Chris

I think in the experimental balance patch I put together a shotgun does about triple the damage of a AR for the same TU cost (albeit with slightly less accuracy) so it's a bit of a beast at close range now...well, theoretically at least.

Have you read the big, now closed, thread on the topic here?

Turns out there's a bug with light drones tied to the fact they're only armed with burst fire weapons that makes them inordinately passive. Kabill, the point of the minimum shot threshold is to stop aliens just shooting at your men from maximum range with lots of shots that have a very low chance of hitting. A higher setting encourages them to get in closer and actually kill your men.

Lidhuin - interesting point. So it turns out the reload cost of weapons is not done as % of TU and is actually a flat value, whereas I thought it was a % value. I'll need to rework the numbers accordingly, although I'm not that fussed about it being a flat value as it does give high-end soldiers a bit of a benefit that they may be able to shoot and reload in the same turn.

Yeah, the % TU discussion has been covered in great detail in the thread linked a few posts up. Opinions are still welcome on the topic but I'd ask people to read the thread first so we're not just treading the same ground over and over. @quiescat - yes, there's a bug where using a weapon with 0 reaction fire modifier reduces your soldier's initiative to 0, which means any alien with sufficient TU is able to immediately reaction fire at them on sight. It's on our fix list to separate out the reaction fire modifier and disabling the ability of a weapon to reaction fire.

If you go down that route of high aimed TU costs across the board, you can't have burst fire on TU parity with aimed shots or you're not able to actually move (i.e. assault) with the assault rifle on burst. I want burst / aimed to be of comparable usefulness, making the AR a properly versatile weapon, so any increase in TU values would only apply to the precision rifle...and would be used to increase the rifle's damage rather than its accuracy, I think. But I'm concerned it would leave them somewhat overpowered. EDIT - the sniper rifle is just a scoped battle rifle, but it's not meant to feel identical to the AR. At the same time, it's not meant to be a full-blown sniper rifle because communicating the move / shoot penalties and so forth is not very straightforward in our game. It's not like in XCOM 2012 where you can just disable firing entirely if the soldier has moved.

Check weapons_gc.xml, see what it's listed there as?

MG's are very powerful in the current build, but also quite situational. I may put recoil back on them in order to nerf their early game power a little though...or at least make strong soldiers particularly valuable for using them. EDIT - actually, this is the problem with people posting their stuff from the new experimental build here instead of in that thread....we're all talking about different versions, probably. I'm talking about the experimental TU patch in all of my comments here, for future reference. I'm pretty sure frank_walls is not.

No, I've tested it using the developer tools and it appears suppression is working fine. Weight reduces a soldier's max TUs, though. Suppression reduces their active TUs, it's not the same thing.

You can look in AIprops to see how many TU an alien has, then divide it by half to get their post-suppression value. If you see them perform an action that costs more than that, you know something is going wrong. The debugger tells you what accuracy a shot is taken at. In fact, it's even easier than that nowadays, because of % scaling. Aliens with rifles can't burst fire them after being suppressed, and those with plasma cannons shouldn't be able to fire them at all after being suppressed. If they're doing either of those things then something is wrong with suppression. I'd be very surprised if we'd broken suppression with our % TU change, given you'd be able to fire practically infinite numbers of shots if fire costs were taken as a % of current TU.

Suppression prevents the target from reaction firing and then reduces their TU by 50% for the following turn. If the aliens have too many TU left over then people need to write down the specific circumstances. There's been murmurings about it not working properly on the forums, but not much in the way of concrete proof so far.

Anecdotal experience is only so useful. AR burst fires three shots at 35 accuracy for 60% TU, while the MG fires 10 shots at 40 accuracy for 80% TU. They do the same damage per bullet, but the MG has better penetration. The MG is therefore substantially more likely to kill something than an AR burst, provided you use it on a soldier with a higher or similar strength to their accuracy.

Nah, adding different stages of burst fire isn't really an option. It requires UI changes as well as code changes and I'm not willing to go that far at this stage. Bear in mind rocket launchers are also going to get a nerf when we allow "miss" bullets to travel through the target tile without being forced to hit the ground at the target's feet. At the moment, a miss that doesn't scatter very far is still going to explode at the feet of the target and do maximum damage...so rocket launchers are inordinately powerful at the moment. I'll consider putting the recoil back on MGs. Frank_walls, hitting with half of the bullets from a burst of MG fire will happily one-shot basically anything in the game of the equivalent tech level to the MG, so I wouldn't be too disdainful about that. The RL needs reloading after every shot too, rather than every two shots. The heavy weapon penalty is not coming back because it's too opaque to be a good system. Sniper rifles really aren't particularly OP at the moment, they're just more accurate rifles without any close combat or burst ability. They only do slightly more damage than normal rifles if you're fighting non-robotic enemies, which is why they're fine (and why I've not set them to one-shot enemies like people requested earlier in the thread).

Yup, Aaron's done a great job with these interiors. They make a big difference to the sense of achievement when you crack one open. The Corvette design is a funny one - I've always thought the central bit looked like an obvious entry point, but a lot of people take one look at the design and assume it's the engine. I've repeatedly had artists send me paintings with Corvettes flying backwards in them. Holy.Death - you can't zoom the view in, but the game displays more tiles on a screen at higher resolutions. I guess if you play at a lower resolution on a larger screen, everything will look larger in the ground combat?

Incidentally, I've added recoil back for MGs and set it to 75. You only get full accuracy with a 75 strength shooter (or a Predator). However, as I type this I realise it's pretty stupid to have done that given MG's already use the lower of strength and accuracy as the soldier's accuracy....so I'm actually penalising low-strength soldiers twice. I'll update weapons_gc in the experimental folder to fix that. Caaygun - I'm not getting that problem. Just checked and it doesn't seem to be happening for me. I'm quite a big fan of the 10 bullet MG burst so I don't really want to change that, to be honest.

Nah, I'm pretty happy with the 10-round burst as is. The 5-round burst was pretty similar to the AR, really. This way the weapon actually looks like it's doing something when it fires so I'm not keen to revert that particular change.

Yes, I am considering upping the clipsize to 30. However, remember that the idea here is to create a fun and interesting weapon rather than a realistic one. In video games, machineguns can often exhaust their ammo relatively quickly because they fire so many shots - indeed, XCOM 2012 has the MEC minigun hold two shots and the conventional one hold the same amount of ammo as the other weapons...or possibly one shot less, I forget. Hopefully we can all agree that the most interesting feature of the machinegun is that it fires a lot of bullets each time you use it? That's even more fundamental than it having a large ammo belt, right? If so, that's the primary reason for its existence and the other features have to be balanced around allowing that without making the gun OP.

So I've incorporated a bunch of these changes into the new experimental balance patch, so you can see how it works for yourself in practice. TU costs for firing have dropped somewhat overall, making the whole experience a bit more fluid.

The changes from the Experimental balance patch have been incorporated into V21 Experimental 6, so these balance patches are no longer required! This is a small update for V21 Experimental 5 that must be installed manually if you wish to use it. It rebalances the weapons in the game in two different ways, and I'm interested in seeing which people think plays better. To install the mods, just copy them into the /assets/ folder of the game directory. Firstly, I've done an updated balance patch using the current system, which you can download here: (removed) Standard Changelog: Fire cost of weapons reduced by 10-15%, as the starting squad have an average of 55 TU rather than 50. I've removed the "heavy" penalty from all weapons; % TU scaling means it is not needed. Soldiers now have 30-70 starting range for all stats, including TU. Soldiers can now gain up to 2 TU per mission, and the cap has been raised back to 99 (from 1 and 79 respectively). I've also done an experimental balance patch for you to compare the updated "normal" balance to. This follows the principles laid out in my Weapon Role thread. You can get it here: (removed) There's been a LOT of changes in the experimental balance patch - in general, all units can now shoot more than before. I'm unsure about the overall accuracy level, but I'm happy with the way all the human weapons compare to one another (and the same for the alien weapons) so I think most of the tweaking can be done by changing the human / alien accuracy modifiers at the top of weapons_gc.xml...it's currently set to 1.25 for both. Let me know your thoughts on which you prefer, and why. It'll help me decide how to integrate some of the ideas into the official builds.

Also, there's not really any need for an AP rocket in the first half of the game. It's not an anti-personnel weapon and the medium / heavy drones don't appear till late game. Not sure I want a rocket that lets you make short work of Androns either, the whole point of them is that they're tough to kill.

Because if it has four Heavy hardpoints it is the most powerful aircraft in the entire game (and you get it after a week). If it has two Heavy hardpoints and two Light slots, it's still one of the most powerful aircraft in the entire game and is no longer particularly vulnerable to fighters. If it has two Heavy hardpoints it's an excellent anti-capital ship interceptor, and later aircraft are still an upgrade on it.

No, we're not putting AP rockets back in. We removed them for a reason - if they're powerful enough to damage heavily armoured targets, they can one-shot basically anything in the game irrespective of tech level and thus ruin the game progression (and if not, people complain it's unrealistic that a humanoid alien can eat an anti-tank rocket and survive). Rocket launchers become a giant sniper rifle. We've tried it already and it doesn't work well, and I'm not going to rework the rocket launcher just to prove to the newer members of the community that something we already know doesn't work indeed does not work. The current rockets used in the rocket launcher are high-explosive thermobaric rockets, not HEAT rounds, so they're not intended to be anti-tank weapons. They're labelled as "HE Rockets" in-game so their use is pretty clear. I don't think the game drops off mitigation in the same way that damage can be set to drop off, so I'm not going to give them mitigation. But you can simulate the same effect with raw damage if desired, particularly if you give explosions a rapid drop-off. A rocket launcher that can't one-shot an elite alien is not garbage....or if you think it is, then don't use it. You get an upgraded rocket at every tech level so if you can one shot basic aliens with the basic rocket, you'll be able to one-shot elite aliens with the tier 4 one. Fundamentally I object to giving people an AOE weapon that also does massive damage on a direct hit; weapons should be either one or the other. It's intended to be a support weapon, not an unguided blaster launcher.

It's a setting in config.xml. Just change it from 0 to 1 or vice versa.

The MG / scatter laser differential in the current build is an error. They're both meant to have 20 ammo, 10 rounds per burst and similar damage per shot to the equivalent rifle in the most recent build. I just forgot to roll out the changes globally. Whatever model I decide on for the final MG stats will also be rolled out to its higher-level equivalents. Regarding rockets, my thinking is they are too powerful if spammed to make them being high-damage weapons acceptable. What do you do if a player takes 4 of them on a mission, each guy carrying 3 rockets? The blast radius is big enough it's hard to miss with them, and if you give them enough damage to destroy terrain effectively AND mitigation then they can one / two shot most things in the game...doing so to every enemy in range simultaneously, in fact. I also think there's a missing niche for long-range cover denial weapon. C4 is all well and good but explodes at the end of the turn, so you can't use it to remove cover before firing with your other soldiers, and it's short range too. Giving that role to rocket launchers seems a more sensible route than making it an armour-penetrating high explosive rocket that can kill most things in one or two shots. Precision rifles shouldn't one-shot most low-level aliens, otherwise the precision laser would one-shot most medium aliens and so on until the MAG Precision would one-shot elite aliens. I think what I proposed for it is fine.

Thanks for the suggestion. We're looking at something similar to make it easier, but using symbols instead of colours (I think too many colours is a bad things). See this thread for details: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/9137-Side-effect-of-based-system-%28no-fixed-numbers-for-shots%29?p=101220#post101220