Milestone 1 Balance Thread

[Alan]

So on Soldier, I unlocked exo-armour, gave a new suit to a zero mission 61HP Sgt with a shield, then watched in surprise as he got gibbed by an exploding pickup truck from 4 squares away.  Did I just completely miss him getting hit by a plasma bolt?  Was the truck just carrying C4? 

Obviously what makes it more embarrassing is that the pickup truck exploded after being hit several times by an overwatching laser machine gun colonel.  But I'm curious how much damage an exploding truck is supposed to do, whether it scales in any way with the amount of damage that it took, then how much damage it takes to gib someone.  Because it doesn't feel like it should be an end game hazard on low difficulty levels.

[Emily_F]

7 hours ago, Alan said:

So on Soldier, I unlocked exo-armour, gave a new suit to a zero mission 61HP Sgt with a shield, then watched in surprise as he got gibbed by an exploding pickup truck from 4 squares away.  Did I just completely miss him getting hit by a plasma bolt?  Was the truck just carrying C4? 

Obviously what makes it more embarrassing is that the pickup truck exploded after being hit several times by an overwatching laser machine gun colonel.  But I'm curious how much damage an exploding truck is supposed to do, whether it scales in any way with the amount of damage that it took, then how much damage it takes to gib someone.  Because it doesn't feel like it should be an end game hazard on low difficulty levels.

Yeah, I had two soldiers in warden armour and decent stats get wiped out several squares away from ground zero by what was apparently a thermonuclear jet ski disassembly after being inadvertently hit by a couple of accelerated machine gun rounds.

[Ruggerman]

It would seem that motor craft of different kinds have this unrealistic habit of exploding with very little force, you should be able to fire many automatic rounds into a vehicle without it erupting into a fireball, they should only explode after hit by a grenade, C4, HEVY, or some other explosive device, and not with some spitball gun? 

[Emily_F]

1 hour ago, Ruggerman said:

It would seem that motor craft of different kinds have this unrealistic habit of exploding with very little force, you should be able to fire many automatic rounds into a vehicle without it erupting into a fireball, they should only explode after hit by a grenade, C4, HEVY, or some other explosive device, and not with some spitball gun? 

Maybe a really small chance with kinetic weapons but more chance with thermal weapons? Would kinda offset some of the plus points of those more powerful weapons

[Chris]

On 8/29/2023 at 11:59 PM, Alan said:

So on Soldier, I unlocked exo-armour, gave a new suit to a zero mission 61HP Sgt with a shield, then watched in surprise as he got gibbed by an exploding pickup truck from 4 squares away.  Did I just completely miss him getting hit by a plasma bolt?  Was the truck just carrying C4? 

Obviously what makes it more embarrassing is that the pickup truck exploded after being hit several times by an overwatching laser machine gun colonel.  But I'm curious how much damage an exploding truck is supposed to do, whether it scales in any way with the amount of damage that it took, then how much damage it takes to gib someone.  Because it doesn't feel like it should be an end game hazard on low difficulty levels.

 

On 8/30/2023 at 7:26 AM, Emily_F said:

Yeah, I had two soldiers in warden armour and decent stats get wiped out several squares away from ground zero by what was apparently a thermonuclear jet ski disassembly after being inadvertently hit by a couple of accelerated machine gun rounds.

This is a little surprising, to be honest. The vehicle explosions only inflict 60 damage (except the snowmobiles which did 100 until I just fixed that) - which is quite a bit, but the Exosuit should provide good protection against it.

The problem is that if it reduces the unit to 0 HP then they're gibbed, because it is explosive damage. So a unit on 5HP would be gibbed if they took even 6HP of explosive damage once their armour was taken into account.

But the Exosuit offers 35HP of protection so a 61HP soldier shouldn't be killed by an exploding pickup. A snowmobile would have done it, but if the pickup is doing it then that's a bit concerning.

[Emily_F]

What's the explosive radius meant to be? I'm pretty sure my dudes were 3 tiles away, were uninjured (straight of the side door of the chopper) and were exterminated by a ski mobile. Is the damage tapered down with distance?

Vehicles tend to go "whoosh" with lots of flame and smoke rather than "bang" with shrapnel. And it's pretty hard to make diesel to do either unless it's already hot. 

[Staffie]

I think in iron men mode, you should really be losing 1 or 2 soldiers per mission for the at least the first part of the game. even whole squads if you don't run the remaining ones back to the abort area and abort. I feel that the main part about ironmen mode. I think there a lack of different mission and more cleaner mission should be made. I would of made a star wars mission with the death cannon. By a countdown clock  where you have the option to send a squad to attack it or let it blown up that city. ship missions and country retake missions if you lost a country. if you lost a country and do a mission in it the army and police will attack you instead of the aliens. once you attack the main base of the cleaners I think you should have sleeper cell mission from the cleaners. so much more could of be adding to make this stand out from X1 and  they hardly did anything. 

[Alan]

  

On 8/31/2023 at 3:57 PM, Chris said:

 

This is a little surprising, to be honest. The vehicle explosions only inflict 60 damage (except the snowmobiles which did 100 until I just fixed that) - which is quite a bit, but the Exosuit should provide good protection against it.

The problem is that if it reduces the unit to 0 HP then they're gibbed, because it is explosive damage. So a unit on 5HP would be gibbed if they took even 6HP of explosive damage once their armour was taken into account.

But the Exosuit offers 35HP of protection so a 61HP soldier shouldn't be killed by an exploding pickup. A snowmobile would have done it, but if the pickup is doing it then that's a bit concerning.

Ok, I thought it was just an overkill mechanic than pure explosion damage.  So possibly he took 100 damage straight from the pickup (like the snowmobile bug), but more likely he took a plasma gun hit in the move that triggered the overwatch fire. Not seeing a source for the stats on the plasma gun, but being reduced to 30HP / 30 armour or 35HP / 25 armour then gets him gibbed by the explosion.

Then the other observation is that the pickup explosion damage isn't scaled down for being on the very edge of the explosion radius, so he should have been standing next to it for the cover bonus or one square further away to be out the blast zone.