Ground Combat Balance Discussion v19 Experimental

[Andeerz]

After playing 3 missions on this release, I noticed that the aliens inside a UFO attempt to fire at my troops outside of it(when they are spotted by an alien outside the UFO), while there is no way to make their shot(door closed, all walls). This ended up in aliens killing eachother inside the UFO before my men reach the door. I also noticed LOF issues in both direct line and angle. For example, there are many occasions that my men should have a clear line of fire to an alien, but the game calculates that it is blocked. When you attempt to target an alien at 45 degrees and there is another trooper next to you, standing, the game still calculates that he blocks your line of fire. I think both issues are connected.

Same thing happens to me. Also, during alien base missions, similar things happen. In fact, I think the aliens are able to see through walls, particularly when your troops are standing right next to a wall.

Also... personally, I think the suppression mechanics are pretty good, though I feel like my own soldiers might not be getting suppressed as easily as the aliens. Then again, that could just be because I actually seek cover and play smart, unlike the AI. I think that many of those who complain about suppression being too good might change their tune if aliens started to fight smarter and not staying out in the open so much.

Edited June 16, 2013 by Andeerz

[Sathra]

I am suspecting something unintentional might have been done with alien sniper rifles. Harridans shoot right through cover with excellent accuracy, I've had a plasma bolt kill my soldier and hit another one further down the map, and they also manage to destroy cover like haybails and still hit a soldier behind it with the same plasma bolt.

EDIT: Another shot from them hit the Chinook, and it looked and sounded like each tile in the Chinook got hit, a lot of sound. It feels like an alien plasma rifle shot will actually hit every tile in its path.

All sniper rifles got hypervelocity back. Overpenetration chance pretty much, so cover isn't great protection (your own sniper rifles can do this too, but their lesser damage limits the effect I think)

[svidangel]

Wonder if the hypervelocity being added back in is connected to the design decision to have all the misses fall short rather than blast through things behind the target.

[Solver]

All sniper rifles got hypervelocity back. Overpenetration chance pretty much, so cover isn't great protection (your own sniper rifles can do this too, but their lesser damage limits the effect I think)

Ah, so that's what hypervelocity is. I see the point, but my sniper rifles generally seem to go through a wooden box or similar cover, while alien sniper plasma seems to penetrate just about anything. I don't know if it is intended for cover to be useless against those.

And I feel same as lightgemini does about accuracy. Except with sniper rifles, accuracy against open aliens doesn't reach 50% even with aimed shots.

[Borsek]

I haven't played much, but if you ask me, accuracy should be higher than it is right now, but should be more range based. As in - lower the rifle's range to 10, increase accuracy by a factor of two. This makes it easy to hit nearby enemies, while making enemies that are far and in cover impossible to hit unless you flank them/blow them up.

Also, the logic and balancing behind burst fire was that you had a lower chance to hit, 30% per shot, which is 1-(0.7^3) = 65.7% chance to hit with at least one bullet, which, while higher than aimed shot (usually around 55%), costs a lot more ammo. That's the tradeoff - either carry a bunch of ammo lowering your TU or risk running out in the middle of a mission.

Imho the gun capacity is also a blatantly obvious attempt at balancing. A rifle with 15 shots, laser rifle with 9 and so on... instead, you could make them all carry 30 or more bullets, and make a 'snap shot' into a 'burst shot', spending three bullets, an aimed shot spending one and burst spending 6-9 per attack. Go innovative - make us decide how much energy a laser rifle spends - a.k.a. how many 'bullets' it uses! You can do a burst of 10%, or an aimed shot of 100% clip size, thereby allowing us to spend less/more ammo and TU depending on what is needed. It would cause a lot more battlefield variety and would look slightly more realistic.

Whatever, I'll make me a mod anyway

[Andeerz]

I'm going to repeat some of what I said in the last balance discussion and related posts with regard to cover and penetration of projectiles and how to balance the weapons in general:

We should do away with the simple hypervelocity tag and make penetration and damage to cover dependent on the weapon it is fired from and cover type. Having this kind of feature would increase the options available for balancing, as well as offer some cool, plausible pros and cons to the different weapons technologies that could enrich the tactical experience of the game. For example, perhaps ballistics would not be able to as easily destroy cover as plasma but would have superior penetration than the others. Lasers would not be able to easily penetrate even thin stuff (provided it's opaque) but could ignite flammable objects and cause a low to moderate amount of damage to cover. Plasma would have low to moderate penetration but have superior destructive capabilities against cover. Penetration power should be independent of damage for sure. And thin cover should be much more easily penetrated than thick cover. Just some food for thought...

[Ol' Stinky]

I think lightscouts and scouts need variety in enemy type. Now that I'm fighting corvs/landingships the ground combat's cool because the enemies aren't going to be all the same. Having harridans in the mix adds to the gameplay way more than you think it would at first glance. With the scouts, once you see a lizard or grey, you know what all the enemies are. As beta goes on and, I reckon, the lightscout/scout part of the game is shortened, this might not seem to be a problem anymore; don't be fooled, though, because boring earlier missions really hurt replayability!

At first I thought it was a problem with the numbers involved, but increasing how many noncoms/guards come in a scout didn't alleviate this issue for me. All it did was make a boring mission take longer.

Given that it's unreasonable to ask for new aliens at this stage, maybe we can have a bit of a varied weapons loadout for the liz/grey noncombatants/guards? And/or maybe a weaker tier of reapers for the lizards.

You could save on making assets for new weapons by creating variants of existing weapons: "overcharged alien plasma pistol", for example, which doesn't have the snap/standard/burst fire of the real alien plasma pistol, but fires a 3 radius explosion shot for 40 TUs (other stats identical to the standard alien plasma pistol). Or a "stable alien plasma pistol", a version of the plasma pistol that does half damage per shot, but fires 6 shots in its burst mode and has a real chance of suppressing xnauts.

When attacking UFOs, I just chuck grenades. Open doors, throw a nade, step aside. A few high-precision guys can shoot, but it's mostly nades. It works and is even kind of boring. At least on small/normal Scouts. This is mostly because aliens are hiding behind consoles anyway, so shooting seems less effective than throwing grenades.

I'm still doing this, yeah. It's kinda funny that once I realise I've cleared the outside of the UFO, all my snipers hurl their weapons to the floor and run inside with grenades at the ready.

My current squad is roughly: 2 redshirts with assualt shields, a RL guy with stun rockets, and the rest are snipers with a pistol and as many grenades as they can carry, a mix of frag/stun/flashbangs. The pistol's not really intended for use except to burn off TUs, it's there so I can check I can actually throw a grenade at a given square without hitting a corner or somesuch. And also because the pistols look cool. There, I said it.

I think I dumped rifles after the second mission. I had four rookies pelting an entrenched grey for two turns with no success, then my one sniper had a go, killed it, and I realised that hypervelocity was back in. Cue a lot of xnauts getting changed to snipers.

Edited June 17, 2013 by Ol' Stinky

[Sathra]

Hmm, maybe Alphas should show up earlier, in small numbers?

[Ol' Stinky]

Maybe, although so far in my v19 playthrough, reapers already come in very small numbers. There's also the fact that reapers are instakillers if they do get to attack, so they're probably not an enemy you want to have a complete newbie go up against.

On the grey's side of things, I don't know whether it's needed to have a "lighterdrone" or whether the current lightdrone's fine for the start of the game. It'd share graphics, sounds and xenopedia entries with the lightscout, the only way a player would know they're actually different from real lightdrones is if they look in the XML files. I reckon 0-2 lightdrones would be okay for lightscouts, but I haven't tried doing that in v19. It might be too much for the starter mission if a player has no clue how to play.

[fury]

Hi - new around here, forgive me if it's not the appropriate thread to add comments to.

+1 for me on the overall accuracy and the contrary "0%" scoring more hits than way higher percentages.

One big thing for me - is there any way of making the AI a lot more aggressive? I just find it really jarring that aliens send a squad of 10+ androns to attack my base, then have to spend the entire encounter rooting them all out of cupboards, and finding the leader and 4 other buddies in a starting room? Yeah, you're really storming the base there, holed up in corners of a single room

Same with "terror" missions where aliens play hide and seek or sit in one spot all game. I expect them to be defensive when I've downed their ship and send a squad in for mop up duty, but as it stands the only agressive unit is the reaper.

While commenting on downed ships, is there also any other way of generating the map where ships don't tend to have their doors be directly next to a wall? It seems in that configuration, movement is bugged so that units can shoot without being revealed, then jump out over the wall and back into the ship to disappear again. It's a bit disappointing having your squad lined up for target practice and having them all wiped out due to the above behaviour

[Aaron]

Please guys, no Geoscape discussion in this thread - that's what the Geoscape thread is for. Once there are major changes to that part of the game I will make a new thread to discuss them.

@fury AI behaviour improvements will come, we want to have them behaving in a much more coordinated squad based manner eventually.

Adding light drones to Scouts sounds interesting, but I believe the the light drones actually unlock a technology when you "autopsy" them, will have to check.

It sounds like, now the accuracy bug has been fixed, people are finding the "real" accuracies of the weapons to be on the low side; anyone disagree? I'm not convinced either way.

[Sathra]

Light Drones can unlock Buzzard if Wolf is done.

[Ol' Stinky]

Nuts, you're right. You'd need to introduce a lighter drone to avoid that, and that might be more trouble than it's worth. Bah.

I guess a wider arsenal of alien guns that don't interfere with the tech tree's the better option, then.

As for the accuracy thing: if you don't think that accuracy's a problem for rifles/shots/LMGs, fair enough, but it was enough to make me look for ways to get around aliens using cover. The RL's inaccurate, but that's offset by its explosive nature, so I'd take along an RL guy despite the weapon-destruction early on for those occasions where I absolutely needed to kill an alien. The sniper rifle doesn't lend itself to mobility, and in a rookie's hands can still miss a lot, but hypervelocity helps neuter the aliens' cover. And grenades are short range (especially for rookies) but even when they miss can still do some good by causing a little splash damage, unlike shotguns.

If I were to restart my v19 game, I wouldn't take along any rifles, shotguns or LMGs. Admittedly, in the case of rifles and LMGs it's because of the AI suppression/TU bug: when that's fixed I'd probably take along a rifle or LMG for the suppression. Most of the guys would be commandos: using snipers, with pistol/grenades in the backpack.

Edit: making a mod of the weapon variant thing and testing it in quickbattle in v19 HF 1, a shotgunner had a 58%/76% chance with snapshot/standard shot against a grey non-com...at point blank range with no cover involved. And he missed both snap shots, causing no damage.

Edited June 17, 2013 by Ol' Stinky

[GizmoGomez]

I have a recommendation concerning bleeding soldiers and medikits. How much healing does it take to remove the bleeding effect?

I was under the impression that it would be removed if you received any healing at all (D&D at work here haha), but when I used my bugged 1/50 medikits to heal a guy who was bleeding out nothing happened, besides maybe him getting +1 HP (it's so hard to tell how much they actually get healed. Numbers please?).

So, should any healing at all remove the bleeding? Or should it be a certain number of healing?

Lets say that it takes 5 hp of healing to remove the effect. How would that be calculated? Would it be 5 hp in one healing "throw" (haha, animations), or would it be 5 hp total since you gained the effect? What would happen if you had five guys each heal the bleeding soldier 1 hp each? It's probably unlikely, but still entirely possible.

[ThunderGr]

I have the impression that the bleeding stops when he recovers maximum battlefield HP.

[GizmoGomez]

That's hardly fair, is it? I mean, what if he's bleeding, but you don't have the time (units) to fully recover him? You'd focus on stopping bleeding first, as that's actually extending the damage, instead of waiting until the rest of him is patched up before stopping the bleeding.

[Nickboom]

I personally think ground combat is a bit too easy once you train some of your soldiers, but I agree with the inaccuracy thing for trained soldiers if they didnt move and took at a shot at a large alien out of cover they should hit but instead they have a 30% chance which is fairly dumb

[GizmoGomez]

Are you using higher aim levels? Right click or use the scroll wheel. Almost every weapon has up to three aim levels, Snap, Standard or Normal (I honestly can't remember which), and Aimed. If you're only using snap shots, you've been firing from the hip this entire time. No wonder you've only had poor accuracy so far.

[smoitessier]

It sounds like, now the accuracy bug has been fixed, people are finding the "real" accuracies of the weapons to be on the low side; anyone disagree? I'm not convinced either way.

I like the new accuracy, it's pretty fun not getting axed 9 times out of 10 by plasma rifles, and it's fun having to get closer, but i think there are some realism problems at close range, i.e. 3-4 tiles with a pistol missing 4 out of 5 shots (showed 45ish % to hit), Oh and the frequent friendly fire which is a step back from last build.

Edited June 17, 2013 by smoitessier

[Sathra]

I have a recommendation concerning bleeding soldiers and medikits. How much healing does it take to remove the bleeding effect?

I was under the impression that it would be removed if you received any healing at all (D&D at work here haha), but when I used my bugged 1/50 medikits to heal a guy who was bleeding out nothing happened, besides maybe him getting +1 HP (it's so hard to tell how much they actually get healed. Numbers please?).

So, should any healing at all remove the bleeding? Or should it be a certain number of healing?

Lets say that it takes 5 hp of healing to remove the effect. How would that be calculated? Would it be 5 hp in one healing "throw" (haha, animations), or would it be 5 hp total since you gained the effect? What would happen if you had five guys each heal the bleeding soldier 1 hp each? It's probably unlikely, but still entirely possible.

It takes about 10 healing to stop bleeding I think. It does seem to add up though, so doing it in two lots of 5 healing works too.

[smoitessier]

Not sure now but in previous builds 5 healing would stop 2hp/turn of bleeding.

[Sathra]

Actually tried out using stun batons just now.

Its very difficult, and cost me 2 (nearly 3) good troopers. The aliens being able to burst fire after being suppressed is getting really annoying.

[Andeerz]

Yeah. Suppression should make firing hideously inaccurate or outright impossible.

[Sathra]

Oh, I would have been fine is they simply couldn't burst fire. Its just that they really should not be able to at all after being suppressed.

[Aaron]

We'll get to the bottom of the alien-firing-while-suppressed issue, it just seems to have many layers...

I'm also interested to hear more about the ancillary equipment like stun batons, smoke grenades, C4 etc... they all need to be important enough to be useful, but not so useful you can't do without them.