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Please give option to disable psionics


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This may be a popular or unpopular opinion, I'd like to hear you guys opinion.

 

So psi has been quite an important part of the Xenonauts, X-COM and XCOM games and have added mystery and unpredictability and overall improved the story. My problem is it featuring in combat.

 

Start mission with well equipped squad. Let's do this! MG in the back spontaneously gun down the two in front of him. Move across the map making no tactical errors. Enemies are taken by surprise and barely have time to fire back. Two experienced soldiers run around cowering in corners. Make good use of my best shield guy in open area. Confidently holding his ground defending comrade behind him. Drop shield, stand up and both get shot. Finally at the UFO, all stacked up and almost ready, just have to reload. Rifleman fires at a wall pinning two of his mates. Allright that's solved and everyone is doing good. Shotgun wielding god who basically carried the mission so far get scared by a lizard or cloud or something and drops his weapon, runs into the ufo and is evenly distributed over the walls by reaction fire.

I save the game and consider savescumming. End up just playing some other game instead.

This is why I've stopped playing Xenonauts and most Xcoms. Psi for me just makes the combat arbitrary and unfair. When I get my own magic spells it doesn't get much more fun because both sides just kill themselves. It is in my opinion a game mechanic that punish you without a previous error or foolish move on your part. In chess it's not allowed to flick elastic bands at the oposite player's pieces, just like I don't like bs magic spells interfering in a TACTICAL combat SIMULATOR.

Let me know what you think. Do I have a point or should I just git gud?

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While I consider this a special X-COM spice, I agree that an option to disable morale and psi should align it better with modern expectations that you don't suddently lost control of your units, at least not without a reasonable / reliable way to bring them back.

I think XCOM 2 (and XCOM) handled it very well not by removing morale and psi but make them more forgiving.  Panic soldiers will find cover and shot some aliens, instead of harming the team or wasting action on doing nothing, and is the status relatively easy to cure.  Your soldiers may get controlled, but the range is limited and not only is there an obvious psi link that point you to the controller, but the controller is relatively weak and there are multiple ways to break the link.

Option to enable/disable morale and psi will make it more difficult to design/develope the game.  Using X1 as example, medel would lost their usefulness, a whole attribute become meaningless, enemy squads need to be adjusted, and some research reports may need to be edited.  Personally, I'd be happy if we can make them less annoying.  Or simply remove them.  I won't miss them.

Edited by Sheepy
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  • 3 weeks later...

I absolutely agree and it sounds like we have an identical way of of looking at a tactical challenge.

I really do wonder how many people think psi, nukes, magic spells, free moves (ones with silly explanations that don't fit a games core mechanics.. xcom2 ahem) and various fant-ass-tical gamey things..., actually lessen these basically great tactical games. I do.

I also prefer an M14 and an M1911 over a ray gun any day. Not because they're better but because they are far cooler to look at and listen to.

Now I don't have anything against people wanting more than a solid tactical challenge and want a turbo button, win spell, get out of jail free, go directly to jail ..., get one blah blah free, etc...

I just hope there's not a lot of development time used up on human psi stuff is all...

I guess Psi use by Aliens is expected, interesting and.. well.. alien.. as long as it's not an auto kill your soldier(s) in disguise of being a challenging AI move or the "Go kill your squadmate(s) annoying.

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Since this wasn't pointed yet, here my input on this topic (again):

In the current game ( Xenonauts 1 ) and most likely in the future game ( Xenonauts 2 ) you already have the option to modify or outright "disable" psionics.

Well, maybe not the most obvious way like having a menu-item.

 

But the game was aimed to be quite easily mod-able, you don't need to know "rocket-science" in order to "disable" the psionics.

 

In "Xenonauts 1", all you need to do is to open file called "psionicpower.xml", look for the lines you want to modify and increase the "action-point / AP"-requirements to "impossible"-amount (E.G. to 999).
(( I personally only "disabled" the "hallucination"-attack since the "berserk"-effect is a little overpowered in comparison to "mind control", at least in the "Community Edition" of this game. ))

 

There are also some nice mods to customize the psionic-efffect further (E.G. changing the "weight"-values of which power is being more often used).

 

(( I am aware that this was more of request done before hand for the "Xenonauts 2", but I wanted to point out this possibility just in case, as I said. ))

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  • 3 weeks later...

I kinda like PSI as it does prevent the issue of juggernauting. Your soldiers become so powerful that nothing can stop them. Now, in the original X-COM games, you could get PSI which instead completely skyrocketed the juggernauting. You could defeat any mission without even leaving the ship. That was all kinds of broken.

Xenonauts took the route of only giving the aliens PSI and this was better. In addition, only I think about a handful of alien types got PSI at all (Ceasan Psion, Ceasan Officer, Ceasan Leader, Preator), which meant that it was a relatively rare occurance and a rare challenge. 

Something I think could be added is to give PSI a range limit. Perhaps not for something like a Preator (it's Aura of Dread should accurately hit the entire map) but for any other PSI user. Just let this be slightly longer than sight range, or perhaps even shorter, forcing aliens to close distance before using PSI (mind you (sorry), you can still use PSI through walls).

All in all, I never thought PSI was *that* much of a problem in Xenonauts. It was an added challenge, and it was relatively rare.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Things I would propose to counter the "humans aren't psychic" imbalance.

1)  Mental discipline center, a place to train your soldiers to better resist psychic attacks.

2)  Psi scrambler:  Requires the power source of the dropship, but interferes with psi effects within a certain radius.

3)  Anti-psi helmets, for some measure of protection.

 

And I'm going to disagree with the "it's a counter to juggernauting" argument.  By the time you have both the research and the materials to Juggernaut, you've earned a mission or two before the aliens deploy counter-armor weapons.

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  • 1 month later...

Not sure about how exactly psi was implemented in Xenonauts, but in original X-com, aliens were supposed to only target soldiers that are/have been in their line of sight (aliens had temporal memory/vision of your troops for several turns after sighing). But due to buggy implementation once even one of your soldiers/vehicles got sighted the whole team could be targeted by psi attacks. Community projects like UFOExtender later fixed that, and made some additional tweaks, such as: 

  • Alien Psi Attack Fix: Aliens will only remember the location of an unseen target for 1 turn. Of course, a successful Psionic Attack may renew this memory.

Without such fixes it was incredibly annoying to face alien psi, because it led to pure RNG: basically, anyone of your soldiers could have been psi attacked anywhere at any time. Also, it helped to incorporate Psi into tactics layer, instead of being above it.

Moving forward, I think, Xenonauts 2 should learn from this and implement Alien Psi properly.

I'm against having human psi abilities, but it's just a matter of preference: I prefer realism in tactics, and think human psi strays into power fantasy territory

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5 hours ago, Slider2k said:

Not sure about how exactly psi was implemented in Xenonauts, but in original X-com, aliens were supposed to only target soldiers that are/have been in their line of sight (aliens had temporal memory/vision of your troops for several turns after sighing). But due to buggy implementation once even one of your soldiers/vehicles got sighted the whole team could be targeted by psi attacks. Community projects like UFOExtender later fixed that, and made some additional tweaks, such as: 

  • Alien Psi Attack Fix: Aliens will only remember the location of an unseen target for 1 turn. Of course, a successful Psionic Attack may renew this memory.

This is a common misconception that AI was able to cheat vision, but I have extensively tested this and have had other retest it for me, but AI does not cheat in X-COM (prior to turn 20 / turn 10 if 2 or less remain).   

Alien's gain vision on you in the following ways:
1. They outright see a soldier.
2. They mind control one of your soldiers and he see's another soldier - this is the commonly how MC cascades for them.
3.  This is the one most people don't realize - you shoot at and hit an alien - no matter where you are on the map.   This is the AI's only recourse against people who abuse smoke / squadsite and it really works wonders when they have MC.

4. There are a number of map errors (especially in TFTD) where you can see through the landing craft from certain angles.  This one works both ways, very abusable in the lightning.

 

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Thanks for actual testing details. Still, it is a fact that there was a mechanic of AI "remembering" your troop positions after sighting:

  • Int: Intelligence of the alien ranked from 2-8. This number corresponds to the number of turns the alien will remember the location of your troops.

For the purpose of Psionics, being remembered for 8 turns was a bit overboard: essentially, once a soldier gets sighted they will remain sighted for the rest of the mission (or until psi enemies killed), being targetted by psi spam, and having successful psi attacks refreshing that counter. Hence aforementioned fix.

Still, even without the fix the psionics system (excluding human psi) was more fair in the OG X-Com (same with panic system) in comparison to Xenonuats, where AI didn't need to sight first, could target randomly anyone anytime, had too high MC success chance even on best troops (with high bravery).

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I'm all for there being an option to disable it for those that prefer it.

In any tactical game versus the AI, it should be expected that the AI gets some unfair advantages, as it doesn't stand a chance against a skilled player.  I've always enjoyed the PSI aspect in every XCOM-like game, as it adds something exotic.  We are fighting aliens after all.  If you want a super realistic tactics simulation in your vanilla alien invasion game, you're probably looking in the wrong place.

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You could allow aliens to remember the position of the soldier and have psi skills target that area. More like a mind grenade than a mind bullet. Most powers should still only affect a single target in that area but others could affect more. If you want to avoid psi attacks you shoot and move, keep mobile and keep out of sight. 

In the end I would prefer psi powers to be present but they do need care to make them a challenge that can be countered rather than a frustration that you just have to put up with.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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  • 1 month later...

They need to be LOS.  And by that, I mean the alien using the psi ability needs to actually SEE the target, not the current setup where it sees it by proxy because someone else saw it.  Having one psi alien sitting at the top of a large ship, hitting your guys on the opposite side of the map with psi abilities is just garbage.

I was never a fan of Psi or MC in the original two X-COM games.  I usually either modded them out completely, or turned on the built-in mod of OPENXCOM to make them LOS.  A million times easier to deal with, but still possible to lose a squad to a V. Large full of psi-capable units.

In X1, we have the problem that psi is basically one-sided.  To my knowledge, we never get the ability to use it.  However, building up resistance to it is also fairly easy, it's just based on bravery.  Once you get bravery rolled over to 99+/99+, your soldier is basically psi proof.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'll throw in my two cents in the discussion.

Personally, I absolutely hate mind control in games. It is not fun losing control over your character(s), and it is even less fun, to say the least, when one of your guys kills others because screw you, player!

Fear? Sure. Panic attacks? Why not. In XCOM and XCOM2 they were implemented to be at least manageable - panicked soldiers hunkered down. While it was losing you a turn with some soldiers, it wasn't a guaranteed death. Mind control though... Even considering all the changes done to it in XCOM and XCOM2, compared to the original games, it is still frustrating and not in a slightest bit fun.

I'm yet to encounter a person who could honestly say: "Yeah, I love losing control over my character and see them mowing down their friends, this mechanics is great!"

Edited by Kligan
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  • 4 weeks later...

I would love for PSI to be something more creative than "mind control" and "run the frick away". Illusions could be cool. A successful mind control attack could create a "mind illusion" giving the impression of an alien that isn't real. 

You could find out it wasn't real by it shooting you and the shot going through, for instance. But it would make you play like normal, but there would be some smoke and mirrors trying to figure out where the *real* aliens are. 

Fear, yes, but the soldiers should make relatively intelligent choices during panic. No one who panics runs *towards* what scares the crap out of them. 

PSI attacks should never directly harm you (such as that utterly awful berserk event), but instead provide an additional challenge. If not, it's just annoying and pointless.

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  • 1 month later...

First off, the Lines of site errors in the games need to be fixed 100%. I have been playing Xeno1 lately and it really is almost game breaking to me how how aliens can "cheat" when in Ufos and other times due to the Maps poor implementation of or blocking of LOS.

XCOM-2 Sucks and really is not a good analogy for any good game. The only good thing about it is the Soldier and weapon customization with good mods.

Psionics should be entirely race driven, not by just a couple of elite's therefore all "sectoids" should have some form of Psionics and the level at which they can control should be then driven by their rank. So if you had a ufo full of "sectoids" then you should have many different style of attacks and they should mostly be psionic making them much deadlier than most other species. Only with a successful mind control should a psionic attack be able to use the soldiers vision to spot other soldiers. All other attacks should be done with the aliens los.

If you have the ability to "turn off" psionics it should be easily done by removing that race entirely from the invasion and removing any counter psi tech for the human if implemented. I think this would be a great option to add for the players who hate psionics.

For those who do like playing with it, then countering tech needs to be available to be researched to lessen its effects, but should never negate it 100% multiple attacks should have cumulative effects on the soldiers. It should not however be an instant effect, and should wear down the soldier over time until they reach a "breaking point"

Edited by Xeryx
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