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Grenade Miss Scatter Discussion Thread


Chris

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Heres a simple idea. For the sake of fun and gameplay (Maybe not realism) could we have the grenades ALWAYS land somewhat near the target? It could be a small radius around where you aim that may not be that large or that small. 

 

This way a grenade will never land at your feet or next to your ally. A lot less frustration and grenades become safe to use once more.

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21 hours ago, Comrade said:

Heres a simple idea. For the sake of fun and gameplay (Maybe not realism) could we have the grenades ALWAYS land somewhat near the target? It could be a small radius around where you aim that may not be that large or that small. 

 

This way a grenade will never land at your feet or next to your ally. A lot less frustration and grenades become safe to use once more. 

Not really, because prior to that you have to calculate whether the grenade should be able to land there in the first place. You cannot use your approach, if the target position is through a wall. But then again, maybe you can throw over the wall? Is there a roof over the thrower or the target? What about windows in the way? Are they aligned well enough that this throw could succeed? And so on and so forth.

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Personally love the idea of having your miss% being related to your scatter range. It would be nice to see the miss calculation take doors into effect. I know this is oddly specific, but I'm still a bit bitter over a recent grenade that was likely a miss due to all the obstacles in the way, but because a nearby door was open, calculated it's miss scatter around a corner and straight into my entire waiting team, because I assumed I would have been able to rush all the doors in the previous round, but wound up only being able to clear one. I never knew a grenade could scatter like that until that point. 

Absolutely on board with the HEVY changes. Can we get more snazzy ammo types for that thing? I REALLY want to try a HEVY only run at some point. 

Maybe it would be more satisfying if the miss calculations happened backwards? Like if when throw it goes.... Yes/No -> Farthest Obstacle to Closest Obstacle. That way you don't feel like those Seals you just hired apparently rode in on the short bus when they hit they misjudge their throw by an approximate 3 miles and somehow hit behind themselves. Most missed throws would fail farther away, and a close range bad throw would have had to fail, let's say 3 40%s in a row to fail that spectacularly. Hopefully I didn't misread anything, but that would feel much better...in the opinion of this particular tired potato. 

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Well, grenade launchers should at least go in the general direction you fire them in! From what I have seen they sometimes tend to drop at your feet. A grenade launcher is designed to do what it says - launch a grenade further than a man can throw it, and a man can always throw it further than his own two feet :-). It should act like a Rocket Launcher, but with shorter range and more shrapnel scatter (which distinguishes it from a rocket launcher).

At the minute its implementation reminds me of that Taliban terrorist on YouTube who fired an RPG into the wall right next to him...

Edited by ooey
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>At the minute its implementation reminds me of that Taliban terrorist on YouTube who fired an RPG into the wall right next to him..

Hehe...you probably want to encourage your enemy to use those kind of tactics.  In terms of "real life" (whatever that is) usage, a weapon which blows up friendlies even two times out of every 100 would never be used, but in the game environment, the failure rate is way of increasing tension/suspense by introducing random problems for the player.  So do we really need more suspense due to weapon failure when we already are unsure of how effective our fire, and that of the aliens, will be?  I doubt it, unless we're trying to make things more "realistic," in which case the chance of firing duds would be much more common than catastrophic failure. 

The only other reason I can see for having any weapon failure (duds or booms) is for balance purposes--like Mars vehicle-based SMGs missing 4 out of 4 shots unless very close to the target.

Edited by maxm222
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Heh-heh, right you are!  It breaks my immersion to see my squaddies do something that stupid.  If anyone is interested, there are a bunch of YouTube videos showing Major Fails of the Javelin anti-tank missile which are pretty funny, and nobody gets hurt--as far as I can tell.  

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Yes I saw that. I think one of them was some Canadians who ran on a miss-fire. Surely they must have been told that the missile doesn't arm itself until it's a good distance away from the launcher! Not sure why they panicked.

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2 hours ago, ooey said:

Yes I saw that. I think one of them was some Canadians who ran on a miss-fire. Surely they must have been told that the missile doesn't arm itself until it's a good distance away from the launcher! Not sure why they panicked.

And................that’s the way to fix part of the problem, minimum arm distance (I freely admit I have no idea of how difficult a programming problem this is though);)

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It still shouldn't just drop at your feet! That seems to be the way the PIAT anti-tank weapon operated (initially anyway). Maybe the grenade launcher here is based on it :-). I think the PIAT was spring-launched (if it wasn't that then it was a similar weapon) and the spring sometimes broke!

Edited by ooey
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9 hours ago, ooey said:

It still shouldn't just drop at your feet! That seems to be the way the PIAT anti-tank weapon operated (initially anyway). Maybe the grenade launcher here is based on it :-). I think the PIAT was spring-launched (if it wasn't that then it was a similar weapon) and the spring sometimes broke!

Great! A new sound effect for the grenade launcher............BOING!.......:)

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Or "Ping!". I think I was watching A Bridge Too Far, and a Paratrooper was firing a PIAT at a Panzer. It just sort of dropped out of the end of the launcher! Don't you love it when people say Panzer tank? What they are really saying is tank tank!

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whatever is decided, I have to say... even a child is very very unlikely to literally toss a grenade at their own feet.

yet here... it's actually quite common.

get rid of that by giving grenades a minimum landing range.  meaning, you can't target your own feet, but there is also no way a grenade you toss can land on your own feet.

it's just stupid otherwise.

makes me want to mod everything that can launch a grenade to have double the accuracy it actually does, which is not something I want to do.

 

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" Don't you love it when people say Panzer tank? What they are really saying is tank tank! "

that's not entirely accurate, since "Panzer" in and of itself refers to an animal, not a tank.

so without common reference, it isn't redundant at all to add the context to the expression, as in:  Panzer tank.

 

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Ahem... from wikipedia

 

"The word Panzer is a German word that means "armour" or specifically "tank". It derives through the French word pancier, "breastplate", from Latin pantex, "belly". The word is used in English and some other languages as a loanword in the context of the German military"

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So much to my annoyance I wrote a long answer in this thread yesterday and then lost it all when my PC decided to restart. Thanks for the replies all, we'll hopefully be bringing in some changes to the grenades for V13. I won't bother writing them all out again but some useful thoughts and suggestions in this post.

I'm going to try and make some changes to the HEVY for the hotfix build due on Tuesday as well - making it direct fire, increasing the accuracy and decreasing the blast radius.

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On 3/14/2020 at 4:22 AM, Chris said:

So much to my annoyance I wrote a long answer in this thread yesterday and then lost it all when my PC decided to restart. Thanks for the replies all, we'll hopefully be bringing in some changes to the grenades for V13. I won't bother writing them all out again but some useful thoughts and suggestions in this post.

I'm going to try and make some changes to the HEVY for the hotfix build due on Tuesday as well - making it direct fire, increasing the accuracy and decreasing the blast radius.

This is a bit offtopic, but does the hevy still destroy corpses and loot from aliens? I thought the fact that in the previous game you were rewarded with more money from alien equipment if you shot them rather than blowing them up was a good feature. I feel it solves an XCOM quirk where there was no reason to not abuse explosives as even if you missed you would still kill your enemy. It seems like alot of these XCOM esque games really make explosives good simply because the soldiers cant aim for shit with projectile weapons.

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When you really need to kill then use explosive weapons. If you want loot then use projectile weapons! I think the hevy is a shrapnel weapon is it not, so you kind of have a bit of both worlds in there. It's not a particularly good weapon to combat Sibillians though, for obvious reasons.

I think the explosive/projectile compromise is a good one depending on what your aim is. Shrapnel weapons are a half-way house. I haven't looked into it much because I don't want to spoil the surprise when the game is finally released. I've only had a quick look over how its progressing, but what I've seen so far is impressive and a good step up from xen1.

Edited by ooey
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On 2/24/2020 at 5:46 PM, Coffee Potato said:

Maybe it would be more satisfying if the miss calculations happened backwards? Like if when throw it goes.... Yes/No -> Farthest Obstacle to Closest Obstacle. That way you don't feel like those Seals you just hired apparently rode in on the short bus when they hit they misjudge their throw by an approximate 3 miles and somehow hit behind themselves. Most missed throws would fail farther away, and a close range bad throw would have had to fail, let's say 3 40%s in a row to fail that spectacularly. Hopefully I didn't misread anything, but that would feel much better...in the opinion of this particular tired potato. 

@Coffee Potato just as a heads-up, this was a really good idea. We didn't initially set the miss shots up this way because it's simpler to check along the path as the bullet as it travels (because that way the bullet always stops automatically when it encounters a 100% blocking object), but after a bit of experimentation we've updated the system so that on miss shots it pre-calcualtes the hit object by checking the intervening objects in reverse order from the first 100% blocking object.

Basically what that means is that for all weapons shots are now more likely to hit objects closer to the target than the shooter. It does indeed look much more sensible and it means units are less likely to blow themselves up with explosive weapons.

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Thank God! I just reinstalled X1 for the fun of it and ..... let us just say my men are more of a danger to themselves than the aliens are to them! I tend to play on Ironman to "live with my mistakes", so when something screws up, I try to roll with it but I've found that in every mission, someone will flub a grenade throw. It's fine if it's smoke, can be painful if flashbang, and utterly stupid if it's an explosive.

Let us be honest, even the most raw recruit does not drop grenades at his own feet, in a million man army, I only heard of it happening ONCE and that was in the 90s. Falling short, yes. Bouncing back closer to you, yes, but not right at your own feet. And you can't even get a guy standing next to the incompetent to grab the flubbed toss and throw it somewhere else.

In real life, someone like this would have been canned from the service or even jailed for negligent homicide after the mates of the guy he killed had a "discussion" with him about his incompetence much less be selected for a special ops team.

Good to know that this is being fixed, it really was a mood breaker to see such incompetence in a soldier.

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