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V21 Experimental 1 Balance Patch Available!


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Played a little (in the late phase of game). I liked v20 and I don't like v21 (especially enemies firing outside of LOS). Probably I placed my message in wrong topic, but it relates to any patch or build after V20 stable.
LOS? I think it's the FOW distance that is the problem. Aliens seem to see further and can target soldiers without any comeback unless you close the distance to them. I really think any fire should reveal the firing units position and/or at least let your sniper have a much longer sight.
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it's more realistic as to how smoke actually works

It's really less realistic. Because of my experience (just a single one, I'm not a soldier or something like that) the smoke from a smoke grenades is extremely thick and you can't really see nothing the first moments(30-60 seconds) but the it is possible to see moments later.

So what I suggest is that the few first turns is completely impossible to see through the smoke. But after, make the reduce accuracy thing AFTER some turns.

Just my suggestion and my first comment.

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LOS? I think it's the FOW distance that is the problem. Aliens seem to see further and can target soldiers without any comeback unless you close the distance to them. I really think any fire should reveal the firing units position and/or at least let your sniper have a much longer sight.

I like that idea uncovering just the tile or tiles immediatly around a shooter if it shoots at your guys. It could be initiative based if you want a chance for your guys not to detect the shot. Could even ad a shot penalty to returning fire to make it more like a "soldier saw where the plasma came from and they suppressing fire in that direction".

But I would first like to see if the shots coming from out of soldier LOS because the aliens can see farther (i thought we changed that range back to being the same as soldiers) so if they are shooting farther than they can see its alien squad sight, but we should decide if squad sight is okay since we xenauts can use squad sight. Again maybe squad sight shots for both sides could have an accuarcy penalty.

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LOS? I think it's the FOW distance that is the problem.
Yes, you are right. I mentioned view distance. All idea of squad-vision is unnatural (sniper didn't see his target but have 95% probability to hit it). But this is already part of the game and I don't think it is will be good to try change something there.
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LOS? I think it's the FOW distance that is the problem. Aliens seem to see further and can target soldiers without any comeback unless you close the distance to them. I really think any fire should reveal the firing units position and/or at least let your sniper have a much longer sight.

I think what is happening is that all aliens have squad-sight. The problem here is that they should only have squad-sight if you have sight on at least one alien, and if that alien should die then all other aliens should loose squad-sight. But this does not seem to be working as it should.

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The problem is with persistent LOS. Bear in mind that if you see something in your turn, you keep on seeing it until LOS resets in the new turn. This is why you can close the door on a scout, and then watch the aliens inside fiddle about in their turn. This works for the aliens as well - once they see something, until it goes out of range of area "scanned" by the alien, it stays seen, even if the alien dies. If LOS was real-time, then this little problem wouldn't keep cropping up.

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The problem is with persistent LOS. Bear in mind that if you see something in your turn, you keep on seeing it until LOS resets in the new turn. This is why you can close the door on a scout, and then watch the aliens inside fiddle about in their turn. This works for the aliens as well - once they see something, until it goes out of range of area "scanned" by the alien, it stays seen, even if the alien dies. If LOS was real-time, then this little problem wouldn't keep cropping up.

Yeah I hope the devs will get that fixed soon, it will increase the suspense a notch or two!

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I think what is happening is that all aliens have squad-sight. The problem here is that they should only have squad-sight if you have sight on at least one alien, and if that alien should die then all other aliens should loose squad-sight. But this does not seem to be working as it should.

I read somewhere that this is being removed for both player and aliens, they plan on re-working LOS eventually to be along the lines of that if a unit is to fire on a target it has to be within it's 18 tile and view angle in order to shoot at it, otherwise they cannot fire at it.

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I read somewhere that this is being removed for both player and aliens, they plan on re-working LOS eventually to be along the lines of that if a unit is to fire on a target it has to be within it's 18 tile and view angle in order to shoot at it, otherwise they cannot fire at it.
Yes, this was partly implemented in one of the experimental builds. I saw it in action. It changes ground combat quite a bit. Your pointman has to stay where he is to spot for the other units. If he moves off you lose sight and line of fire. That makes for a much more deliberate style of play and it also makes it vital that you keep your troops fairly close together if they are going to support each other. A smart player will always reserve some TU for the spotter as he may need to run after he's done spotting. Also, it means that your spotter could very well be killed by reaction fire before or during your turn and deny some or all of your other units a chance to fire at the spotted alien(s). I lost several guys this way without hurting the aliens because my single spotters were cut down before they could get any supporting fire to pin the aliens down.
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I'm having the same unarmed seb guard problem that showed up in that bugged v20 balance patch, but I can't find an unclosed tag in aiprops.xml. I've validated my files, and all showed as ok. I'd really prefer to not do a full reinstall if anyone has a suggestion for fixing it.

Edit: Ok, maybe it's a different issue. I just had several cesean guards and a soldier unarmed during a terror mission.

Edited by Dranak
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I'm having the same unarmed seb guard problem that showed up in that bugged v20 balance patch, but I can't find an unclosed tag in aiprops.xml. I've validated my files, and all showed as ok. I'd really prefer to not do a full reinstall if anyone has a suggestion for fixing it.

Edit: Ok, maybe it's a different issue. I just had several cesean guards and a soldier unarmed during a terror mission.

If you're only encountering aliens with plasma rifles (as opposed to the snipers or the shotgun type ones), it's something I ran into back in the buggy v20 balance patch. I haven't seen it since, though. Guard support units are meant to carry those guns but they didn't. You can try going to aiprops.xml and changing the support ranks to have alien plasma rifles instead. I can't give any guarantees this will work, I'm afraid, and probably not for a save where the aliens are already unarmed.

Edited by Ol' Stinky
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Lightzy, you don't "fix" a system by switching off the lights and telling everyone they're better off in the dark. The initative based reaction system that Chris is looking to introduce will change up how scouting and breaching is handled in a big way. And as Falesh has pointed out) there already are tools to deal with breaching (shields work ever so much better now they block at least 1 shot from the front).

No, I fix a problem by giving severe penalties to reaction shots on moving targets and removing reaction shots against firing targets unless you have enough AP reserved from an aimed shot.

I dunno how your imagination works but it is rather wild.

A solution based on stats is of course much preferable but for now when u have to have something at least halfway sane then this is how.

As for the solutions availalble, doesn't really work. If your grenade doesn't knock them out or suppress them ur dead, because ur soldiers don't know how to toss a grenade over a corner without exposing their entire squishy bodies yet (also preferable, but as I said, bandaid solution).

What I do now is position snipers far away from the exit, open the door with one soldier and run away, hope to snipe, if not, repeat for 20-30 times

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Lightzy, please read the dictionary definition for "metaphor". Please do that. Also, at the same time, look up "hysteria", "ad hominem", "gross oversimplification", "red herring" and that old favourite "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", because with the exception of metaphor, all of them apply to your arguments. Your arguments are disjointed, hysterical, take the worst case as the only case, ignore all evidence to the contrary and in language and tone are similar to a child screaming himself sick. Calm down.

The "halfway sane" choice is not to so viciously clamp down on reaction fire that it becomes a pointless exercise for either Xenonauts or aliens. It's to look at the existing tools for dealing with reaction fire (which are more than flashbangs), see what could use improvement or bug fixing, see what modifiers apply to reaction fire, and look at the mechanical systems behind reaction fire.

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Don't scouts now have Guard-rank aliens with Plasma Rifles?

I meant aliens that spawn with the heavy plasma rifles (the ones that have scattershot) and snipers...or don't spawn, in Dranak's case. Sorry for any confusion.

If anyone wants to try night time LoS rules all the time, then I slapped this mod together in five minutes. It changes config.xml. Install by extracting into your Xenonauts dir, you'll know it's going in the right place if it asks if you want to overwrite the default config.xml.

  • Every mission is a night time mission.

  • Every mission has the usual daytime visual range for units (so soldiers, Sebs, Caes, Androns see for 18 tiles, Wraiths 19, Harridans 20).

  • I couldn't see a way to disable flares - no NightTimeWeapon="1" in weapons_gc.xml that I could see, for example - so I set their light radius to 0, and they only last one turn. I'm not sure this actually renders them useless, so all I can ask is that you don't use them. They might break the spirit of the mod for you, and what's the point in that?

  • While you can shoot at the tile an alien's on, if you can't see him there's an accuracy penalty. You're better off having them in LoS if you want the kill. Jeon says that there's something odd with how that's implemented, so if you're netting a lot of out-of-LoS kills, try opening up config.xml in a text editor. Jeon's advice would be to alter <NoTargetPenalty>0.75</NoTargetPenalty> to 0.25.

  • That spooky night time music gets heard more often.
Edited by Ol' Stinky
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Today I got to the large ufos for the first time ever and the number of targets on my radar went way through the roof. I have 3 bases: north Africa with 3 corsairs and 3 foxtrots, cuba with 3 condors and 3 foxtrots and Japan with 2 condors and 2 foxtrots and I'm so completely overwhelmed I don't even want to continue playing. I'd just want to do something else (ground combat!) than continuously shoot dozens if ufos down. Especially europe seems to get insane ufo numbers and my main base (n. Africa) is continuously struggling under heavy pressure. I play on normal and use auto resolve.

Meanwhile ground combat has become almost trivial. My experienced super soldiers (wolf/laser) are so accurate, fast and strong, enemies have absolutely no means to stop me. So GC is way too easy at this stage and AC is laughably hard and need lots of work in comparison.

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Today I got to the large ufos for the first time ever and the number of targets on my radar went way through the roof. I have 3 bases: north Africa with 3 corsairs and 3 foxtrots, cuba with 3 condors and 3 foxtrots and Japan with 2 condors and 2 foxtrots and I'm so completely overwhelmed I don't even want to continue playing. I'd just want to do something else (ground combat!) than continuously shoot dozens if ufos down. Especially europe seems to get insane ufo numbers and my main base (n. Africa) is continuously struggling under heavy pressure. I play on normal and use auto resolve.

Meanwhile ground combat has become almost trivial. My experienced super soldiers (wolf/laser) are so accurate, fast and strong, enemies have absolutely no means to stop me. So GC is way too easy at this stage and AC is laughably hard and need lots of work in comparison.

We need more people to play past January and comment on the balance IMO. This is good stuff to know. My big problem is there is a new build out before I get that far OR I run into a game stopping bug. What month are you in?
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I'm not so happy with the progression of UFO sizes and numbers. I don't mind doing AC, but I think I'd be a lot happier fighting a few really tough big ships then dozens of mediocre big ships. I noticed that the game become somewhat annoying around January just from the sheer numbers of ACs I was having to do. That's about as far as I've gotten lately in the game (when carriers and strike ships start showing up.) It's hard for me to believe the aliens have as many cruisers and carriers in their fleet as scouts and corvettes.

Also I have a question, are strike cruiser not meant to be recovered? I shot one down and it said it was "destroyed" and there was no wreckage.

Edited by StellarRat
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Yeah, too much too tough ufos with too much escorts. Even if I could manage them, it sure as hell isn't any fun. Can't remember the month atm... I'm at the airport leaving to canarian islands so next time you'll se me here, its february in real world at least. :)

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