Acid is insane... why did you think this was a good idea?

They are disproportionately deadly to humans, due to your soldiers having much less health than the opposition. Also the cyber upgrades make you take double damage from acid! So yes, it wasn’t thought through very well!

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Wouldn’t this kind of issue normally be tackled in game through research?
We can research a counter to the goo, should be able to research a counter to the acid.
The game would most likely use a mount when they really should have implemented a mod system for equipment. Sights, silencers and expanded mags etc for weapons and anti acid/goo/flame coatings for armour etc.

Having said that, the game is not really set up for that, Firaxis Xcom is. Firaxis xcom is more like stargate, small teams going on missions from one base.
PP is more like a war, multiple bases, lots of soldiers and all equipment has to be built separately.

I’d love to see armour and weapons modifications but would it get annoying to keep track of building them and fitting them to each and every soldier?

well because an arthron machinegun has to hit all the bullets and generally only hits 1 trooper. while acid grenades like normal grenades never miss the target.

this means that the MG is still somewhat forgiving, as you can take cover against it. while the acid launcher is kill or disable the unit using it or take a ton of damage.

on top of that its a matter of functionality, before acid weapons where pointless as they only shredded 10 points of armor per turn regardless of the amount of acid applied. meaning it took forever to strip armor with it (enemies had 40-60 armor in key positions). now it strips equal to the acid value this means that they are a lot more effective at removing armor. In my book acid was never intended to be an extremely effective DoT against HP like poison is, or a strong method to disable limbs like fire damage is.

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How fun is it being this game’s testers, with all the constant radical changes that are being made wildly swinging things left or right? Seems absurd that this is how patching is being done… I guess my expectations have grown too high from experiences with other companies.

Still clearly a falsely advertised Early Access game even with DLC releases… :confused: “DLC”… clearly the missing content the game should’ve had to begin with. These business practices make me sick.

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It seems that the enemy’s acid is stronger than the acid we can use. Where is my grenade launcher acid grenade? Where are my acid missles? Of, course our acid is weaker, because their armor is much stronger than anything we have access to. But, even then, I haven’t had much luck using acid against the Pandorans (even after they upped the damage).

I see people claiming they haven’t run into “acid problems”. All I have are acid-worm hurling mutos shooting across the map. And those worms are nasty as hell in areas where there’s a lot of stuff on the ground, cause they can get shot inside stuff like benches which you have to destroy to get to them, if they can be destroyed that is. If not, better have them speed points up and take your chances somewhere else like tackling a siren. No this isn’t a good idea. The damage is insane and there’s no way to clean it off. Unless they do it like in Alien where the victim takes their armor off. I’d rather have my soldiers running around naked than watch them melting.

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I would imagine that it’ll have a big hole in it at the very least :wink:

Naked truth

EDIT: But I don’t have to worry, probably it will be fixed by the same magic which happens when you retreat to the ship.

Enough trolling from my side. Sorry @Asyranok.

Now my feedback about retreat area position Retreat area position have even more sense. Imagine that you are stuck on the top of Anu generator building in the middle of the map (which is common in late game) and surrounded by acid arthrons/chirons. Evac area is few turns away in that starting position. It is a dead trap.

Acid is only thing in game that don’t have countermeasure, only way to save a soldier is to retreat.

EDIT: But I don’t have to worry, probably it will be fixed by the same magic which happens when you retreat to the ship.

Medics are waiting onboard to give them some advil, a bandaid, and a cup of hot chocolate. And for their armor, just some Mighty Mend-it, or some other product sold by Billy Mays. 70% of the time, it works all the time.

Yeah, I actually have saved some by retreating. Unfortunately it often kills a completely healthy level 7 soldier in 2 turns. I’m lucky if I last more than that.

Imagine goo chiron and acid chiron on the same map. Legit by game rules :skull_and_crossbones:

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The chiron needs one round to “reload”, I think. Ok, one is enough to handle, but two become a problem. You can push through to their location, at great risk to your soldiers (and great risk in this game means almost certain death), to start chopping them down, but most areas are full of furniture and junk lying about, the worm hurling chiron can shoot his worms into the junk and not only you will not be able to kill them but often you won’t even see them and one worm will take down one your soldiers if not more.

I had to switch to my “meat” team from my robot team, which incidentally I had created cause the game was giving me maps with 3+ sirens all the time, but the acid damage is just crazy for those units, the thing is, it almost as crazy for the meat units too. So yeah, feels like we are still beta testing.

I get that this game is supposed to be difficult, ok. But it’s stuff like this that makes it seem masochistic, even on the lowest difficulty.

As the devs have admitted themselves, they have not been doing much on the testing end. Especially in regards to games that are pretty far in.

We are the testers. Let that sink in.

Even the standard game still needs difficulty tweaks. I thought with the recent Leviathan patch that everything would be all fixed up, and sure there is definitely an improvement. But it’s still not fixed yet. Further changes needed.

I think the devs fell into the very common games dev trap of playing their game so often, that they got so good at it, that they pumped up the difficulty to match that. Then flash forward to now, they’ve been told “Your games practically impossible to beat unless you save scum and play it a very specific way”, and they were like “People play it differently? Oh crap”. And since the difficulty stuff was put in so early on, their having to rewrite the whole game to fix it.

As on one hand you have the evolution side, and sure that’s been fixed by the sound of it. But then you have the part of what types of enemies are thrown at the player. In one battle, it threw 6 Siren’s at me. That’s crazy. I did beat it, against all odds but still. Then did a Haven defense and had a Scylla, and 2 acid shooting Chiron’s thrown at me. Couldn’t beat that. Went back to the autosave and tried again, same result. Hmm.

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I was under the impression that the “Backers” were the testers and players, not the devs. But we are now backers as well and hopefully the devs will listen.

The problem with huge amount of acid is You cant do anything to stop it. If acid get you ur soldier is dead.
Maybe the problem is that u cant do anything to be “acided”. When acid chiron shoots it is only pure luck. He will hit you or not. We dont have possibilities to defend against chirons attack and cure when we was hited.
Someone dont think about that mechanic.

That’s not how game dev industry works. :slight_smile: Devs don’t play the game at all during work, QA does. And it is very far from normal playthrough. It’s QA responsibility during certification phase to decide if builds quality is high enough to be ready for release, so they look for common and edge cases like, for this example would be: is acid damage is applied correctly, what’s the limit of acid damage, does it trigger every time and so on. There’s not much playing here actually. :slight_smile: At least this is how it works in large game dev studios. Here? I don’t think the QA was involved in this latest release at all.

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They would play it. But it would be testing specific stuff. Like testing setup battles. That’s standard programming / games dev stuff.

You type code, you test if it compiles and works. You run it in the engine and ensure that no crash conditions occur, and that things do what your code is set out to do. If they hadn’t even done that, then the game would be a complete buggy, crashy mess.

What I was meaning, was that they haven’t tested the long game. Only setup test battles. And if they were doing that only all the time, then they’d get super good at it, and make it harder to provide skill for themselves in those test setups. Since they were only experiencing the one battle, and not the war itself.

And would have been just running test maps, like a map with a soldier with a grenade launcher and a target and checking to see if the weapon behaved as it should.

It’s quite common for devs to do this and fall into the trap. Goes all the way back to the NES which had insanely difficult games for that exact reason.

Like I’ve said, it doesn’t work that way :). Devs don’t play even test battles, devs most of the time don’t even see the results of what they code in realtime. Most likely they prepare engine tools, scripts and other assets (shaders and stuff) to be used by level designers. No one in a gamedev company gets super good and estimates difficulty based on how good he is. :slight_smile:

Agree it doesn’t mean it has to be QA fault if it was design decision, but I don’t think it is how you described it. Bad design or no QA, whatever reason is, it shouldn’t happen very often and yet it happens.

To add to Nattfarinn’s comment. Most testers find the majority of issues in a game. The issue is how bugs are deferred for a release. As someone who worked 8 years in the video game industry as, first, a manual QA tester, before becoming a programmer. I promise that the vast majority of bugs any user finds in a game were found by QA, but the product owners and lead game designers decided to defer the bug fixes until later due to the level of effort involved.

That is not a 100% guarantee across the industry, as the smallest game devs skimp on QA, but it holds true more often than not. For instance, I worked for Bethesda Softworks, on games such as Doom, Skyrim, and Dishonored. I guarantee it is true for those. Why do the giants knock you into outer-space in Skyrim? Not because someone said it would be too difficult to fix in time for release, but because a designer said, “leave it… it’s funny”.

Inspired by

Replace part of HP acid damage with WP damage