Reapers are so weak

[Zach]

I remember coming across a reaper in XCOM was terrifying (maybe it was just being a noob back in the day). But the reapers in Xenonauts are easy pickings. They have no armor and are highly susceptible to grenades.

SPOILER: The autopsy says "... can move across the battlefield with inhuman speed..." But they can't. They only have 60 TU. So weak.

Recommendation:

1) Increase TU from 60 to 80

2) Increase armor from 0 to 20

3) Increase HP from 60 to 70 (some Mantids have 70 HP. Goofy to imagine one of them having more HP than a reaper)

Edited August 5, 2023 by Zach
Add #3

[doubleskulls]

Reapers are very dangerous if they get into melee, but I agree a bit too squishy and not fast enough. 

[Vitruviansquid]

I am definitely in favor of a Reaper buff.

[Conductiv]

reapers are cascade/snowball enemies, basically when they start causing problems the problems only get bigger. not only do you lose a trooper, the enemy also increases in number.

this means one needs to exercise some caution in buffing them, if the standard is that they can close and execute a melee its very likely they will become regular run enders.

personally I have a healthy amount of respect for them, their melee is very strong and capable of 1 shotting low health units, they can also move a fair distance and still execute said melee. this brings risks when the area you are in has a lot of blind corners and small rooms. if you catch them in the open, like is often the case in daytime terror missions they are easy to deal with as they are squishy and can't close the entire FOV in 1 dash, but within an alien base with its myriad of doors and tiny rooms to teleport in its a different kettle of fish. note that..as they are melee smoke doesn't protect you if you can't kill it, and they are outright immune to being suppressed. This means staying out of range or killing/stunning it immediately are your 2 options.

 

[Xeroxth]

6 hours ago, Vitruviansquid said:

I am definitely in favor of a Reaper buff.

First of all is increasing their AP to at least 80 and maybe even 100. There should be more reaper variants as well. Maybe armored, stealth and brood beast variants. The armored reapers has the current AP making it more lumbering but capable of shrugging off ballistic weapons, vulnerable to laser and other energy weapons. The stealth one is basically the wraith but melee but way more squishy than the average reaper. The brood beast can create special explosive bloated zombies that spawn 2 to 3 reapers at once.

[doubleskulls]

@Conductiv you are quite right that Reapers are a lot more dangerous on missions with reduced visibility like the Alien Base, and we do need to be careful when buffing them. I think in my last play through I lost one soldier to one in the alien base, and another when I tried to stun it with the baton, not realising that melee would get a reaction. 

In most missions though when I see reapers I think, oh that's going to make life much easier - no ranged attack and squishy. Their AI lets them down, as they are too predictable. If they have LOS they charge heedlessly towards our soldiers, but don't have the resilience or speed to get through any meaningful reaction fire - they are quite easy to one shot. That makes them too easy to bait out and kill in their own turn or just bait out and shoot them in yours.  I think Reaper AI may want to try something like being more of an ambusher, e.g. 

• can I reach an enemy and attack them? If so, do it. 
• If not I'd look to choose my next position based on a weighting of 
  • vulnerability to enemy fire in the next turn - i.e. stay out of LOS or in good cover 
  • proximity to the enemy, i.e. the closer the better
  • safest route - i.e. minimal chance of triggering reaction fire or being hit by it. 

Something like that may make Reapers a lot more effective without really modifying their stats. Also, potentially look at having Reapers use swarming tactics. Probably just spawning them close to one another would be enough to simulate that.  

[mclang]

Yeah, original reapers of XCOM were really scary.

I think boosting their intelligence would be more interesting than making them faster or less squishy. What is more scary than spotting one which vanishes behind corner and fetches some reinforcements, Alien style?

 

[Skitso]

It's also about maps. Reapers should only be found around tight claustrophobic interior spaces and not on open desert.

[Sunnybuns]

Or you can just make them stay in the UFO once you clear the outside area on a downed UFO mission, and they only come out once your guys are inside 

 

Totally not how I lost all my troops on Ironman in X1...

[bifohe6676]

On 8/6/2023 at 2:15 AM, Conductiv said:

reapers are cascade/snowball enemies, basically when they start causing problems the problems only get bigger. not only do you lose a trooper, the enemy also increases in number.

this means one needs to exercise some caution in buffing them, if the standard is that they can close and execute a melee its very likely they will become regular run enders.

personally I have a healthy amount of respect for them, their melee is very strong and capable of 1 shotting low health units, they can also move a fair distance and still execute said melee. this brings risks when the area you are in has a lot of blind corners and small rooms. if you catch them in the open, like is often the case in daytime terror missions they are easy to deal with as they are squishy and can't close the entire FOV in 1 dash, but within an alien base with its myriad of doors and tiny rooms to teleport in its a different kettle of fish. note that..as they are melee smoke doesn't protect you if you can't kill it, and they are outright immune to being suppressed. This means staying out of range or killing/stunning it immediately are your 2 options.

 

 

5 minutes ago, mclang said:

Yeah, original reapers of XCOM were really scary.

I think boosting their intelligence would be more interesting than making them faster or less squishy. What is more scary than spotting one which vanishes behind corner and fetches some reinforcements, Alien style?

 

 

On 8/6/2023 at 8:22 AM, doubleskulls said:

@Conductiv you are quite right that Reapers are a lot more dangerous on missions with reduced visibility like the Alien Base, and we do need to be careful when buffing them. I think in my last play through I lost one soldier to one in the alien base, and another when I tried to stun it with the baton, not realising that melee would get a reaction. 

In most missions though when I see reapers I think, oh that's going to make life much easier - no ranged attack and squishy. Their AI lets them down, as they are too predictable. If they have LOS they charge heedlessly towards our soldiers, but don't have the resilience or speed to get through any meaningful reaction fire - they are quite easy to one shot. That makes them too easy to bait out and kill in their own turn or just bait out and shoot them in yours.  I think Reaper AI may want to try something like being more of an ambusher, e.g. 

• can I reach an enemy and attack them? If so, do it. 
• If not I'd look to choose my next position based on a weighting of 
  • vulnerability to enemy fire in the next turn - i.e. stay out of LOS or in good cover 
  • proximity to the enemy, i.e. the closer the better
  • safest route - i.e. minimal chance of triggering reaction fire or being hit by it. 

Something like that may make Reapers a lot more effective without really modifying their stats. Also, potentially look at having Reapers use swarming tactics. Probably just spawning them close to one another would be enough to simulate that.  

I fully agree with this, simply increasing their TU is not the right choice I think.

Right now overall it feels like either you kill them in the same turn you spot them, or they kill somebody in their turn because of their strong melee, there is little middle ground here (unless you spot them from really far away).

Especially this:

Quote

reapers are cascade/snowball enemies, basically when they start causing problems the problems only get bigger.

Increasing their TU without tweaking their AI will only make this worse.

But Devs already said the AI of all types of units will get overhauled, so I agree with giving them interesting and unique AI.

[SHOGUN_YAMATO]

Hm... on my first encounter with them I managed to stun the first one with a stun baton no problem :P Then I just shot the rest. They are easy to deal with, much easier then Chryssalids from UFO: Enemy Unknown https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Chryssalid 

Those were almost immune to rifles, took 3-9 laser rifle hits to take down (usually around 4 to 6) and were much faster. So yea, reapers seem kinda weak. And they don't even charge at my units, most of the times they seem to run back and forth. AI needs improvement. Other enemies do a better job at fighting.

 

Edited August 7, 2023 by SHOGUN_YAMATO

[Raffik]

On 8/5/2023 at 10:51 PM, Zach said:

I remember coming across a reaper in XCOM was terrifying (maybe it was just being a noob back in the day). But the reapers in Xenonauts are easy pickings. They have no armor and are highly susceptible to grenades.

SPOILER: The autopsy says "... can move across the battlefield with inhuman speed..." But they can't. They only have 60 TU. So weak.

Recommendation:

1) Increase TU from 60 to 80

2) Increase armor from 0 to 20

3) Increase HP from 60 to 70 (some Mantids have 70 HP. Goofy to imagine one of them having more HP than a reaper)

I believe they are strong enough already..

[Mr.Xia]

As much as I like them to be more terrifying in outdoor missions, they already serve their purpose when in close quarters (i.e Alien bases)

Balanced has to be considered when buffing reapers, they are a cascading terror unit that can snowball into a frustrating enemy to tackle if things got out of hand, so making them stronger might seriously make the map too difficult.

 

If there is to be a change, I would suggest they spawn in windowless interior rooms (storeroom in a supermarket for example) and trigger their attack pattern whenever any human unit ventures within their detection range.

Edited August 7, 2023 by Mr.Xia

[Wont Tell]

On 8/7/2023 at 1:06 PM, Skitso said:

It's also about maps. Reapers should only be found around tight claustrophobic interior spaces and not on open desert.

That makes precious little sense as Reapers will be encountered where their UFO got downed when they were intercepted while flying to their intended mission area - and "only interior space" would also make them unavailable for Terror missions, which is their main purpose in the game.

I concur with the suggestion that their TU should be increased to make them more dangerous. Zombified humans move a bit too fast/far though for their zombie-shambling animation

[Skitso]

1 hour ago, Wont Tell said:

That makes precious little sense as Reapers will be encountered where their UFO got downed when they were intercepted while flying to their intended mission area - and "only interior space" would also make them unavailable for Terror missions, which is their main purpose in the game.

I concur with the suggestion that their TU should be increased to make them more dangerous. Zombified humans move a bit too fast/far though for their zombie-shambling animation

You are saying there's no interior spaces in crash or terror sites? 

[Serious Sponge]

The Reapers from the first Xenonauts were absolutely terrifying and just like the Chrysalids from classic XCOM, they did have a crap load of TU and could one-shot any soldier no matter what armor they had on. They definitely are not nearly as strong right now in this game, where I've had more than one soldier survive being hit by one and they barely cross distances that the leveled up player soldiers could breeze past by the end of the current content.

[GreeboCherry]

I feel like Reapers look the most terrifying and when I see one I'm always like "Ok, play extra careful, don't spread out your man, be careful", while when fighting anything else I'm like "It's just one alien with laser pistol, two xenonauts in armour and laser rifles will surely deal with him... crap, how did he hit for that much damage from that distance".

I feel like the AI is not well designed with melee aliens in mind, and Reapers are always out of cover, in the open, ending their turn close to my  people with guns, but without doing any harm to them. I hope some kind of AI improvement will come for them, as @doubleskulls suggested.

[Jorlem]

On the subject of the Reapers, I’d like to bring up the issue of their coloring. The reaper color palette is far too similar to the color palette used by the robot drones that the aliens have. When I first saw a reaper, I thought I was up against this game’s version of an andron, not a reaper thanks to that. 

[cwamartin]

I also would go for a Reaper buff; it was not unusual for me, when playing X1, if I arrived at a terror site early in the game and realised Reapers were present to just abort; they were so hard to kill and could easily overwhelm the battlezone. That is the way they should be. As they are now, I am actually glad to see them because they are so easy to kill. They just run towards your troops mindlessly and rarely do they survive to get close enough to do any harm.  Not to mention that in X1 they could run all the way from out of visual range up to your unsuspecting troops and take them out effortlessly. Now if you can see them at a distance the chances are they won't be able to reach you in one turn giving plenty of time to get ready for them.  In X1 I used to reckon a Reaper needed a heavy weapon at point blank range to guarantee the kill and preferably a shotgun as well.  And if it was a zombie then you doubled up! Until I knew all the reapers were dead (I used to make a note of how many there were in each UFO from the Hyperwave Communication thing) my troops crawled through the battlefield grouped close together so that they would have reserved enough TUs to shoot any Reapers that suddenly appeared to ruin their (and my) day...!

[Serious Sponge]

On a side note: I also kinda think the visual design of the Reapers is a bit of a downgrade from Xenonauts 1. In my honest opinion, the Reapers in this game kinda just look like they're some dude in a suit rather than being a biological weapon of terror. The Reapers from the first game looked way more terrifying.

That being said, it does also feel like they're going for making them look similar to to the original Chrysalids from X-COM so I guess that's nice for the throwback/reference.

[Adamantium]

The only good Chryssalid is a dead Chryssalid! I hate them with a passion

 

I agree with tweaking the AI rather than buffing them, maybe adding a stronger Variant later in the game

[Skitso]

On 8/10/2023 at 7:23 PM, Serious Sponge said:

On a side note: I also kinda think the visual design of the Reapers is a bit of a downgrade from Xenonauts 1. In my honest opinion, the Reapers in this game kinda just look like they're some dude in a suit rather than being a biological weapon of terror. The Reapers from the first game looked way more terrifying.

That being said, it does also feel like they're going for making them look similar to to the original Chrysalids from X-COM so I guess that's nice for the throwback/reference.

Yeah, X1 version: 

This is much more intimidating. Now that I look those old autopsy images, I like the X1's more realistic tone. 

[Komandos]

On 8/5/2023 at 11:51 PM, Zach said:

SPOILER: The autopsy says "... can move across the battlefield with inhuman speed..." But they can't. They only have 60 TU. So weak.

An experienced xenonaut can have 100 TU. It is the player's soldiers who are able to move with "inhuman + superhuman speed".

[Zach]

On 8/23/2023 at 9:53 AM, Komandos said:

An experienced xenonaut can have 100 TU. It is the player's soldiers who are able to move with "inhuman + superhuman speed".

Well.... with the proper armor, you can actually get 112 TU xD

[TornaSerrallonga]

On the other hand in Xenonauts 1 you could equip your troopers with an RPG which did short work of any chrysalid. My plan was always keep your distance and rocket the life out of their bodies in one well-placed shot. If they want to buff the reapers they might want to think about bringing the RPG back or making more MARS available per helicopter.