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Weapon Role Thoughts


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Shot Types: We've had a quick chat in the office about how we think the different shot levels should act. This is what we came up with:

Snap Shots - these are cheap, but inaccurate. They are designed to be used when you have insufficient TU to do anything else. They're cheaper and less accurate than they were before.

Normal Shots - these are the mid-point, costing less TU than Aimed Shots but more TU efficient than Snap Shots.

Aimed Shots - these are expensive and accurate, but provide more accuracy per TU than the other types of shot (including burst). If you have sufficient TU available, you should always use either this or burst fire.

Burst fire - burst fire is only on the Rifles and costs the same as an Aimed Shot. It is more TU efficient than Normal shots, but less TU efficient than Aimed shots. It also provides a suppression bonus.

Aimed vs Burst - We don't want either Aimed or Burst fire to be "better" than one another, so we've made them different.

At range, Aimed provides the best killing power per TU but Burst gives more suppression.

At short range (within 5 tiles), burst becomes a more effective killer and this effect is magnified the closer you get. It also gives the enemy no chance to reaction fire relative to firing multiple cheaper shots, which makes it less dangerous to use in close quarters as well as more TU efficient than normal shots...giving the Rifles an advantage over other types of weapon that do not have it.

Weapon types: This lets us differentiate the weapons into different roles based on their fire modes and TU costs.

Pistols: Primarily a sidearm, these will function like stripped-down rifles: same damage / TU cost and with a better reaction fire modifier, but shorter range and no access to Burst or Aimed shots. Average damage, no armour mitigation.

Rifles: The most versatile weapon, useful in most situations due to having both Aimed and Burst fire. Average damage, no armour mitigation.

Shotguns: A specialist close combat weapon with short range and low accuracy, but very high damage per TU and good reaction fire modifier. No Aimed or Burst shot; the idea is that they get a large amount of their accuracy from the short-range bonus (+48 Accuracy if in an adjacent tile). High damage, no mitigation. Because they fire three pellets and each one does small amounts of damage, they are weak against armour but strong against unarmoured foes (non-robots).

Precision Rifles: These have good range and do similar accuracy per TU than Rifles, but are more expensive / accurate per shot. They do slightly more damage than rifles, but have some armour mitigation so are especially good against robots. The negatives are a high TU cost per shot making them inflexible, no burst fire access, low reaction fire modifier and no short-range accuracy bonus.

Rocket Launcher: This weapon should be used for doing some damage, but mostly for destroying cover and terrain. Damage will be decent, but rockets will have a large blast area and will do incendiary damage (triple damage to terrain) with no armour mitigation. Not intended to be for killing, but useful to remove the cover bonus from your enemies. No reaction fire.

Machineguns: These have different roles for standard soldiers, and when you get Predator armour.

For standard soldiers, they are a support weapon with decent killing potential due to the sheer weight of fire. They have a high TU cost to fire, but fire 10 bullets at low accuracy (reduced further if a soldier does not have decent strength) and do large amounts of suppression. However, they are inflexible, can't reaction fire and also chew through ammo quickly, needing a full turn to reload.

The Predator will have no recoil penalty and a much reduced TU cost for firing these weapons, allowing them to close on enemies while firing lots of bullets at them. At short range this is extremely powerful against basically anything in the game, but the inflexibility of the Predator and low ammo of the weapon will hopefully stop it being completely overpowered.

In both cases, each individual bullet will probably do the same damage as the equivalent rifle but may have some armour mitigation added.

Grenades - A bit undecided on these. I think they should do less damage per TU than normal weapons, but be more reliable damage and also allow you to hit multiple targets if the enemy are grouped. They are *not* incendiary damage, and are not meant to do that much damage to terrain.

If people have suggestions and thoughts about the above, please post your comments here. We'll be using these updated roles to try and rebalance the weapon TU costs, but I feel that we should think about the desired effect before we start!

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Pretty much agree on all of this. Only two comments:

1) Is there a reason to deny shotguns an Aimed shot varient? While I agree that shotguns should be close-quarters weapons, giving them an Aimed shot means that they're not 100% useless outside of their effective range (they're still not great, mind, but it's better than nothing!).

2) With regards to grenades, I personally like the idea of them being more powerful/damage efficient compared with direct fire weapons. They already have a number of disadvantages compared with other weapons: hard-limit on range; high weight/shot; always draw reaction fire because of damage/suppression delay; and destroys equipment (you could add to that a minimum range, as well!). For me, all these things render grenades a fairly niche weapon in terms of their use. Giving them high damage doesn't, therefore, seem like too much of a problem to me. (I've never tried mass grenade-spamming though. Maybe it's amazing?)

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I mostly like what I see, but machine guns shouldn't lose reaction fire. I think that being able to hunker a machine-gunner down to cover an area of terrain (or a craft entrance, corridor, etc) ought to be one of the weapon's main strengths. Holding a position and blasting away at anything that comes into the line of fire seems right up the machine gun's alley.

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If you give machineguns a low kill chance then it makes Predators useless, and is pretty boring in general. The limitations on reaction fire for heavy weapons is partly for your own safety - having your soldiers reaction firing with MGs and rocket launchers can be as destructive to your own team as it is to the enemy.

This does remind me that I need to check whether a 0 reaction fire modifier means the aliens always pass their reaction checks against that soldier, though (as they'd have 0 Initiative). That's not intended if it is the case.

The shotgun and pistol don't have an aimed shot to emphasise the fact they're fundamentally not that accurate and should be up close to make best use of them. I'm tempted to give the shotgun the same snap / normal shot costs as the rifle, just with significantly higher damage. Might simplify things.

Re: grenades, fair points. I'll consider them.

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I disagree with machineguns losing reaction fire. They are MADE for covering large areas of ground with deadly fire. That's why they are so suppressive, because they are so dangerous. They scare soldiers enough that they want to stay down not move. If you take away reaction fire you take away one of main purposes of machineguns.

Also, I don't agree that rocket launchers should do less damage than they do now (if that's what you're planning) at least in the impact tile. They should do a ton of damage to the tile they land in and should have gobs of armor mitigation in that tile. In the surrounding tiles they should have very little armor mitigation. They are made for destroying armored vehicles and should be HIGHLY effective against Androns especially.

The sniper rifle should do substantially more damage than an AR as they are designed to be single hit kill type weapons.

All explosive type weapons (grenades, C4, rockets) should also be highly suppressive in the blast radius. I can vouch for this from personal experience.

All your other thoughts seem fine to me. I like your grenade thoughts especially.

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Having played around with explosive weapons, they worked pretty well before the most recent change with reduced damage and increased radius. Aliens have no armor vs. incendiary, so rockets are effective vs. Androns.

Explosive weapons are highly suppressive right now and it works well.

All the weapon changes seem to be well thought out and I like where they are going.

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My opinions:

Shot Types - No complaints, good show. Slightly different then I originally wanted it but your ideas sound better in retrospect.

Aimed vs Burst - See above.

Machineguns - As other people have stated I'd like to see an LMG's reaction modifier be 0. They aren't pistols or shotguns by any means, but they aren't as unwieldy as rocket launchers either. I like how predator armor turns LMGs into "heavy rifles" and the 0 reaction modifier would help this role, along with reinforcing the fact that LMGs are area denial weapons for standard soldiers. I still think the high tier LMGs need at least 30 ammo. I know you want to keep endgame LMGs from being totally broken with predator armor but 20 round magazines on them totally break immersion. If you need to balance it nerf something else about it (suggestion: accuracy). They don't have to be totally inaccurate bullet hoses but it should be possible to miss every round in the burst.

...but the inflexibility of the Predator and low ammo of the weapon will hopefully stop it being completely overpowered.
If you give machineguns a low kill chance then it makes Predators useless, and is pretty boring in general.

No offense, but I fail to see how 30 round magazines make predator armor toting LMGers "completely overpowered", but nerfing the LMG accuracy makes predator armor "useless".

Grenades - Grenades and explosives in general should do a lot of damage with a lot of armor mitigation in target squares. Grenades should do 50% damage with no mitigation (shrapnel) in the adjacent square, and 25% damage with no mitigation two squares away. They should not damage props too much as that would be a little overpowered for a grenade to destroy cover.

Edited by legit1337
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Legit, you've been asking for 50 round magazines, not 30 round magazines. 50 round magazines would indeed be totally overpowered.

I do find it slightly strange that a MG being able to fire 2 bursts is totally immersion breaking, but 3 is fine? Not saying I'm wouldn't consider changing it, but surely anything less than a 100 round belt is going to break your immersion?

EDIT - and to answer the question, if MGs don't have any kill chance then it doesn't matter how many bullets you fire / are in the belt, you're not going to kill anything. Assault armour that can only be equipped with weapons that can't kill anything would make it somewhat underpowered.

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A unique feature of grenades should be that they provide some indirect fire. Soldiers should be able to effectively throw them over walls or hedges. Not sure how well they work in that regard atm.

They're fine for this so far as I can tell. I've lobbed plenty of grenades over hedges, walls and other Xenonauts (though one should only do the latter with non-lethal grenades ;) )

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Chris, I like your proposals and I vote for the majority sentiment on explosives and machine guns. I do think that armor mitigation should be as follows:

Pistols/Shotguns = None

Rifles/Machine Guns = Low

Grenades/Rockets = Medium (impact tile)

Precision Rifles = High

What do think about giving a longer duration to smoke grenades and stun grenades?

Perhaps give the smoke an extra turn before significant dissipation begins? I often chain two (or infrequently more) in order to give my soldiers enough time for a maneuver.

I think stun grenades should require an extra turn to apply their full effect. And in my experience the effects from several are cumulative. If true, perhaps lessen this? This gives the AI more of a chance against stun grenade spam.

Stun rockets should be more powerful than their grenade counterparts.

I haven't used the melee stun weapon in this version, but it felt a little soft in the last.

Thanks. ;)

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Explosive weapons are highly suppressive right now and it works well.
They are? I haven't seen an alien get suppressed from explosion for a long time except with flash bangs and electroshock grenades. All of the explosive weapons should work at least as well as a flash bang as far as suppression goes. The only reason to choose a flash bang over other explosives would be if you didn't want to kill the alien, a friendly close by, or damage the surrounding area. That's why the police use them instead of hand grenades. Edited by StellarRat
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StellarRat: I agree about the sniper rifles. They shoud have significantly higher damage than AR's and one shot lesser enemies with ease.

I disagree with all explosions needing to be as suppressive as flashbangs. Just purely gameplay balance wise I think they should be your "go to" grenade when wanting to suppress.

Edited by Skitso
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If I want to destroy alien cover I use C4, not rocket launchers. C4 doesn't require me to sacrifice a heavy weapon soldier and is pretty light weight. Rocket launchers need to keep their strong killing potential if they want a space on my team, and they should be especially effective against Androns.

What do think about giving a longer duration to smoke grenades and stun grenades?

Perhaps give the smoke an extra turn before significant dissipation begins? I often chain two (or infrequently more) in order to give my soldiers enough time for a maneuver.

Good idea on smoke. Smoke doesn't really last long enough to have an impact on the battlefield. I've barely used it since it was nerfed from 100% shot blocking. I'm not sure about the stun gas though.

Legit, you've been asking for 50 round magazines, not 30 round magazines. 50 round magazines would indeed be totally overpowered.

I and some others have asked for 30 rounds. 20 round magazine means reloading every 3rd round instead of every 6th. Maybe you've done the math and it's perfectly balanced, but from a player perspective it FEELS like a downgrade from the LMG.

You've reduced the damage per bullet on the LMG while the damage on the scatter laser is still high relative to the other laser weapons. I'd rather have slighter lower damage and a slightly larger mag that the SL as it presently exists.

Grenades - A bit undecided on these. I think they should do less damage per TU than normal weapons, but be more reliable damage and also allow you to hit multiple targets if the enemy are grouped. They are *not* incendiary damage, and are not meant to do that much damage to terrain.

If the alien is in the open, shooting should be more TU efficient. If the alien is behind cover, throwing a grenade should be more TU efficient. Splash damage shouldn't be taken into account because aliens very very rarely stand close enough together for that to matter.

Shotguns: A specialist close combat weapon with short range and low accuracy, but very high damage per TU and good reaction fire modifier. No Aimed or Burst shot; the idea is that they get a large amount of their accuracy from the short-range bonus (+48 Accuracy if in an adjacent tile). High damage, no mitigation. Because they fire three pellets and each one does small amounts of damage, they are weak against armour but strong against unarmoured foes (non-robots).

No aimed shot on shotguns is good, but they shouldn't have to rely on short-range accuracy bonuses to hit enemies. Marching shotgunners up to an alien until the barrel is pressing against its forehead is silly. A shotgun taking a normal shot within green range should have a good chance of hitting anywhere within that range. I'd like to see shotgun accuracy boosted a bit, but only within its green range.

Edited by KateMicucci
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For me the only thing I’m worried about is the grenades and rocket launchers.

Hopefully a rocket will do more damage than a grenade. If the grenades do more damage I think it will be slightly confusing for new players who would naturally think rockets would be more powerful.

That’s all. I’m not too worried about the rest, as it makes sense how it effects gameplay.

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The MG / scatter laser differential in the current build is an error. They're both meant to have 20 ammo, 10 rounds per burst and similar damage per shot to the equivalent rifle in the most recent build. I just forgot to roll out the changes globally. Whatever model I decide on for the final MG stats will also be rolled out to its higher-level equivalents.

Regarding rockets, my thinking is they are too powerful if spammed to make them being high-damage weapons acceptable. What do you do if a player takes 4 of them on a mission, each guy carrying 3 rockets? The blast radius is big enough it's hard to miss with them, and if you give them enough damage to destroy terrain effectively AND mitigation then they can one / two shot most things in the game...doing so to every enemy in range simultaneously, in fact.

I also think there's a missing niche for long-range cover denial weapon. C4 is all well and good but explodes at the end of the turn, so you can't use it to remove cover before firing with your other soldiers, and it's short range too. Giving that role to rocket launchers seems a more sensible route than making it an armour-penetrating high explosive rocket that can kill most things in one or two shots.

Precision rifles shouldn't one-shot most low-level aliens, otherwise the precision laser would one-shot most medium aliens and so on until the MAG Precision would one-shot elite aliens. I think what I proposed for it is fine.

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Good idea on smoke. Smoke doesn't really last long enough to have an impact on the battlefield. I've barely used it since it was nerfed from 100% shot blocking. I'm not sure about the stun gas though.

While I'd not complain about smoke lasting a bit longer, smoke in the present build in still pretty useful. I've been using it extensively in the present build as a breaching tool and it's fantastic; I've also had a lot of success using it to cover my soldiers advancing. Personally, I think it's in a really good place now.

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Regarding rockets, my thinking is they are too powerful if spammed to make them being high-damage weapons acceptable. What do you do if a player takes 4 of them on a mission, each guy carrying 3 rockets? The blast radius is big enough it's hard to miss with them, and if you give them enough damage to destroy terrain effectively AND mitigation then they can one / two shot most things in the game...doing so to every enemy in range simultaneously, in fact.

I also think there's a missing niche for long-range cover denial weapon. C4 is all well and good but explodes at the end of the turn, so you can't use it to remove cover before firing with your other soldiers, and it's short range too. Giving that role to rocket launchers seems a more sensible route than making it an armour-penetrating high explosive rocket that can kill most things in one or two shots.

I think you didn't read my post completely. I'm saying only give them high mitigation and damage in the tile they detonate in. The splash tiles get no mitigation and much lower damage. That means if you don't get a direct hit they are nearly useless against heavily armored aliens. A near miss with any explosive isn't going to do much to an Andron, they are like tanks. At least that's how it should be in my mind. If you want to blow up all sorts of cover with the splash that's fine with me. Right now, the only problem with them is they are pretty effective in the splash tiles too, so misses aren't too bad. My suggestion would fix that and limit them enough that I think spamming wouldn't be a problem. Remember, they are already heavy, have a very low rate of fire, not much ammo, and no reaction fire. Edited by StellarRat
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Legit, you've been asking for 50 round magazines, not 30 round magazines. 50 round magazines would indeed be totally overpowered.

I do find it slightly strange that a MG being able to fire 2 bursts is totally immersion breaking, but 3 is fine? Not saying I'm wouldn't consider changing it, but surely anything less than a 100 round belt is going to break your immersion?

Yes I have been asking for 50 rounds... but suggested at LEAST 30 rounds. 100 round belts would be even be better but even I acknowledge that would be unbalanced.

Regardless, 20 rounds simply isn't enough. That puts it at equivalent/less for an assault rifle of the same weapon tier, which makes no sense for a heavy weapon that is supposed to put out a large volume of suppressing fire. I'm not looking for spot on realism... I am looking for authenticity and consistency within the game mechanics and lore.

I still think 30 is too low. As I said countless times would rather see 50 round mags and a nerf to some other characteristic of the MGs then a 30 round MG with the current stats. A MG without ammo count doesn't feel like an MG. I'd settle for 40 grudgingly, as some LMGs IRL have 40 round stock mags, (RPK).

IMO rockets should do massive damage and armor mitigation to the square that they hit, but no armor mitigation on splash damage. Even an andron isn't going to stand up to a rocket designed to crack tank armor. This should be balanced by bulky and heavy ammo, a turn long reload (nothing else can be done not even movement, make it a 100% TU action), and overkill on the corpses so that nothing is recoverable. Seems like a reasonable balance to me.

Rockets should do more damage then grenades but should have the same blast radius so it is balanced. AP rockets aren't meant for anti-personnel duty anyway.

Hey that's an idea... AP and HE rockets. AP for high armor mitigation and low splash, and HE for high damage + larger radius, but less armor mitigation.

Edited by legit1337
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Hey that's an idea... AP and HE rockets. AP for high armor mitigation and low splash, and HE for high damage + larger radius, but less armor mitigation.
That's not a bad idea, Chris. You do have an incendiary rocket that isn't being used now (unless of course you plan to surprise us with it later.) It could be repurposed into an AP rocket. More options is never a bad thing in my mind and several of the weapons in the OG had different ammo types. We only have one with multiple ammos, the rocket launcher.
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We had ap missiles, ages ago. Remember? At the time the missile sprites were still Bullet Bill, but AP missiles were brought in at the same time as hypervelocity and AP was the bomb. Anything an AP missile connected with died, and nothing else got hurt. Give a rocketeer enough AP missiles and have enough rocketeers, and you could remove first terrain then targets with scientific precision.

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We had ap missiles, ages ago. Remember? At the time the missile sprites were still Bullet Bill, but AP missiles were brought in at the same time as hypervelocity and AP was the bomb. Anything an AP missile connected with died, and nothing else got hurt. Give a rocketeer enough AP missiles and have enough rocketeers, and you could remove first terrain then targets with scientific precision.
Obviously, it would need to be balanced.
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I'm keen to see how an AP missile could be balanced. In a turn-based game where each side is frozen in time when it's not their turn and the opportunities for one side to react to what the other side is doing are minimal, a weapon which does massive damage and armour mitigation to the square it hits is the perfect anti-everything weapon. The only downside I can see straight off is you loose the loot the target was carrying, but if you were gonna fire a missile at a target, them's the breaks.

Edited by Max_Caine
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