project-navigation
Personal tools

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - MonkeyHead

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 9
1
Discussion / Re: Why is this so goddamn hard?
« on: September 21, 2015, 09:05:14 pm »
Well, there is an AM bolter rifle round, but that is a big weapon, after all...

Though, if we have AM missiles as an air to air weapon, is it that much of a stretch to have an anti matter bazooka round, or grenade launcher round ... actually, it probably is - containing antimatter in such a launch on such a scale is a bit silly.

2
Discussion / Re: Why is this so goddamn hard?
« on: September 11, 2015, 11:46:37 pm »
I agree with most of your observations. In mid game the CQ combat options are basicly gone. Upgraded ammo for the shotgun/microshotgun, like the "needler flachette" would be a nice solution imo.

My opinion about Plasma/Particle Blaster is different, though. I simply cannot imagine those heavy and chunky weapons to be good for short range combat, where fast reaction and quick movement is required. Also, the splash damage of the Plasma Blasters ball mode conflicts with it to be used for short distances.

Define short distances. To me, short distances covers anything under about 8, up to point blank. Yes, the blasters ball mode will hurt the shooter from 2 tiles or less, but still is safe for very close combat of range 3 to 5 tiles, where is outclasses the shotguns, but probably not the flamethrower, thanks to accuracy issues. If it is supposed to be a "cumbersome" weapon, then maybe upping the TU's for its use from 8 to 14 or 16 would nerf it a little - making it more "difficult" to use in terms of TU's than a rifle, keeping the shotguns and flamethrower a pair of attractive options for longer, doubly so if they get some kind of upgrade or human based plasma flame tech parrallel - possibly derived from plasma balde tech? The high TU cost of the particle blaster reflects this clumsy nature and high weight, sure. Do we need to come up with new alien CQ weapons, to keep CQ relevant as sniper tech, explosive tech, and assault tech leave it behind?

3
Discussion / Re: Why is this so goddamn hard?
« on: September 09, 2015, 07:42:35 pm »
In 2.6 I have had many interesting experiences with both shotguns. First, the standard one with slugs. The standard shotgun with slugs can on occasion one hit kill a Taman in alien armour - if you can hit him. It will stun them quite often, and even one hit kill or stun a Sheevar if you are lucky, though a few hits will be needed to take down an un-armoured Ortnok or a Taman in heaver armour. They even really hurt robotic enemies, and can put down a hovernet in one hit, if you hit it. The combat versions of robots take more than one hit, of course. They wont dent an armoured Ortnok. The accuracy is horrible for soldiers of low skill and accuracy stat. Despite the incredibly short range of the Flamethrower, it is potentially a better choice on maps with little open space as it does not suffer from the highly erratic accuracy of the standard shotgun. This accuracy increases with some mission experience, but by the time their accuracy or skill is good enough to hit things reliably with the shotgun, you are going to be better off giving them a plasma blaster if the strength stat has grown along with others. To be fair, the plasma blaster is a bit OP, as it will take nearly anything down - I have lost more soldiers to it than any other weapon by far. Standard shotguns with slugs are also very, very useful as a defensive weapon - hide a tile or two back from a corner in ambush, and they fire very reliably as a close range reaction fire weapon. Now... the microshotgun. I love that weapon. I have emplyed it mainly as a secondary weapon for snipers to use if they need to go into close combat mode - storming a building or UFO, say. I have also used it for low strength, low accuracy CQ recruits who do not have a high enough accuracy to be given an SMG in order to pewpewpew away from distance. These act as forward scouts. As with the standard shotgun, they are great as a defensive weapon in terms of generating reliable close range ambush reaction fire, and will 1 hit kill or stun un-armoured organic foes of all types if within 4 tiles or so. Any further might stun or badly wound organic foes if you are lucky. They simply do not hurt robotic enemies enough to justify using against them, nor are they much good against armoured aliens. Similar applies to the flechette grenade rounds.

So, yes, early game the CQ weapons are a fun tactical choice, essential at times in keeping soldiers alive in close quarters defensive combat. However, the tech tree kind of forgets them a little, with the slightly OP plasma blaster a fairly obvious choice for all circumstances. Yes, the plasma pistol is a nice sidearm, or useful for grenade flingers (who I generally give the automatic pistol early game, to keep one hand free for grenade lobbing), and so is the laser pistol (or even particle pistol) - but the pistols are secondary weapons to me, and not to be relied on. I would love to see some variety brought in - I have previously posted about how I would love to see the Particle Blaster be a CQ weapon, seeing as how it behaves like one anyway in terms of its sub par accuracy. Its MASSIVE damage and high TU cost could balance it in that class nicely. I have also seen others suggesting some kind of "alien material" slug to replace standard slugs to give CQ recruits something worth shooting at armoured aliens., and "needler flechette" derived techs for the micro shotgun (which could of course be fired from the standard one too) and the flechette grenades. Heck, there even exists a mod for a "plasmathrower", which could act as a nice step up in terms of damage from a flamethrower (though this might mean the flamethrower needs a damage nerf or more TU's added to its use cost to make it a viable option) and sit alongside the plasma blaster.

4
Feature Requests / Re: Allow deselecting units
« on: September 02, 2015, 09:29:32 pm »
I recently turned the confirm orders option on, and it would satisfy pretty much all of those demands, if you pay attention to the route it plots.

5
Discussion / Re: Why is this so goddamn hard?
« on: August 23, 2015, 10:23:50 am »
I think an important thing to realise is that losing one or two soldiers per mission is part of the game philosophy. You are fighting a war against a much superior enemy, after all.

6
Bugs in development version (2.6-dev) / Mystery Bombs
« on: August 21, 2015, 03:33:26 pm »
Duplicate post made to the bug tracker, but this way I am more confident one of you guys will see it.

Playing nightly build from 16/8/15.

Successful completion of any mission causes the retrieval of 2 bomb items from the battlefield. These bombs spawn in the dropship tiles if the RMA gives you a dropship on missions not needing bombs. As these bombs have a mass of 4kg, they will slowly and steadily fill up stores with a useless item that is not able to be sold off.



I suspect this is linked to the recent addition of mission failure/success criteria, especially as on turn 1 2 or 3 I end up with an on screen message stating "Target area unoccupied" as either my team or the alien team moves away from its initial positions.

7
Discussion / Re: UFO:AI on a low end machine
« on: August 20, 2015, 11:04:33 pm »
Low end machine here. Fujitsu laptop with Intel dual core T5300 at 1.73 GHz. 2 GB Ram. On board Intel GPU. 32 bit Win7. Windows experience rating of 3.1.

Playing 2.6 on my native resolution of 1440*900, on default settings anything other than the smallest maps with small enemy squads suffers slowdowns. Turning off most advanced effects and playing on a slightly lower detail levels makes it run much smoother, but smoke, fire and so on still cause the odd slowdown if the map is big or there is a lot going on. Early game loading times are hardly fast, but tolerable. Late game loading times are a crawl. I do tend to stick to one base with 60 employees to help my hardware cope.


8
Feature Requests / Re: Some small tweaks
« on: August 20, 2015, 10:57:15 pm »
I do agree that it would be nice if using the lock button in the market screen meant some kind of autobuy would maintain stock levels. Saving soldier layout has been discussed before - I have no idea how feasible it would be, but I am in favour of it as an option as I use a lot of standard layouts with minor tweaks where required.

As for the base layout... this is easily moddable in the .ufo files. I for one am constantly changing my initial layout for reasons of efficiency, base defence ideas, or just for aiming for "realism". A little play around can lead you to end up with whatever you want.

I would prefer transit to remain delayed, and to avoid the exploit you mention a delay in requisition orders in to bases be applied, like the original OldCom.


9
Bugs in development version (2.6-dev) / Re: Map issue - Urban Periphory.
« on: August 20, 2015, 10:51:29 pm »
Well, I shall try a new nightly build to see any differences. Might be worth considering where aliens can spawn if they are in an inacessible area.

10
Bugs in development version (2.6-dev) / Map issue - Urban Periphory.
« on: August 16, 2015, 01:49:48 pm »
Odd bug on this map, involving impassable map squares.

8 man team, in Fire bird. 7th soldier had an issue moving from his initial tile. Soldier could only move off tile in one direction, then not re-enter the tile. Did not think so much of this. Door into camera control room in basement section will not open. Do not think too much of this either.

Mission continues as normal.

RMA has given me a map build with the multi level car park.

Soldiers split into 3 teams, each team heading from the base of the car park to the roof via one of the 3 stairways.

Reach the roof. Soldier attempts to move through door from stairway onto roof. Can not click to move soldier through door. Soldier can not pass further than the tile next to the door. Soldier can see through door, shoot and throw grenades through door. Soldier can not move off that tile.

Same issue for all 3 roof access doors.

Should this go on Mantis bugtracker?

11
Tactics / Re: Research Request: Panicking Tactics
« on: October 25, 2014, 01:49:05 pm »
It is easy to confuse a panicking alien with no weapon crouching at the end of their turn with one that is crouching while still holding its weapon - the animations or models are similar. Remember that depleted morale gives 3 outcomes - rage, when an alien will gun things down indiscriminately (funny when a Sheevar with a plasma blaster guns down 4 or 5 of his pals), panic when they will drop their gun and run about for a few turns (they will not pick up their dropped weapon, but may very well have a side arm in the form of a pistol), and shaken where human troopers refuse tu turn of RF - not sure how the aliens deal with this as aliens always have RF turned on unless you flash-bang them IIRC. Like for stunned - some kind of status indicator would be nice.

12
Tactics / Re: Flashbang tactics
« on: October 07, 2014, 05:45:11 pm »
In 2.6, you can easily tell if you "hit" with a flashbang as the alien pain noise is audible.

13
Feature Requests / Re: Some suggestions
« on: October 01, 2014, 07:11:40 pm »
ROunds could seem to vanish if you have autosell on - lets say you have 30 plasma rifle magazines set to autosell, and come home with 8 recovered form the aliens. Those 8 will sell before the "filling up" occurs IIRC, which could drop you by 2 or 3 clips, possibly.

14
Feature Requests / Re: Some suggestions
« on: September 29, 2014, 11:05:12 pm »
    • You should be able to sell live and dead aliens on the market (as well as alien tech), I am sure something like an international weapons company/science community would be interested in stuff like this and they even could start producing alien weapons for the international market after a while. This would somehow more logical than a tiny lab/workshop on the base being able to produce a lot of high-tech stuff, at least for some things.

    This is suggested a lot, and I am sure one of the Devs will be able to give a sensible answer regarding it.

    Quote
    • After the shotgun and the plasma blaster where great, but then there is no good weapon for close combat, so after a while I just had to change the profession of my close combat soldiers, in skirmish mode there is a double barrel shotgun, but I did not find it (yet? I just finished production of power armor) in the campaign.

    TBH there does not really need to be a better close combat weapon than the Plasma Blaster (or flamethrower for troops with horrible accuracy). Laser pistols allow for close combat troops to hit from range, and Particle beam pistols pack a decent punch. Plasma blades are also much fun. I did make the suggestion that the particle beam blaster should be a CQ weapon, but have no idea if this will be implemented - probably not.

    Quote
    • There should be a less steep learning curve in the beginning, I think the first missions, especially after the first month are somewhat brutal.


    Never really noticed them being too hard - if anything, the first few scout missions are too easy and lull you into a false sense of security.

    Quote
    • Initial base design is far from ideal (the alien containment is right besides the dropship hangar and living quarters are far away, the workshop is on the opposite side of the dropship hangar and you have to defend/take two entry points), maybe there should be an option to assemble the initial base in the campaign instead of using the standard layout.

    This can be modified in the .ufo files - basemanagement.txt, towards the bottom. It is fairly straightforward to work out and do.


    Quote
    • Here are some other observations, I don't know if they are bugs or if I just did not figure it out:
      (1) After a while zero bombs showed up in the equip solders menu, but I was not able to purchase any of them or make them in the workshop.
      (2) I think the magazine in the guns get used up even if the guns are not fired during a whole mission. I did not realize this until I got needlers where ammo is somewhat scarce.
      (3) I was not able to find out what smoke was good for.

    1 = specific item for one specific mission. irrelevant elsewhere.
    2 = Not so. Basically the game tracks ammo down to the individual round. So lets say, a shotgun clip. Fire 2 rounds, and the game "stores" the odd 5 rounds and loads a new clip. Fire 2 rounds from that one, and 2 rounds from the invisible clip are used to round it back up, storing 3 "invisibly". Needler ammo, being large capacity clips that are emptied very quickly, seem to vanish as they are filled up from the "invisibly stored" pool.
    3 = Oh boy do you have lessons to learn!


    15
    Discussion / Re: Balancing smoke grenades
    « on: September 26, 2014, 09:19:43 pm »
    Just another one idea about smoke. Probably the most "realistic", but I don't imagine whether it is difficult to implement.
    What if smoke could be semi-transparent? If there is only 1 square of smoke on LOS then an object has, say, 75% probability to be spotted. 2 smoke squares on LOS means 50% to see it. 3 squares - 25%, and only 4 squares of smoke make you totally invisible.

    That idea has some legs. Maybe it will mean that an alien can not see you from a distance, and instead needs to be close to spot you - however, with "clairvoyance", that would be kinda meaningless.

    Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 9