Build V17.9 Balance Discussion

[Lancebloke]

Maybe not so much with the first vehicles, but I would imagine that later vehicles and systems should have almost perfect accuracy. I haven't built the scimitar yet but I imagine it to be a quantum leap upon the hunter with hybrid human/alien systems probably giving it a similar if not better performance than today. Stationary weapons platforms today would very rarely miss, especially when automated. Should we not see that too?

Also, agree with regard to the power of the dual .50 cal. They should tear aliens apart with 1 or 2 shots, the early ones at least. The heavy machine gun should too really. Obviously as soon as the tougher aliens with their armour would be a different story.

Just think if an M-16 takes 4 or 5 shots and a sniper rifle 2 shots, then a dual .50 cal should make mincemeat of the alien scumbags!

[StellarRat]

Also, agree with regard to the power of the dual .50 cal. They should tear aliens apart with 1 or 2 shots, the early ones at least. The heavy machine gun should too really. Obviously as soon as the tougher aliens with their armour would be a different story.

Just think if an M-16 takes 4 or 5 shots and a sniper rifle 2 shots, then a dual .50 cal should make mincemeat of the alien scumbags!

Yes, IF they were dual 50's they would kill aliens with one hit, BUT I noticed the Xenopedia and the vehicle description don't match the other night. One says dual 50's while the other says dual 30's. Obviously, there is a HUGE difference between those two rounds both in damage and penetration. My guess is that Chris intended to say dual 30's. Otherwise, he needs to jack up the damage to at least double what it is now. BTW, I've filed a bug report pointing out the discrepancy.

[Max_Caine]

There is one key point regarding the Scimitar, Lancebloke. Chris has stated over and over he wants the squaddies to be the stars of the show. If the Scimitar shoots perfectly then it hogs the limelight. And it makes missions boring to boot, if there's zero uncertainty if it will miss a critical shot or not.

[StellarRat]

There is one key point regarding the Scimitar, Lancebloke. Chris has stated over and over he wants the squaddies to be the stars of the show. If the Scimitar shoots perfectly then it hogs the limelight. And it makes missions boring to boot, if there's zero uncertainty if it will miss a critical shot or not.

I agree with Max on this one. Even if the vehicles are powerful they should have weaknesses that make having accompanying soldiers necessary.

[flanker84]

To your consideration:

Back to close combat weapons again.

Think that accuracy penalty for using MG, RPG and Sniper rifle should applied when trying to shoot close range (aka heavy weapons are difficult to manage to trace target), so will need to switch to secondary shotgun/pistol, and so they would be used more often, no heavy plasma syndrome.

[Gauddlike]

It might be nice if all weapons had multiple range modifiers in the xml.

Each range could be set individually for each weapon and have an associated accuracy bonus/penalty.

It would be nice if the ranges were not binary as well, shooting at 5 tiles should not be significantly different to shooting at 6 tiles range, even if that is the cutoff for the weapon.

For example:-

Shotgun:

Short range 1-3 tiles, bonus 10%

Medium range 4-8 tiles, no bonus

Long range 8-12, penalty 5%

Precision Rifle:

Short range 1-9, penalty 5%

Medium range 10-18, no bonus

Long range 19-26, bonus 5%

Note the modifier is added onto the accuracy of the weapon after all normal range calculations are taken into account.

Firing over the maximum range listed would incur penalties as in the current system, that is the number that would be used where the range is used currently (for suppression, accuracy calculations etc).

On top of my other suggestion thread this may really drop some weapons into different niches, including representing the same weapon with different attachments for mods.

An assault rifle with a magnifying scope, for example, may be better at long/medium range but worse at short range than one using iron sights.

It is something that aids balancing though and not really a balance suggestion in its own right

[flanker84]

It would nice feature if implemented. I vote “yes”.

[Chris]

General points - damage falls off as projectiles fly beyond their maximum range, so it's possible a plasma rifle shot won't instakill a Xenonaut if the shot is at good range. But yes, the Jackal should protect against it most of the time.

The shotgun: yeah, I can see the points about it being a bit underpowered. I don't really want to increase the range too much, maybe I'll improve the damage instead.

The AI isn't done yet, so don't read too much into that at the moment. But the aliens on crash sites are much more passive than those on terror sites and base missions, which will be more direct. Also his name is Gijs-Jan.

Vehicles - it's now set so you can only have one vehicle to accompany your squad on any mission, so they can be a bit more powerful than before. As they only take up 2 soldier slots you'd be mad not to take one, but at the same time players can't spam them so they can be reasonably powerful.

The Hunter has dual 0.30 cal machineguns. They are intended to suppress rather than kill the enemy, as they'd be a bit imbalanced otherwise.

The weapon changes you mention Gauddlike seem a bit overly complex. There already is range, beyond which range and damage drops off. The "heavy" penalty is already a good 50% penalty if you move and shoot, so if you're trying to use a heavy weapon as an assault weapon it will end badly. The problem wouldn't so much be that the enemy are too close, but that the weapon didn't have time to get set up properly. There's also the additional AP cost per shot for long-range weapons to account for a longer aiming time.

Finally, I've just realised we implemented both kinetic and energy armour values for amour for a reason - allowing me to make the Ferret largely invulnerable to small arms (kinetic) weapons but still vulnerable to alien weapons (energy). I can use this to somewhat reduce the damage dealt by human friendly fire too, while not nerfing damage dealt against aliens. That'll be a nice plus.

[sandmann640]

one big pint for me is the reaction fire from alliens.

you no see one . and lose the first men out black screen.

Ok use the next one and die aigain.

and this with lower sqaud number make it imposibel to take out konzentration of enemys .

[StellarRat]

one big pint for me is the reaction fire from alliens.

you no see one . and lose the first men out black screen.

Ok use the next one and die aigain.

and this with lower sqaud number make it imposibel to take out konzentration of enemys .

They're working on the hidden movement screen. I think that will fix the problems with undetected shots that hit your soldiers.

[StellarRat]

The shotgun: yeah, I can see the points about it being a bit underpowered. I don't really want to increase the range too much, maybe I'll improve the damage instead.

I'd raise the damage to 50 - 60 and consider lowering the range to six, but that's just my opinion. They should be at least a powerful as a REALLY BIG rifle at close range.

[Chris]

Yes, the hidden movement screen bug (not showing your men die) is fixed in the developer version now and I'm thinking about the relative sight ranges of the aliens versus the humans.

[Gauddlike]

The 3 range thing is a little bit more complicated, it is useful to push weapons into their roles more though.

Precision rifles shouldn't really be a good choice for shooting at an enemy who is close in, switching to the short range pistol should be the better option.

As it is the precision rifle does significantly more damage and is a lot more accurate then the pistol so there is no reason to switch.

Even if you have moved the great accuracy of the precision rifle still means up close it is likely to be the better choice.

If you could give some long range weapons a penalty up close then they can be more powerful in their role without being a good choice outside of that role as well.

The precision rifle is a good example because the scope would make it difficult to track close targets.

Not by any means an essential feature but I feel it would be a nice one.

[sandmann640]

not rally.

The Problem is the bigger Sightrange from Alliens.

You move along the street in Backround stand the Sharpshoter to cover the move.

Your Soldier move you nothing see, only a Plasmashot out dark region.

Soldier down to 95 %.

Ok take the next soldier, hope only one more tile need and i see teh enemy.

Are no next reaction Plasma shot and next soldier down.

Then you have Position with 3 or 4 Alliens you no chance to take out this.

And then you can seperate one Allien u need luck to can kil him with 2 shots from Sharpshooter.

I have see a Wraigt, he take 2 schots from Sniper and 2 shots from M 16 .

And this is at easy game mode and not hard or ironman.

For me is game very very unbalancd at moment.

[Max_Caine]

sandmann, I know that sight range is an issue but...

1) Did you read the first post of this thread? All the difficulty settings are the same. Easy is as difficult as hard.

2) Ever try using the Hunter Scout car? That has a much better sight range than soliders.

[Lancebloke]

I agree with Max on this one. Even if the vehicles are powerful they should have weaknesses that make having accompanying soldiers necessary.

That is why I mentioned against early aliens. I would imagine later aliens to have armour that makes kinetic energy weapons all but useless.... especially their robots. And the trade off to me would be having heavy armour on the open battlefield at the expense of soldiers when it comes to breaching UFOs... and judging by the corvette, if later UFOs are much bigger then you will want as many men out there as you can for when you finally get to the UFO. Obviously you also cant use them to raid buildings.... would be good if the A.I were to recognise that and fall back to close quarters if a vehicle was on the battlefield.

Re the accuracy piece, I would suggest that at the expense of almost guaranteed kills (only on open ground), there should be two settings. 1 supression fire mode which may accidentally hit an alien with a shot but is intended on stopping reaction fire while you move troops. The second would be a single burst at a single target giving a certain kill (early game) but costing enough TUs to only allow 1 such burst followed by minimum movement afterwards.

This is just my view based on the fact that, in reality, a vehicle should tear apart an alien if the other weapons do the damage that they do. I think that it can be balanced out based on my points above.

Edited March 20, 2013 by Lancebloke

[Gauddlike]

Why would you ever use the suppression shot over the certain kill?

[Lancebloke]

Because there may be more than 1 alien there that can take out your tank.

If you had maybe 3, 4 or more aliens in cover that you could suppress in order to get other troops forward... would you take the one shot, probably lose you tank in the alien movement turn and then lose the advantages the tank has..... or would you suppress the aliens, move the tank back out of range and get some men forward and in to cover ready for the next round?

I use my hunter more as a scout right now, lots of TUs for movement and can take a shot or two. My losses of men tend to be higher when I don't have that capability.

[Gauddlike]

The way suppression works though your guaranteed kill shot would also suppress the enemies around the target as well as potentially kill more than one target as you specified it to be a burst.

Plus demoralise them as they had lost a friend and also significantly reduce their damage potential in the next round.

On top there would also be any suppressive fire your squad could throw in as they would have been unlikely to move before the vehicle if you were using it as a scout.

Assuming you had a few long range troops or a machine gun you would be easily able to suppress a few enemies and make the most of your insta kill from the vehicle.

In fact that would appear to be a better use for the vehicle if it had the ability you suggest.

Use it to locate and kill an enemy while your troops follow up and suppress whoever is left standing.

The only real downside is slower xp gains for your troops but they would still be firing at, and probably hitting, the enemy so that may not be significant.

Edited March 20, 2013 by Gauddlike

[crusherven]

Edit: I was using the Desura version. Poking around, I see Chris wanted us to use the standalone. Oops. Most of this is still pertinent; deleted a paragraph.

Just got done playing for a few hours. Played the first few months, up to my second terror mission. Thoughts:

1. Suppression seems really good--maybe it's too easy to apply. On my terror mission, a number of sebillians and whatever their terror agent is were suppressed by what looked like berserk civvies.

3. Pistols would be a lot more useful if they were faster to get in and out of action. Usually, you have your main weapon on a sling, and if you can't fire it for whatever reason, you just drop your rifle and draw a pistol--you don't put it in your pack. You can manually drop your soldiers rifle, draw a pistol, and fire, but it would be nice if there were some abstraction for this that's not TU-intensive. I feel like the pistol is weak enough it should be, at a minimum, really fast to draw and fire.

4. One issue I have with bullet trajectory is the instance when you fire at an alien in cover (or maybe out of LOS) and the tooltip says 0% accuracy. I wish the tooltip were more accurate, because it *is* possible to hit the aliens when you have "0%" chance. Maybe call it "1%" if the shot is technically possible? I don't like having to guess if a shot is even possible before I use the TUs. On the other hand, sometimes the bullet enters the alien's square and stops, but you get no wound animation or sound. I assume these are misses, but if so, it should be more obvious. FWIW, I don't really have a problem with the burst fire spread.

5. Speaking of tooltips, I'd love for them to be quicker. If I bother to mouse over my equipment, I want it to be pretty much instant. If I'm trying to re-acquaint myself with the gear (or am completely new) having to wait a couple seconds to find out what is what is obnoxious. This is particularly true in the soldier loadout screen.

6. On the roles/combat loadouts: I assume we'll eventually have icons for the roles? The letters are ok, I guess, but a little ugly. I'd love to see them expanded into the troop list in the bottom left corner, so I can easily see who and what I have loaded on the chinook without manually cycling through my men. It would also be nice to eventually have a confirmation check when you change the default loadout for a role, and maybe automatically equip the appropriate gear when you change someone's role. Right now that feels a little clunky.

7. A few other UI thoughts: It's a tad difficult to stop a soldier from running off in the event of a mis-click. Currently, you can redirect them by clicking somewhere else, but it would be really nice if you could stop them immediately by right-clicking. I'd like right-clicking to do more in general, such as canceling a shot or grenade throw. I couldn't find a way to assign mouse clicks in the keybindings. Finally, it might be nice to add some functionality to clicking on a soldier's portrait in-combat. Centering on the soldier, going to stats or inventory, something.

8. I'll add my voice to those who think jackal armour is too expensive. I kinda just shook my head and sighed when I got to wolf armour. I appreciate that you actually have to make choices, and approve. It doesn't really feel like a choice, though, since I only had enough money to make a fraction of what I wanted and certainly not a second base. As it is, you need to spend a fair amount of money just to have enough craft/craft weapons to take down a corvette when they appear. I really felt forced to invest in allenium warheads and gatling lasers, leaving little money for individual troops. Maybe I'd feel differently if the empty light scouts had been full of lovely artifacts--I'm sure I would have had more money.

The difficulty felt pretty good on Normal. Yes, the aliens see very far, and yes, they kill you easily. I lost maybe 8 soldiers in three months, mostly vs larger scouts and terror sites. It felt like XCOM, though. /shrug. I like what I see so far of the alien movements and even the civilians. I got a kick out of seeing some hillbilly with a shotgun blow away a caesan! Quantity of UFOs felt pretty good. I'm not sure how I feel about the trio of fighters that starts appearing later. It just doesn't seem like it's worth shooting them down sometimes, when you're strapped for cash and can't afford to possibly lose a craft.

Edited March 24, 2013 by crusherven

[Gauddlike]

4. One issue I have with bullet trajectory is the instance when you fire at an alien in cover (or maybe out of LOS) and the tooltip says 0% accuracy. I wish the tooltip were more accurate, because it *is* possible to hit the aliens when you have "0%" chance. Maybe call it "1%" if the shot is technically possible? I don't like having to guess if a shot is even possible before I use the TUs. On the other hand, sometimes the bullet enters the alien's square and stops, but you get no wound animation or sound. I assume these are misses, but if so, it should be more obvious. FWIW, I don't really have a problem with the burst fire spread.

That looks like the same problem that makes bullet spread/miss deviation an issue.

You target an alien and have 0% chance to hit.

You fire and cannot in fact succeed so the projectile deviates.

The deviation is low so the bullet passes through the alien tile.

Because of the stopping chance of the alien the bullet cannot pass through the tile without hitting it (or at least is very likely to hit).

A hit and damage are generated.

If deviation was made tighter as some would like then this would be an even more common occurrence.

The shot is not possible but because of the mechanics used a miss can cause damage...

When the bullet enters the square but no damage is applied is the alien in cover?

If so then that is probably a cover save.

The bullet is actually hitting the barrel/wall etc and not harming your target.

[crusherven]

In one case, I was shooting at a sebillian who was 4-5 squares back from a low waist-high wall. I wouldn't have thought that would count as cover, but most of my bullets hit either the wall or the square he was in (with no damage registered). I've had other instances in which I'm just taking a really long shot and there are many objects in between.

It seems like one way of fixing this would be to lower the stopping chance vs standing targets. You could even get fancy and give Sebillians a 87% / 47% standing / kneeling stopping chance, and Caesans 74% / 34% (because they're smaller). Maybe I don't understand how firing really works though.

Edited March 24, 2013 by crusherven

[Chris]

The accuracy calculation is a bit dodgy at the moment, last week we implemented a debug mode that we're using to try and figure out why it's behaving strangely.

[svidangel]

3) Have combat shields been implemented? Having them at the start of the game would allow for a squaddie to take the role of point man and be able to absorb some of the fire from reaction shots.

Just browsing before I sleep and... this. Even if I had to have the soldier use it as a 2H weapon, it would be amazing.

[svidangel]

Oh, and I think I mentioned elsewhere, smoke grenades seem to be the bestest weapon ever at the moment. I don't even have to go into scouts anymore, just detonate a few smokes at the edge and wait.

Oh, not really balance related, but healing... I have seen quite a few times that my soldiers who are wounded but can go on missions can be healed up to full with a quick medkit burst. Did this one one of those one turn empty scout missions. Not sure why the troops couldn't avail themselves of that at the base if they aren't actually "damaged" or whatever you might call the heal-able grayed out portion of the health bar.