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Laser Rifle - useless ?

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Darknight:

--- Quote from: vulkus on July 28, 2007, 03:00:09 pm ---With regards to the laser weapons, the pistol is pointless except as a suicide weapon. The laser rifle would make a fantastic sniper weapon and the heavy would be ideally suited to an air to air weapon or as a short range heavy weapon. The heavies range is to long, if it requires someone with great strength to wield it, I doubt they would be able to hold it for very long.

I think the lasers have great potential, yet they are out gunned, due to the the aliens better weapons. No sooner have you researched lasers and beginning production and they have moved from plasma to particle.
<Clipped>

Basically I think your always out gunned and out armoured.

--- End quote ---


Having played the original UFO games, I agree with the last statement. A big part of the game, and its challenge, was in coping with the fact that the aliens almost always had you outgunned.

But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. From the alien's point of view, humans are a primitive people with only primitive technology, and as such make for easy prey. That would be why they chose to invade Earth in the first place.

That puts the Earth, and the player, in the position of trying to defend the planet against their superior technology. This is true right up until the end-game, when we finally achieve tech parity with the aliens.

In the case of the laser weapons, this is certainly a case of mismatched firepower. That was true in the original game too. The pistol was fast, but did little more that let the aliens know where you were. The rifle was little better. The only way I found to use the rifle effectively, was by positioning laser snipers to catch an alien in a crossfire. One rifle was nearly useless, but two or three working together could bring down most aliens quickly.

That means its all about the tactics you use, not the firepower, most of the time. The aliens rarely bothered with tactics. (The game couldnt support good AI at the time anyway.) But then why should they? From their point of view, we are little better than cavemen, so they should be able to beat us without bothering much with tactics.

Still, the lasers were never more than a temporary weapon, used until plasma weapons were gotten into service. A bridge if you will, between useless bullet-spitters and weapons with real power.

inquisiteur2:
agreed but would be a shame to end with a set of laser weaponry that no one will develop / use because its is less cost effective and power effective in any way that primitive powder based guns.

It would be also good to avoid what has been introduced for example in UFO ET where there is a lot of weapons technology technology, but from a generation to the another only power increases thus obseleting completely each previous weapon set. Would be good to have a particularity for each weapons technology, for example laser would be caracterized by precision and small TU requirements, plasma by power, starting weapons by versatility, etc...I guess this is what is currently achieved.

Kohli:

--- Quote from: inquisiteur2 on August 31, 2007, 12:08:25 am ---agreed but would be a shame to end with a set of laser weaponry that no one will develop / use because its is less cost effective and power effective in any way that primitive powder based guns.

--- End quote ---

I did do this: http://ufoai.ninex.info/forum/index.php?topic=1725.0 a while back. Dunno if it's going to get implemented or not.
But test it out, if you don't like the current lasers.

BTAxis:
The thing is that armor is probably going to be implemented soon. Once that happens, I intend to completely rework all the weapon values from scratch.

Takai:

--- Quote from: inquisiteur2 on May 07, 2007, 11:19:16 am ---I love the design and the concept but not the weapon stats.

On difficult settings I managed to develop laser rifles with clips

--- End quote ---

Making clip-fed laser already make them pretty useless. Laser in the original X-COM were useful because they were pretty quick to research and produce, and did not ammunition to be produced. What's wrong with clip-less lasers?

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