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Firing stance and aiming


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I'm going to refer back to another X-Com-ish game in making this suggestion, since it helps make my point more clearly than otherwise.

In Hammer and Sickle, (which is basically the same thing as Silent Storm,) I tended to play a fairly paranoid game with my sniper main characters. I could crawl on my belly, sneak around to position myself without being heard or seen, and then take two turns just aiming my sniper rifle at a target (usually another sniper hunting me) to get the accuracy I needed to land a killshot in one blow before moving on to avoid the roving "sweeper" fireteams that moved as a unit with assault rifles hunting after the sounds of the last player shots fired.

I know that "being true to X-Com" is a vague goal of the game, but it really frustrates me that precision rifles have these 60 TU requirements, even if my sniper has only 58 TU per turn. Even when I have tons of TUs to spare, the notion that running in one turn, then firing (only) in the next has no accuracy penalty, but taking one step before firing in a turn doesn't is also a bit game-y, breaking turns up even more.

Hence, I'd like to see something like Silent Storm/Hammer and Sickle's aiming mechanics, where you can spend TU on aiming, trying to mitigate accuracy penalties, and "bank" them for a turn or two so long as you don't fire or move, letting a sniper take one or two turns to get a clean shot off, even at a target almost entirely behind cover.

In a similar vein, I think the game could be made a little more "natural" if it included a concept like a "firing stance" - that is, character usually drop their weapon from firing position to run, and put it back into firing position when firing. Moving between positions chews up a little TU, but in return, once in firing position, you fire with less TU, making it more possible to fire multiple shots in succession. It just seems a bit silly to have that pulling the weapon up, aiming, firing once, dropping your weapon back to your side, then pulling it back up again going on.

If you're willing to go with the complication, there might be a button to stick to whatever stance you are in, and one to change it. Hence, crouching while facing a corner, you can go into firing position to wait for something to come around. If you tried to move while in firing position, you spend far more TU, while hip-firing from out of firing position means drastically reduced accuracy. So, alternately, you could hip-fire a shotgun if you are at point-blank range, and don't need the accuracy of firing from the shoulder.

[EDIT:] I forgot to mention this originally, but:

One of the things that having "bankable" TUs would mean is that, rather than having heavy weapons that are inaccurate if you move in the same turn, they just start inaccurate, and you simply pay more TUs to get into firing position or pay more TUs to further mitigate penalties. [/EDIT]

Edited by Wraith_Magus
Section marked EDIT
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Due to the engine sprite rendering is tedious + takes up a massive amount of space... I'd love to have prone, duckwalking, etc in the game but it won't happen. A "ready" stance ala JA2 has been suggested (better reaction time at cost of move per square) but again, requires rendering for every weapon and armor combo.

Crappy closed source engine woot, you can search the forum for tales of woe.

Reserving AP is an interesting idea that could be implemented afaik.

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The game already has the animation frames for raising and lowering weapons so no additional modeling/rendering would be required for a JA2 style "ready" stance. Basically, it would just be a matter cutting the current firing animations into three smaller animations (raising the weapon, firing the weapon, lowering the weapon).

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Well, additional frames would be necessary for walking with a weapon at the shoulder, unless you were capable of further cutting a sprite down to having the shoulders move as a separate sprite from the legs.

If you had it only stay in firing position until you move again, however, it wouldn't take any additional frames.

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If you want a static JA2 ready stance that would work technically, but the idea wasn't taken before. It does make more sense for walking in CQB.

I proposed having the HW take a lot more TUs to ready and unready to get rid of the accuracy penalty, but it was felt that'd be a bit too finnicky.

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Well, making a hefty penalty to limber/unlimber a MG would turn it into a defensive weapon for area denial, and make it more distinct as a weapon - not exactly negative traits.

Especially when we start having more aggressive AI, where you sometimes need to just hold ground, rather than take it, a heavier MG (possibly even with a distinction of LMG for being more man-portable,) would be an attractive option. It changes the way you think about using those weapons if you have to hump an MG around without being able to fire it, take a full turn to deploy it, and only be usable from a crouch/"prone"/"leaning" or some other abstraction representing you have the bipod down, but then, once deployed, is capable of hosing an area liberally, you start actually getting at the actual purpose of a machine gun.

If anything, I don't see it being any more finicky than having to manually path what steps my units take because of sub-optimal choices by the pathfinding.

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Speaking of how little difference there is between weapons, I have to say it's a little silly that assault rifles are basically treated like precision rifles most of the time - the range difference isn't all that significant, you basically never want to use burst fire, (which should be the default mode of using an assault rifle, not the last resort,) and the accuracy differences between "aimed" assault rifle shots and "normal" precision rifle shots are trivial. (They also cost the same in TUs.)

There is currently no reason I can see to use "aimed" precision rifle shots, as aimed shots don't mitigate penalties from partial cover, meaning that the difference is often 94% accuracy versus 95% accuracy with no cover, and something like 44% accuracy versus 44% accuracy with cover. Unless there's some sort of damage bonus I don't know about, you're burning 10 AP for nothing.

I don't see this as "fiddly", I see it as necessary to make the weapon really make sense.

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My experience has been different. I use burst fire with the assault rifle if I'm close and I want to put multiple rounds in a target before reaction fire, or if I'm trying to suppress. Why would burst be the default mode? At least in the US military, that's not really the case. You fire two rounds in quick succession, but actually using burst mode would be the exception rather than the rule. It's really not very accurate.

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Well, technically, they had to take full-auto mode off of the early M16s because almost the only way soldiers of the time were using the weapon was wasting whole clips for suppression. Considering we're often fighting at ranges where it's possible as an alternative to shooting from a distance, we could instead just run up and punch the enemy, burst fire should be accurate enough. (I often find when using shotguns that it's cheaper, TU-wise, to just run five steps closer and fire two snap shots from near-point-blank than it is to fire two aimed shots from further away.)

Especially for reaction fire, it seems odd that we go with one shot, rather than a burst. The unusually high TU cost of (non-aimed) burst fire, when it takes barely more effort on the part of the soldier is a little unusual.

But anyway, yes, assault rifles really should have some slightly-controlled aimed burst fire (as should machine guns put down on a bipod) while precision rifles need to be precise out to a noticeably greater range than an M16 to be worth the name.

A sniper rifle takes twice as many TUs to fire a basic shot as an assault rifle, and both weapons "cost" nothing, so the question becomes what's the marginal advantage of a precision rifle, if it behaves just like an assault rifle in single-shot mode, but costs more TUs, can't be used well after moving (forcing taking a pistol), lacks that burst capability at close range, and you never really fight at the tiny difference in range between where assault rifles are suffering range penalties, but precision rifles don't.

Unless we get some sort of "scope view" button that lets us see further in daylight in a specific direction, having the capacity to shoot at the head peeking out over a chest-high wall without suffering a flat 30% maximum accuracy because of intervening obstacles would be the best way to really distinguish why the precision rifle is meant for slow, methodical shots from a static position.

Edited by Wraith_Magus
Adding other drawbacks of precision rifle
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Ranges are compressed dramatically for the sake of gameplay--that's not really a great argument for making burst fire more accurate. You bring a LMG to take care of suppression. The purpose of burst fire, IMO, is to have situationally better firepower and a more flexible weapon overall, since it makes the AR better at suppressing enemies than the sniper rifle, but still not as good as a rocket or LMG.

The sniper rifle does not behave just like an assault rifle. It is more powerful, longer range, more accurate, and has the hypervelocity perk. Yes, you pay in TUs for that. The increased range is very valuable, as it allows you to use a spotter to shoot from beyond visible range without an accuracy penalty. You must be playing differently than I am if you never notice the difference in range.

Edit: If you want to make an argument for adjusting the stats of one of the weapons, I'm all ears. But I don't see what that has to do with adding completely new features.

Edited by crusherven
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A precision rifle does not have a range longer than assault rifles to really be worth mentioning, (it's only 3 or so tiles more than the assault rifle before you hit range penalties, and yes, that's trivial, especially since the additional 10 AP you spend firing can be spent just moving up another couple tiles,) and isn't really any more accurate when you fire aimed shots with the rifle, which are the two most important aspects of the weapon. The damage difference is marginal.

The new features I'm talking about do significantly alter the role that a character using that weapon takes up. It's much more than a marginal change in damage, which is highly random, anyway.

Besides which, the precision rifle seems capable of suppressing enemies in a single shot, itself, so saying that the assault rifle is better at suppression with burst fire is a poor argument.

Again, if you have a machine gun that is more potent when planted, but less able to be used on the move, it changes how you use it - the assault rifle is a mobile suppression platform, while the heavier machine guns are less mobile defensive weapons, more practical on base defense or terror missions or watching the flank while others advance than on the advance or a breach.

A precision rifle that has a feature to reduce the cover bonuses of enemies while being a more static weapon performs a vastly different function than the assault rifle, since it gives an alternative to either flanking or just lobbing C4 at cover.

Yes, there are SOME minute differences in the behavior of one weapon to the other, but not nearly enough compared to what differences there should be between the two. Shotguns have a fair amount of distinction from assault rifles with their auto-burst, (although they're accurate out to strangely long distance compared to assault rifle ranges,) while pistols are weapons for grenade-throwers. Rocket launchers are obviously different from other mundane firearms. It's machine guns and precision rifles that aren't distinguished by much but marginal differences in power or a couple extra bullets being sprayed. The assault rifle behaves enough like both those weapons that there's a serious question as to why you wouldn't just use the assault rifle for both those roles.

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As crusherven allready said, you didn't pay attention. The Sniper rifles need more TU's, yes, but they do MUCH more damage than an assault rifle and are more accurate. So they are worth it.

I payed attention to the argument, but the problem is I already dismissed that argument as insufficient justification, OR having much to do with why precision rifles shouldn't have a feature to reduce cover bonuses, or improve accuracy with spending TUs over time:

It doesn't do enough damage to reduce the number of bullets it takes to down a target unless I'm shooting pistol shots at sebs, which is the only real measure of damage, and even then, that's a fairly moderate marginal difference.

Accuracy is largely a wash, since, as I already said, an aimed shot from an assault rifle, which takes as many TUs as a normal shot from a precision rifle, has essentially the same near-cap accuracy. There is basically no reason to use the aimed mode of a precision rifle, since you've long since slammed into the arbitrary accuracy cap, and all the supposed bonus does nothing.

So basically, you're talking about a "difference" of a marginal damage increase that doesn't actually reduce the number of bullets-to-kill on anything but a fairly lucky shot, in exchange for virtually all of the versatility of the assault rifle.

In any event, the point of this thread is not that assault rifles are overpowered, which makes your argument going completely off-topic, but that precision rifles should be more unique, and have a functionality that makes their gameplay application feel more like a sniper or marksman being called in to take out a particularly nasty encampment, rather than just being the guy with the slightly more powerful rifle.

Giving precision rifles the ability to reduce cover bonuses by having a sniper "focus" on the target makes the precision rifle have an actually novel application, as it means you can take out enemies behind large amounts of cover without needing to reach into the C4 satchel again. It actually changes the way you use the units. If you have the option to spend two turns just aiming at the eyeball peering out, rather than, apparently, center mass every time, and get the chance to reduce cover penalties by up to, say, 75% if you spend a full turn or two dumping TUs into precision shots, then you can make a serious change in gameplay tactics.

This also applies backwards - the enemy doesn't currently toss out C4 like confetti the way that players do, but having aliens that have actual snipers that can take out a player that is camping behind cover can change gameplay.

Likewise, machine guns that have to be planted, but fire more rapidly (for less TUs) once planted makes it a more static defense, rather than just being an assault rifle that fires two more bullets at a time.

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Your arguments would be more convincing if I felt like I was playing the same game. I just tested this, and saw the sniper rifle go from 81% accuracy at 50 TUs and 95% accuracy at 60 TUs. The AR capped out at 75% for the same shot--and the sniper rifle did ~60 damage vs 43 from the AR.

So when you say, "Accuracy is largely a wash, since, as I already said, an aimed shot from an assault rifle, which takes as many TUs as a normal shot from a precision rifle, has essentially the same near-cap accuracy..." I am afraid I don't understand what you are talking about. Same with the statement, "There is basically no reason to use the aimed mode of a precision rifle, since you've long since slammed into the arbitrary accuracy cap, and all the supposed bonus does nothing." What? No I haven't. If your accuracy in the 70s or something and you don't need to take as much time to aim, I'm really not sure what the problem is.

Looking at the .xml, the precision rifles do ~20% more damage and are 25% more accurate. A quick test in-game shows that it reaches out 6 tiles farther than the AR, which is capped at sight range. Maybe you don't think it's useful to be able to accurately (and with full damage) engage aliens from beyond their reaction range. I do.

Edited by crusherven
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Well, I only hand the sniper rifle over to someone with some amount of accuracy, so yes, "normal" shot accuracy with a sniper rifle hits 90-something accuracy, (assuming no cover, which still applies the cap, so no matter what accuracy you have, a shot at someone with 40% cover is stuck at around 57% accuracy, max,) and anything above that is a waste.

Besides that, this is a whole load of off-topic.

The game could have had different assault rifle models, some more powerful but less accurate, and some accurate but with some other flaw, but it didn't, because the game was supposed to focus just on the weapons with serious differences between them. The fact that you are arguing that when have to be at exactly the range of 24 to 28 tiles for there to be any real difference in the effectiveness of the weapon at range, with there being little difference at any other range, is somehow the "big difference" between assault rifles and precision rifles, I think you've proven just how little difference there is. The accuracy difference vanishes behind the TU costs - the extra TUs spent on aimed shots on assault rifles brings assault rifle accuracy up basically high as shots with a precision rifle when you spend equivalent TUs. Yes, there's still some difference, but along with trading the versatility of burst fire and cheaper snap shots for just having a marginal increase in damage, this is basically the equivalent of having that different model of an assault rifle that just happens to be better at long range. It's not as different as the shotgun or pistol or rocket launcher is different.

The real purpose of this thread is to talk about putting in a way for sniper rifles to actually play significantly differently from an assault rifle. (As well as other weapons having a chance for a firing position, in general.)

If you ever played Hammer and Sickle, you'd see just how different using a sniper rifle actually was in that game, compared to a machine gun.

First of all, that game had some real stealth elements, it had a "hearing" mechanic, so you could hear the guys tromping up after you, and it had much more dangerous AI... But in general, being a sniper meant that you would crawl everywhere just to keep from being visible or noisy. You had to find someone without being found, dragging the rest of the squad as overwatch for your sniper. You lay still for several turns, building up your AP, and pumping it into steadying your aim for the shot, then you blast a sniper who was hunting for you before they could find you, then you had to move, because the enemy'd hear the sound and go investigating with a patrol that is far too large for a sniper to take on alone. You spend a long time, working around the edges, picking off the enemy one by one, until it's mostly just the sweepers left, and you set a C4 trap for them or something. I could go basically an entire mission without being seen, without my other members doing much but sitting with a machine gun pointed at the ladder or stairs to my final sniper perch. (The AI was smart enough not to climb stairs you had directly in the sights of a camping machine gunner... but not smart enough to know you were planting C4 on the floor right above where you could hear them milling around, waiting for you to come down.)

It's an entirely different way of playing the game from the way that a gunner or a grenadier would play the game.

Putting in the option to have a sniper that can pick off enemies from serious long range, (and that would be longer range than maps are big in this current version of Xenonauts,) because you can burn 3 or 4 turns, just steadying aim to hit a single sniper perched, waiting to catch some sight of you is a far greater difference than some piddly marginal bonus to damage that only rarely even changes how many bullets it takes to drop an enemy, or some 4-tile difference in range. The feature I'm arguing for opens up a totally different option of playstyle, the option of a 4-tile bonus to range is a triviality that does little to change how you play the game.

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The real purpose of this thread is to talk about putting in a way for sniper rifles to actually play significantly differently from an assault rifle. (As well as other weapons having a chance for a firing position, in general.)

I guess that's the problem. To be blunt, what you're asking for isn't going to happen. Staying true to XCOM isn't a "vague goal of the game;" it's the core intent. Ergo, special abilities and such just aren't going to happen. Since I don't think you've really been paying much attention to what I've been saying, I'll also repeat that distances are compressed by design on these maps. We're not going to see sniper rifles that can shoot all the way across the map.

And for pete's sake, if you're going to refer to something I said, make an effort to get it right. It's a six tile increase (where'd you pull 4 from?), or a bit under 1/3 again farther. It used to be longer range but it was kinda OP.

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Well, hypervelocity's probably coming back in at some point. If snipers aren't different enough for you now, that'll distinguish them. Hypervelocity used to ignore a lot of cover types outright and made snipers horribly overpowered. The last I read, they'll do half damage to units behind cover instead. It's buggy as hell, so it's disabled until it's sorted out, unless the devs decide to straight up axe it.

Also, the damage difference really isn't marginal. The AR does 30 damage per shot that mitigates 10 points of armour, the sniper does 50 that mitigates 20 points of armour. With the +/- 50% random damage factor, you can one-shot light scout aliens with a sniper rifle. The snipers are less mobile than an AR, but they pack a lot of killing power.

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Actually, I was getting it mixed up - it's 20 more TUs for a shot from a sniper rifle, and I can fit two normal shots per turn in with an assault, while I can only get one shot per turn in with the precision rifle. That more than makes up for the 25% average damage bonus. You do occasionally get lucky and one-shot an alien, but ARs with two shots can have higher damage probability curves than one shot with a sniper rifle.

However, again, this isn't really about whether or not the AR is "better" than the precision rifle, it's about how close this comparison is, in the first place. Making machine guns (which are also a part of this argument) and sniper rifles have to be planted (which wouldn't even have to take any additional animation) to be used, and just having a button or two to "bank" some TUs so that you have either an accuracy bonus the next turn, or mitigation of accuracy penalties, for the sniper rifle, would mean that the way that you use the MG or sniper rifle would change significantly from the way that you use an assault rifle.

As far as "staying true" goes, we're not getting blaster bombs and psychic powers, (or if we are, they aren't the ones we had in the 94 game,) and suppression wasn't part of the original, nor was air combat where you could actually command your aircraft to do things like roll, but they're here, now. It's more re-imagining than remake, and if it makes sense for the genre and game balance, it tends to go in (or be taken out).

Using a sniper rifle to mitigate cover penalties by aiming at only the parts not behind cover is certainly in the vein of things tactical shooters will do, especially since I'm mostly cribbing this off of Silent Storm.

If there's some gun that previously did something similar that was taken out simply because of bugginess, then there's even more reason to think using this sort of mechanic is in-line with the concept of how a sniper rifle could and should be used.

Having a "firing position" mechanic, in general, also means that characters that focus solely upon firing (without moving), regardless of weapon, can fire more rounds per turn. Having the capacity to throw more lead/energy at the enemy can compensate for the somewhat low accuracy in this game. It also makes storming an enemy that's holding its ground more hazardous, while suppression (to keep them from having so many TUs to spend firing) more valuable.

Edited by Wraith_Magus
Adding last paragraph
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