General > Discussion

Feedback and impressions after 1 campaign

<< < (4/7) > >>

Sarin:
I think you need clarification about how stat upgrade work in game. I don't have exact formula, but in short...amount of experience (in certain stat) needed to "level up" it is increased by difference between current stat level and initial level (when the soldier was first recruited) and reduced by soldier's mind stat. Therefore currently mind stat controls two things. Maximum rank that soldier is able to attain, and rate of growth of all his stats. It's set in the way that stat progression slows down gradually...

And using speed stat the way you propose would require a huge rescaling of all battlescape action costs, since right now, when normal move cost 2 TUs there's little room for altering that...unless we get into all those annoying fractions.

H-Hour:
Bashar, you have some interesting ideas. I'll address them one-by-one.

1. Speed: As Sarin mentioned, having speed effect the TU cost of movement would introduce a lot of fractions and rounding. Most importantly, it would effectively complicate the player's planning process. Most players will learn how far 20 TUs gets a soldier in the current setup. But it will be very difficult to learn how far 20 TUs gets a soldier with 25 speed, and then also how far 20 TUs gets a soldier with 35 speed, etc. Some UI feedback could be provided, but it would force the player to rely on testing the distance rather than having their own implicit sense of how far they can move. Also, you are correct that in its current setup Speed is useful for all soldier types, but I don't think it is equally important for all soldier types. More TUs are more valuable for a close specialist than a sniper. This is also why I am not a fan of combining Speed and Accuracy in one Experience value.

2. Accuracy: I actually think that Accuracy, as it currently works, is good. It is appropriate both from a gameplay and a realism perspective for some soldiers to be highly accurate at certain skill types and not accurate at others. A close specialist will be more accurate firing close weapons while a sniper will be less accurate at firing close weapons. In other words, Accuracy should provide an equally positive bonus to any firemode's skill type. Because the Accuracy ability and the weapon skill work together, there is a progressive effect DEPENDING ON THE SOLDIER'S SKILL. The reduced accuracy of automatic fire ought to be an effect of the weapon's firemode, not hidden inside of an accuracy stat.

I should mention that I think we need to be clear and consistent about the difference between Abilities (speed, strength, accuracy, mind) and Skills (close, assault, heavy, explosive, sniper). Abilities roughly correspond to broad physical attributes of a soldier. Skills represent specific, trained weapons capabilities. This difference is clear, easy to understand quickly for new users, and transparent in the way that it effects things in-game (although because some of it is not implemented yet it can be confusing). For those reasons, I think the mechanisms need to remain comfortably within these conceptual categories.

3. Encumbrance: The use of empty boxes in the inventory panel as a measure of encumbrance is interesting, and I take your point that it offers clarity for the player. But I think it will run into some complications with our current system. For instance, there is only one panel for each hand, which would make an assault rifle and a flame thrower take up the same number of inventory space. I actually think that it would be clear to the player to simply have a weight limit with a display in the equiping UI that tracks the soldiers current/max weight. It has the added benefit of corresponding directly to reality, which is something games can not often do effectively.

You're right that stat increase is difficult for this one. My concern with basing increase on encumbrance is that it effectively requires the player to penalize his own soldier in order to raise the strength stat. I'm not sure how to resolve it, but if we get our numbers figured out we might be able to write an equation that provides strength bonuses progressively based on weight, so that a soldier would get some improvement even if they weren't encumbered, but quite a bit more if they were.

4) Skill experience progression: First, I disagree with your analysis of the rate of increase of accurate vs. inaccurate weapons. There are a lot of factors that come into play which effect how much a soldier is actually firing and hitting an alien. A sniper rifle may be more accurate, but most players will use it from a distance. A close weapon may be less accurate, but it is also going to be used in a different range. Other factors, like the number of shots for a weapon (like the machine gun) also affect the number of shots on enemy. There may be existing imbalances which require certain weapon stats to be adjusted at the moment, but I don't think the underlying concept is fundamentally wrong.

Second, your proposal to base experience progression on expenditure of time units is highly vulnerable to players gaming the system. It would encourage players to bring along extra soldiers to all missioins and just have them fire into the air to expend time units using their skill. It's worth noting, too, that this same problem exists with developing the Speed and Strength attributes and I am not, as yet, sure how it can be prevented.

5) Stat proposal: I believe you read my wiki article on the abilities/skills/damagetype adjustments I am hoping to make. If you did, you will remember that I am trying to match up the Skills to combat roles, to increase the specialisation of soldiers and encourage players to bring along a more diverse set of specialists. In other words, each weapon Skill ought to present a particular solution to one of the tactical problems a player will face on the battlefield, and each tactical problem ought to have solutions that are best performed by one of the Skill sets.

Your proposal to put Rifles in one category, effectively collapses the distinction between an assault specialist and a sniper. Also, your proposal neglects to mention machine guns. But our proposals match up (with different names) for Close (Specialist) and Explosives, so I think we're on roughly the same track.

homunculus:
The fractional time units complication is solved in some games (x-com:eu, jagged alliance) by calculating shooting time units as % of total time units (rounded to integer) and it sort of works.
I didn't read word by word and failed to notice criticism or even mention of it here, so I got the impression that the wheel is being reinvented.

Right now not only accuracy, but also speed seems to be a general weapons skill.
If some soldier can get 36 time units, he can fire two aimed shots with sniper rifle.

I mean, in the (imho more clear) case of % tu for shooting, that % tu could depend on the weapon skill, as skilled soldiers learn to shoot faster, and the % tu for recoil could depend on strength maybe.
Or maybe recoil recovery could be a skill, and instead of weapon skills we would get skills something like maneuvering the weight of the gun (pointing in general direction of target), aiming, and recoil handling (whatever, there are more competent shooters than myself here).
This is why I think with fixed tu for shooting, total tu (= speed) becomes a weapon skill.
About weight effects being added, how much would weight encumber shooting speed in reality?

On the other hand, knowing that a particular shot, say, a sniper rifle snap shot, will always take a fixed 12 time units (the way it presently works) rather than some soldier dependent % is convenient, though.

Snap shot tu + added tu for aiming would be my personal favorite (would make a more clear distinction between the firemode switch on the weapon and soldier aiming), but that is unlikely to happen here.

As for strength, is it used for anything at all at the moment?
How far a soldier can throw a grenade does not depend on strength, as far as I know.

H-Hour:
Yes, more TU will help all weapon skills. But my argument was that it will be MORE valuable for a close specialist, who stands to gain much more from an extra 10 TUs than other skills. A close specialist's ability to move far in a given turn is more valuable, because they are more likely to be moving into unseen territory and encountering surprises after expending their TUs. The extra TUs from speed will increase his chances of winning or escaping a kill-or-die situation, something other weapon skills are not faced with as often.

Strength is not currently implemented.

homunculus:

--- Quote from: H-Hour on February 04, 2012, 09:27:05 pm ---Yes, more TU will help all weapon skills. But my argument was that it will be MORE valuable for a close specialist [...]
--- End quote ---
I didn't intend to contradict this, but was rather thinking about what the dependency on speed would look like with weight effects added.

@Bashar

--- Quote ---I did a search but didn't find a recent thread and was reluctant to bump something that was out-dated.
--- End quote ---
As for the skills and stats rearrangements, I vaguely remember that a few years ago after some discussion and argumentation for and against rather amusing skills and stats proposals it was decided to bury this skills and stats topic and keep it as we presently have it.
I guess that is why the threads are "outdated".

There are such things like
1) firemode switch that is on the weapon
2) aiming that is done by the soldier
3) recoil recovery
and maybe some more, and including the effects of the above on the moment when reaction fire is triggered, and the time units effects associated with getting hit, and perhaps some wounds effects.
All this would be some serious analysis and implementation.
And without doing those you will probably (= as far as I can tell) end up with inconsistencies anyway, and the question shifts in the direction of "Is UFO:AI that kind of a game, or is it more like light entertainment?"

Like, how to do weight effects so that it doesn't burden the player?

Edit:
--- Quote from: wiki ---Soldier gets a weight value up to a certain limit, at which point the soldier is considered "encumbered". When encumbered, additional weight reduces the soldier's maximum TUs.
--- End quote ---
So, once the weight limit is reached, weak and strong soldiers have same steepness of the weight effect on their TU (= not perfectly correct, but for simplicity's sake, we could live with that).
But, the scouts, in contrast to snipers, might want to wear some armor, and therefore they might end up bit burdened, and 2 more max TU (like 32 or 34) might end up determining if the scout can take 2 steps each round (4 TU remaining) or 3 steps (6 TU remaining).
Hopefully it will not be as drastic as that, but nevertheless I mean that the remaining TU effects will become steeper.

x-com:apoc had a similar system, but I got the impression the effect was smoother.
If I remember correctly, the flaw in x-com:apoc was not clearly showing how much the soldier is carrying and where exactly the burden effect starts.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page