While I assume that a lot of this is due to Alpha status, disabling body parts in its current form suffer from issues, that impact gameplay and immersion.
Disabling arms beats everything. Soliders and crabs can both perform reasonably well with a disabled torso or their heads crippled, but shoot their arm and they become useless.
Getting your arm disabled or your weapon blown off isn’t particularly skill dependent. This means everytime your soldiers take a shot, there is a chance they’ll get crippled. While this isn’t unrealistic in itself, it may limit tactical options in the long term, minimizing the risk of getting your soldier incapacitated by a lucky shot will be a simple risk/reward matter.
Shields. While there are simply too many in the Alpha, I assume that enemy variety in the finished product will alleviate some of these issues (shielded enemies are often “elite” ones, mixed in with the regular mooks, since fighting them is usually time consuming). That said, shields are a tad too powerful atm, especially on shooty crab men that really don’t have many weak points.
Speaking of weak points it’s generally better to circle the enemy clockwise because that’s how you bypass the shied and get to the exposed weapon. Are there plans to introduce left handed (clawed?) crab men that hod their shields with their right “arm” to offer variation?
I agree with your first two points. The arm being disabled shouldn’t have such severe consequences compared to other options. I would instead suggest that it reduces the accuracy of weapons being used, or causes self damage whenever an equipped weapon is used. Perhaps even using willpower to fire normally with a disabled arm. It would make sense as shooting with a broken arm would require a lot of pain resistance and a lot of willpower.
I didn’t find the shield crabs overly powerful. If anything was overly powerful it was our heavy unit since only the boss and melee crab men could hurt him. Melee crabs are fairly easy to deal with though and the queen can kill anyone else on your team in one hit, so you’re staying away anyway.
In terms of circling clockwise, I actually found that it was better at times to go behind them or to the side and then shoot their legs. The ‘agile’ legs only have 3 armour and 3 health so they go down easy. They also have fairly thick areas like the crab equivalent of thighs, so it’s easy to land pretty much all your shots on target. (I only shot them from one space away, so if you’re trying to shoot from further away then it might not work as well haha)
If I’m going up against a shielded crabby and can get around their left side, I just shoot off their left arm. The arm holding the shield is very weak, and it bypasses the heavy armour completely. They also tend to loose arms this way and if they haven’t died already, the next shot does kill them.
If I get round their left side I don’t usually bother with the arm, I just aim for the head at point blank range. I’ve killed them pretty much every time that way, haha.
fair enough, but by targeting the arm I increase my chances of disabling the shield arm and removing from play should not all the shots kill it, which has happened a fair few times
Sure, but even then you’d be better off hitting the claw arm so that they can’t damage any of your guys. Then you can just take care of them at your leisure.
I occasionally might shoot the shield arm with the sniper if I have another soldier in range but not close enough to get an easy kill. The sniper doesn’t do enough damage to outright kill the crabmen anyway so hitting limbs is the best choice with him.
In fact this is not such big problem as it seems. Arms of soldiers have enough armor to remain active. Only sniper has few armor to disable his arms. Sturm disabled arm once in all my games. Heavy don’t disabled never. Weapons of crabs are very weak and don’t pierce armor of arm.
At same time get around crabs easy (left and right). I don;t have problem with shield. Almost always one of soldiers have good point for shooting.
Relative to other parts of the body. Disabling torso reduces soldier’s health by half. Such soldiers must remain in rear and less active. Disabling leg reduces speed. And your army forced to move slower. All this is also very unpleasant. Disabling arm still leaves opportunity to shoot from pistol and throw grenades and also loot ammunition.
Relative to other parts of the body. Disabling torso reduces soldier’s health by half. Such soldiers must remain in rear and less active. Disabling leg reduces speed. And your army forced to move slower. All this is also very unpleasant. Disabling arm still leaves opportunity to shoot from pistol and throw grenades and also loot ammunition.
Thank you for a good exponation of “limb mechanics”. It would be great if some of this info could additionally appear in shooting info (so not just leg disabled - but possibility to disable leg and reduce speed)
I ve seen some players shooting alreday DEAD part of body (QUEEN HEAD) and it did great damage and kill easier. Is this a bug or feature? I would expect dead limbs to give 0 damage when hit again.
I may be wrong on this, but in build 1 the queen destroyed limbs disapeared from her (especialy claws and legs) So i guess thei’re some bugs related to the “new queen”. Once the members where totaly removed, it used to be impossible to hit them anymore. As of the head targeting, it may be a wanted feature. Technicaly, assuming you can survive a head loss, it’s still possible to damage you by hitting repetively on the now open neck, facilitating shooting through the otherwise thick shell.
Doing damage to an already disabled body part will still count towards total damage done. This also applies to “over-damage”. If you hit a body part for 8 damage, as an example, and that body part only has 3 HP, you will still do a total of 8 damage to the enemy along with disabling the body part. Depending on the enemy (and the mutation), some limbs get dropped, some just get damaged.
While I do see some rationale in existance of such mechanics, in practice it means that (unless you really want to disable queen movements) insisting on headshots is best tactics to win. A such dead limb has no armor and resistance at all and clearly gets better overall damage then hitting anything else.
So the tactical rationale is good, but that may be over abused. If you ask this one mortal, its better and more challening to remove it - so we have to shoot those other limbs again and again
+1 From BB5 I have seen disabling hands seem like a too go-to strategy for most encounters and an easy way of disabling most foes.
Wanted to suggest that it might be better if an injured a arm would just add an aim penalty (bigger spread), but post above had other neat ideas as well.
What I think would have been cool to see was some ability for certain critters to be able to do in-field mutations that can restore damaged limbs by draining the health of their other limbs.
I really like that if you disable a limb they can’t use that limb, but it would be cool if you blew the arm off a gunner who also had a shield only to see them drop the shield and pick up the gun. Although if they had a spitter face they might opt to keep the shield and go for face only attacks.
