General > Discussion
Weapons and damage in 2.5 (HEAD)
headdie:
One thing learned on hardlight is that you will never convince trashman that SotS is anything less than awesome :P
Crystan:
*offtopic*Haha - good to know but dont get me wrong - i love the SotS Universe in all its glory but the new system is totally confusing which discourages me to play it. *offtopic*
TrashMan:
--- Quote from: Crystan on May 13, 2012, 01:39:47 am ---The first one, yes. But the second one is terrible - they managed to fixed many bugs now - but the new fleet management and movement system is total crap. It also sux that you need some turns to explore a system. That totally slows down the gameplay speed - terrible...
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Different, not terrible. It's fleet-based and action based, and it follows the rela-world operational logic. I for one and glad the game is evolving.
Speaking of which, it's almsot fully patched. All content is in. Two more optimization patches and it should be given a thumbs up.
Jon_dArc:
--- Quote from: H-Hour on May 12, 2012, 01:07:35 am ---[…]adjust a soldier's competencies as he moves through the terrain (such as shifting ammo before entering a UFO).[…]
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Mm. I'm not sure how often this is going to happen, though, without some serious magnification in the situational effectiveness differences between the ammo options—reloading is expensive, which puts the reloading soldier a bit less than half a turn behind the rest of the team in advancing. Additionally, the current partial magazine is sacrificed. Even in the cases where it seems like switching would be most strongly favoured (switching a grenadier to flechettes when entering a harvester), I find myself more likely to just pull a melee weapon.
--- Quote ---On a separate note -- the damageweights system is still very much a work in progress. Part of the issue is that we still have very few aliens to create distinctive vulnerabilities.
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Mm. I think some specialized armors might help there, too (anti-incendiary variants giving boosts to fire and plasma resistance at the cost of normal and maybe blast, or anti-laser armor, or something).
--- Quote ---You might be right, but it's worth considering the spray effect of flechette shells as well. Because they fire 5 shots, they also have the potential to hit multiple targets. The concept behind flechette shells was to have a powerful weapon that was useful when you didn't need accuracy at all (inside UFOs, for instance). Here, having the ability to hit targets standing beside the intended target could be useful.
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The issues with that are twofold. First off, even before damage weighting the per-shot damage is simply too low for accuracy to not matter—to deal 100 damage to a 0-resistance target requires hitting with 4 shots (though thankfully you actually get 8 shots, not 5 as claimed), and that's best case (every pellet hits with maximum damage, and the only alien able to be killed with 100 damage is a minimum-health Taman). Worse yet, the time investment of taking a shot is the same as that required to pull a grenade from belt/holster and toss/roll it, which hits multiple targets with substantially superior damage and damage type.
Really, I think to ever be glad about missing your intended target (and thus potentially hitting a secondary target), you need a situation like the 2.4 machine gun's huge number of shots and high damage—especially in the absence of any sort of wound penalty, anything that risks leaving the original target alive is very difficult to justify, even if more total damage is dealt out.
--- Quote ---Incendiary weaponry was a very late addition to 2.4 and is still only just being worked out. For now, it's role as an area denial weapon is not really in place. The idea is that it can create sizeable areas that are on fire, damaging units within those areas over several turns. Ideally, the alien AI would also avoid these areas. In this way, they could be used to deny aliens a key area or target a large group of aliens. The initial implementation of the fire effect was too short and small, something I hope to adjust.
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This strikes me as the kind of idea that relies on an impractically large amount of surrounding tactical depth to make useful, but fair enough.
--- Quote ---Flechette shells were only intended to provide a gl-carrying soldier with dual-capability. Using a grenade launcher with flechette shells should be worse than carrying a proper shotgun. But flechette shells provide a very small inventory item that allows a grenade launcher soldier to play a role when entering buildings or other tight spaces where the area effect of explosives might make them dangerous to their own team.
You may have a point about melee weapons, but at least early in the game the knife is not nearly as powerful. Consider also the role of reaction fire -- something especially important for indoor weaponry. An alien does not need to walk right up to you to experience reaction fire with the flechette shells.
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Mm. The knife is actually not bad against Taman, especially when you consider that reloading to Flechette is 4 stabs worth of time (and actually firing is another 3 stabs). The reaction fire issue similarly runs up against the machine pistol, which does the same damage at substantially better accuracy and range and gets two more shots for the same TU (full-auto vs. snap shot). Damage type becomes worse as the game proceeds, but flechette grenades never get better either and I'd argue it quickly becomes preferable to have another soldier covering the grenadier than go through contortions to give him/her ranged reaction fire capability.
I'd argue that for reasons of both realism and balance (given the huge cost of reloading a GL and the fact that you effectively sacrifice a grenadier until you reload again) that the flechette grenades should do quite high damage, but certainly I think they're just taking up space as it stands now.
~J
Jon_dArc:
--- Quote from: TrashMan on May 12, 2012, 11:52:49 am ---Spreadsheet balance has lost it's appeal to me. When a weapon cannot be simply explained wit a few numbers - it is then when things become interesting.
Take a look at SOTS and SOTS2 for example. Spreadsheet general will have a fit over it. And I love it.
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What do you mean by this? I've glanced at some descriptions of Sword of the Stars and nothing jumps out at me as defying a quantitative approach (though please don't insult me by implying I'm using a spreadsheet—I use the proper tools for the job ;) ).
Now, I certainly do think there's a danger in naively focusing on those attributes amenable to calculation and hand-waving the ones that aren't—for example, my treatment of range and accuracy is obviously less rigorous than that of damage—but I think I've established that I'm not just ignoring those attributes out of hand. In particular, I should note that all of the complaints I've brought up thus far have been found via gameplay—I didn't run the .ufo files through a great number-cruncher, say "these numbers look wrong!", and come here to mount an attack on them. The process was that I played the game, I thought "you know, these laser weapons really aren't doing it for me", swapped them out for other weapons, and then when I got motivated to recommend changing it I pulled out the numbers so that I had a more convincing argument than "laser weapons feel too weak".
So if you're expressing a worry that these comments are purely numbers-driven, with no checks to ensure that the interpretation of those numbers isn't becoming untethered from actual gameplay, let me assure you that that isn't the case.
~J
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