Capturing live aliens unssng smoke fells too easy.

[Vojevoda]

Not much to add here. After constructing and trying to use first two stun weapon options (baton and pistol) I found it WAY easier to capture live aliens using smoke. It almost feels like a cheat. Throw a smoke(best in closed quarters), soften targets with regular grenade or light pistol fire and you got yourself a live alien.

I think this needs reblancing somewhere in the future.

[Skyfire]

I don't think it's as powerful as it seems at first. Check the tool-tip for gas damage: 'units with enclosed helmets are usually immune'. It's fine for knocking out random basic enemies, but isn't going to work on a lot of more important targets (which we can expect to be required for plot advancement) as they'll have masks that protect them.

Also going to scale badly in general: putting 10-15 stun damage on a target and then chipping it down to lower than that is fine with ballistic weapons on targets with 40-60 health. Getting it reliably low without killing the target is going to be way harder with plasma weapons and enemies with triple-digit health scores. (And that'll go double on difficulties where you can't see enemy health bars...)

Stun guns and batons let you stack stun points on a target quickly and reliably, without waiting for it to spend multiple turns breathing smoke.

Edited July 21, 2023 by Skyfire

[Novadea]

Personally I think it's fine, you'll usually need most of your team to chuck smoke at a single alien to try get it to pass out since it only does like 4 stun damage on explosion (+N on their turn if they move through it, if they just decide to blast your face and stand still not that much). Sure you can try make it easier by shooting/nading them first but at least for myself that'd more often than not mean they'll be dead or I'd be risking the percentages way too much.

I think it works as a nice alternative for capturing some of the early aliens, "hotbox the UFO" .

[Shadooow]

Yes I agree. Not that it would be too easy, it still requires to drop the enemy low enough, and it works well only inside buildings, but as it is now, the stun batons and stun pistols are way too risky and much worse option. It is too hard to get close enough to the enemy to hit with it, and even when you do hit him with pistol or baton they only take around 15 stun damage, which means that he will kill you next round unless you damage him low enough beforehand. But if you damage him under 20 beforehand, then smoke grenade does the job from much large distance while your soldiers are hidden behind obstacles. Additionally it takes much more space/weight than just 1 extra smoke grenade. So really no point to engineer those.

The easy solution would be to not allow smoke to stun (every) aliens, ie. give them immunity against smoke. It still suppress them so the benefit of the grenade is there, but it won't allow player to easily capture aliens even before the plot suggest it to the player (I managed to capture alien in first battle now when I am replaying it over).

Edited July 22, 2023 by Shadooow

[Skyfire]

I'd honestly call smoke stunning riskier than using the baton or pistol - simply because you have to let the alien take a turn. The grenade explosion does around 5 points of stun damage - most of the stun effect is from them taking actions and/or ending turn in the smoke. That means they're getting to take a shot at you. Yes, that shot is probably through cover and smoke, and is going to have a bad hit-chance - but a lot of the time it will have a non-zero hit chance. Sooner or later one of those 5% shots is going to land anyway.

On the other hand, a soldier with good TUs can move 8-10 tiles and still swing the baton twice. In close quarters - e.g. breaching a small UFO when the door still exists - you can potentially get three swings while still starting from out of line-of-sight. Bring two batons on your fastest soldiers, and you can fairly easily put 60+ points of stun damage on a single alien on your turn, which means the thing is lying on the ground unconscious before you press end-turn and is guaranteed not to do any damage.

 

Don't get me wrong - smoke stuns are certainly useful. I use them myself, especially to grab some early captures in the first mission or two. But they're most useful early-game, when you don't have that 70-80 TU assault who can rush in and electrocute the target without giving them a chance to act. By the time you have researched the stun weapons and have engineering time available to build some, you should be able to get good enough use out of them that they're not made pointless by smoke.

(Also, the real answer is 'use both'. Giving the target you want to capture a face full of smoke for a turn while you're moving the tazers close enough certainly doesn't hurt...)

[Shadooow]

8 hours ago, Skyfire said:

I'd honestly call smoke stunning riskier than using the baton or pistol - simply because you have to let the alien take a turn. The grenade explosion does around 5 points of stun damage - most of the stun effect is from them taking actions and/or ending turn in the smoke. That means they're getting to take a shot at you. Yes, that shot is probably through cover and smoke, and is going to have a bad hit-chance - but a lot of the time it will have a non-zero hit chance. Sooner or later one of those 5% shots is going to land anyway.

Not really. You can often throw the grenade from behind total cover. Even in cases where you cannot you typically need to get the enemy under 15 HP to stun him with smoke, so someone has to shoot him first which is where the enemy can shoot back, then throw smokes. And smoke grenades stack, you don't have to wait for enemy to take turn if you hit him with three smoke grenades he falls unconscious immediately.

It is the exact opposite - if you don't bring enemy under 15 HP beforehand, then enemy will shoot back when you shoot him with pistol or strike him with baton.

Even if he doesn't attack back, if the stun pistol/baton doesn't stun him immediately, then the soldier is just dead because to hit with those you need to be super close unlike smoke grenade.

I started abusing this lately a lot, have no problem to capture at least 1 alien every time, in fact the biggest issue is that my soldiers are killing the enemy with overwatch if the enemy doesn't get stunned in my turn.

 

EDIT: Let me put it this way: Anytime you get any alien to 15 or less HP it is a free capture using smoke grenade(s) with pretty much zero risk as you can throw grenade from very far away and retreat under total cover. Both pistol and baton needs close range to be used/effective so if you instead want to use those you are risking possible enemy overwatch, return fire or just simply missing and ending up with no time points to escape. Hence smoke grenades are overpowered. The more I (ab)use them the more I see that.

Game simply doesn't care about the alien having multiple shot wounds despite the original mission suggesting that the scientists wants alien without such wounds. As long as the alien drops unconscious it doesn't matter how much and what type of damage he was inflicted.

Edited July 23, 2023 by Shadooow

[Skyfire]

4 hours ago, Shadooow said:

It is the exact opposite - if you don't bring enemy under 15 HP beforehand, then enemy will shoot back when you shoot him with pistol or strike him with baton.

Suppress it with flashbangs - preferably using the same throw-from-behind-a-wall trick you mentioned for smokes. If you've got a good enough advantage to think about a capture (i.e. you have multiple soldiers close enough to help and you're not fighting a bunch of aliens at once), then there's no reason to let them have a chance at reaction fire.

An alien on 15 hp is just as free a capture for a baton as with smoke grenades - three grenades is roughly one-and-a-half soldiers worth of TUs (50% per throw). I can spend exactly the same amount of TUs on one flashbang and then move in and stun with the baton, and it's more efficient in carry-weight (three grenades weighs the same as one grenade + baton, but the baton is reusable). Not sure what the aim break-point is (if there even is one), but I'm routinely getting 100% chance to hit with a baton so misses aren't an issue.

In the event that something does go wrong (low-roll on the stun damage?), then the baton option still leaves open lines of fire for a team-mate to just kill it. Hard to do that reliably if it's standing in the middle of a smoke cloud.

5 hours ago, Shadooow said:

I started abusing this lately a lot, have no problem to capture at least 1 alien every time, in fact the biggest issue is that my soldiers are killing the enemy with overwatch if the enemy doesn't get stunned in my turn.

1 alien captured per mission isn't really an indication that smoke is overpowered. Last crash site I ran I came out with three captures, and I probably could have pushed that higher if I'd been interested in trying.

Also, there will almost certainly be plot-critical captures that are just straight-up immune to smoke. It's already in the tooltip for gas damage that there will be smoke-immune enemies (anything with a closed helmet), so when the 'Capture an Alien Commander' mission objective comes up you can expect it to be batons or pistols only. Being able to get some extra basic-enemy captures isn't really a major balancing issue, as it just ends up being a little bit more money (and not even that much more, when compared to the overall expected income).