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Suppression Mechanics


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The accuracy of a burst is not determined by a predetermined accuracy modifier, but a recoil modifier and applied only to the next shot. Simplest way would be to make recoil a % variable, e.g. 20% recoil would multiply accuracy by 0.8 for each consecutive shot. You could also add an impact for STR to somewhat reduce the recoil, and then factor in STR being given chance to increase by burst fire, maybe long bursts not the short ones.

The only problem here being how to display accuracy, but I think simply using the accuracy of the first shot would be enough. Maybe some sort of indicator for recoil. E.g. a shot with 45% accuracy and 27% recoil could be displayed as: 45% (-27%)

That's a horrible mechanic and not very intuitive at all. It's overly complicated purely for the sake of recoil.

I see no point to it other then to try to mimic real physics for the sake of mimicing real physics. I expect something like that to cause a lot of frustration and simply not be enjoyable for anyone except people that is overthinking things about weapon recoil.

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That's a horrible mechanic and not very intuitive at all. It's overly complicated purely for the sake of recoil.

I see no point to it other then to try to mimic real physics for the sake of mimicing real physics. I expect something like that to cause a lot of frustration and simply not be enjoyable for anyone except people that is overthinking things about weapon recoil.

/agree

And recoil doesn't really work like that either. You get an immediate spike of recoil, and then you compensate and bring the weapon back under control. It doesn't linearly increase. A weapon's accuracy is a factor of how stable it is during FA.

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No, it's not intended to be a realistic recoil simulation, just a generic burst fire mechanic which I think is better than the current one and would support suppression fire mechanics.

Well, you could add diminishing returns to the recoil modifier or something so the accuracy eventually stays put. But the reason you would want to such a recoil mechanism is to allow higher rates of fire, since such a mechanic would naturally make the first few shots more accurate and the rest a lot less accurate, supporting the idea of suppression fire while balancing the potential increase in firepower.

It would mean that long bursts are devastating at short range where initial accuracy is presumed to be high anyway, but inaccurate at range, meaning you miss most of the bullets after the first few.

As I've understood, right now burst fire has constant accuracy for each shot, which means if one would have, say, 10 round bursts, an accuracy as high as 50% would already be overkill. It's a 100% chance to hit one bullet and in the average you hit with 5. To counterbalance this you'd have to tone down the damage of the weapon, which also sucks, because it's usually unrealistic as hell. So over all the times I've pondered how to fix that balance, I always end up with a recoil mechanism. I just call it recoil because IMO it fits best, but in reality it be considered to simulate many conditions inherent to shooting full auto, such as not being aim for shit after you've pressed the trigger.

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I see the accuracy of the burst shots as more of an average accuracy.

That kind of averaging falls down in much longer bursts though.

Roughly speaking the first shot may be pretty accurate, the second and third would be less so then the rest would come back on target.

If the machine gun is given a full auto mode, as I would like, then some kind of mechanism to mimic recoil might fit quite well.

Full auto would have an initial AP cost, to represent preparation time, and an additional round cost.

On firing the game works out how many additional rounds you can fire after the initial cost is removed and then blasts away until you hit empty.

You could tie that in with accuracy values so the initial shot is more accurate than the follow ups.

Fully realistic mapping of recoil to take into account actual weapon recoil or the effect of walking fire onto the target is a little over complicating things I think.

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No, it's not intended to be a realistic recoil simulation, just a generic burst fire mechanic which I think is better than the current one and would support suppression fire mechanics.

Well, you could add diminishing returns to the recoil modifier or something so the accuracy eventually stays put. But the reason you would want to such a recoil mechanism is to allow higher rates of fire, since such a mechanic would naturally make the first few shots more accurate and the rest a lot less accurate, supporting the idea of suppression fire while balancing the potential increase in firepower.

With that explanation I at least understand where you want to go with it. The last post gave no insight into why you wanted that mechanic.

Although I still don't agree with it, and I don't really agree with your overall idea of supression fire. It still feels to me that you try to bend the and twist mechanic to reflect some idea of how you want to explain it, rather then how it would feel like to play. Baisically the two of us don't agree on what would be fun :P

It would mean that long bursts are devastating at short range where initial accuracy is presumed to be high anyway, but inaccurate at range, meaning you miss most of the bullets after the first few.

As I've understood, right now burst fire has constant accuracy for each shot, which means if one would have, say, 10 round bursts, an accuracy as high as 50% would already be overkill. It's a 100% chance to hit one bullet and in the average you hit with 5. To counterbalance this you'd have to tone down the damage of the weapon, which also sucks, because it's usually unrealistic as hell. So over all the times I've pondered how to fix that balance, I always end up with a recoil mechanism. I just call it recoil because IMO it fits best, but in reality it be considered to simulate many conditions inherent to shooting full auto, such as not being aim for shit after you've pressed the trigger.

First of all I'm confused about the 10 bullet burst. I think that would inherently be a bad design/balance choise. Has anyone spoken about bursts that long or where did you get that number from? :confused:

And 50% for burst fire sounds like you are at nearly point blank distance from a game balance point of view. I agree with you that it would have to be altered some how in that situation.

A far easier balance then introduceing a new mechanic is to simply balance the accuracy, lower it and alter any range modifier untill the weapon/burst is not as overpowered as your example assumes it to be. I don't know why you write that the only way to balance it is to alter the damage rather then accuracy? Could you clear that up for me please?

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Here's a random idea to add to this, once the idea of how suppression has been worked out is over, and people go back to how suppression manifests itself on the game play, what about the possibility ( unknown if feasible) of having suppressed units unable to use the more accurate targetting methods?

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For machineguns, yes, we could potentially do a short (more aimed) burst and a long (more suppressing) burst to give it several fire modes.
I think that might have been what he was referring to.
That just raises more questions for me. Why would he assume a 50% average/initial accuracy for a long burst if that is purely meant to supress? He is trying to prevent or balance a situation which only occurs in assumptions with numbers that makes no sense? :confused:

I admittedly don't know that much about military tactics, but if you are "laying down supressing fire" are you aiming at and activly trying to hit a specific target? Sounds counter intuitive to me.

PS.From a design perspective: haveing to wait for your soldier to fire 10 rounds would most likely be annoying enough that noone would use it.

Here's a random idea to add to this, once the idea of how suppression has been worked out is over, and people go back to how suppression manifests itself on the game play, what about the possibility ( unknown if feasible) of having suppressed units unable to use the more accurate targetting methods?

To be honest down the line this might acctually be the kind of supression I would appriciate the most. It would clearly indicate that you are being supressed, would be easy to explain and not too restrictive/intrusive mechanic.

Edited by Gorlom
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You're right Gorlom, tweaking accuracy is another way to go around the problem of longer bursts becoming imbalanced. But that would really be a work-a-round, not a fix to the problem itself. Think about it this way: what happens in the extreme cases of a soldier that has all the stats and weapons to give best possible accuracy with an MG? Most likely it will end up breaking the system by giving a high chance, regardless of penalty. And that's because the system isn't designed to take that into mind from the beginning.

I know it might be relatively meaningless in most cases, but to me, small things like carefully thought out game mechanics are what I myself respect in games. I guess it's a mindset, most of all, nothing wrong in not being there.

That just raises more questions for me. Why would he assume a 50% average/initial accuracy for a long burst if that is purely meant to supress? He is trying to prevent or balance a situation which only occurs in assumptions with numbers that makes no sense? :confused:

Random number based on experiences with the game. I presumed such value wouldn't be that impossible to obtain even with heavy accuracy penalties in case they were in place.

I admittedly don't know that much about military tactics, but if you are "laying down supressing fire" are you aiming at and activly trying to hit a specific target? Sounds counter intuitive to me.

To be honest down the line this might acctually be the kind of supression I would appriciate the most. It would clearly indicate that you are being supressed, would be easy to explain and not too restrictive/intrusive mechanic.

I don't personally like too gamist mechanics like that. I mean stuff where you can only get effect X by doing thing Y or action Y or using skill Y or whatever, even though logic dictates effect X could be achieved by A,B,C and D as well!

As for military tactics, I'd say the most important one is: shoot to kill. So why would anyone want to intentionally miss someone if he had a chance to hit? So in your case suppression fire could have, say 25% accuracy compared to normal burst, meaning it'll be suppressing and just that. Now, that's fine, until you get to the math and at one point realize that full burst at point-blank (suppression fire) ends up with 1 bullet that hits the target. That's one of the things that COULD happen with a simpler "gamist" system.

Stuff like that are the small details I talked about earlier that really bug me, because they feel silly, and I'm suddenly not "immersed" any longer. Maybe you think it's okay when you realize the rules of the game are fucked up, and that's totally fine and completely up to you. HOWEVER, how many times have you been in awe and admiration when you've realized that the rules of the game are absolutely awesome? They make sense and completent each other perfectly and you're not annoyed by the little things.

Okay, this has been a long rant, but I tried to explain my line of thinking as best as I could and I hope it helps in understanding what I'm seeking for.

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You're right Gorlom, tweaking accuracy is another way to go around the problem of longer bursts becoming imbalanced. But that would really be a work-a-round, not a fix to the problem itself.
I am quite surprised by this statement. Tweaking the (max) accuracy and altering existing modifiers IS fixing the problem. Adding a new mechanic that tries to do the same thing in another way is what I would call a workaround.
Think about it this way: what happens in the extreme cases of a soldier that has all the stats and weapons to give best possible accuracy with an MG? Most likely it will end up breaking the system by giving a high chance, regardless of penalty. And that's because the system isn't designed to take that into mind from the beginning.
Then you tweak all the modifiers from stats and the maximum accuracy cap of tht weapon untill it's not broken. The design HAS taken that into mind from the beginning you are just assuming that it can't.
I know it might be relatively meaningless in most cases, but to me, small things like carefully thought out game mechanics are what I myself respect in games. I guess it's a mindset, most of all, nothing wrong in not being there.
I agree, but your recoil suggetion doesn't seem thought through or meaningful. It's a workaround for a percieved problem that doesn't exist. It is also not intuitive and confusing to represent ingame. You wanted to show it as "X% (-Y%)" where X is the hitchance and Y is the modifier per shot. With the rest of your explanation I could make sense of it. It's not really clear what it means if you just look at it like that though. It could mean lots of things. that X-Y is the hitchance, that X-Y% of X is the hitchance, that the alien is in cover and the cover affects your hitchacne, X, X-Y, X-2Y, X-3Y etc or X, X-Y. (X-Y)-Y, ((X-Y)-Y)-Y etc.

Furthermore I can't do the more complicated math in my head, so the modifier is irrelevant infromation as far as I'm concerned. Probably to most other players as well.

I don't personally like too gamist mechanics like that. I mean stuff where you can only get effect X by doing thing Y or action Y or using skill Y or whatever, even though logic dictates effect X could be achieved by A,B,C and D as well!

I prefere to ask myself why the designer chose to do that instead of wishing it followed real life logic. A perfect example of a gamemechanic not following "logic" as a design choice is the current implemention of reloading versus a cloaking ship in FTL (www.FTLgame.com).

While the enemy cloaks all the reloading of the weapons stops. This is a deliberate choice from the two deleopers, because if they continued loading without fire it would just mean that all the weapons fired at once when the enemy decloaks (and reversly all the enemys guns fire at once when you decloak).

It's not very logical. But it's something you aren't very likely to pay attention to with everything else going on and it's more fun and balanced this way.

As for military tactics, I'd say the most important one is: shoot to kill. So why would anyone want to intentionally miss someone if he had a chance to hit? So in your case suppression fire could have, say 25% accuracy compared to normal burst, meaning it'll be suppressing and just that. Now, that's fine, until you get to the math and at one point realize that full burst at point-blank (suppression fire) ends up with 1 bullet that hits the target. That's one of the things that COULD happen with a simpler "gamist" system.
I'm not sure I understand what you wanted to say here. In fact I'm almost sure I missunderstood you. But if I didn't missunderstand you:

Why is that a problem? If the supression system is less accurate then the normal burst (especially if it's by %) there is going to come a breaking point where the regular burst is going to be more effective then the supression burst. Who cares if I am almost guaranteed to hit 1 out of 10 from a supression burst when I have the same chance to hit 3 out of 4 with the normal burst?

Stuff like that are the small details I talked about earlier that really bug me, because they feel silly, and I'm suddenly not "immersed" any longer. Maybe you think it's okay when you realize the rules of the game are fucked up, and that's totally fine and completely up to you.
The more complicated and contrived a mechanic is the more likely someone is going to be bothered by it. Just look at what Icevamp said about your recoil mechanic: "Recoil doesn't work like that". I am haveing YOUR problem with your suggestion.

The reason I like the mechanic to be simple such as not allowing the higher "aimed" modes is because it is not really obstrucing the gameplay like many other supression mechanics that has been suggested (worst of all being the one that made it possible to drain all of your APs the next round).

As an added bonus it is a logical and intuitive mechanic with a logical explanation. If someone is fireing bullets or laserbeams at you you are going to want to keep your head down as much as possible. You are not going to poke your head out and line up a shot takeing several seconds to aim it.

HOWEVER, how many times have you been in awe and admiration when you've realized that the rules of the game are absolutely awesome? They make sense and completent each other perfectly and you're not annoyed by the little things.

Whenever I have been it has been due to them working inside the game world. Not because they have been taken from the realworld and pushed into the game. I agree with lots of what you say but we still see it from different points of view. I consider gameplay and flow to be the most important. Right now you seem to be so focused on this mechanic that I can't tell if you consider those things. I can't tell if you see how it would interact between different weapons, situations or mechanics. Your off the scale numbers in your examples (that at first seems to be presented as averages rather then extremes that youclearify them to be later) doesn't fill me with confidence that you do.

Maybe I'm keeping in the back of my head the notion that x-com worked absolutely fine without supression or recoil mechanic. That it was fun and had a good flow. That it had instances where the available game mechanic created natural supressing fire. (We even have an anecdote about Xenonuts here on this forum where someone described how a drone supressed his team.) I'm worried that a too complicated mechanic will break that flow as well as remove those anecdotal instances, where it simply breaks part of the fun rather then add to it. All because the bigger picture wasn't really considered enough.

Supressing fire sounds cool, but have you taken a step back and thought about it? If the answer is "yes" then go right ahead and keep suggesting things. I will just reserve my right to disagree with you :P

Edited by Gorlom
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That's a horrible mechanic and not very intuitive at all. It's overly complicated purely for the sake of recoil.

I see no point to it other then to try to mimic real physics for the sake of mimicing real physics. I expect something like that to cause a lot of frustration and simply not be enjoyable for anyone except people that is overthinking things about weapon recoil.

actually it's pretty much the same as JA2's recoil mechanic, most people didn't even know it was there. most that did simply understood that your first shot was more accurate than the rest. the actual formula for recoil was (in vanilla not counting gun mods):

bullets fired in burst - 1 * burst penaly => max burst penalty.

thus the first shot had no recoil, then the gun had recoil up to a point, which it was then compensated for.

As I've understood, right now burst fire has constant accuracy for each shot, which means if one would have, say, 10 round bursts, an accuracy as high as 50% would already be overkill. It's a 100% chance to hit one bullet and in the average you hit with 5.

99.90234375% actually for 1 or more to hit.

a 5 round burst would yield at least 1 hit at 25% = 76.26953125% of the time

chris even talked about this in the OP, when he was saying that bursts were mathematically superior most of the time. he wanted to add suppression in so that he could drop the accuracy on bursts without making them useless. JA2 burst mechanics made intermediate (assault rifles) less efficient at killing than either a sniper rifle, or a machine gun. submachine guns had less AP to fire, making them better at ranges where accuracy wasn't a factor, and they had burst modes as well. thus assault rifles, being the bread and butter of real life soldiers needed to regain their niche, thus JA2 1.13 redid the chance to hit mechanics a bit, and added suppression (in addition to other features) in order keep machine guns useful.

people familiar with the JA2 1.13 suppression system know its flaws, which have voiced their opinion against a straight copy of that system. chris has played company of heroes, which was an RTS which had a similar system, though it had different ways of dealing the issue of pinning a person on in the middle of nowhere. it wasn't a super simple method, the player didn't have to track a bunch of stats, and so the gist of it was pretty simple.

i am not advocating a recoil system, but i am saying that you should knee jerk away from a complicated system under the assumption that individual players would have to figure out the specific mechanics.

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i am not advocating a recoil system, but i am saying that you should knee jerk away from a complicated system under the assumption that individual players would have to figure out the specific mechanics.

I was assuming something along the lines of your description of JA's situation with assult rifles, more then how the system would appear to the player. Granted I did have issues with the representation suggested as well, but that is easily fixed by hiding (read: not explaining) it as I understand JA2 did? (I just assumed that catmorbid would not want/agree to represent it with only 1 number. I might have assumed too much there.) I don't really see any advantage this has over simply lowering the avrage accuracy.

I personally don't see the point of waiting for 4-6 shots knowing that their chance to hit is abyssmal compared to the first 1-2 shots... especially if the first 2 happened to miss. It's just going to feel pointless and stall the gameplay imo.

Did JA2 wait for the shots to land before sending out the next round or shoot them in rapid succession?

Edited by Gorlom
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I was assuming something along the lines of your description of JA's situation with assult rifles, more then how the system would appear to the player. Granted I did have issues with the representation suggested as well, but that is easily fixed by hiding (read: not explaining) it as I understand JA2 did? (I just assumed that catmorbid would not want/agree to represent it with only 1 number. I might have assumed too much there.) I don't really see any advantage this has over simply lowering the avrage accuracy.

I personally don't see the point of waiting for 4-6 shots knowing that their chance to hit is abyssmal compared to the first 1-2 shots... especially if the first 2 happened to miss. It's just going to feel pointless and stall the gameplay imo.

Did JA2 wait for the shots to land before sending out the next round or shoot them in rapid succession?

JA2 doesn't have percentages (at least in vanilla, haven't played much with mods) of shot, and burst is shot all at once (one at a time is stupid) so you see the dispersion of bullets which is pretty nice and also why I very much liked JA2's burst mechanics. I actually didn't know (for sure) JA2 used the similar thought of recoil I had, but it does make sense now that I know it :P

Oh, and what comes to visualizing the accuracy of a burst fire (With recoil mechanism), my initial idea was just that: AN IDEA. I presumed someone would try to develop it further, since I thought with a tone of uncertainty in the message I'd relay that I'm not sure what is the best way to visualize the accuracy. I like to see the values of the variables at play, hence I'd personally appreciate to see the recoil modifier, but people have their preferences and its not really what the issue is here anyway.

Now, on another note, perhaps you should Gorlom have a spin at JA2? It's still a very good game and in fact many of Xernonauts' mechanics are inspired by it.

Whenever I have been it has been due to them working inside the game world. Not because they have been taken from the realworld and pushed into the game. I agree with lots of what you say but we still see it from different points of view. I consider gameplay and flow to be the most important. Right now you seem to be so focused on this mechanic that I can't tell if you consider those things. I can't tell if you see how it would interact between different weapons, situations or mechanics. Your off the scale numbers in your examples (that at first seems to be presented as averages rather then extremes that youclearify them to be later) doesn't fill me with confidence that you do.

I do keep gameplay and flow in mind. And I do not think they require simple mechanics. All they require is that the player is not oversaturated with needlessly complex options. The idea is that taking the action, making the choice should be simple, yet the underlying mechanics should be much much more complex. Computers can handle that, players are not computers, players don't NEED to handle that, all they need is sufficient information on things work, which can be given by manuals, tooltips and bunch of other things. Please drop the scale issue already, I said it was from the top of my hat, you can't presume I'd be providing completely accurate details when brainstorming :rolleyes:

Maybe I'm keeping in the back of my head the notion that x-com worked absolutely fine without supression or recoil mechanic. That it was fun and had a good flow. That it had instances where the available game mechanic created natural supressing fire. (We even have an anecdote about Xenonuts here on this forum where someone described how a drone supressed his team.) I'm worried that a too complicated mechanic will break that flow as well as remove those anecdotal instances, where it simply breaks part of the fun rather then add to it. All because the bigger picture wasn't really considered enough.

Supressing fire sounds cool, but have you taken a step back and thought about it? If the answer is "yes" then go right ahead and keep suggesting things. I will just reserve my right to disagree with you

X-Com worked very well indeed. Until the point when you autoshot an alien from 50 squares away and hit with every bullet. It's burst fire mechanics were hideous, plus you had to watch each bullet go individually. Absolutely horrifying. It might be your goggles are mayhaps a bit too much covered with the gold dust of past? :)

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all-at-once burst or one-at-a-time burst both has it's advantages. The all-at-once takes less time and is less bothersome to watch in certain situations. The one-at-a-time sets a different atmosphere and adds a bit of anticipation if you can bother with the wait and don't have 10 round bursts. :P

To be honest I'm torn between the two camera systems, and can't really chose one over the other. I'll apriciate the visual representation system regardless if Chris stick to what he got or changes it.

As for the rest of the discussion I think you and I have come as far as we will be able to regarding this catmorbid. :)

Let's agree to disagree.

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Do we have to have suppressive fire in Xenonauts? Isn't the risk of getting reaction fired the same thing?

Suppression as it has been suggested would be an action that you perform to influence an enemies decision on which action to perform.

The enemy would also be able to do the same on you.

Reaction fire is something that you leave time for in the hope that it can do some damage.

Unless reaction fire was significantly reworked I don't really see how it would have the same effect as the suppression systems suggested.

Now you could tweak the reaction fire rules so that units who had been taking fire were more likely to get hit by reaction shots to represent a suppression type effect.

That would be tough to balance for me as it would overly benefit the defenders in any given situation.

Making reaction fire more common, more accurate or whatever you decide on to make it more of a deterrent (and therefore more likely to suppress the player) would also make it far more deadly.

That could see you getting troops killed just because you hadn't seen that alien standing behind a rock.

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Suppression as it has been suggested would be an action that you perform to influence an enemies decision on which action to perform.

The enemy would also be able to do the same on you.

Reaction fire is something that you leave time for in the hope that it can do some damage.

Unless reaction fire was significantly reworked I don't really see how it would have the same effect as the suppression systems suggested.

Now you could tweak the reaction fire rules so that units who had been taking fire were more likely to get hit by reaction shots to represent a suppression type effect.

That would be tough to balance for me as it would overly benefit the defenders in any given situation.

And reaction fire or at least the risk doesn't influence what you do? If you know a bunch of aliens are watching the windows of a building that you have guys in your not going to move you men in front of said windows unless you have no other way of safely getting into line of sight of the aliens. So essentially your guys are suppressed.

Making reaction fire more common, more accurate or whatever you decide on to make it more of a deterrent (and therefore more likely to suppress the player) would also make it far more deadly.

That could see you getting troops killed just because you hadn't seen that alien standing behind a rock.

This reminds me of the original.

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Reaction fire risk has a minimal influence as I said.

It is supposed to mimic suppression I guess but it isn't a particularly good, or interesting way of doing it.

The only way you would know if aliens had a window covered and AP left to reaction fire on you is after you have already walked into it and they have used their AP.

It was not a deterrent because you didn't know about it and it is no longer a deterrent because it has already happened.

The suppression systems are an action that is taken to influence the enemy.

If the enemy suppress your troops then you know your effectiveness has been reduced.

That becomes a deterrent to certain actions.

You know that their accuracy is reduced, or you will be less able to make it to the next bit of cover, so you have to consider your options.

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Reaction fire risk has a minimal influence as I said.

It is supposed to mimic suppression I guess but it isn't a particularly good, or interesting way of doing it.

I agree, I'm just worried that we may end up with or waste time on a complicated/exploitable/pointless mechanic. I mean if fire multiple shots and or volleys at an alien they're either gonna be dead, wounded (tho this only helps if being hurt affects accuracy like in the original(does it?) or they are going to be one of the tougher aliens that can't be suppressed anyway.

The only way you would know if aliens had a window covered and AP left to reaction fire on you is after you have already walked into it and they have used their AP.

It was not a deterrent because you didn't know about it and it is no longer a deterrent because it has already happened.

Its still a deterrent because you don't know how much AP they have left. I guess reaction fire is more like area denial then proper suppression.

The suppression systems are an action that is taken to influence the enemy.

If the enemy suppress your troops then you know your effectiveness has been reduced.

That becomes a deterrent to certain actions.

You know that their accuracy is reduced, or you will be less able to make it to the next bit of cover, so you have to consider your options.

I'm not against a suppression mechanic, just as long as its simple and isn't too crippling.

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Unfortunately my thoughts for this thread can be summed up as "TL;DR", given the last time I tried to tackle it it was a mere 3 pages long. I'm sure once we've got a basic system in place we'll be able to iterate it and see what works best.

I mostly made this post to complement Gorzagh on his avatar, as it made me smile.

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I got sidetracked from actually doing things today into playing the alpha more and reading the forum heh. Here's my two cents after reading most of the thread. :)

* all shots have some suppressive value, higher caliber have more. if you want to use the AP of 5 soldiers taking potshots at someone behind cover, feel free! also agree that armor needs to be taken into account relative to caliber/dmg. to simplify: only heavy weapons get a suppression bonus (sniper, launcher, MG), armor reduces suppression rating by x%.

* burst mode changed to a more JA2 like model - initial shot is accurate ala aim2 then it drops off (and can level somewhere for long bursts, how the numbers balance would be solely based on gameplay, but having accuracy drop off provides suppressive value in misses and also limits the OP nature of firing a long burst without having to create a separate "suppressive fire" and you at least have a good chance of having that first shot hit then the rest is distance and the RNG gods). maybe this is why I don't like the Xeno AR yet, the burst feels wrong.

* suppressed units can only fire an accuracy penalized burst or snapshots - don't look too long, spray and pray, etc

* i like the idea of a smaller detection/vision range of suppressed targets

* having this be a bar that overlays bravery in some way sounds good

* not sure how the cone aoe thing will work in practice, having units in an area be affected by bullet proximity seems the cleanest.

* how suppression tapers off should be handled by playtesting what feels best

Now onto the great question, what to do about movement and AP? I like the two different reactions based on cover. Once someone is suppressed enough the following conditions may occur:

Rattled: in addition to the above vision/aiming debuffs the target decides to make a run for it. no AP penalty (perhaps even have moving take less AP?) but they are easier to hit as they are blindly hauling ass for cover, making them prone to reactionary fire. optionally: they cannot fire but are forced to use all their APs moving.

Hunkering: in addition to the above vision/aiming debuffs, the targets AP cost to move shoots up (to some percent that makes sense gameplay wise) but they become harder to hit / gain a bonus from any cover (head down, cowering, etc).

This would either occur programatically (less than .x cover) or possibly player choice?

Certain aliens would be immune to this - robots, mindless rampagey melee beasts, etc. beeps and rawrs need not apply.

In the ideal world there would be more move types in addition to move/crawl - if there was sprint/normal/crouch/crawl we could say Rattled can only run, and Hunkering can only crawl. Movement types would make you more or less susceptible to reaction fire normally, but obviously cost more AP the slower you go per distance. Silly sprite rendering! In any case we can approximate those things via AP cost tweaking.

Edited by erutan
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