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Wraith. They are useless


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Title says it all.

From what I observe they only shoot if there's a target in sight. If not they warp next to my guys and get killed next turn (hopefully). They did attack my squad from behind though... ONCE!

What are your thoughts, guys? Do you feel like their behaviour needs to be changed?

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They used to teleport next to your troops and fire all in the same turn! That was not cool. They probably should always attempt to teleport behind your guys, but I have no idea how the AI would know what "behind" really is other by taking an average of the direction all your men are facing. Ideally they'd teleport in behind your guys, in cover, and crouched down to engage the following turn.

Edited by StellarRat
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I think the best way for them to work would be to shoot *then* teleport away so you can't attack them back. I.e. use them as skirmishers.

Obviously, teleporting to surround your troops would be excellent too, but at StellarRat says, they can't really do that unless they know where you are.

(As it happens, this is more or less the same problem Floaters had in XCom 2012)

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They're not particulary terrifying, yeah. The AI can't seem to handle the teleportation most of the time. I've seen a couple of times when a Wraith teleports into cover instead of just sitting in my firing lines. That's nice.

Shooting and then warping could work too I guess.

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Also I think there's a flaw in Harridan and Large Drone behaviour too: Harridans always use aimed shot, therefore being suppressed they don't even think of using snap shot and prefer to run away; as for the Large Drones - I never saw them shooting their badass cannon. All they do is just closing point blank to my soldiers and, hopefully, die next turn.

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Also I think there's a flaw in Harridan and Large Drone behaviour too: Harridans always use aimed shot, therefore being suppressed they don't even think of using snap shot and prefer to run away; as for the Large Drones - I never saw them shooting their badass cannon. All they do is just closing point blank to my soldiers and, hopefully, die next turn.

Re: harridan I think it might be because they have a rather high minimum accuracy requirement before deciding to fire in aiprops.xml This forces them basically to almost always use aimed shot I believe.

I reduced it by half and they now seem to be happy to use snap shots or normal shots sometimes.

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Fundamentally Teleportation is such a huge advantage that its either monstrously unfair to the player or so badly nerfed that they're better off without it, and a comfortable middle ground is really difficult to achieve in my opinion. Teleporting and then firing is just flat out cheating, but teleporting into your LoS and then sitting there while you wail on them is boring. The only way for it to be fair would be for the AI to use it much more intelligently than an Ai is really capable off, I.E. taking rooftops and second story buildings, teleporting into areas you think you've cleared already, taking full advantage of squadsight, etc. At that point they're hard to differentiate from Harridans however. (Incidentally Harridans are terrifying.)

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I agree that it's unfair for wraiths to teleport and shoot in the same turn. Instead, I think wraiths should show a tendency to teleport in as a pair (or maybe more) when there's a trooper that has been separated from the pack. For example when a scout has ventured too far forward or a heavy weapons specialist is lagging too far back from the squad (e.g. mathematically wraiths should target the soldier that has the largest standard deviation from the average distance between troopers).

When faced with a pair of wraiths the lone soldier would have the following options:

  1. The soldier can kill one wraith only to get killed by the second one on the next turn
  2. Run away until the rest of the squad can be brought closer for support
  3. See if a sniper/heavy weapons can take out one of the wraiths from a distance first, then have the wraith-targeted soldier decide between the above two options.

The aggressiveness of wraith behavior can also be scaled up by difficulty in the following manner:

  1. On easier difficulty settings wraiths could always teleport in adjacent pairs, giving the lone soldier the option of getting an easy 2-for-1 grenade kill. This behavior also teaches the newbie player the dangers of having squads too close together.
  2. On higher difficulty settings, 2+ wraiths (increase number with difficulty) can teleport in but show up more spaced apart (surrounding the soldier using their own squad tactics) to reduce the effectiveness of area of effect weapons and cut-off retreat paths.
  3. If setup in the xenopedia as a race specific behavior (i.e. on veteran wraiths always show up in 3s), another atmospheric element can be introduced if you only see 1 wraith teleporting in (with the other ones always teleporting into locations not in the soldier’s line of sight; e.g., a nearby building). The soldier knows that the lone wraith has companions, but doesn’t know where. This could really add to the tension in night terror missions.

The above wraith behaviors would set wraiths up as a unique challenge that requires sound squad tactics to overcome (e.g. adequate mutual cover).

Edited by Barakinishu
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Thanks :)

I'll probably enable a pre-teleport weight set and post-teleport weight set in a mod.

And add a range check maybe for teleport as well.

:)

I run Wraiths with the actual mechanics and this settings make that they teleport out of Xenonauts LoS in heavy cover possition, to execute ambush in the next turn.

About Aggressiveness

I believe that Wraith need to be a unit that can teleport and shot in the same turn or vice versa. There is no problem with this mechanic actually I found that this promote that player think first after ending the turns.

:) This bring a very interesting element.

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