Request: Headshot mode for sniper rifles

[sirg]

In the 1st phases of the game tamans could be killed with one sniper shot, which is allright with me. So, I was only suggesting to extend this concept further. Even if tamans start wearing heavy armour, you have to keep your skilled sniper alive so his skill will grow to the point where he'll be able to hit a head shot, not miss it all the time. That was the idea. Make the player to keep the soldiers alive and plan ahead their specializations. You might have a very good sniper in the end. I don't see how this concept unbalances the game. You'll still need lots of other weapon choices.

We can extend this talk to rocket launchers which in some cases don't kill the alien. Just because they are advanced it doesn't mean that they defy the laws of physics and don't take inertial damage from an absorbed hit. There is really no problem in making the aliens stronger than humans in terms of everything you may think of. Just add more hitpoints, more armor, more TUs, more power, etc... and more numbers plus better AI.
But don't create unrealistic fights, because they ruin the very essence of squad tactics.


The idea is to recreate and simulate - in the limits of a game - a battle scenario. On the battlefield, if you are hit by a rocket or a sniper bullet you die. Why do you want to romance this gruesome fact, and pretend it doesn't happen?
Now let's ask ourselves - do military squads have a full team of snipers or just a single  sniper in the squad? No, they have one, if any. So you can't kill the enemies with snipers alone, and also the sniper doesn't kill most of the enemies. He kills only strategic targets like the CO, gunner, enemy sniper, driver, etc. I was only suggesting to have this type of unit with this role in the game.

[TrashMan]

There will always be a way to exploit AI to gain the upper hand. If they start out equal to begin with, you have a boring, dull game.

That's what numerical superiority is for. More enemies = bigger challenge

The seven brain comment was a reference more to creatures with decentralized nervous systems, like our friendly neighborhood cockroach.  Blow off the head, it will eventually die, but that may take weeks.

Yeah, but that cockroach is a vegateable after that. Technicely alive, but not really up for doing anything. Like a man on machines with no brain activity.

[sirg]

Yes, Trashman is correct, I forgot to comment on the cockroach idea...

If you blow up an alien's head even if it behaves like a cockroach, it will wander randomly until it dies from bleeding or whatever. I understand that you imagine aliens as some supercreatures, but there is a threshold where you step from SF to comicbook fantasy. Brainless blobs who act intelligent are impossible, because you can't have intelligence without a brain.

[Sophisanmus]

Cockroaches are a basic example, and they will still respond to some basic stimuli.  Also, it suddenly has very limited resources and senses, so it has less stimuli to respond to and with, and fewer basic needs it can fulfill.  Since basic needs and response to stimuli are the backbone of most cockroach behavior, of course it will be far less active.  A more evolved variant of that same model, with a larger body and thus more space to work with, could have either a more redundant anatomy, or a far more sophisticated set of stimuli responses.  Functions, such as "chase", "catch", "kill", could be hardwired in many places, as well as the associated biological functions which support those, and you have one very resilient terror agent, even without armor.

Anyways, the aliens are supposed to have some level of distributive intelligence on a societal level, so would it be such a leap to have some semblance of that on a biological level?  There would be anatomical limitations, especially among the aliens who are evolutionarily more humanoid, but with sufficient genetic variety there would be some with anatomies more inclined to that structure. 

[DanielOR]

Sophisanmus, thank you!  So, how whacked is my idea of a 3-legged, 4-armed, vital-redundant, brain destributed, omni-eyed battle alien?  Sort of luck two Ortnocks glued together.

[sirg]

we are going offtopic here talking about creatures with redundant organs. Even with hardwired responses, like you say, they won't be more intelligent then a rat.

It's much easier to imagine a mechanical creature, like a spider-robot or something like that. It can feature very good AI, and redundancy isn't absurd anymore. Like Terminator, it can continue fighting until it's powersource or vital systems are destroyed. (the Terminator pursued it's victim even without legs and a missing hand).

Back to topic - if the devs won't allow powerful sniper shots, then what's the point of having the sniping skill and sniper rifles? A sniper is a unit that one shots his victim. He can either miss or kill. In the rare occasions, where the sniper aims for the torso, the victim might not die instantly, but it will be seriously incapacitated to continue fighting.

[DanielOR]

good point, Sirg.

So, shall we say that sniper rifle is a nice weapon and it would be really cool to have a slow fire / high damage human weapon in the game.

[Sophisanmus]

I'd have to say half the appeal of the Sniper Rifle is hitting a target out of range for most other weapons.  The second appeal would be high per-hit damage, which would retain its usefulness even after weaker-per-hit automatic weapons have been rendered unusable by enemy armor.  Of course, modern sniper rifles are capable of obliterating their targets with a single hit, but these targets are human infantry.  Just because they are not capable of doing the same to many of the aliens does not delegate them to the scrapheap, they are still unmatched in effectiveness among other human ballistics at long range, and their accuracy is not diminished.

[sirg]

Sniper rifles are by definition one shot one kill weapons since the independence war in America where they were 1st used as a military weapon (and with great succes). After that armies started using dark uniforms (English had those red coats).

What you are suggesting with your comment is that an alien needs to bullets in the head to die which is a bit absurd. Better scap this concept of sniper rifles completely rather than make pea shooters from them. I'm starting to repeat here, if you get hit in the head by a bullet, even if it doesn't reach your skull, the head takes all the inertia from the bullet and the brain is smashed to the skull, so the victim will lose consciousness to say the least (the neck might break too). Probably it will suffer braindamage and never recover. That's why surviving headshots is foolish. Then if this concept is to much, just remove sniper rifles from the game.

I think there is a tendency to exagerate how much powerful the aliens are or how weak the humans are, while there is no need for that. The aliens are very powerful as they are designed in the game right now. You want to see aliens that need one squad to kill while the alien kills half of your squad and cripples the rest. That won't be funny. It will be frustrating.

[Sophisanmus]

Just  because they are not capable of doing the same to many of the aliens does not delegate them to the scrapheap, they are still unmatched in effectiveness among other human ballistics at long range, and their accuracy is not diminished.

We are talking alien heavy armor here.  Not the stuff that has appeared so far in the game.  By the time the aliens begin fielding these, PHALANX has already had a chance to adapt, in weapons and armor alike.  You're asserting it is impossible for highly advanced alien heavy armor, their top stuff deployed to decisively crush human resistance, can't stop a bullet, distribute the force, support the biological asset inside, and otherwise counter arcane human ballistic weapons.  The head wouldn't take all of the inertia from the bullet, the helmet would manage most of it.  Penetration would be more valuable than raw inertia (hence why a monomolecular round could be a potential upgrade for the rifle later in the game).  Hell, this stuff would be designed to survive a particle beam and keep the wearer alive, and that's entire tiers above a simple bullet.

[TrashMan]

Technicely we already reached the point at which we're capable of making weapons so powerful that it's hard to believe any armor can stop it.

Offense has surpassed defense by a lot, and with nukes it made a huge leap again. Just like you can't make a ship capable of surviving a nuke hit (no matter what armor you use or what nano-tricks. The energy is just too big), you can't make a soldier armor capable of withstanding 20x110mm shells.
http://world.guns.ru/sniper/sn56-e.htm

Unless you bring in handwavium and magic shields and stuff. But purely from a material standpoint, it's no can do.

[Mayhem]

Brainless blobs who act intelligent are impossible, because you can't have intelligence without a brain.

And yet, that's exactly what the main enemy in this game is - an intelligence without a conventional brain.

***

The sniper rifle should become obsolete just as much as any of the other human weapons, even if a perfect head-shot from the original would kill an any alien every time.

On the battlefield, if given the choice between a sniper rifle that needs a headshot or a high tech rifle that can still do headshots but also has more chance of punching though the chest armour of an alien that's just run around the corner at you, the high tech choice will naturally take precedence.

A pure sniper version of the Bolter rifle would be a good starting point, and would stop that research being such an instant dead end given that laser research (which allegedly makes bolters obsolete) can be started at exactly the same time.  Built for accuracy it could be nearly as accurate as the laser rifle but with more one-shot stopping power.

[TrashMan]

And yet, that's exactly what the main enemy in this game is - an intelligence without a conventional brain.

Which is IMHO the weakest part of the story. All that clinging to science when it comes to humans, but when it comes to aliens, who cares?
That intelligent virus is one of the silliest things I ever heard.

Not to mention that that whole "uuppps, the aliens were actually soldiers/mind controlled zombies/servants of the Big bad - which happens to be a giant brain/space creature/something" plot twist is definately overused.

[simulatoralive]

XVI isn't so silly to me.  It seems to me that it forms a complete brain, so to speak, by using telepathy as synapses between the individual cells.
(Sorry to get a little off-topic)

Anyway, I see merit in both sides of this debate.  However, people seem to be arguing about the sniper rifle like it's an anti-material rifle.  It certainly isn't.  If it was, it would be larger and take more time to fire.

Anti-material rifles are intended for destroying vehicles, not people, but they can do so in a pinch.  They're just far too over-powered and heavy for shooting people to be used for this all the time.  In other words, they'd never be issued for this purpose and thus, the in-game sniper rifle can't possibly be one.

[TrashMan]

XVI isn't so silly to me.  It seems to me that it forms a complete brain, so to speak, by using telepathy as synapses between the individual cells.

Daft. Daft. Daft.

Viruses are small, simple structures who have very limited purpose. Brain cells are huge compared to them and they exchange data directly.
Transmitting any data to other viruses would require quite e energy expenditure, especially at ranges mentioned. Not to mention that virusus wouldn't even have a fraction of the processing power a brain cell has, given their small size and specialized nature.

Anti-material rifles are intended for destroying vehicles, not people, but they can do so in a pinch.  They're just far too over-powered and heavy for shooting people to be used for this all the time.  In other words, they'd never be issued for this purpose and thus, the in-game sniper rifle can't possibly be one.

If enemy infantry is as armored as a APC, they would.