KateMicucci
-
Posts
107 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Downloads
Posts posted by KateMicucci
-
-
What's annoying is when an alien grenade crits and takes out 3 guys in wolf armor at the same time. I wish it would roll a different value for each target.
-
Do you see reaction fire coming from outside sight range with only Caesans or do Sebillians and Androns do it too?
Aliens are more likely to reaction fire when you have low TU. Shooting at them lowers your TU.
The accuracy of early aliens is so insanely low that you might be right that its too low for them to even attempt to shoot at your xenonauts except through reaction fire.
-
As of now, given the low number of aliens and how easy it is for them to die, I rarely have to reload assault rifles, shotguns, or pistols.
There are only low numbers of aliens on early UFO recovery missions. Once terror missions and base assaults start happening, even ballistic weapons have to be reloaded several times a mission.
If ARs are reduced to 12 rounds, are shotguns going to have 5? Are ballistic rifles going to have 6? And lasers and plasma even less? I don't like the idea of needing to carry around half a dozen spare magazines to complete a mission, especially since most soldiers are so weak they can't carry armor, a rifle and some grenades before they start taking weight penalties.
If the game were balanced with ammo numbers going back up in mind, bullets would have to do less damage relative to the aliens' health, the guns would have to be less accurate, or there would have to be more aliens to compensate for the lack of need to reload. All of which have their own balance issues and would cause complaints from one person or another about how inaccurate soldiers are, how bullets do nothing, or how there are way too many aliens mowing your soldiers down.
I disagree with the assertion that lowering ammo capacities does much of anything to balance the weapons unless its something crazy like 1 or 2 shots. Lowered ammo capacity doesn't do anything for most weapons but make them more tedious to use.
-
I don't like the way berzerking is implemented. Soldiers wheeling around to shoot their comrades in the face doesn't make any sense. It would be better if they only shot at aliens, and if no aliens are available to shoot at, they take shots towards black fog or somewhere where an alien MIGHT be.
-
I really don't care for the balance in this build.
With the low shooting costs it feels really arcadey. Tactics hardly seem to matter now. It's just blam blam blam.
The new pistols really don't feel right.
Aliens are terrible, terrible shots. It seems like they don't receive the close range accuracy bonus that xenonauts do either.
The new high power pistols and low alien accuracy means that I can abuse a strategy of running up shielded pistol troops right next to an alien, avoid most of their shots, and then kill them with 2 or 3 pistol shots.
-
How is the damage potential of 3 pellets any different from a burst?
-
My hunter gets 76 TUs every time it shoots
-
Kate - do you have a screenshot of that weird close combat accuracy jump? It sounds like pretty major bug.
Not of that incident.
What % of an accuracy boost is bug territory? Trying to reproduce it now the highest I've gotten is 16%.
-
Now that aliens can get 4 reaction shots a turn suppression is more important- but flashbangs are still broken. I've used 3 so far against groups of aliens and not managed to suppress anyone and gotten reaction fire for my trouble.
Sebillians (low level ones at least) can't hit anything even when they're spraying bursts at xenonauts only a few tiles away.
Close range bonus can cause a pistol to go from 11% accuracy to 40% accuracy just by walking one tile closer, yet it is still 11% for several tiles further back. Weird jumps in accuracy. Why isn't there a high starting accuracy with reduced accuracy for every tile away an enemy is instead of close range bonuses and long distance penalties and a completely flat value in between?
-
I find it strange how people pick and choose the abstractions they decide are immersion-breaking.
Because I'm not asking for a "realistic depiction of military combat" Chris. The weapons actually should fit the roles of their video game archetypes. There are several ways to balance MGs that don't involve turning them into a different weapon.
Any game where soldiers by default exchange fire with single shots despite having automatic weapons is not going to have realistic ammo levels in it else you'll never need to reload your weapons.Alright... so what? Forcing the soldiers to reload X times per mission doesn't seem like an important balance consideration at all.
And as it stands, the lowered accuracy levels, lowered shot costs and high cover % are doing plenty to burn through ammo already without adding in arbitrary low mag sizes.
-
You can have a perfectly balanced weapon with a 20 round magazine... but it isn't a belt fed machine gun.
I'd rather have 25 accuracy or 5 round bursts back than these tiny belts.
-
When the scatter laser uses 20, that's too few, but from a verisimilitude point of view it's using the same 1 kilo power cells as all the other lasers. The LMG has a 4kg belts that occupy twice as much space and only do the same damage per shot as the AR.
50 round belts were already a compromise on 100 or 200 round belts.
-
Is the 20 round LMG a joke?
-
Can we get a mark on the loadout screen weight bar that shows when the soldier will start taking overload penalities?
-
Actually something that has come to my mind in this thread.
When creating a game I currently choose a determined difficulty setting. But, would it be a lot of extra effort on the part of the team to have an 'advanced difficulty options' section, where you can choose things like 'heavy weapon penalty', 'more TU to shoot' etc.
Don't take those examples as golden, they're poorly worded but I think I have got the idea across.
It would be refreshing to be able to set up my game as a combination of 'base settings' (normal, veteran, impossible) with optional tweaks, for example how a game of Civilization can be set up.
You can mod those things just by changing some numbers in a text file.
-
I think the range restrictions are fine. It's really a close range weapon. 50 yards is about the furthest you can reliably use one.
It should be able to reliably hit an alien who's only standing on the other side of the room. Shotguns rely too heavily on close range bonuses which means walking right up to the alien's face.
To be clear I don't want the range of the shotgun extended, just a small accuracy improvement.
-
M4 carbine emptying a 30 round STANAG in 3 seconds. It fires at a rate of 700-950 rounds per minute.
Okay, so are we going to reduce the AR to 10 rounds?
-
The only downside I can see straight off is you loose the loot the target was carrying, but if you were gonna fire a missile at a target, them's the breaks.
They also have to reload after every shot, need a soldier with high strength to carry the weapon and aim it accurately, a high TU cost, and only 4-6 shots total for the entire mission. Then there's also the times when the rockeeter totally wiffs the shot and blows himself up.
Those are a lot of drawbacks. If a rocket launcher isn't capable of killing non-elite aliens in one hit it's garbage.
-
V21E5
Observed Behavior
Civilians sometimes stand in doorways or narrow spaces between objects and block the Xenonaut's path, then refuse to move
Desired Behavior
A civilian should not stand adjacent to a Xenonaut. If a Xenonaut moves adjacent to the civilian, the civilian should attempt to move at least 1 tile away on his next turn (Xenonaut tells him to get out of the way).
-
If I want to destroy alien cover I use C4, not rocket launchers. C4 doesn't require me to sacrifice a heavy weapon soldier and is pretty light weight. Rocket launchers need to keep their strong killing potential if they want a space on my team, and they should be especially effective against Androns.
What do think about giving a longer duration to smoke grenades and stun grenades?
Perhaps give the smoke an extra turn before significant dissipation begins? I often chain two (or infrequently more) in order to give my soldiers enough time for a maneuver.
Good idea on smoke. Smoke doesn't really last long enough to have an impact on the battlefield. I've barely used it since it was nerfed from 100% shot blocking. I'm not sure about the stun gas though.
Legit, you've been asking for 50 round magazines, not 30 round magazines. 50 round magazines would indeed be totally overpowered.I and some others have asked for 30 rounds. 20 round magazine means reloading every 3rd round instead of every 6th. Maybe you've done the math and it's perfectly balanced, but from a player perspective it FEELS like a downgrade from the LMG.
You've reduced the damage per bullet on the LMG while the damage on the scatter laser is still high relative to the other laser weapons. I'd rather have slighter lower damage and a slightly larger mag that the SL as it presently exists.
Grenades - A bit undecided on these. I think they should do less damage per TU than normal weapons, but be more reliable damage and also allow you to hit multiple targets if the enemy are grouped. They are *not* incendiary damage, and are not meant to do that much damage to terrain.If the alien is in the open, shooting should be more TU efficient. If the alien is behind cover, throwing a grenade should be more TU efficient. Splash damage shouldn't be taken into account because aliens very very rarely stand close enough together for that to matter.
Shotguns: A specialist close combat weapon with short range and low accuracy, but very high damage per TU and good reaction fire modifier. No Aimed or Burst shot; the idea is that they get a large amount of their accuracy from the short-range bonus (+48 Accuracy if in an adjacent tile). High damage, no mitigation. Because they fire three pellets and each one does small amounts of damage, they are weak against armour but strong against unarmoured foes (non-robots).No aimed shot on shotguns is good, but they shouldn't have to rely on short-range accuracy bonuses to hit enemies. Marching shotgunners up to an alien until the barrel is pressing against its forehead is silly. A shotgun taking a normal shot within green range should have a good chance of hitting anywhere within that range. I'd like to see shotgun accuracy boosted a bit, but only within its green range.
-
If a soldier is suppressed by friendly fire, he will lose all remaining TU for that turn (fine). On his NEXT turn, he still only has 50% of the total TU. So a total of 150% TU is lost from taking friendly suppression fire. This does not seem to be intentional.
-
Then take the LMG out of the game. I'd rather have it not be there then reduced to a function it was not meant to be used for.
Let's not be ridiculous. Killing people is the purpose of machineguns. Killing a lot of people, really fast. People are suppressed by machineguns because they are afraid of being killed by them.
Ballistic MGs are fine with their 50 round magazines, although they too could be a little less accurate, hitting 1-3 rounds per burst is a little too much.Too much because its much stronger than other heavy weapons (it isn't- try out rocket launchers) or too much because you think that machine guns shouldn't be useful for anything except suppression?
-
Raw recruit Pvt. StellarRat 50 TUs and Colonel StellarRat 79TUs. How can it possible be that Pvt. Rat aims and shoots his weapon and it only takes 25 TU's while Colonel Rat firing the EXACT same weapon with the same aimed shot takes an additional 15 TUs (40)???
How does Colonel Rat become a quickdraw champion by running the 100 meter dash every day?
-
1. The percentage based TU system isn't bad in my mind. Not particularly great either, but it works. Without going into any details ( I get that this is the wrong thread) I do think it is at least partially responsible for the following point.
2. Combat is way too easy for the difficulty level now. I really liked the balance in the last release before the percentage based TU system. The enemies were very deadly and a hit usually meant the death of a Xenonaut. It was however quite manageable due to the low numbers of the Aliens. Difficult but not overwhelming - I liked it. At present, the Aliens miss a lot of their shots and (not 100% sure here) probably have less shots anyway due to the TU System. In addition my unarmored guys and girls routinely survive hits from plasma rifles. All that put together means I have lost maybe one guy up until armored enemies started showing up and completely skipped Jackal armor - which is to say all of my people are unarmored so far, where before I would build Jackal for all soldiers just for that tiny bit of survivability.
Aliens miss their shots because they've had a big nerf to their accuracy with this patch, not because of the new TU system.
Jackal should be better and Wolf should probably be a little higher on the tech tree so that Jackal can't be so easily skipped. I think Chris intended to lower alien armor mitigation in order to make Jackal better but forgot. A good side effect of the new TU system is that wearing Jackal doesn't reduce the damage output of the soldiers wearing it now.
3. Pistols seem oddly accurate at long(-ish) ranges. 51% on a snapshot (73% aimed) on a crouched target outside of range (16 Tiles i think). It isn't a big deal at any rate, because of the low damage.Just feels a weird.
Pistols should probably have their range reduced. They're very good weapons. At least they were until the TU change. Now that they're limited to 4 shots they might be more balanced.
4. LMGs with their 10 shot bursts are great in theory. I toyed around with them a bit and they have a decent use in game, especially on targets in cover which your AR/Sniper guys have trouble hitting reliably (It's not that they hit better, but 10 shots obviously increase your odds and they generally one hit kill those unarmored aliens). However I still don't use them because of the stationary nature, but I think they could be quite useful with a different playstyle.LMGs only do 25 damage per shot so they can't one-hit anything even on a crit. Ballistic LMGs feel like they are in a good place now except that they could use a 80% TU instead.
5. I didn't really find a use for the shotgun. I tried using them as breaching weapons, but they don't do anything the AR on burst couldn't. I think they might need either more damage or preferably higher suppresion and maybe less TU cost to fire. Keep in mind though that I only tried the balistic version, so they might get better later on.Shotguns give a reflex bonus, meaning that they have a much better chance to fire before the aliens get their reaction shot than an AR soldiers. They have their niche- however, it is extremely limited and competes unfavorably with shield+pistol combos. The shotgun could stand to be a little better and cheaper fire costs might be the thing, or a boost of 10 to accuracy (because of the "spread" video gamers expect a shotgun to have)
Machineguns IRL are scary accurate, out a good 200 meters further than assault rifles. Obviously this can't be modeled in game because of balance problems... But their primary role is as a suppression platform. Do you honestly think MG crews IRL are trying to hit targets with all of their bullets? Or even 1 in 10? They would be LUCKY to hit with 1 in 2000. They are really just glorified bullet hoses designed to spit as much lead in the general direction of the enemy as possible.In-game don't mind them being less accurate than assault rifles, and in fact they should be so because they shoot 10 bullets per turn instead of 2-3. All I'm saying is that accuracy should not be one of the machinegun's attributes, volume of fire and ammo capacity should be. If you have to nerf the former to increase the latter so be it.
The LMG is ALREADY the least accurate weapon in the game and gets kills only because of the 10 round bursts. I am never convinced by arguments of what combat like in real life. It's not real life, it's a video game. Anyway, even if we're talking "real life" LMG's are much more likely to get kills than rifles are. Like Chris said they need to be competent weapons in their own right. A "primarily suppression platform" already exists, and it only weighs 1kg and doesn't take up a heavy weapon slot- flashbangs.
Ground Combat Balance - V21 Experimental 6
in Xenonauts General Discussion
Posted
No- but consider that ammo counts in the OG were pretty high.
Pistol: 12
Rifle: 20
Cannon: 6
Autocannon: 14
Lasers: Unlimited
P. Pistol: 24
P. Rifle: 28
H. Plasma: 35
The weapon that stands out is the autocannon with 14 rounds. This is not very comparable to the LMG's 20, however. XCom's autocannon is a fictional weapon, apparently high caliber and magazine-fed. Even with only 14 rounds it could fire 4 and 2/3rds bursts, two bursts a turn, for more damage than the rifle.
Other abstractions you've made in Xenonauts are either normal for the genre, or convenient for the players. Abstracting one shot to represent two or three shots does neither. It is a fairly hamfisted way to try and make ammo conservation more important.
If your goal is to reward players for taking single shots instead of bursts, then bursts need to be *better* than single shots. In Xcom a burst only cost slightly more TU% than a snap shot. This had the side effect of making bursts more TU efficient than aimed shots. Up until now it seems like you've been trying to balance aimed shots and burst shots so that neither is better than the other. That's fine. However, if players are likely to run out of ammo from using bursts, and bursts aren't more effective than single shots, players are just going to take single shots instead. The more you lower the AR's ammo capacity, the more true that becomes.