Messages

451

Discussion / Re: Plasma Blaster

« on: November 14, 2012, 11:00:28 am »

From my experience I have to agree with OP here. The burst-mode using 16 TUs barely scratches an armoured Taman when you stand next to him, while the Plasma Rifle uses 12 TUs for a 3-round and pushes him out of his shoes immediately. Not to speak - even the Assault Rifle performs better.

If you're standing next to him use the BALL MODE (10 TUs)! This is not meant to compare to an assault weapon. It's a powerful one-shot weapon for close engagements. The other firemodes are fall-backs, something you should only use in desperate situations where you'll trade overwhelming firepower for a lucky weak hit or two at greater distance.

I can see now that when I bumped the alien-armour-vs-plasma I made the snap/burst firemodes of the blaster nearly irrelevant. I'll bump their damage a little. But the Blaster will never be as good in snap/burst modes as the Rifle because it wasn't designed for that.

452

Bugs in stable version (2.5) / Re: Weight penalties

« on: November 14, 2012, 01:07:26 am »

I've just pushed changes to most equipment weights. The overall trend is lighter, but in all but a few cases the revision was small. Still, if you play with a version after this commit, you should feel a little more room to hit that normal TU threshold.

Note: I only revised equipment weights. If you suffer from low-strength soldiers from a save game before the weight system was revised, you'll still find it difficult to field a proper loadout.

453

Discussion / Re: Plasma Blaster

« on: November 14, 2012, 12:56:02 am »

The Plasma Blaster is less accurate than the Riot Shotgun using Saboted Slugs. It is the same accuracy as Flechettes, but as you mention, Flechettes have 8 shots so you get a chance of hitting a little. But this is where play style will trump the raw numbers. If you are a careful swarmer, you'll be turning corners onto aliens with 2 teammates around to finish him off and you'll be happy playing the better odds of a lower-damage weapon that puts out more rounds (more chances to hit). If you're someone who often ends up facing down an enemy indoors with just 1 or 2 soldiers around, you need a 1-shot-1-kill weapon or your man is dead as soon as you press the end turn button. Not all weapons may fit your play style, but they still have their uses.

Still bringing the ball radius up to two (it's 1 now, was 3 if I recall) and/or increasing it's range or accuracy a tad might be good.

A larger splash radius is actually a problem for close-quarters combat, the role this weapon is intended for. You don't want a reaction shot to go off on an alien 2 grid squares away when the splash radius is 3.

If you're firing out to maximum range with the plasma blaster, you're probably wasting ammo.

454

Discussion / Re: Plasma Blaster

« on: November 14, 2012, 12:30:47 am »

The plasma blaster is a Close weapon, most similar in usage to shotguns, and should generally always be used in Ball mode. When you access it (early in the game), your heavy-hitting close-range weapon (excluding Flamer because it is unique) goes from 120 normal_medium damage with the Riot Shotgun to 180 plasma_heavy damage. This is extraordinary power early in the game and will provide a strong punch throughout most of the game.

455

Discussion / Re: Vote for us at SourceForge

« on: November 14, 2012, 12:22:08 am »

I noticed the same. We're 12 votes down, 9 more days on the clock. So close!

456

Tactics / Re: I <3 Smoke Grenades

« on: November 13, 2012, 10:37:43 pm »

How do you feel about extending your work? It's been 4 years since the terrains.ufo saw significant additions. That means that a lot of our textures will not have any bouncefraction defined in terrains.ufo. If you're willing to take on this task, let me know and I can offer a few suggestions that might make it a little easier.

457

Tactics / Re: Can't weaken crashed UFOs?

« on: November 13, 2012, 10:04:24 pm »

Another thing that might be considered is to have the aliens that have crashed be less than full health, or potentially even dead, depending on the condition of their ship.  It makes sense and would make crash missions play differently than landings.

Already happens.

458

Bugs in stable version (2.5) / Re: Weight penalties

« on: November 13, 2012, 10:45:35 am »

@Anarch Cassius: I believe strength will max out at 75. I expect a reasonable veteran to have 45-50 strength values and strong late-game vets to be upwards of 60 strength, but because we've recently adjusted the number of UFOs in a typical campaign this may not be reached just yet.

@DexCisco: Body armour is around 7-9kg. Power Armour is, of course, a special case -- an entirely enclosed suit -- and it will require strong soldiers to wear effectively. Note that I've earmarked Nanoarmour to be reduced to around 9kg, so it's available to rookies who will need some protection in the late-game.

And again, the document you referenced is talking about loads for dismounted operations in Afghanistan -- lengthy patrols. Even the Fighting Load you mention is not their bare Combat Load (read page 7).

459

Bugs in stable version (2.5) / Re: Weight penalties

« on: November 13, 2012, 01:02:19 am »

You need to keep in mind that nearly all soldier load references you'll find out there are talking about soldiers who live, eat, shit and die in the field over days, weeks and months. In other words, the loads are designed for marching and surviving. Rapid response troops (like SWAT, for instance) would never take nearly so much equipment into the field for the kind of single, limited, contained engagements Phalanx troops are deployed to.

Near the bottom of this page, you'll see a "Fighting Load" listed at around 16.7kg. An average Phalanx rookie can carry 17.5kg before he is encumbered and loses TUs. By the time they have gained 10 strength points, they will be able to carry 22.5kg before becoming encumbered.

When we say "encumbered", we're not saying completely ineffective (except in cases where weaponry should only be used with high TU firemodes -- snipers and the RPG). The sense of time can be deceptive in a turn-based system, but turns last only seconds. That means we're talking about weight that can slow a soldier's sprint and snap-to-target speeds by no more than a second or two.

As we've said before, the numbers are still being worked out (I just spent a couple hours with some spreadsheets) so please be patient. You will be very restricted in the loads you're able to carry, and you will have painful choices to make regarding armour, secondaries and miscellaneous equipment. But there are definitely some items I've identified that need reducing in order to hit certain load-out benchmarks. We'll get there before too long.

460

Discussion / Re: Accuracy, Sniping and tactics.

« on: November 12, 2012, 07:05:54 pm »

A lot has been said about this and the weapon balance in the past and, in your defense, it's spread across a lot of threads so its not easy to find. But in short: the battlescape represents a dramatically scaled-down version of any real battlefield. Much of the rebalancing going on in 2.5 is an attempt to bring more tactical mechanics into the game, but this will not correspond to any reasonable sense of "realism" in a world where most assault rifles are accurate out to 300 metres (30x the distance of most of our maps).

461

Bugs in older version (2.4) / Re: useless building-tile in new base

« on: November 11, 2012, 05:11:33 pm »

This is not a bug, but you can file a Feature Request to ask for a check in the code to prevent the base entrance from being placed next to two unusable tiles.

462

Discussion / Re: Button to autoturn the view in the direction of the selected soldier sight

« on: November 11, 2012, 12:52:45 pm »

I think such a feature may exist -- hopefully someone who has figured out all the hotkeys will post if so. If not, please fill out a Feature Request.

463

Discussion / Vote for us at SourceForge

« on: November 11, 2012, 12:23:41 pm »

Some of you may have already seen the item on the news page about SourceForge putting us in the running to be December's Project of the Month. If you haven't already, please take a moment to vote for us. You've got to have a Twitter account to vote, which is pretty annoying. But we're not far behind the leader. We're only 11% (23 votes) behind and the poll will close in just one day.

If you can, please go and vote. Little accolades like this help us gain attention and notoriety, which we might be able to leverage into more widespread publicity when we release 2.5.

464

Discussion / Re: Button to autoturn the view in the direction of the selected soldier sight

« on: November 11, 2012, 12:19:40 pm »

If you're asking for a first-person view (ie - what it looks like through the soldiers' eyes), this is not likely to happen. Our maps are not built with ceilings or other things invisible from below, so the maps will not look right in first-person view.

465

Artwork / Re: 3D models questions...

« on: November 10, 2012, 05:50:14 pm »

Each MD2 file points to its own skin file, and this has to be configured when you export the model. We use a system for referencing adjacent files with a "." and no file type extension (jpg, png, etc.). So, your MD2 exporter should allow you to define skins. If you did so for a model that had a skin file in the same directory named "car.jpg", you would set the skin to:

.car

Then the game (and Radiant) should be able to locate the skin. You can even specify multiple skins and in the func_model definition add a skin property pointing to each one (starting with 0).