DrNoid

Would it be feasible to have an empty starting base, and have all building and hiring that happens in the first hour be finished instantly? Or to only have this for higher difficulty levels?

Because Pvt. StellarRat has TUs that take 0.2 seconds, while Colonel StellarRat has TUs that take ~0.13 seconds and they both take the same amount of time to aim and shoot their weapon. Assuming each round takes 10 seconds.

I don't know the equation for damage drop-off with range, so that's not added. If you have that equation, please add it, or post it so I can add it. Of course, if the equation is only depending on range it won't change anything when comparing the different shot types.

But I'm guessing you where aiming those bursts... In real life you don't have just 1 option for burst fire, you can have everything from "spray 'n pray" to carefully aimed bursts. I've never fired a gun, so I have no clue about how much "real life TUs" a burst takes. Is the in-game burst more akin to a snapshot-burst or a aimed-shot-burst? How many of those close-grouped bursts could you make, compared to equally accurate single shots? But then again, this is a game, we want interesting options, not necessarily realistic options. No need to guess, we have the numbers in the spreadsheet. Unless there is a calculation error in there (always possible), snapshots are already king at any range. Two snapshots costs a bit more TU's (15 more than 1 aimed shot, 10 more than a burst), but they beat the others in terms of damage and chance-to-hit. The only reason not to use 'em is if you're really short on TUs.The question is not what the best shot is, the question is what the best shot should be, and whether we want there to be a different best shot at different ranges.

I agree. Unfortunately, from playing a bit with the numbers in the sheet, that can not be achieved with the current to-hit equations. Do try it out yourself, everybody should be able to edit the spreadsheet. The best way to get that effect would be to change the RangePenalty equation. The important part: Which is the same as: This means weapons have a flat hitChance until WeaponRange, and then drop off linearly until 2*WeaponRange. And since WeaponRange is per-weapon and not per-weapon-per-shottype, the accuracy of a shot-type will always be above or below the accuracy of another shot-type, regardless of the range. I guess the easiest would be to make the WeaponRange depend on shot-type. That would be a pretty ugly solution, but would allow for bursts with a higher short-range accuracy, and aimed shots with a higher long-range accuracy. A slightly nicer way would be introducing a "RangeLimit" parameter, defining after how many ranges the RangePenalty reaches 0, and change the equation to: A weapon/shot-type with a low RangeLimit but a high Range would have a short plateau, but a long, gentle slope. A weapon/shot-type with a high RangeLimit and a low Range would have a long plateau, but a short, steep slope. Of course I don't know how feasible any of these suggestions are...

Right, now that my spreadsheet is more or less finished(I don't know the min and max tohit chance), lets come back to this. The following assumes a shooter with accuracy 0.6. In the third tab I've graphed the expected damage as fraction of the weapon damage, versus the range, for 1 aimed shot, 2 snap shots and a 3 round burst. The result: at point-black range (1, 2 or 3) the 3rd burst is best. At rang 4 to 36 the 2 snap shots have better expected damage. After that the burst takes over again (due to the minimum hit chance) At no point is the aimed shot best, and most of the time the aimed shot has exactly the same expected damage as the burst shot. Conclusion: For damage output 2x snap is best, and burst and aimed are the same. In the second tab I've graphed the chance to hit any shot for 1 aimed shot, 2 snap shots and a 3 round burst. It's mostly similar, with 2x snap shot being the best most of the time. Burst is actually worst most of the time. Conclusion: For finishing blows on nearly dead enemies 2x snap is the best and burst the worst. Though considering the small difference between 2 snapshots and 1 aimed shot, and that 1 aimed shot is 15AP cheaper than 2 snap shots, it's probably better to use 1 aimed shot to finish something off. When you increase the shooter accuracy to 0.8 interesting things happen with the Chance to Hit. A single aimed shot has the highest chance to hit for normal range, but at long range two snapshots become better.

Thanks, Added And of course, in a discussion about balance of hit chances you need numbers Aimed and snap are just straight copies of the table with different "Weapon Accuracy" values and burst a copy with the "two shots" columns removed. What do you mean with "up to four zoom levels"?

Great! I've started a spreadsheet with chance-to-hit calculations per range: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkNMPlaGZUcLdDlUYWlUeUhlQ2c2OFlZZW04WXZxN2c&usp=sharing The only missing details: How does "NoTargetPenalty" work? How does "Short Range Hit Bonus" work? Once that is in, we can just copy the sheet for each shot-type, add some graphs and compare

Does the engine support rotating the camera in steps of 90 degrees? Like what for instance Gnomoria does. That game also has 2d sprites for graphics, but you can put the camera in each of the four corners of the world. In essence it would "just" be iterating over the tiles in a different order and applying a fixed "rotation" to each tile. Though if the engine wasn't designed with that in mind it's far from trivial to add later since it affects a lot of things.