option as well. They're weird, i'll cover them later
  
• APC9 K and Mini Uzi are the only two weapons (besides the RPK/M249 LMG) that are shot full auto
  
• There's code for the Mk17, a AKM Militia variant, and a RPK Militia variant, but they don't have classes assigned to them [apparently the Militia had access to the RPK but it was OP on them so it was dummied out. Bruh you could potentially have had 20 RPK's shooting at once!? holy crap i missed out]
  
• The mini uzi sidearm uses CIA AttackTypes while the militia mini uzi uses its own NWS_Uzi variants

All that distraction to tell you that the M16A4 on the SWATAssault class uses the Ranger AttackTypes.
Yep! They get the faster-to-fire attack types AND shoot in burst fire with better crit chance bonus!

Here, let me show you NWS_RapidFireMed. This is from 5-10m.
We're already at 650m to aim at 10m, and only getting 10% crit chance and attacking slower.

It gets worse with NWS_AKAimedFire... This is 10-25m
[internal screaming]
This is still where Rangers are using Ranger_RapidFireMed.

I'm not even going to bother with the other attack types - in essence they're taking almost a full second to attack where Rangers are twice as fast. It gets worse outside of 45m; at least the Rangers were capped at 900ms to aim! SWAT AK's go even slower and have a cap of 1500ms!!! (tho that's 9999m, so in effect they're simply a little more than 900ms)

That means the following guns are borderline useless for SWAT:

• AK/GP34
  
• AK-47 SF Carbine
  
• AKM
  
• AK47 Underfolder if used by Assault/Sappers - especially since it has no optic
  
• M4/203's only saving grace is the grenade launcher and the NWS_CarbineAimedFire AttackType out to 34m, which is a 9m increase to get to 900ms to start shooting at max range.
  
• Base M4's merely superior to these other options
  
• Vulcan isn't worth looking at either
  
• Dragunov imo isn't worth using over APC9 K. It's, well...fine, but SWAT isn't really a sniping faction, and you can't get 100% crits with the Dragunov. I'll bring it up when we talk about the Militia.

Actually tell you what, let me show you the Vulcan

• "NWS_RapidFire" out to rangeMeters="5"
  
• "NWS_VulcanRapidFireMed" out to rangeMeters="14"/>
  
• "NWS_VulcanAimedFire" out to rangeMeters="22"/>
  
• "NWS_CarbineAimedFireLong" out to rangeMeters="45"/>
  
• "Rangers_CarbineAimedFireXX" out to rangeMeters="9999"/>

I'll just give the notable changes:

• VulcanRapidFireMed is out to 14m instead of AKM's 10, maxAimTime is 550, and has a 13% crit chance. So far a straight speed upgrade over NWS_RapidFireMed
  
• Aaaand then it goes to crap as it slows down faster, increasing to 900ms aim time at 22m rather than the AKM's 25m, with slightly faster fire rate/resetTime
  
• Identical otherwise

...Yeah, so we have semi-auto only and slower aim for every gun but the RPK / M249 both sharing the superior LMG AttackTypes, but otherwise the M16A4 is...you'll never guess.

Okay, look, you're using the inferior M855 ammo,
So you're dealing with a 4-5 shot kill.
BUT IT USES RANGER ATTACK TYPES!!!!!

Even with mediocre ammo you're still engaging with it faster than every other weapon type at all ranges! [Okay, fine, SMGs, LMGs, and the shotgun are pretty good too]

Help it's past midnight

We're gonna skip ahead and talk about the Militia before we cover SMGs or LMGs [and why you shouldn't use the Dragunov].

The M16A4 is an option on the Militia. It shares the M855 ammo type, meaning ie's donig 30-20 damage, but what's interesting is its fire types.

• "NWS_MilitiaBurstFire" out to rangeMeters="30"/>
  
• "NWS_MilitiaBurstLong" out to rangeMeters="45"/>

...You catch that?
BURST FIRE OUT TO 45m, BAYBEEEEEEE

This thing is just a DREAM at suppressing your enemies.
Oh, you thought I was going to say it kills fast?
Well yeah, it'll two-burst anything at any range.

Let's look at the code:
...Did this thing just become an M16A3? lmao

Okay, it's kinda slow to start shooting, and it's somewhat inaccurate, but you're still getting 3-round bursts. Put two of your M16A4 Militia dudes to hold a line of sight and whatever they start shooting at ain't shooting back.

I would like to repeat myself in that the M16A4 so far is:

• Burst fire out to 5m for SWATAssault and all relevant Rangers that can shoot it - all of the above use the Ranger profiles
  
• The Ranger's M16A4 is superior in accuracy and attackType ranges to the other rifles and is therefore superior to SWATAssault's other weapons [Minus SMGs/Shotguns/LMGs, but we'll get there]
  
• Militia are firing in 3 round bursts, improving their hit and suppression chance

The only issue to the M16A4 is that it's not available on the CIA class, but they shoot everything in semi-auto anyway and get the MCX RSAR for general purpose use and the M110A1 otherwise [and Mk24 handguns too, but the CIA are weird and have different priorities]

If I haven't convinced you it's the best overall rifle in the game yet, you probably either prefer sniping, pistol use, SMG use, LMGs, or the M4 URG-I [we'll get to that later too, promise]

Let's see, we covered the M110A1's superiority past 15m... Let's finish that ranged thought thread with the Dragunov and the FAL

Let's start with describing the Dragunov.
Ammo:
...That's going to be a solid "Yikes" from me, Batman.

The AttackTypes are familiar but are at worse ranges than the M110A1

Of note, if you can get the DMR mounted, it acts like how the Rangers's AimedFireMounted attack type, which grants 35% crit chance (which applies from 0-48m)
If we take the PSO39 into play, then we get:

• 7-15m: +10%
  
• 15-25m: +22%
  
• 25-48m: +30% [goes up to +50 but the attack type changes]

Luckily, so long as we mount it, we get half-decent crit rates, assuming we pick the 203gr ammo

• 0-7m: 68%
  
• 7-15: 78%
  
• 15-20: 90%
  
• 20-25: 90-86%
  
• 25-45: 94-79%
  
• 45-48m: 79%

Now look, that ain't bad for a sniper. It's not 100%, and you HAVE to be mounted or all these values lose 35%

[fiddles with calculator] ...Well, okay, it's not that bad.

NWS_DMRAimedFireShort grants 40% Crit.

• 0-7m: 33 [ammo] + 10 [7-15m, scope] + 40 [AttackType] = 73%
  
• 7-10m: 83%

Rangers_DMRAimedFire grants 30% crit

• 10-15m: 33 [ammo] + 22 [scope] + 30 [AttackType] = 85%
  
• 15-25m: 33 to 29.2 [Ammo] + 22 [scope] + 30 = 85-84.2
  
• 25-35m: 29.2 to 21.6 [Ammo] + 30 [scope] +30 = 89.2-81.6

Well, it's not bad. Not perfect, but it'll kill in 2 shots, whether it's based on damage [it's got like 66.66r meter range before the 203gr ammo drops to a 3stk]

Look, if you're going to mount the Dragunov on cover, you're getting some real reach out to 48m. If you need to take a shot within 35m out to that range, you're still getting a good deal, it's like you're using a M1911 at range.

But if I might make a suggestion? You might want to employ a Militia unit using a FAL instead.

You see, the FAL is coded to use Mk17 Carbine ammo. If you recall, that's a base 35% chance (and it's a 3HTK out to 18m as is - that increases to 4stk past that, but)
The FAL uses Ranger DMR attack types. Remember that crappy Squad DM Rifle? the DMRAimedFire attack type (from 10-30m on the Militia's FAL) gets +30 crit. That's right,
THE FAL IS GETTING 65% CRIT WITHOUT COVER.
And if you get the FAL dude behind some cover, you can safely add another 5% for that attack range. for 70% crit. That's ~91% chance to kill in 2 bullets.
And one FAL dude only takes up 0.5 Deployment slots! You can easily be doing something more important with your leader like using a M4/203 for the 40mm grenade or a APC9 K.

Mind you, this is only out to 30m, if you need a sniper past that, then yeah, Dragunov mounted up should kill within 2 shots, fine, fine.
I'd just rather be using the grenadier rifle since long range is kind of accounted for with the FAL.
Or the M16A4 that the Militia's use.
Or heck I'll just use cover to get closer.
Or use the eight Assault troopers to use the M249 and just use suppressive fire at extreme range, lmao
Heck an Assault rocking an ACOG on an M16A4's doing pretty good work too

• Starts at 30% crit, and a 3-round burst within 5m is probably a kill anyway.
  
• 7-15m you're shooting 6 rounds per second semi auto and get >60% crit chance
  
• 15-25m, M16A4's only attacking twice per second while the Dragunov's shooting once, getting ~53% crit chance
  
• 25-45m, M16A4 is still shooting twice per second, but we're closer to ~38% crit

Honestly, if I use the SWAT Leader, I'd rather use the M4 for the grenade launcher utility or just give him a APC9 K

Speaking of which, let's talk about why SMGs as it stands are mediocre at best.

So, quick recap:

• The M16A4 is as fast (or faster) to engage than all the other weapons discussed so far in CQC
  
• With Mk318 SOST Ammo (Rangers), it's a consistent 3-round burst that will kill
  
• If you forget to change it or are using SWAT, M855 has better crit rates out to ~45m over SOST ammo, but you're no longer guaranteed a 4stk - M885 ammo makes the burst inconsistent (90-88 DMG per burst) but makes up for it by having a decent crit chance (at least 28% per bullet within 5m), and at least the burst is fast and a followup burst comes out pretty quick.
  
• SWATAssault M16A4 uses the Rangers' AttackTypes, so it's attacking faster (faster aim time, 6 shots per second out to 15m; 2 shots per second out to 45m) and with more accuracy, especially past 15m, and is still a 4stk out to 50m, whereas the AK rifles are always a 5stk (and shooting slower/less accurately).
  
• Militia are firing 3 round bursts out to 45m as well, so they're reliably hitting at least once and at least doing a good job suppressing the enemy they're shooting at - this is in comparison to the other rifles either shooting potentially too few or too many bullets and at as shorter range [Mk18 3.5m, M4/Mk17 4m]

So yeah, overall the M16A4 is pretty good!

If a comparative weapon is going to have any chance at being better, it needs to specialize at this point.

• We already talked about the Mk17 having ~70% crit with LVPO 1-8x past 7m - a modest crit chance increase over the M16's 55-60% with the optic (SOST ammo), but it is shooting semi auto more slowly out to 15m
  
• Sniper rifles are getting guaranteed crits past 15m and is engaging faster than M16A4 past ~18m,

The only downside to using rifles is that they don't shoot full auto past like 4m; the M16A4's so far got the longest "auto" range of 5m.

That's where SMGs come into play. You see, their AttackTypes are - well, let's just look at the Rangers' MP5A5, first.
Ammunition
For 9mm weapons, M1153 ammo is generally the best choice because it's a guaranteed 4stk, but for the MP5A5 it slows the fire rate down. The ammo's base critical chance is notably higher than 5.56x45 SOST's 25-20% as well, so within 12m you've got a realistically great crit chance to account for that extra shot to kill...or at least I could safely say that with the third AttackType, but before we hop to that, M1152 is a reasonable alternative on the MP5A5 due to the fire rate not being reduced; M1153 is more consistent with a stronger STK profile, but you're shooting full auto slower than the 5.56 rifles; at least you're shooting bullets further out, but it really is a toss-up for the MP5A5.

Quick note on MP5SD6: M1153 becomes the only ammo worth taking since the other ammo types drop to a 6htk and have worse crit rate by more than 10 points reduced where it matters - CQC. Sound radius is 2.5m on the M1153 with the MP5SD6 so if you're gonna use a suppressed weapon on the Rangers, you should be using this SMG with this ammo type.

Attack Types
Spoiler alert: the SMGs get auto fire to longer distances than the rifles, importantly from 4-8m for the MP5A5/-SD6 (ranges are the same with the MP5SD6, though performance is generally slightly worse)

Let's take a look at SMGAutoFire and SMGBurst Fire.
In comparison to the CarbineAutoFire attack type, SMGAutoFire:

• Is just as fast to start shooting at 350ms
  
• Is shooting 3-9 bullets, rather than 2-6. There's a few takeaways from this:
  
• With the increased base crit chance from the ammunition, you have 37% crit chance within 4m as opposed to the Carbines' ~19% crit chance in this range
  
• There's a significant chance you'll shoot too many bullets, and while that's inefficient for single enemies, you could keep spraying and hit an enemy behind the first, and with up to 9 bullets (and that crit chance), you have a chance to kill them as well. I don't like relying on this, but at the very least the possibility exists

SMGBurstFire shoots 3 round bursts with a similar negligibly-different crit chance compared to SMGAutoFire, as opposed to the rifles shooting semi auto. With 5.56 weapons, that means for every two trigger pulls of their rifle, we're more-or-less shooting a 3 round burst with superior crit rates - it's therefore not foolproof, but still a very good performance over the longer rifles.

Try to not let your MP5 dudes shoot past 12m; past 8m, we're borrowing the rifles' RapidFireMed profile. It's still okay, since our ammo's base crit chance is still [M1153: 42.13-39.2]+20% from the attack type, so we're getting upwards of ~60% crit before accounting for the optic [Holo Sight grants +10% from 7-15m] here, but the problem arises with the maximum distance of 12m - it means we're taking longer to aim out towards 12m (maxAimTime=600ms) where the 5.56 rifles start getting faster on single shots out to 15m.

Past 12m, the MP5 is using the slower CarbineAimedFire attack type, but they're only shooting twice a second and are engaging notably slower than rifles. The Crit Chance is sharply declining at these ranges too; the Holosight 1x is no longer giving crit bonuses past 15m, the AttackType is only giving 10% crit, and the M1153 ammo is giving [39.2-33.3]% crit chance. 5.56 rifles are just starting to use CarbineAimedFire, and if you're planning to post a trooper at these ranges intentionally, you're likely giving them at least a Combat Sight 4x, which is now granting 15% crit to compensate for 5.56 having weaker innate crit rate. You also have snipers one-shotting everything past 15m, and LMGs bursting down everything on top of that.

In summary:
The MP5A5 out to 12m is out-performing rifles with its higher crit chance once it starts firing, and you're likely giving it the HoloSight 1x to further improve its engagement speeds and crit chances, and should be your go-to tool for dedicating a Ranger to interior redecorating if you want an automatic weapon.
M16A4 still kills within 5m faster with its 3-round burst having a whopping 16 roundsPerSecond, but the MP5A5 is a no-brainer choice for room clearing.

Just quickly glancing over the APC9 K for the SWAT team now...

So there's a number of details that strike me as intriguing.

• First thing that strikes me is the first AttackType is notably longer to start engaging - we're now at 450ms minAimTime vs the Ranger's baseline of 350ms [remember I said for SWAT the non-militia M16A4 uses Ranger AttackTypes? This is where it becomes important]
  
• The second thing that I notice is that damage profile. 5-6 STK, ew. At least the range for the 6stk is 25m - we won't be engaging that far out.
  
• The damage dropoff is also less of an issue since we're guaranteed to shoot at least 5 bullets within 7m, and continue shooting until the target's dead; see MaxShots="-1"? That's listed that way because once the SWAT dude sees his initial target dead, he'll immediately stop shooting, but will continue shooting until that last bullet hits. This is the first time we've seen this in this game - it was a bit more common in Door Kickers 1, but it's important because it especially means we're only going to shoot the necessary 5 bullets!
  
• We're also shooting long bursts out to 18m, where the would have been shooting semi-auto since 8m. The Damage drop-off is 25m to start being a 6stk - we're likely to only need 5 bullets, but because the burst size is 3-6 bullets, the APC9 K dude might stop shooting. At least the resetTime is a very quick 200ms, so he's shooting that second burst quickly!
  
• The fire rate is also a blistering 18.3 roundsPerSecond. Once the APC9 K starts shooting, whatever it points at is either dead or rapidly suppressed.

I'm honestly very impressed/satisfied with the APC9 K. It's rapidly becoming my favorite weapon for the Nowheraki SWAT, even if the M16A4 is still a great all-around rifle. I typically put it on the Leader and Sapper units if I'm not using M4/M203 on Leader/Shotguns.

Well, that is if you really wanted to. Did you know that the Nowheraki SWAT get Mini Uzis? They're even equippable as sidearms for non-Militia! [you can also give it to Militia units as a primary]
Let's look at that now:

I'm having fun with these section titles lmao
The ammo type is the same, so I consolidated the Militia and Sidearm [Leader/Assault/Sapper] versions.

The main problem with the Mini-Uzi being a sidearm is that it's a sidearm and takes time to switch to, but once it's out:

• It's a guaranteed 5stk
  
• Within 9m you're engaging faster than the other weapons [excluding the M16A4]
  
• It shoots as fast as M16A4 SOST burstfire [you don't get SOST ammo on SWAT]
  
• Within 9m, you're shooting 5-8 rounds (5 is enough, but you're dealing with possible base inaccuracies here, so more bullets is fine)
  
• Coin flip on whether or not one burst kills between 9-18m since it's 3-6 shots, but i mean it's still probably enough to suppress the enemy
  
• You're engaging faster from 18-30m, and while it might be less accurate than semi-auto fire, 2-6 bullets is a good amount to suppress someone; 550ms starting at 18m, and 800ms at 30m, notably faster than primaries!

Overall, not bad. Not my first CQC pick for SWAT, but if your leader's rocking a Dragunov, taking the time to switch to this to clear a room [say on Lone Wolf runs, or just to help out] isn't a terrible choice.

As for the Militia:

• We're shooting bursts out to 25m to varying levels of effectiveness
  
• within 7m, we're shooting vastly too many bullets - 10-16 rounds. This is overkill territory, so if they're pointed at multiple enemies when the militia unit starts shooting, they're likely to get 2 kills.
  
• Same deal with 7-15m, though it's fewer bullets, so a second kill is slightly less likely - 6-12 bullets.
  
• 15-25m, we're shooting 4-8 bursts, and engaging faster than the rifles - at 25m we're beginning to attack at 550ms...that's DMR speeds [not accounting for optic], and
  
• At 15m we're even faster at 450ms, which is faster than even the M16A4 is able to start engaging enemies at [600ms and climbing, sans optic].
  
• Every uzi attack type has a -20% crit penalty. You're not getting critical hits.

Where the Rangers prefer mid-range with semi-auto rifles (or heck, 7x frag grenades, lmao), the SWAT unit do VERY well with automatic SMGs. It might take them a little longer to start shooting, but anything they point at dies.
Or is at least suppressed.

In conclusion, SMGs rock everything within 8m (Rangers)/18m [Nowheraki SWAT]. I still hold that the M16A4 is a great weapon overall, but Marksman rifles are the first weapon set [at range], and the SMGs are the second weapon set [CQC] that have a niche over the M16A4.

Before we hop to the last two weapon types [Shotguns, LMGs], let's finish up the Militia's weapons. We talked about the FAL being equivalent to an Optic-less Mk17 Carbine, and how it serves as a serviceable ranged weapon - enough to not need your Leader to rock the imperfect Dragunov, but there's two other weapons the Militia can use:

The M16A4 [go figure] and the AK47 Underfolder.

M16A4 Militia
AK47 Underfolder Militia

I briefly covered the M16A4 for the Militia before. It shoots 3-round bursts out to 30m, then is inconsistently shooting 2-6 rounds out to 45m for some reason.

Since the AK47 Underfolder is the last weapon the Militia get (aside from sidearms), let's take a look at its AttackTypes.
In short, don't use it outside of room clearing. 5-13 bullets is more than enough to kill something indoors, so long as it actually scores hits. I'm not quite sure how reasonably far out full auto fire will work, but it's there. 5 shots to kill at all ranges hurts to look at.

At least it's full auto. I'd much rather have a Mini Uzi (room clearing) or M16A4/FAL (accuracy at range) on militia, though.

Curiously all of the Militia's primaries [aside from the FAL] are Burst or Full Auto. This makes them great tools for suppressing enemies while your better units take aimed shots.

Speaking of suppression...

...Ho baby!

The M249 is the other fully automatic weapon that your SWAT team gets [and Rangers], and IMO it's the best option for your SWATAssault troopers overall. It's so good I'd even recommend it as your main LMG for Rangers!
There's no alternate ammo type for the M249 on the Rangers, so details here will be similar between Rangers and Militia.

One thing I noticed is that while the AttackTypes are the same, the Militia use the Short/[normal]/Med AttackTypes out to further ranges and skip over Long and go straight to LongXX.

Let's go over the unmounted AttackTypes.
Mounted, for comparison
Yes, I know that's a lot at once. Let's start with comparing Unmounted to Mounted

• Each relevant Mounted type matches up with its equivalent Unmounted AttackType for both Rangers and Militia, so there's no worrying about thirty levels of calculus like how AttackTypes and Optics have different ranges when doing something like calculating Crit Chance - this'll be easier to compare Unmounted/Mounted
  
• Mounted is nearly universally faster to acquire targets, excluding LongMounted's MaxAimTime and LongXX and LongXXMounted having the same AimTime values for Min and Max
  
• Excluding LongXX/-Mounted, Mounted versions shoot more bullets per burst
  
• ResetTime is universally faster. 100ms [ShortMounted] vs 300ms [Short] all the way up to 250ms [LongXXMounted] vs 500ms [LongXX], which means if the trooper needs to shoot at the same target again, Mounted will see a minuscule break before firing again, while unmounted will be noticeable.
  
• SWAT units use the closer-range AttackTypes out to further distances, making them even faster for the SWAT units, and...
  
• If you've been paying attention, these AimTimes are competitive with SWAT's other weapons

The full auto AttackTypes by themselves is enough to make the M249 an excellent all-around weapon. The Rangers have faster options for weapons in terms of shooting the first shot, but once the M249 starts shooting, whatever it's aiming at is either dead or suppressed, and for the SWAT, it's probably their best weapon outright.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE

Suppressive Fire is a manually-activated attack that sets every LMG to shoot a specific way no matter the distance or whether or not the trooper is mounted or not. The cone of fire is even shown to you, so you can force the trooper to be more (or less) accurate!
This can be activated at any time, so long as your LMG dude isn't being suppressed (and his LMG is up - try not to bump into him with other troopers, LMGs are slow to ready.

• Flat 250ms to aim! That's faster than even the M16A4...theoretically. In practice, you're likely to pause after you already see an enemy, so your troopers are already aiming within the split-second between when you, the player notice an enemy, so you've likely lost time to actually aim the weapon...therefore, the 250ms is simply 'how long it takes after giving the order to Suppress before the trooper starts shooting'. It's still a very good time!
  
• 8-12 shots per burst! This'll make even the heavier LMGs shoot more bullets per burst!
  
• No accuracy penalties, since you can manually set the cone of fire (and direction); the circle you can manually put down is the weapon's maximum cone of fire, so you can push that past the enemies you want to attack in order to make your spray more accurate, or in front of it if you want to make sure you catch a wider cone of fire.
  
• Reset time is 500ms, but that's fine since the gunner's not wasting time trying to actually aim at individual enemies - aiming by itself takes upwards of 400ms
  
• Suppressive Fire is also useful enough so it can perform indoors, easily outperforming rifles and being competitive with SMGs!
  
• Its only downside is that you're locked in place while using it, plus you have to manually set it, which costs time, and it's pretty easy to get to the point where your dude's already shot 20 bullets past what's necessary before you realize you need your gunner to stop shooting.

Bullets! Lots of Bullets! You can have up to 4 LMGs on any map on the Rangers, and up to 8 for the Nowheraki SWAT!

The M16A4 is still equippable on more classes overall, which is why I say overall the M16A4 is best, having great overall performance, but the M249 rewards increased effort (read: manually setting suppression fire). The only downside is that Suppressive Fire locks your trooper in place, and if you're not using suppressive fire, your gunner's mounted behind cover or is moving to cover and is manually engaging enemies somewhat slower than rifles.

Briefly covering the LMGs together:

• M249 shots at 13.3 rounds per second, has a damage profile of 4-5stk with a damage drop-off at a whopping 42.55m, and 200[!!] rounds
  
• Mk48 has no damage drop-off [4stk], a slower fire rate [10 per second], and 100 rounds. It otherwise uses LMGStrafe AttackTypes. It's not worth picking over the M249 - while the M249 slows down past 40m, you could just oh i dunno manually select Suppressive Fire for it
  
• M240L uses GPMG AttackTypes, which universally take longer to aim and shoot fewer rounds [3-5 in close quarters and as few as 1 round 'bursts' for the GPMGStrafeMed AttackType and further out. Uses LMGStrafeMounted AttackTypes, so it's not unique. 9.2 rounds per second and 100 rounds; easily the worst.
  
• CIA get a PKP Pecheneg. First off, using LMGs on the CIA Black Ops troopers feels wrong; they need more flexible, suppressed weapons to perform multiple duties. It uses LMGStrafe AttackTypes out to 8m, which isn't worth it. The only thing interesting about it is that it gets AP ammo, but otherwise is sharing stats with the Mk48 in terms of damage
  
• XM338 uses the worse GPMG attacktypes when unmounted but is a 3htk. 10 rounds per second 50 rounds and a ungodly slow 4100ms reload time, though... It's the only other LMG that stands out for the increased damage.

All of the LMGs use the same LMGStrafeMounted AttackTypes, so what matters for them is their fire rates, their damage and damage ranges, their magazine capacity [or belt capacity, if you care about technical terms], and their unmounted AttackTypes.

• M249 is the only LMG that shoots faster than 10 per second. 13.3 isn't terribly fast, but it's fast enough that if the XM338 shoots at the same time as the M249, the M249's 4th bullet comes out almost exactly the same time the XM338 shoots its third bullet - for both guns it's the kill shot if all bullets hit.
  
• M249 is the only LMG that has over 100 rounds, making the other LMGs obsolete within 42.55m, and past that, it's just one more bullet to kill, and the M249 is shooting faster anyway.
  
• LMGStrafe is better than GPMGStrafe, so the M240L shouldn't even be looked at

So yeah. M249 is the best LMG, and the only reason it's not the best weapon in the game is because of needing to be mounted or babysat [suppressive fire is what carries it tbh] and otherwise its availability: Rangers can only have 4, SWAT can only have 8, and CIA would rather be doing other things anyway, but you could have 2.

It's also great in CQC once it gets firing, but SMGs don't require manually activating suppressive fire, and there are two weapon types that are faster to engage indoors: handguns aim faster but shoot slower, while shotguns are fast and hit like a truck.

The M1014 is an odd beast.

• 7+1 capacity, loads one shell at a time - this is automatically interrupted if the Trooper sees an enemy, as the trooper will stop reloading and engage nearly immediately
  
• Shoots 9 pellets at once, each with independent damage and critical rolls
  
• Does enough damage so that if each pellet hit, it's a guaranteed 2stk out to 31.68m, giving it some mid-range flexibility

Here's the ammo data:

Now look, the M1014 slows down considerably past 7m, but is at least shooting twice a second out to 14m.
But look at that minAimTime! Within 3.5m, the M1014 is getting the first shot off faster than your MP5/5.56 rifles!

I don't know how to calculate chance when you have multiple pellets rolling critical hits at the same time, but if just one of them needs to be a critical hit to kill (which is true), it should be that within 3.13m is an effectively guaranteed kill - it's not, of course, but in practice, the M1014 tends to kill in one shot, with a follow-up shot coming up within the next quarter second.

I've even noticed that the M1014 performs decently out past 14m, even - it's a little over one shot per second, and it's not landing every pellet, but it's still doing solid hits.
It performs so well that I would rather use it rather than an MP5A5 - the MP5 matches rifles' initial aim speed and bursts down enemies, sure, but the aimtime differences and immediate dispatching of enemies seems to make it far more effective.

And if you want even faster, there are the handguns.

Not going to touch on CIA yet, but:
Rangers and Nowheraki SWAT get the M9 as a starter handgun.
Rangers can also purchase the M17, M18, G19X, G22, and 1911 pistols.
Nowheraki SWAT can get Mini Uzis, G17, and HS-45 pistols.

For 9x19mm handguns, only the base M882 ammo type has any differences:
M9 - 5 roundsPerSecond, 20 damage, 25% crit at 0m, 0% at 100m
M17 - 5.5 roundsPerSecond, identical otherwise
M18 - 5.5 roundsPerSecond, identical otherwise
G19X - 6 roundsPerSecond, identical otherwise
G17 [SWAT] - uses G19X stats

Rangers get the choice between M882, M1152, and M1153 ammo. SWAT don't, so for they're pretty easy to summarize - G17 is a modest fire rate / draw speed increase over the M9.

I'll go over the weapon handling stats for the other weapons at some point, but 'changeInTime' becomes more important for handguns.

Let's cover the SWAT choices, since there's only 4:

Mini-Uzi
The Mini-Uzi has...a changeInTime of zero? I guess that means once your trooper pays the ChangeOutTime for their primary, there's no additional time spent drawing it. readyTime I think refers to the amount of time the weapon takes to raise up, and I don't know what guardTime does.

M9
The M9 is the default handgun and is nearly identical between Rangers and SWAT. See the much faster readyTime/guardTime? If you bump your trooper against a wall, then turn away, their ability to fully aim their handgun again is nearly instantaneous. The only difference is that SWAT takes an extra 200ms to draw - numbers listed are for the SWAT version. They have different AttackTypes as well, but you were probably expecting that.
You'll also notice i'm including accuracy now. The handguns' accuracy generally degrade out to the same distance, but for indoor work, it's not so important. Just don't push them to the point where they start invoking their relevant "PistolAimedFire" AttackType and you'll be fine.
I promise you I'll go over the accuracy of the rifles in a later section, but it's less important

G17
G17 is a 100ms speed increase to draw over the M9, but is losing out on accuracy a bit faster.

HS-45
A side-grade for speed, but the HS-45 has some negative traits going on with its AttackTypes.

Before we get to AttackTypes, let me cover the Rangers' handguns.

M9
Faster than the SWAT version, and superior accuracy.
Note that the accuracyEndDist is 100m for all the Rangers' handguns, so any decreases to accuracy isn't very significant - what's more significant is that the M16A4 has a baseline accuracy of 300 while the Mk18 has a baseline accuracy of 200 - the attack type past 15m makes the Mk18 inaccurate out to longer ranges. But for handguns? Sub-100 accuracy is good enough for indoor work.

M17

M18
Fastest Swap speed while having superior accuracy to the G19X.

G19X
Whatever readyTime is, the G19X is fastest at it.

G22
G22 has a higher crit rate than 9x19 and is a guaranteed 4stk. For those reasons, the G22 is a low-maintenance (don't have to remember to equip M1153 ammo) upgrade at face value.

M1911
M1911 is its own can of worms and is overall the best handgun, but like the other handguns on the Rangers, you still have to switch to it.

This isn't even counting the rifles' changeOutTime. I'm going over this now because if you're going to use handguns for CQC, you need to keep them outside of the line of fire to safely draw their guns - even the fastest handgun, at 700ms, is too slow in a firefight.

But if you prepare a handgun ahead of time...

Edgy section title, huh?

Well let's compare apples to apples.

I mentioned M882 ammo for handguns, so let's introduce the best ammo type for handguns, M1153 9x19mm.
M1153 ammo grants a superior crit chance and a guaranteed 4 shot to kill.

Here's the MP5A5's M1153 ammo type again:
10 additional crit chance in cqc, a negligibly higher higher damage value in cqc (doesn't matter, still a 4 shot to kill), and of course a full auto fire rate.

And since I need to mention it, here's the G22's JHP 180gr default ammo
Only real thing to note is the crit chance.

We're still needing to compare apples to apples, so let's show the pistol Attack Types out to 8m, where the MP5A5 is shooting full auto:
This is the M9's attack types out to 15m.

• M17 is the same except PIstolAimedFire9mil, which drops to 13m. M18 is the same except PistolAimedFire9mil, which drops to 11m
  
• G19X has DoubleTap9mil out to 5m, ControlledPair9mil out to 9m, PistolAimedFire9mil out to 13m
  
• G22 uses the same attack types; DoubleTap9mil out to 4.5m, ControlledPAir9mil out to 8.5m, and PistolAimedFire9mil out to 14m

If my math is right...

• The M9 is firing its first shot faster than the MP5A5 (no optic) out to 7m.
  
• It might be a single shot, but DoubleTap9mil/ControlledPair9mil get +17% crit (1.5-8m). With the ammo type granting 37.4-34.8%, handguns have an impressive >51.8% crit in this range. That's >76.76r% chance for a crit within those two bullets; pretty good!
  
• Past 8m, the handguns slow down quite a lot, but you're still getting +10% crit chance - that's as much that the Holo Sight 1x gives from 7-15m, so it's still decent
  
• G22 has a higher crit chance, pushing this range up to [45.02-40.47% from ammo] >57.47% per shot - with 2 bullets that's >81.9%!

But the M1911, ho boy
Guaranteed 3 shot kill, 55 flat crit rate!
The attack types are similar too:
...Did you catch that?
27% critical chance. from 1.5m to 7m. It's easier to calculate since .45acp has a flat 55% base crit, but that's 82% crit per shot! Two shots is 96.76%!
With 6 shots per second and between 1.5-3.5m, the M1911 has a 96.76% chance to kill by the time the MP5A5 gets off its first shot. Out to 7m it slows down and the MP5 is shooting almost 3x as fast, but you have to keep in mind that every single ranger can have a M1911 for CQC work whereas only your Assault Rangers can have an MP5A5.
Oh, I forgot the MP5A5 shoots 3 round bursts past 4m anyway. Let me do the math real quick for 8m, a HoloSight 1x, and calculate for both M1152 and M1153 ammo (M1152 is really only useful for the MP5A5 due to keeping the higher fire rate)

It's ultimately a toss-up whether or not the M1911 and MP5 are faster. Let me show you those kill times on the MP5 for the two ammo types:

Right, so the problem arises past 4m for the MP5. If you're not killing in one burst, you're wasting a terrible amount of time that keeps the M1911 competitive.
At 8m, the M1911 is at most 866.67ms to fire off its second shot, and it's a cumulative 93.24% crit chance, and a guaranteed 3 shot kill anyway [1266.67ms]. Within 7m, you're killing within 700ms, if not by 450ms by the second shot's cumulative 96.76% crit chance, which makes the M1911 better in every case the MP5 hasn't crit at the end of the first burst, and even if it does, there's only a ~38ms time difference if the M1911 crits by its second shot as well!

And with an M16A4, well:
A M16A4 with a Holo Sight and Mk318 SOST ammo kills within 5m between 403.57 and 425ms, longer to aim if point blank. Controlling for optics, an M16A4 kills before the MP5A5 gets its third shot off, and can start engaging another enemy while the MP5A5 is either continuing to shoot full auto (within 4m), or potentially having to shoot a second burst (if the ~77% cumulative crit chance by the third bullet doesn't kill).
Within 7m, the M1911 has fired its second bullet at 450ms, and that's a 96% crit chance. It's not impossible to not crit by then, mind, but there's this thing called Occam's Razor.

William of Ockham: "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one".
There's two major concepts behind this, and at this point I'm quoting another guide:

• There is no significant difference between a wounded zed and a healthy one. Both can kill you in the same manner. The only difference is between a live zed and a dead zed.
  
• The more moving parts an action involves, the more chances than a mistake in a single part will cause the whole thing to fail.

The guide I'm quoting is from "FeelZeSchadenfreude" and his guide from Killing Floor 2.
https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=834945919

Theoretical Efficiency is higher with tools that can do their job in one attempt rather than many.

• That's why the M110A1 w/LR Optic 5-25x is so important - it does its job with one attempt past 15m.
  
• That's why the M1014 shotgun is so important - it has a very high kill potential thanks to multiple crit rolls and kills in the second blast on base damage anyway.
  
• That's why the M16A4 w/Mk318 SOST ammo is so important within 5m - the 3 round burst (pending misses) is enough damage to kill.
  
• M1911 is available to all rangers, kills in 3 shots, has a base crit rate of 55% and between 1.5-7m increases to 82% because of AttackTypes.
  
• M249 is the only other meaningful full auto gun, and it can shoot full auto any time, theoretically faster than the MP5A5, and at all ranges that matter

I don't like relying on crit chance. I'd rather know that wherever I put my troopers, enemies are going to fall at a reasonable pace.

The MP5A5 isn't enough gun to stand out amongst its competition - its only real niche is between 4-8m since it can shoot 3 round bursts where the carbines are stuck with semi-auto, and even that is inconsistent. It's still a fine room-clearing weapon, don't get me wrong, but there's better ways to make that happen.

This'll be quick. Fire rate is irrelevant thanks to the 9x19mm pistols all shooting the same speed, and attack types are irrelevant because all the pistols use similar types - what matters is their range, then.

Priorities:

• EmergencyFire grants no crit bonus, but shoots until the target is down - it's...fine, but the shorter this distance is the better
  
• DoubleTap and ControlledPair grant crit chance - 17% for 9mil and 27% for 45
  
• ControlledPair is slower but managable
  
• PistolAimedFire is significantly slower, so the further out ControlledPair, the better
  
• We REALLY don't want to be at PistolAimedFireLong, so i'm listing PistolAimedFire ranges - DONT USE PAST THIS

Thoughts:

• M9 might be sluggish to pull out, but has superior range
  
• G19x is better until 5m, but that dedicates it to indoor-only use. Might be worth it, given it's also a little bit lighter than the M9
  
• G22 is a very modest range and crit chance upgrade over the M9
  
• M1911 is notably shorter range, but it slaps so hard it's worth it

I also quickly glanced at AttackTypes that the SWAT use.

• They use Rangers_EmergencyFire within 2.5m
  
• There are two attackTypes past that: NWS_PistolAimedClose and NWS_PistolAimedFire. 9mm guns shoot 2.2/2.1 times per second, have 10/7% Crit chance, and have some pretty bad resetTimes at 450/300ms (faster at longer range, but it's only single shot - the Close one shoots one or two bullets
  
• the 45 gun will always shoot once past 2.5m and has a reset time of 550ms.
  
• 300ms at 2.5m to aim, 500ms at 6m to aim, and then it increases to 800ms at 15m for the M9, 10m for the G17, and 12m for the HS-45.

Just use the M9 as a sidearm if you are going to at all. FAL Militia do ok with it - it might take them 6 shots to kill but they'll suppress if they're shooting at someone with it, lol
Militia are baaaaad with pistols, but the M9 at least has some decent range [15m before we get into some slow shooting] and at least you start with it.

Rangers:

• Assault are best off with the M16A4 - Great, you start with it!
  
• Supports should be using the M249 - Great, you start with it!
  
• Marksmen should use the M110A1 with LR Optic 5-25x. Don't use the Squad DM Rifle, it's actively terrible, probably the worst gun in the game
  
• Grenadiers should stick to the starter M16/M203 - Great, you start with it!
  
• You can use M1014 shotgun if you want with any class, I recommend borrowing a few Marksmen - it's a personal choice but you don't really need 4 marksmen for the majority of maps. You can borrow a Support or 2 if you want to level them up
  
• M9 is fine, M1911

Optics and other details

• Manually give your 5.56 guns Mk318 SOST ammo for a guaranteed 3 shot kill within 24.4m [M16A4], especially within the 3 round burst.
  
• M9 pistols (if you're using them) should get M1153 ammo for a guaranteed 4 shot to kill.
  
• Dual Role 1/4x is your best choice on Grenadiers, Combat Sight 4x is good enough if weight is an issue and you're using them at range. You can put it on the M249's as well
  
• LR Optic 5-25x gives 100% crits past 15m for the M110A1
  
• Holo Sight 1x for anyone pushing a building, or use pistols
  
• Raid armor is faster. IV Plates slow you down but block 9x39 and Dragunov shots.

Nowheraki SWAT:

• Leader can get by with the Dragunov so long as you mount it, but would much rather be using the M4/M203 due to exclusivity to the 40mm grenades, or APC9 K due to it just shredding.
  
• Like holy crap I can't stress enough, the APC9 K is amazing. Use it out to 18m, it gets full auto AttackType profiles! Mini Uzi sidearm is fine too.
  
• Assault get M249's. Use them, love them.
  
• If you're not using an M249, the M16A4 they get uses Ranger AttackType profiles so it's their best rifle overall.
  
• M500-MEK is available to Assault and Sappers if you want to play with it, just be sure to use the 00 Buck ammo, it's miles better.
  
• Militia shouldn't be using the AK47 Underfolder. Literally everything else is quite good. Uzi for indoors, M16A4 for general purpose, FAL uses Ranger Mk17 AttackType profiles!
  
• Single SAPI plate is all Militia get, but once you buy it, everyone has it.
  
• Front ESAPI Back SAPI is a raid vest and is a good upgrade over Single SAPI, upgrade when you can.
  
• Assault have Dynamic Hammers or RPG-26's as their only options for the Large Equipment slot. ...Don't take the hammer, take the Longbow. See that wall? it doesn't exist anymore.
  
• Sappers can take the RPG-26 as well but they'd be better off with 3x Demolition Charges for the Large Slot and two 1x Door Charges in their Small Equipment Slots.
  
• Frags, give everyone frags. I personally never use Molotovs but they can block enemies from pushing you...if that's valuable to you for whatever reason. i'd rather just have two muzzles pointing in any given direction - anything that comes into view gets shredded. I mean heck you can get up to 8 M249's, if that isn't enough to kill everything idk what the heck you're doing

So what have we learned?

• AmmoType sets up weapon damage, critical chance, and the ranges for each (also Armor Penetration)
  
• AttackType defines how fast the trooper will engage enemies with AimSpeed, how many shots they'll fire, potentially how fast they'll fire those shots via roundsPerSecondOverride, and how far out via rangeMeters how that AttackType will be used
  
• Optics, while not specifically mentioned, give important boosts to AimTime, resetTime, and usually critChanceAdd

Point 1: For the CIA, there's a few things you need to know that'll make things a bit faster to calculate which guns are best.

Aside from the following guns:

• PM63 (Undercover Secondary)
  
• Mini Uzi (Undercover Secondary)
  
• Mp5K (Undercover Secondary)
  
• Double Barrel Sawn-off (Undercover Secondary, included due to technicality)
  
• VSS Vintorez (out to 4m)
  
• M249 LMG
  
• Mk48 LMG
  
• PKP Pecheneg LMG

All of the weapons that the CIA can equip are fired exclusively in Semi-Auto, usually with the Rangers_RapidFire / _RapidFireMed variants.

Rangers_RapidFire is an attack type that's similar to _RapidFireMed, except it:

• Uses a roundsPerSecondOverride of 7, one bullet per second faster than _RapidFIreMed
  
• Shoots a minimum of 2 shots and a maximum of -1, which means it shoots until the target is dead
  
• Gets no crit chance bonus, as opposed to _RapidFireMed granting +20%

The takeaway here is that you should pick a good generalist weapon that'll be decent at mid-range (or just stick to long-range sniping with your primary), which means Optic selection and the base stats on the ammo type are significantly more important.

Point 2: You only get 4 units: 2x Undercover (which don't get LvIII Armor or the big primaries) and 2x Black Ops (which can't Play Civilian again once they Go Loud if you're doing Poncho use)

The CIA play so significantly differently that it's critical you make sure you have more generalist equipment, but thankfully with no crazy AttackTypes to worry about, the choices are a bit more obvious

The Black Ops units have only 4 primaries worth considering due to everything shooting semi auto due to the AttackTypes being all semi auto. Those are:

• M110A1 for all your ranged needs past 15m - easy choice with LR Optic 5-25x
  
• MCX RSAR can equip a LVPO 1-6x - while not as good as the 1-8x, it has a sound radius of 3 with subsonic ammo, and at range has similar performance to the Mk17 Carbine while having a 30 round magazine. Oh and it's a 3-4stk with subsonic ammo; supersonic is always a 3stk if you're going loud or don't mind supersonic crack
  
• Mp5SD6 is a suitable budget suppressed weapon. 2.5m radius with M1153 ammo
  
• VSS Vintorez is a slower option but is a 2HKO out to 15m, and shoots 2-3 rounds within 4m. I wouldn't use it with the 4x scope - even if it gets a 90% crit rate, you're slower on the draw and can easily get suppressed by an enemy firing back.

Everything else is significantly worse:

• MP5A5 Suppressed is technically a MP5SD6 with longer AttackRanges, but the quietest you can do is 4.5m sound radius
  
• MP5KPDW is a worse MP5
  
• MP7A1 has even more range than the MP5 and gets 3m sound radius with subsonics and 35 crit chance out to 15m, but always a 5stk as opposed to the MP5 being a 4stk with M1153 ammo
  
• AKS74U has terrible supersonic ammo, Subsonic ammo has a sound radius of 6 and is a 4-5stk
  
• Mk18 has worse damage profile and shorter range AttackTypes and no subsonic ammo
  
• AK 105 Alpha might be able to equip better optics but it's a AKS74U you have to buy
  
• AK47 Underfolder, lol
  
• Mk17 CQC is inferior to Mk17 Carbine
  
• M4 has better performance with its RapidFireMed being 20m and CarbineAimedFire being 45m. For a starting rifle, it'll do until you can afford the MCX, just don't forget you need to add the suppressor and Mk318 SOST ammo [4-5stk, worse crit rate]
  
• Anything the Mk17 Carbine can do, the MCX RSAR does while having a 30 round magazine and having a suppressed soundRadius of 3. More crit at range, but you'd rather be using the M110A1 past 15m anyway
  
• Skipping over the LMGs. Why on earth would you want one for your CIA dudes?
  
• SVD is inferior to M110A1

The starting M4 Carbine will do you well enough until you can afford at least an MP5SD6 for your CIA unit, since you really ought to prioritize a suppressed handgun for the CIA first. The MCX RSAR is also 10 points, so that might require completing multiple maps to unlock first if you're just starting out. Other than that, nah,

This one gets its own section. It's a double-edged sword as a stealth weapon, trading lethality for an improved crit chance and a 2.5m audible range with M1153 ammo does more damage.

Rangers don't really have suppressable weapons - if you played Door Kickers 1 at all, you'll know all the benefits of the Stealth class and how handy it is to have a weapon that can kill enemies silently.

I'm including this section because suppressors aren't really all that important for the Rangers - the rifles are generally fast and accurate enough to get away with going loud, but trying to suppress the rifles don't really do much to suppress 5.56 - they're still audible out to a long distance.

The only suppressable weapons the Rangers' Assault Class can use are:

• MP5SD6 [Intergral, 2.5m sound radius]
  
• Mk18 Carbine [45m sound radius]
  
• M4 Carbine and M4 URG-I Carbine [40m sound radius]
  
• Mk17 CQC [50m sound radius]
  
• Mk17 Carbine [48m sound radius]

...As you can see, if you're going to use suppressors, your enemies are still going to hear and potentially investigate.

As I mentioned briefly with the M4 URG-I sections, suppressors' secondary use in Door Kickers 2 is to push the weapons' early AttackTypes' ranges back a bit, meaning your weapons attacking faster, and any AttackTypes with better Crit Ranges are pushed a bit further back

I originally thought that a longer weapon was bad, but there's no stats regarding a weapon's length, only that it takes longer for them to raise it back up if they bump something. There's also benefits in that most 5.56x45mm weapons get a slight RPM buff in CQC for full auto [MP5 doesn't]

You can put a suppressor on your Rangers' M9 Handgun... Don't.
To explain, the use-cases for Rangers to draw their handgun in the first place are essentially situations where their primary is too slow to get that first shot off before they start getting shot themselves - Marksmen are the prime example, taking over 200ms longer to fire their rifle inside buildings (when they can easily be suppressed and ultimately unable to shoot outright). Support gunners can get by with pre-firing with suppressive fire whenever you see someone.
Don't misunderstand, pistols are faster than primaries long-arms within 4m and arguably within 8m, but if you need a suppressed pistol? You really ought to be letting another trooper use a Mp5SD6 - the performance with the suppressor past point-blank is just garbage.

The last point is a Marksman with a Suppressed M110A1 will likely be taking shots where they won't be getting shot back very much anyway. At that point there's no point not to, as the ONLY difference is a 100ms increase to reload time. If you're taking shots past 47m, enemies won't hear - that's the same distance the other rifles can't be heard either, anyway.

Suppressor use is something that should be experienced rather than explained. Door Kickers 1 does a good job to practically show you why the Stealth Class is the best class in the game.

The M4 has a unique interaction with the M855A1 ammo when it's suppressed. It becomes 15rps, gains a 35% base crit chance, and has its auto fire extend out to 5.5m, further out than the M16A4. Furthermore, its RapidFireMed range becomes 18m, meaning it has a bit more range at that crispy 20% crit and 6 shotPerSecond AttackType.

Unsuppressed, it's 14rps and has the auto fire range of 4m.

The M16A4 can't be suppressed, so that's a moot point - its 3-round burst is 5m, though.

Here's M16A4's AttackTypes again

And here's the M4 URG-I's stats. It has some unique attack types.
Here's some thoughts:

• The AutoFire attacktype is now extended further out than the M16's burst range. There's still a slight chance to not fire enough bullets, but we're dealing with significantly faster follow-up attacks with the ResetTime being 250 instead of 300.
  
• URGICarbineAutoFire and URGIRapidFireMed extend further out, so it takes longer for us tog et to 600ms to start shooting
  
• URGIRapidFireMed's resetTime is faster in case we need to continue shooting the same target - a bit more reasonable out to longer ranges
  
• Its fire rate is also faster, and we have increased followupShotAccuracy - not much for either, but it's significant enough.
  
• We're getting to URGICarbineAimedFire's maxAimTime at the same time as the normal M4, which is still closer in than the M16A4.

In short, this feels like the equivalent to the G19X over the M9 pistol - the early ranges are shifted out, but the further-out ranges are pulled in a little bit and we're also attacking modestly faster in comparison to the M16 past burst-fire range.
At this point, if we're to dethrone the M16A4, we'll have to look at the other variables - the ones innate to the guns themselves.

M16A4:
M4 URG-I:
[to complete analysis]

I haven't included these values yet because:

• moveSpeedModifierPercent is a quality of life thing. You could just get your troopers to start running if it's that big of a deal. Santa hat is an alternative too
  
• turnSpeedModifierPercent is largely unimportant, especially for 1%. For reference, M249 has -5% turn speed. This is a game where every millisecond counts, sure, but
  
• Reloads should be done in an empty room / behind cover - there's only like three weapons you'd ever want to worry about reloading - Handguns, generally; shotguns, and the SMGs since they spray excessive amounts bullets; maps generally aren't that long where you're forced to reload, but I've seen it
  
• I think i figured out changeInTime - the Rangers hold the rifles across their chest, so once the pistol is holstered or they finish using a gadget, they immediately start lifting their gun up, and it takes the stat "ReadyTime" for the amount of time to lift up. Non-issue for gadget use, just don't be exposed to enemy
  
• and GuardTime is probably the amount of time it takes to lift the gun up if they bump into something - a wall or a trooper cuts in front of them. This one coming into play only has one response: Skill Issue.
  
• M4 Accuracy is good enough at mid-range while the Mk18 is not - it's the only detail that's significant for longer ranges - ranges the rifles will be shooting very slowly anyway, and ranges that M110A1/LMGs shine

In summary, anything the M16A4 does, the M4 and lighter carbines generally do faster - it's just that you start with the M16A4 and past the BurstFire range (which in of itself is superior to the range the carbines shoot full auto), all the rifles have equivalent AttackTypes, so other stats like Accuracy and Damage Range matter more.

The M4 URG-I is the only rifle to have improved AttackType performance due to a faster semi-auto fire rate and an admittedly slightly longer AutoFire range, which I've already discussed is a volatile AttackType. Even the URGIAutoFire AttackType becomes merely a reasonable sidegrade because of the range extending out to 5.5m, so it's used in an equivalent manner (6m suppressed), while the normal M4 loses the autofire range earlier, at 4m (and 3.5m for Mk18), extended to 5.5m when the M4 is suppressed (Mk18-SD is 4.5m).

Quick note: I listed suppressor ranges for autofire. Suppressor use makes the guns slower, but pushes some of the earlier AttackTypes out further - it's important for the Mk24 handgun because it adds 2m to its ControlledPair attack type, which means its meaty 82% crit gets a 25% longer effective range and is even better over the M1911 handgun [though the suppressor itself made it superior, the range is icing on the cake]

Just for the M4 Carbine as an example, the suppressor:

• Merely reduces sound radius to 40-45m
  
• Slightly longer reload times
  
• Slightly longer ReadyTime
  
• Slightly longer GuardTime
  
• AttackTypes for CarbineAutoFire [4 to 5.5m] and RapidFireMed [15 to 18m] have their ranges extended out

I'll give you that the suppressor is beneficial just for those two AttackTypes, and I'd agree with you that it would be intellectually inconsistent to say that longer reload/ready/guard times can be managed.

After all, weapon length doesn't matter - it's there's like this hitbox in front of every trooper, and if something's there, they'll lower their weapon, and there's nothing specific to guns saying what that length is, no way to alter it as far as i know, and even if there was, again, it's a skill issue to make sure that doesn't come into play.

So what are we left with?

The M4 URG-I should be the only 5.56x45mm rifle you use instead of the M16A4. The one advantage the M16A4 has in CQC is a sidegrade, and in mid-range [5.5/6m to 40m], the URG-I is out-performing the M16A4 due to faster fire rate.
It doesn't dethrone the M16A4, though - it can't since it's only available on the Army Rangers, and the URG-I has other weapons it would have to compete against for the title of Best Weapon anyway:

• The MCX RSAR is superior to the M4 in every way that matters, and I'm not hyping that up either because it's CIA Black Ops exclusive - CIA shoot every longarm semi auto except the Undercover sidearms and the LMGs, so what matters is Damage/Range and Crits, and the MCX RSAR is superior, being equivalent to a Mk17 Carbine with 3m sound radius when suppressed and a 30 round magazine
  
• The M249 is arguably the best gun, but you only get it on 4 Rangers-Support and 8 SWATAssault (which is actually really good, please try it at least once), and CIA would rather be doing other things
  
• Any argument for the rifles at range is somewhat meaningless, as the M110A1 is killing in one hit past 15m (and again, the M249 is shooting multiple bullets instead of just one)
  
• While slower to start shooting, the APC9 K is dominant out to 18m due to actually shooting more than one bullet, and the M4 is shot exclusively semi-auto on the SWAT (as well as CIA), so AutoFire matters a lot more

The URG-I is a reasonable sidegrade for your Assault troopers if you're focusing on CQC use - they handle a little bit better for sake of speed when doing stuff like throwing grenades or manipulating doors, and can hold their own out to midrange.
So is the Mk17 Carbine, though, having a gnarly crit rate around 70%, even if it shoots slower.

I don't know. 20 stars will happen if you're not buying everything to try out. It's better, but not overwhelmingly so.
Heck, in an earlier incarnation, I thought the XM338 was pretty good, being a dedicated 3stk LMG, but then I actually looked at the GMPG AttackTypes, and on top of that I found out it only has 50 rounds. And if all bullets hit, the M249 shoots its kill shot at the same time the XM338 does as well due to a faster fire rate, so that is a time where the increased damage profile doesn't matter

The Poncho is an interesting but somewhat underwhelming option that opens up a few other playstyles. You get effectively 3 Concealment points back [+5 in actuality, but Black Ops start at 8 Concealment for balance purposes rather than 10 like Undercover], allowing you to either

You could

• play a Black Ops unit as a third moving camera, spotting enemies and keeping track of sightlines for your Undercover units [or your other Black Ops unit], eventually going loud once they get into a position where they can safely hold with their superior firepower [or actually have an armored pistoleer]
  
• Sneak a heavier weapon in with no armor or gadgets and pray you don't get slaughtered once you go loud.

The former is the better option if you're going to use a Poncho. You play the map watching out for your Undercover units, and whenever you need a third gunman for a simultanious execution or are in a situation where you might have to Go Loud, you trade places between your Undercover dudes and your Poncho Black Ops dude.

So what about what guns you can equip?
If you're rocking a Poncho, you can choose to either stay Covert by:

• No armor or throwables, in which case virtually any primary will keep you Covert
  
• 1 set of throwable grenades or small gadget, in which case you can still pick a -4 Concealment primary [or combination primary/secondary and still be Covert
  
• 2 sets of throwable grenades or small gadgets, in which case you can only pick a -3 concealment primary [or combination primary/secondary] and still be Covert

Having one set of additional gear will prevent you from taking -5 Concealment combination of weapons. This is important because it locks you out of options such as:

• Any -4 Concealment weapon with any sidearm or G19 Suppressed
  
• Mk48 Mod 1 LMG [lol]
  
• M110A1 Suppressed [No Sidearm]

Having two sets of additional gear will prevent you from taking a -4 Concealment combination of weapons. This includes:

• Armor + Any pistol other than G19 unsuppressed
  
• G19 Suppressed with any primary other than AKS74U or AK47 Underfolder [lol]
  
• Mp5SD6
  
• Mp5A5/Mp7A1 if you throw a suppressor on
  
• All suppressed rifles [excluding AKS-74U Suppressed, that's allowed]
  
• All LMGs [lol]
  
• VSS Vintorez + G19 Suppressed

Note that the G19 by itself on the Black Ops does not invoke concealment penalties. Adding a suppressor does have it invoke a concealment penalty, though.

So what does this mean?
If you want to stay Covert, the Poncho makes you give up a lot of useful equipment for the benefit of being able to potentially sneak something stronger than a pistol past the map's forward guards.

But what if you don't mind being Suspicious and carrying heavier equipment?
Please don't. You won't be able to get out of the entry gate with your sussy baka Black Ops with his """"concealed"""" Mk48 Mod 1 LMG. It's one thing if you can sneak in a back door, but in that case you're better off just going with a suppressed rifle and have a better gadget anyway.

So what's the plan then for Poncho use?
Sure, here's my suggestions.

Option 1: Suppressed Pistol

• No Primary
  
• Mk24 Suppressed, play it within 10m best you can
  
• Traditional Hat
  
• Armor of choice; I'd recommend Raid Vest for the point of mobility
  
• One light gadget - Frags or Flashes
  
• If you can sneak your dude and use another gadget early, you could get away with a Slap Charge or a Thermal Torch - once you use it, you'll no longer be Suspicious

Usable as a 3rd set of eyes, either to cover another Black Ops agent that's going loud, or to cover your Undercover Agents while they do their wetwork. Clear up the easier kills, and break this guy out whenever you need a third gun, then swap mobile-camera roles with your Undercover agents and do your best to maneuver your Black Ops agent into position - the Mk24's speed will take care of the rest, so long as you're within 10m.
Honestly this is my preferred way to play with the Poncho. When you're ready to play dedicated Pointman, go in and start blasting.
There's not much use for a loud pistol, but you could use the M1911 or G19 Custom otherwise.

Option 2: CQC Suppressed Primary - Vintorez

• Vintorez with PSO1M2 4x
  
• No Sidearm
  
• Traditional Hat, no armor
  
• 2 sets of small equipment

2STK up to 15m. This is strictly better at indoor use, and tbh your Undercover Agents would be better suited for this, since they can go Civilian again - you'd really rather have armor on your Black Ops - but hey, it's an option - a dominant one, at least.

Option 3: Mid-Ranged Suppressed Primary - MCX RSAS

• MCX RSAR w/LPVO 1-6x. You'll be getting 70-ish% crit rates with this.
  
• Traditional Hat, no armor
  
• You get one set of equipment before you become suspicious, so make it count. Frags are a great way to make noise away from you. I wouldn't take flashes, since you're already not making enough noise for enemies to notice you (dont forget to maneuver your Undercover units to ensure you attack without being overwhelmed!)

Due to relative advantage, the MCX RSAS the best middle-ground and can be equipped with no armor and poncho AND still take the LVPO 1-6x to push its crit chances upwards of 60% once you're shooting at targets further away than 7m. ...It's still not a guarantee, but hey, you picked the poncho.

Option 4: Gonna go sniping?
You really only have one option if you're gonna snipe with a suppressed rifle and use a poncho.

• M110A1 Suppressed with default LVPO 1-6x will give you guaranteed crits from 15-50m.
  
• Nothing else.

Glass Cannon. If you absolutely positively need to sneak a sniper rifle into a place before going loud, this is an option

In conclusion, Poncho use means you're trading a Large Inventory slot and either foregoing armor or a primary weapon...or risking being Suspicious (which isn't a fun time to play with). There's maps where it works, but I wouldn't default to it if you could help it.

Last section of guns. This'll be fast.

Mk24 should be the only handgun you use once you can afford it [5 stars]. If you're just starting and need a gun, the G19 Pistol [not the customized one, you want the one that can equip a suppressor] is 2 stars.

Mk24 suppressed has a 55% flat crit chance from ammo alone, gets 27% crit out to 10m from the CIA_HKDoubleTap45 and 25% with CIA_HKControledPair45. 82-80% Crit per bullet. It's also a 3 shot kill, so if you somehow don't crit within 2 bullets, you have a third. Its only downside is its 8 round capacity on your Undercover units [10 with Black Ops, only notable if you plan on doing Poncho+Armor w/no primary]

Everything else is worse.

• MkIV Hush Puppy has 55% Crit out to 2m, dropping to 37 and dropping rapidly past that. Does 10[!!!] damage in CQC and drops to 5 rapidly, so you're relying on crits...
  
• PPK has a lowered Concealment Modifier and can theoretically be taken with a primary on Undercovers, ...but you can Play Civilian and hide and reload your Primary [VSS Vintorez, likely], and switching to your pistol is slower than just drawing one outright (since you have to deal with holstering the primary), so I don't see a use-case. It's weaker than 9x19mm anyway
  
• G19 Pistol is only reasonable other pistol - standard 9mm performance, and is suppressable
  
• G19 Customized can't be suppressed. You could put it on your Black Ops units as a loud sidearm, but I'd rather give them M1911's or Mk24's at that point.
  
• G17 can't equip a suppressor
  
• G22 is the same as the Rangers', though you get a few more ammo types
  
• M17 and M18 can equip Red Dot sights, but are otherwise mediocre
  
• M1911 is an easy "slap it on and don't fiddle with settings" secondary for Black Ops units. You hear it being fired, you've messed up and need to figure out why your Black Ops unit switched weapons - it hits hard but has worse AttackRanges than the Mk24, but I prefer it over the Mk24 for Black Ops because the noise of the handgun is actually important for you more so than your Agent. It's like an alarm clock! Time to get your unit to cover and get them to reload their primary!

There's a few more weapon types on the Undercover agents.

• PM-63 is a bad
  
• Mini Uzi is...fine, but can't use a suppressor
  
• Mp5K sidearm doesn't crit much but anything it blasts is going down. Genuinely a reasonable assassin tool since it shoots 5-8 shots, so it's a guaranteed kill just by bullet count alone [use exclusively within 5m if suppressed, you shoot semi auto past this]
  
• Double Barrel...it's a shotgun. You should know how powerful shotguns are. It's loud, but anything it points at dies. Try to use it further out than 2m though, 2m is the double barrel blast range.

So yeah, Mk24 Suppressed is best overall handgun. G19 Suppressed got me through my first playthrough so I give it a thumbs-up as well (tho the lower crit chance isn't great). Mp5K on Undercover will kill in an autofire attack, and the Double Barrel is a fun meme weapon.

Pretty simple.

Optics:
Within 15m: 1x Optic is best, Pistol Red dot on anything that can support it, Holo Sight is faster than standard Red Dot. You want speed, and you get a minor bonus to crit from 7-15m (which probably compounds with the crit bonus for shooting semi-auto at those ranges
Past 15m: Biggest thing you can slap on, do it - LVPO, LR Optic, whatever the biggest thing you've got is.
7-25m special note: Combat Optic 4x is good enough if weight savings is important to you, but LVPO will grant overall 5% extra crit chance.
Marksmen should just use LR Optic 5-25x and shoot past 15m.

Ammo:
5.56x45mm should always use Mk318 SOST ammo if it can due to increased damage profile. Don't even bother with match ammo.
9x19mm should always use M1153 JHP due to increased damage profile.
SWAT M500 should buy and use the 00 Buck ammo. The pellet count is always (defined by the shotgun itself, the game stats lie), and you get like 12% crit chance PER PELLET out to 5m
MCX RSAR can benefit from the supersonic 125gr ammo if not using a suppressor - it's a guaranteed 3htk at any range with at least 30% base crit chance anyway. You won't be quiet, but it's fine

Every day I'm learning something new, it seems.

Let me go over optics really quick.

Optics:

• Slow down reload times, ready and guard times, and change in/out times. These all can be mitigated by getting behind cover and having another rifleman providing overwatch [and is why the slower M16A4 is the best rifle overall in the game imo]
  
• speed up aimTimes, resetTimes, grant accuracy and critical hit bonuses
  
• the heavier optics also reduce move speed and turn speed

You want to try to optimize for your engagement ranges.

• DoorKicking: HoloSight 1x is strictly better than Red Dot 1x. Its optimal range is 7-15m as well, so it'll give you a little extra agility out to those ranges, but it's the best you can do within 7m so you might as well slap one onto all your room clearing dudes.
  
• Mid-range [7-25m]: Combat Sight 4x keeps your move speed up and gives a modest 15% crit chance between 15-25m.
  
• Mid-range [Snipers]: For sniper rifles, LR Optic 3-18x grants similar speed bonuses and better crit chances - it's my recommended
  
• Pseudo-Sniping [Assault]: If for some reason you feel the urge to use an Assault dude exclusively past 15m, either of the LPVO's will work, and their differences are minuscule, but of course we have a chance to optimize. 6x if performance within 20m is more important to you, 8x if >20m is more important.
  
• >25m [Snipers]: LR Optic 5-25x. 3-18x is faster between 15-25m, though.
  
• Machine Guns [Mobile]: Dual Role 1/4x will do you well out to 25m. Holo Sight if you're a mad lad and want to take it room clearing [it's lots of fun!], just remember it falls off past 15m.
  
• 7-25m [LMGs, stationary]: 4x MG Optic.
  
• >25m [LMGs stationary]: 6x MG Optic

Special Section: CIA's MCX RSAR

• <15m: Holo Sight 1x
  
• <25m: Combat Optic 4x grants best speed up to 17m
  
• >15m: LVPO 1-6x

Weapons within a tier are not sorted, with the exception that I'd recommend the MP5SD6 over the MP5A5, but that's a unique situation due to the suppressed sound radius being so important.

S-Tier: Your Best Options

• M1014 Shotgun [Shreds [i]so much

[/i] face, and decent past 10m]

M249 [Manually selected Suppressive Fire puts this above the M16A4. It's tedious, but at least you get 200 rounds!]

A-Tier: The Gold Standard

• M16A4 [The entire reason I made this guide in the first place]
  
• M1911 [Slaps hard within 7m - slows down past that but a 3 shot to kill regardless of range. Can't go higher since you actually have to take it out - uses up valuable time]

B-Tier: Good, but there's better options

• MP5SD6 [Best bet for suppressor use indoors. It doesn't directly compete with the loud weapons, but I'd put it here]
  
• M14EBR [Probably your best bet for a DMR. Sniping is a support tool since engagement times are enough to make sniping almost not worth it in this game, but at least the M14's putting good work in. Better stats than Mk20 SSR, but no suppressor. Gets 30% crit at 8m from DMRAimedFire attack type - it's slower to start shooting in this range, though, so a faster optic might be worth equipping]
  
• M110A1 [Best Suppressed sniper]
  
• M4 URG-I [Slightly better mid-range performance than M16A4, but doesn't stand out enough to make this anything more than a sidegrade. It's quite fine, don't get me wrong]
  
• M9 [is fine]
  
• G22 [Slightly less range but better crit rates]
  
• MP5A5 [SMGAutoFire might kill two dudes in one attack, if you're lucky to have them lined up. 3 round burst from 4-8m gives it some reach, but it's not worth taking over rifles or the M1014, imo]

C-Tier: Outclassed but workable

• M4 Carbine [handles a little faster in ways that don't matter and is less consistent in ways that do]
  
• Mk17 Carbine [Only notable for base crit rate of 35% whereas 5.56 rifles degrade from 25-20 with SOST ammo]
  
• Mk20 SSR [Weaker stats than M14EBR and M110A1]
  
• Just lump all the other 9x19mm pistols here, they have worse/variable ranges compared to the M9 and shoot the same fire rate with M1153 ammo anyway

D-Tier: Inferior

• Mk17 CQC [Worse damage and crit rate than Mk17 Carbine with no benefits that matter]

F-Tier: Oh god why are they so bad

• Squad DM Rifle

S-Tier: Your Best Options

• MCX RSAR is the best gun in the game. Shame it's semi-auto only, but

A-Tier: The Gold Standard

• Mk24 is best handgun overall and is your main tool

B-Tier: Good, but there's better options

• G19 Handgun (Not the Customized one) is a good budget handgun for your Undercover. Does everything it needs to, just a little inconsistent
  
• Double Barrel is hilarious to play with and surprisingly effective, but it's a loud gun
  
• M1911 is even better with CIA than the Rangers, but Mk24 takes its place since you want suppressed guns
  
• Mp5K (Undercover Sidearm)
  
• M110A1 is your best dedicated sniper for >15m attacks. Not needed much since you can just go Covert and 'backstab' everyone, too risky to just have one dude shooting at everyone, but it works
  
• MP5SD6 is a good budget primary. It'll do, but if you're already going to spend 6 stars, you might as well wait for MCX RSAR.

C-Tier: Outclassed but workable

• M4 Carbine listed this high up because it comes unlocked. You have to buy the suppressor. It's...fine, decent, in fact, but the sound radius when suppressed is still super big.
  
• G22 and all the 9mm handguns can safely go here, even the G19 Custom. You want to be using suppressed weapons.
  
• The two loud SMGs that Undercover get go here - PM-63 and Mini Uzi.
  
• VSS Vintorez is very slow to fire, but is a 2stk out to 15m.
  
• All other 5.56 rifles go here
  
• MP5kPWD, MP5A5, MP7A1 go here. If only they shot full auto bursts...
  
• I suppose you could make the Mk17 Carbine work...

D-Tier: Inferior

• PPK is an unnecessary addition. It's...adequate in practice, but neither class wants it. Its only use case is as a sidearm to a VSS Vintorez with Undercover, but you don't play Undercover as an assault unit
  
• Mk17 CQC is strictly inferior to Mk17 Carbine in every way that matters
  
• 5.45x39 is strictly inferior to 5.56x45

F-Tier: Oh god why are they so bad
[tier]

• 7.62x39 is strictly inferior to 5.56x45[/tier]
  Untiered:
  
  • Why on earth does the CIA get LMGs?

S-Tier: Your Best Options

• APC9 K [Probably best room clearing automatic gun in the game, if only it was a little faster to start shooting]
  
• M249 [You get 8! They use Ranger Profiles! You can use Suppression Fire to make them start shooting faster!]

A-Tier: The Gold Standard

• SWATAssault M16A4 [Only downside is that SWATAssault would rather be using APC9 K's or M249's]
  
• Militia M16A4
  
• Militia Mini-Uzi [Same issues as MP5A5, "shooting too many bullets but not always being a bad thing"]

B-Tier: Good, but there's better options

• M4/M203
  
• Dragunov [no guaranteed 100% crit ranges]
  
• Militia FAL [Weaker than other Militia weapon types, but good enough to replace Dragunov imo]
  
• M9 Sidearm
  
• G17 Sidearm [sidegrade to m9]
  
• Mini Uzi Sidearm [only here cuz you need to actually switch to it, and that takes time you could be doing better things]

Far as I'm concerned, there's a few tenants that need to be addressed to give the guns a chance.

For the Rangers, you have the following issues:

• Assault: M16A4 is overperforming in CQC, among other balance issues with other guns
  
• Support: 4 LMGs with only one of them being significantly better, to the point where it's not even worth unlocking
  
• Marksman: Squad DM Rifle is garbage, other rifles are either "lol use at range" or worse
  
• Handguns: 9mm handguns that aren't the M9 need something else to give it a little more oomph

Let's start with suggestions for the Marksman class.

First, I'd give it the M4 URGI. I'm going to be making changes to it later on when we address it with the Assault class, but in essence it'll be the Premium CQC-Midfield rifle that will fill the gap in the Marksmen's kit.

Meanwhile, let's address the Squad DM Rifle. It's weak, has low critical hit chance, and is slow to start firing, making it essentially a straight downgrade to the M110A1, let alone the starting M16A4 rifle. The only thing going for it is its accuracy at a flat 400.

Spoiler alert, we'll be buffing the M4 URGI as well, but in the meantime, we'll turn the Squad DM Rifle into a fast-firing mid-range crit machine.

• Let's start with the Mk262 ammunition. 556FMJMk262_M16A4Marksman could be converted into an ammo type with low penetration (blocked by LvIII Body Armor) but high damage and critical hit values, perhaps 35 dmg and 40% crit outright. Mk262 ammo on the Marksman then becomes a superior ammo type that's equivalent to the stronger SMG ammo - it's even blocked by armor.
  
• Secondly, the AttackTypes. We'll keep it Semi-Auto only to keep it in line with its proposed use in ranged attacks, starting with the closest range attackType being changed to Rangers_RapidFire instead of the DMR variant. One of the biggest problems with the base rifle is its utter sluggishness in CQC, and that's primarily because of the 500ms minAimTime with Rangers_DMR_RapidFire. If we're sticking to semi auto, let's at least give it a faster engagement time. We'll increase the range to 6m to match the CIA's M4 profile.
  
• The next attack type should be Rangers_RapidFireMed. This is primarily to give it the 20% crit bonus. We'll extend the range of this out to 20m to match the M4 setup the CIA uses.
  
• Rangers_DMRAimedFire comes third, and we'd extend this out to 45m. Getting that meaty 30% crit chance gives this new Squad DM Rifle its niche of a very large crit chance - 70% base before accounting for optics. I'd like to extend this range further out, but IDK if that's wise
  
• Finally, we give the Squad DM Rifle a suppressor and a subsonic match ammo option that drastically reduces sound signature - subsonic 5.56 match ammo exists, and having it be exclusive to this rifle would be pretty interesting, I feel.

These changes would keep the Squad DM rifle a semi-auto rifle while giving it better performance within 15m with the trade-off of reducing armor penetration. It therefore becomes a better Rattler / a ranged M1911, especially after considering the more powerful scopes it can get. We could optionally use URGI fire types via Rangers_URGIRapidFireMed to give it an additional boost.
I'd also recommend an additional attack type past RapidFireMed where it shoots somewhere between 2.5-4.5 shots per second (kinda like ControlledPair9mil or CIA_AKAimedFire) from 20m-40m at a crit rate of 25%, then have DMRAimedFire from 40-60m. It might be pushing into the 7.62 snipers' niche, but they can one-shot, so i'm focusing on a faster 5.56 rifle that engages very well whether it's in cqc or at long range. Other weapons will do better in their niche, but the Marksman lacks a speedy rifle, be it for trying to level up or just dealing with threats quickly.

Mk17LB will be addressed later.

M14 EBR is fine. Cheaper but no suppressor, gets to DMR Aimed Fire at 8m - which means it's slow to engage but is getting 100% crits past 15m with anything stronger than the LPVO 6x

Mk20 trades performance past 48m for being a M14 that can take a suppressor. It's fine.

M110A1 gets some mid-range aimSpeed bonuses and a suppressor in exchange for dropping off past 48m. It's fine.

Rangers_DMRRapidFireMedMounted should get a modest critChance buff, maybe to 10%.

Support is in a bit of a bind considering how good the M249 is. It:

• Has a blistering fire rate, enough to make the reduced shot to kill the other LMGs offer unimportant
  
• Generally shoots more than the necessary 5 bullets to kill
  
• uses the superior LMGStrafe attack types, which are both faster to engage and shoot more bullets
  
• is the lightest out of all the LMGs, so your troopers can move around fast
  
• 200 rounds!

Honestly, I wouldn't change the M249, the issue is everything else is middling.

• Assault rifles only shoot semi-auto, when they could easily be shooting burst fire out to mid-range, borrowing from the MP5's attackTypes
  
• M240L and XM338 use the worse GPMGStrafe attack types - the Mk48 uses LMGStrafe but has a slower fire rate and less ammo

I'll come back to assault rifles later, but for now, I have a simple solution: Buff the Mk48/M240L/XM338 LMG crit rate up ~10% by simply increasing the crit rate via ammo. Currently the M249 has a 15% chance while the other LMGs are equivalent or worse. The idea is that this would make the M249 the "more bullets = more suppression" + "speedy" LMG, while the others would have damage and crit chance to go with them.
We could take it a step further and give the M240L and XM338 higher crit boosts, since the M240L is worse in every way that matters than the Mk48 - GPMGStrafe doesn't matter if you're either using suppression fire or mounting anyway.
Otherwise, giving the M240L 200 rounds would be a good way to balance it over the Mk48

So the other issue I see is that full auto is used only within 5m. The M16A4 is overperforming because:

• SOST's High base damage means you only need 3 bullets - guess what, it shoots 3 round bursts within 5m
  
• The BurstFire attackType's range goes out the furthest (excluding M4/URGI suppressed)
  
• Best accuracy for mid-range and beyond - Mk18 will start missing attacks past 15m (which is fine tbh)

So I then propose the following:

• Mk18/M4/URGI get autoFire/BurstFire attack types out to 4/8m like the current MP5A5/-SD6. RapidFireMed out to 15m for Mk18, 20m for M4
  
• M16A4 can keep its burst fire within 5m, switches to RapidFireMed after that. Reduce fire rate to 12 (WHY IS IT 16 WITH SOST AMMO!?!?) to let the other rifles kill faster
  
• Rifles get a few new attackTypes: Rangers_CarbineAutoFireClose that shoots a minimum of 2 rounds with a maxShots of -1 so they shoot until the dude's dead, and Rangers_RapidFireLong which also grants 20 crit but has fire rate become 2.5 shots per second. URGI gets 3 shots per second just to have a clean number, Squad DM Rifle gets 30 crit (and 3 shots per second).
  
• MP5 (both of them) have Autofire extend to 6m, Burstfire out to 12m, RapidFireMed to 16m

This would look like:

• Rangers_CarbineAutoFireClose out to 4m [M16A4 uses BurstFire out to 8m]
  
• Rangers_CarbineAutoFire out to 8m
  
• Rangers_RapidFireMed out to 20m <--- Extended out because of later changes to MP5
  
• Rangers_RapidFireLong out to idk 30m? <--- new attack type. SquadDMRifle would use its own variant that grants improved Crit Rate
  
• Rangers_CarbineAimedFireLong out to 40m to match its current max range. SquadDMRifle uses DMRAimedFire
  
• Rangers_CarbineAimedFireXX out to 9999m

The idea is to give the auto rifles the chance to actually use their automatic fire out a bit further out than "Across the Room" and give the Rangers faster rifle speeds out a little further. CarbineAimedFire is a good attack type, but I'd rather have faster shots.

The MP5 would then have its attack ranges extended 4m - SMGAutoFire out to 8m, SMGBurstFire out to 12m, ETC going up in 4m increments. I'd give RapidFireLong as well since it's hitting CarbineAimedFireXX at >24m now, but honestly i like the MP5 having an upper cap of 20m, nice balance. The MP5 might be dealing less damage but is engaging plenty fast out to 12m

Mk18 would have CarbineAutoFire to 5m, Carbine AutoFireLong out to 8m, RapidFireMed out to 16m, RapidFireLong out to 24m, CarbineAimedFire out to 35m, CarbineAimedFireXX past that. Some simple range changes to make it the equivalent of the M18 handgun compared to the M9's longer range - equivalent to my changes to give the Mk18 a bit more autofire range as opposed to the M4's better accuracy and range.

I matched the Mk18's ranges to the MP5's ranges. Unfortunately the game's a little overtuned, so the MP5 isn't standing out too much, but hopefully this is enough to give the rifles a bit more reach.

Lastly, buff the M4 URGI's accuracy up to 360. This is to make it both a Premium M4 for Assault and a slightly less-viable ranged option for the Marksman and keep the Squad DM Rifle viable at range. There's other things i'd do but i'll stop there.

In short: Better effectiveness at the 12-20m mark for all weapons by pushing the ranges out a little bit.

The other option would be to exaggerate the ranges of the existing AttackTypes to give each weapon its niche.

• 7.62 snipers kill in one shot past 15m with virtually every optic above the LVPOs
  
• Squad DM rifle is a fast-firing Semi-Auto only rifle, kind of like what the CIA does, except getting a nice meaty crit chance bonus to keep up with the other snipers
  
• M16A4 is the starting rifle, and is an M4 with more accuracy and slightly longer RapidFireMed range. The 3 Round burst is what's making it overperform, so it should be replaced with Rangers_RapidFire
  
• M4 should be the middle ground, able to shoot full auto out to 8m while still having enough reach to hit mid-range shots. Its accuracy is just bad enough to make distant shots a pain.
  
• Mk18 is an odd beast, but we'll play it like the M18 handgun is to the M9 handgun - the Mk18 will have its autoFire attackType go slightly further out, but its RapidFireMed cuts off earlier
  
• MP5A5 should just have a 4m buff to all its attack ranges and it's good to go - It would therefore perform like an even more exaggeratedly fast weapon out to 12m, but then slow down considerably, which should help it compete.
  
• M4 URGI is the premium all-around rifle. It should have accuracy of at least 300 and have its attack ranges extended out a bit - AutoFire to 8m like the base M4, RapidFireMed out to 20-25m, and CarbineAimedFire out to 60m.

This one will be pretty simple.

• Mk17 CQC should have accuracy around 230 and have its crit rate increased to 35. Increase range for all attack types out by 4m. Increase Damage to 38-33 and keep the damage range. It should use Rangers_CarbineAutoFire as well instead of _CarbineAutoFireHeavy to shoot more bullets, and have the range go out to 8m. RapidFireMed should go out to 18m.
  
• Mk17 Carbine should have accuracy around 280 and have its crit rate increased to 40. Increase range for all attack types out by 4m. Potentially replace Rangers_CarbineAimedFire with Rangers_DMRAimedFire to give it bonus crit chance. Increase Damage End to 33 and Range endDist to 40.
  
• Mk17 LB should have Rangers_CarbineRapidFireHeavy instead of DMRRapidFireMed to give it crit chance, and all attack types should be pushed out by 4m.

Now the why:

• The Mk17 CQC's rework would make it an M4 with more base damage and crit chance at the cost of fire rate and magazine size. At a base 35% crit, it's a little more likely to get a critical hit within the three bullets necessary to kill in CQC, giving it the oomph it needs to keep up given its lower fire rate. The damage range increase is to give it some extra range - as is it only has a 8m dropoff range before it becomes a 4stk. The Mk17 CQC therefore becomes a good all-around rifle.
  
• The Mk17 Carbine becomes a DMR-lite option for Assault - not perfect, but sometimes you want those higher crit chances for longer ranges. With a LPVO 8x, we'd be getting 40+30+20% crit unmounted past 15m - 90%, and another +5% if mounted. This, along with the proposed URGI changes, would give Assault a second Premium rifle to work with - hitting harder while being a little slower. The Mk17 STD therefore becomes a slightly sluggish pseudo-DMR with some auto-fire capability in close quarters.
  
• Mk17 LB gives the Marksman an alternative to my proposed Squad DM Rifle rework as a indoor-capable rifle. It's still a gamble between 15-25m, but 95% crit isn't bad, and it becomes 100% past 25m with anything stronger than an LPVO. This would give a reasonable tradeoff to guaranteed crits past 15m with the other sniper rifles - if you can mount it, it's still a 100% crit past 15m thanks to the attackType override, so it allows for flexibility.

This section was started to be written on 22 April, 2025. Previous sections are preserved since their explanations are still relevant to how the game works currently - it's only certain things are swapped in and out.

Okay, now that the game is properly released, there's a few major changes, namely Doctrines.
For the Rangers, the ones that stands out for me is Short Range Burst and Medium Range Burst - we'll get those in a moment, but let's take a look at an example of how the attackTypes code changed for the M9 pistol.

v.36 Beta M9

1.09 Full Release M9

As you can see, the devs decided to change the way attackTypes were implemented; rather than transitioning from DoubleTap to ControlledPair, Rangers use a different attackType, PistolAimedFireShortxxx. That looks like this: (9mm as the example)

And ControlledPairxxx looks like this (9mm as the example, since we're talking the M9)
So I need to emphasize right off the bat that the most important thing here is that the aimtime is half the amount of time - given that the sweetspot is 300ms, the pistols go from 'You're going to get shot before you pull the trigger' to 'I have a good chance to fire that first shot before they do'. You're also gaining a modest amount of critChance, and that matters greatly considering the M9 is a semi-auto weapon; Crit chance matters less with full auto guns where low crit chance is fine since the 'race to 100 damage' via weapon DPS is good enough compensation.

Now for code's sake, do you see the text disabled="true" on the 1.09 Full Release M9? [I'm hoping I included it, but] the way attackTypes work, the game goes down the list from 0m until the first entry's maximum range (in this case, M9 uses EmergencyFire9mil out to 1.5m), but there's two entries for 8 meters - naturally, one of them are disabled due to the Doctrine. Let's take a look at how the code is for that now:

Doctrine Code for Rangers' Controlled Pairs

So my earlier comments towards ControlledPair were actually missing this valuable step where there's additional reset time bonuses, accuracy bonuses, and even critChance bonuses (+5%), and this is per Doctrine point added, so you could theoretically get up to +10 crit chance on top of the +7 crit chance for Controlled Pair outright.
With JHP M883 ammo, the M9 is now doing about 37+10+7= 54% crit chance between 1.5 and 8m.

Please note that going down the list, the Controlled Pairs are the same for all handguns on the Rangers excluding:

• M9 Suppressed - ends at 6m
  
• G19X - ends at 9m
  
• G22 - ends at 8.5m
  
• 1911 - ends at 7m and uses ControlledPair45, which grants a hefty 17% crit chance rate instead of 9mils 7%

So the full bonus of this Doctrine only matches up with ControlledPair9mil on the M9, M17, and M18 pistols. Keep that in mind.

Okay, this is the reason for the update to the guide in the first place. We'll be talking about Short Range Burst and Medium Range Burst here.

Real quickly though, the Rangers' M1014, the LMGs, and the Marksman Rifles (sans Mk17 LB) saw no attackType changes. This is important since now the Marksman class gets a full auto rifle in the Mk17 LB, and the majority of assault rifles now push multi-round bursts out to something like 15m, depending on the weapon.

First though, let me cover the M16A4 since that was the Beta's meta weapon:

v.36 Beta M16A4 attackTypes

1.09 Full Release M16A4 attackTypes

RapidFire and RapidFireMed have been in the code since the beta, but the beta M16A4 used BurstFire out to 5m (the longest range any auto weapon used more than one bullet. Since it's the only weapon type that shoots 3-round bursts, let me at least cover what it does before we talk about the automatic weapons and how they're different.

Rangers_RapidFire and _RapidFireMed

Rangers_BurstFire and _BurstFireMed

And then the Doctrine Code:

So what this means is that the rifles are shooting semi auto (7 rounds per second for RapidFire, then 6 rounds per second for RapidFireMed, URGIRapidFireMed shoots at 6.5 rounds per second, the Mk17s use RapidFireMedHeavy which is 5 shots per second) out to varying distances - those distances actually change depending on the weapon now, but we'll cover that shortly. For now, we'll keep focusing on the M16A4.

Before getting the Short/Medium Range Burst drills, the M16A4 has about 50% crit chance (ammo depending) between 7-15m, making it actually not bad as a midrange rifle outright - you've got, what, a 75% chance of getting that one shot kill after 2 rounds? 87.5% at 3 rounds? If you're using default M855 ammo, it's a 4 shot kill out to 50m anyway (5 shots past that) so you've realistically got a decent chance to drop them in 3. Granted, Mk318 SOST ammo increases that to being a 3 shot kill outright out to 35.38m with a crit rate of about ~43% - two rounds is about 67.51% chance of a crit kill.

Now if you add in just one doctrine point, you're now doing ammo crit chance minus 10 (burst attackType) + 5 per doctrine point (2 points possible). I won't include Surgical Shooting here since that would be another potential 10% crit chance and would be the same either way - i'll cover that shortly though.

You're essentially trading a high innate crit chance between 7m and 15m for a 3 round burst on the M16A4 - tie that in with Mk318 SOST ammo and you have yourself a guarenteed kill due to DPS out to 15m - still a great option, but let's check on the other auto rifles that Assault can use and see how they stack up.

So to recap, M16A4's attackTypes:
I'm omitting _CarbineAimedFireXX for the sake of saving text space. It's still there.

Here's the expected 'Close Quarters' to 'Long Range' ranking for the other automatics that Assault gets:

MP5:

Mk18:

M4 Carbine:

URGI:

SCAR-H CQC:

SCAR-H STD:

SCAR-H LB - Including since it's relevant to the full auto topic and gets benefits too:
Quick side note: I covered DMR attacktypes before - they're slower than anything using RapidFireMed (unless you can mount them, and even then they're only starting to shoot faster past like 12m or so, depending on the weapon.

Right, so my main point: Full auto is now available for all rifles, and most notably the previous CQC champ, the MP5, is now nerfed - you now need to invest in doctrine points in order to be able to utilize its niche.
You'll notice however that the MP5 uses 'SMG' in its attackTypes whereas the rifles use 'UnregBurst'. Before we cover that, let me briefly go over how the weapons work:

Up to 7m, the MP5 and all the 5.56 rifles shooteither SMGBurstFire or UnregBurstFire. The SCAR rifles shoot UnregBurstHeavy out to 5m (CQC), 4.5m (STD), or 4m (LB). This is important because this distance is where the 350ms AimTime is the same between min and max - if you're slightly past these distances, you're still engaging in full auto (out to the BurstFireMed variants) but you're losing reaction time.

The maximum distance full auto is used is out to 15m with the URGI (matching the M16A4's BurstFire), 14m with M4 Carbine, 13m with the Mk18, and 12m with the MP5 and all the SCAR-H variants.
Furthermore SMGBurstFire is only 3 rounds, whereas UnregBurstFire is 2-4-
HEY WAIT A MINUTE

I just tested this, and with the Mk18, he's consistently shooting 3 round bursts, whereas the MP5 can shoot 3-4, so something's going on here with the doctrine...
I was ABOUT to say that the Mk18 is potentially a straight upgrade since its ReadyTime and GuardTime is faster, but then I go and test it and see the MP5 shooting more than 3 round bursts, but now i'm conflicted. See, what I was going to say is that the Mk18 is now a contender for the best CQC weapon since it has better ranged accuracy outright (making it more flexible - longer range accuracy doctrines essentially bring it from 'being incapable of dealing with enemies past 15m' to 'as good as a non-doctrine M4 is past auto range [which is actually decent]) and it has faster readyTime/guardTimes.

What i did was I did a quick test on the first mission "Path To Suck Less" in 'FNGs Welcome', and got similar results between the MP5A and Mk18 (both with HoloSights, same doctrines).

Okay, my point though is that I overlooked CarbineAutoFire - compared to SMGAutoFire, CarbineAutoFire shoots 2-6 rounds while SMGAutoFire shoots 3-9 rounds. You still have that chance to only shoot 2 rounds...unless they changed things under the hood. I've seen some strange things changing since the Release (1.07 is when I started playing again) where it now seems that the troopers continue shooting until the target is down OR their attackType stops. That can't be the case though, since the way it should work is maxShots="-1" would cause that behavior...

Right, so after some studying, "Path To Suck Less" has engagements within 4m, so the Mk18 is using CarbineAutoFire attackTypes - I've indeed seen it use a 2-round burst as well as shooting past the necessary number of shots, but it hasn't bit me in the butt regarding not shooting enough rounds yet. As such, I believe the MP5 is potentially dethroned as the CQC weapon of choice (though the MP5SD still has a use case in being ultra quiet with subsonic ammo)

However, you'll now see that if any weapon uses automatic fire, they'll use it once you invest in that Doctrine, making the difference essentially negligible when it comes to room clearing - either pick something agile for your room clearers to use (MP5, Mk18) or pick something accurate for your midfielders to use (M4 or bigger) and you'll be fine.

Ran out of space, but again, the SCARs trade fire rate for crit chance. And again, don't use the SCAR-H CQC (for now). Not only does it have an inferior crit chance rate but there's also currently an issue where it has Rangers_UnregBurstHeavy listed twice, and once you're at like 4.5-5m your trooper will have some screwy attack speed problems because as you approach 5m the maxAimTime is 650ms.
I put in a post on their Crash/Bug fix topic in Discussions, so I promise to edit this once things update.

Ah, right, the SCAR-H LB got full auto too, giving it a proper fiexible Midfield rifle so it doesn't have to play two extremes of a Mk14/M110A1 or the Joint Combat Shotgun. It's okay. It'll shoot full auto out to 10m (lowest of all), but like the other Marksman rifles, past 10m it'll start shooting DMRAimedFire, which gets 30% crit (from the attackType) on top of 45% crit (from ammo), so past 10m you're getting 75% (80% if mounted) from 10m-45m - that extra close range on the close end gives the LB an unmatched Midfield niche, which frees up your Assault units from potentially having dedicated Midfield units. You're still going to want at least the LVPO 6x on the SCAR-H LB in order to get guarenteed crits (if mounted) between 15-45m, but now you have a real contender for a tool to on your Marksmen use other than just a Mk14/M110A1 with a 5-25x or the Joint Combat Shotgun. Just don't expect them to do well with it if they push a room first, but they can hold a hallway fine.

Of course you COULD just have them just switch to a handgun if they have to tag along for room clearing, but that's digressing from the point.

One final note - during beta, I noticed the Mk18 having poor accuracy at range - apparently 200 accuracy on the Mk18 vs 230 accuracy on the M4 is notable enough for longer ranges to have more misses at range. It is therefore notable that you can tighten that accuracy at range/in general with Surgical Shooting and X Range Drills for better accuracy at varying ranges. I think you have to invest in them anyway to get further down the tree, but it's worth it to make the Mk18 a new contender for best all-around weapon.

In short:
Handguns: Niche is still the same - M1911 best overall due to fastest readyTime speed, damage, and crit chance; G22 if you need/want more ammo (more crit chance over 9mm). If you want to stick to 9mm, G19X/Mk27 Mod2 have the furthest ControlledPair range at 9m as well as reducing your moveSpeed the least.
CQC weapons: Joint Combat Shotgun (Power per hit), MP5A3 (more bullets within 4m), Mk18 (Great All-around)
Midfield weapons: M4/URGI (Agility/CQC Flexibility), M16A4 (Guarenteed 1-burst out to 33m or so), SCAR-H STD (Crit Chance on Assault), SCAR-H LB (Marksman exclusive, gives them a Midfield rifle)
Marksman Rifles - unchanged. Mk14 or M110A1 if you must take one. SquadDM rifle still worst Ranger weapon.

Ah, I should briefly go over the Mk27 Mod 2 pistol. It's a sidegrade to the G19X with its only notable things being it can equip a suppressor and red dot sight, it has better CQC accuracy (significantly better but honestly negligible due to range), slightly less ammo, and has some other modestly weak buffs over the G19X. Not 100% better due to worse accuracy at range but it should do you nicely enough.

...Or, at least that's my conclusion without looking at the rest of the doctrines on Rangers. There's some juicy stuff in here.

Alright, so I was actually working through CIA next when I noticed I hadn't talked about the non-BurstFire doctrines. Let's start with just focusing on what happens to Rifles - I'll be comparing the Rangers' M4 carbine to the CIA's in a moment, so I at least want to put things down here.

Right, so CloseRangeBurst:
<Enable name="Rangers_CarbineAutoFire"/>
<Enable name="Rangers_UnregBurstFire"/>
then grants:
up to 2x points can be put into this, so double the numbers

and MediumRangeBurst:
<Enable name="Rangers_UnregBurstFireMed"/>
And then grants:
<AttackTypeModifier target="rifle" minRange="7" maxRange="15" resetTime="-25" accuracyAdd="+10" critChanceAdd="5"/>
Up to 4x(!) points can be put into this

I want to point out critChance for a moment. 4x points in MediumRangeBurst to replace RapidFireMed's 20 crit chance? That almost makes it worth it in and of itself! There's a flat -10% penalty to both the UnregBurstFire attackTypes and a -5% penalty to CarbineAutoFire so this basically makes makes it so you're net positive if you add full points. Pretty good!

BUT WE'RE NOT DONE YET

ShortRangeDrills is necessary to get to CloseRangeBurst, so let me list that:
Now we're just a bit faster in close quarters, beating that 350ms threshold and making it so even Lv1 Rangers with -any- Assault shooting (iirc a score of 0 gives a 50ms penalty to AimTime) will beat out EnemyExpert attackTypes

MediumRangeDrills is somewhere on that list too
Same deal here, we're shaving off important AimTime

SurgicalShooting is going to make you scream:
And you can put two points into it!!
...Mind you that's three lines there, one set for ranges 1-15m, a second set from 15-25m, and the rest from 25-50m; realistically you probably wont have to take those kinds of shots hardly ever, but for our purposes, you can get a whopping 40 crit just for being within 15m! And then most ammo have crit rates of at least 20% on top of that, so you're basically getting 60% crit just for existing within 15m of your enemy (the BurstFire doctrines makes things slightly wonky)! In the beta I could safely say autofire was king, but when it's better than a coinflip for that one-shot, autofire isn't as necessary any more! ...It still helps though, putting 3 rounds down range when you need only one to crit at like 80% (from BurstFire doctrine buffs) is still a good call, and at that point you really only need accuracy (which you're getting with SurgicalShooting) and AimSpeed to start shooting in the first place (which you're getting from Short- and MediumRangeDrills.

One last thing to look at is the Elite Doctrine, Elite_AdvancedShooting
So with only 2x SurgicalShooting AND Elite_AdvancedShooting we're at 50% resting crit between 1-15m; add in ammo and you're over 70% in nearly every case for single shots. It drops down to 27% between 15-25m but that's still pretty good

Honestly Elite_AdvancedShooting isn't terribly necessary, but when you've already got 80%-ish crit, another 10% halves the chance your shot won't crit, so it's worth a single point if you're already investing in crit

Quick glance at pistols - Controlled Pair is something of a mixed bag on CIA, but let me check out how it is on the Rangers' M1911 real quick:
Looks like they're going to include DoubleTap45 at some point, but lets compare PistolAimedFireShort45 to ControlledPair45 for now.

<AttackType name="Rangers_PistolAimedFireShort45">
Oh dear, that's pretty slow. 400ms minAimTime is slower than the threshold we're looking for.

<AttackType name="Rangers_ControlledPair45">
OK that's better, that essentially means that out to approximately 5.75m we're beating enemy reaction time with that first shot (assuming the Ranger has 50 Assault shooting)

On top of that, we're also getting other boosts for engagements:
And we're getting these up to twice (2 point investment), so add +10% crit; 27% crit on top of 55% base ammo crit is 82% base crit, up from 70%. We're also getting a reduction in resetTime, so it's more likely multiples of 2 shots - wait, no, it's probably going to be the 2 shots because of the critChance, whoops, but all things considered that third round is gonna be ripped off pretty fast if the first enemy still needs it.

This crit bonus is a bit more important if you want to go with 9x19 pistols since the base crit isn't so high. Let's take the new Mk27 handgun as an example.

Random Fun Fact: Unsuppressed 9mm base ammo (M882) has a degrading crit chance, from 25% at point blank to 0 at 100m. It's also only doing 20 damage outright, so switch off it. Suppressed M882 has higher base crit chance, but really you want to be using M1153 ammo whenever you can.
Unsuppressed:

Suppressed:

Consistent critChance and 4 shots to kill outright.

Anyway, the Mk27's AttackTypes (we'll used the suppressed version):

Dunno why ControlledPair9mil is listed twice, i'll contact the devs to make sure that's working properly. I think the intent is to have it so that unlocking ControlledPair would extend the range out further. We'll see what the devs do with that. For now, let's compare PistolAimedFireShort9mil to ControlledPair9mil

<AttackType name="Rangers_PistolAimedFireShort9mil">

<AttackType name="Rangers_ControlledPair9mil">
[coide]<ModifiableParams minAimTime="200" maxAimTime="400" roundsPerSecondOverride="3.5" minShots="2" maxShots="2" resetTime="500" accuracyAdd="10" followupShotAccuracyAdd="0" critChanceAdd="7"/>[/code]

So I'm guessing the intention is to have ControlledPair9mil come online right after EmergencyFire 9mil, and I saw in the M1911 that they're testing DoubleTap as well out to like 4m, but I digress. With the Controlled Pairs doctrine, we're getting +17% Crit Chance on top of around 36% crit chance on the ammo itself, so >53% crit out to 8m. Not bad, honestly,

Also, quick note: G22 has higher crit chance - 46% at 0m and 33% at 20m and onwards, so at 8m that's roughly another 7-8% or so crit chance at 8m? That's assuming you're using the JHP rounds and not FMJ btw, FMJ ammo is still doing about 36-30 crit with the only advantage is base damage (25dmg flat over 9mm's 20) and actually having a critical chance that doesn't degrade to 0 lmao

So yeah, ControlledPairs on Rangers - pretty good!

oh whoops i guess there's the new weapons, the XM7, LAMG, and XM250 to worry about now huh?

Before I do though I didn't cover the Mk17 grenade launcher variants or the URGI M320 variant.
Mk17 URGI. In summary, the Mk17 CQC also has the issue with the duplicate UnregBurstHeavy attacktype, messing with its aimTimes

Okay, so the XM7.

• Ammo grants a shot to kill of 3-4; 38 damage, degrading to 28 damage at 35m, so that 3-shot threshold is at about 16.1m.
  
• Crit chance is 38-35, meaning at base value it's a little over 1/3rd chance to get that one shot.
  
• Fire rate is 13.3, faster than the SCARs' 10
  
• Armor penetration is 70

Ah, interesting, I remember armor penetration being a single digit number, now it's a two-digit number. Must have been an issue with how the numbers scale? Fascinating...

Okay, so just looking at ammo stats, the XM7 has a 3 shot to kill distance, slightly beating the Mk17 CQC (15.166r for Mk17 CQC, 16.1m for XM7, 23.1m for Mk17 STD).

Otherwise in terms of distance it seems to have its RapidFire and UnregBurstHeavy attackType between Mk17STD and CQC variants, UnregBurstHeavyMed equal to Mk17STD's, one meter closer RapidFireMedHeavy and one meter longer CarbineAimedFire than the Mk17STD. It also has agility / accuracy scores that match the Mk17 CQC (accuracy degrades slightly at range for XM7).

In short, it's almost a flat upgrade over the Mk17CQC, having a niche between the M4 and Mk18 in terms of agility (the XM7's readyTime is actually 5ms faster than the Mk18!), offering that 3-shot kill out the box, innate armor penetration that should beat everything, and with a fire rate that beats out the Mk18 unless you're using M855A1 with a suppressor (which slows it down). Looking at the stats, the XM7 suppressed mimics the naked M4 carbine in terms of agility and attackType distances while only being slightly slower in fire rate.
Overall I'd put the XM7 at the top of the list of guns to consider once you get battle honors! It's a great all-rounder, though you'll need those accuracy doctrines.at range.

XM250:

• 13 rounds per second makes it at worst a sidegrade to the M249.
  
• M249's damage was 28-20, crossing over to 5stk at 37.5m; XM250's damage is 35-29, crossing into 4stk at 25m
  
• Crit chance for M249 is 15, XM250 is 24-20

Without looking at the XM250's attackTypes I'm already calling it a winner, wow.

ok so i looked at the attack types and the attackTypes are duplicated out for the LMGStrafeLongMounted so you might have something wonky going around 50m, but inwards of that EVERY attackType on the XM250 is further out than the M249.

The only downsides for using the XM250 is:

• 100 ammo, which isn't nothing
  
• Minuscule amount slower readyTime (20ms slower at 570ms for the XM250)
  
• Minuscule amount worse turnSpeedModifierPercent {at -7%, M249 has -5%)
  
• M249 user can still move while shooting, XM250 user can't

We'll call that a win.

Now how about the LAMG?

• Slower fire rate at 9.7 rounds per second vs M249's 13
  
• Same damage model
  
• Same ammo stats, though LAMG loses crit over distance (only 3%, and that's from a range of 35m-60m, so that's super long distance anyway)
  
• Slightly faster changeInTime and changeOutTime, faster readyTime (so if you bump something it's ok, it'll come up 3/4ths of a second faster - still sluggish at 475ms - half a second!)
  
• slightly worse accuracy (5 points across the board)
  
• the dropoff for attackTypes is closer in than M249

If it wasn't for the fact that you're losing 8% move speed and 3% turning speed (vs M249's 10% move speed and 5% turn speed), I'd call this a straight downgrade. As such, the LAMG has a niche in min-maxing mobility for those 8 Mobility spawns, allowing -slightly- more gear on your Support trooper. It's not much, but sometimes you just need more gun, and this'll be waiting for you when you need suppressive fire in a forward spawn. Nice, I dig it.

Right, so as a quick summary, I recommended:

Undercover:
Quiet loadout: Mk24, MP5K Sidearm, G19; AK74U with subsonic ammo, VSS Vintorez
Loud loadout: didn't really ever give this consideration, but now that the game's out, I'd say M1911 + M4 Carbine is optimal

Black Ops:
Quiet loadout: Mk24 or G19 Pistol (Suppressed), with MP5SD6 Subsonic as a first unlock, then MCX RSAR Suppressed when you can afford it with M110A1 SDMR as a marksman rifle option (only a few maps I'd truly recommend this
Loud loadout: M1911 and M4 Carbine



Right, so like with the Rangers, CIA gets some autofire doctrines, as well as some unique "FastFire" doctrines. Let's take a look at the MP5SD6 that the Black Ops get for reference.


So you'll notice that FastFire and BurstFire both have disabled attackTypes at the 6 meter mark. If my understanding about this is true, this is because you can have both the FastFire and BurstFire doctrines unlocked at the same time, and the BurstFire doctrine changes will take prescident.

Let's take a look at the close quarters attack types.

That's a really bad AimTime, and the fire rate is also pretty slow, goodness.

Well that's modestly better,



A quick glance at the doctrine tree shows that one can put two points into Close Quarters Speed (up to 7m), 3 points into Medium Aim Speed (7-15m), so bringing this down isn't too bad, but even looking back at the v.36 beta attacktypes (it used Rangers_RapidFire and _RapidFireMed), I now see that the speed of the attackTypes weren't properly figured out yet. That's a shame, this now means the CIA is no longer the 'We're as good if not better than the Rangers, but have fewer dudes' to 'now we really gotta play smart if we're gonna pull out on top'. Curious, but fair enough.

Anyway between FastFireClose and BurstfireClose, you're choosing between a modest increase in aimTime and a slightly worse critChance bonus, but you're continuously shooting the target until it goes down vs shooting a burst of bullets with a critChance penalty.
I'd perseonally take the BurstFire any day, but let's at least do the math on how far we can bump this AimTime down.

For reference, enemies tend to use either "AKWildFireShort/AKWildFire" or "EnemyExpert_Burst/-_BurstMed". Ideally we have attackTypes that have faster AimTimes than these, as the AK is probably the most common enemy weapon - our par time to beat.


So that 350ms AimTime is a magic number for us, we absolutely need to be faster than that in order to start shooting before the EnemyExperts do, and ideally we'll at least be before 400ms with our shooting.
The Rangers match 350ms with their rifles, while the LMGs start at 450ms unmounted and 400ms mounted, so that's all fine and dandy - we can even bring the LMGs down to 350 unmounted/300 mounted with Assault SAWs doctrine. Rangers' DMRs start at 500ms (that's why they're so bad honestly, minus the Mk17 LB now), but with Assault Marksmen we can bring that down to 400ms at pointblank and 300ms going up to 7m with Assault Marksmen, so they're at least able to deal with someone that's snuck up on them (and are in view; if they have a flank, well the trooper's a goner anyway)
But for the CIA? Sheesh, that's a tall ask, because not only do you have a really long AimTime, but you also have scaling based on level-

...Actually tell you what, this is rumor territory at the moment since I can't verify this, but from what I recall, if you have an 'Assault shooting' stat less than 50 (5 bars), you have even longer AimTimes, and if it's higher than 5 bars it's faster, up to 50 AimTime discount at maxed 'Assault shooting' stat, but that's rumor so don't take this as fact just yet.

But otherwise, for this sub-7m range, we have the "CIA_RiflesShortRangeAimSpeed" Doctrine. That does:
...and you can invest in it twice.

So that means by default, it'll bring our MP5SD6 using CIA_RifleAimedFireClose out to 6m from 530/550ms to 490/470 at one point and 450/390 at two points.

Then, there's Close Range Crit which reduces AimTime by another 10ms, so 440/380.
This alone with a maxed out Assault shooting stat (if i'm correct) would bring us to 330ms at 6m, and that would beat out even the EnemyExpert attackTypes.

Then we have the choice between FastFireClose and BurstFireClose:
FastFireClose has 510/530, which then becomes 470/450 at one point of ShortRangeAimSpeed, then 430/370 with two; 420/360 with ShortRangeCrit, and then theoretically 370/310 with maxed Assault shooting.

Better, but I hope you can at least see how the 'proper implimentation of CIA' means they're actually outnumbered AND outmatched.

Granted, you're supposed to use them for 'backstabbing enemies with suppressed weapons anyway' and therefore shouldn't be getting hit at all, but it's at least worth mentioning the nerfs to CIA for Full Release.

I guess we ought to start with the MkIV Pistol for starters, it's first on the list. It's the .22LR pistol.

Damage: 10 damage at point blank, declines until 30m where it reaches and stays at 5 damage until infinity.
Default Crit chance: flat 20% out to 4m, declines to 1% and stays there from 15m out.
ArmorPentration stat of 10, so basically any clothing blocks it, yay.

The attackTypes have changed since beta. Instead of using Rangers_ attackTypes, we're now using post-release CIA attackTypes.

I should mention I'm omitting Rangers_PistolAimedFireLong9milXX for sake of saving a few characters of text, but past 20m to infinity it's that one. It's bad, don't worry about it/don't use handguns that far out.

I mentioned this earlier in the guide, but CIA_CloseRangeDispatch - wait, it has a crit chance of 35%? I thought it was 50%

...Ahh, earlier in the guide, all I said was that the MkIV pistol has 55% out to 2m. Yes, that's correct; 35% crit from the attackType and 20% from the ammo. Its only niche is the 2m sound radius, which in practice means you still can't kill the enemy without their death noise alerting nearby enemies, but at least if the first shot doesn't kill you still have a decent percentage chance on the next shot to get the kill.

Right, but then we have the CIA attackTypes to cover next.


So during the beta, the CIA pistols were using Ranger attackTypes and therefore were shooting at as fast as 200ms aimTimes, but now we're rocking double that; you'll be trading single bullets with enemies and getting hit if you fight face-to-face [not that you should with the MkIV anyway). I must point out that DoubleTap9mil feels like a raw downgrade here over PistoAimedFireShort9mil. Shooting 3 times a second feels like it's more consistent than firing twice then [i]waiting half a second[/i] to shoot again. The 3% crit chance doesn't feel worth it.

Clancing quickly through the other pistols, they follow a pattern. For our example, we'll look at the PPK, the next pistol in the .xml document:

• CIA_PistolAimedFireShort9mil out to 6m
  
• CIA_PistolAimedFire9mil out to 12m
  
• with CIA_DoubleTap9mil out to, say, 2m and CIA_ControlledPair9mil out to 6m as doctrine activatable options [ControlledPair9mil not an option on MkIV]
  
• and then Rangers_PistolAimedFireLong9mil and -Long9milXX past that.

For reference:


Now while DoubleTap didn't make much sense, ControlledPair makes even less in this case since it mimics PistolAimedFireShort9mil while only increasing the number of shots before each resetTime.

Looking at the next gun on the list, the G19 handgun, we have:

Now while we lose critChance with EmergencyFire, we at least have a chance to activate it. We're still shooting slower than the Rangers would (see 'roundsPerSecondOverride'? that changes the fire rate of the gun we're using), but it's far easier to get in close enough to activate this attackType (play civilian, get behind them, pull the pistol out, you know the drill by now).

In short, unless the pistol is doing a very large amount of damage/high innate crit chance, we're not going to have a good time. The only pistols tha tbuck this trend are the .45 pistols, and that's because .45acp innately has higher crit chance/damage. Let's look at its attackTypes.

Right, so .45acp ammo:

Base FMJ: 35-34 damage so always a 3stk; 55% flat crit chance, 6 shots per second. Suppressed version has 5.5m sound radius
185gr: 42-34 damage (lowest damage at 50m; still a 3stk); 62-55% crit chance (62% out to 5m, reaches 52% at 18m); 5.2/5.4 shots per second (faster when suppressed); sound radius of 6.5m when suppressed
160gr: generally slightly inferior to 185gr but has a armor penetration of 30 that slowly drops to 20 at 15m, so I guess if theoretically any II armored enemies existed it'd penetrate??? I don't even think that's a thing

In short: Base FMJ if suppressed (HK45), 185 for M1911s

So before I say anything I'm going to to show the HK45 Suppressed attackTypes - it's notably further out than the unsuppressed version.


Quick note - between Undercover and Black Ops, the only difference is that the CIA_HKDoubleTap45 attackType goes out to 5m. literally why lmao

Okay, now those attacktypes:

We're gonna start by going down the list and looking for categories based on weapon type.

We have the good ones at the start:

[AKWildFIrePro, PM63WildBurstPro] PM63
[CIA_UziAutoFire, CIA_UziBurst, CIA_UziAimedFire] Mini Uzi Undercover
[CIA_UziAutoFire, Rangers_RapidFireMed, Rangers_PistolAimedFireLong9mil] MP5K Undercover,

[Rangers_LMGStrafeShort, _LMGStrafe, _LMGStrafeMed, etc] M249, LAMG, Mk48, PKP (though it uses GPMGStrafe attackTypes past 8m, that's lame, but mitigatible if you mount it
[RangersDMRHeavyRapidFire, _DMRHeavyRapidFireMed,_DMRAimedFire] SVD
[RangersDMRRapidFire, _DMRRapidFireMed, _DMRAimedFire] M110A1

[CIA_Sawnoffbothbarrels, CIA_SawnoffOneBarrel] Double Barrel Shotgun



And the lame CIA attacktypes:

[CIA_RifleAimedFireClose, CIA_RifleAimedFire, CIA_RifleAimedFireLong, with Fast/Burst fire options]
MP5k BlackOps, MP5A3, MP5SD, MP7, MCX Rattler, Mk18, AK105 Alpha, Mk17 CQC, Both M4 Variants (The Undercover version uses shorter RifleAimedFire/FastFireMed distances), Mk17 STD,
[Above but AK variant] AKS74U, Type 56,

Shoutout to the VSS, who at least gets full auto: [CIA_RifleAimedFireClose or _FastFire or _VSSBurstFire out to 5m, CIA_RifleAimedFire or CIA_AKRapidFireMed out to 10m] - at least it can shoot full auto out to 5m like in the beta.

Right so we need an explanation. Let's start with CIA_RifleAimedFireClose

"530ms" EXCUSE ME!? This is the same issue we had during the beta where all the weapons were shooting semi-auto, but now they're taking longer to start shooting (AimTime) and the fire rate is reduced significantly (4.2 per second, sheesh!)

Even slower, sheesh.

Most weapons follow this attackType pair, with options for faster semi-auto fire out to 15m or BurstFire out to 5m. Let me show the BurstFire option first - there's two variants: CIA_BurstFireClose and CIA_BurstFireHeavyClose (the latter for Mk17 variants)

These would replace CIA_RifleAimedFireClose, depending on the weapon. 2-3 or 2-4 round bursts depending on the weapon, only out to about 5m. We're at least attacking half-a-second faster (still abysmally slow), and if we can get the jump on the enemy, we'll be able to put enough DPS downrange to make it somewhat worth it.

Now for the semi-auto 'fast fire' upgrades:
Right, so this is about the fire rate we were dealing with during the beta, but now with significantly slower AimTime speeds than the equivalent Ranger attackTypes. It's at least worth it to have FastFire at minimum if only for the baseline upgrade.

Ah, right, there's also Doctrine buffs. Let me go over the M4 Carbine for the Undercover units as an example.

Right, so we're looking at the M4 for the Undercover.
BlackOps has the _RifleAimedFire and _FastFireMed ranges at 20, so it's not too different.

There's 3 speed upgrades for CIA, and there's some overlap between them

First is the Close Range aim speed upgrade - we'll just list the Rifle upgrade since we're looking at an M4 here:
And we can apply this twice.

Then the Medium Range aim speed upgrade:
And 3 upgrades here

Then the Long Range upgrade:
With 2 upgrades here.

'OpFor Rifles' have an additional buff but we'll cover that next

Right, so I'm going to do my best to add the bonuses up between the three, accounting for all doctrine point upgrades:


Right, so that's quite a bit faster just short of 15m, let's see how that translates to the base Undercover M4:

<AttackType name="CIA_RifleAimedFireClose" rangeMeters="7"/>
<AttackType name="CIA_RifleAimedFire" rangeMeters="15"/>

Now I won't cover the longer-range attacks past 15m right now, but allow me to at least express: "Holy crap things look better for CIA once you get the doctrines going. Engagement times are even better than they were before the full game release! That helps a lot.
Okay so for reference, EnemyExpert something or other went as low as 350ms, and even AKWildFire is 400ms, so we're looking to beat that. We're above the 350ms mark [slower!] with RifleAimedFireClose until 1.866r meters, so make sure you're not barrel stuffing enemies with your rifle and you'll be ok.

<AttackType name="CIA_BurstFireClose">
Unless it's an oversight, we're shooting faster than the weapon's base fire rate, lol
With the BurstFire attacktype and all the speed upgrades, we're safely ahead of the 350ms threshold, likely even getting off that second bullet before the enemy is even able to shoot. If you're rounding a corner with the M4 out indoors, you should be able to successfully melt enemies just fine - so long as they're within 7m with the M4.

<AttackType name="CIA_FastFireClose"> [Up to 7m]
If you don't care for full auto for some reason, your M4 is shooting semi-auto pretty fast, nice. For reference, 6.5m is the URGIRapidFireMed rounds per second, though that attackType is used from 7m to 16m on the URGI.

<AttackType name="CIA_FastFireMed"> [7-15m]
For reference, 5 rounds per second is equivalent to RapidFireMedHeavy, and would be used for this fire type as well. CIA uses worse attackTypes, but at least with the doctrine speed boosts we'll be engaging pretty dang fast out to 15m. Honestly a Zero to Hero difference.

But we're not done yet, we have CIA_RiflesShortRangeCrit, CIA_RiflesMediumRangeAccuracy (3 steps), and CIA_RiflesLongRange (2 steps) to include

RiflesShortRangeCrit
<AttackTypeModifier target="rifle" minRange="1" maxRange="7" minAimTime="-10" maxAimTime="-10" resetTime="-5" critChanceAdd="5"/>
<AttackTypeModifier target="rifle" minRange="7" maxRange="15" accuracyAdd="5" critChanceAdd="2"/>

RiflesMediumRangeAccuracy
<AttackTypeModifier target="rifle" minRange="7" maxRange="15" resetTime="-50" accuracyAdd="10" roundsPerSecondAdd="+0.1"/>

RiflesLongRange
<AttackTypeModifier target="rifle" minRange="7" maxRange="25" minAimTime="-20" maxAimTime="-120" accuracyAdd="5" critChanceAdd="0"/>

Our <AttackType name="CIA_RifleAimedFireClose" rangeMeters="7"/>

and
<AttackType name="CIA_RifleAimedFire" rangeMeters="15"/>

Okay that's super, but what happens to the Rangers' M4 with doctrines?

Rangers M4
I'll only compare out to 15m again since that's typical inner building engagements, and at most 'one corner of a building exterior to another' or something.

So first of all we have auto fire out to 14m, but we'll ignore that for now

<AttackType name="Rangers_RapidFire">

<AttackType name="Rangers_RapidFireMed">

And you can already see we're at the "EnemyExpert_Burst" AimTimes with the Rangers' default:

Now for the doctrines, we have ShortRangeDrills, CloseRangeBurst (up to 2 points), MediumRangeDrills, and MediumRangeBurst for speed, as well as the very notable SurgicalShooting that can add a whopping +20/+40 crit (two points) out to 15m.
I'll try to combine them all here:

I really hope I'm not messing this up because I did this at like 2am ugh

<AttackType name="Rangers_RapidFire">

<AttackType name="Rangers_RapidFireMed">
Not gonna bother with 7-8m there's a spike in there, you know it. In short, enemies melt under 15m with the Rangers once you get that Surgical Precision up and running. 70% base crit chance out to 7m, 90% crit chance out to 15m - honestly with the rangers you can save some points by going full crit this way. Didn't even consider it until this guide.

So comparing apples to apples here:
CIA M4

Rangers M4

Rangers have optimal attack time around 7m but are only needing 2-ish bullets. CIA is blisteringly fast from 7-15m, especially approaching 15m, but you're still not getting a ton of critChance (unless I overlooked something)

I'm taking a quick glance through the Doctrines for CIA now and...it seems in terms of CritChance they remain pretty low for basic rifles, but DMRs get a whopping 30% crit from Rifles Long Range in the 25-50m range - that aligns with my earlier idea that their best rifle is the M110A1.
Honestly though? With the 2 points in RiflesLongRange The Dragunov is suddenly hitting 100% crit (though no suppressor...) past 25m and the best optic, so if you really want to stick one on an Undercover and use him to snipe, you could make it work quite well.

Right, but what do you really want to be doing with CIA units?

There's essentially a few ways to play them:

• Undercover play civilian, get behind enemies, and deliver suppressed shots (emphasizes concealment, sound radius, critChance or at least good damage)
  
• Undercover play as secondary Riflemen for a Loud Op (general DPS is fine here)
  
• Black Ops play with Poncho to act as a third Civilian, spotting for Undercover while they pick off the easier enemies, then trade places and go loud once there's no other way (slightly more room for better weapons than the first entry)
  
• Black Ops go loud from the start with a powerful weapon (general DPS)
  
• Marksman Rifle to pick enemies faster than they can shoot (100% crit chance, fast aim times [DMR with good scope])

There's not really any overwhelmingly good suppressed pistol options. Even with the HK45 suppressed, you're getting 84% out to like 4m with the Double Tap and Close Range Crit doctrines - not terrible, but not guaranteed, even if your trooper fires twice; 5.5m sound radius is also hard to work with when you're dealing with interiors.

Here, let me get you the sound Radius of the guns with the smallest sound radius and we'll go over if they're any good:

• 22lr in MkIV - 2m
  
• M1153 in MP5SD6 - 2.5m
  
• 4.6x30 subsonic - 3m [24-20 damage, 35% crit out to 15m, drops to 10 at 30 and stays there]
  
• .380 90gr JHP in PPK - 3.5m [notable for being only .8 towards concealment]
  
• 9x19 M1153 suppressed (M9 suppressed, go figure) - 3.5m
  
• VSS Vintorez using SP5 - 3.5m
  
• M1153 in MP5A3 Suppressed and G19 Handgun Suppressed - 4.5m
  
• 220gr 300 Blackout in SIG MCX Rattler - 5m
  
• 9x19 M1153 suppressed (MP5PDW) - 5.5m
  
• 230gr FMJ HK45 - 5.5m [guaranteed 3stk, 55 flat crit%]
  
• 7U1 subsonic 5.45x39 AKS74U - 6m
  
• 185gr JHP HK45 Suppressed - 6.5m [45 damage out to 8m, drops to 30 at 50m; crit is 61% out to 8m, drops to 45% out to 35m]

And past 6.5m you don't really have many good options for maneuverability when your goal is to 'shoot the unaware bad guy in the back of the head'.

You've essentially got two sets of weapons: quiet Sidearms that have tradeoffs for their use, and quiet primaries most of which can't be used on Undercover anyway - worth noting for Black Ops units.

.22LR MkIV - well, we've already gone over it. 2m sound radius, but you have to be within that 2m to get the 35% crit from CloseRangeDispatch, and I've had that roll fail 4 times and my trooper get shot and killed before. Not to mention the 'IM DEAD' sound radius enemies give makes this rough to work with as is.
PPK - competitive crit chance at 35-25% from ammo alone, and within 8m or so if you don't get those rolls it's a 4 shot kill anyway, i'd take it over the MKIV any day
G19 Suppressed - next step up, roughly the same as the PPK, trading a meter of sound radius for guarenteed 4stk and slightly better crit chance (38-26%).
HK45 - Already talked about this, 84% crit within 4m; you're trading sound radius for that heavy hitting slug and a reduced shot to kill.

MP5K is the oddball here, being the only automatic the Undercovers get that can be suppressed. It's the same since before the full game release with no doctrine changes. It's probably an oversight, but it even didn't change from Rangers' AttackTypes!


It's kind of bizarre, how the Undercover MP5k not only is faster to acquire a target but how much it melts enemies. If you can afford 5.5m of sound radius, you're going to have no problem with single-target eliminations with this. If you can help it, try to line up a second target behind the first - your Undercover unit is likely to shoot too many bullets once the first guy is killed and mow down the second one, or at least put a few rounds in them! The MP5k also serves as a great weapon out to like 9m due to the AimTime being reasonable, and the bonus crit chance for shooting semi-auto with RapidFireMed gives it an edge even over bigger weapons like the M4 Carbine (since the M4 is using CIA_RifleAimedFire/_FastFireMed and whatnot); naturally this comparison changes if you get Close Range Burst on the M4, but that still goes to show you that it's probably not the best option you have.

You've also got the AKS74U shooting burst fire out to 6m, and that's workable since its subsonic ammo is 6m radius as well, but that's still 2-4 rounds per burst where the MP5k is shooting 5-8 bullets out to 5m. The AKS74U is a tradeoff - weaker crit rate per bullet, slower fire rate, but at least it draws/holsters faster than MP5k. I'd mention it has extra concealment points, but secondaries get bonus points to concealment so you can do things like take armor in and still be Covert. Sidegrade, honestly.

So in short, you're choosing for either sound radius [MKIV (2m), PPK (3.5m and most concealable)], ensuring enough damage so you get those kills [HK45 for crits, MP5k for bullethose, VSS Vintorez does 50 damage in close quarters so you only need 2 bullets outright], or taking a 'more ammo' approach [G19, AKS74U]
Each path naturally has its merits. Sound radius has more risk (MKIV is the least consistent pistol, PPK only has 6+1 rounds so you're ONLY taking out one, MAYBE two enemies before reload), Power has a wider sound radius but makes up for actually being able to kill their mark, and More Ammo lets you transition to another nearby enemy somewhat quickly without having to worry about reloading after two kills.