OpenXcom Forum
OpenXcom => Open Feedback => Topic started by: Surrealistik on August 08, 2015, 11:03:06 am
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So how do these work in openXcom/TFTD?
Like the original incendiaries ( https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Incendiary ), minus the bugginess?
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see here https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=2379.0
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They are useless but this time without killing your squad if you fire them while they are sitting in fire tiles
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Any mods that make fire/incendiaries not utter shit for anything other than illumination?
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incendiary in ufo phosphor in tftd does little damage but does over time to whoever sits in the fire and can even make units or objects catch fire for extra burn time. after fire is done you get a bit of smoke which can protect your troops usually the outer edges have smoke
incendiary is garbage and is just expensive illumination
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Sure, but is there a mod that makes them better?
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There will be, in time.
TFTD has only just come out (unofficially), and doesn't have a good mod support yet. Give it time.
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As far as I know, there is no way to add more damage to incendiary weapons besides making them fire more like the flamethrower mods, unless you go for OpenXCom Extended where you can set damage done.
So don't hold you breath for a phosphor torpedo that does a decent amount of damage in regular OpenXCom.
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You can make a tiny mod that modifies the damage factor of "incendiary damage" for every armor / alien. If you multiply by 3 compared to their original value, everybody takes triple damage.
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problem with incendiary is the whole system stinks
units take a small amount of initial damage followed by higher sustained damage while they are inside/on fire
aliens don't like sitting inside fire so they usually take very little damage as they leave right away.
one time i tested i takes about 4,5 hits of incendiary to kill a sectoid. aka garbage
i guess it could be useful for crowd control
forcing aliens to go trough fire to get to you
forcing aliens to go alternate routes by placing fire on their direct path to your unit
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Besides making light, fire is good for a few things, but killing aliens is indeed not really one of them unless you use a flamethrower mod. The most disappointing ones are the incendiary rockets where the big number makes you think it'll be awesome and then it does nothing.
It can:
- Slowly kill aliens in a difficult to access area, without destroying anything. This is especially good if you can manage to set the interior of a UFO on fire before breaching. It won't destroy anything, not even the squishy stuff on the floor, but eventually it will kill some aliens or at least damage them so they are easier to kill when you breach. Especially good with the incendiary grenade mod on crashed UFOs (since you can throw the grenade in through the hole in the roof).
- For base defence missions with a long bottleneck, setting the whole thing on fire can work well at tenderising the aliens as they walk to you, without damaging any of the loot, unlike shooting rockets down the hall. It can even put them on the backfoot as they don't want to step in the fire so end up on the defensive in your hangars (less good if they are psi aliens that don't care about distance). You can then keep pushing them back and sniping a few every turn before retreating safely in side rooms.
- Influence where aliens go. Ever thought "This would be a perfect sniping position for an alien"? Set it on fire and it ain't that good any more, as far as the aliens are concerned. You could put smoke there, since aliens only shoot at what they can see, but if you do, you can't see the alien either (and they can still throw grenades).. I like to put a proxy grenade in places I don't want aliens to go to, but if one goes there and dies, I prefer setting the place on fire to deter any other, since putting another proxy would destroy the loot if triggered.
The advantage is mostly preserving loot while damaging aliens, which is very relevant in some mods (Piratez!) and always good for your balance.
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Arthanor explained it very well : Fire is a weapon of terrain control. It robs your opponent of defensive positions and mobility, and this can save more lives than raw damage.
In terrains like the UFO farm land, fire is devastating.
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I'm aware of the potential tactical applications of incendiaries.
The problem is that outside of illumination, and the very early game, they are completely impractical and ineffective, unless you like spamming the hell out of the end turn button and using far too much of it.
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Late game where mutants appear and ethereals floating makes fire less appealing
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You guys need to try the flamethrower mods if you think fire can't do damage. It is a great way to use incendiary damage to kill things in a different way (ignore armor and reliably deal a small amount of damage many times). It is a great weapon against cyberdiscs and gazers (cyclops in Piratez).
Otherwise, yeah, sure, fire is not a great end game weapon (if you don't use flamethrowers, which are at least decent mid/late game weapons). What's so bad about that? Move on and use a different technology...
There's no great end game ap weapon either in vanilla xcom, and even mods like the gauss ones will never be great against mutons, unless jacked up with different ammo or crazy raw damage numbers (which would make them too good against other aliens). In fact, mutons are a great counter to early game tech (ap and fire) since they are very resistant to the first, and have so much HP that it would take forever for even a flamethrower to damage them. I think that makes sense. They are the elite of the alien invaders, after all.
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It makes you wonder thought why they have resistance to ap.By the time of snake men you have lasers why should you ever use ap?
For the forgoten cannon tank in your base?
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It makes you wonder thought why they have resistance to ap.By the time of snake men you have lasers why should you ever use ap?
For the forgoten cannon tank in your base?
I guess Mutons don't care what you have. They do what they want. :P
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fire is more of a tactical tool than a weapon.
it provides light, smoke, and aliens will avoid walking through/into it if they can. you can use it to influence their pathing and create choke points, forcing them into well lit killzones.
that is worth more than damage alone.
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fire is more of a tactical tool than a weapon.
it provides light, smoke, and aliens will avoid walking through/into it if they can. you can use it to influence their pathing and create choke points, forcing them into well lit killzones.
that is worth more than damage alone.
Or you know just auto shot them in vanilla terms
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I'm finding incendiary weapons are less useful in OpenXcom than the OG due to side-effects of incendiary-related bugfixes, even when played straight without abuse.
For example, the funky fire bug: When hitting a unit with more fire while it's already standing in fire, damage per hit was increased (effectively doubled? Not sure). This also increased the value of incendiary rockets when used in combination with auto-cannons and heavy cannons (first hit a building or area with the incendiary rocket to cover the area, then fire autocannon and cannon at it to add more fuel to the fire). It was an interesting combo which doesn't work well-enough anymore.
The other is when zombies killed by fire wouldn't spawn a chrysalid. That alone was worth bringing a couple autocannons with me way past their normal shelf-life, which was more interesting than not bringing them.
Since these mainly de-value autocannon incendiary rounds (and by extension the autocannon itself to some extent), I personally mod them to a weigh 2 pounds less than explosive rounds (so 3 instead of 5) -- otherwise I'd simply never bring incendiary rounds (I play with the 80 item limit on skyrangers turned on). I also reduce the weight of incendiary rockets and heavy cannon rounds by the same amount, but I tend not to use them much anymore regardless.
I'm considering doubling the armor damage multiplier for all aliens vs fire.
Smoke's stun damage also becomes kinda meaningless without the funky fire bug (for both xcom troops and aliens -- my unarmored troops can stay in smoke the whole battle, every battle), so I think that should be doubled (or maybe tripled or higher, but it would be hard to simulate this by just increasing this by a flat amount) as well -- I just don't know how.
The bugs were worth removing, despite the cost. It's just that I think we lost some of the offensive effectiveness of smoke and fire tactics along the way, and I'd like to get them back because they were fun. I'd like to have the effects of the funky fire bug back, if they can be made to apply logically rather than affecting the whole map, because when played straight without abuse it made incendiary weapons a viable alternative to other weapons in a way that was different than simply increasing the damage (albeit highly situational, which is fine). I liked how fire was the only good way to kill a zombie, too, and I miss having to move my own units out of smoked areas or risk falling unconscious.
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For example, the funky fire bug: When hitting a unit with more fire while it's already standing in fire, damage per hit was increased (effectively doubled? Not sure). This also increased the value of incendiary rockets when used in combination with auto-cannons and heavy cannons (first hit a building or area with the incendiary rocket to cover the area, then fire autocannon and cannon at it to add more fuel to the fire). It was an interesting combo which doesn't work well-enough anymore.
That bug actually caused units standing in the fire taking damage whenever you fired an incendiary, regardless if you hit them or not. Fire mechanics are good IMO, just vanilla has little use for it (with how easily you can access high-damage weapons - incendiaries would be the best starting weapons against Cyberdiscs, for instance, if you had no access to Rocket Launcher). So it's a question of game balance, not "wrong" mechanics. I didn't use the fire when playing OG at all (except for night missions), simply since I didn't know about this bug and assumed incendiaries worked just like they work in OXCom now. I don't think 'win through finding & exploiting bugs' is my way.