Proposed Psionic Fixes

[kabill]

Would something like that be moddable?

Kind of. It looks like the strength of individual powers can be set, so the more powerful abilities can be used at a decreased strength. The morale system itself is already fairly well set up for it: Fear halves a soldier's morale (a value which can be changed) but it recovers very slowly (3/turn, I think) without boosts from killing aliens.

The difficulty would be whether the AI can coordinate itself well enough to use psionics like that. I know literally nothing about the psionic AI, so I'm unsure how it picks targets and powers. There's also no way to mod it, so far as I can tell, so it would be contingent on the AI being set up to cope with it already.

It might be worth an experiment some time, though, just to see.

[KevinHann]

It would be more intimidating if it doesn't outright alert you your soldiers will be at risk. Slowly, gradually depleting morale would be so much better until what you thought was insignificant unnerving in the first couple of rounds suddenly threatens to seriously expose your soldiers... and makes you reconsider your options of how to achieve success in the mission. A growing threat the longer you experience the presence of the aliens is definitely something the gameplay might earn from.

On the other hand, do it a three-time super random event and then mind control and we're back at square one.

[Gauddlike]

If psi powers could use the same sort of check as weapons fire then it might work quite well.

Weapons are not fired if the alien has a low chance to hit.

If psi powers are not used if there is a low success chance then the powers with the higher chance, for example fear from the above suggestions, would likely be used first until other powers became viable.

The alien has access to mind control and fear.

The mind control success chance is checked first, if it is is unlikely to work then fear success chance is checked.

If fear is viable then it is used.

Next turn repeat until mind control reaches the threshold that makes it worth trying to use.

I don't know how the AI currently selects which abilities to use when it has access to more than one or if it checks the chance of success in any way though.

[kabill]

Yeah, that would be ideal. Don't know if that's how it works, though. My experience in the past has implied that it's fairly random, but that was before any of the recent psionic changes.

A possible work-around if it doesn't work like that would be to have different aliens with different abilities. If some only had Fear and used that, and others only had MC (but with a very low chance of success against non-morale-depleted soldiers), then it might turn out similarly.

[Gauddlike]

It would rely on both aliens managing to survive a crash as well which could be unlikely.

Especially when someone keeps blowing up all of these power cores everywhere

[kabill]

This is true, although you could get away with adding more aliens with psionic powers to counter it. While I think Chris's recent change reducing the number of psionic aliens is good, I think it's only especially important for the more powerful abilities. If you had UFOs with, say, 4-6 low-level Fear users and one or two Berserk/MC/Paralyse users, odds are good that enough will survive a crash for it to still be relevant. The only problem with that is message-spamming, but it might be possible to mitigate that with some changes to the messaging system?

(Exploding power cores? I don't know what you mean *looks innocent*).

[Gauddlike]

If all or most of them survived though you could have everyone in your squad affected by fear each turn.

A landed UFO could easily become a nightmare with all your soldiers running around with 50% morale and a single loss spelling disaster as everyone panics.

It could also make it very difficult to respond tactically to the position of the psi enemies if they are all over the place.

[kabill]

I'm not sure the first point is necessarily a bad thing. Obviously it would need some balancing to get it right, but I think it would make for a distinct type of mission if your soldiers were constantly on edge and liable to panic. To be honest, I can see it being more preferable as a system to being one-shot MCed/berserked since it's an effect that interacts with the rest of the mission rather than more or less randomly screwing you over.

The second point is possibly a problem, but you could easily have most/all aliens with psionics be UFO/Command Centre bound so at least they're all in one place. Indeed, I'm fairly certain that's largely the case now. I wonder whether this wouldn't create a different mission dynamic as well, since it may encourage a UFO assault before fully clearing the rest of the map.

It might also be a disaster of course, but it's something perhaps worth investigating.

(Ugh, almost all I can think about at the moment is Xenonauts mods. This is not good.)

[Gauddlike]

I guess that depends on how many aliens there were all together amongst other things.

If you had the 5-8 psi aliens from your earlier post and all were restricted to the command room it feels like a bit much on most of the lower UFOs and even a bit cramped on some of the bigger ones.

If that only left a handful of enemies in other locations it would be a bit reminiscent of previous builds were half the map was empty once the few active aggressive enemies died.

Restricting the heavy hitting psi powers to the command centre and having some weaker 'fear' style abilities as front line powers could be interesting though.

Very fitting for caesan troops at least.

[kabill]

The numbers were suggested with the largest UFOs in mind. Smaller UFOs would have less. (The command room reference was meant in terms of alien bases, though that wasn't at all clear).

Having a mix UFO bound and 'front-line' Fear users would be fine, though. Alternatively (additionally), it would be possible to repurpose the 'Support' class variants by giving them psionic powers and setting these as the primary type of defensive/command alien. That way, you could maintain the vanilla UFO loadouts, but retask some of the UFO defenders to psionic support.

It might not work depending on whether aliens will prioritise shooting over psionic attack when threatened though. In a previous build I tried something similar, but the use of psionics seemed to be random, such that in the middle of a firefight a Caesan decided it would have a go at Fearing one of my soldiers instead of shooting, which was easily a suboptimal choice.

[KevinHann]

I must say I really like the idea of having some missions (but not a very large % of them) incredibly hard or impossible to pass forcing you to seriously consider retreating and overall consider what crashsites to attack - or even be unable to predict which crashsites will be impossible before you get there.

[arisian]

So, I'm not sure how psi is "supposed" to be working at the moment, but it still seems...problematic. I can understand it from a tone perspective, but as a gameplay mechanic in a tactical battle game, it's still pretty broken. I've just downed my first battleship, and there's (supposedly) a praetor on board. Having people get hit with dread at the beginning of the first turn (i.e. before either side has taken any actions) was a surprise, but I could work around having fewer time units. What's a problem is that on the aliens' very first turn (i.e. as soon as I hit the "end turn" button), I seem to invariable wind up with one of my guys either getting MC'd or berzerking; either way, somebody winds up dead. This is true in spite of the fact that everyone's got "99+" listed for morale, and I can't imagine the Praetor is *that* close to the drop zone. I was so surprised at this "drop-zone MC" that I re-loaded the combat-start savegame and re-ran the first turn a couple of times to see if it had just been amazingly bad luck, but it seems to happen pretty frequently.

Is this really working as intended? Because at the moment, it sure doesn't seem like there's any meaningful tactics I could use to handle this (outside of exploits like holstering weapons at the end of every turn, or save-scumming for good "vs. psi" rolls). Are there tips for dealing with this for the *actual* state of psi in the game (as opposed to "tactics vs. proposed replacement psi-systems," which some of the stuff in this thread seems to be).

[Dandywalken]

Something that'd be neat as heck is if the mind control wasnt just "YOU'RE CONTROLLED/YOU'RE NOT!", but some degree of inflicted mind control that stacked if resisted the first time. It'd be evident by decreased LoS as the character becomes less able to focus, or messages regarding the character in question experiencing some serious confusion/mental effects.

Having psionicsl be a resisted/not-resisted thing is reasonable gameplay wise, but if the engine permits you can do some really unique stuff with it I imagine.

Let hallucinating not just be a message, but make the character taking random Overwatch attacks at nearby terrain/scenery to illustrate the slow loss of control as the alien achieves dominance etc. That accompanied with that decrease in LoS etc will demonstrate that the character isnt fully under your control, but in turn isnt fully dominated either... but they've become a liability until that stacking psychic dominance is relieved.

EDIT: To above poster, yeah its technically working as designed... but I'm also of the opinion that that isnt a good thing necessarily. You cant really counter/prepare for it, and its random nature that operates without LoS feels primitive and just annoying IMO. But the community wanted it to be as such during development apparently, so the devs complied. Democracy has failed us

Edited June 23, 2014 by Dandywalken

[Tulx]

The psionics are not a threat really at the moment... it is extremely easy to negate their effects by rotating every single one of your soldiers on the ground until they lose their TUs so that they cannot take reaction shots. If they have no TUs for reaction shots they cannot also do anything serious when mind controlled or berserk, they just sit in one place like fools. With care it is possible to sometimes reserve just enough TUs for snap shot, but when the soldier turns to shoot it's buddies he depletes TUs so he can't do anything anymore.

But psionics have negative effects for players right now:

1) Can't use reaction fire. Not a problem in my opinion, on higher difficulties it gets you killed anyways. One or two shots that hit the alien are hardly gonna do anything. And ceaseans who are the weakest aliens also get somekind of advantage then (no reaction fire from the enemy).

2) It's annoying - rotating everybody gets boring fast.

Your proposed changes make the game just easier (smaller chance that when you don't take care of your soldiers they kill their friends).

If anything I'd like to get UI improvements to "not allow" reaction fire.

I haven't seen the endgame aliens yet so maybe my tactics are completely worthless there, I doubt it however. I also tend to play with mainly rookies (every high ranked soldier ends up dead somehow ).

[KevinHann]

I'd like to see how rotating to hell will preserve your soldier from something like Mind Control. I bet the Praetor will bust it's arse laughing at you from the other side of the monitor.

[Tulx]

I'd like to see how rotating to hell will preserve your soldier from something like Mind Control. I bet the Praetor will bust it's arse laughing at you from the other side of the monitor.

I don't really know what the mind control does exactly. Is it like berserk that requires TUs or can aliens use the soldier with full TUs even if I depleted his TUs? If so, goodbye humanity my rookies will die then.

[PurpleXVI]

Something that'd be neat as heck is if the mind control wasnt just "YOU'RE CONTROLLED/YOU'RE NOT!", but some degree of inflicted mind control that stacked if resisted the first time. It'd be evident by decreased LoS as the character becomes less able to focus, or messages regarding the character in question experiencing some serious confusion/mental effects.

How about instead of having separate powers for "unnerved, hallucinating, mind controlled, etc." let it be a progressing tree of effects. First a soldier gets unnerved(more likely to break, panic, etc.), then he starts hallucinating(may duck back into cover, panic or take a random shot at a piece of terrain each turn) and finally he goes into total Alien Control. This way, if a particularly low-Bravery soldier is rapidly getting pounded in the head with psi powers, you could stun prod him and stash him around a corner, or leave him somewhere he's very unlikely to blow up the rest of your soldiers, maybe disarm him or something.

Then you have to choose whether to risk your machinegunner maybe opening fire on a friend or random terrain, or sending him back/stunning him and continuing into the alien base with one man less on board.

[Megajoel]

How about instead of having separate powers for "unnerved, hallucinating, mind controlled, etc." let it be a progressing tree of effects. First a soldier gets unnerved(more likely to break, panic, etc.), then he starts hallucinating(may duck back into cover, panic or take a random shot at a piece of terrain each turn) and finally he goes into total Alien Control. This way, if a particularly low-Bravery soldier is rapidly getting pounded in the head with psi powers, you could stun prod him and stash him around a corner, or leave him somewhere he's very unlikely to blow up the rest of your soldiers, maybe disarm him or something.

Then you have to choose whether to risk your machinegunner maybe opening fire on a friend or random terrain, or sending him back/stunning him and continuing into the alien base with one man less on board.

Actually I think this is a good solution. My main gripe is that it's too random and sudden with no warning. The player cannot do anything to counter it (break LOS, bring equipment etc) barring having to have all their troops hidden from each other which is not really fun.

[arisian]

I don't really know what the mind control does exactly. Is it like berserk that requires TUs or can aliens use the soldier with full TUs even if I depleted his TUs? If so, goodbye humanity my rookies will die then.

At the moment, when a character gets MC'd, they immediately get a full turn's worth of time units, which they then immediately use (as in, during the Alien turn, before you get a chance to do anything). Whether they had any TUs left at the end of *your* turn doesn't matter. It's not reaction fire, it's "standard" fire. And you're absolutely right, it's essentially a guaranteed death for one (or more, depending on positioning/loadout) of your other soldiers.

[KevinHann]

The only workaround against this currently is to holster weapons prior to ending your turn.

Although with the Community patch available it is only a matter of time before someone produces an Armor boosting Bravery as a viable counter-measure.

[dpelectric]

I don't really know what the mind control does exactly. Is it like berserk that requires TUs or can aliens use the soldier with full TUs even if I depleted his TUs? If so, goodbye humanity my rookies will die then.

This has me cracking up. Like Kevin says, I can't wait to hear about you fighting praetors with rotating rookies. Better make sure they have their ballet shoes! And one, two, pirouette, now dip, and one, two, high kick, pirouette...

[KevinHann]

This has me cracking up. Like Kevin says, I can't wait to hear about you fighting praetors with rotating rookies. Better make sure they have their ballet shoes! And one, two, pirouette, now dip, and one, two, high kick, pirouette...

Do I sense the cruel hint of expectancy by an experienced player who's "been there, done that"

[dpelectric]

Cruel? No. Humorous? Yes. I want to see YouTube videos of the battle!!!!

[KevinHann]

Nothing beats the grenade/rocketeer blasting half the squad at the UFO door.

[tonberrytoby]

The thing that makes the psionic attacks so annoying is that there is no real defense against it. Except possibly for abusing the TU system.

What I would like is some device that offers partial protection. How about a shocker device that suppresses your xenonauts if they come under psy attack. Fluff wise this is inspired by the excrutiator from StarControl.

If a xenonauts goes berserk or gets controlled, he then only has half or none of his TU left to do damage. The downside would be that even an unsuccessful psy attack suppresses your xenonauts.

Is this kind of thing possible to do by modding?