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Where we playing 2 different versions of insane? because I was playing it ironman and you and me are doing far far different strategies, Shotgun and smoke? No thanks, I use rifles and stun gas and flashbangs, smoke is just for flank cover and blocking fire, shotguns open you up to way way to much reactive fire, you have one guy establish LOS then you have everyone else shoot from outside the aliens LOS, if hes using cover get rid of it with machine gun fire and the rocket launcher, or use ample amounts of stun gas to force them out of it. by the time aliens are showing up with heavy plasma you should have decent laser weapons or skilled enough troops to do team fire from distance on them. CQC is a death sentence without proper use of cover and flashbangs. How many guys are you losing with this shotgun and smoke strat? I can go many many missions without losing a single dude on insane, depending on how much i am paying attention, V5 I had 5 of my original squad and the other guys where 1st replacements when i got in power armor and had plasma weapons after that it was easy street. shotguns don't even have enough range and cant decently punch through cover. TU's on them are still not worthwhile, your better off with a pistol and a shield if you wanted to go that route, not that a shield or pistol is really all that great. IMO distance team fire from rifle &machinegun is best with 1 guy to scout for targets. Precision rifle leaves something to be desired as well not very great for a weapon that is supposed to trump the rifle at range, esp when you consider its 60 tu's for a aimed shot and you have move and shoot penalties it should provide much higher returns or receive less of a penalty when you shoot at enemy's in cover.

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Does accuracy over 100 on a weapon mean anything? Or is it only used for enemies behind cover?

Weapon accuracy is multiplied by soldier accuracy, so a weapon with an accuracy value over 100 simply gives you a base chance to hit which is higher than the soldier's raw accuracy (so, a soldier with 60 ACC has a base 72% chance to hit with an aimed rifle shot, for example). So yes, it does matter (up until the point that you get very high accuracy soldiers, anyway!).

The increased accuracy seems to primarily benefit the player, as before Aliens rarely fired at you because they were suppressed with 1-2 shots, so now on the occasion they do shoot at you, it's more dangerous...but...

But they aren't going to survive for as long now, so its less chances to shoot overall.

Ironically, given our previous discussions, I do agree with this, although it's only something I particularly noticed today while playing 19.6.

I think there's a lot of other factors that play into this, though. I've not yet gotten away from fighting light scouts yet (in spite of being half way through October) so all the aliens are still armed with plasma pistols and have a tendency to shoot on burst (which will give them the least chance to hit, especially when shooting beyond effective range). Plus, early aliens have inferior aim to Xenonaut soldiers and are less numerous. I think when higher rank aliens with better weapons turn up, it should swing to being more even (maybe).

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I have an idea how to further buff shotgun.

1) Buff damage (already done for ballistic in v19.6), I'll use x3 pistol damage of same Tier;

2) Nerf range (8 instead of 10);

3) Nerf auto fire for Tier2-4 (2 shots instead of 3);

4) Buff TU for single shot (20 instead of 25), for auto fire (30 instead of 40).

So lets see example of new shotguns :)

Ballistic Vanilla(v19.6) | Ballistic Upgraded

Range:

<props range="10"> | <props range="8">

Damage:

<type="kinetic" damage="60" mitigation="0"> | <type="kinetic" damage="60" mitigation="0">

Single Shot Accuracy:

<Set1 ap="15" accuracy="40" /> | <Set1 ap="15" accuracy="40" />

<Set2 ap="25" accuracy="90" /> | <Set2 ap="20" accuracy="90" />

-------------------------------

Lazer Vanilla(v19.6) | Lazer Upgraded

Range:

<props range="15"> | <props range="8">

Damage:

<type="energy" damage="45" mitigation="0"> | <type="energy" damage="105" mitigation="0">

Single Shot Accuracy:

<Set1 ap="15" accuracy="40" /> | <Set1 ap="15" accuracy="40" />

<Set2 ap="25" accuracy="90" /> | <Set2 ap="20" accuracy="90" />

Burst Fire Accuracy and Shot Count:

<BurstFire ap="40" shotCount="3"> | <BurstFire ap="30" shotCount="2">

-------------------------------

Plazma Vanilla(v19.6) | Plazma Upgraded

Range:

<props range="15"> | <props range="8">

Damage:

<type="energy" damage="60" mitigation="0"> | <type="energy" damage="150" mitigation="0">

Single Shot Accuracy:

<Set1 ap="15" accuracy="40" /> | <Set1 ap="15" accuracy="40" />

<Set2 ap="25" accuracy="90" /> | <Set2 ap="20" accuracy="90" />

Burst Fire Accuracy and Shot Count:

<BurstFire ap="40" shotCount="3"> | <BurstFire ap="30" shotCount="2">

-------------------------------

MAG Vanilla(v19.6) | MAG Upgraded

Range:

<props range="15"> | <props range="8">

Damage:

<type="kinetic" damage="75" mitigation="0"> | <type="kinetic" damage="195" mitigation="0">

Single Shot Accuracy:

<Set1 ap="15" accuracy="40" /> | <Set1 ap="15" accuracy="40" />

<Set2 ap="25" accuracy="90" /> | <Set2 ap="20" accuracy="90" />

Burst Fire Accuracy and Shot Count:

<BurstFire ap="40" shotCount="3"> | <BurstFire ap="30" shotCount="2">

p.s. high damage is useful to destroy walls and other obstacles :cool:

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I disagree; the shotgun and the carbines should be fundamentally different. I'd prefer a medium/low damage bullet-sprayer to a high damage one-shot-er. Carbines would deal the same damage as a rifle and have about the same accuracy within range, but be more maneuverable and closer range (thus lower TU costs and shorter range).

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Based on Aug 3, 2013 Early access:

Aug 1, 2013:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6gnADbp-vU

If you have locked down art, you can still finish the game with balance and good AI plus working, reliable features.

The look is also important however:

- Nice looking tile art and alien ships, beautiful environments!!

- Hidden Movement screen is very good, as well as the research screen shown here on this forum. Vehicle Equipment is also nice.

- Geoscape looks okay, you made a good decision to add that rectangle pattern filter/raster thing overlay. Country borders are a nice job. That big ugly green blotch representing the ship is a huge off-turner: you should add some dark lines of detail and some green highlights onto same green ship icon.

- Your strongest attraction is the awesome Battlescape environment art, I would advertise this game excessively showing battles.

- Excellent Alien Autopsy screens!!! You see the discrepancy, where the GUI and equip screens look so weak - with the New Tech Discovery screens looking medium quality/okay - and the autopsy is Top Notch? See the detail, shadows, highlights, textures on the autopsy screen? I would at the very least use the nice Alien Armor detail level/style seen on the Sebillian Autopsy screen for covering current plain GUI surfaces elsewhere. You should re-work GUI surface to have that awesome Sebillian Scales detail/style/look in other words 3D rendered elements! It can be done in Photoshop too if one is an old veteran.

- I would increase font Size on most Screens = rework to make space for bigger letters or just set font "Tracking" <-AV-> to negative values. If a player can't read sh** on those screens because eye straining tiny font design the enthusiasm for "I want to play this" quickly abates.. to "meh..."

- Air battle: ought to replace those green "Line of Sight" cones with animated ones that become more transparent/fade out with increasing distance from ship radar equipment.

- Green and Red boxes need to be replaced with cool looking path indicators, see rectangles in UFO: Defense

- Cross-hair is too big and ugly, obstructs target and anything when placed over: See nice cross-hair in UFO: Defense

Cross-hair should embrace the target, meaning only have "cross-hair" pixels at the four corners and maybe a pixel line under or at the top to make it feel the "cross-hair" or in this case selection rectangle covers/embraces the target. The current concentric circles are too much.

- I would redo the Battlescape GUI, currently it looks like too inept, it must have a greasy, rusty metal or worn muddy look, more 3D or more like worn F-16 cockpit instruments.

- Soldier injury list screen after battle and Assign Soldiers to craft plus the various equip weapon GUI sections with the hand drawn soldiers look weak and might scare off buyers, because it appears 16 year old's doing Photoshop exercises with hand drawn line-art and filling surfaces up with plane color.

Plain GUI surfaces should have 3D rendered lighting effects, grease, rust, tiny shadows where rust has eaten into the metal or scraped paint, highlights. Review Planescape Torment and Baldurs Gate 2 GUI.

Edited by mercy
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I disagree; the shotgun and the carbines should be fundamentally different. I'd prefer a medium/low damage bullet-sprayer to a high damage one-shot-er. Carbines would deal the same damage as a rifle and have about the same accuracy within range, but be more maneuverable and closer range (thus lower TU costs and shorter range).

We have this situation right now. Carbine is almost as assault rifle but worse in every way. Less damage, less mitigation, less range, less suppresion, less max accuracy, same accurate auto fire. Carbine has only one thing better than assault rifle, 5 points TU less per accuracy option which is unnoticable on leveled soldier. My vision is - carbine completely reworked to make it different from assault rifle. Make them automatic shotgun version instead of bad copy of assault rifle.

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Not sure if this is where I should report bugs.

Bugs:

Air combat auto resolve with 2 fighters and a corvette crash to desk top every time. If mini game, shoot down just the corvette, and run away, it has crashed every time.

Edited by bigwookiee
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It's not; go to the bug report section (at the bottom of the main page), go to the experimental report section (at the top of the bug report page), and post a new thread. Title it in a standard way, like "[v19.6 / Air Combat] <brief description here>" or something similar.

Thanks!

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Why not fix the problem instead of reinventing another solution?

A carbine is not a full auto shotgun, it's a carbine.

Give it the same stats as an assault rifle, then take ten TUs off all firing modes and shorten the range. See where that puts us.

+1

It says carbine so make it behave like one, or give us some kind of plasma shotgun instead but really i'd prefer a carbine that acts like a carbine.

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Why not fix the problem instead of reinventing another solution?

A carbine is not a full auto shotgun, it's a carbine.

Give it the same stats as an assault rifle, then take ten TUs off all firing modes and shorten the range. See where that puts us.

That would improve carbines for sure. Lets see what will happen in future builds.

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We have this situation right now. Carbine is almost as assault rifle but worse in every way. Less damage, less mitigation, less range, less suppresion, less max accuracy, same accurate auto fire. Carbine has only one thing better than assault rifle, 5 points TU less per accuracy option which is unnoticable on leveled soldier. My vision is - carbine completely reworked to make it different from assault rifle. Make them automatic shotgun version instead of bad copy of assault rifle.

+1 If you look at a lot of CQC carbines nowadays they like to use bigger rounds for stopping power. Its natural evolution that you would have a weapon that was poor at range but high stopping power and easy to shoot and accurate at close range. IE the FN SCAR-H / Mk.17 rifle prototype in CQC (Close Quarter Combat,short barrel) configuration,7.62x51 mm NATO version. stopping power is a huge deal at close range so your enemy cant return fire.

You want something that drops a enemy ASAP when you walk around a corner, not pepper pot him with rounds so he can return fire, and something that can penetrate cover at close range.

Personally for the evo of the shotgun in xeno i would up the penetration, up the damage up the close range accuracy IE it has sights that are built for close range, open irons for shotgun then eotech holographic for laser then some sort of advanced digital hud and laser sight for the plasma.

Anyway balance wise it should be able to have great dmg short range, and great accuracy in CQC and few TU's to use it. I would drop the TU's for its singe shot down to 15-17 or something and get it more dmg at close range so like 6-9 tiles and have it drop off rapidly after that very fast. inside of 5-9 tiles you should get accuracy bonuses for close range and outside of that it should be terrible to use.

The presision rifle is UP as well. It should get less of a penalty when shooting enemy in cover, as it has precision sights so would be better at it then the STD rifle and should be. thus the penalty should be less for shooting a enemy in cover and less of a penalty for shooting through cover, right now all weapons get 50% penalty for shooting through cover, the PR should get a 25% penalty instead at long range and the shotgun should get a penalty 25% instead inside of 5 tiles.

These changes will make the game far more tactically involved and far more reason to mix your weapon loadouts.

Making the carbines bastard rifles is the wrong direction, make it unique and useful and make sense for the role! Stopping power is key at close range,

And as this nerdy talk about OHH their carbines! tech you can change the name to whatever you want unless you plan on telling me you know what a laser shotgun/CQC weapon looks like. Fun and gameplay is far more important then all the nerdy misunderstanding of what a carbines job is.

And it makes sense you would use larger less focused lens on your CQC laser weapon where it does not matter if its unfocused for distance same goes for the plasma larger less stable round at distance but good for close range with high stopping power and accuracy dude to it being a larger round.

Edited by Apollo
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I feel the fact that one of the major areas of complaint is that the shotguns / carbines are underpowered suggests we've made some progress in recent times :D

We'll look into the bugs and see if we can get another hotfix out early next week.

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Do smoke grenades even work in this build anyhow? Got everything covered with smoke, but neither my soldiers have accuracy reduction, nor aliens have. My soldier had entered the smoke and all three shots from enemy's reaction fire hit him and he died. I assume enemies should either have bad accuracy against targets in smoke, or they should not see the soldiers so easily? If it works only when the enemy is in smoke, when what's the difference between flashbang and smoke grenades? It feels kinda lame to recieve reaction fire while being covered with tons of smoke the very same turn. And even more - that all shots hit you in it. Or is it a bug or temporal balance issue?

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Smoke grenades don't affect LoS (at least, if they do, I, er, didn't notice it). The 30% hit reduction is applied per stack of smoke, so try and keep as many smoke tiles between you and the enemy. If you get ~4 inbetween you and the aliens, they usually don't even try to shoot you, although you can still trigger their reaction shots.

I generally use more than one smoke at a time, since the spread is random. I wish the middle 9 tiles of a smoke grenade's explosion were certain, even if that meant the radius had to reduced by 1 to try and keep it balanced. Or at least as balanced as it is now.

Smokes are interacting with sniper rifles weirdly at the moment, but sniper rifles are a little rough this build anyway. Still worth taking for when they do work though!

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I noticed an issue with smoke grenades not wanting to fill certain sports, creating a line.

Seems like it could be a submap or seam issue, no idea, I have no expertise in that department.

I've seen something similar where I threw a smoke grenade where there was a destroyed wall and it only filled spaces in front of where the wall was and not behind it. I thought it might have been the wall still blocking the tiles even though it was destroyed, but it could be a submap thing equally. Sadly I accidentally deleted my pics of it.

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A feature was introduced several builds ago where smoke/fire would not fill past walls, as this was causing unusal events such as stun gas filtering into UFOs via an unboken wall. It seems that the code used to determine where to stop the fill can't tell when a wall is destroyed or not.

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- The doors on UFOs have been completely reworked. They now support manual opening/closing, no longer auto-close and are also destructible

I don't think outer UFO doors should be destructible: if those things can survive atmosphere entry and direct alenium air-to-air torpedo hits, they shouldn't crumble when hit by a hand held RPG.

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"Well done, Goldhawk. Now accuracy of snipers, rifles and chainguns is adequate. Other weapons not tried yet."

Holy shit, they added a chaingun in 19.6? Finally, something early-game besides the crappy little machine guns or rocket launcher for the scout cars. Totally switching from 5.

Edited by EchoFourDelta
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