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Original post by Kest As drakostar mentions, scale is the biggest deciding factor. 1. If a mountain region will fit into one tile/hex/square of your game, then you should keep ranged units the same as melee units, and just modify their bonuses and penalties. 2. On the other hand, if a tile in your game is the size of a real world floor tile (around 40 inches or 1 meter), then it would be extremely generic for ranged units to have an attack range of 1. In this situation, you can easily get away with unlimited range for them, where their attacks are only limited by their line of sight. If #2 is the case, and you're only dealing with modern or futuristic ranged weapons (no slings or bows & arrows), decreasing damage with range will only be useful if you can zoom out and shoot targets that are 50+ tiles away. Things like monsters/aliens spitting acid also won't decrease damage with range, but the spit velocity should cause it to land before it gets very far (3-5 tiles).

Oops, I forgot to mention the scale!

I am not going for 1, where each tile contain a "region". It is more like 2 but probably not to scale with real life. Right now I am using a scale similar to the one used for Starcraft where an armored tank is the size of 4 marines. The entire field is just a few hundred metres across.

I think I am going with your suggestion that modern/futuristic ranged weapons in a scale similar to 2 have unlimited range. And thanks for the idea regarding acid spit velocity! Didn't think of that.

Decreasing damage with range might simulate the variability in accuracy encountered when shooting someone who is 100 metres away? I don't intend to use a random "to-hit %" and so reducing damage seems like the next best choice.

I quite like how some games (eg Fantasy General or Wesnoth) abstract away ranged weapons, instead giving them the advantage that units without their own ranged attack can't strike back when attacked by a ranged unit. You still need to be adjacent to attack though.

Another idea you can use to simulate range is the order in which you resolve the combats.

If you ahve longer ranged weapons attack and do their damage first, then you can reduce the effectiveness of the shorter ranged unit, which get to have it's attack after the longer ranged units have had their turn.

For instance:
Longgunners unit: Range 5, Hits 0.5, Size 20
Handgunners unit: Range 2, Hits 0.5, Size 20

The Longgunners unit get to attack first and does Size * Damage (10 damage total) to the Handgunners which loose 10 units leaving them with 10.

The Handgunners then get to attack, but they now only have 10 units left. So Size * Damage gives a total damage of 5 and the Longgunners loose 5 units. leaving them with 15.

So long ranged units can have an advantage over short ranged units. This can be balanced by giving the Shorter ranged unit a higher hit rate (in this example to make them even the hit rate would need to be 1 for the Handgunners, but with other factors that would be in your game you might not want to make them too similar)

Unit that ahve the same Range value would act concurrently and both make their attacks before the damage was calculated.