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OP Reapers


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I know we had this discussion a number of times, but was just playing the new stable release and found that reapers are just as OP as ever.

It's just frustrating and not fun. I am loosing soldiers not because i made an active mistake, but because this stupid alien can walk from outside my side radius next to my guys and still attack them.

It's rediculous.

Have a melee unit that can walk across half the map, fine.

Have a melee unit that can one - hit - kill any of your soldiers, questionable but fine.

You can even have a melee unit that can multiply it's numbers by a dozen by feeding on stupid AI soldiers.

But having one unit be able to do everyone of these is just not good balance.

They need to be nerfed. Either reduce their Tu significantly, or make the attack not ignore every single armor completely. Once you get to predator armor, this just gets silly.

It's just not fun.

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I am loosing soldiers not because i made an active mistake, but because this stupid alien can walk from outside my side radius next to my guys and still attack them.
I'm assuming you meant "sight radius" not "side radius". Is that actually true? Can a Reaper cover 15 or 18 tiles per turn and attack? If so, I would agree that it's OP. Up to this build Reapers haven't been that quick or maybe not that aggressive. With the AI fixes I can see the Reaper becoming much more deadly because it may no longer "hesitant" before attacking. Hopefully when Chris adjusted the TU costs to move downward he also nerfed the TUs available to the Reapers. If not, then they became much more powerful as movement IS basically their attack strength. A 1/3 reduction in movement costs without a corresponding nerf in TUs for the Reapers would be huge increase in their effectiveness since their possible attack area would be greatly increased. Also, I'm wondering how the % based attack system affected their attack strength? Edited by StellarRat
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Reapers have 66 Tus, apparently, so can move up to 22 tiles in one turn. Their attack uses 25% TUs, so 17ish. Hence they can move ~16 tiles and attack in the same turn (assuming running in a straight line). So they can't *quite* attack from beyond vision. Except if they hide close but out of sight behind obstacles, of course!

Personally, I don't mind them being tough (and I say this having been destroyed in a number of ground missions by them). They're terrifying and deadly, and require quite a different approach to usual (which I think is why they're so tough - regular rules just don't apply and you need to adapt to them. I think. I'm still getting the hang of dealing with them!).

I'm unsure whether they're not overpowered relative to other equivalent alien units (whatever Caesans and Androns get during Terror missions, it's not nearly as scary as Reapers). But I'd rather they were scary than not.

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I haven't had a chance to face them yet hopefully i can stay with my current game long enough to test them out. Xcom type games always punish you for a lack of patience, you could have scouted that black tile but you took a gamble and ohshit its an alien! The best thing i've done so far was retreated a shield scout into a building right after he lost his shield due to an ambush. He retreats into the building then i swivel him around to see hes now right next to a fucking seb and hes got no TU's and no shield hahaha.

Androns and disks have already changed my play style drastically so i cant wait to see how the other aliens affect it.

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Reapers have 66 Tus, apparently, so can move up to 22 tiles in one turn. Their attack uses 25% TUs, so 17ish. Hence they can move ~16 tiles and attack in the same turn (assuming running in a straight line). So they can't *quite* attack from beyond vision. Except if they hide close but out of sight behind obstacles, of course!

25% TU for a one hit kill is just rediculously low.

I aggree that they should be scary, but completely ignoring any armor is just insane. As far as i remember the energy armor gave a chance of surviving chrysalids, while in xenonauts your soldier is dead no matter what he wears.

There's another point and that ones a big one.

AI. Really powerfull chrysalids were fine in the original, because the enemy ai was pretty dumb. They would always stand out in the open and could be relatively easily shot.

Reapers are smarter, which in turn makes them way overpowered.

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25% TU for a one hit kill is just rediculously low.
Based on the information about moving 16 tiles, plus a one hit kill that also creates another enemy, I'd have to say they are WAY OP right now. There really isn't much defense against them at all if there is any cover at all that they can hide behind. Reaction fire might stop one, maybe, but they're not exactly easy to kill. I also agree that their ability to penetrate any armor seems a bit far fetched. I could see basic and improved being easy for them, but after that it should become progressively more difficult for their attacks to be successful. They could be plenty scary with less movement or more expensive attacks. Edited by StellarRat
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Increase attack TUs to 35%? That would allow them a ~13 tile straight-line move+ attack instead. 5 tile warning should be sufficient to deal with them (if only to fall back for a better effort next turn).

Not sure I'm so much a fan of making their attack less deadly - if a Reaper manages to ambush you/you manage to get ambushed by a Reaper, then I think it's fair you pay the price for that.

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my beef with nerfing reapers is they have next to no armor so they melt to any weapon. i am pretty sure they cant attack vehicles at all. as soon as you get any of the flying armor you can use like 3 TU to float up a square making them powerless. they have no means of reaction what so ever. there deadly where you don't have open fields of view thats it, other wise they are a turkey shoot. i think you should get your teeth kicked in for not having a guy or 2 ready to reaction fire if you know your facing reapers. reapers only show up with sebs the lowest accuracy and in my mind least deadly race . i think terror missions only spawn at max 3 reapers, so your only faceing a lot of them if you let them sit and fester, which is there flavor in my mind. maybe the health buff for higher difficulty makes reaction fire too unreliable but on normal they are not the biggest threat vs the other terror weapons. IE wraiths and the sniper guys the androns roll with

so i say all that, as i go back to read you guys say they are hard to kill so i dont know a shotgun blast from plasma takes out the alphas far more often then not. so maybe this is just a scaling issues for the harder difficulty. also i am on experimental branch so unless i am missing some AI changes reapers might be able to move 18 squares and attack but i have never seen one sprint that far and do so. lucky crits i dont know

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Unless the design has been changed Xenonauts doesn't have flying armour.

You cannot hover above the battlefield picking off reapers in the same way you could in the original.

The Xenonaut jump armour needs to start and end its movement on the ground so you could use it to run away or to jump onto a building though.

I could see the chance of a successful reaper attack being based on armour remaining.

If that was the case they may need to spend a few attacks ripping through your armour first to degrade it enough to be successful.

The down side is that they don't appear to be tough enough to stand toe to toe to most weapons long enough to be a threat.

If you start your turn next to most enemies with a shotgun or a burst capable weapon and full AP they are not likely to be stood next to you for long.

Edited by Gauddlike
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my beef with nerfing reapers is they have next to no armor so they melt to any weapon. i am pretty sure they cant attack vehicles at all. as soon as you get any of the flying armor you can use like 3 TU to float up a square making them powerless. they have no means of reaction what so ever. there deadly where you don't have open fields of view thats it, other wise they are a turkey shoot.

You do know that the mission were you don't have open field of view is pretty much every mission ever, right?

And i don't know what game you have been playing but in my game reapers still take a couple of plasma shots to the face before dying. Coupled with the fact that reaction shots are unreliable at best, leaving one or two guys with reaction fire is not really a solution to the problem.

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Hmm, now you mention it, I'm not sure we ever reduced their TU when we reduced move costs per square from 4 to 3. Reducing their TU or increasing their attack TU cost might be in order.

They are meant to be one-shot-kills enemies, though. I'm not going to change that.

Guaddlike, you can now hover using jetpack armour but you can't fire while in the air.

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Unless the design has been changed Xenonauts doesn't have flying armour.

You cannot hover above the battlefield picking off reapers in the same way you could in the original.

The Xenonaut jump armour needs to start and end its movement on the ground so you could use it to run away or to jump onto a building though.

i cant shoot while floating like that but i also cant get eaten by a reaper, i can end my turn floating like that. that is sentinel armor dont have a buzzard to check but i thought they worked the same.

should have reloaded sorry

flying.jpg

flying.jpg

flying.thumb.jpg.cfd19fdf6a6a535138dc236

Edited by quiescat
should have reloaded
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You do know that the mission were you don't have open field of view is pretty much every mission ever, right?

And i don't know what game you have been playing but in my game reapers still take a couple of plasma shots to the face before dying. Coupled with the fact that reaction shots are unreliable at best, leaving one or two guys with reaction fire is not really a solution to the problem.

guess i have just been very lucky then. most of the arctic, middle east, and desert maps i play have lots of open space. but i also don't use any of the map packs so that might color my view a lot. i did add in that i was playing on normal and there is a health buff at higher levels as i understand. but also comparing them to the sebs they run with which take 2 or 3 shots and almost never die to reaction fire where as i get reapers to stop pretty commonly. it might also help that i creep very slowly so i level reaction fire a lot. but i also try to force aliens to have to turn corners or shoot me from long ranges. when you put a reaper in that spot hes standing face to face with a plasma shot gun and quite often dies. but i will add again i am just a noob playing on normal. i figure they have lots of people tossing out feedback on insane-o-man difficulty experience.

not even kidding with this load up the editor on a map with reapers and camp a shotgun around a corner about 1 square back so your out side the angle shot of that corner reapers end up pathing so they stand 1 maybe 2 squares away and shotguns reaction is great.

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Hmm, now you mention it, I'm not sure we ever reduced their TU when we reduced move costs per square from 4 to 3. Reducing their TU or increasing their attack TU cost might be in order.

They are meant to be one-shot-kills enemies, though. I'm not going to change that.

Guaddlike, you can now hover using jetpack armour but you can't fire while in the air.

Don't you think they're should be tiny chance they could miss (5%)? Just to make things exciting? All weapons are capped at 95% so you obviously believe miracles should happen in game.
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Don't you think they're should be tiny chance they could miss (5%)? Just to make things exciting? All weapons are capped at 95% so you obviously believe miracles should happen in game.

I've a lot of fondness for that idea. One of the appeals of a game like this - for me anyway - is when the unexpected happens (especially when it happens in my favour!). Being convinced of a soldier's demise as a Reaper sprints towards your soldiers only for it to swing and miss is precisely the kind of thing that makes for memorable momements (again, for me, anyway).

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I've a lot of fondness for that idea. One of the appeals of a game like this - for me anyway - is when the unexpected happens (especially when it happens in my favour!). Being convinced of a soldier's demise as a Reaper sprints towards your soldiers only for it to swing and miss is precisely the kind of thing that makes for memorable momements (again, for me, anyway).
I'm not going to hold my breath. My idea for the Rambo civilian didn't go to far either.
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Make the upper limit of the Repear hit well into over-kill numbers and the lower value just below 75 or something (taking into account wolf armour). Maybe 1 in a 100 hits from a Reaper your Major/Colonel could survive - something you would never forget!

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IMO reapers are fine.

In the OG (anything past easy difficulty) reapers could move 21 squares (23 on superhuman) and still attack. Their attacks would always hit, and would instakill with one shot no matter what armor the defender was wearing.

So... they could move from literally outside of sight range, oneshot your troops, and create a zombie that spawned another chrysalid if killed and was in the meantime a formidable opponent on it's own accord.

It wasn't OP back then, hell it wasn't even the most dangerous opponent in the game. They were just very dangerous.

So you see why everyones claims of OPness sound a little premature? Hell the reaper in Xenonauts isn't even as dangerous as the OG chrysallid.

Edited by legit1337
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IMO reapers are fine.

In the OG (anything past easy difficulty) reapers could move 21 squares (23 on superhuman) and still attack. Their attacks would always hit, and would instakill with one shot no matter what armor the defender was wearing.

So... they could move from literally outside of sight range, oneshot your troops, and create a zombie that spawned another chrysalid if killed and was in the meantime a formidable opponent on it's own accord.

It wasn't OP back then, hell it wasn't even the most dangerous opponent in the game. They were just very dangerous.

So you see why everyones claims of OPness sound a little premature? Hell the reaper in Xenonauts isn't even as dangerous as the OG chrysallid.

Yeah but having played the OG multiple times, the reason they were not the most feared enemy is because their AI was retarded. They would always stand out in the open and taking them out was pretty much a cakewalk as long as you got enough TU left. Now Reapers will retread, go into cover and try and flank your guys, which makes them so much more powerfull.

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Yeah but having played the OG multiple times, the reason they were not the most feared enemy is because their AI was retarded. They would always stand out in the open and taking them out was pretty much a cakewalk as long as you got enough TU left. Now Reapers will retread, go into cover and try and flank your guys, which makes them so much more powerfull.
You took the words out of my mouth. In the OG, the AI had no sense of timing, so the they'd run to attack even if they couldn't reach your guys. At least half the time that left them standing out in the open begging to be gunned down. The Reapers in Xenonauts actually know what they're doing. That makes them WAY more dangerous. Edited by StellarRat
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