TU usage as absolute, not relative

[richardhead]

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.

[ohartenstein23]

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.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

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.

[The_Funktasm]

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.

[Abyss]

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

[The Reaver of Darkness]

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.

[richardhead]

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.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

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

[richardhead]

 I've never seen a place for those types of definitions, on weapons and such. Is that a thing in the extended version?

[The Reaver of Darkness]

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.