[MOD WIP] Asymmetric Weapons Tech with Plausible Advanced Ballistics

[Gengis Dhen]

Thanks for all that!

[coma berenices]

Yeah, that's supposed to be it. I tested it and it worked just fine, but it seems I'll have to double-check things. I'll try to fix it as soon as possible. In the meanwhile you could double check that you have the strings.xml from the mod in your assets folder. It might be that the research will unlock fine, but there certainly should be a description.

or better yet, open both researches.xml and strings.xml and find (ctrl+f) the string "Researches.AdvancedConventional" without the quotes. If you can't find it in either file, then replace that again from the zip. I just checked and it should be in the zip and should be valid.

It's about strings.xml. I have same issue. Checked and I have different size of this file because of my community edition.

[catmorbid]

Oh, well it's okay to overwrite the CE strings.xml, since there aren't any big differences. It'll have X:CE compatibility in the next version.

[catmorbid]

I'm currently working a concept for a new research tier which would basically include morally questionable weapons. Yeah I know, what's morals got to do with fighting off alien invaders? Exactly my point, which is why I want to include nuclear weapons in the arsenal.

The Nuke Grenade

The Nuke Grenade is a basically a miniaturized nuclear warhead fitted into a steel cylinder and equipped with an unconventional arming mechanism. Well call it the twisterpuller: You twist, then pull, and finally, throw - And then you run like there's no tomorrow, hoping there will be. Tossing away all notions of ethics, we used a mix of Alenium and low-grade plutonium, which will contain the explosion in a manageable area and will leave behind a deadly radioactive cloud. The cloud will persist for a while, so you better not throw it anywhere you might want to visit later, although it's also useful tool in covering your back.

Grenades can be thrown from the hand, or can be thrown from the backpack using the grenade quickslot in the combat UI (this costs more TUs than if the grenade was in the soldier's hand, and still more if the soldier does not have an empty hand).

Damage: 150 Incendiary

Suppression: 100 Suppression

Armour Mitigation: 0

Blast Radius: 6 Tiles

The weapon has like 90% chance for smoke and smoke does 40 chemical damage and has 5% chance for dissipating, so I'd expect the cloud to persist for at least 20 turns.

I'd like to add even more weapons. I'll probably add a nuke rocket, and maybe vehicle weapons as well. However I was wondering if you guys would have any more ideas. I could re-add the chemical weapons currently disabled in the mod, i.e. nerve gas and toxin grenade.

I'm also looking for a good name for this new reserach tier. So far I've been considering:

- Extreme Warfare

- Unethical Warfare

- Dirty Bombs

- Dirty Warfare

The nuke's going to be in the next release, but I'd like to add more weapons if possible. All ideas are welcome!

[Ragnarok]

How about something like

"Last Resort", "Endlösung", "Escalation", "Full Scale", all together with "Weaponry".

[Nibelung44]

Escalation Weapons seem good. It is a mean to the right end.

Can you add flamethrowers? Guess it might be difficult. Or Mortars

[kyosuke]

How about Michael Bay Weaponry?

What about Total Annihilation?

[catmorbid]

Hmh... Escalated Annihilation Weaponry?

I could try some sort of flamethrower mockup by replacing the bullet projectile with a fireball of sorts and making it fire really fast bursts, so it would "look" like it'd be firing constant flame. But I'm not sure how good it'll look or work. Mortar should be doable in theory, but it might not look too good, since it'd have to rely on one of the existing animations. Maybe a shoulder-launcher mortar could do the trick The biggest problem with grenade launchers is that you're limited to one grenade type so far. Here's hoping to X:CE will fix it.

[Mikhail Ragulin]

I could try some sort of flamethrower mockup by replacing the bullet projectile with a fireball of sorts and making it fire really fast bursts, so it would "look" like it'd be firing constant flame. But I'm not sure how good it'll look or work.

That, sir, is an inspired idea. I just gave something similar a try, and it works too. Hello flamethrowers!

It's so stupidly easy, I'm surprised no-one has done it yet. Here's what I did: bullet type to rocket, impact spectre to robannas (like the 'werfer), fire and smoke chance to 100, radius 1.5 (which is actually the minimum, I tried less but it's always at least this size). Projectile to pulse laser, slowed it down to 800. In the words of The Move, "get the fire brigade, get the fire brigade, see the buildings start to really burn". Sing along, people.

One drawback I've found - the impact causes stutter, presumably due to all the flames being created.. This might vary on system to system - but setting it to single shot gets around this somewhat.

[TheD3rp]

morally questionable weapons.

Yes please.

[catmorbid]

That, sir, is an inspired idea. I just gave something similar a try, and it works too. Hello flamethrowers!

It's so stupidly easy, I'm surprised no-one has done it yet. Here's what I did: bullet type to rocket, impact spectre to robannas (like the 'werfer), fire and smoke chance to 100, radius 1.5 (which is actually the minimum, I tried less but it's always at least this size). Projectile to pulse laser, slowed it down to 800. In the words of The Move, "get the fire brigade, get the fire brigade, see the buildings start to really burn". Sing along, people.

One drawback I've found - the impact causes stutter, presumably due to all the flames being created.. This might vary on system to system - but setting it to single shot gets around this somewhat.

Yeah, I did that too, and it does work surprisingly well The tricky part is in figuring out how large of a burst is good enough, but I think we can have working flamethrowers now Also, I experimented with the animated projectiles in the robbanas folder, and found out that they work pretty well. Now I'm thinking of making a flattened version of those sprites so they'd look more like projectiles than fireballs. However, the sprite atlas is causing me some headaches, probably because they Goldhawk likely used some software solution to generate the atlases from single images, which makes sense, because no sane mind would ever want to write down pixel coordinates for 1 000 000 images.

[TacticalDragon]

I have check the files, stats, playability of this mod. I personally think that the game is not only about weapons, you need mechanics and gameplay.

You can do what ever you want with weapons nuclear bullets, explotions that clear all the map... but the real tactical advancement requiere deeper modifications.

If you manage to set a new tactical enviroment your doing a real progress.

The game has enough weapons, but lacks in mechanics.

[catmorbid]

Sure, everything else naturally matters as well. But for me, personally, the guns have a huge importance. More over, the "feel" of the weapons, the sound and visual feedback. So, I'm building everything around them, focusing solely on ground combat.

My current focus is on the aliens and their weaponry as well, but I've no considerations for adding new enemies or stuff like that, since I think they already are varied enough (for now at least). What they do need is a little tweak here and there. Alien weapons though... I might do something weird there, in theme of the rest of the mod

Anyway, thanks for checking it out

[Mikhail Ragulin]

Yeah, I did that too, and it does work surprisingly well The tricky part is in figuring out how large of a burst is good enough, but I think we can have working flamethrowers now Also, I experimented with the animated projectiles in the robbanas folder, and found out that they work pretty well. Now I'm thinking of making a flattened version of those sprites so they'd look more like projectiles than fireballs. However, the sprite atlas is causing me some headaches, probably because they Goldhawk likely used some software solution to generate the atlases from single images, which makes sense, because no sane mind would ever want to write down pixel coordinates for 1 000 000 images.

I've been using 10 as the burst length. The only problem with bursts, is if there's a firechance or smokechance set, and then the explosions cause stuttering - but it looks a bit odd if a flamethrower doesn't start ground fires. I'm going to have a look at bigger bursts, like 100, but with only a tiny delay, to try and get a stream of flames. Using pellet count is interesting too...it creates a wall. There's scope for more than one kind possibly - needle like accuracy of a stream werfer, or area burn of a wall.

That's pretty much exactly what I did with the sprites, but I was much lazier. I squashed down one of the animations from the robbanas explosion sequence and turned it into a projectile. Looks a bit pointy though, it might be better being blunt/round. Are you trying to make an animation sequence for it, rather than just a projectile?

[catmorbid]

Yeah, my idea is to use one of the robbanas explosions as the template, then squash it and reduce the opacity a little so they'd "blend in" a bit better, make it look a bit more like a fireball. But as I just figured out how to make the texture atlas, it might actually be easier to just make a short custom animations. We'll see

So far, I've used 50 round bursts, which seem very nice. Once the accuracy is set low enough and if you use one of the robbanas projectiles and set the projectile velocity to ~1000 you'll start to see a very flamer-like effect. It's far from perfect, but I believe it's a very good start. With 50 round bursts, you can also afford to set the firechance lower, so you'll get a good mix of fire and smoke, but not enough to stall the game

[Mikhail Ragulin]

I tried the animated robbanas one. It was so good. But then I tried the standard "fire" animation...it was even better. Plus, I'm still getting the robbanas effect due to the impact spectre. There'll be a video up soon with that one. If you're having a go at making one, it might be interesting to try and blend the two sets of images - the robbanas ones maybe aren't quite flamey enough

I switched to 100 round bursts, 0.01 burst delay. It exudes a much more terrifying effect, in-keeping with the flamer sound. With the vanilla flamer, there isn't a fire chance set, which probably means that it's not a good idea anyway. I've just had it set to 1, and aptly enough, 1 tile set on fire - which is probably enough, as the fun is in the shooting.

[Nibelung44]

Hi,

Still using your mod, catmorbid. There are a few typos in the geoscape tooltips, I don't know if you are interest in me pointing them out.

Also, some remarks:

The Magnum 44 pistol is a bit too weak IMHO. I would say the 35% TU cost for snap fire can be a bit lower, perhaps 30%. Also reload cost of 35 is too much, I would say 25.

The AWD pistol is slightly too good, sure the range is very small, but if you close in with high TUs, there is not much that can stand 10 bullets in the body. I would reduce magazine down to 20 probably, and perhaps bullets to 8 in auto mode.

The shotgund is really nice (although the picture is not that nice), but recoil 70 is too much if you play with unmodded stats. I know you propose higher starting stats but for me playing vanilla stats, strength 70 is just too much, I lowered it to 60.

The combat rifle is really nice, although the picture is too grey/cartoon IMHO.

For the heavier weapons, I'll soon start using them. Can't wait trying the grenade launcher and the minigun

All in all, your mod is awesome, I really like ballistic weapons and you gave me a lot to play with.

[Ragnarok]

Personally, i think this mod is not balanced at all..

Once you get the basic tech done, you can basicly roll over almost any ufo.

Especially the Uzi and the Assault Shotgun are overpowered in my eyes. You can run into every ufo with Uzi and Shield and one shit Aliens, its not funny anymore.

And that is even after i nerved the UZI (mac10) damage.

I havent even bothered to get the heavy weapons tech...

I would suggest to revisit the stats. In addition, i would say get rid of the scope magnum, its a gimmick gun. Instead, put the desert eagle mk 1 in, build in 1983. Replaces the normal handgun.

[coma berenices]

Just finished the game on veteran and this mod. Was looking mainly into main game weapons rebalance rather than new advanced ballistics which I did not use at all.

Your scatter laser is overpowered, same plasma caster.

I never got to MAG weapons and also almost did not use any plasma at all. Was fun - yes. But too easy to beat aliens with these two guns (especially given their range).

I think it'd better to get rid of advanced ballistics and just rebalance main game weapons better so it's not boring as in vanilla version but also not too easy as with your modification.

[catmorbid]

Thanks for taking the time to check out my mod and especially thanks for the feedback!

Hi,

Still using your mod, catmorbid. There are a few typos in the geoscape tooltips, I don't know if you are interest in me pointing them out.

Also, some remarks:

The Magnum 44 pistol is a bit too weak IMHO. I would say the 35% TU cost for snap fire can be a bit lower, perhaps 30%. Also reload cost of 35 is too much, I would say 25.

The AWD pistol is slightly too good, sure the range is very small, but if you close in with high TUs, there is not much that can stand 10 bullets in the body. I would reduce magazine down to 20 probably, and perhaps bullets to 8 in auto mode.

The shotgund is really nice (although the picture is not that nice), but recoil 70 is too much if you play with unmodded stats. I know you propose higher starting stats but for me playing vanilla stats, strength 70 is just too much, I lowered it to 60.

The combat rifle is really nice, although the picture is too grey/cartoon IMHO.

For the heavier weapons, I'll soon start using them. Can't wait trying the grenade launcher and the minigun

All in all, your mod is awesome, I really like ballistic weapons and you gave me a lot to play with.

Regarding the recoil, I view it as a mechanism to limit the use of the more powerful weapons until you've progressed far enough to have soldiers with enough strength. I've made some tweaks that'll be in the next version, released when I'll get enough content in.

I'm sad to say the grenade launcher isn't that good, thanks to the limitations of the current game, but I'm hoping the CE would bring a fix to that. The minigun happens to be one of my favourites, but you really need the Predator Armour to get everything out of it

Personally, i think this mod is not balanced at all..

Once you get the basic tech done, you can basicly roll over almost any ufo.

Especially the Uzi and the Assault Shotgun are overpowered in my eyes. You can run into every ufo with Uzi and Shield and one shit Aliens, its not funny anymore.

And that is even after i nerved the UZI (mac10) damage.

I havent even bothered to get the heavy weapons tech...

I would suggest to revisit the stats. In addition, i would say get rid of the scope magnum, its a gimmick gun. Instead, put the desert eagle mk 1 in, build in 1983. Replaces the normal handgun.

Yeah, they probably are a bit unbalanced. That's why I started rebalancing the aliens, mainly giving them actual armour, that should change some of the weapon balance pretty drastically. E.g. shotgun would be practically useless versus Androns which have 50 to 80 armour currently, and sebillians as well, though you'll still carve through most caesans. There's a lot to test though so I haven't released it yet.

Just finished the game on veteran and this mod. Was looking mainly into main game weapons rebalance rather than new advanced ballistics which I did not use at all.

Your scatter laser is overpowered, same plasma caster.

I never got to MAG weapons and also almost did not use any plasma at all. Was fun - yes. But too easy to beat aliens with these two guns (especially given their range).

I think it'd better to get rid of advanced ballistics and just rebalance main game weapons better so it's not boring as in vanilla version but also not too easy as with your modification.

I realize not all want to use the advanced ballistics, which is why they're under a separate research tree, so fully optional to use. I just realized the MAGs also require the heavy advanced ballistics research, so did they even come up for research for you? Now that I think of it, it might actually be better to just ditch that research requirement.

I'll have to take another look at those two weapons, but strictly numbers-wise they should not be too unbalanced. The range might be key factor here though, also the burst length. Now that I think of it, especially the plasma caster could probably use a bit of tonedown there...

Thanks for your effort and feedback, it's really valuable to me

[coma berenices]

Thanks for taking the time to check out my mod and especially thanks for the feedback!

Regarding the recoil, I view it as a mechanism to limit the use of the more powerful weapons until you've progressed far enough to have soldiers with enough strength. I've made some tweaks that'll be in the next version, released when I'll get enough content in.

I'm sad to say the grenade launcher isn't that good, thanks to the limitations of the current game, but I'm hoping the CE would bring a fix to that. The minigun happens to be one of my favourites, but you really need the Predator Armour to get everything out of it

Yeah, they probably are a bit unbalanced. That's why I started rebalancing the aliens, mainly giving them actual armour, that should change some of the weapon balance pretty drastically. E.g. shotgun would be practically useless versus Androns which have 50 to 80 armour currently, and sebillians as well, though you'll still carve through most caesans. There's a lot to test though so I haven't released it yet.

I realize not all want to use the advanced ballistics, which is why they're under a separate research tree, so fully optional to use. I just realized the MAGs also require the heavy advanced ballistics research, so did they even come up for research for you? Now that I think of it, it might actually be better to just ditch that research requirement.

I'll have to take another look at those two weapons, but strictly numbers-wise they should not be too unbalanced. The range might be key factor here though, also the burst length. Now that I think of it, especially the plasma caster could probably use a bit of tonedown there...

Thanks for your effort and feedback, it's really valuable to me

Yes. Somehow MAG did not appear in my research so probably something is/was broken in version 0.2 I played. Regarding scatter laser and plasma caster I agree, burst length and range were crucial. I ended up using on end mission 4 scatter laser and only 2 plasma caster as first one was sufficient enough to not replace with plasma counterpart.

[Fucille]

I'm sure this has probably been discussed, but casually looking through the files, I noticed the minigun takes 70% TUs to fire instead of 80% like the LMG. This means that with Predator armour on, a minigun wielder can fire twice in one round, putting out a hundred bullets. This massively outstrips even the MAG storm in terms of average damage, so i thought you might want to look at that.

[catmorbid]

Yeah, I noticed that myself as well! But thanks for letting me know

That was before I actually knew everything the Predator Armour was doing, since there was no mention of this AP reduction in the game files I'll be grouping the minigun together with two other (new) weapons intended to be used with Predator armour, so they'll have TU costs adjusted accordingly. They'll be usable with other armours, but you'll be badly gimped.

[greatergood45]

I'll have a look and give you feedback ASAP

Edited July 3, 2014 by greatergood45

[catmorbid]

Thanks greatergood45!

I'm very close to getting a new version released, it's still largely untested, so I'm trying make sure everything works like its supposed to. Unfortunately the new version breaks savegames, since I introduced 3 more researches

Version 0.4 will include (among many things):

- New weapons: flamer, desert eagle, m79 & sawed off variant, heavy MG, ultra heavy rifle

- Rebalanced Aliens

- Rebalanced Alien Weapons

The alien and their weapon rebalance should generally make the game a lot more challenging now, but I'm still in the process of testing it out. Unfortunately the grenade launchers don't yet work like they're supposed to (hardcoded restrictions), and they're instead practically rocket launchers with just one ammo type now, but hopefully we'll get to change that.