A more sophisticated weapon system

[Rodmar18]

I come with some ideas about how the Xenonauts-1 weapon system (weapon and ammunition definition files) could have been more sophisticated, still keeping the same general game mechanics. Feel free to append. Released game has not to use any of them, but the implementation could be done so that modders could use them if needed.

1. Different ammunition for a weapon and/or a weapon's fire mode. We had it only for hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades.
2. Separate the suppression power into two terms: fire mode and ammunition, that would stack (or either have the ammunition's power supersede the weapon's power when higher). In Xenonauts-1, suppression fire would depend only on fire mode (excepted for hand grenades, but not for RPGs). For instance, an explosive bullet could generate more threat than a simple one, whether fired in burst or not.
3. Assign several damage types to ammunition, as well as associated radius of AoE. We had only the possibility to generate smoke and fire, to deal EMP damage (an stun damage if proper flag was set) on top of the ammunition's damage type.
4. Assign a range modifier to fire modes (and ammunition) as well. Only weapon would be associated with range and precision.
5. Add more "radius rules" for AoE effects (I'm not sure here because I don't know how Xenonauts works with this). We had very small radius hand grenades, perhaps necessary to keep the fight fun. But what if the explosive radius is smaller than the kinetic (shrapnel) radius? While not too harmful for balance (?), that would be so more realistic when you consider the lethal radius of an irl frag hand grenade).
6. Add more damage rules for AoE effects: lower damage with distance (energy, blast) and/or lower chance to get damaged with distance (shrapnel, fire). Also differentiate between centrifuge effects (shrapnel, irradiation, spray) that can be somewhat blocked by a shield and forward armour, and whole area affects (burst, fire) that can't.
7. Implement a spray attack template, that would be useful to flame-throwers, not focused wave effects (sonic, energy...).
8. Redesign some technological effects. This was discussed elsewhere and requires to be backed by enough technical knowledge, so that we feel a real difference between technologies. E.g. plasma should generate a slight EMP damaged (bullets), a fusion explosion should generate blast (explosive) and thermal damage, as well as EMP and chemical (NBRC) damage. I understand that balancing would be harder, but one mean to achieve this could be to ask oneself how well an armoured soldier (and buildings) would resist the global effect of a projectile/explosion: What if he wears a NBRC suit? A steel plate? Etc. Also, most heavy smoke should harm whoever doesn't wear a breather (stun or choking damage, chemical damage).
9. Add a third secondary effects for some ammunition: contaminate tile. We only had fire and smoke tiles. Contaminated tiles would behave the same as fire tiles, except that the chemical/NRBC armour would be checked instead of the thermal armour. It would be better if there is no visual effect attached to these tiles, however.

[Chris]

Quite a bit of this stuff is already in there (or you can generate those effects by using systems that already exist); I'll wait until the beta comes out to discuss exactly what is there but in general ammo has the power to modify most properties on weapons and spawn various types of environmental effects.

 

[Decius]

Having things like airborne hazards (and the tools to protect against them) would be interesting.

If it isn't going to be expensive to enable modding support for the ability to give ammo arbitrary properties (dragon's breath EMP shotgun rounds , skittles MG ammo fired from a pistol), that would also be good. If things like allowing each round in a magazine to have different effects would crowd out other features, it's probably not worth it.

[Rodmar18]

My English is so awful in my first message above... If it's not clear, I ended all my points referring to what was/would be used back in Xenonauts-1.

In Xenonauts-2, will we be able to switch between two non empty magazines (at least for multi-ammo weapons), the same way we can exchange RPGs in a launcher (although RPGs are de facto "full magazines")?

[Chris]

11 hours ago, Decius said:

Having things like airborne hazards (and the tools to protect against them) would be interesting.

If it isn't going to be expensive to enable modding support for the ability to give ammo arbitrary properties (dragon's breath EMP shotgun rounds , skittles MG ammo fired from a pistol), that would also be good. If things like allowing each round in a magazine to have different effects would crowd out other features, it's probably not worth it.

 

2 hours ago, Rodmar18 said:

My English is so awful in my first message above... If it's not clear, I ended all my points referring to what was/would be used back in Xenonauts-1.

In Xenonauts-2, will we be able to switch between two non empty magazines (at least for multi-ammo weapons), the same way we can exchange RPGs in a launcher (although RPGs are de facto "full magazines")?

So basically now all types of armour have % resistances against various types of damage (kinetic / laser / plasma / chemical / etc) and you can set a specific ammo magazine to do a specific type of damage. Therefore you could create a new M-16 rifle clip that made it do laser damage if you wanted to, or stick taser stun rounds in a shotgun etc.

The UI isn't working yet, but you should just be able to right click on the ammo quickslot to cycle between the different kinds of ammo you're carrying and then you can reload the weapon as normal to change the magazine. The previous magazine is discarded unless full, as we don't want to be messing about with half-full magazine and tracking which specific magazine is where.

Ironically the airborne hazards were something you could already do in X1 - we already had poison gas etc, and you could have made "contaminated ground" just by making invisible gas that did not dissipate. However in X2 we may well create a special type of breathable damage so we can also potentially incorporate rebreathers that make soldiers immune to poison gas.

[jamoecw]

i'm guessing the damage types will be moddable as well? i am not sure how useful it will be to the base game, but putting in kinetic and hardness damage types can give some realistic diversity to ballistic weapons. AP ammo doing more 'hardness' damage and less kinetic would help it to 'penetrate' certain armors and do less damage against less rigid armor. HP rounds would be the opposite of such relative to normal rounds.

what about having damage dependent on what another damage type does to the armor, like HEAP ammo? so if a specific type of ammo does more of one type of damage then causes more damage of another type.

something like 5 hardness+(dealt hardness*2 explosive)+2 kinetic against 40%hardness armor, 0% explosive armor, 0%kinetic armor would do 3 hardness damage (.6*5), 6 explosive damage (3*2*1.0), 2 kinetic damage. against 40%hardness armor, 50% explosive armor, 0%kinetic armor would do 3 hardness damage (.6*5), 3 explosive damage (3*2*.5), 2 kinetic damage. against 80%hardness armor, 0% explosive armor, 0%kinetic armor would do 1 hardness damage (.2*5), 2 explosive damage (1*2*1.0), 2 kinetic damage.

it probably wouldn't help the base game too much as it would add some complexity to the game, and aside from maybe some poison darts, tazer, or particle stream weapons i don't see it as having much impact overall. it would be cool for modders though.

[Chris]

Armor penetration is modeled by weapons / ammo having a penetration value that lowers the resistance of the armour accordingly. For instance if Wolf Armour has 40% kinetic resistance and you shoot a kinetic M-16 round with 10% penetration on it, the Wolf Armour will effectively only have a 30% resistance value instead.

[Arturius]

22 hours ago, Chris said:

The previous magazine is discarded unless full, as we don't want to be messing about with half-full magazine and tracking which specific magazine is where.

Ahh, that's not good, as it will lead players into situation where they want to haul maximum possible amount of ammo magazines of every type.

Let's say that I start the mission with normal ammo, and after firing my first shot I notice an alien that is susceptible to fire - then I would have to irreversibly throw out 99% full normal ammo magazine that I might still need later in this mission.

[Decius]

On 5/25/2018 at 6:59 AM, Chris said:

Armor penetration is modeled by weapons / ammo having a penetration value that lowers the resistance of the armour accordingly. For instance if Wolf Armour has 40% kinetic resistance and you shoot a kinetic M-16 round with 10% penetration on it, the Wolf Armour will effectively only have a 30% resistance value instead.

Floored at 0%, or is AP going to be strictly better/strictly worse than HP in mid-range situations?

For example, if a HP round does 12 damage 0 penetration, and an AP round does 10 damage 20% penetration, and there is no floor, the AP round will do 10*120%=12 damage against something with 0% armor, the same as the HP round. At 20% armor, the AP round would do 10 damage while the HP round did 9.6, outperforming until at 100% armor the AP round does 2 vs 0; with those numbers and no floor, AP ammo does strictly more damage if the enemy's armor is nonnegative. If we adjust HP ammo to do 15 damage instead, against 50% resistance the HP ammo does 7.5 damage while the AP does 7. (They break even at 60% resistance, doing 6 damage; AP ammo with those numbers is less ineffective than HP ammo only above that range)

To find numbers where AP ammo is noticeably better against targets with armor in the 40-60% range, and HP ammo is noticeably more effective against unarmored targets, try giving AP ammo 60% penetration, give HP ammo 1.5 times the damage, and floor effective resistance at 0%. HP ammo is more effective down to 33% resistance, then AP ammo becomes radically more effective. Very heavily armored targets will still reduce the effectiveness of AP rounds, and there's even an option for base resistances above 100% (although effective resistance should probably be capped at 100%, to prevent a shot from healing a particularly well-armored target).

Alternately, things like high-expansion rounds could instead apply a multiplier to the target's resistance: 15 damage with a 2x resistance multiplier against 30% resistance would double the resistance to 60% and deal a mere 6 damage, about the same as the 10 damage unmodified round.

 

If the armor piercing value of ammunition isn't a big enough difference to be worth the tactical costs of picking which ammo type to run, the effort to implement the feature is wasted; there has to be a situation where using AP ammo is better and a different situation where it is worse, or it becomes a global upgrade.

[Chris]

On 5/31/2018 at 10:55 AM, Decius said:

If the armor piercing value of ammunition isn't a big enough difference to be worth the tactical costs of picking which ammo type to run, the effort to implement the feature is wasted; there has to be a situation where using AP ammo is better and a different situation where it is worse, or it becomes a global upgrade.

This feature is largely for use by modders; from my point of view armour penetration is largely driven by the weapon class (e.g. sniper rifle vs assault rifle) and the ammo type drives the type of damage that weapon inflicts (e.g. kinetic shotgun rounds vs incendiary rounds vs taser stun rounds). 

Still, it's pretty easy to imagine a situation where Androns or specific armoured variants of certain races have a very high kinetic resistance and AP rounds are useful against them, and HP rounds are more useful against everything else. But that's for modders to worry about.