OpenXcom Forum

OpenXcom => Suggestions => Topic started by: ReCurse on November 08, 2013, 09:15:37 pm

Title: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: ReCurse on November 08, 2013, 09:15:37 pm
So this is a long shot, i´m not sure about it myself, but maybe someone else has a better view on the implications...

What would be, if the TU consumption (e.g. for firing a weapon) weren't relative to the maximum TUs a unit has, but an absolute value.
It strikes me that even if a soldier has way more TUs than average, all he can do is walk further (Well and more inventory re-arrangement).
Why not fire more often or throw more stuff?
Of course there are a lot ways to interprete TUs in a round based game, but it makes sense that "has a lot of TUs" means just "is faster".
That should imo apply to everything, not just walking.

Balancing should not be a problem (in terms of possible, not saying it requires no work).
Now lets not even stop there, since there are other stats, that can be included... :)
Lets say a soldier with 50 in firing skills takes 40 TUs for an aimed shot with an autocannon.
A soldier with 75 on firing skills may just aim faster and just use 35 TUs, so it may be possible, if he´s got really good stats he can fire aimed twice.
(left aside that autoshot would probably be better in this case :P)
Same may go for about any other action.

So, how about it?
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Sharp on November 08, 2013, 09:55:56 pm
Well TU's is more representative of movement speed not just quick reflexes (which would come under reactions).

Put it this way, give the same rifle to a fat slob of a soldier and a lean mean athlete, both should still fire at a similar rate because the limitation is the weapon not how fast they move. That being said there are certain items which are better for high TU person like using motion scanner and medkit which are flat-costs I believe.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Warboy1982 on November 08, 2013, 11:33:03 pm
there's a flatRate field in item definitions for exactly this purpose.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Man in the Funny Hat on November 09, 2013, 08:28:02 pm
I remember having brought this up in some forum many years ago.  I had realized that more TU's didn't change your rates of fire or the like because they were all percentages of your available TU's and not fixed amounts. The only thing more TU's actually got you was more movement.  Nobody grasped the idea and they thought I was delusional.
"You might be able to eventually run clear across the map in a turn but if all you do is pull the trigger you'll never fire even one more shot no matter how many TU's you start with."
"What?  Of course you can shoot more - you have more TU's!"
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Sharp on November 10, 2013, 12:15:02 am
"What?  Of course you can shoot more - you have more TU's!"

That sounds pretty silly especially as the costs in the ufopaedia specifically state %costs and not flat amounts., maybe they were trolling.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: ReCurse on November 10, 2013, 01:44:37 am
yes, that is the point... ^^
firing one shot of a laser pistol costs like 30% of your available TUs, no matter if they´re just enough to walk 2 steps or 2 times across the map.
This does seem kinda silly to me.
(And reminds me of Windows Vista, always takes up 60% of the available RAM, no matter how much there is available ;) )
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Shadow on November 10, 2013, 08:07:54 pm
I agree with Sharp in that TU use percentages are supposed to represent the technical limitations of the items a soldier is using, and that their physical stats have no bearing on the weapon's speed.

I don't find it silly at all. A more athletic trooper won't make his rifle's bullets fly faster. A weapon needs a fixed amount of time to fire a fixed amount of bullets, and whether the soldier could run 20 or 50 metres in the same time doesn't change that fact. Yes, you could say a more experienced shooter can achieve the same accuracy as a lesser one faster, but X-COM opts for simply making skilled marksmen more precise. A mod implementing a system in which you can trade TUs for accuracy and viceversa would be neat, but quite the task.

Still, if you want to experiment, you could make a custom ruleset, set all the battlescape items to flatRate: true, tinker with various fixed TU values and see what happens. I can't promise the AI will adapt flawlessly: not sure how its logic works in this regard, but in a couple of previous occasions I've found out it plans around saving percentages of their TU reserves, as opposed to fixed figures.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Qpoter on November 10, 2013, 08:46:30 pm
I think the best system would be (and I'm sure this has been posted before) one in which Auto Shots have a high % cost but a low fixed cost (limited by rate of fire, but not much aiming necessary), Snap Shots have a medium % and fixed cost (slight rate of fire handicap, some aiming time), and Aimed Shots have a non-existent % cost but a high fixed cost (the rate of fire of the weapon in question would have a negligible effect if one at all with a carefully aimed shot, but a lot of manual aiming time is necessary).

This is also my first post, hooray!
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: xracer on November 13, 2013, 03:34:20 am
Hello all i had thought about this long ago and had posted about it somehwere else,

I thought that training was a good solution for all this request.
Allow for training in specific weapons type
such as pistols (handgun) rifle (assault weapons) and heavy (heavy :S)
as a unit improves in training a small percentage of the TU can be "discounted"
lets say
lvl1: novice training 1% training time: 1 week
lvl2: -----              3%                 : 2 weeks
lvl3: ---                 5%                 : 3 weeks
.                           7%
.                           9%
.                           11%
 
lvl 10:----              19%                 : 10 weeks

or something like that or keep a system that tracks the unit and after using a weapon for a long time your proficiency on said weapon increases. so it is considered "field training"

I mean it is true that as you get more proficient with a weapon its time usage diminishes, which from personal experience it is true.

Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Sharp on November 13, 2013, 12:53:29 pm
I mean it is true that as you get more proficient with a weapon its time usage diminishes, which from personal experience it is true.

Yes but your hiring soldiers, not untrained civvies. You don't need a lot of specialised training to pull a trigger so while proficency with a weapon decreases how long it takes to use it, it is a very short ramp to a plateau, a guy with a week's experience of firing a rifle will probably fire just as quickly as someone with a year, accuracy on the other hand is a different factor and that is sort of simulated in the game anyway that a high accuracy soldier can fire a snap shot while a low accuracy soldier fires an aimed shot but both can have similar to hit chance.
---

I think the best system would be (and I'm sure this has been posted before) one in which Auto Shots have a high % cost but a low fixed cost (limited by rate of fire, but not much aiming necessary), Snap Shots have a medium % and fixed cost (slight rate of fire handicap, some aiming time), and Aimed Shots have a non-existent % cost but a high fixed cost (the rate of fire of the weapon in question would have a negligible effect if one at all with a carefully aimed shot, but a lot of manual aiming time is necessary).

This is also my first post, hooray!

Hybrid costs are interesting, but still having flat costs puts the low TU soldiers at unreasonable disadvantage, just because you don't run very fast doesn't mean you can't shoot just as quickly as someone else. The way TU's work in the game with % costs make it so that anything with a flat TU cost implies movement speed is a factor, like moving soldiers and crouching or even using certain items (not sure why Psi-Amp is fixed cost though), flat TU cost indicate soldier speed while % TU costs indicate the action takes a fixed amount of time in the round.

It takes maybe 3 seconds for a soldier to fire an aimed shot with a rifle but in those 3 seconds soldier A might only be able to run 5m while soldier B might be able to run 10m, and soldier C might be able to run 30m but all those soldiers will still take 3 seconds to fire an aimed shot so %TU costs for shooting is fine with flat TU cost for moving.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: ReCurse on November 13, 2013, 11:37:43 pm
as expected, a lot of different and valid views on that :)
what got me thinking about this first time was actually decades ago in the original game. i had a guy that was that well trained, he had actually enough health to survive a direct blaster shot, not kidding (was like a year in the hospital after that ^^).
enough TUs to run about anywhere on the map, so completely OP and ridiculously superhuman. but no matter what, he could not fire more than anyone else, out of a fully automatic weapon...
so, a new thought on that:
if TUs are the measurement of the speed of a unit and each round has the same duration (in ingame time)...
then anything that could be trained to do it faster would have a fixed TU cost, since TUs get more for an experienced unit and it can do it more often then.
but anything that is limited by pure time or the used equipment (e.g. scanner, non-automatic weapon, etc) would use a percentage based TU cost, so it´d never be possible more often, no matter how fast the unit is.
that may probably be interesting just to see in a test ruleset...
someone did mention that it might do funny stuff with the AI, but since their units can't get any more TUs, it might be easy just to balance the fixed costs on the percentages they´re reserving.
would probably be interesting to have the aliens get increased TU count later in game anyway ^^
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Qpoter on November 14, 2013, 04:38:26 am
Hybrid costs are interesting, but still having flat costs puts the low TU soldiers at unreasonable disadvantage, just because you don't run very fast doesn't mean you can't shoot just as quickly as someone else. The way TU's work in the game with % costs make it so that anything with a flat TU cost implies movement speed is a factor, like moving soldiers and crouching or even using certain items (not sure why Psi-Amp is fixed cost though), flat TU cost indicate soldier speed while % TU costs indicate the action takes a fixed amount of time in the round.

It takes maybe 3 seconds for a soldier to fire an aimed shot with a rifle but in those 3 seconds soldier A might only be able to run 5m while soldier B might be able to run 10m, and soldier C might be able to run 30m but all those soldiers will still take 3 seconds to fire an aimed shot so %TU costs for shooting is fine with flat TU cost for moving.

On some level I agree with you, but flat cost in my post refers to aiming time, not firing. I don't think the disadvantage would be that steep. Sluggish soldiers or rookies with low TUs will take more time to raise their weapon and align their sights, that sort of thing; whereas comparatively agile soldiers will acquire their target faster.

An unintentional effect I did not note will be that low TU troops will tend to use Auto and Snap more than Aimed since they're % based and therefore less TUs. This basically makes the Aimed Shot the 'best' shot level with high TUs. Shots are supposed to be valuable based on the tactical situation, and not just plain better.

EDIT: No TU solution is perfect. I'd actually like it if many different systems alongside the default one were implemented as advanced options.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: xracer on November 14, 2013, 06:34:00 am
Yes but your hiring soldiers, not untrained civvies. You don't need a lot of specialised training to pull a trigger so while proficency with a weapon decreases how long it takes to use it, it is a very short ramp to a plateau, a guy with a week's experience of firing a rifle will probably fire just as quickly as someone with a year, accuracy on the other hand is a different factor and that is sort of simulated in the game anyway that a high accuracy soldier can fire a snap shot while a low accuracy soldier fires an aimed shot but both can have similar to hit chance.

although I agree we are not hiring civies, the level of training for a specialization varies drastically, learning how to shoot and shooting the same weapon for a year, 2 years or so makes a huge difference, however the law of diminishing returns does apply.

Shooting a weapon is not just lifting your weapon and pulling the trigger as you say, we are talking about actual shooting, reaction, sight alignment, sight picture, trigger control, an individual with a lot of training with a weapon will shot more accurately and faster that an individual with little or no training, i can tell you this as it took me about 2 years to be come an expert marksman, able to hit 9 out 10 target at 1000 yards within 3 minutes.

Although maybe we can agree to give a range value to make it sort of random, so instead of making 2% increase make it 1-3% range and allow an RNG to assign a value.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: ReCurse on November 14, 2013, 03:46:25 pm
Yes but your hiring soldiers, not untrained civvies.
judging from the hit ratio of rookies, are you sure about that? ;)
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Camalex97 on November 14, 2013, 07:41:52 pm
judging from the hit ratio of rookies, are you sure about that? ;)

i'd blame the gun, there is no way you can say its perfectly fine and leaving the barrel 90 degrees to the left!
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: richardhead on December 29, 2018, 06:09:26 am
So  you hire a soldier with 60 TUs.  It takes him 45 or so for an aimed shot. So you edit his TU's to, say, 140, and suddenly firing the weapon costs more TUs than he originally had? like 79?  This makes no sense whatsoever to me.  It makes TU's completely irrelevant, since a soldier with 140 TUs will not be able to fire any more shots than a soldier with 60. They CAN cover a little more ground since movement is flatrated, but big woop.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: ohartenstein23 on December 29, 2018, 07:09:12 am
Having that extra movement is super helpful - it's very noticeable in mods that have soldiers with extra TUs. I think it would be terribly unbalanced and doesn't make much sense to have things like firing be flat costs, but fortunately you can mod whether or not they are if you want.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: The Reaver of Darkness on December 29, 2018, 12:43:03 pm
I actually feel that time units is one of the most important soldier attributes even when it grows so little over a soldier's career. Rising from 55 to 80 makes a bigger difference than bumping strength up from 25 to 50. I've never had a problem giving a soldier just a gun and nothing else, provided they can run and shoot.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: The_Funktasm on December 29, 2018, 10:19:16 pm
I don't take issue with the way time units work, though I suppose minor bonuses to some activities for higher rank soldiers would be fair.

Perhaps they can't squeeze off a burst of gunfire extra per turn but they may save enough TU on each shot to still retreat if they miss, or perform equipment operations like reloads that have much more room for improvement than aiming and shooting speed.

Maybe a 1% reduction in TU cost per level of soldier rank, where it peaks at one of the early-to-middle ranks with a 2% reduction. There can be only one commander at a time, and they would have the most reduction at 7%.

For someone to perform an action with a TU cost of 40 they would instead expend 37 units with this bonus maxed out. The longer an action the more benefit, and the shorter one is the less likely there's any difference.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: Abyss on January 22, 2019, 11:51:22 am
The TU flattening makes more sense in the case of aimed fire for it may abide the formula of AFC = Flat X + K*TotalTU

Example for 60 TU guy
AFC = 25 +0,25*60 = 40
For 100 TU guy
AFC = 25 +0,25*100 = 50
Which enables two aimed shots in the same direction

Say, the flat number represents the aim time and the variable represents all other manipulations - raise and fire.

But the question is - would someone bother determining TU costs for all that variety of weapons AND would Reaver count it purposeful in his Firing mod
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: The Reaver of Darkness on January 25, 2019, 08:43:57 am
The above is a good way to try to represent realism in the game, but I don't think it's important for the gameplay. It's more complicated than it's worth, and in the end if you actually go to all of the effort to design the system, modders using it must spend extra effort designing and testing every single new firearm, and players need to spend more time learning to understand the more complicated system, all just to represent the way that in real life, the time it takes to make an aimed shot scales less than the speed of the person but more than zero.

I think it's also missing that a person's athletic speed may not be very strongly connected to the speed at which they make fine adjustments.

In the end, what little variances you have between real life variation and in-game variation easily fall into the trough of myriad variations in all the other minutiae such as how aimed shot time is affected by lung capacity or even the type of boots the soldier is wearing. I say it's neither worth pursuing for realism nor for gameplay. Instead, keeping small variations in time units between soldiers (realistic) reduces the discrepancy anyway.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: richardhead on February 07, 2019, 10:20:40 pm
at any rate, altering the % of TU required to take a shot should be an option.  I think there should just  be a maximum number.  like, the TU cost of firing scales up to the game regular maximum.  The highest TU an aquanaut can start with is what? 80? So a sonic rifle requires 60 for an aimed shot at max, it should also require 60 TUs for a guy with 999 TUs. Clearly you are already cheating...let the guy fire multiple times.  Right now, I can MC 10 aliens in one round but can only fire my weapon once. That's crazy.
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: The Reaver of Darkness on February 08, 2019, 08:49:57 pm
I find that better trained soldiers can elect to use less accurate shots and in that way are able to shoot effectively more times in a turn.

But just setting the shots to flat rate TU cost should work fine for anyone who feels that a faster soldier should be able to shoot faster. A good example of a weapon that should be fired faster by a soldier with more time units: anything hand-operated, such as a bow/crossbow, thrown knives/axes, pump-action BB gun, even a bolt-action rifle.

So a sonic rifle requires 60 for an aimed shot at max, it should also require 60 TUs for a guy with 999 TUs.
You can do this by setting the weapon accordingly:
tuAimed: 60
flatRate: true
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: richardhead on February 13, 2019, 04:52:10 am
 I've never seen a place for those types of definitions, on weapons and such. Is that a thing in the extended version?
Title: Re: TU usage as absolute, not relative
Post by: The Reaver of Darkness on February 13, 2019, 05:18:53 pm
I've never seen a place for those types of definitions, on weapons and such. Is that a thing in the extended version?

It's right in the items section.

Original Heavy Plasma:
Code: [Select]
  - type: STR_HEAVY_PLASMA
    requires:
      - STR_HEAVY_PLASMA
    size: 0.2
    costSell: 171600
    weight: 8
    bigSprite: 30
    floorSprite: 29
    handSprite: 40
    bulletSprite: 8
    fireSound: 18
    compatibleAmmo:
      - STR_HEAVY_PLASMA_CLIP
    accuracyAuto: 50
    accuracySnap: 75
    accuracyAimed: 110
    tuAuto: 35
    tuSnap: 30
    tuAimed: 60
    battleType: 1
    twoHanded: true
    invWidth: 2
    invHeight: 3
    recoveryPoints: 5
    armor: 50


Altered to have flat rate TU cost:
Code: [Select]
  - type: STR_HEAVY_PLASMA
    requires:
      - STR_HEAVY_PLASMA
    size: 0.2
    costSell: 171600
    weight: 8
    bigSprite: 30
    floorSprite: 29
    handSprite: 40
    bulletSprite: 8
    fireSound: 18
    compatibleAmmo:
      - STR_HEAVY_PLASMA_CLIP
    accuracyAuto: 50
    accuracySnap: 75
    accuracyAimed: 110
    tuAuto: 35
    tuSnap: 30
    tuAimed: 60
    flatRate: true
    battleType: 1
    twoHanded: true
    invWidth: 2
    invHeight: 3
    recoveryPoints: 5
    armor: 50

All I did was add flatRate: true anywhere into the definition of the weapon.