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Why not leave them all at 100? It just seems cleaner.

I like that you're looking into the stat gaining, though, it's important.

Another thing that might need to be looked at is the rapid rise in ranks. I'm not talking about the rank names, it's simple to mod those and they really have no bearing on gameplay (player immersion is another story, but not one for here).

Should gaining ranks take longer? Or is the morale progression just right?

How hard is it to become panicked? I've never seen panic at all, so I don't know how difficult it is. That could be because I always seem to have rank-5s by the time anything larger than a scout appears. That seems to be too fast, based on my observations, that is.

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I'm relatively new to the game, having only started playing at the Steam release (and having switched over to the experimental builds, so that I've not really managed to take a game much past the introduction of carriers). However, I did want to put my two-cents into the debate on stats etc.

I've seen the comments earlier in this thread on the dominance of the sniper weapons later in the game. I'd agree with that based on my own experiences - but worry that simply reducing accuracy further is not the solution. If anything, I'd urge that consideration be given to increasing accuracy with other weapons (particularly in the early stages of the game). Carbines in particular seem to suffer at the moment from a difficulty in filling their intended role because, even at point blank ranges, their accuracy is so poor that using them either involves playing roulette or doing massive save/load spamming. It approaches immersion-breaking levels at times, when supposedly elite soldiers, stationary and crouched, are missing shots that I'm fairly sure I could make myself (and I'm no marksman) while drunk and with one eye closed.

Even if you don't go in the direction of improving the accuracy of non-sniper weapons, please make sure that any nerf to the accuracy of sniper weapons doesn't translate into an equivalent nerf across the board.

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I think it's good idea to make shotguns firing bunches of projectiles instead of one powerful one. Just as they really do.

That entirely depends on what the shotgun is loaded with. You can have birdshot, sure, but will that penetrate enemy armor? Probably not. Buchshot would be better, but even then it doesn't have quite the power of a slug. Besides, based on the current engagement ranges in this game, you really wouldn't notice any spread anyway.

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That entirely depends on what the shotgun is loaded with. You can have birdshot, sure, but will that penetrate enemy armor? Probably not. Buchshot would be better, but even then it doesn't have quite the power of a slug. Besides, based on the current engagement ranges in this game, you really wouldn't notice any spread anyway.
Yeah, shotgun slugs are bad news. I don't think any vest is going to save you against those. Even if it doesn't penetrate the wallop you'd get would probably do substantial damage, broken bones, concussion, etc...
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Hi, I've been playing the campaign at veteran difficulty and I'd like to share some of my impressions; first, since the grenade TU decrease, I've found that a soldier with a load of grenades is better than almost any other weapon (I have plasma weapons at this point). Possibly a precision plasma at the hands of a very good sniper is better than the all grenade loadout.

I've also noticed that the air combat image of the cruiser is not proportionate to its size during ground combat. When you think about how large a fighter jet is, and how small it looks compared to the cruiser during air combat, I'd say it looks twice or three times as big in air combat as it looks in ground combat. I know it's a small detail, but I was disappointed the first time I've seen the cruiser and I think it hurts the immersion.

Thank you for this great game.

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@enobayram

I still say Suppression need to be a "Bar above Alien's Heads" and fill up, instead of just being suppressed or not. (As the bar increases, their TUs go down) So Suppression doesnt = Defenseless Alien. You'd have to drain its TUs down really low to do that.

As it is, its far too easy to get a quick suppression off and then run in one at a time tossing grenades.

However I still dont think all grenades is better. Yes its overly effective, but Closer = Riskier. You can still over extend, and get flanked, or uncover another Alien a bit farther back after spending half your moves.

Ranged still is a more efficient and safer tactic.

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RE: Random Maps

text i like

RE: Snipers / Ground Combat

Broken for it to be amazingly better than anything else at killing in geneal, yes. These aren't "snipers" so much as "designated marksmen" rifles (going by the picture). They should be better than normal rifles, but not so much as to totally unbalance the game in their favor. I would suggest:

Make
two separate sniper rifles
: one with the same damage/recoil as a rifle but with increased range (at a far higher TU cost), another with much higher damage and increased range/TU but also a ton more recoil/weight (so that they are fairly inaccurate for soldiers to use unless they are high strength). The latter needs someone who has both high strength and accuracy to wield, which (look below), should NOT be that easy to come by. The former seems better, and will be on open maps, but at the same time is really weak in shorter range situations where it can't fire as much and can't burst fire, so if you get a "random" map with a lot of CQC, your sniper squad just became weak as hell. This forces balancing on squad loadouts and severely reduces the OP nature of snipers currently.
Also, the former is basically a 'scoped' version of a rifle, so it should
cost
the same, while the latter (for any tech tier) would require a whole reworking of the weapon to produce high-powered, high-accuracy shots, so the weapons should be much, much more expensive to boot (and with far reduced ammo counts, moreso than currently).
Also,
limit soldier progression
a bit. A big reason snipers are so OP is that you can end up with soldiers that are really OP, with both the strength to handle any weapon and the accuracy to hit a penny at 2km. Stats need stronger caps, with soldiers have a wide randomness to their max caps, so you end up
having
to specialize them, instead of being able to plop a CMD or CLN into anything you want with everything you want, being able to hit anything you want at any range, and being able to run a mile and shoot 5 aimed shots in one turn because they have infinity TUs.
Also, in general, make
weapons less accurate
so that
tactics
(flanking, advancing under covering fire/smoke) become more important than having 5 snipers in a line 20 tiles away playing "firing squad" with the enemy (which is unchallenging and boring and unrealistic and unbalanced). Even with a "sniper", you shouldn't be able to get 80-100% hit rates at 20 tiles.

These are all things that devs can change to rebalance the game and really create a much better ground combat game, which seems to be their focus anyway.

Oh, and of course making an actual battle AI for aliens that has them using cover instead of running in circles in open fields when under fire would go a long, long way.

For starters, i really like the soldiers getting better at their jobs and taking that away, it would be even harder for me to find a soldier to be a heavy/assault/grenadier because of some invisible cap. and having this cap be random (as some are suggesting) seems unfun and hard. (And i am not a huge fan of the so called nintendo hard part of the game, but i am also turned off by the holding the hand easy of nowdays games.)

And now i see you propose a drop of accuracy of all guns? are you lucky? my first allien base assault will forever be in my mind. 5 soldiers have a single allien surouunded. no cover. all 5 miss, one with a Lcarabine, 3 laser assault rifles and a scatter laser.

i've never seen 20 tile accuracy being OP, but i never get that far in te game (i die or have a crash too often) but maybe it would be wiser to have a higher accuracy and a faster dropp off. having less then 50% hit chance at 2 tiles seems awefull.

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There already is a cap. It's "invisible". Currently, there's little point in having it be so high since I can totally fill in the inventories of my CLN and CMD troops and have like 15kg to spare. Really, after 10-15 missions soldiers are basically "maxed out" anyway, in terms of how much they need to be able to carry realistically.

So, you had 1 unlucky die roll and now you want that to make a case for something? Those are called "odds", and weird things happen with "odds", like 1 in a 1000 sorts of good/bad luck. It will happen even if you increase accuracy.

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@Mytheos

The continuous supressedness scale could be fun, but I don't think the power of the grenades come from their supression effect. Imagine this, in my current game, I've started seeing cruisers, and I've recently started building plasma weapons. Weapons being expensive, most of my team members have laser weapons and 1 or 2 have plasma. At this point, the aliens are heavily armored, especially the Sebillians. I don't actually remember the last time I've killed an armored alien with anything other than a precision laser/plasma or alenium grenades. It takes 2 alenium grenades to kill a heavily armored Sebillian, and something like 10 shots with any laser rifle (other than precision laser). Add on top of this the "accuracy" of the grenade. Even the worst guy lands the grenade somewhere near the target, but a bad shooter will shamelessly miss 10 consecutive shots. I'm also not so sure about grenades being unsafer to use. If your soldier's strength is above 75, his/her grenade throwing range will easily be further than the effective range of his/her rifle. Add on top of this the fact that you can throw grenades behind cover, and I think using grenades is much safer. If the aliens were throwing grenades too, the game would be impossible to beat.

My point is that the grenades are so much better than other weapons, it's quite disappointing to spend $180000 and occupy the workshop for days for a scatter plasma only to find in the end that the soldier wielding it will continue getting all the kills with grenades. Grenades that are free, light and acquired without much research effort early in the game.

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@enobayram

I have 90 STR and I cant throw a grenade as far as I can shoot a riffle, maybe around 70ish percent of that range maybe.

So for me at least, it means getting closer, which can open flanking lanes, can get you reaction shot easier, and moving forward = uncovering the blackness, which means maybe uncovering an Alien you were not expecting.

It adds more chances to putting yourself at risk in very common situations.

Yes sometimes it can minimize your risk, in some situations, like 1 Flash tossed in early UFOs suppresses the 2 Alien crew. If you didnt use grenades it'd take at least two rounds of fire with a weapon, which exposes you to more chances to die to reaction fire.

I dont mean grenades are OP because of their suppression power, I mean they are OP because all you have to do is use a Ranged weapon, like a Machine Gun, and you have a solid chance for Suppression.

Then with spending 40 TUs, the Alien is harmless and you have a wonderful chance to run up and toss grenades at the Alien in safety.

Where in the old XCOM, there was no suppression, so you would get reaction shot in the face for doing that.

Here though I like the mechanic of Suppression but its seriously OP. I mean honestly melee isnt supposed to be an option for this game, unless its an Ultimate Last option.

But in reality the use of a Stun Baton is very practical here, even tho the research talks about Shock Jocks being a hated task...because in most XCOM games that role has always carried a HIGH chance of death.

Here though, not so much.

Edited by Mytheos
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Yeah, suppression sounds good in theory, but it gives any decent player a huge OP advantage I think. It needs to be reworked. I would suggest:

  • incremental suppression (just reduce TUs for every suppression event by a bit)
  • Immediate reaction fire is not affected by suppression from whatever triggered the suppression (you can fully react to a flashbang as its being thrown, even if it is displayed as occurring after the nade pops)
  • its reduced a bit overall
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  • 2 weeks later...

Suppression only seems OP when you're mopping up. Suppressing an alien on the frontline means he's vulnerable to xenonauts closing in, but moving in carries a real risk of being reaction fired at by the alien's friends hanging back.

I'm not a fan of defense trumping an offense. I didn't like the fact that there wasn't really a counter to reaction fire in the OG, and I wouldn't want it to happen in Xenonauts, which is why I'm a little worried about the idea of Androns being suppression-immune.

I got this version and the hidden movement screen does not go away when an alien is visible

Browse to Xenonauts\assets\gui\GroundCombat\hiddenmovement\. Make a folder called "backup" in here or something, and move hiddenmovement.png and hiddenmovement_small.png inside. Now when you end your turn, you won't see the picture in the middle of the screen. Enjoy!

Edited by Ol' Stinky
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