Given that the GL/Rocket combo is so powerful at the moment, I wonder whether it should be limited underground - (and yes, I know that in the final game having 8 squaddies with 6 or 7 explosive projectiles is unlikely, but it is still possible).
The most obvious check & balance would be to make the Rocket’s arc hit the tunnel roof in anything but the largest of spaces, which could cause some interesting blowback the first couple of times you tried it ;0)
Another possibility is building in a percentage chance of destabilising and collapsing the roof, causing collateral damage back along the tunnel, but that would only be a deterrent if there was a significant chance of the Squad getting caught in the landslide.
The plan for explosive devices like rockets and grenades is for them to have scatter (they won’t accurately land where you aim), just like in the original X-Com. So there will be an element of risk to using them.
You know that will end your rampage with Grenade Launchers? Mutations. First which comes to mind would be explosive resistant body parts. And the other just body parts with many HP. Now GL is so effective because it removes less durable body parts and make some small amount of damage to main HP pool. With those body parts removed their HP drops down and bleeding finish the rest. If each body part had 4 times more HP and the Crabmen would still have something like 10 HP then you would need to fire many times to kill them.
Good point well made. I made a similar suggestion in another one of my threads a while ago (probably the OP one).
I think that’s what’s going to be one of the truly unique and fascinating things about this game - the fact that no single strategy can every become the AI-killer, because the AI will constantly mutate to counter whatever game-winner you’ve come up with.
Btw @UnstableVoltage will the corridors in alien bases have ceiling? And maybe not destructible ceiling, because those in building can be pop out with explosives. Making it this way would limit use of Grenade Launcher and Grenades in alien base attack missions. Of course bigger caves can have ceiling a lot higher than corridors between them.
They already have a ceiling, you just can’t see it. In fact, before the first release of BB3 we had to made an adjustment because all grenades and missiles just hit the ceiling and exploded.
So I probably encountered some bug because I can use explosives without any problem in those corridors. I will look this closely next time. Sorry for bothering.
I must admit, I’m not convinced that’s the way forward.
At the moment, as I’m on-record saying elsewhere, grenades and RLs especially are a tad OP. One way of limiting them in the Hives is making their trajectory intersect with the ceilings, so that it becomes really problematical to launch a rocket in an enclosed space.
At the moment, I have a House Rule that I am only allowed to launch rockets if I’m in a wide cavern, not a narrow corridor, on the assumption that a cavern more than 4 tiles wide will have a higher roof. In game terms, that makes things much more interesting - I can’t just carpet-bomb the Crab-pod that’s just come round the corner until I get into a more open space where they have the advantage of manoeuvre, so I have to create a much more efficient kill-zone than I used to.
So if there’s any way of raising the roof in larger spaces, but keeping it low in narrow spaces (eg. the roof is automatically as ‘high’ as the corridor is ‘wide’), I think that would work much better.
No one suggested that this is the way forward, hence why I said “in this build”. Until the game is feature-complete and balanced, there are always going to be certain shortcuts just to get features up and running in their current state.
So is anyone else finding the nest missions to be extremely difficult? I’m playing on rookie and with 6 level 4 soldiers the Pandorans keep lobbing explosives repeatedly. I keep running out of ammo, medkits, and body parts! I had a guy who was acting as a mule because he had crits to both arms and couldn’t do anything besides carry stuff. I took out at least 20 enemies and there were still more. I only had 3 soldiers left when I encountered 2 of of the guys with launcher arms and they both shelled my guys in their own nest! Did I attempt the nest raid too early or is this just how tough the game is on even rookie level?
It’s a generally accepted thing that Lairs are too tough at the mo and that Citadels are too easy. You’ll find an extremely long discussion on the subject here: Lairs vs Citadels
