2.5 dev combat

[jerzy_cz]

Some thoughts about tactical combat in 2.5 dev:
Aliens don't prefer “orkish approach” any more. They sometimes try to take cover and wait for soldiers, making ambushes. They often get reaction fire and with plasma or particle rifles its quite dangerous, especially with medikits downgraded. With plenty of new maps it makes the combat much more challenging. So what to do? Sniper rifle is my best friend, later mostly replaced with coilguns. When direct assault is required I try to shoot trough walls with bolter(later coilgun). Grenades are excellent, never got shot by reaction fire when tossing one. Plasma and later particle pistols are fast enough, but they are a bit to inaccurate. 

[homunculus]

assault rifles were improved, i must admit i didn't use all snipers and grenades any more when i tried some 2.5 but used like 2 snipers and 2 assault.
i vaguely remember something had happened to flamethrower (a fun weapon that forces the wielder to move forward most of the time), for some reason i didn't feel like using it anymore, is it still a good weapon?

[jerzy_cz]

Well, flamer still has a good firepower, but less shots. Problem is with too high TU cost. Soldier often kills an alien with one shot, but also gets hit from reaction fire. It should be avoided because of downgraded medikits and new wound system.

[homunculus]

assault rifles were improved, i must admit i didn't use all snipers and grenades any more when i tried some 2.5 but used like 2 snipers and 2 assault.[...]

it seems assault rifles do no damage at all to combat bloodspider (took some time to get to that point in the game) and armored ortnoks are extremely hard to take down with assault rifle.
so that makes me regret starting to use assault rifles at all, and even more so, writing that they are good in the forum.
so, the update is that assault rifles are useless, and your soldiers will be dead as soon as they run into a combat bloodspider.

i wonder what weapons are good at taking down those armored opponents, or is it just sniper-rifles-only again, just need to suffer the increased time unit costs.

[H-Hour]

Weapon usefulness is designed to change as you meet new enemies. There is (or should be) no single load out or team setup that will last you the whole game.

Combat Bloodspiders come pretty late (if you're playing with a build from the last few months). They're pretty resistant to Plasma and Normal weapon damage. Try needlers or particle weapons if you've got them. Otherwise, try out the flamer or even lasers.

Armoured Ortnoks are beasts, but fire damage is particularly effective against them, so try that out. They're weak to lasers, but the whole weapon set is probably too weak to effectively take down an Ortnok without a lot of shots on target.

[homunculus]

yeah, combat bloodspiders and ortnoks appeared in november, maybe already in october.
sniper rifle can still kill combat bloodspider in 2 or 3 shots, but everything else has been pointless so far.
as far as i remember, bloodspider legs were vulnerable to explosions, but they seem to survive quite a few frag grenades.

particle beam battlescape weapons have not yet appeared.

flamer against an ortnok seems somewhat out of the question, as the ortnok is usually wielding a needler.

have not tested incendiary grenades, maybe i should.

as a side note, is it possible to reduce alien ai aggressiveness in some config file?
other than the aliens being tough, missions seem somewhat boring with the aliens being so predictable.

[H-Hour]

as far as i remember, bloodspider legs were vulnerable to explosions, but they seem to survive quite a few frag grenades.

The Combat variety are particularly reinforced against blast damage types. Maybe too much, but the blast category is kind of a hard one to balance. The Combat Bloodspider is supposed to be a difficult alien and you're supposed to feel out-gunned when they and their Armoured Ortnok partners start to appear.

have not tested incendiary grenades, maybe i should.

We have a new incendiary damage type, but this hasn't been included with the alien resistance values, so I'd be curious to know your results. I don't know what happens when a resistance value doesn't exist for a particular damage type. I assume it's just 0, which would make the ortnok vulnerable to incendiary. But the incendiary weaponry is not very powerful at the moment. This will need to be worked on further in the future.

[DarkRain]

In fact, the code is dealing raw damage for incendiary fields, so it completely ignores resistance AND armour protection, guess I'll have a look at it later.

[homunculus]

it took about 4 or 5 incendiary grenades to kill combat bloodspider, but then i noticed that even when the bloodspider survived it was dead next round, and once a few tiles from where it originally stood.
and 1 or 2 incendiary grenades were enough to kill it, but not on my turn.

and then i tried with my own soldier, and moving the soldier adjacent to fire caused damage about half the health points (didn't try moving into fire, though).
would be optimal if that was time units spent in (or near) fire causing damage, but that may be hard to do, whatever.
it is cool enough that incendiary grenades are special that way.

one candlelight with flamer was not enough to kill the bloodspider, btw.

ok, that's the results of what i tried with incendiary.

then i killed 2 armored ortnoks (from landed harvester) with two sniper rifle shots each, the snipers had competent (about 35) sniper and accuracy skills.
the same snipers did one-shot on shevaar and armored taman (from crashed fighter) in the next battle.
did damage depend on skills?
that makes old-timers even more valuable and new recruits more useless.
sniper rifle has somewhat high one shot damage, and therefore it is useful against armor.
that is, if i remember correctly that armor value is subtracted.
therefore, there doesn't seem to be any reason to use anything else but sniper rifle right from the start in order to train the skill, and assault skill experience seems a waste.
i mean, you can suffer the increased time units cost, but at least it is possible to kill something.

[Flying Steel]

I have to say that one thing that's really bothered me since maybe v2.2, is that the rocket launcher / recoiless rifle is your heaviest weapon, but is essentially ineffective against heavy aliens like the cyborg ortnok. Making a direct hit with a weapon that fires one shot every two turns with modest accuracy and only a handful of extra rounds, should at least temporarily incapacitate an opponent that isn't literally a light tank or heavy UGV.

[H-Hour]

I have to say that one thing that's really bothered me since maybe v2.2, is that the rocket launcher / recoiless rifle is your heaviest weapon, but is essentially ineffective against heavy aliens like the cyborg ortnok. Making a direct hit with a weapon that fires one shot every two turns with modest accuracy and only a handful of extra rounds, should at least temporarily incapacitate an opponent that isn't literally a light tank or heavy UGV.

It's a little difficult to balance properly. But I hope to introduce an advanced rocket ammo for later in the game that would do better against the heavy aliens.

[Sarin]

I'll poke this a bit.

First, about rocket launchers. Is it possible for rocket to deal two separate hits? I mean, is it possible to make a HEAT rocket that would deal only low area damage (something like frag grenade) but would actually deal huge damage to target that was directly hit?

And I've ran into a tactical problem that I need help with. It's that #%$^$$!ed map Mansion...lots of narrow corridors with doors. So often, it happens to me that I position my troops near doors, and alien opens them...there is no space to flank him to avoid reaction fire, and some aliens already have needlers that are deadly even against nanocomposite armors. How do you deal with that?

[Triaxx2]

Auto-mission.

Actually I went with auto-mission because it takes forever to load the map and I got my team wiped out by a bad spawn. (Shevaar on the balcony with a Plasma Blaster. Snipers couldn't hit over the railing, grenade launcher couldn't get close enough to arc over, cover seemed to do nada.

Some of the maps seem a little weighted against the player. Like the Street map. You'd better have at least two exceptional snipers, or you're in deep trouble. I crashed a UFO and found myself fighting two Shevaar, two Taman, and THREE Hovernets. Fortunately the Hovernets go down in one-two shots of the Sniper Rifle. The Machine Gunners I brought were useless. (Plasma Blasters not actual MG's)

[Sarin]

Nope. In this mission I have first opportunity to capture a needler. But that's also a biggest problem, as needler reaction fire is capable of tearing full health soldier with nanocomposite armor apart.

It got a bit better after restarting a few times and going more slowly with scanning ahead with IR goggles, but I ragequit after it went well, was hunting for last alien, and he turned out to be shevaar with needler, ambushing and killing one of my best soldiers...and after retry I got crash to geoscape :/

[Triaxx2]

The way to deal with that is ambush tactics combined with sniper rifles. Ambush the alien around corners where it's your reaction fire not his, or if you come around a corner and see one, duck back and bounce grenades in his face. Or use a cannon fodder with a rocket launcher.

I don't have any experience with needlers yet, but I really like Plasma Rifles with Full-Auto.