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A few features/ items that are in the game, but I'm just not using. Does everyone else use this stuff and it's just me, is it balancing that prevents it from being as useful as it should, or is it just not very useful?

Shotguns - I used to use these in industrial maps. But those have been replaced. I occasionally used them for UFO breaching. The grenades mean I don't have to any more. They used to be handy for taking out Sebillians, but the Sebillians aren't as tough any more. Pistols are far more useful for suppression.

High Explosive - I've never used this, so it's not just this build. Hardly any aliens use buildings in my games and UFO hulls can't be breached.

Stun Batons - I have never used these. Why would I get anywhere near an alien to stun it, when I have nifty stun grenades and stun rockets. Even in 19.4, where the stun damage looks to have been reduced, it's worth the wait, rather than get a Xenonaut shot sneaking up.

Aircraft cannons - The upgrades are more useful, in that it's either use them or go back to base and rearm. But the initial cannon doesn't get used at all.

Flash Bangs - I find that between normal grenades, smoke grenades (that I've used less in the last 2 builds) and definitely stun, that I never have to go near these.

Vehicles - I've not used these for several builds now. In 19.4 I'm focusing on base building at first. The first few months are much more successful. Vehicles and garages are expenses that I don't have if I want to get 3 bases up and running. That's personal choice, but I've not felt the absence of extra scouting or protection in several builds.

Stores - I've not looked at this tab in the first three game months (or the vehicles one as per above). I'll only start looking when I'm upgrading the cannons on the Condors for the other bases.

Manufacturing - It is used, but only barely. Since early armour and laser weapons can be pretty much skipped, I've built 2 Foxtrots. I built 4 Gatling lasers (but I'll possibly skip even those next time round). Not mush for 3 months. Infinite weapons, ammo and auto upgrading missiles don;t help. But the lack of necessity to have extra weapons and armour in early combat is probably the real reason.

Edited by thothkins
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Shotguns - I'm waiting for stray shots to be working properly again before I come to a final judgement, but in 19.4 I don't use them at all. I'm the type of player who will tend to choose safe damage over unsure damage, and I find shotguns miss so often it's not worth the risk...and that's when aliens aren't even in cover!

High Explosive - I'm waiting until I get far enough in my 19.4 campaign for aliens to be safely over 100 health before I try and use this. My thinking is that later on it might be really good for wiping out every trace of cover in a UFO room, without the risk of killing the aliens inside and destroying their equipment. Right now, though, I'm only at corvettes. So I haven't used it at all yet.

Stun Batons - These can pump out a ton of stun now. The actual attack costs all of 15 TU. As I said above, though, I'm a "play it safe" kind of guy, so my instinct would be to use stun grenades anyway. A stun baton takes up six slots in the inventory: that's six stun grenades, which is probably going to get the job done. This doesn't mean that stun batons are bad though! I've forced myself to use them to see how the changes are, and honestly, they do a good job of corraling aliens in a UFO earlier on. They're probably better in close quarters than a shotgun right now - it's not like the shotty's reaction fire is going to hit, anyway.

So in conclusion, I think that they might be an option now for close quarters. I'm not sure what they can do to buff them now that doesn't end up breaking them.

Maybe ranged stun should be a stun-over-time effect instead of a straight-up stun value. An alien that's been dosed in a ton of stun gas could still be around for a few turns that way, making ranged stun have some sort of risk attached to it. You'd have to have a cap on how much ranged stun could be applied per turn, to stop soldiers using a million stun grenades and knocking it out in one turn anyway.

Aircraft cannons - I guess I use the autocannon if I send a lone condor out to kill a lightscout. I don't do that if I don't have to. That's it, really.

Flash Bangs - I still use these. Their suppression radius is 5, so I think the only weapon that's got a wider area of effect is C4 with its 8 (!!). Sometimes the aliens in the UFOs are just too dang far apart for a regular grenade to suppress the both of them. While you could use an LMG for nearly the same effect, an LMG uses 40 TUs, while you can use a flash for 20 TUs and probably get all the suppression you need. So I always bring a few along, even if they might not see use every battle.

Stores - I always click this tab thinking I use it to transfer aircraft, then I remember that you use the "relocate aircraft" button in the aircraft tab. That's...that's the only time I click on the stores tab, really. I might look at it if it tracked order times, something even the original game had.

Manufacturing - Yeah, I prioritise aircraft over everything else. I feel like I need as many jets as I can to control the airspace. I've not built gatling lasers, opting for as many hangers + baseline jets as I can get.

Jackal armour smells. It has a huge vision penalty, meaning I'd have to babysit a jackal scout*. There are times when 20 energy mitigation would mean the difference between life and death, but not often enough for that kind of irritation. And on top of this, they want me to pay them for jackal armour! Fat chance. I'll use smoke grenades to advance into dodgier territory and pay for another rookie instead if things go south.

I've modded my game so that jackal armour is identical to basic armour in terms of stats - same weight, same mitigation, same vision, no cost, no production time to speak of. I find that this jackal armour's more useful than the real jackal armour, since it always me to make vet soldiers look different to rookies on the battlefield.

*Move jackal up one square. Move unarmoured guy up one square behind him to make up for the blind jackal as much as you can. Repeat.

Edited by Ol' Stinky
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That seems to be the way to go, yeah. I do like to have an LMG guy for long range suppression; even though suppression's unreliable right now, a suppressed alien generally can't run away, making it even easier for snipers to get a bead on him. Suppression for LMGs between tiers is identical, so you don't have to worry about upgrading his gun.

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You're not alone! You just didn't get many responses because you forgot to put an angry red face in your thread's title.

and! Exclamation!! Marks!!! Grrrrr. :mad:

I'm also taking along an LMG. Comes in very useful actually, if not for outright kills then, for allowing for some flanking.

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As far as I know, they still cause a crash if you open the inventory while they're on the ground. Apart from that, they're working and they're good. They have a 80% chance to absorb any attacks from the front, so as long as you play cautiously, they give that poor rookie scout a fighting chance.

Also, they don't break instantly when they reach zero health. They'll absorb any excess damage, too. So if a caesan guard burst fires with his alien plasma rifle and hits the shieldbearer with all three attacks, and it isn't the 20% of the time attacks don't get through, the shield will take the 210 damage and then break. So if you have a shield guy with only 1 point of shield-health left, don't panic, you're good.

One final note: hypervelocity weapons seem to ignore shields, unless I've just been massively unlucky. So watch out for alien snipers like harridans, they completely counter shields.

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The shields are very good indeed. With the exception of the terror missions, no squad should be without one. They provide the best way to breach the UFO, and the pistol provides excellent suppressing fire too.

Some have also posted that they use the shield as ..um well a shield... for others to scout over clear areas. Those soldiers just sit in behind the soldier with the assault shield.

There was an issue involving dropping it resulting in issues. But I've never had to do that. The breaching guys are far more likely to be taking damage, so they aren't the best choice to be the squad medics. The issue may have been fixed.

I haven't had a single issue using them across a number of builds.

As a bonus, the weight of the assault shield means that you will be able to use the stat exploit on that soldier for longer :)

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I haven't played 19.4 yet, but in earlier builds (19.2 I got the farthest) I used two snipers w/ shotguns in their packs, two shield bearers with pistols, an LMG, a RL, and two Riflemen/medics/grenadiers. I'll have to actually finish installing 19.4 into my wineskin before I can actually try it, though.

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My current main 8 are (mid December):-

2 Rocket Launchers; 1 LMG, 1 Shield/Pistol, 2 Snipers, 2 Rifles (1 was initially an assault troop with a back up shotgun, but it's not being used so it was dropped.)

All have lots of grenades and each has a medipack where possible.

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Yeah Jackal Armor vision malus is pretty crippling. Would be nice to see it tweaked a little to make it worthwhile in price and in the realm of usefulness.

Vehicles have really high hitpoints now though. You might want to try them out.

Edited by shabowie
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Thanks for the feedback guys, this sort of thing is very useful. I am going to give the vehicles a bit of a buff for the next version - more armour, and additional hit points for the later tiers; do remember the heavy plasma rifle is one of the more powerful alien weapons, so it probably would be quite deadly.

Question: If I removed the sight range penalty from the other armours, do you think the weight penalty of using the heavier ones would still balance out against the lighter armours? I don't want every squad to just be equipped with the heaviest armour all the time, but it's also clear they need to justify the cost of building.

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Pretty much agree entirely with the OP, with two exceptions:

- Aircraft Cannons: I do use these, quite a lot. Not necessarily because I need to, but where I can I'd rather shoot something down with cannons over missiles to save the missiles for if I really need them.

- Stun Batons: I've not actually used these, but I've had a couple of instances in 19.4 where (because of the Stun Grenade nerf) I've taken hits as a result of waiting for the gas to kick in. As a result, I'm tempted to experiment with Stun Batons to see if they're any use (Baton and Combat Shield might be interesting to try).

@Aaron, re: armour and sight - I'm unsure. I was going to say that I think weight penalties alone would be ok, but thinking about it, actually I'm not so sure. Like the others above, I've not used heavier armour much because of the vision penalty, but it is that trade-off between armour and vision that is key and I don't think a weight-armour trade-off alone would be enough to make me think.

For me, it's key that the vision penalty can't be negated by anything else, which means it's *always* an issue regardless of where you are in the game. In contrast, weight can be off-set by developing soldier's strength, which means the choice about armour will become less important as the game progresses. Having weight as the only balance might simply create a tiered system between new soliders (with low strength) being unarmoured and elite soldiers (having developed their strength) being heavily armoured.

I guess, then, I'd rather see armour get buffed in terms of improving the protection it offers rather than reducing its penalties.

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I'm not sure that weight would at the moment, because it's not long before soldiers get pretty strong, as long as you keep them at 80%+ of their carry capacity. I reckon you can get around the problem with costs. If someone can deck their guys out with the best heavy armour around while having a strong enough airforce to control the skies, they're probably about to win. If the lighter armours were noticably cheaper than the heavy stuff, I reckon you'd get most people using it for the greater part of the game.

People generally seem to talk about armour as if it's free. It really isn't. A new soldier costs $10k, a jackal soldier costs $30k. I can't remember wolf off the top of my head so a guess: $60k for the suit and $10k for the soldier, so $70k for a wolf soldier? I want value for money, and with the vision penalty, I'll never get that.

Lasers seem to be in a similar situation: we've got people saying that they skip lasers in this thread, and apart from less ammo, they're straight up upgrades to their ballistic counterparts! The only reason to pass them over is because they want the money for the geoscape at that point. (I like to have one laser sniper around, myself, but that might be me wanting a security blanket.) If you're unsure of playing with armour, maybe use laser weaponry as a petri dish first?

Edited by Ol' Stinky
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I remember that field-of-vision had been previously controlled in the xml (the definitons are still there) and it's now hardcoded? Perhaps being able to alter field-of-vision rather than vision range might have the desired difference. Or that a "reasonable" (whatever that is) baseline vision range is set, and light armours have a longer vision range than the baseline.

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If possible, a cone penalty would be the best way to limit armors, yeah. That way, you can still see straight ahead, but might miss things on the sides if you don't actively turn and look on the sides. Adding a penalty like that, and removing the penalty on the scout armors, would make the scout armors actually useful, in that they protected their guys decently, but still allowed them to see properly. One question, does the best scout armor have a vision range increase? I think it should, if it doesn't.

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Aircraft Cannons: I do use these, quite a lot. Not necessarily because I need to, but where I can I'd rather shoot something down with cannons over missiles to save the missiles for if I really need them.

That's interesting. Does that work in practice. I feel that I'd get thumped by not softening them up with missiles first. I guess your air combat is a bit more involved than mine, constantly trying to get behind them to use the cannons.

Stun Batons: I've not actually used these, but I've had a couple of instances in 19.4 where (because of the Stun Grenade nerf) I've taken hits as a result of waiting for the gas to kick in. As a result, I'm tempted to experiment with Stun Batons to see if they're any use (Baton and Combat Shield might be interesting to try).

I've modded in a selection of magazines for the Xenonauts to read while waiting for the stun grenades to kick in. It's not as if the aliens ever do anything. Nor does time have any meaning in the missions, for that matter.

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I've modded in a selection of magazines for the Xenonauts to read while waiting for the stun grenades to kick in. It's not as if the aliens ever do anything. Nor does time have any meaning in the missions, for that matter.

Hmmm.... "make aliens avoid gas" added to GJs list. :)

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