Ol' Stinky

Nice catch! Random notes from playing this evening: A big "thank you" for letting us stand behind a 2x1/1x2 prop and not hit our own cover! The different aim modes feel better than experimental 1. Civs seem to have a sight range of 16 again. I've set it to 20 for my playthrough. I've lost a bunch of guys, but mostly because of silly mistakes (assuming I'd killed all the outdoor aliens, sloppy miscalculation of TUs when breaching, etc.). I think what'd help improve the AI is to try and use LoS a bit better. Right now, it values staying behind cover in Xenonaut LoS over moving out of LoS. I know the AI can tell which squares are in the enemy's LoS, but can it tell without uncovering enemy units? If it can't, maybe it'd be worth setting EnemyLoS to a positive number (it's -0.25 right now, i.e. it favours enemy LoS tiles slightly). Are the assault rifles, LMGs and sniper rifles meant to have 30 range? This was the case in balance patch #1 as well, but I kept schtum because I'm a jerk that way.

Hello there, flash! I hope things have gotten a bit better for you as time's gone on.

I saw something wrong with Seb guard AI now. They ran towards my troops, then ran away, seemingly in an endless loop. They didn't fire their guns - in fact, they didn't seem to be holding guns at all. Is anyone else getting this, or did I botch my installation? Caes worked fine when I ran into them.

I like the idea of special weapons per tier! It'll help with the lack of game changers around; psionics and blaster bombs were a big deal in the OG. The only thing kinda similar in Xenonauts is the stun gas stuff. The tweaks I'm mooting are: Ballistics: They're free and they have more ammo, that's good enough for me. Laser: More accurate, and the shotgun now is burst fire and not scattershot. Laser guns also have a small bonus to armour penetration. My laser weapons are meant to be the guns you pass on down to your fresh rookies. Plasma: Same deal as Gaud, although the chance of mine causing fire would be low and mainly there for visual effect. I'm been wondering how to pull this off with burst fire modes not supporting explosions, and I think I've settled on the route I'm gonna take - all burst fire modes now become scattershot. Scattershots can be explosive, it turns out, which is exceedingly cool. Plasma weapons also have +1 suppression radius. MAG: I was planning on giving all MAG guns hypervelocity, but I'm not sure it's coming back. It's never really worked right and it was hard to balance, to boot. So I'm not sure what to give to MAGs. I'd like to give them all burst fire/scattershot, but that doesn't fit with the "feel" of MAGs. I might give them buffs to suppression value, accuracy, damage, range and armour pen., while slapping on severe recoil requirements/heavy weapon status for all MAG weaponry. The very best guns, but hard to use. Rookies stay away!

The short answer is "yes, with the patch from the last page". You'll need to use the industrial fix on the previous page for my industrial maps or else you can't move around large portions of the map. Also, desert maps might have a visual oddity: the normal chain link fences were replaced by more heavy duty ones with barbed wire around the top. These new ones don't have pieces with holes in to allow units through, so there'll be nothing there instead. What this means is that there'll be mysterious gaps in the line of fences. There's no gameplay effect, though. I'm working on updating my maps but if you do download the current version, you won't run into any crashes. It's more likely there'll be Mysterious Open Spaces. If you encounter problems, please say what tileset you were on (farm, desert, arctic etc.), the type of UFO you were fighting, and if you're feeling kind, a screenshot to go with it.

It's quicker to suppress them and move in and out of the smoke, or use grenades once you get non-lethal ones, but yeah, smoke's very powerful. If an AI can see smoke but no Xenonauts, it should fire at the centre of the cloud to suppress anyone inside. Given that you're not fighting many guards at once, suppression power on some alien weapons' burst modes might need to be bumped up.

Blue numbers are stun damage. You probably didn't realise that because stun gas clouds don't show how much stun they're doing, but that's because environmental damage doesn't come up as a floating number yet. We don't get any feedback on suppression other than "is suppressed" and "is not suppressed". It's definitely an unfortunate bug, because people use an FB on their first light scout mission, see that it does nothing, and then conclude that FBs are worthless. They're fiddly because we don't have a line of fire going on for grenades, but smoke can help with that.

It's not really a problem because non-coms are now relegated to defending the UFO. You don't see Dave the alien accountant running around the battlefield doing somersaults and scoring sick mid-air headshots. Also, you downplay the importance of having different weaponry, since plasma pistols don't hit nearly as hard as a plasma rifle. Also, it can be tricky to get the 45 degrees needed for the 80% stopping chance, because there's no way to sidestep. I suspect that even when I go around the corner diagonally I'm putting myself in the 60% zone for some possible reaction shots. This is mitigated by smoke, sure, but are we meant to use smoke every time we round a corner? (That's not a rhetorical question.)

I'm still convinced that's a bug related to throwing a flashbang into a UFO from the outside. The fact of the matter is that Caesan non-coms should always be suppressed by a flashbang. A flashbang deals 100 suppression damage, a Caesan non-com has 40 suppression "health". I don't know if it still works, but it used to be that if you created a save just before you throw the flashbang and load if the non-coms aren't suppressed, sometimes the FB will work properly.

I've tried out a few missions now, and I prefer it to standard v20 so far. In my first mission I lost three soldiers! And not all to reaction fire either, one Caesan guard was hiding in a building and popped out to say hello. Good stuff. I agree with others that aim modes don't seem as significant. I suppose you could revert the accuracy stats or put in some other incentive, like less random damage or something, but to be honest I don't find it to be that much of a problem. I can use snap shot without feeling bad. The lowered TU costs mean my guys are much better at moving around; in my second mission, I suppressed a Seb guard in a barn and flanked him successfully, which was cool. It would have been a lot more fiddly in standard v20, with team rookie wheezing and gasping from the effort. If nothing else comes from this experiment, please keep the 3 TU move costs.

You should find the explosives to be better with today's patch. There was a bug that caused RLs/grenades to do their 4x extra environment damage to enemies as well, meaning they'd produce some bonkers numbers. As for electroshocks: they'd be good with a couple of tweaks. They put out more suppression than a flashbang and do 80 stun if they land directly on a target. Flashbangs are better for breaching because of the end-of-turn factor, and gas grenades are instant as well as leaving a cloud behind. Buff the suppression to 180 so that one shock can insta-suppress enemies all the way up to Seb warriors and make them detonate immediately, and they'd be better.

You've got a point. There should be an option for people with hearing difficulties that allows "subtitles" for the important info, like [Civilian death cry!] or [Alien shout of pain!]. I guess I'll try and get back on topic. Changes you can make without the whole team, right? I can't talk about the mod just yet. Okay then. I was sort of vague earlier about suppression, but I've gone away and thought about it, and I think what actually bothers me is that a rifle's snap shot is capable of chain suppressing a lot of aliens. That's fine at the very beginning, but it should drop off sooner than it does. A Caesan warrior regens all of 20 suppression a turn. So you get one guy who spends his turn suppressing three aliens, then everyone else can focus fire on "real" shots to kill one target. Maybe reduce a single shot for a rifle down to 10 suppression and bump up suppression regen a bit? It's not a problem for shotguns or pistols because of their short range. I also want soldiers to be able to take cover behind 2x1 or 2x1 props and be able to shoot over freely. I don't know if it's as simple as setting IgnoreCoverRange to 2 or whether you would have to wrangle with a million lines of code, though.

I agree that there are some things that can be left to instinct. Usually this is about the enemy units' capabilities: we don't need to know how much health an alien has, since we can learn that it takes two sniper hits on average to kill one of those redshirt guys. We don't need to know the exact chance an alien has of reaction firing, since it should be a threat, and there are actions the player can take to avoid being picked off by reaction shots. (Well, mostly. Let's just say there's some guys in the Chris Mod that I'm not looking forward to meeting.) On the other hand, when it comes to decisions we have to make in the game, it's not much fun being denied info. Imagine having to guess how that rock in front of the alien effects your target, or having no indication what was in your line of sight, or what's been explored this particular turn and what's actually grey fog of war. Or not being told that firing through smoke is an automatic miss. How about we go back to the OG and not have TUs remaining shown on the walk path? Let me be clear that I'm not trying to set up a strawman here! I know no-one wants to go backwards when it comes to the UI improvements. I'm just making the case for more feedback, so that I can make informed choices. Let bad play come from making bad calls, and not from opaque mechanics. You're not alone about suppression. For example, I'm unsure whether an LMG's 40 suppression counts as "one" shot (the same way burst fire does against shields and, I think, environmental stuff like windows?). And grenades are odd, yeah. I don't know whether there's a way to mod in those explosive rounds. Does armour degradation affect all of the armour, or just the affected category? So if I shoot an alien with a sniper rifle (kinetic type damage), does only its kinetic armour drop or all types? If it's all types, I guess you could buff aliens' incendiary or chemical armour by a large amount, and then set the explosive ammo to incendiary/chemical type damage. You'd have to alter other weapons to match, of course, but it's the only possibility I can think of. It's a long shot, though.

It happens a whole lot with experimental versions. Good luck saving the world!

There's a +/- 50% random modifier on weapon damage, so you don't always know whether a low hit's because of an armoured target or because of bad luck. If you have two targets and one of them doesn't have armour, you'll probably focus fire on that one. If an andron and a drone pop into view, you'll know to go for the drone, especially if you're a bit behind on weapons tech. I like to know what the weapons I use actually do. Do you know what the difference in suppression is between an LMG and a sniper? If you do, hat's off to you, because I wouldn't be able to work it out from playing the game normally. I am a bit dim, admittedly. For some of us, a headset's not an option. I don't know why, but earphones (or headset, or whatever) causes my tinnitus to go up a pitch. Please don't make me rely on audio cues. I don't think anyone's asking that more feedback should be forced on people. But it's a lot harder to learn what does what when there's no display of, for example, suppression radius. Or suppression value. Or proper explosion radius, or grenade arc...

[video=youtube;8Q7FFjUpVLg] Looking forward to giving this a shot.

Or even people who play with the radio\music\etc. on in the background. Turn based games generally don't require people to listen out for audio cues. Playing the metallic sound when a shot hits an aroured unit is a cool idea, don't get me wrong, but it's not enough on its own. Instead of trying to convey how armour's had an effect after the damage, why not indicate roughly how much armour an alien has when you target him? I'm thinking a shield icon to go above the TU cost of the shot. The icon could have nothing but an outline if the alien has less armour than the weapon has armour penetration, green if the armour will absorb up to ~20% of the shot, amber if it will absorb ~20-50%, and red if it's 50%+. The main drawback is that shield icons were used to show how well covered a target was in Firaxis-XCom, which might confuse people. Maybe someone can think of a better symbol than a shield.

I think we're tapping into a problem that's bigger than even Chris' Amazing Balance Patch is able to handle - there's no good way at the moment to convey the amount of info to the player. In a perfect world, when I take a shot I'd like to know: How much was mitigated by armour How much suppression was caused Whether the amount of damage dealt was lucky or not How much was mitigated by cover, assuming thats still in I love seeing numbers pop up in battle, floating numbers release the good chemicals in my brain. I appreciate not everyone's that way, though. In addition to the visual/audio cues, I'd like a combat log such as the one in debug mode, that can be hidden for those wanting immersion. It's probably too late to see that happen, unfortunately.

Sounds good to me. They could afford to feel a bit more different. You could also try setting the Sebs who spawn in the UFO to an aggressive playstyle. The idea being that against Caes/Androns the battle's the same "secure the outside, breach the UFO" deal, while against Sebs it's "secure the outside as quickly as you can, because the guys in the UFO are on their way to join the fight outside." This would probably stop at some point (cruisers? carriers?) when UFO retrievals are more about the fight inside.

Maybe short range should come up as a different colour for the line of fire indicator. How about blue for tiles 1-8, green for 9 to the gun's range, then yellow? (For a sniper rifle it'd be the same green then yellow it is today, naturally.)

If you don't mind me asking: what size did you settle on for light scouts? 50x50? And is it only for light scouts, or is it inline with the new standard, so lsct/sct/corv?

I'd take a rookie with 30 ACC but good TUs and STR if I needed a shieldbearer. I already recruit people by highest TUs as it is. The beginning stats stuff isn't avaible to mod right now, but I'd imagine it wouldn't be too tricky for Chris to change it from the current ~50-60 to ~30-70. The stat cap is there in gameconfig.xml, so it would be even easier to cap APs at (say) 75-80.

If aliens are made more fragile at the same time, that's going to effectively improve the rifle's damage. I guess it depends how the other changes work out, though.

It's fairly easy to keep an alien suppressed forever once you get them to zero in the first place. A Caesan warrior regens 20 points of suppression resist per turn, right? Which is how much an assault rifle does with a single shot. Since all a suppressed alien is going to do is fire off a weak snap shot, it's something that needs to be considered for goal #6, especially if you're going to lower the number of aliens in ground combat. I'm not sure I really have much of a solution other than increasing suppression regeneration from 25%/turn to something a lot more drastic, like 50%-75%, and maybe tweak the Seb suppression variable if those guys can't be kept down. Another thing I'd like to suggest: lower the assault rifles' range from 20 to 18. People have been saying that snipers don't have much of a niche right now, and that's because assault rifles pretty much are mobile snipers at the moment. With the range nerf, they wouldn't be able to suppress without going into enemy LoS (except against Sebs): long range suppression would be the domain of the LMG and sniper rifle.

Are you happy with players being able to easily chain-suppress? If you're not, it might be an idea to play around with suppression resist regeneration\bravery values\etc. This might already be solved in Chris' Amazing Balance Patch V1! due to lowered movement costs, I suppose.