jeon

Wow, that is quite the journey. I'm glad that it turned out so well for you. The fixed TU vs. percentage TU cost change was quite the little upheaval. And the discussions popping up about lack of realism vs. gameplay every so often got old sometimes. You did a good job handling it most of the time, and I salute you guys.

I made an electroshock rocket once, it was just a recolor of fusion rockets I think. I gave up on it because I couldn't find the fine line between being more useful than electroshock grenades, but not so incredibly OP that there was no reason to use other rockets.

I like stun gas grenades. They are fairly situational and make for an interesting choice at times. I'd like to see some aliens more resistant to the gas, but other than that they are quite nice. I can't say I've ever used a stun baton, because charging into aliens with a melee weapon just seems silly. I have never used one in classic XCOM or in Xenonauts. The arc thrower in the 2012 XCOM is more reasonable (and much more important for overall research progression).

I'm thinking increasing cannon ammo to 80 and reducing the damage of light missiles by 20% (200/300/500/750 -> 160/240/400/600) should do the trick. The overall effect will be 1/3 more damage for the corsairs, a bit more damage for condors with higher tier cannons, and a bit less damage for condors when cannon tech is lagging behind missiles. Also, you should probably reduce plasma cannons to 13 damage and mag cannons to 20 damage per shot.

I've used the debug logger for this game several times looking around for other strange behavior and I haven't noticed any problems with the random numbers. I also have not seen any unusual streaks of misses/hits while playing the game. If there really is something going on, someone needs to capture either a save with reproducible results or they would need to provide a debug log showing a problem with the random numbers.

Combat fuel usage is one of the reasons why I don't ever do the manual battles. I'm thinking auto-resolve should respect ammo usage more than it does now though. Kinda silly that you can kill stuff without using much ammo or without even having ammo. However, it does currently respect ammo types vs. opponents that can roll for combat strength. Missiles count at half and torpedoes count at zero strength if the enemy has roll. It is certainly far from perfect, but it does a good enough job most of the time. It is hard to model all of the components of a fight down into some numbers that are compared and then a random roll is made to influence the outcome and to have it all turn out correct all of the time. As for Total War games... I've played a few of them, mostly Rome 1 and Shogun 2, and there were many times I preferred the result of an auto-resolve. Usually in a large battle I would have a few units get hit pretty hard by a force 1/2 - 2/3 of my strength, but auto-resolve would spread the casualties out to a more manageable level. Also, sieges in Shogun 2... I pretty much always would auto-resolve an attack and manual fight a defense of a castle because the auto-resolve would always end up with way less casualties on the attacking side than a manual battle would have. Auto-resolve also made it possible for some pretty lousy army compositions to march across the countryside destroying everything in their path without a problem. It's not always perfect, but it did do a good job in taking tedium out of the game for me. The only time it really bothered me was when it gave me really poor results and I had to fight the battle manually. It's really the same for me in Xenonauts: as long as the auto-resolve gives me a good enough result that I don't have to manually fight, it's working good enough for me. It does need to be improved some in the ammo department though.

I tested this out by changing all of the random events to have 0 penalty and turning on/off various types of events and it would appear there are 2 things doing this. 1) Some of the events generated by the bombing groups seem to add some positive points on the other side of the world or something weird, it isn't very consistent. 2) The fighter/interceptor groups that generate the airliner shot down/military plane shot down events create lots of positive points in the region where they are active. By putting event penalties back to normal and having a high rate of air events and no chance for other events, regions could end up with very high increases or decreases in funding when a fighter group was around... it appears to be tied to certain events for whether it goes up or down overall, but I'm not 100% sure.

I haven't ran into the problem with the target being against a wall or with the diagonal healing. I tried reproducing it just now and couldn't. I do know that healing a wounded target you have to do enough healing to remove the wounds first before any healing is applied to their HP, so that could contribute to the confusion in identifying what may or may not be a bug involved with medipacks. It probably would be helpful if there were messages about bleeding slowed/stopped when using the medipack to remove wounds and only the actual hp healed for the green +number. The two problems that I have seen for a long time are: 1) TU costs for a medipack says more TUs than it actually uses. It used to always be 5 TUs over, but now it appears to have been changed and is using path-finding costs since you can click on someone to run over and heal them now and when you use a medipack on yourself it says the correct costs. The cost that it is off by appears to be the amount of TUs it would cost to move into the target square and then change your facing to match your original facing. 2) Healing over a short wall, fence, or hedge takes your TUs away without doing anything. No charges lost, no hp healed, just TU gone.

I like damage variation on explosives for this game. XCOM 2012 could get away with that system because it fits in their tabletop-like ruleset. I don't think it would fit that well in this game. I like to think of the randomness as the difference between the rocket hitting them in the chest and exploding or hitting the tile they are in while they are rolling away some.

Flashbangs don't seem to work if the aliens pass a reaction fire check which happens before the grenades explode. The order of events appears to be: 1) Soldier Throws Grenade 2) Grenade Lands 3) Aliens check to see if they can shoot the guy who threw the grenade. 4) The grenade explodes. 5) Any aliens in queue to fire don't take suppression damage. 6) Aliens shoot the guy who threw the grenade. As for balance regarding ammo counts, etc, I think we are getting closer to being balanced. 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. With the later tech and the larger enemy ships, reloading does start to come into play. I agree with bumping the ballistic weapons to be down at the later tech levels for ammo because it makes the transition between conventional and futuristic weapons much smoother and gets you used to the levels of ammo that you are going to be managing. Also, ballistic LMG ammo should probably weigh less. 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. As for sniper rifles, I think they need some personality. I do like the idea of a very accurate, high TU cost aimed shot and not so accurate other shots. A high accuracy shot is good for taking out a target behind cover btw, I'm pretty sure the min/max values are applied at the very end of the calculation now.

Having played around with explosive weapons, they worked pretty well before the most recent change with reduced damage and increased radius. Aliens have no armor vs. incendiary, so rockets are effective vs. Androns. Explosive weapons are highly suppressive right now and it works well. All the weapon changes seem to be well thought out and I like where they are going.

Explosives act silly with smaller radius and full damage in the whole radius. Instead of blowing things up, they just melt the aliens and objects in the impact radius and leave the rest of the room/aliens/humans unaffected other than suppressing them. It's just weird. And changes explosive weapons from area of effect damage to smaller radius instant kill weapons.

Hmm, the static numbers do have a simplicity to them, even if I don't agree with the majority of the points I have seen from those opposed to % costs. I wouldn't scream and yell if the numbers went back to static numbers, assuming that the range of AP values for both human and alien forces is condensed down. I'm not sure it would give the intended mobility for aliens that are supposed to move faster relative to their shooting speed, but something like that could be easily fixed with the addition of a new value that multiplies the shot AP costs for an alien. It could probably be used on human armor as well to make shots cost more or less ap based on the armor. (I'm thinking mostly just reduced cost on predator to represent ease of firing heavy weapons in it). Overall though, I'm liking the reduced number of actions per turn. I prefer these shorter turns with more back and forth between me and the aliens, so if we go back I'd still like less shots per turn for both sides.

Because the 1 gain per mission and the lowering of the TU cap a couple of times until it is now at 79 are both band-aid fixes to the problem that high stat soldiers become too powerful. We are discussing whether the band-aids are fine, or if there is a real issue that needs fixed. I'm of the opinion that the % based TU firing cost fixes the real problem and then some of the band-aids can be removed. There are various other things it helps with such as: shorter turns, excessive reaction fire, and grenade spam.

As per current gameconfig.xml numbers, a soldier can only increase each skill by 1 per battle. Also, TUs are currently capped at 79. Also, I'm confused, if your soldiers rarely survive long enough to gain many additional TUs, and if TU% cost is balanced based on the average starting TU, you aren't ever going to see much of an increase in your TU costs. I'm all for % TU costs for shooting for the following reasons: 1) There aren't magical numbers of TU amounts for a soldier that suddenly let you shoot an extra shot with a certain weapon. Making the change to a % system makes scaling less exponential and erratic. 2) Both Xenonauts and aliens become easier to balance. 3) Losing some veteran soldiers is no longer an end of the world scenario. 4) Soldier recruitment is no longer heavily slanted towards the guys with the most AP. As for the extreme low TUs with being overloaded, I am fine with being able to shoot without any extra penalty, because not being able to move as far is the penalty. In my opinion, the drop-off to 0 is a bit fast with the current settings, I've had pretty good results with bumping limitCarryCapacityMul in the gameconfig.xml from 2.0 to 3.0.

Xenonaut debugger logs using the tool Chris posted on another thread:

Sebs could be a bit higher numbers, less hp, less accuracy. Androns could be in lesser numbers with more hp and AI to charge you. As for the accuracy formula: Range Penalty = ((Weapon Range * 2) - Target Range) / Weapon Range (100% if target range <= weapon range) Unit accuracy value is multiplied by 1.2 if the unit firing is crouching (and it caps at 100 if crouched). Recoil Penalty = Weapon Recoil - Unit Strength (0 if no recoil or if strength > recoil). Unit Accuracy = Unit Accuracy - Recoil Penalty Unmodified Accuracy = Unit Accuracy * Range Penalty * Weapon Accuracy for the shot Cover Hit Chance = Flat Cover % (if object) or Unmodified Accuracy * NoTargetPenalty (if unit). Cover Hit Chance = Cover Hit Chance / 0.8 if the unit firing is crouching. (Not displayed on screen for object cover, but displayed for unit blocking.) The highest cover chance of any blocking unit/object is used for the shot. Terrain Accuracy = 100% - Cover Hit Chance - (Tile Distance through smoke/gas * Accuracy Reduction for each smoke/gas) Minimum of 0%. Chance to Hit Target = (Unmodified Accuracy * (0.8 if target is crouching) + Short Range Hit Bonus) * Terrain Accuracy. If Chance to Hit Target > MaxChance, Chance to Hit Target = MaxChance. If Chance to Hit Target < MinChance, Chance to Hit Target = MinChance. Then, random roll from 1-100. If roll > Chance to Hit Target, you miss. If you miss and if your roll is > Unmodified Accuracy, your shot scatters and rolls a different trajectory. If you miss, each blocking unit/object it passes, it rolls to see if it hits it based on the cover hit chance.

Stun gas is easy to balance vs. higher rank aliens, just give them chemical armor to compensate.

Armor protects against damage, stun, and suppression. Only regular damage reduces the armor values. Jackal could use being 4kg lighter with half the cost and time to manufacture. If shields were made to cost money/time to replace, I would replace my shield guys with smoke grenade spam guys. With the current trends of lethality and reduced alien numbers, there comes a point where the safest strategy may well be to run around with guys who are unarmored and only carry smoke grenades, C4, flashbangs, and gas grenades... and a pistol only for reactions modifier.

It is probably all melee actions over a piece of cover since medkits have the same problem.

Actually, mitigation and damage are always functionally different, even if every alien has some kind of armor value. For example: adding 5 points of mitigation on a weapon that already has high mitigation will only help on aliens that have more armor to be mitigated. Also, mitigation ignores armor for that shot, but has no impact on armor degradation which does play a major roll in doing damage when higher armor values are in place. Even if the 5 points of mitigation does help, 5 points of damage also has another layer of different functionality: damage rolls. 5 points of damage increases damage by 2.5.-7.5 points for any given shot. 5 points of mitigation increases damage by however many points of armor it helps you to ignore for any given shot. For example: compare a 50 damage, 50 mitigation weapon with a 100 damage weapon vs. 100 points of armor. The average roll for both results in 0 damage for the first shot. The high roll for the 50 damage, 50 mitigation weapon is 25 damage after armor. The high roll for the 100 damage weapon is 50 damage after armor. The amount of armor removed can vary from 6.25 to 18.75 for the 50, 50 weapon. The amount of armor removed can vary from 12.5 to 37.5 for the 100 weapon. So, the average roll for the second shot of the 50, 50 weapon is between 6.25 to 18.75 damage depending upon the first shot, and the average roll for the second shot of the 100 weapon is between 12.5 to 37.5 damage. The high roll can be up to 43.75 for the 50, 50 weapon and up to 87.5 for the 100 weapon. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but it does show a trend that damage is more prone to the effects of randomness and that damage is more effective than mitigation point-for-point after the first shot. (And continues to be more and more potent the more shots it takes to bring down the target).

I'm not sure where you guys are getting the explosions only dealing 25% damage to targets in the blast radius. Try throwing a frag grenade in the middle of your squad at the start of a mission with a group of rookies without armor and see what happens. It is pretty clear that the squares adjacent to the target are taking nearly full damage from the explosion and that even 2-3 squares away you still are getting hit for about 50% damage. Now, if there is any cover in the way of the explosion, that is when you have the problem. The cover tends to absorb both the damage and suppression a bit too much. Changing the damage type on grenades back to incendiary does help quite a lot with that though because at least the cover will be destroyed. Bumping up the radius does help as well, especially if you give the tougher aliens incendiary armor to help counteract it somewhat. Electroshock grenades with instant explosion would be better for sure. A little radius increase with the other grenades and 10 points in mitigation and you are set. Now, as for gas grenades, the easy way to reduce their effectiveness in the late game is to make the higher rank aliens have a bit of chemical armor (+15 for warriors/officers, +30 for elite/leader). Also, flashbangs still don't apply suppression to anything if one of the aliens passes the reaction fire test. Alien weapon variety would be really nice if there was a tier of rifles between plasma rifle and the battle rifle for them. I've thought about adding some kind of in between plasma rifle, but the races that really need that help (Androns and Sebs), don't have sprites for plasma rifles at most high ranks. Also, slightly lower weapon damage but higher mitigation on alien weapons would be nice to reduce the amount of instant-gib from across the map thing going on sometimes. Also, I'm still just not sure about the whole heavy plasma being a shotgun type weapon, it would make the aliens a lot more threatening if it were a machine gun.

I pretty much only use autoresolve, and I find it very easy to keep up with the aliens. As long as your missiles are up to date, you should be able to beat most fights. Your aircraft will pretty much always receive damage at various points of the game, but it usually isn't a big deal. The really funny thing is that corsairs, which are pretty much a useless upgrade for normal combat, are actually really good for autoresolve fights. In autoresolve they have a better strength vs. large ships than a foxtrot does at equivalent tech levels and of course a much better capability vs. fighters.

They should, but in the config.xml it still says: <Shield angle="180" angle2="90" stoppingChance="100" stoppingChance2="60" /> Which has the stopping chance and stopping chance 2 accidentally swapped. The other thing is that the angles are counted degrees from forward such that angle 2 corresponds to the front 180 degree arc and angle 1 covers the whole 360 degree arc, but angle 2 has priority over angle 1, so stopping chance of 60% is applied to front and 100% to the back. <Shield angle="90" angle2="45" stoppingChance="60" stoppingChance2="100" /> The above should give intended blocking of 100% in the front 90 degree forward arc and 60% in the remaining portion of the 180 degree forward arc.

I'm still looking at 60~ seconds load times for a light scout mission while watching the load screen and 15~ seconds by alt-tabbing out and then coming back in. My full screen resolution is 1366x768. Hmm, I just tried it in windowed mode (1280x720) and it loads in 12~ seconds. So, I guess I'm playing in windowed mode for now.