Alien lethality possibly too high?

[Chris]

2 hours ago, Komandos said:

Yes.

The game does not take into account the consumption of ammunition for small arms. And I think that the game will not take into account the consumption of armor plates in the armor of a soldier. (Armor repair).

The game does currently allow you to rebuild destroyed vehicles at half their original construction cost / time, so you can probably do that for destroyed armour too.

[Jet Jaguar]

47 minutes ago, Chris said:

42 minutes ago, Chris said:

No problem. You're aware that a few builds ago we made armour destructible, right? If the soldier wearing the armour is reduced to 0HP in battle then their armour is lost.

Thanks for the response, Chris! I was not aware of that my apologies.

47 minutes ago, Chris said:

45 minutes ago, Chris said:

If so then what you're proposing is an interesting idea, yeah. You're adding an outcome where the soldier can survive but their armour is destroyed, moving the tension away from losing soldiers to having to pay potentially a lot of money to replace their equipment (assuming their armour saves their life). I hadn't considered that idea before and I don't know if I'll end up using it, but I'll think about it. 

Yeah, that's the gist of it. Currently, I think there can be many methods to challenge the player in both combat and on the Geoscape. The tension of losing soldiers should always be present in every mission. I just believe that the best way to lose soldiers is to feel as if you made a genuine mistake or took a risk that did not pay off. That is why I feel that if we make it more punishing economically speaking, it can bring an interesting new dimension on how to manage your resources.

Maintaining and upgrading the equipment for your top Veterans while also keeping newer recruits in line with previous generation armor. It can make it interesting how you manage your money, engineering time, income through idle engineers, etc. It also gives us a reason to continue to keep around the older generation of armors. You don't need a sniper to be wearing Warden armor if you plan to keep them safe in the back. Maybe they just need some lighter armor? Building only the stronger and more expensive armors for your close-medium range troops.

Would you rather take soldiers with weaker armor, and have a higher risk of losing the money and time you invested in both their armor and soldier? or is it better to invest more in the stronger armor? Lowering your odds of losing the soldier and armor but potentially having to rebuild their armor repeatedly if It's destroyed. Do you give your troops with the highest HP value the best armor or do you risk letting them go around in lighter armor, risking death and damage, potentially being wounded if they survive their mission? It just seems to open up a lot of new possibilities in my opinion.

45 minutes ago, Chris said:

The game does currently allow you to rebuild destroyed vehicles at half their original construction cost / time, so you can probably do that for destroyed armour too.

It is just some food for thought, maybe I'm just overthinking it. I appreciate the consideration though, thanks and keep up the awesome work!

[Alienkiller]

The UNI-Mod for UFO 1 ET have an cool Middleway found for that Problem. I played a lot of Missions in UFO ET with it.

The Armor have (what we can see in the Picture in an other Threat) several Defense-Things (against Poison, EMP, Kinetik, Energey etc.). The Armor get Damaged then and will lose (as realistic) Defense-Protection. At some Point (say 3 or 4 Attacks if you get lucky) the Soldier get HP-Damage, because the Protection goes rapadly down. Such an System is planed to integrate in the UFO 1 ET-Platinum-Refit and for UFO 2 ET DLC.

I don´t know what an System Xenonauts have atm. in that Part, but it´s better then in the Prevouis Betas (V. 01 to V.19 or 20), where the Armor get destroyed completly and the Soldier get dying on the first or second Hit.

[Shahadem]

This is why options are always a good thing.

Especially with the impossibly huge breadth of customization the devs made available in Xenonauts 1!

I definitely modified my game so that alien guns were one shot kills up until Wolf armor, wolf armor let the soldiers take a few shots, and then the final tier turned the soldiers into walking tanks. That's absolutely the most fun for me. I also changed the hp values for the aliens with unarmored and lightly armored units being easily killable while heavily armored aliens would take a pounding to bring down. Especially the robots who I felt should really take a lot to bring down at all research tiers since the alien circuitry is able to reroute processes around damaged chips and the robot should have ridiculous armor (and aim) because that's the point and benefit of sending in a robot verse an organic alien.

I also doubled the hp value of the starter shield and upped the value of the alien metal shield up the whazzoo because it's made of the best toughest alien alloy and was about 2 inches or more thick of solid material so it should really have been way better than it was originally statted because only having double the hp value of the original steel shield just didn't make any sense at all. I also thought there should have been an intermediary shield using the alien metals or special ceramic alloys.

As for realism, that's really open to interpretation here. We have no way of knowing exactly what the properties of the alien alloys are, how much energy the plasma weapons could deliver, whether we'd be able to find a way to defend against that using modern day magnets or some such, etc.

Plus in the first game I remember that one of the research notes mentioned that the plasma weapons were prone to having their plasmas being expended on rain droplets, so possibly some form of water spraying defense would be effective as silly as that sounds. I was surprised that nothing more ever came of that. Maybe because it would just feel too silly to put in game.

Edited December 12, 2021 by Shahadem