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Suicide bomber aliens


Policenaut

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I'm trying to create a new alien type that is supposed to act as autonomous mines (i.e suicide bombers) that move around and explode when they get close to Xenonauts or when Xenonauts get too close to them. Making them explode on death is already easily doable but making them kill themselves is proving to be a challenge. The closest I got was experimenting with their sight range and a rocket bullettype weapon with very short range. However, the AI seems to be too good for this as it simply tries to avoid killing itself (as it should, heh) but that's working against this idea.

Could the ability for a new bullettype or an ability which causes damage to the attacker instead of the target be implemented? It should be capable of "reaction fire" and have the ability to always perform "reaction fire" no matter how many TU they spent last turn etc.

Edit: Alternately an ability which just makes the unit die when you move in the proximity of 1-2 tiles around it.

Edited by Policenaut
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Incidently, this is what X-Division is working on right now as well.

I always thought you can work around that with the AI things like:

                    DamagePreference:            The weight given to the damage done to the target (damage / maxHP),

etc ...

Try a melee weapon with aoe damage, thats as far as we are.

Give me the specs of what you used in your future tests.

 

X-Division will have the definite answer in the next few days.

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I tried using both melee and normal bullettypes with impact radius AOE but unlike rocket bullettype they didnt seem to damage the attacker, only the targets. Another problem with the rocket bullettype is that reaction fire doesn't seem to work with it in my experience. I will play around with DamagePreference and other AI settings as well, thanks for suggesting them.

Ideally would be a new feature in X:CE but I'll try working with what I've got and I'll share any future findings in this thread.

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The only aoe damage type is rocket. 

You can make them kill themselves with some ai edit. 

Using reaction with this is beyond me. 

The problem is the damage and the unit hp should be nearly same.  So it should not have so much hp and resistance. But it should arrive to melee range too. 

I think it's not doable without any Extra code. You can do it but it will be very limited. 

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Adding the MeleeWeapons ability fixed the issues I had with this. Just make the suicide unit carry a rocket type weapon with range="1" with 1TU cost and edit its aiprops minimumaccuracy to 0.01 and engagement range to 1.0. They still can't reaction fire so they will only explode when killed or during alien turns.

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My unit is a slime creature that is very slow (very low TU) but has a very high amount of health. Its deathexplosion does not cause any damage but is used for particle effects and spawning a permanent slime tile after it dies, which hurts units that walk over it. Its "weapon" causes extremely high damage and has enough AOE radius (1.5) that it always gets caught in the blast but only a range of 1 so they have to get in melee range to use it. It also has a TU cost of only 1% so it pretty much can use its "weapon" every time it's next to any humans.

The idea is that they're very slow but very tough, so they'll slowly move towards your units while being able to take a lot of damage and if it's able to get close enough, splat! If Xenonauts kill it, it does not explode so when one appears you should focus all your firepower on it and never let it get close enough during alien turns.

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Hmm.. it's a different approach. But if it's detected, it could be kited easily and he got so much HP and his weapon is so powerful to kill even itself at full HP, it's a one shot weapon (kills anything with any armor if attack), am i right?

Another possible problem could be about meleevehicle AI. If you use it, it will attack civillians or vehicles first %95 of the time even there is xenos near by. At my tests, i created 2 AI, A spawns B. A is a normal AI without meleevehicle and B is meleevehicle and they are both under same custom race. When i was fighting against A at close range (2-3 tiles) with many Xenos near by, after i killed A and it spawned B, B lost interest with any xenos around him and rush to a civillian even out of my view range in a building.

So a really slow slime which targets civillians and vehicles could create some balancing problems. 

Here is the AIprob i created: aiprops.xml

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Yes, its weapon does enough damage to kill pretty much every unit in one hit and it has enough HP to survive a lot of shots, even the high end weapons. Making all your units focus their fire on them makes them manageable though.

About the focus on civilians/vehicles over xenonauts, how about editing the Faction values? I looked through your aiprops and you use the default for your MeleeVehicle units. Civilians and AlliedUnits have lower values than Xenonauts so switching those for the MeleeVehicles units might help? It won't help with the vehicles beeing a priority but that is less important than chasing civilians far away. Another thing worth trying is very low sight values.

Here's a preview of the unit as well if anyone is curious.

 jellynoid_idle.png

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3 minutes ago, Charon said:

Acidlings in action. Critic points:

  • The disableDamageScaling="1" is not working ( damage still gets randomified ) so i will have to lower the hp/increase damage. Either one of those. This is the reason the acidlings are not killing themselves straight away all the time.
  • The gas cloud may be too large, maybe a 1 radius smaller ?
  • The current damage soources are
  1. The direct radius 1.5 attack which kills the acidling themself. 20 damage in comparasion to 20 hp. The radius will get decreased to 1. The hp will get reduced to 10 so acidling are always be killing themself.
  2. The deathexplosion when the acidling gets killed. 10 damage
  3. The gas cloud triggered with a 100 % smoke chance. 20 damage. radius will get reduced to 2.5 and smoke chance to 80%
  • This is phase 1 material, so lets do the math. Jackal armour has k30 e20 i5 c5, fox armour has k20 e12 i40 30c 8 both are phase 1 ).
    When all sources hit jackal armour wearers primary target receives (5 - 20= -15 ) + ( 5 - 10= -5 ) + (5 - 20 = -15) = -35 damage. Side damage with gas =-20, and without is =-5. Wounds will additionnally be created.
    Jackal armour: (30 - 20 = 10) + ( 30 - 10= 20 ) + (30 - 20 = 10) = 40. So 0 damage for a fox armour wearer.

These number make me believe that they can still be increased and tweaked upwards for a more dnagerous foe. Right now they dont use mitigation at all, to increase the importance of anti chemical armour sets, but is up to debate. They all have high AP damage to stress the paralysisng factor of the acid. The closer you are and primarily sources receive more ap damage.

 

Data:


    <Props  sightRange="18" moveSpeed="350" stairsMoveSpeed="80" deathExplosion="weapon.explosive.acidling" suppressionMultiplier="0.0" />
    <GibbedSpectre name="particles/gibbed_xeno/gibbed_xeno" />

    <Rank  type="XAcidlingGuard">

      <Props APs="100" Resilience="10" Strength="60" Accuracy="300" Reflexes="50" Bravery="100" Abilities="" CrouchDisabled="1" />
      <Armour kinetic="0" energy="0" chemical="0" incendiary="0" />
      <Items killed="Items.XDroneCorpse" stunned="Items.XDrone" />
      <BloodHitSprite name="particles/hit_xenoblood/hit_xenoblood" />
      <Equipments>
        
        <Equipment>
          <PrimaryWeapon name="weapon.acidlingspray" />
          <Belt>
          </Belt>
        </Equipment>

    <Weapon MODMERGEATTRIBUTE="name" MODMERGE="insert" name="weapon.explosive.acidling" >
        <Ammos>
            <Ammo name="ammo.none" type="chemical" damage="10" stunDamage="0" empDamage="0" mitigation="0" apDamage="25" isOverdamage="1">
                <Impact spectre="particles/hybridexplode/chemicalexplosion" radius="2.5" sound="GibbedUnitSound" fireChance="0" smokeChance="100" gasType="Acid" />
            </Ammo>
        </Ammos>
    </Weapon>

  <GasType MODMERGEATTRIBUTE="name" MODMERGE="insert" name="Acid">
    <Anim name="particles/acidsmoke/acidsmoke" />
    <Props damage="20" stunDamage="0" damageType="chemical" dissipationChance="30" accuracyReduction="40" />
  </GasType>

AI is classified yet.

 

Enjoy:

 

 

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