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Suicide Grenades and Alien Alloy Starvation


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- Human (thrown) grenades:  Has anyone checked the percentage of self-damaging throws? 
I think this issue came up before, but unless a soldier is wounded or impaired in some other way or facing high obstacles, I think the percentage of throws that land close enough to kill or injure the person throwing should be about 5%, max.  For soldiers to throw a grenade right down in front of themselves, we're talking either dropping it when it is thrown, or being seriously depressed and wanting to end it all.  If they're that depressed, it's probably because they were stuck in the wheel of the drop ship the previous turn...

- Alien Alloy Starvation
This has also been discussed somewhat, but for the 3rd or 4th time in a row, my game will be ending due to being unable to make more advanced anything because I don't have alien materials and can't make better aircraft or weapons or much of anything else.  Perhaps the humans might be able to pick up some working weapons and ammo on the battlefield sometimes?

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Yeah, the grenade thing is a tad iffy. I think it's supposed to count for flubbing a throw and having it bounce, but it really comes across as your recruits having suffered brain damage sometimes. Instructions inclear, shoved portable nuke into shoe. Like I think the odds of a grenade backfiring in Silent Storm was even higher, but it was usually your fault, because you aimed for a window, it missed the window, hit a pipe, and rolled back down. Or those moments when it flew, hit a guy, and rolled back. Either way, XD's fix to this was just to give them a really nice accuracy bonus. Somehow they still couldn't aim past smoke worth a crap, but not sure how they pulled that off. Just would be nice to have backfires be rare, rather than the norm for sure. 

 

I'd imagine the balance will be nicer, they are working on a crap load of other stuff for now, nothing's going to be balanced.

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On 1/21/2020 at 12:49 PM, maxm222 said:

- Human (thrown) grenades:  Has anyone checked the percentage of self-damaging throws? 
I think this issue came up before, but unless a soldier is wounded or impaired in some other way or facing high obstacles, I think the percentage of throws that land close enough to kill or injure the person throwing should be about 5%, max.  For soldiers to throw a grenade right down in front of themselves, we're talking either dropping it when it is thrown, or being seriously depressed and wanting to end it all.  If they're that depressed, it's probably because they were stuck in the wheel of the drop ship the previous turn...

- Alien Alloy Starvation
This has also been discussed somewhat, but for the 3rd or 4th time in a row, my game will be ending due to being unable to make more advanced anything because I don't have alien materials and can't make better aircraft or weapons or much of anything else.  Perhaps the humans might be able to pick up some working weapons and ammo on the battlefield sometimes?

I agree on both points.  In real life grenade throwing is not that difficult. Alien alloys should be more plentiful, after all those are big spaceships. I think the alenium (sp?) should be increased somewhat too. Otherwise the game gets boring doing countless missions just to get material to build stuff.

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Yeah, grenade scattering is still crap. This is something we've been planning to look into but haven't had time. There's no perfect solution to it though really, if you use a standard shot scattering calculation for the grenades then they end up being extremely powerful because they don't tend to miss by much and therefore almost always catch the target in the blast radius. Once you start forcing them to miss by more than normal you start getting weird behaviour like we're seeing here ... but I'm sure there's improvements to be made.

Alloy starvation is definitely a thing; I might have already fixed it up over Christmas but I can't remember. I'll pay attention to it in the next balance pass.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I know it’s a very difficult balancing act and there are other important updates to do but after trying a HEVY launcher on a MARS today the grenade scatter really made the mission almost unplayable. I had to savescum, change the seed a number of times just to have a reasonable change to hit the side of a UFO. Also haystacks seem remarkably grenade proof:p

Edited by stewpidbear
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4 hours ago, stewpidbear said:

I know it’s a very difficult balancing act and there are other important updates to do but after trying a HEVY launcher on a MARS today the grenade scatter really made the mission almost unplayable. I had to savescum, change the seed a number of times just to have a reasonable change to hit the side of a UFO. Also haystacks seem remarkably grenade proof:p

I think the time to take a look at the grenade / grenade launcher miss scatter might have finally arrived. I'll ask the coders what the formula we're currently using is and then I'll have a think about how we can improve it; maybe I'll see if the community have any suggestions too.

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  • 1 month later...
On 2/14/2020 at 6:39 AM, Chris said:

I think the time to take a look at the grenade / grenade launcher miss scatter might have finally arrived. I'll ask the coders what the formula we're currently using is and then I'll have a think about how we can improve it; maybe I'll see if the community have any suggestions too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Amy_RWpU8t4

:)

 

As for the alloy/material starvation, you could add it in as an optional tech or 2. I can even think of the text:

Level 1

As you know, most of the alien alloys we have found do not exist in the form of ingots for our convenience. The vast majority of it are already processed into alien structures and equipment that are of little use to us. Our new laser technology now offers us the chance to melt down and recycle metals found in alien equipment found in the field, which would go a long way into relieving our shortage of alien alloys for construction. (Come to think of it, it might be an option, instead of auto-selling the equipment for $X, there could be the option to recycle it instead, leaving the player a choice between money or material).

Level 2

Similar to when we used lasers to melt down alien equipment, we can now use plasma to melt down and recycle the walls and structures of alien UFOs. As crude and brute force as the process may be, it should be simple for even the engineers in our workshops to do. (Alloy bonus depending on size of UFO cleaned out).

Edited by Nightowl
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  • 2 weeks later...

@Nightowl Did you post those in the suggestion thread? That could be workable as long as the amount didn't overpower the balance. Too much and there wouldn't be as much a drama between needing to make decision over material and money. That decision already exists with the choice of sending the troops or calling in an air strike. It would, however, give a material reward for going after Terror Attacks. Currently the reward is political more than anything else.

Edited by Challenge
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4 hours ago, Challenge said:

It would, however, give a material reward for going after Terror Attacks. Currently the reward is political more than anything else.

As an aside, V13 is probably going to see the addition of some alien bombs on Terror / Raid missions that contain Alenium. You're right that Terror missions don't really give you much tangible as a result of fighting them (despite them often being quite difficult) so I figured I'd fix that.

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Something tangible, yeah ... like not having a continent stop your operations and payments while inviting the aliens in for coffee. :)

Thanks for fixing that for us.

Terror raids were one of the things that kept me from getting stuff from the UFOs I shot down. I had two fairly early, one happened at the same time I had taken down two UFOs and so I had to use airstrikes on them. That helped the finances a bit, but the next terror strike caused so many injuries and losses that I couldn't go after the next UFO. To requote King Pyrrhus: one other such victory would utterly undo me. So when they actually started sending the next group of alien combat troops we were little more than target practice.

So I do appreciate the thought.

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