Therefore sneak attacks with grenades are definitely “in”.
Real life grenades come (or used to in WW2) come in shrapnel and blast varieties. So remove shred from shrapnel type grenades, but keep their effective radius large-ish (although with more randomness ‘to hit’ towards the edges. Blast type grenades can shred but with much small blast radius. Should also make hand-thrown grenades less accurate than they currently are - that’s a good point!
Build costs. Yeah maybe these are about right at the moment and GL ammo should be relatively expensive c.f. hand-thrown ones.
I read all the threads about abilities and personally I simply think PP awarding 10SP per successful mission is too much given the number of haven rescue and lair raids that happen mid to late game. Reward XP leveling with more SP (but stop stacking training centers since that makes no sense), reduce team-level SP to 2 (for eg) per mission, and maybe add some SP for those in the team that secure objectives/high kill count/etc. At the end of the day every game will have min-max’ers, but I honestly think most players don’t think along Terminator-build lines… my 14yo son just enjoys what he is given “as is”.
Yep, you know, I thought almost the same but with higher values and smother decrease. For instance 20 for the first mission, then 19, 18, 17 … and 1 at the end would stay forever. This way you’re squaddies will get 120 from levelups and 210 from their first 20 missions and after that +1 per mission. That is a bit over to the old cap of 300, yours would be a bit harder (150 from first 15 missions and then +1 per mission).
But something in this direction should be the way to go, IMO.
Yes, in the end it’s about determining how many max SPs we want and how fast we want character progression to be.
I think of 300 SPs because it worked on Veteran (which is what I was playing at the time). But that was before the increase of costs to raise SPD, so I’m not insisting on 300.
It could also be linked to difficulty level, so higher cap on lower difficulties.
BTW, what do you think about this:
I had this discussion with @MichaelIgnotus already, I wonder what other players think.
I’m not sure if I got @MichaelIgnotus’ suggestion correctly.
But the proposed “Evolve” would basically counter the unbalanced weaknesses of the game with a “punishment”. If the opponents develop “additional” resistance against certain damage but then give nothing (compensation) on the other side, it would not make the game interesting in my opinion. Then you would ultimately slow yourself down and not use the full power of the skills in order not to be “punished” again. In my opinion, such a solution would be largely unpopular.
I would like much more that the opponents then e.g. are increasingly more scattered. A “special” shield that develops against impact from above, but then shows a weakness as a counterpart on the other side.
But all of this should be pretty difficult to implement. Just the fact that there is a multicalss system in PP and that every soldier can use a different weapon and tactic extremely flexibly.
Personally, I think: if certain skills are simply too absurd and can cause huge damage without any risk, then they are simply “OP” and should be adjusted.
Responsible evolution can then fine-tune it, if it is implemented at all.
In the case of the “blanket resistance”, ie all Pandorans progressively developing greater resistance to explosives the point is to nerf the game only for those who abuse explosives, so it is kinda intended as punishment. The point is not to make the game fun for the players who abuse explosives, but rather not to make it unfun for those who don’t.
I don’t agree with this approach for several reasons, but I hope I’m not misrepresenting the logic behind it. ( @MichaelIgnotus can confirm)
In the case of some Pandorans developing a resistance to blast damage the compensation is that they don’t have a different mutation.
What I mean is that you would have Arthrons with maybe 1-4 (depending perhaps on difficulty level) reactive mutations, and if they develop ablative armor (50% resistance to blast damage) they don’t have for example, old style Return Fire (which I wish came back as a reactive mutation only for Pandorans), or resistance to paralysis, or they don’t start on Overwatch, etc. [I tend to suggest things that I think are easiest to implement]
Currently the two suggestions to counter the abuse of Boom Blast to mount a First Turn Bombardment are:
Nerf it as @Voland has suggested, which removes several of the things that non-abusing players really like about the skill.
or
Use Evolution as a dynamic nerf which would only affect those who abuse the skill (as long as it’s set up properly).
So yes, it is disincentivising those who field 2+ Heavies in a squad and use Boom Blast to rain down 6 explosives on the biggest cluster of Crabbies, essentially FTSing them. But no, it’s not punishing those who use Boom Blast in the other interesting ways that it can be used.
This is what evolution is all about in warfare. One side creates night bombers, the other side evolves radar, the first side evolves chaff etc… So if the Crabbies constantly get Boom Blasted to oblivion, they will evolve a nerf to it until it evens out and one third (or whatever the properly balanced number) of them don’t get disabled at the start of every turn. Then it stops, and it’s up to the optimising player to figure out how to re-optimise their tactics to deal with that.
TBH, I don’t see that as any different to saying: “We are now going to universally restrict Boom Blast so that you can only fire explosives twice/turn over half the area you used to have and at one third of the range - and those of you who liked being able to fire your grenades that 50% farther will just have to put up with it.” Except that the only people to whom we are saying: “We are now going to make Boom Blast Xty% less powerful than it used to be,” are the people (mainly Legendary optimisers) who are abusing the skill in the first place. Everyone else still gets to enjoy the skill the way they like using it.
I think that what @walan wrote is not wrong, it could end in a form of a self restriction only that they not evolve against something that hurts them and for that the player want to use as often as he can.
On the other side I like the Idea and it would be insane when it goes that way.
Independent of these two sides, I think it is very difficult to implement and balance and also on a way that everybody is able to understand what happens.
We talk about snapshot games indy studio …
Oh, come on, reducing the bonus to range from +50% to +25% is really all that?
Not really… The first problem is that it’s hard to define what abuse is. Certainly, doing 30% damage with explosives using a Berserker/Infiltrator might qualify as such (and it doesn’t involve Boom Blast in any way). But, for example, the use of grenades with Boom Blast and Quarterback is not so much about damage dealing as a more intangible control of the battlefield: you put a Grenadier on a roof top and he can throw 4 grenades anywhere on a small map with 100% precision. The damage from them might be negligible on the grand scale (probably under 10% of total damage dealt during the battle), but the effect is devastating nonetheless.
Another point is that, of course, you can meta the rule - don’t go over the threshold and you are safe, and this is actually the optimal way to use explosives: you don’t use them as damage dealers, but as target softeners.
Finally, though one might want to picture the addressees of the punishment as the Legend optimizers who optimize the s**t out of the their game and then complain about it being too easy, it’s just as likely to fall on the causal player who has found what he perceives as a legitimate combination to solve all his problems and who will not understand what is happening, or why, or how to deal with it.
As a rule, I don’t think it’s good practice to punish the players for doing something that you have provided them with an opportunity to do in the first place.
If it came to this, I think a fairer approach would be to say that after x amount of damage dealt with explosives, all explosive weapons wielded by the player will do 20% less damage, and then 40% less, and so on and so forth and show the count of how much damage the player can do with explosives before the next penalty kicks in.
That is actually apparently fairly easy… There are some issues with designing the trigger so that it captures what you want to react to (30% damage on average is easy, but will it capture all the cases?), but implementing the mutation (especially something like a resistance) is not hard.
And the advantage with making some enemies resistant to blast damage is that the trigger does not matter that much, it just spices up the game, it’s not responsible for balancing it.
Again, a blanket resistance is, I think, very hard to understand. And if you are going to punish the players for doing something, you better explain the rules.
Some enemies becoming resistant to explosives, on the other hand, doesn’t need any explanation. You will have players wondering if it’s random, or a reaction to something they did, but they won’t have any legitimate reason to be upset, I think.
That is exactly what I mean with difficult to implement.
Not what you give the enemies against any abusing what ever the player uses to much, that should be very easy to implement. But the logic behind that to trigger at the right point seems for me not to be fairly easy and also has to be balanced over all difficulty levels. Remember the DDA problems …
Edit:
In my experience this is only a dream, maybe they have no reason to be upset and maybe you can explain it to them fairly easy. But they will be upset, I’m pretty sure
Yeah, exactly. But that’s why I don’t think that you can use it reliably to balance the game. You have to balance the game independently - then reactive evolution becomes something that makes the game much more interesting.
yeah, that’s why I say legitimate reason to be upset
At some abstract level, I think such a reactive evolution is not that much different than a dynamic difficulty.
Since I basically find this principle of any form of DDA good and interesting (I never had a problem with it), from my point of view they should definitely try it as described above by you.
But if they do, they should implement it right from the start, at least for the time being, only for the higher levels of difficulty. At least for the easier difficulties, I find it quite legitimate to go through the whole game and use a functioning tactic again and again without being ‘punished’ for it. Purely from the point of view of a ‘casual player’
How about a more directed evolution like shoulder mounted acid spot launchers that have a chance to shoot down incoming grenades? More in keeping with the lore/theme? Ala Predator plasma launchers.
So that’s how I imagined that the evolution within the game was originally going to be. Before the game was released, I was thinking wow this could be interestingly difficult! But perhaps deadlines prevented this from happening. I believe that other backers thought this too.
But on easy level, not too much evolution until a player has worked the dynamics of the game out. But on difficult levels, the skill would come in how find a solution or weakness to the continuous evolution due to your gameplay. We need to think original.
It’s feeling much closer to it now. But wouldn’t it be great if the intelligence report gave recommendations on this evolution based on your gameplay? Something like ‘It appears that the Pandorans have evolved to heavier ablative armour to counter our continuous use of explosive weapons. New alternative strategies are recommended for forthcoming weeks to confuse the Pandoran evolutionary cycle’. Or something to that effect.
The game should be evolving to your gameplay. I’m not a designer, but maybe reduce body signatures, so some Pandorans could get to within 5 squares or less and bang. Obviously, once observed the reason in the new intelligence report would give you recommendations for the new behaviour. Perhaps mostly disabling headshots, formations of units or simply copycat tactics etc. I’m sure there’s plenty of people here who have better ideas. But the game giving feedback in intelligence reports about your gameplay - that would intrigue me.
The way I imagine it is that you wouldn’t actually realize if it was reactive, or just random. And there would be some randomness to the reactivity anyway, like you would have to trigger a particular mutation - for example, do 30% or more damage with explosives on average over a number of missions - and then roll it on the next evolution cycle; there would have to be *a lot * of different mutations and you don’t want to have all of them at the same time.
Also, some mutations would only appear on higher difficulties.
So on Rookie and Veteran you would see some reactive mutations, because it’s always cool to see something that might be a response to your actions, but there would be less of them and they would be weaker.
I imagine it would be a little like with the Dark Events and the Chosen actions in Xcom2/WOTC and you would have players posting pics from their evolution reports, saying “hey, look what I got playing on Legend on the second week of January!! This f*!?-%=! Arthron Returns Fire when I attack other crabs!”
Other thematic solutions possibly, Tritons because of multiple arms have a chance to catch grenades and throw them back? Archons with shields can ‘bat’ them away or possibly if in a group one can sacrifice itself by throwing its body and or shield on it? I think just adding more armour or damage reduction is a bit of a cop out when there are so many options that can be used in a more fun way with the evolution mechcanic. Don’t just use a flat reduction system add more chaotic chance system for more surprise and ‘wtf’ moments.
I suppose I have similar thoughts as @walan and @MadSkunky. Concept seems ok, but I wonder about implementation and “hazards” connected with it:
Which damage types would you include in such mechanic? Only Blast, or Acid, Fire etc. too, or standard Impact(Direct?) damage too? Because if you put resistance to each type of damage (also on standard assault rifle impact) then aliens would become “walking voids” being able to “inhale” anything coming at them, except next point…
How many such resistances aliens would be able to have on a single alien? If single alien (for example Arthron) would be able to have single such resistance or maybe maximum of two such resistances then maybe it would be ok. But if he would be able to resist Impact + Blast + Fire + Acid then you don’t have much of a choice left and there is not enough different weapons to deal with such enemies. When each mutation would have only one resistance then it would impact what you use in each case, but wouldn’t render your team incapable of dealing with enemies.
What do you mean by “it doesn’t nerf an entire weapon class”? Because if you think about heavy weapons then you are right if we take into account “blast resistance” as there are also weapons with impact, acid and fire damage, but for example such resistance would eliminate almost all mounted weapons and most of hand grenades. “Impact resistance” eliminates most of the weapon classes (handguns, shotguns, assault rifles, pdws). So I’m not sure about how these weapon classes would behave with different resistances. We would need to have different damage types in each weapon class.
Thinking about it I’m not sure if it isn’t too big concept to implement. I would rather nerf some attack combinations instead of developing counters to such overpowered combinations. And I don’t care about players who like “power fantazy” playstyle, which you don’t want to upset.
Well, it is. Dynamic Difficulty was about increasing aliens number. You still could easily dispatch them with any given weapon. Proposed resistance system could leave the number of aliens intact and would force players to change their equipment.
I’m not sure how it keeps with lore/theme? There wasn’t anything like that in the short stories. It sounds more like countermeasures of some advanced civillization (even if it is acid fired) rathen than mutating shape-changing virus. Resistance and reactive armor are more likely possible for me in this theme.
Nice ideas, but do you imagine how much of implementation each idea would require? Definitely a lot. I suppose they don’t have time for that with their 4 coming DLCs already in mind.
How about then just allowing them the chance to spit acid from the mouth like snakes then? I suppose I look at it at where the balance point is between game and supposed realism. Boom blast is perhaps op, not so much in rounds per second but why is it a launcher suddenly can fire half as far again? Multiple firing of a grenade launcher should, perhaps, be slightly less accurate but cover a larger area as in an arc?