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Ground Combat Balance Discussion v19 Experimental Build 5


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This latest build makes some important changes to Xenonaut equipment in ground combat - armour has been significantly buffed, gaining more protection and losing the sight penalty; and grenades have been nerfed harder than a nerf herder, losing 3 tiles of range and gaining the overdamage property, which means they destroy equipment being carried by their target.

Additionally I have made a pretty major overhaul of the numbers and composition of the alien forces appearing in each ground combat mission - there will now generally be more of them, and better use of the "defensive" and "command" aliens inside UFOs.

Here's the balance changes:

- Extensive rebalance of the composition and number of aliens spawning in every UFO and Alien base

-- Alien numbers now randomised to make missions a little more individual

-- Generally, you can expect up to 50% more aliens than previously in a UFO

-- Better use of Passive (lurking), Defensive (UFO bound) and Command (UFO command room bound) aliens

-- Larger UFOs now have proportionally more aliens on the defensive inside them

-- Alien bases should now be much more busy, though they are sometimes affected by the note below

-- Unfixed bug: it seems later UFOs/bases do not always load the correct set of aliens; please report this if you see it

- Close range accuracy bonus increased from +8 per tile to +15 to encourage closer engagements

- Grenades now cause overdamage, meaning they will destroy the equipment an alien was carrying

- The various types of Xenonauts armour all now provide an extra 10 points of damage protection (e.g. Jackal now 30 up from 20)

- Heavier armours (Jackal, Wolf and Predator) now now longer have a signt range reduction

- Alien battle rifle damage increased from 70 to 100 (but 20 armour mitigation removed)

- Base grenade throw range reduced by 3 tiles

- The extra TU required to vault low walls has been reduced to 6 from 12

- Stun grenades made slightly more effective (both initial blast and gas)

- Flashbang stun damage halved

- Reduced range of sniper rifles down to 25 (both human and alien)

- Sniper rifles now cost an extra 10 TU per tier to fire

- Reduced range of some drone weapons down to 20

- Xenonaut stats progress has been capped at a single point for each stat per mission

- Final mission has been tuned a bit in terms of layout and alien numbers; still very rough but should be more playable (remember most of the art in that mission is placeholder)

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I've just gone through a few battles in build 5 but so far I like the changes that I'm aware of, particularly the random number of aliens and that now I can no longer really predict where they'll be (I found one alien lurking inside a house, something I've not seen before). I'm still getting one-shotted, though, wearing Jackal armor (at least I think it was just one shot- couldn't really tell because the Hidden Movement screen is still in the way of action during the alien turn that I should clearly be able to see).

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Hello,

the hidden movement screen is not doing the right thing.

a) does not show or is difficult to see alien's shots or reaction fire shot directional.

b) even see alien, hidden movement window "blocks" seeing alien moving (regardless of moving out into visible zone or moving out, into zone of fog).

seems like this hidden movement window is smaller, does shift to area of movement (very close to zone of fog), as if soldiers could spot or is aware (sound, smell, etc). (still show window, blocking view anyway.)

I was not sure if this feature was implemented in 19.5 or earlier.

R

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after not having any problems on any other builds, on my first caesan light scout, on easy, I lost my entire team. I think it's a bit too difficult at the moment.

Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm honestly, 100% not trying to be a jerk. How did you lose a lightscout mission?

- Did you go heavy on assault rifles, or try a mix of weapons?

- Did you use smoke grenades?

- Did you use cover? Did you try flanking the enemy?

- What kind of map was it?

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This is from a saved game from version 4 continued with version 5, so I am not sure if it applies or not, but from this one battle, the aliens are now much too strong. My base was invaded by 16 aliens at the beginning of December, and by multiple saves I was able to survive without much damage to my 12 soldiers until the last room. In this large room were 9 aliens distributed in well-covered positions, all of tem agaoinst the back wall facing the two doors (an ideal defensive position). Despite much saving and restarting, when the battle finiished I had 2 dead and 11 wounded. Three of my soldiers had Wolf armor and a few others had Jackal.

With the now restricted range of grenades and killing aliens requiring multiple grenades or multiple gunshot hits, and the improved accuracy of aliens, it was impossible to enter this room more than a step without getting opportunity fire from multiple aliens,so I had to use the technique of stepping inside the door (there were 2 doors), taking a pot-shot at an alien in cover (usually missing), and ducking in cover again.

Had not some of the aliens occasionally stepped out from behind their cover to attack to cause additional casualties to my soldiers but leaving themselves open, I probably could not have finished this battle before running out of ammunition.

I have started a new game from scratch, so I will have a better idea of how it develops, but from this single battle, it appears that the changes of 19.5 give the aliens too much advantage. Of course since I "only" lost two soldiers, it doesn't look so bad, until one sees that I finished the battle only to see that I had two terror missions in the next few minutes, with only 3 fit soldiers to face them and whatever else was waiting for me in the next week or so.

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yeah, I had 4 sniper rifles and 4 machine guns and my team all died trying to kill the 3 caesans that were in the light scout, they kept hitting all 4 of my troops that I could fit in the UFO and reducing my TU's to where I couldn't shoot or even throw a grenade.

Again, last build I could clear the exact same mission with no losses.

For the next light scout with sebillians I tried all riflemen since that's what I got to replace the team that all died and since sniper rifles have been nerfed so badly, and it went a little better, I only lost 2 members and some wounded, but again, it's on easy and I would not have had any losses before.

that's 10 lost troops and several wounded in the first two missions on easy :I

Edited by kefeinzel
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maybe that's where their aggression comes from. Lack of hugs ? :)

I go into the Light Scout when I'm bored of firing form the door or if I want to test out things without resorting to stun grenades. If I was playing the final build and it was like this, I'd always use the grenades. Too risky otherwise.

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Well, I've been giving out a lot of hugs. In my 19.5 playthrough I was lucky enough to get stun weapons online by the time the fourth light scout came along, so the breaching procedure went from "open the door and spam flashbangs to stun them" to "flashbang, then proggle them". I'm quickly growing fond of the stun batons. If nothing else, they're really good for stunning civs/friendly AIs who are being annoying.

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Ah the flares. I've had to use them twice in 19.5. With the grenade range issue I couldn't throw them far enough to make much of a difference and, as mentioned, they don't last long. The problem is that with infinite amounts of them, you'd want to avoid evening up the human eyesight with that of the aliens.

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I'm starting to think something weird's going on with the LMG.

Q6R5Hc7.jpg

0% to hit: the first two hits of the burst connect and kill the enemy. I know it's actually 1% chance to hit (well, if config.xml's minimum chance to hit is working), but it still seems strange. This isn't the only time I've beaten the odds with an LMG.

This isn't a complaint that I'm actually hitting an alien. I'm wondering if the LMG's bugged or if it's a general accuracy problem.

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I've missed form 4 feet away with the LMG on my last mission, but like yourself, have hit twice with seemingly no chance. I'm ignoring 0% chance with grenades as well. If I'm in range I just through it.

In the middle of November, general accuracy of ballistic weapons seems low. On the other hand, I'm having better luck with stun grenades. I'm now capturing more than I'm getting close to killing.

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Yeah, the hit indicator as a whole seems really dodgy. It's not been too much of a problem until fairly recently, when you can be unable to take the shot due to too low a chance to hit (presumably).

I'm wondering how this general scenario is meant to play out: a Xenonaut with an assault rifle or shotgun is in range of an enemy. The enemy has no cover. The enemy type's that of a grunt, so it's not a supposed to be a meatshield. The 'naut and the alien are of equivalent tier groups, in both armour and weapons. Is the 'naut meant to kill the enemy in one turn?

If he is, please increase AR/shotgun accuracy, because they aren't cutting it. If you're worried about cover being marginalised, increase the mitigation bonus a unit gets from crouching behind cover. The AR might need a range nerf to go with it, but that's a trade I'll happily take! Even if the range comes down to ~14, at least there'll be some range where the AR is satisfying to use.

If he isn't, well, I'd beg you to reconsider. It's naff spending close to a hundred TUs and only getting a single hit out of it when you're in an ideal situation to take the shots. The only reason I can see you wanting the game to play out this way is so that there can be fewer enemies per level, but I'd rather have more enemies running around than this.

I'd also consider changing the AR to have a difference of 5 TUs between shot types instead of 10. So snap/normal/aimed becomes 20/25/30. Right now it doesn't feel mobile at all.

Edited by Ol' Stinky
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example: Scout mission in the desert.

I spot a Sebillian hiding beside a crate. Not behind it, just beside it, so it's not in cover from my soldiers. I fire LMG, from within range. All shots miss, peppering the ground around it. Second LMG fires and also misses with same effect. I fire three pistol shots at it. They all miss. I fire two round of automatic rifle fire. They all miss. All soldiers are within range. I fire a rocket launcher (stun) it misses completely hitting the ground nearby.

Alien turn. Not only does it critically wound 1 soldier, but all it's pals move up and wound another three. 1 comes out of the Scout and kills a soldier.

Reload game.

LMG soldier moves close enough for a grenade. Dead alien. second LMG then moves towards next cover. He spots a second alien. Two riflemen with stun grenades move up and capture it. Breach soldier opens the UFO and rocket launcher throws a grenade in and stuns it at the first attempt.

So, same scenario. Grenades vastly superior to use.

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I support making the AR less TU intensive to fire; 20, 25, 30 sounds good. Also, burst should be 30 then, right?

Bumping the accuracy sounds like a good idea as well; really, these should be low damage, high rate-of-fire, good accuracy weapons with fairly decent suppression and barely any recoil at all.

I like the sniper change, kinda. It makes their wielders require better stats to fully utilize the full potential. One question; should we increase the recoil on these? This would make strength more of a factor, so you'd need a decent strength soldier to use them properly.

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I loved the accuracy buff in the unofficial test Aaron put out; there weren't any problems at all I saw. Even firing inside the UFO was better, which is saying something.

I'm waiting for an official (as in, Aaron developed) unofficial test, though. Even if it's the same as yours, I'd like Aaron to actually approve it before I start testing it.

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I like the changes to stun grenades so far, they seem moderately more useful now that three of them can stun a Sebillian with the initial stun.

Out of interest, have stun grenades always done damage to props? I ask because of the recent landing ship mission I did. The last Sebillian managed to escape to one of the reactor rooms, leaving me to try to dislodge him without detonating it. I couldn't get close with stun batons so I tried stun grenades but received an unpleasant surprise when the reactor suddenly exploded after the second grenade. Has it always been this way or is this new?

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Ah the flares. I've had to use them twice in 19.5. With the grenade range issue I couldn't throw them far enough to make much of a difference and, as mentioned, they don't last long. The problem is that with infinite amounts of them, you'd want to avoid evening up the human eyesight with that of the aliens.
Maybe the grenade range has been lowered enough that they're not useful, now. Before, I found them pretty useful... but insanely time consuming to use.

As for Stun Grenades, I think they were better than guns in the previous build, and probably still are. To be fair, Military CS gas is nasty enough to stop a bear, so it's not unreasonable. But then, the guns might be a bit too inaccurate.

It would be good if there was a small chance of aliens surviving lethal damage, also (that's part of the reason I always use stun grenades, since guns seem to always be lethal).

Edited by Mask
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Out of interest, have stun grenades always done damage to props? I ask because of the recent landing ship mission I did. The last Sebillian managed to escape to one of the reactor rooms, leaving me to try to dislodge him without detonating it. I couldn't get close with stun batons so I tried stun grenades but received an unpleasant surprise when the reactor suddenly exploded after the second grenade. Has it always been this way or is this new?

There's a weird and enduring bug around that causes smoke to destroy and set fire to low health props, maybe it's related to that? It shouldn't be happening, anyway, since stuns do 0 regular damage (unlike flashbangs or stun rockets).

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Not specific to the most recent version (not played enough yet), but something that's bothered me for a while (and inspired by discussions about grenades) - TUs spent on swapping items between belt/backpack and hand seem very low. It takes ~10 TUs to stow a weapon in a backpack and draw a handgun from a belt, which is half the TUs needed to take a snap shot with a rifle or shotgun.

I'd make two contentions for increasing the TU costs for this. Firstly, I think it would be more realistic (certainly my backpack-packing skills are not so lightning fast!). More importantly, though, I'd argue that it would add something to GC by making item-in-hand choices a little more meaningful. Given that it's so easy to swap items in and out of hand, it makes relatively little difference at the moment what you have in hand already. A soldier armed with a LMG or sniper rifle is hardly troubled by drawing their pistol to take a shot on the move; a medic is hardly troubled getting their medikit out to heal a badly wounded soldier; etc. IMO, I'd like these things to all be more important then they are at the moment.

This would also expand the use of pistols a bit more by making carrying grenades/medikits in hand a little more valuable (I've never used the Commando unit class since it's never troubled me to use grenades from the belt when I've needed to, so I've never seen the advantage of having a grenade already in hand).

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- Xenonaut stats progress has been capped at a single point for each stat per mission

I was just looking in the gameconfig.xml file and noticed that the maximum advancement points for STR is 40 while you need 20 to increase the stat by 1 (implying that you can gain 2 STR per mission). I assume this is unintentional?

For, clarity's sake, the bit I'm refering to is:

<strengthProgress pointsToProgress="20" maxPointsInSingleBattle="40".../>

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