Feedback on the most recently implemented Free Aiming feature

Damn! - I now feel very vulnerable in the legged region.

I’m fine with the enemy being able to do that so long as the rules apply fairly to both sides.

Whether it’s a negative or positive change to game play I think depends upon personal preference. I enjoy crits being present in a game. In my case it’s the oppose, I’m potentially becoming bored when there’s an absence of this type of mechanic.

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The planning element is to be prepared for the possibility that any of your team can be ‘critted’ and have secondary plans/support in place for that eventuality. (You should be doing that anyway, especially if situations exist where normal damage has the potential to outright kill members of your squad)

Re balancing - As before I don’t think it’s really an issue at this point in development, or for an experienced game dev in general.

I would say this is probably where we disagree. To me having a 0-18 damage spread is basically like already having crit in the game. Adding even more RNG and damage doesn’t really add much in this situation, the accuracy and thus damage range of the weapon are already enough. I personally refuse to use the X2 repeater because I find that RNG “crit” to be anti-climatic, just as how I found Damage Roulette to be frustrating even though at the start of the game (the hardest part) it worked more in my favor.

It’s not like I’m doing anything skillful for the crit. I didn’t aim for a weakness. I didn’t take a greater risk. Nothing. Instead the game just decided “here, have some extra damage cuz reasons” and that’s it. To me the current damage spread is a better damage range mechanic since it requires better accuracy and/or range to improve your damage. Or hoping for RNG accuracy on shots. As opposed to the RNG of accuracy, crits, and dodge/graze shots (if they’re added).

But that’s just me. I have no problem with some RNG and crits/dodge/graze can be made to work. I just think that in this particular game they’re an undesireable mechanic given how other systems work. Just as how I don’t think blanket crit chance in an RTS would be a good thing (as a special feature of a unit possibly, but then you open up the can of worms and risk it spreading).

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Yeah, it’s probably, like RNG, itself a marmite mechanic.

I played a bit of D&D back in the day, and those situations were you rolled a natural 20 or a natural 1 were generally some of the most fun moments of combat. They spiced it up as compared to other games where you just made a dice roll.

Re damage range itself, it’s just a matter of scale. 0-18 vs an enemy with 18 HP is the same as 0-180 vs an enemy of 180 HP. Dice rolls and damage over the course of a game will generally result in a normal distribution of one type or another.

You can see that happening here, even when dice rolls are aided.

Where crits change things is generally by adding a slight kick on the ends of that normal distribution, but it also depends on how you implement crits, a pretty standard way would be to double damage for each projectile that hits, but you’re not limited to that and could implement grazes and crits in other ways, for example.

  • On a crit a projectile passes straight through its target and proceed onward to other limbs/creatures behind the first one hit.
  • On a graze, your gun jambs and is not usable for the following turn.
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I wonder now, how often will I deliberately try to hit for minimum damage. I think of situations when there is only one enemy left and I want to capture him or kill him slowly. Then I will set center of aiming circle outside of enemy to have him only in red circle and watch if all of my soldier will hit. Just like a lottery.

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That last comment is a genius consideration in the free aiming conversation. How many times have you wanted to capture something only to have rng work out in your favor and instagib it when trying to weaken it.

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