Hey, I've started playing outcast and have worked my way in a bit, but I'm having trouble with some basic strategy (predominantly involving which gun to choose), and I can't seem to find any faqs that go over any more than the main plot. Am I missing anything or are there just not many FAQs written for this game?

Either way, I guess the type of thing I was looking for would be a comparison of the weapons. I've been experimenting with saving, then buying a gun and ammo and trying it out on the enemies from the armory/barracks, but I'm not really finding much of anything better than the HK. What I've learned so far:

The UZA seems like it takes double the number of bullets to take down an enemy compared to the HK, and fires slower even when maxed out (you can take down an enemy very fast if you just click like hell with the HK and hit).

The SLNT is a good gun with how it tranqs enemies and then you can kill them in 1 hit while they're on the ground, but the ammo is expensive and hard to replicate, and there's this weird glitch where whenever you go from the normal view to the scope or the scope back to normal view, all projectiles in the air just disappear, so if you lined up that perfect shot and pulled the trigger, but didn't wait until the bullet hit before pulling back off the scope, you didn't actually hit.

You'd think that with the charge-up time of the HAWK, it'd do enough damage to enemies to make them go down really easily, but you'd be wrong (at least at first level). After a standard fire shot enemy in the armory got up after being hit a second time with it, I gave up. If you managed to get a bunch of enemies to line up in a row, it might be worthwhile as it seems to travel straight through them, knocking them over.

With a name like LN-DUO, you'd think that you'd be getting something like a double barreled shotgun or machine gun or something (at least until you read the manual). Once again it just doesn't seem to do much damage and is hard to work out the aiming for (I turned around and used it on the merchant that sold it to me, and it took 3 direct hits before he went down).

The FT-74 looks promising, in the fact that I love flamethrowers in games, but I haven't been able to afford it after buying some other guns. If it follows the traditions of the other guns, it'll probably have some terrible flaw that will make it mostly useless, assuming that it manages to do even half the damage you can do by just spraying with the HK.

Seriously, with no wait time needed between shots and ammo boxes that only cost 1 of each of the 2 most common minerals in the game to replicate, the HK manages to trump everything, especially when modded for the 24 round clip for extra spray. Combined with some creative macro use, you can effectively use the HK as a SMG, shotgun, or just standard pistol. Close second is the SLNT, which allows you to two-shot pretty much all enemies as long as you can afford the ammo and don't mind being forced into the glitchy scope mode to fire. Third has got to be the UZA, just because the game throws ammo for it at you at every turn and for the price it's generally a good investment if you accidentally use up all your HK ammo. Fourth is probably the LN, just because in the time it takes to charge up and fire the 2+ shots from the HAWK to take down an enemy, you could have killed 2 with the UZA or 5 with the HK, and there can be strategic use for mines. Withholding judgment on the flamethrower until I get my hands on it.