Praetors, Wraiths, and other things about ground combat

[Mooton]

Praetors and Wraiths have abilities that are quite obnoxious. Now you'd think that these abilities would just be kind of inconvenient, but given the absurd way power ramps up they're debilitating.

Praetors constantly cutting your teams TU's down to useless or near useless levels when enemies have 200+ health and your guns do 70 a hit on average is ridiculous. Honestly this isn't just a problem with Praetors, it's more a problem with the rest of the design that multiplies how obnoxious Dread is. TUs are so incredibly valuable because shooting is a flat cost (in contrast, X-Com made the difference between rookies and veterans not heaven and hell by having percentage cost on guns). A rookie affected by dread is useless. A long time veteran affected by dread is a really accurate rookie.

Needing a ton of TU to get anything done, you're severely screwed if you lose multiple of your veterans in a short period of time. A team lacking in 75+ TU soldiers simply can't reasonably take on an alien force with a praetor. Especially once you factor in how important doors are and the 24 TU cost to open and close them. When it comes down it, you have to game the alien AI and abuse doors because they're simply too tough when fighting together. The fact that there are doors everywhere only encourages this strategy. In contrast, X-Com had a lot less doors and the AI was smart enough to use them against you too.

Dread isn't fun, it's too much, my opinion is that even if the other things got fixed I'd still want to see it straight up removed.

Wraiths teleporting is the answer to abusing doors. But thanks to a combination of the teleport not causing reaction fire (Either I've won the no reaction fire on teleport lottery or it doesn't), and the fact that even if it did the wraith would survive make this a really, really dumb solution. A wraith with a plasma cannon can teleport behind your troops and kill them with no chance of failure. Even if you let reaction fire work against them they simply have too much health to be stopped.

Now you could lower their health, and you should, along with making reaction fire work on the teleport. But then you're stuck with the praetor problem. Combined with the constant TU cutting of the praetor and against wraiths you're going to be moving up only 3 or 4 tiles a turn. That still wouldn't stop them from teleporting from an upper level in a UFO to a backroom at the bottom of it, which I think is something that needs addressing to reduce frustration.

Wraith Teleport should be changed to anywhere within line of sight of the Wraith. Maybe even increase their line of sight to make this better. Reaction fire should also be enabled on the teleport. Perhaps removing plasma cannons from allowable weapons for wraiths. Not all of these have to be done, but something does. But what really needs fixed is the rest of the game.

The difference in survivability of each armor type and each alien rank is ludicrous. Weapons that regularly do 70 damage to jackal armor instead regularly do 0 to wolf. This makes upgrading armor far too important, especially when you consider that maintaining air superiority is the absolute number one priority of the game right now (which needs some tuning). Combine this with also needing to constantly upgrade your weapons and there's not really a balance to this.

The alien health getting absurd makes rookies so useless that you start debating the merits of sending them to fight scouts / landing ships 10 times so they can have stats even remotely capable of scratching elites. If you don't do that, then there's zero point in manufacturing better weapons/armor for them because they'll never make use of them. But even if you did, if you couldn't afford to outfit them with plasma weaponry then you just wasted your time because they're still useless.

What I think should happen is a decrease in the ramp of alien health, armor defense, and weapon damage. Rather than an elite being 5 times harder to kill than a non-combatant, make them closer to 3 times. This would also work the other way, so that wolf armor isn't immune to some weapons but so weak to the rest that you die in one shot from those.

Make the AI smarter with doors. Let them attempt to punish you setting up your entire squad in close proximity to a door, or even use the strategy themselves. Also make there be less doors in alien bases. Some always open doorways would help.

Now the plasma cannon. This weapon is far too threatening because of one thing that needs to be changed: aliens having infinite ammo. Since aliens have infinite ammo the higher ranked aliens can walk a few steps then fire this thing twice, both shots of course having 100% chance to hit because of their insane accuracy. Not only that, but then they can do this for as long as they're alive. The solution? Stop being lazy and code in the ability for aliens to reload and make them have to deal with their ammo. This would also come with the bonus of if you stalled so long that you ran out of ammo you aren't instantly full on it by swapping to some alien weapons.

To summarize

1. Dread is frustrating and only magnifies the faults of the rest of the design. Remove it and give Praetors a different ability.

2. Wraith teleporting needs some changes to make it counterable, but that also requires some changes to the rest of the game.

3. Health/damage/defense rampup needs to be toned down. It's simply absurd.

4. Aliens shouldn't have infinite ammo because it makes the plasma cannon far too strong. Removing this would also lessen all the ammo on the ground to restock when you run out, adding quite a bit more to think about tactically.

Xenonauts is a solid game. The only "X-Com spiritual successor" that has any idea what it's doing, and is far more what the X-Com reboot should've been than Xcom 2012 is. I think these changes would go a long way to making the experience even more enjoyable.

[Jean-Luc]

I guess X-Com "solved" some of this simply because it didn't have tiers of the same alien type so a rookie could always be a threat with the right weapon. Likewise a lowly sectoid wtih a plasma rifle could down your power armoured soldier with one or two shots. The drawback is that armour wasn't much help since everything had to be "normalized" up until the late game. Everything was susceptible to everything at all times.

Also can't help but think if opening doors should cause reaction fire. It would encourage the use of shields, high reaction weapons and add some risk to it but also remove the exploit and the "unrealistic" TU cost of opening/closing doors. Of course aliens would need to be toned down as well.

[Mooton]

I guess X-Com "solved" some of this simply because it didn't have tiers of the same alien type so a rookie could always be a threat with the right weapon. Likewise a lowly sectoid wtih a plasma rifle could down your power armoured soldier with one or two shots. The drawback is that armour wasn't much help since everything had to be "normalized" up until the late game. Everything was susceptible to everything at all times.

There were tiers of aliens, and they also had statistical differences. They just weren't nearly as huge.

See: http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Alien_Stats

A guy in a flying suit taking a shot to the face had a good chance of surviving a heavy plasma shot (up to about 75%), but it is true that the random nature of weapon damage was something that could've been improved on in X-Com.

Opening doors not causing reaction fire is part of the mutual surprise clause that original X-Com introduced so that you could successfully breach through doors. They also used one tile wide doors a lot more so that you couldn't have a firing squad shoot through the doorway.

[Solver]

Let's not forget that X-Com had another huge problem with doors, which was that you could not just open them, you had to go through. The mutual surprise exception was good and necessary for the gameplay, but it sucked when you were ready to breach a UFO and had to order a guy inside in order to get the door open.

[Mooton]

Let's not forget that X-Com had another huge problem with doors, which was that you could not just open them, you had to go through. The mutual surprise exception was good and necessary for the gameplay, but it sucked when you were ready to breach a UFO and had to order a guy inside in order to get the door open.

Face door, right click on tile past door, door opens without you moving.

Magic!

The mutual surprise rule didn't work if you sent him in instead of simply opening the door, because of a bug with doors that didn't stop you from moving the moment you saw an alien if you had just told your guy to walk through a closed door.

[Solver]

That way of opening doors only worked in TFTD or with one of the unofficial X-Com patches like UFOextender, I'm pretty sure it never worked in the original DOS X-Com. I may of course be remembering wrong.

[Mooton]

That way of opening doors only worked in TFTD or with one of the unofficial X-Com patches like UFOextender, I'm pretty sure it never worked in the original DOS X-Com. I may of course be remembering wrong.

My experience was mostly with the unpatched collector's edition that didn't have stat caps. I'm fairly certain it worked in that.

[StellarRat]

I'm with Mooton on a couple points:

Wraiths are too good because your troops can't reaction fire them and they can teleport anywhere even places they can't see (that seems like it would be very dangerous what if you teleported yourself into a piece of equipment or another soldier??) plus they usually carry the deadliest weapons the aliens have. It's one thing to lose to in a firefight, but to have an alien that just goes executing Xenonauts with no counter-measure seems wrong and unfair.

Dread is too powerful. Dread needs to be line of sight only and should only last one turn. The plasma cannon is OP, IMO. As far as I know, it kills anything it hits. Someone correct me if this is untrue.

Edited December 18, 2013 by StellarRat

[legit1337]

Plasma cannon is one of the reasons why I think limited ammo is necessary on the aliens.

Wraiths should only be able to teleport to a square in their LOS.

Dread needs to either be nerfed substantially, or be an LOS only ability. Psi should be devastating, but it's ridiculous in its current implementation.

Health scaling is too high at the upper tiers and even at the lower end somewhat. A caesan non-com should not be able to take 4-5 ballistic rifle shots to take down considering that according to the ingame lore their bodies are substantially weaker then humans are. Elite aliens should not take 4-5 plasma rifle shots to bring down. Even with their high technology state of the art armor, plasma is extremely destructive (which is why the aliens use it for weapons) and armor designed to counter it should only absorb 1-2 shots before becoming useless. Just as a ballistic vest IRL is designed to counter bullets can only take 1-2 shots before needing to be replaced.

[Mooton]

The plasma cannon is OP, IMO. As far as I know, it kills anything it hits. Someone correct me if this is untrue.

A soldier with jackal armor, a shield, and a little luck can survive a direct hit from a plasma cannon. A soldier in wolf armor and full health assault shield will survive the plasma cannon shot every time as long as it hits the shield. Moot point though, since he'll just get shot twice because the aliens don't have to reload it.

[Chris]

Even the in-game lore says that the Plasma Cannon can be fired four times without needing to be reloaded, so that's a pretty poor argument for us putting in a feature that (for reasons explained elsewhere) I don't see much reason to implement. Rather, your argument says that you think the TU cost for firing the weapon should be increased so it can only be fired once per turn. Quite possibly, but once again the unlimited ammo of the aliens is of no real relevance to the discussion.

Solver is actually correct about the doors in the OG too - to right-click was only added in TFTD, although it's such a natural feature it's difficult to imagine a game without it once you've experienced it. Reaction fire for opening doors probably is a good thing to add. I didn't realise it did not currently trigger it.

Your thoughts on the other stuff I've read but are primarily something for Aaron to look at (I've pointed him at it). However, it's quite amusing that you complain about the ramp-up in weapons and armour being too high and therefore upgrades are too important, but also that the key to the game is air superiority. Surely reducing the necessity for battlefield upgrades is just going to make air superiority relatively even more important?

[Solver]

Eh, I think the point here was that door opening not triggering reaction fire (similar to the original's mutual surprise rule) is a good thing. It does make doors a bit easier to assault, but being cut down by reaction fire from 3 aliens as you open a door will feel unfair and frustrating.

As for the plasma cannon, it's simply an over-buffed weapon that was recently useless. It should be fireable once per turn only, and it should also leave your soldiers with some chance of surviving. Whether alien ammo adds anything or not is up for debate, but I think it'd be great to at least simulate alien ammo by making them reload occasionally, even if it's otherwise infinite.

[Chris]

Bit cheap to be able to open it, see the aliens on the other side, then just shut the door again (to avoid reaction fire) though

[llunak]

However, it's quite amusing that you complain about the ramp-up in weapons and armour being too high and therefore upgrades are too important, but also that the key to the game is air superiority. Surely reducing the necessity for battlefield upgrades is just going to make air superiority relatively even more important?

No. Air superiority seems to be already important enough to be the highest priority (at least I pour most resources into it whenever I can), so making something else less important is not going to change the importance of the already most important thing. Reducing the ramp-up in ground combat (or anywhere) would only make the game less susceptible to missing some important advance and failing completely because of it. For example, I think I might have already lost my current game, since now I get noticeably better equipped and more tough aliens than before and given the time and costs to manufacture anything, I probably can't catch up anymore.

FWIW, the game feels to me rather susceptible to fatal mistakes, unlike the OG which was much more friendly in making things gradually harder and there weren't any sudden changes (anything new first appeared only sparingly) or all-or-nothing situations. I once lost a research base in OG on Superhuman, it took more than a month to rebuild it, and I still could continue the game. I don't know if it's on purpose, but I can't imagine surviving anything like that here - besides the current game I've already practically lost a game because Sebillians attacked my primary base, rushed the command center against ballistics and I didn't have resources to continue with my remaining bases; I once got all my best soldiers wiped out in a terror missions where I first time met Androns; I'm quite sure the first time I met a plasma cannon was during a terror mission too; and I could only be grateful Repears were disabled in the build where the first time I met them was during my base defence. I know veteran is supposed to be at least a bit tough, but although I mostly find it easy, there are times when I think it's too tough for the wrong reasons.

Edited December 19, 2013 by llunak

[Mooton]

Even the in-game lore says that the Plasma Cannon can be fired four times without needing to be reloaded, so that's a pretty poor argument for us putting in a feature that (for reasons explained elsewhere) I don't see much reason to implement. Rather, your argument says that you think the TU cost for firing the weapon should be increased so it can only be fired once per turn. Quite possibly, but once again the unlimited ammo of the aliens is of no real relevance to the discussion.

Grabbing the gun from the ground shows a 1/1 ammo counter. I didn't know we were supposed to follow seperate rules from the aliens! The Plasma cannon is too powerful for the rate at which it can be used. I'd rather see it changed to have limited ammo than make it not the same kind of threat the blaster launcher was in X-Com.

Solver is actually correct about the doors in the OG too - to right-click was only added in TFTD, although it's such a natural feature it's difficult to imagine a game without it once you've experienced it. Reaction fire for opening doors probably is a good thing to add. I didn't realise it did not currently trigger it.

I hope you also consider adding some open doorways in alien base maps.

Your thoughts on the other stuff I've read but are primarily something for Aaron to look at (I've pointed him at it). However, it's quite amusing that you complain about the ramp-up in weapons and armour being too high and therefore upgrades are too important, but also that the key to the game is air superiority. Surely reducing the necessity for battlefield upgrades is just going to make air superiority relatively even more important?

Well this was primarily something targeted at the ground combat. I don't think anything done to the ground combat will really solve the current issue with air superiority. I just think that it's ridiculous how the damage/health/defense scales up. Someone in wolf armor dies in one hit from a battle rifle every time but is completely immune to a plasma rifle and heavy plasma for a few shots? The same problem occurs with aliens. Upgrading from a laser rifle to a plasma rifle is the difference between killing an andron guard in 10 and 3 hits. I'd assume it's even more for high ranked sebillians, but honestly when reapers became common I just started aborting every sebillian mission.

My problem with reapers is also tied to this damage rampup, I don't think I addressed that. I have nothing wrong with reapers except the fact that it takes so many shots to kill them that you'll never get them with reaction fire. Which ends up being really bad because you can never advance because you will never have enough TU. Combine that with a Praetor and the chance of me willing to do a battle with reapers is absolutely nonexistant. But like I said, less of a problem with reapers and more of a problem with the rest of the things making reapers too high a risk to ever be worth the reward.

[Solver]

Bit cheap to be able to open it, see the aliens on the other side, then just shut the door again (to avoid reaction fire) though

Does reaction fire happen before an action that triggers it or right after? What I'm getting at is, perhaps there could be reaction fire for closing the door. Then trying to close it could lead to being fire upon before you shut it, while avoiding the cheapness of open-peek-close and still allowing a fair approach of open-grenade-shoot.

[Aaron]

@Mooton, thanks for the detailled post.

Both Wraiths and Dread are things we know are annoying, and are thinking of way to deal with them. For Wraiths we are probably going to force the teleport to be the final action of their turn. For Dread we might limit it only to soldiers who are alone (i.e. no friendlies within X tiles nearby). Those changes should allow you to counter both things, if you are careful.

I think some of your assumptions about the strength of various things in the game are a bit off though:

Weapons that regularly do 70 damage to jackal armor instead regularly do 0 to wolf.

I doubt this is the case as the Jackal is 35 armour, and the Wolf is 65 - the damage difference is 30 at most.

Rather than an elite being 5 times harder to kill than a non-combatant, make them closer to 3 times.

In terms of HP that really isn't the case - a Noncoms generally start with 80, and Elites max out at 200; that's a big jump but not a multiple of 5. I guess you probably mean overall lethality, but if so I'm not sure how you arrived at such specific numbers.

I definitely think I will reduce the number of doors in bases though, yeah.

[Chris]

Mooton - As Aaron mentions above, Jackal armour gives 35 protection and Wolf gives 65 protection, and a noncom has 60 HP and an elite has 200 HP. They both have the same armour value so it's only 300% of the original figure, not 500% of it.

A human plasma weapon does just over twice as much much damage as a ballistic weapon so even if you don't have MAG weapons when you're fighting Elite enemies they've only increased in toughness by 50% relatively.

That's not to say your argument doesn't have merit, but every shot does between 50-150% of normal damage. You may just be being unlucky with the RNG. I'd take a look at the stats of the various items if you think it's more than that as it might help us focus in on what the specific issues are.

It's a possibility that the weapons are not strong enough compared to the aliens. Maybe the aliens just need to go down faster in all parts of the game?

[squigoth]

It would be nice if once you open a door it stays open (if you want it to)... on base raids they seem to always close at the end of each turn (my experience anyways).

Having a way to keep them open after the turn ends (aside form the good old universal C4 key) would be cool.

[Mooton]

Mooton - As Aaron mentions above, Jackal armour gives 35 protection and Wolf gives 65 protection, and a noncom has 60 HP and an elite has 200 HP. They both have the same armour value so it's only 300% of the original figure, not 500% of it.

A human plasma weapon does just over twice as much much damage as a ballistic weapon so even if you don't have MAG weapons when you're fighting Elite enemies they've only increased in toughness by 50% relatively.

That's not to say your argument doesn't have merit, but every shot does between 50-150% of normal damage. You may just be being unlucky with the RNG. I'd take a look at the stats of the various items if you think it's more than that as it might help us focus in on what the specific issues are.

It's a possibility that the weapons are not strong enough compared to the aliens. Maybe the aliens just need to go down faster in all parts of the game?

I've looked at the health stats and figured it had something to do with resistance values. This seemed true when officers would take 0 damage from the first one or two ballistic shots directed at them 100% of the time when non-combatants never seemed to have that. I haven't explicitly tested it, but it definitely seemed that way to me. The laser-plasma thing was similar. Going from laser rifles doing 30-55 damage to plasma rifles doing 65-105 damage it seemed like a huge damage jump. I still have some laser rifles in my squad and the damage variances still seem about the same assuming the laser equipped soldiers ever hit (Combining their low max TU with dread means they pretty much never even have an opportunity!)

I wasn't sure how the numbers worked between the different armor, but I can tell you that in the last 10 ground combat missions I've been on my soldiers in wolf armor have not taken anywhere between 0 and 100 damage from an alien weapon other than the heavy plasma (my shields seem to be vulnerable to being plasma castered in the back!). I'm fairly certain a plasma rifle can't hit for 100 on wolf armor before the wolf's resistance is almost totally destroyed.

The heavy plasma has managed to hurt my wolf armored guys on first shot. From point blank. Which wraiths love to do. They've yet to die from a single heavy plasma shot after switching to wolf armor though.

I do appreciate hearing the damage range for weapons is 50-150. That is definitely the first thing I would've changed in the original X-Com if I could.

Edited December 19, 2013 by Mooton

[jeon]

Plasma Cannons and Rocket Launchers both are currently too powerful. I think I saw someone mention that the 4x incendiary damage multiplier is intended only to help them destroy terrain and cover, but it definitely is making them one-shot everything at the moment. Right now I have them as energy/ballistic as necessary.

I think the reaction fire isn't too bad except for the alien battle rifle... that thing is really mean and prone to one shots and probably could use less damage, more mitigation, and maybe a reaction fire penalty. (High damage, 0 mitigation weapons are more prone to randomness than Lower damage, high mitigation weapons while still being effective vs. armor.)

Advanced alien grenades are crazy powerful and also have the high damage randomness going on. It made the door open/close thing in an andron battleship my only chance of survival because if the door was ever left open it would be grenade spam. They all had heavy plasmas so the reaction fire was more of a joke than anything with wolf armor on.

I think the alien health is fine... although I actually gave my aliens more armor at higher ranks because I found it was disturbing how easy I could kill the elites with laser weapons, although I think I gave them too much because I should be doing my mods on veteran... well superhuman really but without a way to disable iron man testing would be hard. I mean, tier 2 weapons shouldn't be murdering tier 4 aliens so much, but maybe it is fine on normal.

Dread is pretty annoying though and Wraith teleportation can be a pain in the butt when they decide to pop up behind you and fire a plasma cannon shot.

[Mooton]

Plasma Cannons and Rocket Launchers both are currently too powerful. I think I saw someone mention that the 4x incendiary damage multiplier is intended only to help them destroy terrain and cover, but it definitely is making them one-shot everything at the moment. Right now I have them as energy/ballistic as necessary.

I think the plasma cannon should keep its current deadliness per shot. The rocket launcher should as well, though the rockets could be toned down because honestly you can kill anything with the starter rocket which is silly and pretty much defeats any gains from upgrading them.

[StellarRat]

I think the fire rate (TUs) for Plasma Cannons needs to decreased (increase the TUs to fire.)

Also, the Xenonaut rockets are OP at the moment. There should be a chance a direct hit can fail against higher level aliens (Androns, Warriors, Officers) i.e. they need to be a two shot sure kill vs. one shot. Against lower level aliens I would still expect one shot kills. Also, the non-Alenium round probably should be three shot weapon against the higher level aliens. Probably a greater range of damage variabilty would also solve the problem. I always think of rockets as a "tricky" weapon to use vs. a rifle.

Edited December 19, 2013 by StellarRat

[Solver]

Allowing Wraiths to only teleport at the end of their term seems like the best solution. It solves the actual problem of them mitigating all defenses to fire on you, and that's what the game research text says anyway, that they can not move or shoot after teleporting.

[StellarRat]

Allowing Wraiths to only teleport at the end of their term seems like the best solution. It solves the actual problem of them mitigating all defenses to fire on you, and that's what the game research text says anyway, that they can not move or shoot after teleporting.

Agree. That is great idea. Solves all the problems with the least amount of changes except the AI will need a tweak.