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Sibillians overpowered.


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Personally, I just scream "for the Queen!" and rush in a couple shock-jocks with shields. If you send them in with full TUs you should be able to get off at least two jabs each and the sebs don't have much in the way of whatever health it is that determines stun rate.

And on a side note, be grateful that they nerfed the androns: time was they were harder to kill than you find the sebs and they just loved grenades. I still have nightmares about them.

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I still hate fighting androns, but they're not as bad as sebs. And yes it turns out that sebs make excellent stat growth early game. Just pin one down inside a light scout, keep hurling flashbangs at him, and have your entire squad blast away with pistols until their aim stat grows. Its actually more likely to pass out from the flashbang than to die from the weapons fire.

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I've found that giving all my snipers shotguns as well really helps on clearing the command room on a landing ship. I use shock grenades and/or LMGs to suppress everything, then have all men with shotguns rush in. It feels more like room clearing in real life and actually works really well, so long as you outnumber the remaining aliens.

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Player plays on insane mode, complains about X being OP. Play on veteran, then.

X is being OP against ~X (!X, not X, -X, everything else X), do you understand me? Everything plays well but Sebillians play bad. Not too challenging, just too boring. Veteran is too easy for me - nothing about challenge at all.

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I have predicted such answer :) No, it's not, AI is foolish as hell. Seb (or several of sebs) sit behind the pilot chair, but my troops stand behind door in 4-5 tiles. I can "open door - shoot - close door" until on some turn (10th or 20th) I will be at last so lucky to kill him in one round. So current AI dooms seb to be flawlessly killed and me to be flawlessly bored. However, the enemy would come to the door, open it and kill 2-3 soldiers at point blank range.

I'm going to go back to the point I made before: it would have been easy enough to have rushed it down under those circumstances. Most soldiers can clear 4-5 tiles and burst fire with a rifle. Snipers could have softened it up first with aimed shots and even the machine gun could have come in for some close-range damage. Shotguns/carbines would be better, of course, but I still don't see how you could fail to kill a Seb Officer with all those soldiers unless you got some terrible RNG luck.

As for moving forwards to attack, I don't have a problem with aliens being more aggressive in their defence. But in the circumstance you've described there's literally nothing the Officer can do, at least not if it's suppressed, because it doesn't have enough TUs to move to the door, open it and attack.

This is too costly for insane level. I tried play in this manner (no reloads, fair play, avoiding of use AI bugs e.t.c.) and after second month lost 2 of 4 regions.

If losing soldiers is too costly on Insane, why do you want the AI to more aggressively kill your soldiers? Won't that have exactly the same effect as what you've said you've tried here and therefore make the game too hard?

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I'm going to go back to the point I made before: it would have been easy enough to have rushed it down under those circumstances.

Obviously have I saved the game in calm point and tried all of these solutions you offer to me. We have 8 xenonauts and 2 sebs (officer and soldier) in corvette pilot room. This room is full of chairs, walls, computers and other obstacles, so both aliens covered multiple times from any position I can get. My actions?

1. I rush to kill both sebs from point blank range. Nice - I'll get 2-3 reaction fire one-shots, and other soldiers will able even to kill one of them. Next turn survived seb will kill one more solider and on my turn I probably finish him too. Result - about 2-4 victims. Not acceptable.

2. I try to suppress them first from safe point. Yes, I can do this. half of my men lose all his TUs for this. Than rest rush in... but they are snipers, rocketeers or something like... OK, they rush and kill one or half. Next turn 1,5 sebs kill 1-2 my soldiers and supress rest. But, probably, next turn I'll finish them off. Result 1-2 guaranteed victims. Acceptable 1 or 2 times, but not every corvette I'll breach.

3. I stay at safe distance and open door from side, fire all rounds, close door. Due regeneration every turn I'll need to start process over the beginning. But from tenth try or some later I'll kill one seb. Then I will rush other, or use same tactics. Result - zero victims. Acceptable? Probably not. Because this "tenth try or later." But if I wish excellent result I must follow exactly such tactics.

So my opinion is: "tactic, effective enough for insane difficulty is insanely boring". If you'll offer me more effective tactic than "door game", I'll admit my wrong.

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Suppression carries over partially across multiple turns. Therefore, you begin by laying down heavy fire/using flashbangs to suppress the aliens and take cover for the turn. (This is even assuming they didn't waste half their TUs wandering around doing nothing, which the aliens are wont to do inside the UFO! Though this might be fixed in 1.07)

On the following turn, the alien's suppression values will not be recovered very much. A single rifle burst should be sufficient to re-suppress them. Furthermore, because the aliens have only half their TUs and because Sebs have low Reactions stats, it will be possible for you to move your riflemen up to the Sebs without drawing reaction fire. So, you move a rifleman up, burst-fire to suppress and get some good hits, and take it from there. If you had some Laser Carbines it would be easier, of course, but the rifles should be sufficient.

Doing this, you should guarantee one Sebillian dead. Killing the second as well on the same turn might be tough (although you never mentioned a second one in this situation previously) but you should have enough left at least to suppress it. This will almost certainly pin it down and make it capable of taking only a single snapshot which will have at best a ~25% chance of hitting (and, depending on armour, may well not kill either). If you had a shield solder, even better as you could use them to draw fire and at best you'll take a scratch.

For what it's worth, I'm not trying to argue that door spamming isn't broken. It really is and if you want a 'perfect' game then it is the best way to clear UFOs. But if using that exploit is what's making the game dull for you, I can only suggest not doing it. That's precisely my take on it: it makes the game boring, so I don't do it. I'm not convinced that the game is otherwise so hard that you have to rely on it, so I'm happy not to.

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there's a thread further down the page about passive aliens where one of the devs says they're putting out a patch that'll give the aliens the ability to use doors that are blocked by your troops. This may remove your boring but effective strategy.

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there's a thread further down the page about passive aliens where one of the devs says they're putting out a patch that'll give the aliens the ability to use doors that are blocked by your troops. This may remove your boring but effective strategy.

Sounds good. Thanks.

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Suppression carries over partially across multiple turns. Therefore, you begin by laying down heavy fire/using flashbangs to suppress the aliens and take cover for the turn. (This is even assuming they didn't waste half their TUs wandering around doing nothing, which the aliens are wont to do inside the UFO! Though this might be fixed in 1.07)

On the following turn, the alien's suppression values will not be recovered very much. A single rifle burst should be sufficient to re-suppress them. Furthermore, because the aliens have only half their TUs and because Sebs have low Reactions stats, it will be possible for you to move your riflemen up to the Sebs without drawing reaction fire. So, you move a rifleman up, burst-fire to suppress and get some good hits, and take it from there. If you had some Laser Carbines it would be easier, of course, but the rifles should be sufficient.

Doing this, you should guarantee one Sebillian dead. Killing the second as well on the same turn might be tough (although you never mentioned a second one in this situation previously) but you should have enough left at least to suppress it. This will almost certainly pin it down and make it capable of taking only a single snapshot which will have at best a ~25% chance of hitting (and, depending on armour, may well not kill either). If you had a shield solder, even better as you could use them to draw fire and at best you'll take a scratch.

For what it's worth, I'm not trying to argue that door spamming isn't broken. It really is and if you want a 'perfect' game then it is the best way to clear UFOs. But if using that exploit is what's making the game dull for you, I can only suggest not doing it. That's precisely my take on it: it makes the game boring, so I don't do it. I'm not convinced that the game is otherwise so hard that you have to rely on it, so I'm happy not to.

Kabill's post is sound boarding advice. You can apply those tactics to other races too except Androns (because they can't be suppressed.) Another thing you could try is dousing the entire area with stun gas, lot's of it. Rocket launchers with stun rockets are perfect for this. It will actually force them to move, knock them out, and it can cause suppression too. If they move far enough they won't have the TU to reaction fire. It's useful even if you don't plan to capture any aliens and it will cause less damage to the UFO making your recovery more profitable. Edited by StellarRat
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Kabill's advice is great. I really wish to see how it works in practice - just like action movie. I am not very good in English, therefore unlikely to be able to pass the desired degree of irony in this phrase.

"A single rifle burst should be sufficient to re-suppress them". No, my rifleman would miss all the rounds and suppress only his mate, who standing nearby.

"Rocket launchers with stun rockets are perfect for this". No, they NOT! I have filled the whole room with purple laughing gas, but sebillian never even coughed.

This will almost certainly pin it down and make it capable of taking only a single snapshot which will have at best a ~25% chance of hitting. But he hit and one-shoted my soldier in wolf armor.

And so on. In real game everything goes not as planned, but how random says. This is not card game, nor chess.

In short, I expressed my personal opinion - sebillian regen overpowered on insane difficulty. Can it be killed? Of course, yes. Is there some tactic that allow to do it quickly, without significant losses, without the need for specially selected equipment and Irish luck? I'm not know, really want to see video how kabill doing this in real game and in same conditions.

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In short, I expressed my personal opinion - sebillian regen overpowered on insane difficulty. Can it be killed? Of course, yes. Is there some tactic that allow to do it quickly, without significant losses, without the need for specially selected equipment and Irish luck? I'm not know, really want to see video how kabill doing this in real game and in same conditions.

If you're going to insist on bring up the worst case scenario as a way of arguing against any possible solutions to the problem you pose, then I'm not sure there's any point in continuing the discussion further.

Yes, *of course* all your shots can miss. Yes, *of course* the aliens will sometimes get a shot and one-hit-kill your soldiers.

But there's nothing in that argument that is specific to a Sebillian. It might as well be a Caesan Non-Com: if all your shots always miss and the aliens always hit you for a lot of damage, you can't win and that's the end of it. Throwing around the "worst case scenario" as a trump card is worthless, because it applies to anything.

In contrast, if you actually look at the odds you'll find them quite in your favour. Assuming you can avoid the target's cover (which is fairly simple at that distance) you're looking at ~60-70% hits on burst fire with a rifle with a soldier with mediocre accuracy (50). So that's roughly 2/3 hits. If you average the damage for the assault rifles (60+60 = 120) and the laser rifles (90+90= 180), that's 300 damage. A sebllian officer on Insane has 200HP. So, on average with those four soldiers you've killed it one and half times over. That's a large margin for error, even just using the riflemen. If you add in the other four soldiers, I'm not even sure how you can lose.

So, if you'll trust a paper-argument, 1) you don't need specially selected equipment since what you're soldiers had was more than sufficient; and 2) you don't need the "luck of the Irish" by any stretch of the imagination.

And on the subject of "specially selected equipment": having to use the right tools for the job is hardly a bad thing. Shotguns/carbines are designed precisely for the kinds of close-quarters fighting that UFO assaults entail. You can refuse to use them all you like, but you can't then complain if you struggle with a certain part of the game. It's analogous to not using cover and then complaining that the aliens kill your soldiers all the time - if you don't use appropriate tactics, it's not the game's fault if you lose.

Of course, I'm not going to pretend that any of this guarantees you won't take loses. If you want to play a 'perfect' game then continue boring yourself with door-spamming. But if it's causing you not to enjoy the game, I can only encourage you to try experimenting with other approaches that make things more interesting. You might find yourself pleasantly surprised.

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X is being OP against ~X (!X, not X, -X, everything else X), do you understand me? Everything plays well but Sebillians play bad. Not too challenging, just too boring. Veteran is too easy for me - nothing about challenge at all.

Have you beaten the game on veteran yet? Or are you one of those players who jump to the hardest difficulty in the name of challenge? If you are, you shouldn't be complaining about how difficult it is to win, then. If you made any progress on Veteran I would assume that you have knowledge of effective tactics for taking down units in close-quarter combat..

Based on your refusal to try different tactics (shotgun/carbines) to take out units and your insistence that the situation is impossible based on bringing up the worst case scenario as an argument, I don't know what to think. You really need to avoid limiting yourself to one or two strategies though, there's always a situation where you'll need to mix it up to be more effective.

Edited by ViewThePhenom
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The fact that you're playing on Insane difficulty is the entire reason there is a balance issue. It doesn't matter what armour your men are wearing with the ridiculous damage multiplier Insane difficulty has and the massive damage variation the vanilla, unmodded game has. They can and will frequently be oneshot.

Sebilians are only really a problem because of their slightly ridiculous HP regeneration. Everything else is due to the aliens' stats getting huge bonuses.

Basically the difficulty jump is much higher between each level in sequence. Easy to Normal isn't much of a difference, Normal to Veteran is a big different, Veteran to Insane is a HUGE difference.

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Pretty much, but the difficulty is almost solely due to it being Insane mode; not because he's facing Sebilians. Reserving a few guys to all shoot at the same time at the same target will make sure regeneration never even comes into play.

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max hp based regen coupled with smoke grenade immunity makes for some scary aliens on insane difficulty. Is the regen of sebs something moddable, beause if so, you could set it to 1/4 instead of 1/2. That would probably make it seem a bit less overpowered. I don't think that that would need to be an official change, insane is insane, but this game is extremely moddable.

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max hp based regen coupled with smoke grenade immunity makes for some scary aliens on insane difficulty. Is the regen of sebs something moddable, beause if so, you could set it to 1/4 instead of 1/2. That would probably make it seem a bit less overpowered. I don't think that that would need to be an official change, insane is insane, but this game is extremely moddable.

I think you can mod it in config.xml

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