To the developer, can you rebalance the Crabs with the machine guns?
My recommended fix.
Remove the ability to return fire with heavy weapons. ( machine guns, cannons, Grenade launcher)
It should not be a death sentence to shoot at an enemy.
-arthrons have poor perception and return fire does not trigger at ranges beyond half perception. usually 11 tiles or more distance and it simply won’t trigger
-return fire will not trigger if the arthron is dazed, cannon-to-the-face.
-return fire will not trigger on the arthrons own turn, you can overwatch lock him. (not from a position where he feels safe to open fire, lest he will just stand and shoot)
-return fire cannot be used through walls (indirect fire with grenades, mindcrush).
cover rarely if ever works, not something to rely on…because if return fire triggers you are likely too close for the cover to do much. and if you are using high cover the soldier will step out…invalidating the cover to begin with.
grenades and plinking from afar are the safest bets, arthrons don’t have a lot of limb HP (arms best that I have noticed is 70 HP/ 30 armor, weapons 100 HP/ 20 armor) so a few nades and limbs will start falling off, and the range will prevent the return fire trigger. if forced up close…extremely high blunt force melee (as they lower the HP enough to get the daze treshold), cannons or stun grenades can help. panic or mindcontrol ability from the priest can also help.
overall there are enough counters, and the arthron is the only pandoran at this moment in time using the return fire ability. (with its insanely powerful 50X6 MG…it can hurt…but the 35 or viral variant are easily survivable, the arthron will never use return fire with its poison spit or grenade/acid launcher) as such I don’t agree with your suggestion that the arthron should be unable to use its return fire ability.
Thank you for the tips. But just think about all of the listed precautions listed that you need to take to shoot at the arthrons. What do you do if you are in close combat and cant retreat and also being overwatched by another enemy. You are free to have your opinion but I dont think a it would be to much too ask that heavy weapons can’t be used for return fire, arm them only with the viral weapons or just remove the machine guns .
I hope you have some other buddies with your close combat trapped squaddie. This is a tactical game and you should use your whole team to solve problems.
If you’re trapped with one squaddie alone and without any buddy nearby to help him you maybe have done something wrong beforehand. The only way out of this trap i can think of is to go in overwatch with himself and pray for some luck. Such a situation should not end without any consequences. OK, maybe on easy but defently not on any higher difficulty.
I personally don’t want to see a general nerf like this for the poor crabbies. Dependent on difficulty would be ok, but not in general.
it is not a nerf, it is a fair balance
For you but I’m pretty sure not for all players.
that goes for your opinion also
I never assumed anything else
Edit:
if that were true you would not be trying to force you way of gameing on anyone else. and just to stop this silly word game. “Last word times infinity”
Tell please: what is your difficult Setting?
I am using the veteran difficulty
@Caedeas, this is a well-known ‘issue’ within PP and a nasty little trap for new players - much like discovering that cover doesn’t work nearly as effectively in this game as it does in, say XCOM (if you want full cover, hide behind a wall completely and only step up to the corner when you want to fire, then step back).
Mad Skunky is not alone in not wanting RF to be nerfed - in fact some like me would like it put back to the old way, where the target of your shot couldn’t RF, but all his buddies within 10 tiles could. That (imho) very accurately simulated the way that covering fire works in a tactical firefight situation.
But I know and understand that doesn’t work for everyone.
People having the same problems as you screamed about it so loudly that the devs nerfed RF to what it is now - which means that in most cases, the poor little Crabbie never even gets a chance to fire back because he’s been alpha-struck unto a floating cloud of plasma before he knows what’s hit him - and you can do it standing right out in the open, because none of his buddies around him are going to bat an eyelid.
If RF is troubling you so much, I suggest you do what I and many others have done. Go to Nexus and download @pantolomin’s excellent ‘RF a la Carte’. This allows you to set RF to work how you personally like it: so I have it set to ‘All allies within 10 tiles of the target RF at full burst’, while you can set it to ‘nobody RFs’.
Then everyone’s happy.
Yeah, me too.
But I suspect we are in the minority, which is why I think @pantolomin’s solution is damn near perfect (I’d like to set it so that the Target can’t RF, but can’t figure out how/if it’s possible to do that, and I’d like to limit the number of shots the RF’er fires back but Panto hates having a half-empty mag after RF, so didn’t include it - the selfish b*$£ard! 
Other than that, it’s a great little mod which gives everyone what they want).
Is there anything ‘modwise’ that allows RF to trigger, but only after the unit taking the shot has moved back into cover?
Not yet. Panto’s the one who has looked into this most closely, and I suspect the code is too difficult to decompile: @pantolomin, do you have anything more to add to this?
This is the one mod I desperately want for my game.
First, I haven’t updated the mod for latest version because it seemed to work.
Secondly, there are 3 distinct settings:
By default, I’ve put everything at “true” but you will want to set “TargetCanRetaliate” (or also “CasualtiesCanRetaliate”) at “false” to prevent RF from those that took some damage (let’s say shock disables RF).
Thirdly, yes, I didn’t put the possibility to empty half of a burst ; it screws your next shot. Also it break equality between soldiers (there is no half burst for shotgun).
And finally, returning to cover before RF triggers. This is tricky because there is this huge monstrous method that contains lots of stuff (I’d get fired if I coded like that … probably not but lots of unhappy collegues that need to read it later … code is globally well made but this method is … aargh). There is a place in the code where it calls the RF behavior and then continues with the animation to return to cover. I’d have to swap calls but to do that I either:
And no, the way it’s made, it doesn’t seem possible (I don’t know enough how Unity works) to play 2 animations at the same time (RF and returning to cover).
PS: if you want the same behavior as first release (except for half-burst), you set:
ShotLimit = 0
TurretsShotLimit = 0
PerceptionRatio = 0,5
TurretsPerceptionRatio = 0,5
AllowBashRiposte = true
TargetCanRetaliate = false
CasualtiesCanRetaliate = false
BystandersCanRetaliate = true
CheckFriendlyFire = true
ReactionAngle = 360
TurretsReactionAngle = 360
# AllowReturnToCover = true
PS2: if you want half burst, you can use other mods to change the weapon property “ReturnFirePerc” from 100 to 50
Blessings on your House for this.
Thanks Pantolomin. This is one of the few mods I actually use, and it’s really useful.
M<