Weapons and damage in 2.5 (HEAD)

[Jon_dArc]

Understanding that with 2.4 having just been released 2.5 is very much in a kind of "gameplay alpha" status with lots of fluctuations in values likely, I'd like to bring up for discussion a few things that caught my attention with the weapons and damage weights as they currently stand. For organizational reasons I'm going to put each new subtopic in a separate reply. First up: laser weapons.

Laser weapons appear to have been nerfed into uselessness. Accuracy has been drastically reduced (and the non-pistol weapons have picked up an inexplicable penalty to accuracy for burst-fire modes), laser pistol damage has been substantially reduced, and though the Heavy Laser got a slight damage bump it also got more TU-expensive. Worse yet, nothing is vulnerable to it—the Shevaar have no resistances, but the other three species resist at least a third of the expected damage before armor (Ortnoks are guaranteed to take 1 damage per laser pistol hit, and resist ~73% and ~50% respectively for the laser rifle and heavy laser). Armor also has substantial impact.

In 2.4, at least, the implied bargain was "high accuracy, reasonably fast, low damage, stay away from Ortnoks". IMO at least it failed at this by being too effective overall, so a nerfing was needed. Unfortunately, by striking at both accuracy and damage the pendulum has swung much too far in the other direction—I'm honestly not sure that the weapons would be viable even with 2.4 accuracy, given 2.5 damage and TU use, but as it stands they're a clearly bad bargain.

I'm inclined to say that their accuracy characteristics should be restored to their 2.4 levels, the Heavy Laser should be restored to its 2.4 TU use, and the Laser Pistol and to a lesser extent Laser Rifle should get a damage bump—maybe to 30±5? Or 25±5 and a drop in Ortnok resistance? Actually, dropping all base resistances by 10 could work. Well, actually, let's try a more principled approach by comparing it to some other weapons.

Laser pistols have Spread 1.5, Crouch 1, Range 60, 28 ammo, 10 TU reload cost, are 2x3, and have 2x1 ammo. They deal 20±5 laser_light at a TU/shot of 4/1 or 8/3.

7.62mm () pistols have Crouch 1, Range 40, 12 ammo, 6 TU reload cost, are 2x2, and have 1x1 ammo. They deal 30±5 normal_light at 4 TU for Spread 2 and 8 TU for Spread 1.5.

Plasma Pistols have Crouch 1, Range 40, 8 ammo, 15 TU reload cost, are 2x3, and have 1x1 ammo. They deal 50±10 plasma_light at 6 TU for Spread 2.2, 10 TU for Spread 2, and 10 TU for 3 shots at Spread 2.8.

Laser pistols have a 50% range edge, but I'd argue that their inaccuracy makes it largely irrelevant—you can't seriously engage targets in the 41-60 range category with any actual hope of hitting. Therefore, I'm going to focus on their other characteristics.

Per-round damage by alien/armor; damage whose range is constrained by minimum damage has its range given in parentheses:

Taman:
7.62mm: 30/15/(1)±5
Laser: 10/5/(1-5)±5
Plasma: 45/15/(1-5)±10

Ortnok:
7.62mm: 10/(1)/(1)±5
Laser: (1)/(1)/(1)±5
Plasma: 50/20/(1-10)±10

Shevaar:
7.62mm: (1-5)/(1)/(1)±5
Laser: 20/15/10±5
Plasma: 60/30/10±10

Bloodspider:
7.62mm: 10±5
Laser: 10±5
Plasma: 50±10

So in terms of damage it's almost strictly dominated by plasma. In principle it would make up that deficit through superior accuracy and volume of fire (fewer TUs/shot, plus a larger magazine and less expensive reloads), but look at how many more shots need to hit:

(Best case-worst case ranges to kill an uninjured alien with no/light/medium armor; probabilities will weight towards the better end, as the worst case requires larger numbers of extreme results)

Taman:
Laser: 7-26/10-130/20-130
Plasma: 2-3/4-26/20-130

Ortnok:
Laser: 150-190 (all)
Plasma: 3-4/5-19/15-190

Shevaar:
Laser: 5-12/6-16/8-32
Plasma: 2-4/3-8/6-160

Bloodspider:
Laser: 10-30
Plasma: 3-4

So with the notable exception of a Shevaar using Medium Alien Armor, you consistently need at least twice as many hits for a kill, wiping out the speed advantage (though reloading speed recovers a little of this) and magnifying the effects of the reduced accuracy. Although 2.4's 36±6 damage for the laser pistol was excessive, 30±5 or maybe 25±5 with a reduction in Ortnok laser resistance (it'd be nice for it to be possible to deal more than 1 damage to an Ortnok, even if it remains a miserable option) seems reasonable.

An alternative to a straight damage boost could be to make Shevaar more vulnerable to lasers and less to plasma, but given that a laser pistol takes up the entire holster I don't think making it a dedicated anti-Shevaar weapon is reasonable, especially given how much time there is between being able to research laser pistols and when Shevaar make their first appearance.

(Another question this raises is whether 7.62mm pistols are intended to have any role in the game—I understand they're intended to become obsolete, but they do that almost instantly, as soon as the player either researches laser pistols+DF cartridges or obtains and researches plasma pistols, plus maybe a bit to build up a comfortable reserve of plasma pistol ammo. Even just making them 3-square L-shaped in the inventory like the machine pistol would go a long way to making them not quite as much a complete joke.)

~J

[H-Hour]

Thanks for this detailed analysis. Gimping the laser rifle accuracy is one of the more controversial decisions. I don't have a lot of time at the moment, but I'll give your comments some serious consideration when I get some time to think about it.

[Jon_dArc]

The other issue I wanted to bring up at the moment is the way weapons with variant ammo types don't really work at the moment. This currently affects the Rocket Launcher, Grenade Launcher, and Riot Shotgun.

The usual promise of variant ammo types is the ability to react rapidly to different situations, picking and choosing the right tool for the job. The current system fails at this—reloading is very expensive (14 TU for the riot shotgun, 16 for the grenade and rocket launchers). Except in the case of the rocket launcher, which can't be fired twice in a turn anyway (and can't even be reloaded and fired without 40 TUs), this is in excess of the cost of firing a shot—which means that the benefits of changing ammo would need to exceed the benefits of an additional shot with the current ammo (or some maneuvering, or anything else you could do with those TUs). This is a very high bar to clear, and it's made harder by the fact that partially-full magazines are discarded by reloading—not that ammo is terribly tight in the game, but if ammo-switching were otherwise more practical you could burn through a lot of it this way.

There is an alternative reasonable approach: the ability to essentially have a different weapon based on what ammunition you load, and to change that on reloading. This means you're not expecting to switch ammo in the middle of an active fight (at least not without having run the magazine dry first), so the opportunity cost of reloading doesn't matter. The problem is that as it stands each of these three weapons has a very clear "default" ammo type with solid general performance characteristics, with the rest of the ammo types generally being very specialized—strong performance in specific situations with often glaring general weaknesses. Going down the list:

The Riot Shotgun very clearly favors having saboted slugs loaded by default. Range and accuracy are problematic for both ammo types, but significantly more for flechette shells; this is especially true early in the game (which is the only time the riot shotgun isn't obsolete) when Taman vulnerability to normal_medium damage means that a hit is likely to be a kill anyway, rendering flechette total damage advantage irrelevant. Against alien armor normal_medium is a substantially more favoured damage type than normal_spray, and that's also true for the other alien types. Actually, I think the big issue here might just be that flechette shells are bad.

The rocket launcher likewise favors HE rockets—although there's a split between enemies who are strong to fire and weak to blast (Taman, Bloodspider) and those who are weak to fire and strong to blast (Ortnok, Shevaar), alien armor protects against both pretty similarly, and the big damage advantage HE rockets have over IC rockets easily makes up for Ortnok/Shevaar resistance swings. There are some things that suggest that incendiary weapons are supposed to light something (terrain? Units?) on fire and burn over multiple rounds, but I can't tell what that's supposed to be or if it's currently in effect—certainly even if it is, more damage adjudications means more impact from armor (not to mention the advantages involved in killing a hostile before its next chance to act rather than after).

Last, we have the grenade launcher. I was going to call HE grenades the poor man's PB grenades, but they're now plasma_heavy instead of blast, good times. Flechettes have the same damage and damage type as shotgun flechettes, an even shorter range, better accuracy (though still miserable), and worse TU cost and reload time—admittedly ammo is also 1x1 instead of 2x1, but I can't see why someone would consider toting a GL with flechettes loaded instead of just taking a riot shotgun. Incendiary grenades suffer basically the same problem as IC rockets, only now they're sandwiched in by plasma_heavy as well. Ortnoks are slightly more vulnerable to IC than HE, but we've already established that switching ammo on a per-enemy basis is impractical and it's just not a big enough swing (on /one/ enemy type) to load IC by default.

So yeah. Not sure what to do on this; just drastically reducing reload times still leaves the issue of loss of partial magazines, while making it more feasible to have a different default ammo seems like it would be very fiddly in the presence of four alien types and three monotonically increasing armoredness levels. Allowing multiple types of ammo to be loaded simultaneously could help, especially with the Grenade Launcher, but you'd either need to change the ammo-handling code to handle two separate magazines or you'd need a combinatorially-exploding number of "combined magazines". Although I'm a big fan of the combined changes to the Grenade Launcher of beefing up per-grenade damage, increasing range, increasing TU cost, and eliminating the burst-fire mode, this issue is now even worse because of the substantially reduced frequency of running the magazine dry and being forced to reload.

(Also, flechette grenades may just need to go—they're caught in this nasty zone where they'd need to be really compelling, probably overpowered, to compete against either a melee weapon as an emergency close-combat weapon or any of the other weapon options as a short-to-mid-ranged standard-use weapon.)

Anway, just my thoughts on that matter. Time for me to do real work again now.

~J

[H-Hour]

I haven't forgotten about the laser post. But that requires more time and testing. A couple things about the ammo variants.

The usual promise of variant ammo types is the ability to react rapidly to different situations, picking and choosing the right tool for the job. The current system fails at this—reloading is very expensive (14 TU for the riot shotgun, 16 for the grenade and rocket launchers). Except in the case of the rocket launcher, which can't be fired twice in a turn anyway (and can't even be reloaded and fired without 40 TUs), this is in excess of the cost of firing a shot—which means that the benefits of changing ammo would need to exceed the benefits of an additional shot with the current ammo (or some maneuvering, or anything else you could do with those TUs). This is a very high bar to clear, and it's made harder by the fact that partially-full magazines are discarded by reloading—not that ammo is terribly tight in the game, but if ammo-switching were otherwise more practical you could burn through a lot of it this way.

This was not the usage I had in mind. I wouldn't expect a soldier to switch out ammo types between shots just for the damage gain. I think of the ammo variants in terms of an entire battle. A soldier is more likely to switch ammo to take on a very specialized role (like incendiary -- more later) or to adjust a soldier's competencies as he moves through the terrain (such as shifting ammo before entering a UFO).

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.

The problem is that as it stands each of these three weapons has a very clear "default" ammo type with solid general performance characteristics, with the rest of the ammo types generally being very specialized—strong performance in specific situations with often glaring general weaknesses.

I think that's pretty accurate at the moment.

The Riot Shotgun very clearly favors having saboted slugs loaded by default. Range and accuracy are problematic for both ammo types, but significantly more for flechette shells; this is especially true early in the game (which is the only time the riot shotgun isn't obsolete) when Taman vulnerability to normal_medium damage means that a hit is likely to be a kill anyway, rendering flechette total damage advantage irrelevant. Against alien armor normal_medium is a substantially more favoured damage type than normal_spray, and that's also true for the other alien types. Actually, I think the big issue here might just be that flechette shells are bad.

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. Also, as I mentioned before, the damageweights system is not quite as I'd like it so the normal_spray could play a more useful role in the future.

Having said that, I have checked the damage values and it does look a little weak. This may have been a side effect of preventing the micro shotgun from being too powerful (the micro shotgun can only use flechette shells). I've put it on my list to check more thoroughly -- especially because of alien resistance to normal_spray -- and possibly adjust. Thanks for the notes.

The rocket launcher likewise favors HE rockets...

Last, we have the grenade launcher...

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.

Flechettes have the same damage and damage type as shotgun flechettes, an even shorter range, better accuracy (though still miserable), and worse TU cost and reload time—admittedly ammo is also 1x1 instead of 2x1, but I can't see why someone would consider toting a GL with flechettes loaded instead of just taking a riot shotgun.

...

(Also, flechette grenades may just need to go—they're caught in this nasty zone where they'd need to be really compelling, probably overpowered, to compete against either a melee weapon as an emergency close-combat weapon or any of the other weapon options as a short-to-mid-ranged standard-use weapon.)

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.

[GPS51]

What a fascinating read, I've been playing UFO:AI for a year and a half now? Still enjoying it!

Edit: Was any thought given to allowing flashbangs to be made into a GL module?

[TrashMan]

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.

[Crystan]

SOTS? Sword of the Stars?

[TrashMan]

Yes.

[Latino210]

SOTS? Sword of the Stars?

Great game...

[Crystan]

Great game...

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...

[headdie]

One thing learned on hardlight is that you will never convince trashman that SotS is anything less than awesome 

[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]

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...

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]

[…]adjust a soldier's competencies as he moves through the terrain (such as shifting ammo before entering a UFO).[…]

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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