jeon

As far as I can tell, these appear to be the formulas for damage and suppression relating to armor and such: Damage before armor = Random roll of between (100 - DamageRandomChance[From config.xml]) to (100 + DamageRandomChance)% -- Default of 50-150% * Difficulty Modifier in gameconfig.xml (only used for aliens, but presumably there is a variable for humans as well) * Range Penalty (Range of Shot / Weapon Range IF Range > Weapon Range) * Damage of Weapon Then, your final damage done = damage before armor - (armor value vs. damage type - weapon mitigation IF armor value - weapon mitigation > 0). Suppression is a bit different but it goes mostly like this: Check to see if target is in inner or outer half of suppression radius. If the radius is 3 I think the inner radius is 1.5 so anything within 1.5 tiles gets full suppression and anything from 1.5-3 tiles gets half suppression value. The final suppression value = (suppression before armor - (armor value vs. damage type - weapon mitigation IF armor value - weapon mitigation > 0)) * the suppression modifier on the alien race. Finally, the armor value vs. damage type is reduced by (damage before armor value * ArmourDegradation%[Also from config.xml]) -- Default of 25% of what damage the shot would have done before being reduced by armor.

I'm not quite sure I understand what you are explaining here. The stopping chance of the blocking unit is the NoTargetPenalty (0.75) * the chance to hit the tile (without obstructions), which is soldier accuracy * weapon accuracy * range penalty. The stopping chance of a blocking unit is decreased by 20% if it is crouching. If I set the value to 1, a blocking unit will reduce the accuracy exactly proportionate relative to the shot, creating some interesting results. A shot that would have a 100% chance to hit a tile before close combat bonus and being capped at 95%, would have a 100% chance of hitting the block unit and make the chance to hit the tile 1%, which is still actually hittable if you roll a 1. The effects aren't as noticeable with lower accuracy soldiers and weapons though. Once you have a soldier with 90+ accuracy or are taking aimed shots with snipers does it really show up in force because it is easy to hit 100+ hit chance with them. Here's an example: Soldier with assault rifle and 90 accuracy with the 0.75 NoTargetPenalty. If he does an aimed shot, it will have 108% chance to hit any tile within his range. If there is a soldier or alien in the way of his shot within his range, the blocking unit will have a 108 * .75 = 81% chance to stop the shot. His chance to hit a target not in close combat range would be 20.5% ((100-81)% * 108%). On each shot he would have a 20.5% chance to hit the target, a 64.4% ((100-20.5)% * 81%) chance to hit the blocking unit, and the remaining 15.1% chance to miss both of them. If he took a snap shot instead, it has a 72% chance to hit a tile. A blocking unit will have a 54% chance to stop a shot. The chance to hit his target is 33.1%. On each shot he would have a 33.1% chance to hit the target, a 36.1% chance to hit the blocking unit, and a 30.8% chance of missing both. This also has a similar effect if shooting through smoke. Assume there is enough smoke to reduce the chance to hit to 1%. If you target behind an alien with your 108% chance to hit shot, you will have an 81% chance to hit the alien. Here's the above numbers if the NoTargetPenalty is set at 0.25: Aimed shot has a 78.8% chance to hit the target, a 5.7% chance to hit the blocking unit, and the remaining 15.5% chance to miss both. Snap shot has a 59% chance to hit the target, a 7.4% chance to hit the blocking unit, and the remaining 33.6% chance to miss both. Shooting an aimed shot through the smoke will have a 27% chance of hitting the alien. Here's some (poorly done) pictures to show the effects of each setting with approximately 90 accuracy soldiers:

I like where this is going. Your "TON" of armor on your Andron elite is 2/3 of what mine is at and your hp is 80% of mine, but I also give my soldiers more armor and changed alien weapons to encourage slightly longer firefights. It does make for interesting situations though in that an alien with full strength armor doesn't get suppressed very easily, but given your values it should be fine... mine were almost impossible to suppress cause I got carried away with armor values and had to reduce them. Anyways, looking at your changes you shouldn't have armor problems for either damage or suppression. I do have some suggestions for explosive type weapons though: 1) Make grenades(human and alien) back to incendiary now that 4x damage multiplier correctly destroys terrain and cover instead of everything. 2) Give aliens some incendiary armor to keep tier 1 rockets from destroying elite aliens so quickly. Since air combat is so important, chances are your rockets will be on tier with the aliens and should actually need the upgrades. 3) Increase radius of rockets and grenades a bit to reinforce their usefulness of destroying terrain and injuring multiple enemies. 4) Decrease radius of C4 to make it more of a directed demo charge and not a mini-nuke. I haven't been playing much lately so I haven't kept up my balance modding, but many of the things you are doing are the direction I would like to go with mine so I'll just piggyback on yours for now. Also for shotguns, instead of raising accuracy, lower damage a bit, remove mitigation, and increase the pellet count to 8. Should probably lower the reaction modifier to 1.5 given the current reaction system. Increased pellet count is fun stuff and encourages close quarters ambushes, charges, and other risky and fun things.

Hmm, it works fine for me, maybe something happened to your animation files for the aliens blowing up. Try extracting: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/87916212/gibbed%20alien.zip in your Xenonauts directory, it is the animation files for the exploding aliens and see if that works.

I am getting 90 second load times on light scout missions as opposed to 15 second load times from before the loading screen. Oddly enough, if I hit load and then alt-tab out to watch the resource monitor, it only takes about 15 seconds to load. It's not coming anywhere near close to the limits on CPU and it barely touches the SSD and RAM. Given the way it is behaving, I am guessing the progress bar updates are being pushed, then rendered, then back to the loading process, which is going to slow it down relative to your frame rate since you have to wait for the next frame to come up before you get back to loading. I just started up FRAPS to check the frame rate in the loading screen to see if it is lowered and noticed my display's frame rate was capped at 40 for some reason. I changed it to 60 and the loading now takes 56 seconds while watching it. So, I suppose it wouldn't be as noticeable on a 120hz display and probably has no problems on a 240hz display assuming that the game always runs at max frame rate.

Yes please, I don't know how many times I've had to spend 10+ turns blowing things up trying to find that one alien hiding under a rock somewhere.

There is an incorrect parameter set in the config.xml that heavily affects the friendly fire issue. <NoTargetPenalty>0.75</NoTargetPenalty> I read that the intent of this parameter is to reduce the chance of hitting a target that you are not targeting by 75% such that 75% of your hit chance applies to whatever you are targeting, and 25% to the obstructing object. The problem is, the way the number is used is the opposite of that intent. It actually corresponds to a 75% chance to hit the obstructing object and a 25% chance to hit the targeted object. I recommend changing it to: <NoTargetPenalty>0.25</NoTargetPenalty>

Well, if all you want is the aliens to progress slower, all you have to do is open up gameconfig.xml and change the following from: <!-- DIFFICULTY MULTIPLIERS --><!-- The values for each are multiplied by these numbers --> <alienTickerSpeedEasy value="0.75" /> <alienTickerSpeedNormal value="0.8" /> <alienTickerSpeedVeteran value="1.0" /> <alienTickerSpeedSuperhuman value="1.2" /> to: <!-- DIFFICULTY MULTIPLIERS --><!-- The values for each are multiplied by these numbers --> <alienTickerSpeedEasy value="0.375" /> <alienTickerSpeedNormal value="0.4" /> <alienTickerSpeedVeteran value="0.5" /> <alienTickerSpeedSuperhuman value="0.6" />

Good call, those two need to be switched. Edit: it ALSO appears that the values for angle are to be understood as degrees from the front in either direction, so angle2=90 means that stopping chance 2 is applied 90 degrees left and 90 degrees right of forward, so essentially angle=180 covers all the way from the sides to the back. For intended behavior of: I suggest using the following in the config.xml: <Shield angle="90" angle2="45" stoppingChance="60" stoppingChance2="100" />

Ya, something crazy is going on with shields. I was testing something else with the debugger (coincidentally the flashbang suppression bug), and noticed that shields were reporting a 60% block chance from the front and 100% from the back. Also, if an alien succeeds in their reaction fire check, they will be hit with the damage portion, but not the suppression portion of the flashbang grenade, and then they shoot you in the face.

I'm not so sure how the suppression works with cover. Even a flashbang does damage to someone crouched behind cover and that has numbers much smaller than the suppression so the code is different for the explosion damage and suppression spread. Suppression appears to only hit for full, half, or none so it might be ending up below half and just going all the way to none or something like that. Oddly enough, if you add a burst fire mode to a shotgun, the suppression values for the burst fire mode is used for the single shots as well as the burst fire. I tried just putting the suppression values on the burst fire mode, but it appears it requires a valid burst fire mode to make the single shots cause suppression. Still no luck with the all shots missing or hitting problem in this thread though. I've noticed several streaks of 2-3 rolls of the same number in a row, maybe a bit more clumping than a random number generator should give you, but I haven't noticed anything horrendous that would cause a whole turn of all hits or misses. (Especially the 95% misses that were reported)

Shotguns don't appear to apply any suppression at all, even when you are shooting someone point blank in the face. I was wrong about the missing thing. The suppression does appear to get blocked by cover though, although I haven't tested how little cover it takes to completely block it. I shot a rocket launcher on one side of a table with 37.5% cover and the suppression hit my soldiers 4 squares away, but not the guy only 1 diagonal square through the table away from the blast that blew up the table and injured him. Or if I shoot all my weapons at the same square instead, people will take suppression if they are out in the open, but the guy diagonally behind the corner never takes any. I did some tests with shooting at the alien and tossing flashbangs at him and discovered that the suppression is not applied for the flashbang if the alien succeeds in his reaction fire test. I bumped up the reaction multiplier to 3x on his plasma rifle and he would never take suppression from flashbangs unless he was out of TUs to make a reaction fire check. He did still correctly take suppression from normal weapons fire (except shotguns), and he wouldn't take suppression if my shot hit the cover 4 tiles away from him, so that part does appear to be working, it is just flashbangs and weapons with a pellet count that seem to be bugged (I just put pelletCount="3" on the pistol and it stopped creating any suppression just like the shotgun). Also, the chances to hit the shield is not coming up right. Any shot from the front is showing chance to hit shield = 60%, while a shot from the back shows chance to hit shield = 100% and the alien did shoot past my shield a few times from the front and being shot in the back gets blocked every time.

The shield taking the full force of the explosion is an unintentional consequence of shield block being upped to 100%.

Ah, a debugging tool, I will use it to see if I can help track this problem down (although I have not seen it at all). I have tried it out some and noticed that suppression acts weird, applying or not applying to various aliens in the room from what are, as far as I can tell, identical shots. I'm guessing there is some other roll related to suppression that is not shown in the tool because it apparently can miss. I have seen some random number clumping, but nothing that would cause everyone in a turn to miss or hit.

Using the debugger I saw posted in another thread, I can confirm that the NoTargetPenalty needs to be 0.25. It does make everything more reasonable with the correct value in place.

The thing is I have a 1% chance of hitting any given object in the room because of the smoke accuracy loss. But, if I target a square with my 1% hit chance behind an alien I then have a 75% of my accuracy chance to hit the alien. Although, if you are intending to have a 25% of your accuracy chance of hitting a target instead of the tile, it appears that the NoTargetPenalty in the config.xml should be set to 0.25 instead of 0.75. I was wondering what that property did and decided to check it out when you mentioned the 75% chance which didn't sound right at all from accuracy numbers I had been seeing and swapped it to 0.25 and now the numbers look right.

I think the strength-weight ratio is fine, but the weight limit to 0 TUs could be upped to a 3x or 4x multiplier, or maybe have a constant added in there too of +10kg or so to make the TU penalty not as sharp to make being overloaded not as bad as fast as it is now. The weapon damage is a bit high for my taste, I'm not a fan of one shot kills so often. The shield is now almost completely worthless as is Jackal armor on veteran difficulty. (I thought Jackal armor was okay until I realized my modded armor file was still the one in the directory). I prefer to only lose men to bad tactical decisions or overwhelming enemy numbers/strength in harder missions, not because some random guard with a plasma rifle shot me across the field straight through my armor. As for smoke grenades... I have tried playing around with them some. I removed the blockLOS portion of them and reduced the accuracy penalty to 20% per square... I'm thinking of making it 15% though. So far it works fairly well with the aliens getting reaction fire and making it dangerous to have a bunch of people in the smoke, but I think the minimum accuracy setting for aliens is too high for them to decide to shoot at me in the smoke. It would be really nice though if squares with smoke grenade smoke counted as 4 or so squares for sight range calculations, and maybe 1.5-2 squares for weapon range calculations.

It would be nice if the hotkeys (default 1-0, shift 1-6) would also center on the soldier.

I'm not sure how these guys with low strength are passing the physical requirement testing and training to join/stay in a special forces organization that is fighting aliens in the first place. Or how a person in peak physical strength can go from a score of 70 to a score of 100 by riding off on a helicopter and shooting some aliens for a few hours every week or so. They must do a lot of strength training while they are bored riding for hours on end to the crash sites. As for the strength system itself... it is fine, there shouldn't be that much of a difference in being able to carry stuff. Maybe make the overloading TU penalty less severe and put some penalties on the different kinds of armor or something. I don't see how carrying more stuff is going to make it take that much longer to run between pieces of cover and lean over it and shoot aliens. Of course with the balance going in the direction of aliens that are more lethal and easier to kill, the amount of equipment we need to bring will drop anyways.

I saw the files bounce back and forth a few times in the hotfixes over the past few days. One time both the light scouts had guards in them, now in my directory sebs have guards but not caesans. It is not a part of the experimental balance patches because they don't include any ufocontents directory.

Ceasan Light Scout ufocontents still says the same 6-9 non-coms, but the Seb Light Scout now says 2-3 non-coms, 2-3 guards. Also, I don't think the crash victims count as kills, but if local forces kill them it counts. (Or the other way around? not sure)

If you play on Veteran or Insane you won't see damage numbers on the aliens.

Medikits are buggy in a couple of ways. 1) TU Cost for a heal always says 5 more than the healing amount, but it doesn't actually deduct the 5 extra TUs when you heal someone. You have to have the TU amount available, but they aren't all used. 2) Healing over a piece of cover frequently takes away your TUs but doesn't actually heal your target. 3) When an injured soldier is brought into battle they can be healed to 100% health.

It seems to be the C4 charges. I knocked out my guy who was carrying the C4 with some stun gas on accident and when I threw a flashbang nearby he kinda blew up.