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Ground Combat Balance Discussion V20 Experimental 7


Aaron

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Legit is right, though: for those of us who don't know what the game looks like internally it's pointless to talk about what kind of code would be easy or hard to implement; I'm basing my ideas off of what the code for the game would look like as written by me, which I can guarantee is not what the actual code looks like. Good to hear that GJ is working on things, though!

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Getting the AI to use some sort of resupply system would probably be as big of a project as getting grenades working was - is that really where you want development time spent?

I don't think anyone is asking for any kind of 'resupply system', unless you're using that as a bizarre way to refer to 'reloading with the magazines in their inventory.'

I find it hard to believe this is as important as people say, given aliens have had infinite ammo for the entirety of development and I recall very few complaints about it before now.

Perhaps for the entirety of development, people have assumed that the game is in development, and thus this was incomplete? I can't speak for anyone else, but I simply assumed that this was a bug or an incomplete feature.

It kind of irritates me how so many modern games have regressed versus what was common 10-20 years ago. You can deduce from my name that I'm a Fallout fan... and it frustrates me to no end that enemies in the new Fallouts have unlimited ammo and bottomless magazines, when the originals had no trouble tracking the number of rounds in the enemies' guns and inventories. Likewise, it annoys me that Mass Effect 2 added an ammunition system to the game, but Commander Shepard is the only person in the galaxy that uses it. In the FPS world, Half-Life made enemies that need to reload (despite having unlimited ammo) a standard feature of the genre, which seems to have fallen completely by the wayside.

Really? You wouldn't prefer we get Reapers to behave more dangerously? You wouldn't prefer we get Harridans to use jetpacks? Aliens to behave in a more interesting way in Terror Sites?

I'd put alien ammunition on an equitable level with Reaper AI (though probably giving the edge to Reapers), but more important than the other items.

So I think you overestimate both the difficulty and the impact. If aliens learn how to reload (and I don't see why that should be technically difficult) and get enough extra clips to have say at least 30-50 shots, I think that's good enough for most people.

That's what I always assumed that the game would end up doing.

Just so we don't come across too harshly, I am looking into it; it's just low priority at the moment :-)

Groovy. I'd rather it not be a bottom priority, but low priority is better than no priority.

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I find it hard to believe this is as important as people say, given aliens have had infinite ammo for the entirety of development and I recall very few complaints about it before now. I honestly can't even recall if OG had infinite ammo for aliens, I'm curious how many of you can tell me without consulting UFOpaedia.

Really? You wouldn't prefer we get Reapers to behave more dangerously? You wouldn't prefer we get Harridans to use jetpacks? Aliens to behave in a more interesting way in Terror Sites?

Anyway, the way we have implemented infinite ammo for aliens means you can just mod weapons_gc to remove it, so play around with that in the next build if you like - don't expect the AI to deal with it gracefully though.

I'm good with the current alien ammo situation.

Would you guys please consider putting a storage bin/weapons rack in the transport craft?

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Generally it's because people expect games like ours or the new Fallouts etc to have not only just the features that have become standard in the interim (nicer graphics, UIs that are not horrendous, gameplay that is not broken or so easily exploitable, etc) but then also to have all the features from old games too.

People want games to "move on" ("else why wouldn't I just play the old game?" they ask) but when a conflict arises between the old and the new, suddenly they hark back to how great the old times were. And then it falls to the developer to weigh up both options and choose what they think is best - knowing full well that whatever they choose will be wrong.

In this case, you need to weigh up the benefits and the cost. Aliens having limited ammo complicates the AI and has historically caused a number of bugs. It also opens up potential exploits and other unintended behaviours. As an example, you can imagine the capturing / killing an alien would be trivially easy if you had combat shields and stayed in cover just inside the alien firing range and waited for them to run out of ammo. I don't want to reward that sort of play style.

If that sounds far fetched, then why is it important that we give aliens the ability to run out of ammo? The aliens carry enough ammo that it won't matter whether they can run out of ammo or not except in fringe cases that 99% of players will not see, so spending developer time on it would be a waste.

For just normal in-fight reloading, remember units have no obvious reload animation, so you're more likely to end up in a situation where a reloading alien looks as if it just hasn't performed any actions instead of gunning down your exposed soldier - which is going to look more like the AI glitching or being stupid than being intelligent. Maybe you can add a sound or something, but even then the average player is still going to be confused irrespective of how clever the game is actually being.

Hence, when Half Life is mentioned above, you're thinking about the Marines in it reloading...the human enemies that use the same weapons as Freeman uses, weapons that you already understand and expect to need reloading. But do you see the Vortigaunts reloading? The player's not familiar with the alien weapons in our game so they don't have to follow the same rules as the human weapons.

Thus the idea of spending a fair bit of time on implementing and debugging a feature that has few benefits and a number of potential negatives doesn't strike me as a hugely important task.

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A case in point - people want an advanced AI, but they also don't want it to spam grenades in every situation where a grenade would be better than shooting at a unit with conventional means (basically anything below 10 tiles in range). And so on.

A game that was tuned to be wholly realistic rather than catering to gameplay enjoyment wouldn't be a very fun one, so the aliens playing by different rules is not inherently a bad thing.

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I can attest that limited ammo has caused some nasty bugs. One of the earliest Hidden Movement infinite loops was when aliens were trying to shoot a weapon with no ammo in it at a target, couldn't, and kept trying to do that over and over.

This was solved though, right?

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Like others, I always assumed that the infinite ammo was a placeholder until you could get the reload/magainzine system working for aliens.

Had I known you intended aliens to have infinite ammo in the finished product I would have voiced my opposition to it much sooner.

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@chris

Yes gamers expect games to move "forward" when it comes to features. But I don't think it is unreasonable to also want the basic features of the old games to stay as well.

I just don't get how pretty much everything is better over the OG, yet something as simple as the magazine system and the aliens reloading is suddenly "too much work". They did it in the 90s with computers and programming languages 1/1000th as powerful as we have now. Why is it an issue?

Also, like aaron, I think you are overestimating how exploitable limited ammuniton for aliens will be. With 3-4 magazines per alien, simply standing in front of it with combat shields to deplete its ammo will result in a dead squad.

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@aaron

In all honesty I think they are equally important. Yes I want reapers to be more agressive and intelligent, but at the cost of not even having a working reload system for the enemy combatants? Lolwhat?

And yes I knew that in the OG the aliens had limited ammo... Combats were usually too quick for them to run out though. But thank god they only had 1-2 blaster bombs.

I'm not proposing giving them 1 magazine and having them run out every fight. But I for one want to see aliens actually reloading when necessary when in combat with my troops, and in LONG firefights have the POSSIBILITY of running out.

If this truly would be too hard/time consuming to implement. So be it. You guys are the devs, not me, and its your game. But this kind of feature is important in my mind, and probably to many others as well.

Again, I just feel that unlimited ammo aliens who don't have to reload EVER is just gamey, immersion breaking, and cheapens the experience somewhat.

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If I'm sounding critical, it's only because I love this game and want to see it be better. Seriously, you guys have done an awesome job so far, and I'm glad I was able to contribute my money toward a spiritual successor of the original x-com games. Also, I appreciate the direct developer responses which is a rarity in this day. Especially aaron, even if we have disagreed on pretty much everything.

Keep up the good work guys.

Edited by legit1337
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I think you are overestimating how exploitable limited ammuniton for aliens will be. With 3-4 magazines per alien, simply standing in front of it with combat shields to deplete its ammo will result in a dead squad.

True, but then I don't really see what value has been gained from giving them limited ammo? I understand that people don't like the idea of a system where the aliens don't fight fair...it just kinda feels "wrong" when you find out about it. However, I think people are over-estimating the difference giving the aliens limited ammo would make to the game. I honestly think the difference would be negligible.

In any case, it is useful for us to have the discussion and we do appreciate the feedback the community gives us on our product (even if we occasionally appear to disregard it entirely and do what we want instead). It's better than having mindless fanbois and it's certainly better than having no fans at all!

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@chris

I believe it is necessary because at least once or twice over the course of a campaign an alien is going to run out of ammo (whether having to reload or be out of ammo entirely) and it's going to mean something.

A soldier who would have gotten shot to pieces instead lives. A mission that would have failed instead succeeds. A player having a hard time capturing an alien now is able to pull it off...

Such moments are uncommon (and should be). But just because they are uncommon doesn't mean they should be written out of the game entirely imo. You take that kind of stuff out of the game and you lose something special... possibilities.

Edited by legit1337
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Just a random thought here, on grenades.

What if they dealt "true damage", or a kind of damage really hard to mitigate, but it's damage was never too great?

Like, a grenade would always do around 40 damage meaning it wouldn't kill soldiers or aliens by itself, but it would soften up targets and destroy cover reliably making it a good tactical weapon instead of a nuke (ofc you could nuke targets too, just throw more of them)

Edit: Reading the discussion on alien ammo, just saying I'd like to see it working as well, if anything for immersion's sake.

Also, on the subject of blind fire people were talking about, what about a flat damage reduction on unintended targets with a small % chance of dealing full damage (never a crit, if they exist)? The reason being, you're not aiming properly so you won't be hitting an eye or vital spot as you would if you were aiming at the target.

Edited by Voidian
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The human player has the advantage of having a brain, so I think it's fair that aliens should have limited ammunition. An alien rarely takes more than 10 shots at my squad before it's dead, so I don't see how this would drastically change things.

Anyway, the AI seems to be a lot better. Plasma pistols are far more accurate and the alien yeomen are finally a threat, which is nice to see. The biological aliens aren't stupidly charging out into the open as much anymore. The aliens tend to fight as a unit now, instead of just staying at their spawn locations and turtling like they used to, way back in the early days.

I think that one "problem" with the alien AI, so far, is that the aliens don't seem to realize when they are in danger. While they are good at finding cover, they often put themselves in bad spots and then just sit there while they take fire, instead of moving back.

They still need to learn how to flank better, I think. I've never had an alien sneak up behind me.

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