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Ground Combat Balance - V21 Experimental 6


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Normal shots TU cost should be more than 50% so you could only shoot 2 snapshots, 1 normal or 1 aimed. Aimed should be considerably more accurate than normal shot.

Something like

Snap: 45% TU, 40ACC

Normal 60% TU, 60ACC

Aimed 95% Tu, 150ACC

Edited by Skitso
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How about balancing it so that you can shoot 1 normal and 1 snap shot?

Gameplay-wise, it should use up your entire turn, so the slight bit of accuracy you get from the normal shot vs snap shot isn't a big deal balance-wise, but it does feel like you get rewarded for not moving.

Realism-wise, it reflects the first shot being somewhat aimed (normal), but the recoil stopping you from getting the same odds on the 2nd shot.

2 snap shots would then occur when you need to pivot, crouch or make slight adjustments.

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Flashbangs don't seem to work if the aliens pass a reaction fire check which happens before the grenades explode. The order of events appears to be:

1) Soldier Throws Grenade

2) Grenade Lands

3) Aliens check to see if they can shoot the guy who threw the grenade.

4) The grenade explodes.

5) Any aliens in queue to fire don't take suppression damage.

6) Aliens shoot the guy who threw the grenade.

As for balance regarding ammo counts, etc, I think we are getting closer to being balanced. As of now, given the low number of aliens and how easy it is for them to die, I rarely have to reload assault rifles, shotguns, or pistols. With the later tech and the larger enemy ships, reloading does start to come into play. I agree with bumping the ballistic weapons to be down at the later tech levels for ammo because it makes the transition between conventional and futuristic weapons much smoother and gets you used to the levels of ammo that you are going to be managing. Also, ballistic LMG ammo should probably weigh less.

If the game were balanced with ammo numbers going back up in mind, bullets would have to do less damage relative to the aliens' health, the guns would have to be less accurate, or there would have to be more aliens to compensate for the lack of need to reload. All of which have their own balance issues and would cause complaints from one person or another about how inaccurate soldiers are, how bullets do nothing, or how there are way too many aliens mowing your soldiers down.

As for sniper rifles, I think they need some personality. I do like the idea of a very accurate, high TU cost aimed shot and not so accurate other shots. A high accuracy shot is good for taking out a target behind cover btw, I'm pretty sure the min/max values are applied at the very end of the calculation now.

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Grenades should not provoke reaction fire.

It would make them useful for clearing out entrenched enemies that have TUs saved up, and for clearing rooms when the aliens are watching the doors. This is their use in real life so it makes sense.

It also makes sense game-wise because grenades can be tossed around corner or thrown from behind cover. How can you reaction fire against that?

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legit, follow your thought through. You have a weapon that doesn't provoke reaction fire. All other weapons do. What's the appropriate way to exploit this? Why, to carry a pistol when scouting (so you can get close enough) then fling grenades with impunity with your other hand. Or carry a shield with one hand and fling grenades with the other. Stun grenades are good verses early aliens, electroshock would be good verses the rest. I'd love the thought of a weapon that doesn't provoke reaction fire. What a safe weapon to use!

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As of now, given the low number of aliens and how easy it is for them to die, I rarely have to reload assault rifles, shotguns, or pistols.

There are only low numbers of aliens on early UFO recovery missions. Once terror missions and base assaults start happening, even ballistic weapons have to be reloaded several times a mission.

If ARs are reduced to 12 rounds, are shotguns going to have 5? Are ballistic rifles going to have 6? And lasers and plasma even less? I don't like the idea of needing to carry around half a dozen spare magazines to complete a mission, especially since most soldiers are so weak they can't carry armor, a rifle and some grenades before they start taking weight penalties.

If the game were balanced with ammo numbers going back up in mind, bullets would have to do less damage relative to the aliens' health, the guns would have to be less accurate, or there would have to be more aliens to compensate for the lack of need to reload. All of which have their own balance issues and would cause complaints from one person or another about how inaccurate soldiers are, how bullets do nothing, or how there are way too many aliens mowing your soldiers down.

I disagree with the assertion that lowering ammo capacities does much of anything to balance the weapons unless its something crazy like 1 or 2 shots. Lowered ammo capacity doesn't do anything for most weapons but make them more tedious to use.

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legit, follow your thought through. You have a weapon that doesn't provoke reaction fire. All other weapons do. What's the appropriate way to exploit this? Why, to carry a pistol when scouting (so you can get close enough) then fling grenades with impunity with your other hand. Or carry a shield with one hand and fling grenades with the other. Stun grenades are good verses early aliens, electroshock would be good verses the rest. I'd love the thought of a weapon that doesn't provoke reaction fire. What a safe weapon to use!

Do you think lowering the damage and increasing the explosion radius of frag/alen/etc. grenades would work? It'd make throwing from out of enemy LoF easier without screwing up the reaction fire system.

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Have to say I'm happy with reducing LMG capacity (along with ALL weapons). There's no reason we can't abstract ammo a bit, so that each round and shot fired is the equivalent of 5 in reality (though a single hit is still a single hit).

I mean, real-world combat accuracy is a lot lower than in the game also. So it'd take way more shots to get each hit if this was reality (though suppression is then very weak in-game).

Additionally, the time it takes someone to run as far as they do in-game is like 10sec or whatever per turn. You can easily empty a full clip in that time in reality.

Point is, if shot time has been expanded to like 3x of reality, and shot volume per hit reduced by 3x from reality, then reducing magazine capacity by like 3x just puts it all in-line with reality.

And making the game "reality based" for ground combat is making yourself deal with very tedious turns. Trust me, I've done it, and after each soldier sprays half a clip per round each round with the same number of hits as if they just were doing a couple single shots, you realize it's best to abstract things here and just make it all proportionate, as has been done (except for magazine capacity for non-LMG weapons).

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legit, follow your thought through. You have a weapon that doesn't provoke reaction fire. All other weapons do. What's the appropriate way to exploit this? Why, to carry a pistol when scouting (so you can get close enough) then fling grenades with impunity with your other hand. Or carry a shield with one hand and fling grenades with the other. Stun grenades are good verses early aliens, electroshock would be good verses the rest. I'd love the thought of a weapon that doesn't provoke reaction fire. What a safe weapon to use!

If all you took was grenades you would never get close enough to use them, even with a pistol or shield.

If you had enough troops rushing forward at once so that you can overwhelm the aliens fire (taking massive casualties in the process) and just throw grenades at them, should that not be a viable tactic?

Even with grenades not provoking reaction fire, guns would still be necessary to perform a mission.

In the OG throwing grenades did not provoke reaction fire, and it worked fine there.

How about instead of dismissing my ideas outright, you actually consider them first and come up with good arguments against them instead of sarcasm.

I disagree with the assertion that lowering ammo capacities does much of anything to balance the weapons unless its something crazy like 1 or 2 shots. Lowered ammo capacity doesn't do anything for most weapons but make them more tedious to use.

THANK YOU!

Someone gets it! I've been trying to get this point across for the past two weeks.

Edited by legit1337
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I disagree with the assertion that lowering ammo capacities does much of anything to balance the weapons unless its something crazy like 1 or 2 shots. Lowered ammo capacity doesn't do anything for most weapons but make them more tedious to use.

You think all weapons should have unlimited ammo, then? If ammo levels are irrelevant, is there any reason to have reloading and clips at all?

(That's not what your post says, of course, but it's what the assumptions in it imply)

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If all you took was grenades you would never get close enough to use them, even with a pistol or shield.

If you had enough troops rushing forward at once so that you can overwhelm the aliens fire (taking massive casualties in the process) and just throw grenades at them, should that not be a viable tactic?

Even with grenades not provoking reaction fire, guns would still be necessary to perform a mission.

In the OG throwing grenades did not provoke reaction fire, and it worked fine there.

There's plenty of places you could exploit it, though. E.g. UFO breaches and base missions where you are typically in such close quarters that it's not hard to get into grenade range. indeed, reaction fire is basically all UFO-defenders have; if you provide a means of attacking them which offers no possibility of reaction fire then they basically cannot possible attack you.

I'm not arguing that you could complete an entire mission like this, but at some points in the game dealing with reaction fire is the key. That challenge would be trivial is using grenades ignored reaction fire.

Also - at least according to UFOpedia - throwing items provoked reaction shots in the OG (http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Reaction_fire_triggers)

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There's no good way to make reloading relevant - you'll just end up forcing people to take more magazines. It would be nice however, to switch the precision rifle to something different (the hybrid depicted looks a bit like G3, which should already have 20 round magazines). Since it's 1979, it could be replaced by a PSG-1, which only has 5 round magazine and is pretty new in the game time.

Moreover, wouldn't it be a good idea for the troops to use battle rifles? The intermediate cartridge was devised specifically for lightly armoured targets, and aliens with their neat alloys aren't exactly soft. :)

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There's no good way to make reloading relevant - you'll just end up forcing people to take more magazines.

There's a pretty big difference in ammo consumption between someone firing aimed shots from an AR and someone firing burst fire every turn. If the former person can take a few more grenades into battle and is less likely to run out of shots at inopportune moments, I don't see why that's not a suitable reward for managing their ammo more effectively?

It's a bit late in development to re-do the weapon art, even if I wanted to :)

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I only managed to get pretty early in the game on normal difficulty, but I very rarely reloaded the ballistic weapons (I still managed to take a small alien base with half the team using ballistic weapons). I do think the ballistic weapons should be introductory tools to the game - ammo management shouldn't be that big of a deal there, both due to authentic and gameplay reasons. Lasers and up should be much more demanding in usage. Ballistic MG could be a good suppression tool with the 50 round magazine, but the laser one with 20 round battery should be a much more specialized weapon that's designed to actually kill, not scare away the enemies. That way, both weapons are still viable (at least in "laser era") and authentic. It would also make the upgrade to laser tech more visible, with reloading playing a much bigger role than before.

Also, keep in mind that I don't know much about game design, I'm just a reviewer. :)

EDIT - *If* the art guys have some spare time, then why not? There's no need to phase out the M16, you can always add a battle rifle as an alternative. Unless the art works are outsourced and paid on per-image basis. :P Besides, you already have a G3 model, just with scope and marksman scope - making a normal G3 out of it wouldn't be a problem. PSG-1 is also based G3. Soldier sprites however...

Edited by HammerHead
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Usually how FPS games approach machine guns is that they increase the reloading time. Reloading a belt fed machine gun takes so much time that the player feels he should be in good cover whereas changing a clip to a smaller weapon can be done quickly while crouching behind a simple cover. Longer reload times also give an important rhythm to firefights when players can flank and advance when they see their enemy is reloading. If it looks like xenonauts are not needing to reload at all with "big" clips like 30 rounds then I think the game has too high accuracy. Bullets should be flying.

I like this thread btw. Of course it's mostly subjective chatter but it has had nice conversation about balance vs realism vs gameplay in general. Personally I'm not hoping for a realistic game. I liked original tongue-in-cheek UFO with cow abductions, over the top weapons like autocannon&blaster launcher and how these made the destructible terrain shine. I prefer this approach over Jagged Alliance. That said, I do very much agree what was said earlier about setting weapon balance base around normal weapons that everybody knows. And then boosting the alien weapons up from there.

I might be wrong, but from lurking around I've gotten the impression that end game balancing is currently going on. This shows from trying to keep later weapons from coming too strong compared to early weapons. Also from the latest percentage based TU change, to prevent veterans coming too strong. I understand the motivation but just be a bit mindful about it.

This is a single player game, completely smooth and balanced progress doesn't really matter. Personally I would go even as far as to say that end game doesn't matter. It has not worked on any of the UFO games so far and I have still loved them. OG broke with psionics and Apocalypse just had too long end game. When I have 15 to 20 hours of campaign time done I just want the game to end. It's okay to be too easy by that point. If I want more I can start a new campaign. It's better than all of the game feeling the same with only reskinned weapons. I'll be thrilled if you get end game to work but I won't mind if you don't. What I hope won't happen is that 90% of the game becomes too tedious and gets too complex rules so that 10% of the game feels a bit better.

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This is a single player game, completely smooth and balanced progress doesn't really matter. Personally I would go even as far as to say that end game doesn't matter.

That's a good point Jaran. I always felt the game balance/difficulty should have a curve to it. On Normal setting the first few missions should be fairly easy to get you used to the game. Once you start researching laser and plasma technology the difficulty should increase because the aliens are like, "Okay, these guys mean business!" Then once you get MAG weapons and all the superior aircraft you should be on equal footing with the aliens. To balance it out you might see more terror missions and larger groups of aliens as they get more desperate in their attempt to take over earth.

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If they do' date=' I'd prefer new assets for maps than a rework of guns. (There'd be hardly any coding time involved in adding new props to maps, it's so easy even I can do it.)[/quote']

As opposed to swapping gun sprites which require no coding work at all? :) Pretty sure they haven't done the sniper rifle soldier sprite, so they have to do that. Additional work would consist of one image (if we're talking about swapping the PSG-1 for the G3-ish gun). Adding/replacing rifles with battle rifles would take time, and it's not really necessary at this point.

But Chris wants people to reload more often, so 5 round semi auto sniper rifle at a relatively low cost wouldn't be a terrible idea.

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legit, I asked you to think it through, I understand that you feel I am lightly dismissing your thoughts, so, here's a 10 minute clip of me using grenades and basic pistols and my crappiest soliders to take on a Caesan corvette. (I apologise for the delay in reply. After I read your post I straight away went and did the mission, but it took over 2 hours to upload the video).

[video=youtube;57slfIAqFBM]

Despite the fact I played very, very badly I still was able to kill all the aliens I faced using nothing but grenades while holding nothing but pistols. The assertion that I'd never get close is bollocks. I'm sorry, but it is! You can see that when I took on that first drone, overwhelming it with a human wave was a terribad idea. Outflanking it was the smart plan. Each and every alien I killed I either got close to or they got close to me. In general something of both but I was able to do it throughout that clip (I went on to play a lot better and wipe the corvette without any more losses, but some wounds).

I considered your thoughts, then went out to see if I could actually do what I thought I could do. My assertion stands. While my pistoleers carry their pistols they have their reflexes multiplied by 2. As you could see my troops got into position and threw their grenades mostly without interruption because of their boosted reflexes. As it was, they threw their grenades without provoking reaction fire. Now, if grenades didn't provoke reaction fire as an inherant property rather than as a combination of items, my soliders would be even better because they could get into position and never get shot at. I'm sorry, but it's not a good idea because of the way the game works and the ways it can be and will be exploited.

Edited by Max_Caine
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As opposed to swapping gun sprites which require no coding work at all? :) Pretty sure they haven't done the sniper rifle soldier sprite, so they have to do that. Additional work would consist of one image (if we're talking about swapping the PSG-1 for the G3-ish gun). Adding/replacing rifles with battle rifles would take time, and it's not really necessary at this point.

But Chris wants people to reload more often, so 5 round semi auto sniper rifle at a relatively low cost wouldn't be a terrible idea.

Well, the coding amounts to copy/pasting existing files and tweaking a few values. It is odd that the sniper rifle and assault rifle share the same soldier sprites, though. It's even stranger given that there's a perfectly good AK-47 in there, only used for the fringe case of looting friendly AIs on Middle East maps and using their guns. Would anyone mind if the current AR visuals were replaced with the AK?

Edit: if anyone wants to try it out, here's a quick mod that makes riflemen use the AK-47 soldier sprites. Install to your Xenonauts dir and it should put soldier_spectre.xml in Xenonauts\assets\units\xenonaut\armour.basic\weapon.rifle - to uninstall, delete this soldier_spectre.xml file. The rifle will still look like normal in the geoscape/inventory/UI.

Edit 2: there shouldn't be a space in "weapon.rifle" up there, but the forums are trolling me and inserting one. You win this round, forums, but I'll have my revenge.

Edited by Ol' Stinky
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I considered your thoughts, then went out to see if I could actually do what I thought I could do. My assertion stands. While my pistoleers carry their pistols they have their reflexes multiplied by 2. As you could see my troops got into position and threw their grenades mostly without interruption because of their boosted reflexes. As it was, they threw their grenades without provoking reaction fire. Now, if grenades didn't provoke reaction fire as an inherant property rather than as a combination of items, my soliders would be even better because they could get into position and never get shot at. I'm sorry, but it's not a good idea because of the way the game works and the ways it can be and will be exploited.
The reaction firing system and AI shooting in general is screwed up that's the root cause of the problem, not the fact that grenades draw in reaction fire. At 2:47, 4:40, 4:53 and 5:04 (when I quit watching) the AI passed on chances to fire at your guys just standing in the open either reaction or during their turn. That's what the problem is. Reaction fire should be triggered by your guys moving into to view NOT from your guys firing/throwing. That's just dumb. Why would you ever wait for the enemy to fire first at you? See first, shoot first, win, that was the adage in ROTC. The AI should NEVER pass on a chance to fire at your men if they are standing in range specially during their own turn. The new system either has a bug OR the system is wrong.

What's really funny is that I would never play the way you were, so I wouldn't have ever figured out how exploit grenades. I always just assumed the AI was going to shoot me at every opportunity.

Edited by StellarRat
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The reaction firing system and AI shooting in general is screwed up that's the root cause of the problem, not the fact that grenades draw in reaction fire. At 2:47, 4:40, 4:53 and 5:04 (when I quit watching) the AI passed on chances to fire at your guys just standing in the open either reaction or during their turn. That's what the problem is. Reaction fire should be triggered by your guys moving into to view NOT from your guys firing/throwing. That's just dumb. Why would you ever wait for the enemy to fire first at you? See first, shoot first, win, that was the adage in ROTC. The AI should NEVER pass on a chance to fire at your men if they are standing in range specially during their own turn. The new system either has a bug OR the system is wrong.

To add to this, I've had troops in smoke or cover in an enemy UFO that don't get shot at, because the noncombatant accuracy is too low; despite being two squares away, they assume reaction fire will be better.

I then proceed to flashnade them to stunnage.

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To add to this, I've had troops in smoke or cover in an enemy UFO that don't get shot at, because the noncombatant accuracy is too low; despite being two squares away, they assume reaction fire will be better.

I then proceed to flashnade them to stunnage.

Yep. I also want to point out that the minimum chance to fire and the aliens max. sight range should also apply to reaction fire. Right now, I think they not using the same parameters as normal (non-reaction) fire. I posted a thread on that elsewhere. It may be related to weapons with zero reaction chance. I'm not sure, but something is definitely messed up there.
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[ATTACH=CONFIG]2989[/ATTACH]

There already is art for the PSG1 in the game files under weapons/ballistic/alternative. There are also other art and soviet weapons there for anybody interested.

e.g. [ATTACH=CONFIG]2990[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]2991[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]2992[/ATTACH]

Cool. I guess those soviet guns are relics of when the Cold War setting was more important.

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