Condition: Black (Alien Weapons mod)

This works with: Experimental v22.5

Art By: Henry Ponciano

Words by: Max Caine

If there's something that Stinky and I agree on, it's that aliens need more weapons. So, we put our heads together and plotted about how we could give aliens new weapons. Stinky's already done this, with some sweet poison rifles So... what if we gave aliens grenades...

That one was in memory of Aarons' dream of giving Sebbies poison gas grenades (art curtosy of H. Ponciano). But we went further!

That one was inspired by the Terminator. Androns now have incendiary grenades.

As usual, this mod is still under construction, but it's playable (xenopedia needs correction and cleanup). Aliens can be random about throwing grenades, and currently only noncoms and guards will throw a grenade anyway, but give it a whirl! (I'll put some vids up over the weekend).

Here's the Link

Many thanks for your effort, I'll test this mod and try to put it on my modded versions.

You can help me adding new weapons to the game? We are missing something.

Incendiary granade will be great but I think that fire in this game need to do damage when your near.

Thanks max.

Are you planning to have these weapons kept and used by players?

There doesn't seem to be much reason for them to be impossible to use for human soldiers as there is with alien rifles.

Stinky's already set it up so you should be able to pick up an incendiary or poison grenade and throw it. Haven't tried that, but I'm going to have a bash at it later on. I'm very iffy about letting players keep these in-between missions, though. They're pretty potent and would be more than a little OP verses aliens. Especially the incendiary grenade, because I had to take human armour into account when fiddling with the stats which most aliens don't have.

EDIT: Let me expand on that further. Okay, so I've handwaved away the possiblity of manufacturing these alien grenades - "Violet Haze" like a stubborn teenager refuses to be analysed, and the creatures on the toxin grenades would be extremely difficult to be created. The thing is, Stinky set up the AI variables and I set up the stats so in general, it's preferable for an alien to throw a grenade than fire a gun when in range, but they don't. So it would be easy to build up stockpiles pretty quickly, and when I say these are OP verses aliens, I'm not kidding. The incendiary grenade does incendiary damage but even Jackal armour can absorb 35pts worth of incendiary damage so I had to crank the damage up to 50 to cause a small amount of damage to Jackal-armoured soliders. The same can't be said for aliens - the incendiary grenade reliably roasts low-level aliens, which means that yes, in-game that's funny, but is OP if I let the players stockpile those weapons.

EDIT 2: I've remembered the example I was thinking of to illustrate my point. Remember how easy it was to stockpile alien grenades from the OG? Like that, just with more flavours of grenade.

EDIT 3: TacticalDragon, I've no objection to you incorporating this mod into your own one, but please make sure you credit the appropriate parties. Regarding the "heat haze" from fire, the only way I can think of doing that would be to make a "heat haze" gastype as well as setting the fire chance to high, but I have no idea how you'd layer the gastype around the fire.

EDIT 4: Okay, I've come up with some reasons why you can't stockpile these grenades. The colonies in the toxin grenades are now short-lived. It's presumed they are stored cryogenically, then restored prior to issuing. Violet Haze degenerates due to its semiorganic nature, creating dangerous gasses which mean the weapon must be dismantled and the substance held in a suspension of other liquids. Violet Haze is used as a fuel to help heat the labs.

I'm assuming that since jackal and wolf armor have zero chem resistance you scaled the toxin grenade damage accordingly? Or did you keep the value relatively high so this is a weapon humans should truly fear?

Yep, I scaled them accordingly, as the first armour you get with chem resistance is predator armour, which is late mid game. 7pts base on explosion, 20pts for the gas cloud itself. On paper they don't seem to do a lot of damage, but they do enough! (Seriously, they are pretty scary and I didn't want one-shotting grenades)

That sounds pretty fearsome. If I get it thrown at one of my soldiers' feet, and he takes 20 pts damage each step walking out of the cloud...

Stinky set up the AI variables and I set up the stats so in general, it's preferable for an alien to throw a grenade than fire a gun when in range, but they don't [\QUOTE]

I'm sorry, but I'm not quite sure if I understand this correctly. Are you saying you and Stinky increased the alien propensity to actually use their grenades?

Yes, we tried to encourage aliens to use their grenades, because aliens like their big shiny gurnz and they don't like using grenades. However, it's a bit hit-or-miss as whether they'll use them. And while 20pts per tile would sound nasty, you don't suffer damage that way. You only suffer 20pts + random damage once when you hit the cloud, and then afterwards you don't suffer any more damage.

EDIT: If it did per-tile damage, I would absolutely reduce the damage to around 10pts, because that would be totes unfair otherwise.

Nice work!

The only way i can think of to rebalance alien resistance towards fire is to e.g. Lower the incendiary bonus against props, increase all incendiary damage and add incediary armour to aliens. But explosions also use incendiary, and no doubt there would have to be more finetuning, but it is something to think about.

Also, stun grenades (in the style of electroshocks) would be a good addition to ceasans. You could say they are used in abductions and if one of your soldiers are knocked out you can revive them with a medkit, finally giving that feature a use

Stun grenades for Caesans are next on the list - they make a good fit. I think I've figured out why grenades are such a hit-and-miss affair. Each racial type has a general setting for grenades, but the class type also have specific settings for gun/grenades as well and the class specific settings might be overriding the general setting. I figure if I play about with those, I might be able to set something up. I don't know what to give Harridans and Wraiths. Landmines? It's possible to set gas dissapation chance to zero, so you have a permanent tile effect, which is the functional equivalent of an infinite landmine. The current grenade types do high damage but have zero mitigation, so that can easily be reversed for low damage with high mitigation. It's a pity that kinetic and energy are functionally the same re. armour. I'm going to experiment with pelletCount, see if I can make cluster grenades, but I don't think I'll get too far.

New post because of the way the forum handles videos. Here's a short video of a toxin grenade in action. I'm about to head out to work, so I don't have time now to upload the changes and tweaks I've made. I'll do all that when I get back home.

[video=youtube;aMK572NdFZo]

While it looks like the grenade didn't do that much damage, in the next turn it applied 20pts + extra random damage because she was in the cloud at the start of the turn. Thankfully, the cloud doesn't do any more damage after the first encounter, but she went from 67pts down to 19!

Wow, that's deadly. It's not insta-kill but very close.

Maybe an alien version of C4 for harridans, with a 1 turn delay, if the AI can handle it. Might not be possible, if the timer has to done manually

I looked into that a while ago and the AI never made use of any "explosive" subtype weapons I gave it, so I'm guessing it doesn't know what to do with it. Currently I'm leaning towards a high-tech version of caltrops for Harridans - something that's thrown that can pierce boots and inject neurotoxins, or electrifies the local area or something along those lines. If anyone has ideas they'd like to share, I'm always happy to listen.

For Wraiths, maybe a grenade that does a small amount of damage, suppresses and creates a small, opaque, gas cloud around the impact point. The idea to limit the visibility and mobility of the xenonauts, so it can use it's teleport more effectively. Though it might overlap somewhat with the sebillian toxin grenades, maybe remove the opaqueness of the toxin grenade and just reduce accuracy through it

Another idea for harridans is mini-grenades, low incendiary damage, small radius, cheap throw costs, extended throw range and give harridans 3 or 4 of them. Increase projectile speed and have no delay for the explosion for a better feel. Used primarily to get through cover so they can use their superior markmanship. Of course you would have to make sure they dont spam them and only use them if they dont have a good enough chance to hit with guns

Also, how are the grenades distributed? To all ranks, or a chance that an alien will spawn with them? If an alien has 2 types of grenades will it throw a random one?

They're currently distributed to all classes, so all aliens of a specific race will spawn with one (this is the way all weapons are distributed - a class either has it, or it doesn't). The idea is to help accentuate racial types through racial specific weapons and grenades are a very low-cost way of doing that. I haven't yet seen what happens when an alien has two choices, because I prefer to test in "authentic" surroundings, i.e. actual battles and I need to claw forwards to the solider class.

If the opaqueness from the toxin is removed, I'm concerned that Sebbies will benefit not only from the grenades' chem-damage but also from the toxin clouds which will be as clear as day to them. I'll try it out, and see what happens.

EDIT: Thinking about it, I can always create a specific "grenadier" sub-class which is only armed with racial grenades.

The gas block LOS right? That bring cool element to the game cuz aliens can't enter the area and react against other units.

Neither can humans, which was what make smoke the bomb. Anyways, I've made some small tweaks, these being:

• Toxin grenade gas damage reduced from 20 to 15
• Xenopedia entries altered signficantly and cleaned up
• Grenades made slightly cheaper to throw, and slightly more accurate to encourage grenade throwing
• aiprops altered to encourage grenade throwing
• Weight of toxin grenade and incendiary grenade increase to 2 kilos

Here's a vid of an Andron throwing an incendiary grenade. Fast forward to 00:40 to skip to the explosion!

[video=youtube;u0PifwfLJD8]

I love the color of the fire!

There is any possibility that fire make damage inmediatly when you start the turn?

Nice balance put more heavyer grenades!

Al grenades is affected?

Thank you

Thank-you for you encouragement! The purple fire is a gas type, which means it follows the gas rules. Gas damage is applied in the unit's own turn, once each time a unit enters the gas "field" and as soon as possible. That means when a grenade explodes as well as doing any instant damage (as detailled in weapons_gc) it will then do gas damage in the following turn at the start of the turn. I have to be careful when adding instant damage, because I run the very real risk of one-shotting squaddies in a 1-2 combo of instant damage and gas damage.

That's gorgeous. Although now I really want the different Androns to have different coloured grenades to match their paint-jobs.

I did some research into coloured fire and you can have all the colours of the rainbow - it just depends on what you put into the fire and how strong a concentration. So science sez you could have a different coloured fire for each Andron type.

This might have to happen.

Also - meant to post this a while ago but forgot: I really love the artwork for the mod. I'd install it just to look at the pretty pictures, if I'm honest.

Oooh, shiney! Variety is always welcome.

Nice fitting pictures, too. Toxic grenades could probably benefit from some glow (many original xenopedia pictures are using it).

I wonder if I can do that in Paint.net...

Anyway, here's a question. Currently the alien grenade Xenopedia articles are "free" projects - they don't require research time or staff. Should they? The primary reason alien weapons require research time is because they're prequisites for other technologies, whereas these don't do anything - they're just fluff.