Ground Combat Balance Discussion V20 Stable Candidate 1

[Mooton]

I'm finding that the aliens don't really put up much of a fight. The only times aliens shoot at me are (1) reaction fire and (2) if my guy is only a few tiles away, such as if we're both inside a scout. Other than that, the aliens will not shoot at me. This is most obvious when I have a shield advance, he takes reaction fire from an alien, and then the shield guy just sits still turn after turn while my snipers blast the alien from a distance. While the alien can clearly see my shield and will shoot if RF is triggered, on the alien turn the alien will simply sit there.

The aliens have been shooting at my guys on their turn, however they often choose to save their only shot for reaction after being suppressed.

[jeon]

I like the current amount of accuracy, I think there's a better solution than nerfing it a bit more.

Increase the maximum of every shot that can be made to 95%. Since the accuracy multiplier is lower on crouching and behind cover enemies you'd find that you need more accuracy to get the same chances. Of course you might want to lower alien accuracy values a little bit so they don't just have 95% against crouching behind cover xenonauts from the start of the game. As it is their accuracy is already high enough that non-combatants should be getting 95% shots on snap and auto fires on people standing in the open.

I have my accuracy max set at 200% and the aliens still miss me fairly regularly when I am behind cover. The thing that really stands out with 200% accuracy is that my sniper isn't completely useless, staying still makes her good at taking a shot at someone in cover, and taking aimed shots with assault rifles comes in handy at times as well. I think the alien snipers also are more likely to take an aimed shot and plunk one of my people behind cover as well which is a good touch.

[Ol' Stinky]

Unlike exp. build 8, I'm not seeing dummy AI light scout ground combat anymore. Phew! It's a lot more fun when they fight back. I'm a big fan of the aggressive alien script.

I'm not so cool with what I assume are the "passive" aliens. The purpose of putting these guys in the map is to have aliens as watchmen, right? They lurk behind cover and when a player stumbles upon them, they give out the call and aliens within a certain radius come to help. However, that's all they do. Passive aliens don't run away as much as run between a couple pieces of cover, if they even move at all. They don't actively fire, relying on reaction shots (easy to get around with scout 'n' snipe on most maps).

Compare sebilian lightscouts to caesan ones. In days gone by, we'd laugh about the poor sebs and how they got a raw deal compared to their smarter grey brothers-in-arms. Now, though, it's the greys who are looking a bit dumb. Up to half the team can mill around doing nothing. While sebs are set to aggressive, they're not idiots by any stretch. They will move if they're under fire. They'll shoot on their own turn. I've seen a couple already move to an out-of-LoS location when I fired at them - I don't know if it's deliberate, but trying to lead my scout into an ambush by using LoS blockers is pretty damn smart.

In the short term, it can be fixed by lowering the number of passive aliens a great deal and skewing the aliens on the ground towards being aggressive. I've already changed caesan lightscouts to do this since otherwise their ground combat is, well, boring otherwise, once the few aggressive fellas are bleeding out.

In the long term, the passive aliens' role needs fleshing out. Perhaps have them retreat towards the UFO if a percentage of outdoor aliens have been killed? Or towards the nearest ally, at any rate?

Edited December 19, 2013 by Ol' Stinky

[Solver]

Not entirely sure this is a balance issue, but there's a certain change in ground combat that is, I believe, a result of the revamped accuracy a few builds ago, that you can now "miss" while hitting the target's tile.

Firing a burst of bullets at an obstacle will not anymore let you shoot past the obstacle in the same burst. To put it clearly, say there's a window. You fire a burst through the window, the first bullet breaks the glass, but the next bullets will still hit the window's title, they won't go through.

[kraex]

Not entirely sure this is a balance issue, but there's a certain change in ground combat that is, I believe, a result of the revamped accuracy a few builds ago, that you can now "miss" while hitting the target's tile.

Firing a burst of bullets at an obstacle will not anymore let you shoot past the obstacle in the same burst. To put it clearly, say there's a window. You fire a burst through the window, the first bullet breaks the glass, but the next bullets will still hit the window's title, they won't go through.

Bug forum?

[Skitso]

There seems to be something wrong in how the game calculates accuracy. I had a sebillian behind a stone fence (farm tile set), had a rifleman with 55 accuracy and sniper with 65 accuracy side by side. Rifleman's maximum aim was 41TU 46% and sniper 62TU 46% even with better accuracy stat and more accurate weapon.

Even if I moved the rifle guy further away, it was constantly more accurate than my sniper... can anyone confirm this?

[Max_Caine]

There may not be anything wrong at all. After the inital accuracy score is calculated, it's capped at 95%. Once the cap (if the score is over 95%) is applied, cover and any bonuses for cover are then deducted. Therefore, it doesn't matter how accurate a weapon may be, the score will be the same if both weapons are capped at 95% in the intial step of the calculation.

[Skitso]

Ah, sounds reasonable I guess... I just feel that snipers are a bit underwhelming at the moment.

BTW, I just had my machine gunner killed because he didn't stop his movement when spotted an alien. He just happily continued his movement all the way next to freshly spotted alien until 0 TU's... sigh.

[Max_Caine]

What I'd personally like to see is a bug turned into a feature. Every so often the problem of overpercentages rears its ugly head. Rather than try and squash it, I'd prefer it was tamed by applying the cap at the end of the calculation rather than halfway through. That way skilled soliders with accurate weapons have an advantage verses hard to hit targets, so players have a reason to have snipers, because they can winkle out entrenched enemies.

[Ol' Stinky]

What I'd personally like to see is a bug turned into a feature. Every so often the problem of overpercentages rears its ugly head. Rather than try and squash it, I'd prefer it was tamed by applying the cap at the end of the calculation rather than halfway through. That way skilled soliders with accurate weapons have an advantage verses hard to hit targets, so players have a reason to have snipers, because they can winkle out entrenched enemies.

I'm guessing that's not the case to keep cover valuable throughout the game. I think the universal accuracy bonus being too high is the problem here: snipers aren't bad, with high range, suppression and armour pen., but assault rifles are hitting very high amounts of acc. (with normal shots, even!) very quickly. Assault rifles also have a range of 20, so they can happily fire from outside an alien's LoS. That's pretty much sniping.

By all means increase the accuracy of burst fire in general, the short range bonus, pistols, and whatever else might be necessary, but I think the universal accuracy multiplier needs to be dialled down a touch.

Edited December 21, 2013 by Ol' Stinky

[Skitso]

snipers aren't bad' date=' with high range, suppression and armour pen., but assault rifles are hitting very high amounts of acc. (with normal shots, even!) very quickly.[/quote']

This is exactly the problem, I think.

[ElMyamo]

What I'd personally like to see is a bug turned into a feature. Every so often the problem of overpercentages rears its ugly head. Rather than try and squash it, I'd prefer it was tamed by applying the cap at the end of the calculation rather than halfway through. That way skilled soliders with accurate weapons have an advantage verses hard to hit targets, so players have a reason to have snipers, because they can winkle out entrenched enemies.

Maybe the cap should vary depending on the kind of weapon used. If the cap is higher for sniper rifles, for example, the endresult will always be higher than for an assaultrifle.

Although that would mean that a shotgun pointed to an aliens head from one field away has a decent chance to miss, not exactly realistic either...

[jeon]

Unlike exp. build 8' date=' I'm not seeing dummy AI light scout ground combat anymore. Phew! It's a lot more fun when they fight back. I'm a big fan of the aggressive alien script.

I'm not so cool with what I assume are the "passive" aliens. The purpose of putting these guys in the map is to have aliens as watchmen, right? They lurk behind cover and when a player stumbles upon them, they give out the call and aliens within a certain radius come to help. However, that's [i']all[/i] they do. Passive aliens don't run away as much as run between a couple pieces of cover, if they even move at all. They don't actively fire, relying on reaction shots (easy to get around with scout 'n' snipe on most maps).

Compare sebilian lightscouts to caesan ones. In days gone by, we'd laugh about the poor sebs and how they got a raw deal compared to their smarter grey brothers-in-arms. Now, though, it's the greys who are looking a bit dumb. Up to half the team can mill around doing nothing. While sebs are set to aggressive, they're not idiots by any stretch. They will move if they're under fire. They'll shoot on their own turn. I've seen a couple already move to an out-of-LoS location when I fired at them - I don't know if it's deliberate, but trying to lead my scout into an ambush by using LoS blockers is pretty damn smart.

In the short term, it can be fixed by lowering the number of passive aliens a great deal and skewing the aliens on the ground towards being aggressive. I've already changed caesan lightscouts to do this since otherwise their ground combat is, well, boring otherwise, once the few aggressive fellas are bleeding out.

In the long term, the passive aliens' role needs fleshing out. Perhaps have them retreat towards the UFO if a percentage of outdoor aliens have been killed? Or towards the nearest ally, at any rate?

That's some interesting insights and possibly explains a great deal of behavior when I looked at the AI settings for some of the other things like the Andron terror mission I recently encountered. There are a LOT of Elite Androns on a battleship. They should have walked over to my ship and kicked the crap out of me once they realized I was there since I'm only packing 8 guys with laser weapons. But, only a few of them are set to aggressive. Once I killed those ones off as they rushed towards me and nearly killed half my squad, the rest were just sitting ducks spread out along all of the cover in the whole place. It would be a hell of a fight if the aliens were on kill mode instead of picnic mode. Okay, maybe not much of a fight cause they'd probably just lob advanced alien grenades on me until all my guys were blood stains on the street, but it would at the least provide a better starting point for doing other balancing with more aggressive AI.

Maybe it could be difficulty dependent so that say 25% of passive aliens are instead aggressive on normal, 50% on veteran, 75% on superhuman? Or maybe after a certain amount of fighting passive/defensive aliens that are near a serious firefight switch over to aggressive and start rushing out at you?

On the accuracy side of things, I have my max set at 200% and my multiplier at 1.5x and it feels right until my soldiers get 90+ accuracy and AP and then it seems a bit out of control. I tried 1.25x and then my rookies were a bit too useless. I think I might mod my stats to cap at 80 instead of 99 and balance around that because it just seems like there is too large of a gap between new soldiers and veterans, as well as a quirk that makes crouching not give you any better accuracy than 100. A soldier with 82 accuracy or 99 accuracy has the same crouch accuracy (100). This could be affecting the aliens as well which would make them less accurate when crouching since they all have more than 100 accuracy except for the non-coms. (I was playing with the stats and made my people gain up to 3 a mission which made some hit 101 accuracy and LOSE 1% hit by crouching, and I'm not talking about the increased chance to hit cover, this is against open targets.)

[Skitso]

I am still unable to get better shots with my more accurate sniper than my rifle guy. Even if I compare direct hit shots without a cover, the sniper doesn't get any edge. Both guys are capped at 76% (why?). Sniper only has the same percentage ragardless of TU's spent.

Ok, I'm not familiar at all with the math and calculations behind this, but this can't be right. I can't think of any advantage in taking snipers to missions as they are as accurate as rifle guys but with heavy weapon trait, rifles have burst and lower TU cost to shoot. Am I missing something here or is the game really this broken atm?

[legit1337]

I'm starting to be convinced the accuracy buffs were too much... I'm seeing some ridiculous shots, both of my own and the aliens too.

The suggestion about bringing the accuracy to 1.25 seemed like a good one. Seconded.

I know this is being talked about in another thread but the non-shooting passive aliens need to be fixed so that they are more trigger happy. As an addendum, civilians need better "run away from crap" AI, and not move toward the aliens that are trying to kill them. I've also seen aliens shoot at civilians in cover instead of at my troops when my troops had shot at them the previous turn. Aliens need to prioritize xenonauts over civilians as targets.

I still think all aliens' health needs to be looked at. Some like sebs feel right, but caesans are way too tough for the lore. Have not progressed to androns yet in the current build so can't comment there. Maybe if the aliens didn't take 4-5 shots to bring down, reserving TUs for reaction shots might be a viable tactic.

Accidentally flashbanged one of my own troops and it did damage to him. Quite a bit actually, almost 25% of his health. This should be fixed IMO, a flashbang IRL is designed to be nonlethal, even if it goes off in your hand (you might get minor burns). I also did not get the "supressed" popup either even though the TUs were correctly subtracted.

Edited December 22, 2013 by legit1337

[Mooton]

Accidentally flashbanged one of my own troops and it did damage to him. Quite a bit actually, almost 25% of his health. This should be fixed IMO, a flashbang IRL is designed to be nonlethal, even if it goes off in your hand (you might get minor burns). I also did not get the "supressed" popup either even though the TUs were correctly subtracted.

Well technically speaking flashbangs can cause serious damage, it's just extremely unlikely. There's even at least one incident of a flashbang killing someone.

[legit1337]

Well technically speaking flashbangs can cause serious damage, it's just extremely unlikely. There's even at least one incident of a flashbang killing someone.

Probably someone with a heart condition. NOT a trained military commando.

[Gijs-Jan]

Passive AI Bug

So I became a bit frustrated with the poor AI behavior of the last patch, which I thought was mainly due to an unbalanced aiprops.xml. This file holds all kinds of variables which can be modded which the AI uses in its decision making process. I saw Ol' Stinky's post with the modded aiprops.xml; but this didn't fix everything so I decided to explore a bit.

Cause

Well, there's several things going wrong in the latest patch, and I think that most of the behavior you guys are seeing can indeed be contributed to an unbalanced aiprops.xml. However, as I'm currently adding a lot of stuff, I can't just give you my local version.

There was one thing though that struck me as odd; the non-firing behavior.

So, the AI only decides a shot isn't worth it when the accuracy is below a certain threshold, which currently is set at 35%. And in a lot of the cases you guys found and sent me saves for, the accuracy should've been higher.

Long story short, I discovered that the penalty for using Alien equipment was being applied to aliens as well. (50% drop of accuracy). So yeah... There will probably be some balancing changes in the new build :-P

Temp Fix

In AIProps.xml, search for: MinimumAccuracy, and change its value from "0.35" to a low value, e.g.: " 0.01".

See Ol' Stinky's post for a file that fixes this, but tweaks several other things as well. This will make the AI a bit more active until the official patch, which will address a lot of things and introduce whole hosts of new behavior.

Happy Christmas

[Solver]

Great news, and I think you in particular deserve a Golden Debugging Medal and some Distinguished C++ Champaigne for these holidays.

[StellarRat]

Passive AI BugIn AIProps.xml, search for: MinimumAccuracy, and change its value from "0.35" to a low value, e.g.: " 0.01".

See Ol' Stinky's post for a file that fixes this, but tweaks several other things as well. This will make the AI a bit more active until the official patch, which will address a lot of things and introduce whole hosts of new behavior.

Why did increasing the strength of the aliens cause them to fire more too? How/why does the grenade range affect whether or not they shoot direct fire weapons too? They shouldn't be tied together right?

[Gijs-Jan]

Chris and me both took a look at that, and it didn't seem to affect things on my end. Strength should only alter accuracy on heavy weaponry. I found the bug for the penalty being applied to aliens by accident while going through all the accuracy calculations to see if strength affected it.

The only thing that also might have affected combat quite a bit was the range change on the heavy plasma.

[Gauddlike]

Why did increasing the strength of the aliens cause them to fire more too? How/why does the grenade range affect whether or not they shoot direct fire weapons too? They shouldn't be tied together right?

Strength and range both affect accuracy for grenades.

Is the grenade check done first and causing an issue maybe?

If the accuracy for a grenade throw is too low is the main weapon checked separately?

I haven't checked all of the settings individually and don't know if stinky has so don't know for sure if those settings have an effect or if maybe the minimum accuracy alone is making the difference in behaviour.

[Ol' Stinky]

Strength and range both affect accuracy for grenades.

Is the grenade check done first and causing an issue maybe?

If the accuracy for a grenade throw is too low is the main weapon checked separately?

I haven't checked all of the settings individually and don't know if stinky has so don't know for sure if those settings have an effect or if maybe the minimum accuracy alone is making the difference in behaviour.

I lowered the minimum accuracy aliens would take a shot at down to 5%, but they still wouldn't fire at range. Bearing in mind I did my testing with light scout battles, I also tried:

• Increasing the alien plasma pistol's accuracy for normal, aimed, and burst fire by x1000 in weapons_gc.xml

• Then increasing its range to 99

• Then putting these changes into weapons.xml (the weapons file for geoscape purposes, but it does affect ground combat as well in some cases, e.g. clip size has to be consistant with weapons_gc.xml)

• Increasing the burst reaction fire range in config.xml to 99

• Lowering the short range accuracy bonus to 0 in config.xml, in case aliens thought it was a good plan to move in to get +15%+ accuracy

• Removing the alien accuracy penalty in config.xml.

The alien weaponry accuracy penalty didn't get them to fire at range so I didn't test it any further, I just moved on. Having seen GJ's post I tried it again, thinking I'd borked the AlienWeaponAccuracyPenalty test. (I think I might have done anyway, as I have a sneaking suspicion I set AlienWeaponAccuracyPenalty to 0 instead of 1. I blame the holdiay season for my dumb mistake.)

While AlienWeaponAccuracyPenalty=1 plus MinimumAccuracy=0.01 works on some units (Sebilian guards and guard support for example) it doesn't for others while the strength boosts does (e.g. Caesan non-coms) and others still are just plain pacifists (e.g. light drones, which drift around the battlefield aimlessly).

As for what causes it, I honestly don't know. I wanted to get the AI to shoot at me, and what started as me toying around with the alien accuracy threshold and alien plasma pistol values turned into me throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the problem. In light of the AlienWeaponAccuracyPenalty bug, I'm guessing that the aliens don't have to be in grenade range, but it forces a secondary accuracy check that's, um, accurate. I can't say for sure.

Bugs are really interesting when you're not the one who has to fix them. (:

Edited December 26, 2013 by Ol' Stinky
Typos etc.

[Gauddlike]

Yeah bugs that are somebody elses problem really are the best type.

Could be worse though, you could be working on the EA/DICE BF4 team.

[StellarRat]

OK, you guys are going to think I'm crazy, but when I'm programming I like fixing bugs and optimizing code for speed the most of any of my IT duties. Most programmers like writing original stuff the most, I guess I'm more of mechanic and less of a composer. It could stem from the fact that I find working with government bureaucracy very frustrating at times. Projects take forever and the users (the real experts) usually can't / don't help you much.