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Weapon Role Thoughts


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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.

What happened to the two ammo types for the starting launcher. Explosive and armour piercing?

I think if you made the armour piercing rounds available it would really help with one more choice to deal with androns with good armour mitigation (maybe it could have a cone blast radius that extends three squares in front?). Then I would have no problem with you nerfing the explosive rounds. As it stands how do we deal with Androns in a tight base map?

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We removed AP rockets. It's not realistic to expect anything to survive a rocket capable of taking out a tank, and the aliens don't really have armoured vehicles to destroy. The Androns are meant to be tough, so having a rocket that can one-shot them kinda defeats the object entirely. It just turns rocket launchers into a massive rifle that can kill anything in the game.

Precision rifles and MGs are pretty handy against Androns, and if not then normal weapons can take them down...you just need to shoot them a lot. Remember armour degrades with every hit.

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But the 50 - 150% damage variance affects all weapons equally, right? Because you still have to do a fixed amount of damage to kill each alien.

So shooting the same alien three times with an AR would have exactly the same chance the alien not being killed as with three pellets from a shotgun blast (assuming everything hits)...you'd just spend more TU doing so with the AR.

The variance is actually most likely to cause you major problems on high-damage single shot weapons like the rocket launcher.

A rocket launcher falls under the category of a "weapon with high base damage output" just like a shotgun does. This has essentially been my argument.

Yeah, I think that was the point (which I totally missed at first!).

In practice, though, I've not seen this happen often with shotgun weapons. Personally, I think they do what they do quite well at the moment.

Exactly.

I'm not arguing that shotguns are overpowered or anything. It just their damage can be random at times, an unfortunate side affect of the 50-150 system.

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My problem isn't with the 50-150 model for single shot weapons, but on the spiky, random amounts of damage from weapons that have a high base damage output (like shotguns).

Unless I've misunderstood the above quote, a rocket launcher is a single-shot weapon so you consider it fine? That's the only reason I mentioned it.

I'm not quite understanding your point regarding shotguns, though. Why are they at any disadvantage versus an AR due to spiky damage? Perhaps I'm missing the point but implying lower damage weapons are good because of more consistent damage is disregarding the fact that lower damage weapons have to score more hits to kill anything...and once they score more hits, they have the same higher damage as the higher damage weapons do (and therefore lose any consistency benefit).

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We removed AP rockets. It's not realistic to expect anything to survive a rocket capable of taking out a tank, and the aliens don't really have armoured vehicles to destroy. The Androns are meant to be tough, so having a rocket that can one-shot them kinda defeats the object entirely. It just turns rocket launchers into a massive rifle that can kill anything in the game.

Precision rifles and MGs are pretty handy against Androns, and if not then normal weapons can take them down...you just need to shoot them a lot. Remember armour degrades with every hit.

Yeah that's true I guess and probably better from a gameplay perspective.

However, the Androns seem too tough in base maps simply because out of the two weapons that can really damage them, neither can really move and shoot in same turn.

Also because of the way reaction fire now works, with them being able to fire off all their saved TU's they are really deadly. All it takes is you firing once (which will never ever kill an Andron unless you hit it with 6 rounds of MG) and you will get double reaction fire with one shot being enough to kill someone in Jackal/wolf armour.

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Unless I've misunderstood the above quote, a rocket launcher is a single-shot weapon so you consider it fine? That's the only reason I mentioned it.

I'm not quite understanding your point regarding shotguns, though. Why are they at any disadvantage versus an AR due to spiky damage? Perhaps I'm missing the point but implying lower damage weapons are good because of more consistent damage is disregarding the fact that lower damage weapons have to score more hits to kill anything...and once they score more hits, they have the same higher damage as the higher damage weapons do (and therefore lose any consistency benefit).

I'm not saying lower base damage weapons are better... I''m saying higher base damage weapons are unreliable due to the high spreads of damages that are possible.

If you shoot a rocket launcher you will most definitely kill whats in the target's square. But the other 3 aliens that get hit with splash may only be wounded, or it may kill them completely. That isn't even necessarily a bad thing, I was just remarking on how random it is sometimes.

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If you change the damage calculation so it is worked out individually on the receiving end wouldn't it also need to be calculated individually for each tile that is hit?

Each wall section, prop, floor tile etc has to take damage as well to see if it switches to the damaged/destroyed version.

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If you change the damage calculation so it is worked out individually on the receiving end wouldn't it also need to be calculated individually for each tile that is hit?

Each wall section, prop, floor tile etc has to take damage as well to see if it switches to the damaged/destroyed version.

Not necessarily. Blast damage is much more uniform than fragmentation damage. But, no matter what, the soldiers need to be evaluated individually. I can live with the props taking a single amount.
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He's talking about it from a code perspective, not a gameplay perspective. It's hardly a pressing issue and if it's a significant code change it's unlikely to happen because of that.
I was too. I was simply suggesting that in the code it's not really important to roll the props individually just the soldiers and aliens. That should save some coding time and execution time. I hope I'm not being a pain. Edited by StellarRat
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Assuming that those entities are already differentiated by the code.

If the game specifically knows the difference between an alien, a Xenonaut, and a wall or bush for example when it applies the damage.

If those entities are not clearly identified then all would be treated in the same way.

As the game currently doesn't need to know the difference to apply the damage I am assuming it would need coding to recognise them then split them and decide which can use the current standard damage roll and which need to have unique rolls, making the coding and execution time requirement higher than treating all of the objects the same.

If it is a simple change then go for it, just pointing out that it may not be the easy change it might appear to be on the surface.

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Assuming that those entities are already differentiated by the code.

If the game specifically knows the difference between an alien, a Xenonaut, and a wall or bush for example when it applies the damage.

If those entities are not clearly identified then all would be treated in the same way.

As the game currently doesn't need to know the difference to apply the damage I am assuming it would need coding to recognise them then split them and decide which can use the current standard damage roll and which need to have unique rolls, making the coding and execution time requirement higher than treating all of the objects the same.

If it is a simple change then go for it, just pointing out that it may not be the easy change it might appear to be on the surface.

Of course that is possible. I did make the assumption that the soldier is "different" in code. It seems like it would have to be a completely separate object to me, but who knows.
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EDIT: It looks like reflex modifiers already do what I'd been babbling about in terms of protecting shotgun users from reaction fire. I seem to be afflicted with a serious case of the dumb this morning.

As for the answer to armor penetration in shotguns, just say they shoot flechettes. Simple as that. No reason to have in-your-face weapons that plink off of armor.

Edited by RotGtIE
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Are there any infos on the various rocket types and flame thrower returning in till the final version?

I can see the images for both, remember a discussion on the flamethrower that no animations are done for it so it may not be implemented, but the 3 different rocket types (or at least two of them: normal and anti Armour) were already in game but now they seem to be left out so: is incendiary and anti-Armour rocket planned within the role concept if it defines the rocket as a means to destroy cover?

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I really like the changes in the v21 candidate. I think that pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles and assault rifles are pretty much spot on. MGs look too powerful. They do all the things a sniper rifle can do in addition to destroying cover, suppressing and being a lot more versatile up close. I think 10 bullets per burst is a bit too much, 6-8 would be more reasonable, imho. Also I think the accuracy is a bit too high.

Edited by Khelevaster
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Bear in mind that MGs get -1 point of Accuracy for each Strength the user has below 75 due to having 75 recoil, and always use the lower of Accuracy and Strength as the shooter accuracy because they are Heavy weapons, so they're not quite as overpowered as their stats suggest on paper.

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..but combat experience tells it's brutally op atm. With 10 relatively high damage bullets per burst, MG kills much better than a sniper regardless the distance. Decrease bullets per burst and buff sniper damage while increasing significantly it's aimed and normal shots TU cost.

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Thanks for the info. I was talking form the experience of actually using the MG, not paper stats. I usually give the MG to a high strength soldier even without knowing about the recoil. Even at two screens away my machinegunner is able to put 2-3 bullets into the target (which is usually enough to kill it), making the MG rival the sniper rifle at long range.

At lower soldier levels it was less so, but once the soldiers start reaching colonel rank, the machinegunner turned from powerful to a walking machine of death. Even more so with predator armour.

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