UFO:Alien Invasion
General => Discussion => Topic started by: talon on June 01, 2010, 01:27:43 am
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i'm often having the problem where a alien is standing just beside the door , my shooters can not seem him so i wanted to ask if i drop a grenade next to the wall or detonate a rocket against that wall near the door will it go through and kill the alien
Explosion
wall wall
_______ Door _______
Alien
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i know its really hard to program into the game
but its times like this i really miss blowing apart a wall and then sniping the alien behind it
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No it won't. Walls are impenetrable, but if you throw a grenade just inside the door, the alien takes the full brunt of the blast.
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Thanks for the reply Edi
i remember hearing something in the tip of the day
about changing the height level when using the rockets
is it possible to actually target the floor just inside the door
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Yes.
Close doesn't count. Unless you're using high explosives, of course... :D
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do you have to do something special
hold shift or something to target the floor
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No. Just target that square and the soldier will fire at it.
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Just tap the shift button and it will cycle through floor, mid-level and above head on the selected floor lvl. Works like a charm for grenade launchers, you can air burst their heads right over fences and hedges. As for destructable terrain, I hope one day some one implements that, it used to be a major tactic for me in the old X-COM series. Another tip: if there is doors, use 'em. hitting backspace near a door allows for open/closing (1 Time Unit). I had fun on an industrial level where a building had a door not far from the doors of a harvester and I had both flanks covered by the rest of my squad while my main character stood in front of the door. Open, fire, close, next turn, repeat and they dont seem to get a clue lol. Always pack medkits on all your troops. None of mine die this way, with them in pairs healing each other.
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maybe i read (or dreamt i read) a long time ago that current engine does not allow for destructable walls. Or at least the devs didnt knew how to. Thinking the quote was similar to "If you can manage to make -this game engine- do that, be my guest"
Besides, You are an eco friendly Phalanx Unit! you recycle, use public transport, and mantain Private Property Walls unharmed. Also, you dont splatter the guts of aliens in front of children.
Speaking of which. The game needs more half sized civilians that run a lot, are a harder-to-hit-target, and will run into your soldier's LOS at every given chance. I mean those little human vermin known as Kids.
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Speaking of which. The game needs more half sized civilians that run a lot, are a harder-to-hit-target, and will run into your soldier's LOS at every given chance. I mean those little human vermin known as Kids.
VERY true. IMO we could use a lot of new civ models, of all ages, that fit the game's setting (about 80 years in the future) better.
Hmmm... I think the next time I have more spare time on my hands, I just might model a few. Yes, I think I'd like to try that.
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maybe i read (or dreamt i read) a long time ago that current engine does not allow for destructable walls. Or at least the devs didnt knew how to. Thinking the quote was similar to "If you can manage to make -this game engine- do that, be my guest"
Besides, You are an eco friendly Phalanx Unit! you recycle, use public transport, and mantain Private Property Walls unharmed. Also, you dont splatter the guts of aliens in front of children.
So, we have high explosives, blasters, and yet the tents are left undamaged. No property loss.
It's the exact opposite of comic books, where buildings collapse and no one gets hurt :-)
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It's too bad that with explosions we don't have the "chunky salsa" effect in the game. That would be nice, though it would take a bit of coding work to implement, having to check all nearby surfaces and such.
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i'm often having the problem where a alien is standing just beside the door , my shooters can not seem him so i wanted to ask if i drop a grenade next to the wall or detonate a rocket against that wall near the door will it go through and kill the alien
Your high explosives will not kill aliens hiding directly behind a wall, but they SHOULD. This should be a feature of explosive weapons, to compensate for the huge hole in gameplay balance that is the lack of destructible environments (which in turn are only there due to significant technical challenges of implementing them in the near term, not as a matter of balance design, if I am not mistaken).
It should be made a feature that explosive blasts cause some degree of damage directly through a wall, perhaps even full damage through walls not thicker than 1 tile. Because a big part of modern day infantry rocket launchers is to demolish defensive hold outs like bunkers, if the enemy insists on not relocating or counter attacking (which the aliens often don't, they simply take pot shots from their structure).
It's a vital counter to camping in many situations that's currently missing form the game, even though it would be no where near as difficult to implement as destructible environments and would thus make an excellent interim solution.
As a side benefit, the rocket launcher which is strangely about twice as accurate as the sniper rifle and almost entirely more useful, could have a more reasonable balance and realistic role if one of its primary abilities/advantages was to kill held up enemies that most weapons couldn't touch (without getting very, very close).
I would even say that to further counter structure camping in maps with sparse cover for advancing grenadiers, the high velocity electromagnetic accelerators- the railguns, coilguns and particle beams, should penetrate right though walls that are not more than one tile thick.
Then clearing a building, with one camping alien with a particle beam, where there isn't sufficient cover for a grenadier or CQC specialist to close the distance, wouldn't necessarily cost so many lives. And the aliens could and should use the same advantage against you, so that you can't always get away with simple and extended camping strategies either.
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Even if you could shoot a coilgun through a wall, how would you aim it?
I disagree that the lack of damage through walls or destructable terrain is a hole in the gameplay. Being able to blow through every wall actually reduces the tactical complexity of the built environment to a very one-strategy game. This may change somewhat, however, when a visibility system is introduced to the game.
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I guess it would make sense if it was impossible to destroy walls in UFOs (because it would require too powerful explosives that could destroy everything around the ship).
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Even if you could shoot a coilgun through a wall, how would you aim it?
There are many situations where someone on your team has line of sight on a camping alien, but can't do anything or enough about it directly. So this "spotter" is how you know where to land the heavy artillery.
Other times just seeing where the alien ran in and guessing where he is in there by how far he has already moved (and thus how many time units he had left) can be enough for landing a damaging shot on him.
I disagree that the lack of damage through walls or destructable terrain is a hole in the gameplay. Being able to blow through every wall actually reduces the tactical complexity of the built environment to a very one-strategy game. This may change somewhat, however, when a visibility system is introduced to the game.
You might be overlooking some key limitations of damage through walls though if you think it would make for a one strategy game:
1) It doesn't demolish anything.
2) It doesn't defeat the stealth advantages of cover.
3) It has very limited penetration and/or area effect inside; it can't really hurt more than a couple targets behind more than a single thin wall.
4) The few weapons that can actually do this are specialized, unwieldy, expensive, advanced and/or ammo limited.
5) The battlescape conflicts are brief and fierce, with no reinforcements, so you don't have time to bazooka everyplace someone might be hiding, again and again.
6) It's a major factor in real life warfare, which uses numerous strategies.
As far as it being a hole in the gameplay or not, how else do you take out one or two aliens, held up in some small building, with very limited to no cover around it to approach with? Your only options are to use grenades or to storm it, but both of those require getting extremely close, which means losing (perhaps a lot of) soldiers almost certainly.
This is where some kind of artillery is supposed to come in, both in real life warfare and a well balanced strategy game. You have to have something to use against an enemy that is sticking to a very defensive position indefinitely. If they are consistently not doing anything particularly intelligent or active, just camping there, they need to be punished for it on the battlefield, not rewarded.
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I think it should depend much more on the type of material the wall is made of. And if you do shoot trough it, your damage should be lower than normal (completely penetrating particle beams, every players worst nightmare). Also regarding rocket launcher, at least real life AP-rockets work basically by punching a small hole into the armor and spraying molten metal all over the other side (IIRC, temp. inside a tank could raise well over 1000 Celcius). Such rockets could work as bunker-busters through cover.
Tactically, this would be interesting however. Kinda like in BF: BC2.
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as far as i have seen, in every map there is always enough cover to get close safely.
however, it may be difficult to identify what is cover and what is not, from what things look like in the tactical screen.
for example, in the 'rome' map there is lots of cover right in the middle of one of the bridges, but it might not look like a good cover.
and, i am bit confused about the topic of the thread.
the original post involved a door, to me it seemed like the original post was about 'do explosions travel around the wall through a doorway?' which would be similar to 'does an explosion in a small room do more damage than in the open?'
maybe i misunderstood, and it was indeed meant as 'through walls', but why the doorway then?
it is not only about explosion damage traveling this way and that, but also about smoke and gas grenades, and flamethrowers.
we would need not only destructible walls, but also an aerodynamic model.
: ))))))) !!!!
lol.
and, if we did have destructible walls, how would a building really collapse?
what about thermobaric bombs?
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I disagree that the lack of damage through walls or destructable terrain is a hole in the gameplay. Being able to blow through every wall actually reduces the tactical complexity of the built environment to a very one-strategy game. This may change somewhat, however, when a visibility system is introduced to the game.
I can assure you that in the original XCom, destroying walls to gain access to enemies was both needed, useful, and risky (you gave them access to you as well).
as far as i have seen, in every map there is always enough cover to get close safely.
Try playing Wilderness as a skirmish. Wide open, shooting each other the first turn.
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Maybe it was a bug, but I had a situation last night on the bridge map where it appeared that a sniper shot when through a wall (a fence, rather). I was hitting the space bar to step through the alien targets when I saw one that I thought my sniper has LOS on.
As I clicked to hit, I noticed too late that the green line went through a fence about 2 squares in front of him and then turned red the rest of the way to the alien (although I did have a cross hair). However, I had already clicked, and the shot went off, killing the alien.
So either, a) it went through the fence, b) my shot was a little off line, far enough to miss the fence but not far enough to miss the alien, or c) the "blocked" red line wasn't accurate.
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B is right. The line is from center of your soldier to center of alien. I had a few similar hits too.
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Explosions do not travel through walls, though I would like to tweak the range on mine so they damage a bit further out than they do (like one or two more squares tops). My people can't seem to throw hand grenades to save their lives.
Speaking of which. The game needs more half sized civilians that run a lot, are a harder-to-hit-target, and will run into your soldier's LOS at every given chance. I mean those little human vermin known as Kids.
Great, something else for an alien to try to hide behind when I'm using my flamethrower!
Funny story - I was at a farm earlier today with one of my flamers searching through a house. Alien ran by her and ducked into a bedroom. My turn came up and my flamegirl walks around the corner - there's the alien, standing in front of a civilian in the corner of the room, apparently thinking that I wouldn't risk hitting her.
Russia paid well for that harvester a few minutes later and we kept the story of the flame-broiled civilian between us. ;)
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Maybe it was a bug, but I had a situation last night on the bridge map where it appeared that a sniper shot when through a wall (a fence, rather). I was hitting the space bar to step through the alien targets when I saw one that I thought my sniper has LOS on.
As I clicked to hit, I noticed too late that the green line went through a fence about 2 squares in front of him and then turned red the rest of the way to the alien (although I did have a cross hair). However, I had already clicked, and the shot went off, killing the alien.
So either, a) it went through the fence, b) my shot was a little off line, far enough to miss the fence but not far enough to miss the alien, or c) the "blocked" red line wasn't accurate.
The sniper rifle shots DO go through walls. I have used it multiple times to kill a camping alien and my soldier wasn't even close to seeing the bastard. Use IR goggles to spot aliens behind walls and sniper rifle to eliminate them safely. I am not yet sure if the shots also travel through the walls of a UFO or only human-made structures.
Game version is 2.3
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The sniper rifle shots DO go through walls. I have used it multiple times to kill a camping alien and my soldier wasn't even close to seeing the bastard. Use IR goggles to spot aliens behind walls and sniper rifle to eliminate them safely. I am not yet sure if the shots also travel through the walls of a UFO or only human-made structures.
Game version is 2.3
Yes, I've seen the same thing. I was quite surprised the first time I saw the bullet trail coming through the wall, and just today I got the opportunity to target and successfully take down an alien hiding in a building. I am now looking forward to testing out my other weapons to see what else can fire through walls. I enjoy using heavy lasers, but unfortunately they don't pass through
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@Slim & dough:
We should be able to shoot through japanese paper walls and some other things in the future, but right now, shooting through walls is a bug.
If you find such a situation again, please report it with mapname, weapon, position/screenshot (of the place and the targeting, not the bullet).
It shouldn't depend on the weapon afaik.
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If it shouldn't be happening and not on a per-weapon-specific basis, then why is there a 'throughWall' parameter in the weapon UFO data and why did the 'resolve single shot' code check it and make provisions for reduced-damage wall-penetrating shots? (Or at least there was, the last time I looked -- which was a while ago).
IIRC, only the sniper rifle, bolter rifle, coil gun, and minigun have it.
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Hello I am new to the website but I have played X-Com for several years and have been playing UFO:AI for about 1 year. I just want to let everyone know in regards to explosions through walls. Today I was playing and (mis)threw a plasma grenade. It went up against the window and detonated, killing two aliens inside. The next map I intentionally did it a second time, but with a gas grenade. It was effective in stunning the alien. So in effect as long as the alien is next to a window and the grendade is against the wall, (or at least in the area of effect).