Jump to content

Cover and accuracy poll


Cover and accuracy system  

23 members have voted

  1. 1. What system would you prefer

    • Actual 3D tracing and calculation of bullet trajectories and surface intersection (chance to hit difficult/impossible to calculate, realistic cover)
      16
    • Cover gives a fixed defense bonus (chance to hit simple to calculate, leads to strange/unrealistic scenarios)
      5
    • Other (specifiy in thread)
      2


Recommended Posts

3 hours ago, TrashMan said:

It's not been done, therefore it cannot be and shouldn't be done? With arguments like that, creativity will surely reach new heights.

It all comes back to the fundamental truth that for this system to work, the player must have complete confidence in the developer - that the game is totally free of bugs and accurately models every variable as it works in real life. As soon as there's even a suggestion that the game might be at fault the entire system falls apart completely, and even if I wanted to make a game without proper hit %s I'm not willing to assume every single player who plays the game will be willing to give us that level of trust. I think it would be critical and commercial suicide, so I consider the idea a non-starter.

There's also two important considerations:

  • That system is better suited to a Jagged Alliance game where you are fighting humans with real-world equipment. Lots of "realism" assumptions go out of the window as soon as you start fighting fictional enemies who could have completely unrealistic capabilities.
  • It's extremely difficult for a new player to learn how to play a game that doesn't give you hit %s. I play a lot of strategy games and I struggled to get into Jagged Alliance, mostly because I knew all the things that would improve shot accuracy but didn't know which the game considered to be most important, so it was difficult to figure out what I should have done differently when my guys missed a shot (that and not completely trusting the game, as I mentioned above).

The optimal system for this sort of thing really would be a sort of real-world Valkyria Chronicles game, with weapons just having a possible hit circle and the player getting a first-person view as the unit takes a shot. That way you can see if the unit has missed the shot by aiming off-target, or if they aimed on-target and the shot hit cover, or recoil messed up the rest of the burst, etc. You'd need to design it from the ground up if it were to have any chance of success.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, TrashMan said:

It's not been done, therefore it cannot be and shouldn't be done? With arguments like that, creativity will surely reach new heights.

That is your assumption, not what I said.   But I'm not surprised that you think your idea is creative.

My previous response pretty much explained myself for your other points (e.g. I named four to five old MMOs above), so I'll stop by adding that I do have played at least one game that mostly meet my "name a game" challenge - except the "good result" part which is my point.

It's a game that is turn based, squad based, top down, action point based (like XCOM 2012), open world, and is pretty complicated with jumping, climbing, pinning, throwing, lighting, large (multi-grid) units etc.  When you attack, you pick a corner from the current position to launch the attack, and which grid of the enemy to attack (which also allows you to target hidden enemies).  Line of Fire tracing is then done to the centre of the target grid to determine obstacles such as wall, vegetation, or smoke.  There is no shot preview, so a good sense of space is very helpful in planning your moves.  LoF is not shown so if you are lucky you can see the bullet hit the wall.  If you are not you may never know it reduce your hit chance.  And of course the LoF may be bugged; no system is perfect.

It takes four to five hits from a main weapon to drop a standard enemy, with some taking a lot more.  There is no health bar, the game only let you know when the enemy is at half health.   Hit chance is hidden, starting at half half and goes down as the game progress.    The game designer says the balance is intentional, designed to meet the tastes of modern gamers.  For example, players are expected to grow up with the game and use experience to observe and create tactical advantages that make up for the drop in accuracy curve.

Indeed, player feedback overwhelming compare the changes with "modern" MMOs (modern at the time).   For this part, that means the combat is long and boring, you just keep repeating the same mostly missing attacks and may not even know why.  It is possible to manually track every attack and every hit to deduce hit rate and hp, but most players don't bother.

Expansions couldn't delay the inevitable and the designer admitted that this system is part of the failure, in that it does not make combats fun and does not meet player expectations.  Now you cannot find any of this and other soul-searching blog posts on the series' official website; it is as if the publisher want to pretend this game never existed, esp. when you can still find articles for older games.

 

If you are confident in your creativity, don't waste your time on arguing why we should agree your ground-breaking creative visions.  Go ahead, actually work on it.  Chris's vision on kickstarter convinced me.  Aren't you confident in your ideas?

Edited by Sheepy
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Chris said:

It all comes back to the fundamental truth that for this system to work, the player must have complete confidence in the developer - that the game is totally free of bugs and accurately models every variable as it works in real life.

This is not accurate.There is no such thing as totally free of bugs and the simulation doesn't have to be 100% accurate - rather it has to be a convincing simulation. You don't have to take into account things like wind speed or falloff (I guess you can already file that under "less accurate at longer range"), but the basic concept of stability of the shooting platform, cone of fire and surface area to hit (and obstructions)

And I have to have confidence in the developer to trust your displayed % too.

 

2 hours ago, Chris said:

The optimal system for this sort of thing really would be a sort of real-world Valkyria Chronicles game, with weapons just having a possible hit circle and the player getting a first-person view as the unit takes a shot. That way you can see if the unit has missed the shot by aiming off-target, or if they aimed on-target and the shot hit cover, or recoil messed up the rest of the burst, etc. You'd need to design it from the ground up if it were to have any chance of success.

It's extremely difficult for a new player to learn how to play a game that doesn't give you hit %s. I play a lot of strategy games and I struggled to get into Jagged Alliance, mostly because I knew all the things that would improve shot accuracy but didn't know which the game considered to be most important, so it was difficult to figure out what I should have done differently when my guys missed a shot (that and not completely trusting the game, as I mentioned above).

 

Jagged Alliance has shot accuracy IIRC.

 

The optimal system for this sort of thing really would be a sort of real-world Valkyria Chronicles game, with weapons just having a possible hit circle and the player getting a first-person view as the unit takes a shot. That way you can see if the unit has missed the shot by aiming off-target, or if they aimed on-target and the shot hit cover, or recoil messed up the rest of the burst, etc. You'd need to design it from the ground up if it were to have any chance of success.

That's not a bad system either.

One way to do it could be to check how much of the enemy is visible/hittable (hitting an enemy in the open, one who has 10% of body sticking out of cover and one who has 50% body sticking out of cover) and add to that the gun/shooter accuracy.

At the end of the day, accuracy is always displayed as a chance. You can get unlucky and miss 5 90% shots in a row. Is it a bug? A railed calculation? At the end you still don't know without a lot of testing.

 

 

1 hour ago, Sheepy said:

If you are confident in your creativity, don't waste your time on arguing why we should agree your ground-breaking creative visions.  Go ahead, actually work on it.  Chris's vision on kickstarter convinced me.  Aren't you confident in your ideas?

"Go ahead an make it yourself"

Stellar argument my man. Why indeed comment on anything or argue for anything when every single one of us could spend time building our own dream game?

Let me just get my 50 million out of my bank.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, TrashMan said:

This is not accurate.There is no such thing as totally free of bugs and the simulation doesn't have to be 100% accurate - rather it has to be a convincing simulation. You don't have to take into account things like wind speed or falloff (I guess you can already file that under "less accurate at longer range"), but the basic concept of stability of the shooting platform, cone of fire and surface area to hit (and obstructions)

When I play shooters, I have to guess if wind and bullet falloff affect my accuracy. It takes some time with the game before I learn that. I would be surprised to find these things in a tactical game; instead, I would wonder why my long ranged shot are simply missing. Maybe my unit was facing the sun? What else is going on? 

I don't expect your position to be "pure sim > abstracted numbers", but instead that some abstractions can be done away with, or some information hidden. For example, XCOM2012 shows enemy health bars, Xcom 1994 and Xenonauts do not. I would want accuracy to remain visible - but would it be better to replace it with "very/likely/unlikely to hit"? 

The game Frozen Synapse went one step further, and removed all %s; instead, it was Time to Kill. It took a gunner 1.0s to kill a unit, but a shotgunner 0.5s to kill a unit who was in range. Battles were deterministic; the whole idea of the game was running simulations. The game wasn't any easier though, as it made unit placement and cover very important. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 10.4.2017 at 4:35 PM, TrashMan said:

Jagged Alliance has shot accuracy IIRC.

It does, but at least in the first "Jagged Alliance" the hit-chance is hidden or otherwise not told to players; you only get to know how much action-points you are using for more "precise"-shot; makes me wonder why even have different kind of "precision" in the end though.

"Jagged Alliance 1" regardless in a un-favourable spot when compared to UFO / XCOM, mainly because a large portion of players first had played Xcom before Jagged Alliance
(I've yet to find exact info which of the games was released first; Xcom was on March 1994 and seemingly the reviews of the time when making comparisons make it sound like Xcom was first published, especially with such comments as "clunkier and vague Xcom" and so on).
In end though, "Jagged Alliance 1" gameplay-mechanically speaking has not aged well at all when compared to "(Open)Xcom"; it is simply infuriatingly far too "trial & error" and "cheat-sheet / reference-card (mainly for different kinds of move-command)"-reliant game, in my opinion.

---
---
---

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 7 months later...

I like having a poll, I think it provides the devs with insight into what the players are looking for a specific feature in the game and I'd like to see more polls like this covering different features.  So here's my two cents.

What we are basically talking about here is cover and concealment which are not the same thing and I imagine from a strategy game like this has varying difficulty in implementation. Cover provides you with protection while concealment just prevents the enemy from actually seeing you. A shrub provides concealment since if I fire into a bush and you happen to be hiding behind that bush there is a statistical chance I will hit you.  If I fire at bulletproof glass that I can see you behind that offers no concealment but a certain level of protection which brings about two new topics which are penetration / damage and hit location so I'll save my opinion on those for another post :). Let's assume for this discussion that for concealment you are either seen or unseen and for cover we have four levels (25%, 50%, 75,100%) based on how much of your body is exposed. For hit location you are either hit or not.

25% - I'm standing behind a wall knee high

50% - I'm standing behind a wall that is waist high or crouched behind a log

75% - I'm standing behind a wall with only my shoulders and head exposed

100% - I am crouched down behind a wall in full cover and fully concealed

Without taking penetration and damage into account you could get some pretty easy calculations for chance to hit, however to me it's still missing some realistic relevance here. I think penetration / damage would be way top difficult to implement in a game like this (but I could be wrong) since you then have to determine what the material of each cover is and assign it a value then determine the bullet size ant type (Ball, AP, Explosive), etc, etc. However I think implementing a hit location would bring you a lot closer to realism while providing the feature of hit effects based on location (I'll go over that in one of my other posts)

Now if it is possible to implement penetration and damage then I'd say go for that too since it would only add even more realism to the game.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

i don't get why you can't use LOS to figure % to hit. JA2 did it eventually, xcom did it as well. you just draw a line from the person firing to the person being fired on. you draw lines to the edges of the target (hit box). if the first line isn't blocked then you have a non-zero chance. if the area made by the other lines intersects with cover decrease to hit by a % based on cover. you could get complex by redrawing the lines to shrink the effective hit box so cover behind other cover doesn't count. this pretty much means that the dichotomy of a complex system without accurate numbers vs. a simple system that doesn't take into account obstructions is completely false. the calculations are already done for LOS so the rest isn't much different really.

one could have objects operate like smoke in that they obstruct LOS but not provide cover, though this would still provide a decrease in % to hit chance. maybe even something as simple as the object operating as 50% effective for cover calculations (if you don't redraw for cover calculations).

in the end not giving the % to hit would be a bad design IMO. you need to tell the player what is going on, any good team leader needs to be aware of the nuances of the situation at hand that don't show up on paper.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...