My advice would be to do the math on the target before running up to it. Click its INFO and check out each limb to see what the armor/hp values are (often there’s a weak point that can be exploited, especially early on), can you do enough dmg anywhere? Line yourself up to hit that part and go, otherwise stand back and find a way to soften him up first (use someone else to snipe/grenade/etc.) Also, use overwatch from around a corner where an enemy may try rushing at you (don’t let them see you), giving you an easy 100% hit shot while making them waste their AP.
Looks like you were doing one of those “Stomped Havens” missions where the Pandorans enter the phase of the game where they begin to crush the weaker Havens. These are probably some of the hardest random missions you’ll encounter, and you don’t even need to do them. That being said, consider bringing as many of your best troops as possible or just not doing it.
THAT being said… Obviously the Bomb Chirons are the biggest issue right off the bat. If you’re unable to kill both of those in the first turn from where you’re standing, best bet would be to run inside of the nearby shack with your slowest troops first and rush the closest Chiron with your fastest troops and try to take it out with everything you’ve got. Next turn that second Chiron won’t be able to do much as long as you’re hugging the wall where the first Chiron is. If you got War Cry, you don’t even need to kill the first one and it won’t do anything on its turn.
Second turn, Scylla is going to be up in your face, either destroying that small shack or destroying that building you’re hugging and I wouldn’t imagine it doing much else than that since those variations just like to waste their AP speeding towards you (hopefully the shack isn’t too close for it do something else?)
Then it’s all about luck. Where are the Arthrons and Tritons. Because if there’s 4 of them with machine guns next to that Chiron, you probably lose. If not, then you have to be able to kill the Scylla on turn two and move whoever you can inside the bigger building and worry about killing that 2nd Chiron asap without getting anyone too exposed.
I have tacked quite a few Extreme level missions with this same team (6 Soliders), but this one is way way harder. Its the completely unpredictable difficulty level that really ruins this game, I dont mind hard, but this is ridiculous.
Keep an eye on the haven assault parameters when you choose to accept the mission. If you see 20+ attackers and an extreme threat level, expect a Scylla, 2 Chirons, and a strong supporting cast. This usually happens when you get to a mist zone that’s been growing unmolested for weeks.
Not all missions are doable given the setup. Sometimes you’ve just got to bug out.
Like rjherbert says. You don’t have to win every mission. This is a strat/tac game: so you drop in, you assess the situation - and if it looks too hairy, you bug out as fast as you can.
Personally, I like the fact that not every mission is winnable. It feels both more challenging and more realistic to me. But that’s the key thing to learn from that setup - some missions are simply not worth the pain, so run away and let the DDA register it as a ‘loss’. It means your next mission won’t be nearly so hard.
The fact that you’re put in a situation where you have to kill two opponents on turn 1 of a mission or find yourself totally screwed for that mission as a whole is in of itself a major balance issue within the game.
Dash being nerfed or otherwise isn’t the issue there and in its prior state it was only putting a sticking plaster over the underlying problem. It’s the game as a whole that needs re-balancing.
I feel like this depends on how you view the baseline of “balance”. If your opinion of balanced is “you should be able to win every mission you deploy to”, then yes of course. If your opinion of balanced for this game is “you need to pick your deployments carefully because some of them the enemy will have overwhelming force”, then it’s not an issue it’s a feature.
Such is war, not everything is winnable and you have to pick your battles carefully - not all deployments should be winnable, but there should always be some deployments that are such that if you pick your battles carefully you should be able to win all the time with a few casualties.
I’ve long since stopped playing but nerfs were definitely needed to some abilities. However I’m seeing insignificant changes to enemy balance. The chiron nerf is nice for sure, maybe it’ll keep your soldiers from getting instantly oneshot quite as often. Ultimately, this game just isn’t ready despite all the delays. Luckily firaxcom is still there and great, with loads of mods to freshen up the experience. If future patches significantly improve the situation I might consider coming back, but the game is not very compelling in its current state.
Basically, the problem is they half-balanced the game. They (correctly) saw that some abilities were ludicrously overpowered and weakened them. The problem is, they did that without actually fixing the problems that were causing people to abuse the abilities, and in so doing as far as I can see they’ve broken the game’s balance even worse.
Basically, at this point, I’ve given up and uninstalled the game- there are glaringly obvious problems with the balance, and there doesn’t seem to be any desire to address them.
Maybe by the time of the Steam release I’ll check back and see if the game is done yet, but back to Xenonauts for now.
My apologies, that was probably a bit harsh. If I seem frequently angry it’s because I honestly feel like I was sold an unfinished game- someone said somewhere that this feels like a game that would be in Early Access if it were on Steam, and honestly it feels that way to me as well.
What I should have said is “It doesn’t seem like the developers see the balance of the game anything like I do, because they’re weakening the player’s options (and, yes, some of them were hilariously overpowered, I don’t think anyone disputes that) while leaving the inevitable progression to massively armoured, high-HP enemies more or less intact.”
I think it’s more that fixing the DDA is more complex than nerfing the obviously OP skills and they haven’t completed it yet. There have been several occasions on these forums where UV has said: “We’re working on it.”
Even with 50 programmers on the payroll, I expect that doing a proper balance pass on such a fractal system is a massive job - and we’ve already been told on several occasions that they are split into different teams with different responsibilities.
You may want to consider using the infiltrator’s crossbow with poison.
The advantage of using “silenced” weapons is that they don’t locate you. So, even if they get alerted, they don’t know where to shoot. And once they locate you, they know where you are for ever. Chirons will bomb your face.
And, if you apply poison with your 6 soldiers (300 poison), the first Chiron won’t last long. Then the second. And finally the Scylla.
But, as others said, evac is perfectly acceptable (and will lower the difficulty a bit).
That’s interesting! I didn’t know the silenced weapons actually work.
Is it possible to find out how much noise is generated by each weapon? Because I don’t think it is shown in game UI.
Unfortunately, I won’t have much time to read the code in the next 2 days. But I saw that “hearing” checks if the weapon “isSilent” to set the “located” state for an actor (if it is not silent).
I guess that only crossbows are silent and, since I’m new to this stuff, I don’t know where to look into the assets for weapon stats and the “mods” (JJ’s) on Nexus don’t show it.
The way the game handles this is as follows (very simplified):
Each faction has a list of actors along with their state (hidden, located, revealed). If you shoot a “non silent” weapon, you become “located”.
What I saw is that this “located” state is not “reset” when moving (and dead Pandorans can still hear you). So once you shoot a “non silent” weapon, Chirons will always know where you are, even if you cross the map without anyone seeing you.
I suppose that they set the “located” status on the actor that shot (that’s why I would have to check the code) rather than a “virtual” actor that was just created to make a “ping” on the map but wouldn’t move.
Once I have time, I’ll try to get to the bottom of it and potentially make my second “mod” : pp-realistic-hearing
I’m glad that I picked this up late so that I didn’t get attached to that ability. I prefer the right challenge balance anyway. Looks like I jumped in at the right time (hopefully)
You need choose a building that won’t be destroyed by the Scylla, but the building to right, and even the small one, are protected by civil, and you can bet there’s more than one civil here.
That looks like a cool and very interesting setup, I’d love play it.
Tiny maps are a lot smaller and I have seen a lot worse start.
This is plain wrong, If that was true then they would start bombard right after any attack. But nope.
Im’ cumulating testings since last patch, I save a combats when I suspect a good Chiron case to test, and do some replays and testing, no conclusions yet, but the code reading you already did is far to match.
A point is chirons bomb, good and worm don’t have the same AI or AI setup.
There’s many unexplained aspects. So if it’s complete, it isn’t on all factors.
After playing quite a bit with the new dash, my conclusion is that it was nerfed in the wrong way. The problem is that the distance that can be covered with each use of dash using an optimal build is huge.
It makes jetpack mostly irrelevant.
The AP cost actually does not change things that much, just favors crossing assault with sniper to get quickaim.
And I’m not even using frenzy yet, or gear to maximize speed.
I think the best solution is to cap the total distance that a soldier can run in a turn regardless of speed, dash use, or frenzy. It’s the only way to make sure. Visually it could be represented as a redline when selecting the soldier. It could be made dependant on the average of the soldiers characteristics corrected by stamina, or just a hard cap so that the soldier can’t run more than approximately half the length of an ordinary map.
The advantage of this approach is
no more running around the map at close to relativistic speeds,
instead of stacking as many buffs to speed as possible, the player has a choice as to how achieve maximum mobility. Invest in speed? Use specialized gear? Frenzy? Or use dash? Capping the effects of buffs gives more tactical options.
gameplay doesn’t change significantly for players who are not using dash exploitively.
Nerfing dash further, e.g. back to 50% distance, will not solve the issue, because it appears as a result of stacking different buffs together, as most other OP holes in PP (I started a thread on this here A proposal on how to rebalance skills)
In other words, even reducing the distance granted by dash to 50%, with top speed, optimal gear and frenzy the soldier will still be way too fast. At the same time it will make dash less useful for ordinary, non exploitive gameplay styles.
: pp-realistic-hearing