Messages

106

Suggestions / Re: Should the AI consider enemy range and partial cover?

« on: February 01, 2020, 12:55:08 am »

100% sniper-spotter AI is exactly what the player gets. Yes it's absurd, and that's why megamods heavily nerf firing on enemies you can't see, which allows sniper AIs to actually help their ally without being OP. The most cheaty thing the AI does is "intelligence" where it automatically knows where you are a few turns after spotting you.

107

Suggestions / Re: Should the AI consider enemy range and partial cover?

« on: January 31, 2020, 11:25:50 pm »

Alright alright, I've done more testing and it's pretty darn negligible 

I'm will try to fork and add modding capabilities for:

• "Unrealistic" XCOM2 style multiplicative accuracy reduction penalties when firing against an enemy who's right next to cover facing firer's direction and AI accounting for it.
• AI knowing that the unit panicked and so is not a threat.

Is forking OXCE to add modding capabilities common practice? People do it for event hooks.

I do think it's reasonable that the AI should know the player panicked, because it's pretty easy to tell even without the screen. But sure it should be a mod feature.

108

Suggestions / Re: Should the AI consider enemy range and partial cover?

« on: January 31, 2020, 11:10:44 pm »

That's very difficult with the constantly recentering camera. Still I'll keep trying and let you know if I succeed.

109

Suggestions / Re: Should the AI consider enemy range and partial cover?

« on: January 31, 2020, 10:52:39 pm »

try ctrl w to "warp" the selected unit to the cursor position in debug mode.

How do I select an enemy?

110

Offtopic / Re: Phoenix Point

« on: January 31, 2020, 10:41:08 pm »

The balance is terrible, terrible, terrible. I'll play in a year when it's not about alphastriking 20 enemies a turn, and they have actual upgrades rather than one gun being universally OP and aliens just becoming uber-meatshields.

It did not reasonably fulfill its core promise of an adaptive AI. Geoscape is one giant lootbox, there's no actual "4x" gameplay, which is okay.

I think it has a lot of  potential as the abilities are very fun. Oh yeah, manual aiming is awesome and adds way more to the game than one would think.

111

Suggestions / Re: Should the AI consider enemy range and partial cover?

« on: January 31, 2020, 10:36:13 pm »

1/ AI doesn't know how much TUs your units have and how far can they go... knowing it (without mind probe) would be cheating

Fair enough, they could make a reasonable assumption by taking (minTU+maxTU)/2 using the stats for the class. But overall I don't think it would be a huge impact.

2a/ aliens can't "hulldown"

Everyone can hulldown on hills by walking to the spot where they can just barely peek over the hill to shoot at an enemy. Even tanks, which cannot crouch. That is why it is called hulldown. This is VERY effective cover, in a good position maybe 40% of shots hit the hill. I would like to be able to teleport enemies in debug mode to test exactly how effective this is though, any way to do that?

Probably the most reasonable counterargument to adding this is that even with the current code the AI is still more likely to enter a "hulldown" position with the rational that some of the enemies are totally obstructed, which is better than no enemies being obstructed.

2b/ "light cover" is (for practical purposes) no cover in xcom

Correct, except as outlined by 2a above. But I could implement it by making spread non-binary. Doing that would be an easy way to allow modders to add balance light cover, which I see as a huge improvement. However it's pointless if the AI doesn't understand it, hence one of the motivations for this thread.

Instead of adding spread, it could also take a less "realistic" approach like XCOM2 where shooting through a space with cover (even if not hitting the cover) gives a flat accuracy reduction. But that's somewhat besides the point.

112

Suggestions / Re: Spawn multiple objects/soldiers/craft after research.

« on: January 31, 2020, 02:32:11 am »

It looks like you can just mention the item multiple times. If not, just have the research give an item that can be used to manufacture all those items.

113

Suggestions / Re: Should the AI consider enemy range and partial cover?

« on: January 31, 2020, 02:28:16 am »

It does need an engine modification to work though.

114

Suggestions / Should the AI consider enemy range and partial cover?

« on: January 31, 2020, 12:54:25 am »

There are some very smart things about the AI like not giving away ally positions. But after digging through AIModule.cpp I can safely conclude that the AI only looks at whether it can spot enemies/allies. It doesn't consider

• That a melee enemy can't even reach it this turn
• That it could enter a "hulldown" or "light cover" position.
• That a panicked enemy isn't a threat.

I propose that when an AI unit tries to take cover, instead of an enemy counting as 0 or 1 spotters, it should be able to count as a fraction of a spotter if one of the following is true:

• The enemy will need to spend TUs to get within maximum attack range or pull out a weapon. It should count as (max((dist+enemyTU)/enemyMaxRange, enemyQuickdrawTUs/enemyTUs, 0.25)) spotters.
• The AI unit's body is partially obscured ("hulldown" "light cover")from the enemy. Trace rays from the enemy to a random part of the AI, if some of these rays hit a wall, it's partially obscured and so should count as maybe 0.6 spotters, or spotters proportionate to how many rays didn't hit a wall but that's higher performance costs.
• The enemy is panicked. It should count as 0 spotters.

The AI also might want to consider prioritizing shots on targets that are not partially obscured. This will be especially important if cover is buffed by giving it an accuracy reduction even if its model is not physically touched, which is what I've been trying to do today. Adding light cover is pretty pointless if the AI doesn't use it. This could be a fun addition to the game which makes the AI not just stand there and get slaughtered by shotgunners. Or it could simply be too much work or too non-vanilla, let me know.

115

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 1.0.2: Judgement Day

« on: December 03, 2019, 01:06:57 am »

No he's right, psiclone is really the only easy way to get a Cool Gadget around the same time you get a Strange Creature.  Otherwise you're waiting quite a while, and All Staff Recruited is absolutely necessary for midgame progression. It's not something that is very harmful to gameplay, basically just one more random factor, so I wouldn't call it a balance problem. It is mildly disappointing that out of that huge list only one item really matters.

116

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 0.9.9e2: Summertime Lovin'

« on: October 01, 2019, 05:57:21 pm »

Sol, RNG in combat is a little more useful because it changes your plan. Whereas victory points lossage tends to just make you lose. A rule of thumb is that the earlier in the game the RNG happens and the more you can pre-plan for it, the fairer it is. Personally I think a little VP RNG would actually be mechanically good for XCOM, as it prevents bean-counting whether you'll make it to the next month. Either way <0.1% of games will be lost by this. It would still be <2% even if it was -1000 points imo, because you tend to lose only after most of your soldiers are dead. Now if there was an RNG chance to lose a base, that would really suck. Then again vanilla practically does that, base defenses are not a fun way to go out.

117

Help / Re: Max soldiers and Aliens in a game map.

« on: September 13, 2019, 11:48:31 pm »

Taken literally, the game is  one unit per tile. So a 50x50x5 block can have 12500 units 

It really does vary depending on game design. But generally "mid range" is regarded as about 12 blocks. So if you have more than 1 per 10x10, there will be a lot of splash damage and CQB.

118

The X-Com Files / Re: Minigun seems OP

« on: September 03, 2019, 02:45:58 pm »

@Hexhammer

Unfortunately Xfiles has a much much higher TTK so "just stand still and shoot" strategies are overly dominant. Also the minigum appears waaaaay before the blaster (does the blaster appear at all?)

119

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 0.9.9e2: Summertime Lovin'

« on: August 30, 2019, 01:45:26 am »

I know they do but they can't be reduced to leaving the council by relations AFAIK, so it's not as big of a deal. In fairness I should have mentioned that.

120

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 0.9.9e2: Summertime Lovin'

« on: August 29, 2019, 06:49:30 pm »

Tbf the scoring system is pretty shit. Flat score, which gets converted to a random % raise, which has the illusion of being tied to separate countries? No thank you. Every other XCOM-like does scoring differently from the original (see Xenonauts where UFO flyovers directly reduce income per second), because it's shit. But implementing a new system while keeping the former in OpenXCOM (and compatibility with the various rules that interact with it) sounds like a very difficult task, even for Meridian (which btw he would certainly never do).