Overdamage

I was reading one of the previews of XCOM and it mentioned you had to be careful to not use too much firepower when attacking aliens, or there wouldn't be anything left to recover. We were planning to put something like that in Xenonauts, but it got swept into the big old "something to look at in beta" bin at the time.

Now's the sort of time to start thinking about it, and whether it should work. My initial thoughts are that it'd be a good addition to the game. It would mostly affect rocket launchers (Ferret and infantry) and to a lesser extent, grenades and C4 charges.

I think the main value in it would be to allow us to make them more powerful. At the moment they don't really have the wow factor where they flatten buildings and kill most things nearby. This is for balance reasons - it's just too easy, particularly with the Ferret. The upside of adding overdamage is that you can kill aliens quite easily using the Ferret rockets (if it hits) but you wouldn't recover a corpse or any equipment if you did. I like that idea.

I'm not sure it's technically plausible to have a running HP value for each item in the game, so I think it'd make more sense to have a sort of damage limit for items. If the tile / unit they are on recieve more than that amount of damage, they are destroyed. I guess they should probably be replaced with some "destroyed remains" tiles to show there was something there, and there should be a generic mangled corpse to replace the normal corpses.

Does that make you guys happy? Do you have alternative suggestions?

I personally like idea of explosives blowing up aliens into small unrecoverable pieces so I'm happy with that

Well, a normal grenade isn't going to "vaporize" your victim even they they are lying on top of it. I suppose the rocket launcher and C4 could do that, but I'd have to say it should only happen if it's a direct hit i.e. it hits in the same tile as the alien/soldier. You'll have to use your judgment on the more powerful advanced explosives. My suggestion is to use a formula that reduces damage as a square of the distance from the explosion tile and then takes into the account the toughness of the target to determine if it was totally destroyed.

Something like: Final Explosion Damage = Damage / (distance from explosion ^ 2)

IF (Final Explosion Damage > (Alien Remaining Hit Point + Remaining Armor Toughness) * 2)

then Vaporize Target

Else

Normal Death

End IF

Another thing to consider, if a unit is killed by incendiary weapons would probably ruin the target and any equipment too no matter how close they were to detonation point.

By the way, are you going to allow buildings and such to catch fire and for the fire to spread? I believe the old XCom allowed for smoke and damage, but not fire spread (I could be wrong about the spreading.)

I like the basic idea of it but I'm worried it'll lead into the kind of power gaming where these heavy explosives are completely pushed aside to maximize profits. Especially with the Ferret 50' cal and burst weapons in general becoming more useful with their pseudo-stun.

It seems like a very tricky thing to balance but I'm generally in favour of things that introduce more decision making, risk vs. reward kind of thing.

And who could say no to mangled corpses.

I think it would be a great ballance feature. Perhaps on easy more the damage needed to destroy stuff is higher than that on hardest mode.

This way the people playing easy mode can throw the kitchen sink at a target and still get nice rewards and then as they move to harder levels the bigger the gun the less the loot meaning it is an additional harder feature.

Only for explosive weapons. I'd hate the idea to micromanage my damage in mid-late game, bringing a weapon for every alien type to be able to afford my base upkeep. While fighting for humanity's existence the condition of an alien corpse should really only matter if scientific progress i.e. things that improve the chances of winning said fight are to be expected.

In the end if you find someone that spits out a ton of cash for an alien corpse you can find someone else who likes his alien corpses mangled even better

will firing on dead aliens (ie corpses) mangle them and destroy their equipment? so that it is possible for (tier 2+) machine guns hitting dead targets near live aliens to destroy equipment as well.. or even pistols if you are insistent enough.

I'd only be ok with seeing this for high explosives, like Rockets or C4, not for grenades and such.

We've already got over damage for air combat, which can result in quite a few destroyed UFO's early on if you don't pay attention.

Only for explosive weapons. I'd hate the idea to micromanage my damage in mid-late game, bringing a weapon for every alien type to be able to afford my base upkeep. While fighting for humanity's existence the condition of an alien corpse should really only matter if scientific progress i.e. things that improve the chances of winning said fight are to be expected.

In the end if you find someone that spits out a ton of cash for an alien corpse you can find someone else who likes his alien corpses mangled even better

From my experiance with people been turned from a living state to a no longer living state I have experianced that 5.56 rounds (our rifles) generaly leave people intact with a number of holes on them. The GPMP is around 7.62 (machine gun) and that normally makes a lot of holes. the 30mm the tank weapon normally turnes meat into soup and metal into history.

Explosions and flames usually turn stuff into gone.

So simple version.

Little rifle = nothing lost.

bigger gun = stuff damaged but still there.

biggest gun = useless crap.

rockets, explosions + flames = History.

I honestly fail to see the complexity of this. use rifles to get all loot. Use rockets, explosions and flames to get non. easy mission and no loot = blow up the map. harder mission and loads of loot = small arms. Pistols are for when you rifle fails, not for hunting.....

I honestly fail to see the complexity of this. use rifles to get all loot. Use rockets, explosions and flames to get non. easy mission and no loot = blow up the map. harder mission and loads of loot = small arms. Pistols are for when you rifle fails, not for hunting.....

That may be due to the contested "turning living things into dead things devices" lie outside your scope of experience.

I was wondering about the effects of all those shiny new toys that have yet to be discovered. Laser and plasma = flame? Thanks but no thanks. Just go by the size of the weapon? Large laser = damaged small laser not damaged? Doable, not amazing but doable.

Next thing is no one has any mentionable experience on how earth weapons effect ALIENS (hint sci-fi/fantasy). So realism plays a side role here. Game balance should have our complete attention. Androns would probably be less than impressed with fire based weapons (we can't shape alien alloys but our flamethrowers melt alien combat mechs? weeeeell).

In the end the writer of xenos back story just hast to come up with something believable, believable in the framework of a sci-fi story that is

(we can't shape alien alloys but our flamethrowers melt alien combat mechs? weeeeell).

Doesn't need to melt the exterior if bathing it in flames overheats the interior circuitry causing the thing to crash/mlfunction.

Whether the feature makes any sense depends on how dependent you are on salvaging the alien's carried equipment.

In XCOM, those weapon fragments are a currency all by itself.

Taking prisoners is difficult/dangerous and the only way to get intact weapons for research. (and from what I read - for cash flow)

Is the whole cost/income model of Xeno finalised enough to even tell to what degree this would work?

But in general - it makes sense. Killing things with area damage shouldn't leave much in salvageable loot. Rockets are no nukes but a plasma rifle that got hit by a rocket will not be an item but a small pile of twisted metal.

The interesting question is what happens if an alien survives the rocket because it is heavily armoured.

Does it not have a weapon any more? Rocket >> plasma rifle. No more rifle.

If it works on alien death, it should work always.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you do make salvaging intact alien weapons for cash important, then the player can "starve" during a lull in alien activity. He'd lose his source of income and go broke on upkeep.

Just a matter of balancing, of course. The question is if you want the player "raiding" alien missions to maintain cash flow or if recovered material should rather increase monthly funding.

The player having a constant yard sale on extra alien weapons always struck me as odd with many XCOM type games.

Looted technology (beyond being researchable) increases score, score increases funding - but at a controlled pace. That makes sense for a government-funded organisation. Oh, and makes it harder for the player to game the system. =).

It also lets the player plan ahead without depending on "random drops".

I always thought it was pretty neat in X-Com Apocalypse that the more powerful explosions would destroy all the equipment on the ground near by (even causing explosion cascades) so I think this would be a great feature.

Doesn't need to melt the exterior if bathing it in flames overheats the interior circuitry causing the thing to crash/mlfunction.

Somehow I knew someone would say something like that.. Then again: exactly my point. An android with overheated CPU sure is salvageable

I always thought it was pretty neat in X-Com Apocalypse that the more powerful explosions would destroy all the equipment on the ground near by (even causing explosion cascades) so I think this would be a great feature.

That was even the case with xcom and tftd. Alien corpses usually wouldn't survive an explosion. Weapons were a little more durable. A little rng was involved. Sometimes you could even loot an intact cyberdisc/biodrone AFTER their very own self destruct explosion.

I think it would definitely be a good step.

Rocket launchers etc could be a lot more powerful if you had to be cautious using them.

Not just because they may hurt your troops but because you may lose something you need.

I would limit it to the dead/unconscious and any equipment on the floor.

Assume the enemy is protecting his gear somewhat while he is able.

I really like what Gazz mentioned as well.

Rather than selling the alien corpses and extra weapons etc for cash they should increase your mission score and have an effect on funding.

It just feels like a better system and far easier to balance.

For example you could put a hard cap on how many points your standing with the funding nation can go up by on certain mission types.

The player is less likely to feel cheated when they get the perfect 500 point increase than if you sold all their shiny new loot off but capped how much money you gave them.

If you blow everything up with no regard for salvaged gear you will do less well in the funding review than the player who gave lots of new toys to the people paying the bills.

A handgrenade should definatily not push over walls or rip bodies to bits, unless being a highexplosive one in a confined area. I love the grenade effect as they are right now.

Anyway i like the idea of having both enemy corpses and equipment being destroyed. And having mangled bodies sounds like a cool thing.

I dont know whats possible with the animations of explosions. But say you have a direct hit from a rocket on a enemy- Then could you animate him being torn to pieces within an explosion? Seing the body, maybe shaded black from the bright light and smoke, limbs and bits flying around. Then afterwards bits of flesh and so on lying around in the crater, maybe a broken rifle.

I love the animation when the drones pulverize, feels very violent.

Then say if the target isnt destroyed, the ordinary explosion plays?

Just as long as they physically dont just go up into thin air, thats lame.

You could destroy corpses and artifacts with explosives in the original, so I'm glad that it's in.

I'm a fan of explosives destroying aliens and their gear (as well as civilians), as well as collapsing buildings doing similar. Going 'heavy' may clear the map easier, but makes artifact recovery much more difficult, there research/etc more difficult.

tl;dr : I like unrecoverable gibs.

I sort of like the idea of being able to obliterate all traces and make corpses unrecoverable. If you're going to be very aggressive with explosives as a primary weapon, there should be repercussions. If you have in mind "Okay, it's a medium ship, and I want to get everything I can," then you should organize your equipment as such. Stun launchers, machine guns, melee weapons, etc.

As far as sub recovery goes, in the original X-Com games, I always thought it would be neat to research a magnetic weapon, of sorts. It would require knowledge of alien subs and magnetic navigation so you can understand how they get around, then devise a weapon to gently disable their sub, landing it without damaging it (or destroying it if it was very small). Obviously, there needs to be a catch to it so you don't use it as a primary weapon against large and very large ships.

A grenade doesn't have to rip a body to bits or vaporise it to make that body undesirable for scientists to study.

It just has to do enough damage to make studying it difficult.

Same goes for weapons and other gear.

It doesn't have to be utterly destroyed to make it practically worthless, it just has to be less useful than the other items on the market.

Grenades should be able to render items worthless, it should just be harder than with more powerful explosives.

That is pretty much covered by their relative damage.

Rather than selling the alien corpses and extra weapons etc for cash they should increase your mission score and have an effect on funding.

It just feels like a better system and far easier to balance.

My biggest gripe with Apocalypse is the "raid humans for cash" (oh, and aliens, too) approach to keep a positive balance.

They tried to counter it with dynamically adjusting selling prices but that's a flawed concept when you're dealing with free money, ammo, rockets as well...

It also devalued funding as part of the winning strategy. Funding ended up being a nice bonus.

XCOM 1 had the same problem in a different way. You would produce lasers (or whatever) for selling and the actual funding became optional.

In both cases, the funding system stopped being a gameplay element. Why bother designing it in the first place? Go JA2 and have a bunch of thugs live off the land and sell the loot...

If you have "official" funding in the game, it has to be important. No ifs or buts.

Turning the Xenonauts into a large-scale black market op is totally out of character.

A soft cap on the monthly funding increase would be the only place where you'd have to balance income! Big, big advantage.

The player would also care a lot more about protecting Earth and keeping the funding nations happy and less about the perfect looting strategy.

That's how it should be and the gameplay would reward that approach. Losing a soldier by skimping on grenade use while trying to maximise loot... should hurt the mission score!

Ignore a small landed UFO because there won't be worthwhile loot? Bad idea when it makes this country unhappy!

Reward "in character" tactics, not gamey ones! =)

As most people said, it's about balance. If destroying an alien or his weapon would cripple the player's economy/research, then you could implement huge explosions without jeopardizing non explosive weaponry. There could be huge penalties for friendly fire as well, against allies or civilians, which would also moderate the use of explosive devices.

But if you don't manage to balance it, you could also keep their real life effects (for the non sci-fi weapons, that is). Anti-personnel grenades and rockets produce a 3 meters wide explosion. They are deadly in a 5 meters radius, harmful in a 15 meters radius. Anti-tanks rockets kill the armored target (and detonate the target's own shells, hence the big kaboom), produce a 2 meters wide explosion, are lethal in a 2 meters radius and stun people in a 6 meters radius, however it needs to hit a solid target to explode and I don't think it would detonate with a human on its way (but it would make an ugly hole). Incendiary devices can melt steel and are considered very dangerous to carry/use as a hand weapon.

See, there's plenty of room for both solutions. Pick your choice. Still I would suggest you to keep in mind the role of the infantry. Their job is to secure building, not destroy them. That's why they rarely use high yield devices. Leveling cities is the job of the fly-boys.

OK, we'll put this in the game. I think limiting it to explosive damage and that from hypervelocity weapons is sensible; small arms fire shouldn't do that. To those people talking about grenades, conventional grenades aren't that powerful but later-game grenades certainly will be.

OK, we'll put this in the game. I think limiting it to explosive damage and that from hypervelocity weapons is sensible; small arms fire shouldn't do that. To those people talking about grenades, conventional grenades aren't that powerful but later-game grenades certainly will be.