Leaderboard

Hey people! I want to talk about weapon firing types (single, aimed, auto...) and how to make them realistic and more fun.. At X-Com type games, we got standard firing methods.. single, aimed and auto. Some weapons do not have all the options. It was nice for a while but now we got more options which can bring more action to the warzone. I wanted to add this to the open-xcom because X-1 did not allow me to mod so deeper. But i could not finish it at Open_Xcom because the balancing is very hard.Again but Phoenix Point will make it. We need to create more firing types and leave some old ones.. Let me discuss this per weapon type: Pistol: Pistols are ultra weak at every xcom game.. there is always much better option.. Why? At reality, many special forces are still using pistols but at games we could not simulate this.. we always bring bigger guns.. John Wick kills mostly with pistol.. So pistols are very fast weapons which easy to aim at short distances. We give single and aimed shot to the pistols and player should fire many times with very low acc. The result is, no more pistols, give me my rifle.. At gun fights, you mostly never go for single shot if you can't aim well because of being under fire. So single shot for pistol is meaningless. There should be something like autofire for pistols with good suppression at shot range. This shot could have a bad aiming but the reason to use it to create a suppression fire at short distances like inside a room. Aimed shot should have a very very good acc bonus at close range which you should miss very rare. Even if we need to go far, we need to have a "critical hit" mechanic with range included. So aimed pistol shot should have great aim and great critical chance but it should have bigger TU then we use. As TU usage, i say make auto and aimed nearly same TU (aimed could be a bit less as single shot). A player should able to fire 2 auto or 3 aimed pistol shot with full TU. Rifle: Our standard weapon at this genre.. everyone wants a rifle.. you can use at any situation. Short range, mid range.. as the playground is not so huge, it's the best weapon.. but it's not right. We got single shot with rifle.. i don' like that.. if you fire your rifle under fire, you use short bursts. So you use autofire as single shot at RL. For that reason, i don't like to have single shot at rifles. I think we need an auto shot and burst shot for rifles. Auto will fire 3 bullet and burst will go for 7 to 10.. so the auto will have a average aim and burst will have very bad aim with suppression. Aimed shot should not be for every "rifle".. you can make a special rifle type with only auto and aimed as it has a scope and you dont use it for burst. Rifle should have penalty at short ranges.. not so huge but it should be there.. so the player will need to take their pistol when he opened a door and saw an alien next to him. Or he will bring shotguns for those close encounters. Rifleman should be someone for support fire at a short distance.. Big guns: LMG.. so you will ask me about this when you read the rifle and how i give supp to it already. Suppression should be very important point for the battle. For us and for aliens. Alien AI should able to handle supp damage very well. Some of the AI should fire at you just to make supp and others should go for kill.. So LMG should have 2 burst type for sure.. like rifle.. An auto shot with 5-6 bullet and full burst with crazy supp. LMG should be used against armored bigger opponents. They need to destroy walls and covers.. LMG carrier soldier should take aim penalty if he moves that turn. If you are not Arnold, you just can't run and shoot someone with LMG's.. Sniper: One of the coolest weapon we just can't use good enough at standard xcom games because the play ground is so messy to put someone somewhere long range and use it to shoot aliens at close areas. Sniper rifles should have special aimed shots. They need to ignore covers somehow.. So they should able to hit very heavy on an alien under a window. Even a full cover would have some weakness as the alien will try to look. So when they pop their head, sniper will hit it. We need to simulate this. Those ideas need some game mechanics to use. I hope we can have some of it to able to give special tasks to every weapon. Thx!

Air support is utterly unfair. Utterly unfair, and boring. You get to face it in Phantom Doctrine. An invisible, invincible monster with LOS to all points of the map and weapons which if you stray into their AOE, kill you instantly. It's "balanced" in Phantom Doctrine by giving a timer before it hits the player, and making it unusable inside buldings, which are invulnerable. It adds tension to Phantom Doctrine because the player can't use it. Honestly, the more people ask for air support, the more tempted I am to try and mod a simulation of the kind of air support they think they want, and find out that when they can kill everything across the map with no effort just how boring that is.

I had another thought when it comes to drop ships investigating crash sites and alien raids ... you know how after, I think, 20 turns or so on an alien city raid, the whole map would be displayed for you along with exactly where all the remaining aliens were / what they were doing? I'm thinking of a smaller scale, less approximate use of such a system of aerial surveillance, the trade-off being that you got results much sooner into the battle itself, but at a reduced value of certainty. Ugh, let me break it down into steps. 1) Drop ship lands in affected area. Cue drop ship some few feet off the ground, stabilizers & landing gear engaged, dust, leaves, sand, grass blowing around the LZ. Cue pilot headset chatter announcing landing, perhaps announcing something along the lines of 'LZ HOT ! or LZ COLD.' depending upon alien presence or lack thereof. 2) Soldiers encounter initial alien response, eventually contain threat, last soldier leaves drop ship or soldiers move a sufficient highlighted distance from drop ship. 3) Start of next turn, drop ship lifts off into the sky, cue pilot headset chatter, 'BIRD BACK IN THE AIR ...' or some such. 4) A turn or 2 later, pilot headset chatter, 'SCOUTING FOR UGLIES !' 5) 5 to 10 turns into mission. Pilot "We May Have Something Here. North Northwestern Grid, Unidentified Heat Signatures in (Forested Area, Open Area, Residential Area)." Or just skip the type of area description and end with 'unidentified heat signatures' and pan camera briefly to a small area unmasked from fog of war, with a red or orange outline of general area aliens may be lurking in. 6) Repeat this process every 5 to 10 turns if helpful / needed.

Hi Devs, when is V7.1 coming out?

I have units with bravery over 100, and with half their TUs or more left(60-90/120+), a few steps out of the dropship, morale through the roof from taking out 6 dudes in one round, and still wind up with up to 5 Mind controlled without many issues. I'm pretty sure something's bugged out of control with it. You can just reload the save, though. Mind War turns off entirely, teleporters turn off, and you can't target any units until your next turn for...some reason.

Guys, guys. I think air support is a nice idea. 1. Close range calls only. So for instance a grenade ( optionally which marks affected tiles around it ) which gets thrown in an 8 to 10 tile radius. No laser pointer which can point at the other side of the map. 2. The air support takes a full turn, and gets executed at the beginning of your next turn. This means "in theory" no air support ability will ever hit anything, unless people dont move away. Its more of a zoning tool. 3. Air support for both sides. Aliens can also call in a limited number of air support abilities, which again take a full round to get executed. This means you have a full turn to withdraw soldiers in the effected area. Suppression and or panic together with air support makes for a more dynamic gameplay 4. Buildings can be affected, but bullets should be simulated "from above". 5. Obviously it needs to be balanced. Light MG Fire, area suppression, napalm, etc ... . 6. Aliens could have different air support abilities which they can only use a limited amount of times in battle. 7 Obviously high production cost. Maybe ... maybe ... you can even build your air/ground support and station them in your base like any other aircraft. Upside is that you can call in air support, the downside would be that you have to keep a hangar, a plane, and can only call in as much as you have. That would be a nice crossover between Ground Combat and the Geoscape. 8. Timers on air support grenades. So you could throw an air support grenade, which triggers in 2 turns, after which it needs a full round to execute. 9. Geoscape time cooldown. Which means you cant use them nonstop by going from one Crashsite to another. I think that is a very important point. Yes, this can already be modded in in X1, except for the GC - Geoscape connection.

I agree to your statement. I think that if CAS is to become a thing, it would have to be well balanced in terms of costs (material and opportunity), precision, effects and use limits. I can only speak from X-Division experience, but in that scenario I would find it okay if I had to equip a fighter plane with a special one-time use air-ground weapon that costs materiel and time to build (binding engineers), send it alongside the troop transport (which means range limits as the fighter usually has less fuel), then have it shoot that stuff on demand, but with a one turn delay, and it likely doing more of a suppression effect than killing due to accuracy limitations and cover. Targets in buildings would not be as effected, even more so in the UFO. Also, you'd risk killing civilians, but that is always a danger present. Basically, it would be a high cost larger radius rocket with high suppression effect. You could make it even harder by having to have a soldier throw out a signal flare or grenade for the CAS to hit its mark. Basically, it should come with costs appropriate to the effect granted.

I'd love to see civilians in cities running around with TV's in their arms...