Chris

I'm not sure I'm convinced. A 2x modifier means you can spend half your TUs before the enemy even have a chance of reaction firing at you; that's very powerful indeed. 1.5x seems much fairer. You can get a shot or a few moves off without fear still.

So previously the soldiers had a 2% panic chance for each morale point below 40. This is now a 3% panic chance each point below 30. There's no chain panic chance, but soldiers lose 0.25 morale for each point of suppression they take and 0.5 for each point of injury. Remember, a successful hit will apply both and alien weapons got a suppression buff recently. The morale suppression damage may be a bit high.

I am probably going to nerf the reaction fire bonus on shotguns and pistols to 1.5 rather than 2, btw. I think 2 is a bit overpowered. I'm also going to see how combat shields affect reaction fire. I don't think a soldier with a combat shield and a pistol should still be getting the pistol reaction fire bonus.

Do you know how the reaction calculation works? I've explained it in a few threads, it's the same as in the old game (except for the addition of reaction fire modifiers for weapons). It's worth reading on exactly how it works if you don't know because it's quite an elegant system. http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Reaction_Fire

No, they're the results of the example mod that we've always planned to package with the game...the Soviet Weapons mod.

StellarRat, if the aliens aren't firing at his troops it's because those troops have a higher Initiative score than the aliens do. The unit with the higher Initiative score can do whatever it wants until it no longer has the higher score. The aliens "passing up a perfectly good reaction shot" may well just be them not reacting fast enough to use it. Max is pretty familiar with how the reactions systems work so I imagine he's using it to his advantage.

There's a pretty big difference in ammo consumption between someone firing aimed shots from an AR and someone firing burst fire every turn. If the former person can take a few more grenades into battle and is less likely to run out of shots at inopportune moments, I don't see why that's not a suitable reward for managing their ammo more effectively? It's a bit late in development to re-do the weapon art, even if I wanted to

Yeah, I can see that being annoying. Unfortunately the damage is calculated at the weapon's end, rather than at the soldier's end. Not sure it'd be entirely straightforward to move it.

Oh, fair enough. I'll push it a bit higher up then.

You think all weapons should have unlimited ammo, then? If ammo levels are irrelevant, is there any reason to have reloading and clips at all? (That's not what your post says, of course, but it's what the assumptions in it imply)

Nope, it does need to be updated. It's on the to-do list, but it's something that will be done just before release along with all the tooltips etc.

Maybe it's fixed in the dev build only then. Just tested it again with the walls and it seems to be fine.

In the first save game you provided, the alien in question has 37 TU. Their max is 50. That suggests that the suppression TU penalty is not being applied correctly in some circumstances. If you play the gc_editor version and press U, it opens an editor that lets you view the TU of any unit you click on. We'll look into it at your end, but it might help your hunt too.

I'm not getting this one; tried to repro it but it seems to be working fine now?

OK, I'll update the values a bit to make panic somewhat less likely. Bezerking prioritises aliens first now, rather than the closest units like it used to. I don't want to remove the friendly fire chance entirely, though.

Thanks. This actually only affects it when you are using a combat shield and C4, which is why we hadn't picked it up earlier.

Perfect, thanks. Just fixed this.

Yeah, I've reproduced this. I imagine it's to do with the TU % change not affecting vehicles correctly.

True. That's just an oversight on our part.

Unless I've misunderstood the above quote, a rocket launcher is a single-shot weapon so you consider it fine? That's the only reason I mentioned it. I'm not quite understanding your point regarding shotguns, though. Why are they at any disadvantage versus an AR due to spiky damage? Perhaps I'm missing the point but implying lower damage weapons are good because of more consistent damage is disregarding the fact that lower damage weapons have to score more hits to kill anything...and once they score more hits, they have the same higher damage as the higher damage weapons do (and therefore lose any consistency benefit).

We removed AP rockets. It's not realistic to expect anything to survive a rocket capable of taking out a tank, and the aliens don't really have armoured vehicles to destroy. The Androns are meant to be tough, so having a rocket that can one-shot them kinda defeats the object entirely. It just turns rocket launchers into a massive rifle that can kill anything in the game. Precision rifles and MGs are pretty handy against Androns, and if not then normal weapons can take them down...you just need to shoot them a lot. Remember armour degrades with every hit.

Yeah, what Gauddlike said. Rockets always do more damage at the center (100%) than at the edge of the explosion, it's just that some rockets do more damage than others due to the variation. Whether there should be any damage variation on explosives is a different discussion entirely (XCOM 2012 used that system successfully).

I was under the impression the soldiers had a mean of 50 across all their stats (55 for the starting squad)? Is that not the case? If not, then yes we do need to do a bit of work on that issue.

The real argument against variance with shotguns is that if a shotgunner gets a bad variance roll and his target survives, that usually leaves him standing face-to-face with an alien and unlikely to survive the alien turn.

Is there any particular trigger for panic etc you think is overpowered, like suppression? The soldier taking damage?