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2.5 sucks completely

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Visitor:
To be honest, I don't mind homing that much - and actually, in bigger maps there's still a lil glitch where aliens will stand guard in corners of it instead of closing in on Phalanx troopers.

I'd still claim that the problem lies in the stats of aliens that make all kinds of creatures annoying when they home - they seem as they get no weight penalties from stuff on top of great attributes and plain unfair amount of TU, forcing player to basically go through the whole game exploiting one or two tactics with little wiggling room and plenty of redundancy if one wants to avoid heavy losses - so, still beatable, just not fun.

H-Hour:
You can check your theory by playing as the aliens in skirmish mode. You'll find that even the hovernet, which has way more speed than any other alien, only gets slightly better TU (less than 30% over average phalanx rookie). And as this chart shows, accuracy and weapon stats on average have only a marginal effect on actual accuracy. It's effective at the very upper ranges (which the phalanx soldiers can never reach), but because non-robotic alien weapon stats have such a wide spread, its not easy to predict where they will fall on this spectrum.

As an example, a hovernet will only have around 15% better accuracy than a phalanx recruit firing an assault rifle on snap shot.

Visitor:
Compared teams in skirmish mode (thanks for suggestion!), my theory was confirmed - it may not be accuracy skill on it's own, but it shows that starting alien groups have very high skills in general - while Phalanx recruit starts with around-average weapon proficiencies - at best - and possibly is barely competent in one or two categories (usually mind and/or strength):

- average taman is between very good and outstanding in mind, with proficient accuracy in case of the whole team and between very good and outstanding proficiency in every weapon class - quite 'upper ranges' unreachable by Phalanx H-Hour mentioned - on top of average strength and often - competent speed, thus outclassing even experienced, decent human trooper in most stats, often by several degrees.

- all other alien races are comparable to that, with some of them having all three - accuracy, speed and weapon proficiencies high enough to explain going thorough long distances, then still being able to shoot and/or RF with high accuracy. Even if enemies like hoverbots don't have weapons in-built during single player campaign, all alien units - including tamans - have also enough strength to be armored and carry decent assault weaponry without being over-encumbered, while also requiring less items in general (hoverbots or bloodspiders cannot bleed out or panic and thus wouldn't need first aid kits even if AI would care about preserving troops and not have unlimited numbers of them).

Optimistically assuming that alien stats don't get higher than that thorough the campaign as per raising tenacity of invading force, basic invader mooks are more capable - AI aside - than the best and most experienced human infantry, and that not counting weaponry/armor which is understandably and logically superior, at least a first and for which - if I am not mistaken (do tell if it was only fluff /rumour/changed feature) - aliens get additional bonuses in comparison with Phalanx.

There are no weak aliens. Even basic 15% higher chance of scoring a hit (and it does seem higher than that - was weapon proficiency taken into account?), when considering damage dealt with alien weaponry coupled with regular psychological mechanisms making failure more impressionable than success - especially when using limited resources - explains why many people in this and Mary Sue Aliens thread seem to indicate it's nearly only the shortcomings of AI and exploitation of a few tactical maneouvers that allow the player to win.

Edit: Adding a link, cleaning up the text.

H-Hour:
Visitor, please go back and read my post again. The point is that even though aliens have much higher stats, this does not have a strong influence on TU or accuracy, as the chart (which does account for accuracy and weapon stats) showed. To test this in Skirmish mode, you should play as both the aliens and phalanx, using the same weapons to compare compare accuracy at similar ranges.

ManicMiner:
Hi

I started the Mary Sue thread and haven't posted much since so just to quickly summarize where we are from my POV - constructively!

Firstly I like the weight enhancements and the simplification of the weapons classes / skills (IMO "heavy" + "High Explosive" made better sense if merged). The AI and game rules are, IMO, overcomplicating things and this is where some of the issues crop up.

Perhaps the answer is to have a sanity check on how the gameplay can be made a bit more intuitive. A good start would be to ensure heavy/HE weapons need to be two-handed across the board. Anything designed to be held in one hand shouldn't be "heavy".

RF should be a dual concept thing: reacting to an unexpected enemy appearance, AND "lying in wait". At the moment it's all of the former, none of the latter.

I'd like to see the RF modes set to either. So, for example, sniper shots given an accuracy boost if the soldier is holding the weapon "2-handed" AND knelt/lying down at the end of the round if he/she is "lying in wait" rather than standard RF but there should be a time penalty for enabling that mode in addition to having enough movement points left over to pull off an aimed shot with an accuracy boost.

Standard RF should apply if an alien walks into view and shoots at your grunt who just happens to be holding a laser rifle in one hand so he/she can retaliate. Only snap shots or "spray shots" should be used unless the soldier is armed with a light one-handed weapon like a plasma pistol. No human or alien should be able to pull off a sniper shot or an aimed shot when shooting a heavy/2 handed weapon from the hip while standing up.

The aliens should be subjected to these exact same conditions.

Secondly the aliens should have one penalty than your grunts don't because your grunts should have the element of surprise and have a good idea where they'll be in relation to the dropship, whereas even if they are expecting organised resistance the aliens have other mission goals, like terrorizing citizens and rounding up cattle.

So if you've got an alien with a grenade in one hand and a heavy weapon in the other walking out of a building and seeing the dropship in Round One, it shouldn't be able to pull off a pinpoint-accurate aimed shot in the Round 2 RF unless it's dropped the item in the other hand, knelt down and preserved enough TUs to actually perform that shot after its round has ended.

Or something like that.

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