[Suggestion] Counter civilian stunning exploit

[Delian]

It often happens that "pro" players use a tactic where, in missions that involve civilians, like terror missions, they stun civilians so that aliens wouldn't attack and kill them.

I suggest modifying, or adding an option to modify alien AI in the following way: If the player stunned any civilians (check the battlefield if there exists any unconscious civilian units where the last his was from the player), it triggers a change in alien behavior in a way that they (the ones with ranged attacks) start attacking downed civilians. Not sure about the AI priorities, but attacking the bodies should become an option for the AI.

In other words, if aliens shoot a civilian and the civilian lives, then all is good and the behavior stays the same. But if player does that, then aliens start cheating and attacking downed civilians.

Hmm. Maybe it would also be a good idea to change the civilian AI so that it would be a bit more fearful of aliens. So that this counter wouldn't be too detrimental to the normal gameplay.

[eclecticbibliophile]

The only way to tell the difference between a corpse and an unconscious unit is to stand over it and check the inventory (barring mod added indicators), so aliens knowing from a distance feels out of place to me. And if they could, why would they distinguish between who knocked them out?

[Delian]

There's another way to tell the difference between a corpse and an unconscious unit. It's called "basic logic".
1. When units are killed, they scream, and when they're knocked out, they don't. So based on this, aliens could tell who was stunned and who wasn't.
2. Aliens have a theoretical power called "memory". They can remember who they already killed and who they didn't. So if they suddenly spot a civilian body who they remember that they haven't killed yet, well, that's pretty sus, isn't it?
3. Mod indicators. If players are allowed to see the zzz signs, then why wouldn't aliens? It's kinda obvious that if a civilian body isn't lying in a pool of blood that they aren't quite dead yet hehe

So the way I see it, it makes a lot of sense that aliens, who are on a mission to kill civilians, would know that they need to kill both conscious and unconscious civilians to complete their mission.

Anyway, the distinguish of who knocked them out is for the purpose of keeping original behavior in case the player isn't using the exploit.

[Nord]

Hardest part will be - to teach AI to attack an item. Because unconscious people are items, not units.
Much easier will be mod, giving negative score value for inconscious civilians, as it is for dead ones.

[N7Kopper]

Hardest part will be - to teach AI to attack an item. Because unconscious people are items, not units.
Much easier will be mod, giving negative score value for inconscious civilians, as it is for dead ones.

I prefer the exploits being a part of the game (for UFO and TFTD at least) - it wouldn't have been too difficult to program Terror Missions to lose you a minimum of 1000 points on mission failure even in the original DOS engine. It could have been hardcoded: IF mission_status = fail OR abort AND mission_id = terror AND points_lost <1000 THEN points_lost = 1000. Imagine TFTD without being able to bail out of Lobsterman terror missions before you even have the Not Small Launcher or the drills researched. The difference between an exploit and an intended advanced strategy can be as simple as a developer realising something and leaving it in, like Melee's Wavedash.

As for mods, a better approach may be to make the civilians more like Fire Emblem green units, and balance the aliens around them actively supporting X-Com in the fight. That said, an optional AI behaviour to execute or capture downed enemies ("Civilians" are player-allied AI) could be very useful. Imagine Mutons smart enough to pick up unconscious X-Com units and drag them away somewhere so they're no threat when they revive. (And maybe mission failure or abort leading to MIA units could spawn Retaliation battleships if your guys are psi-weak enough!) After all, the aliens want to capture unconscious units as much as X-Com do, at least story-wise.

[Yankes]

I do not know if this is good suggestion, you can't control Civ and then are only big lability, at least now you have race to who reach them first.
Adding this make stunning pointless and guarantee that most of civilians will die and remove strategic options for player.

[Meridian]

I don't really have anything relevant to add to this discussion, just a small thought: if I was an intergalactic alien horde, civilians and xcom are both just "civilians" to me (or "hairless apes" if you wish), I don't care who gets plasmified.

[Delian]

I do not know if this is good suggestion, you can't control Civ and then are only big lability, at least now you have race to who reach them first.
Adding this make stunning pointless and guarantee that most of civilians will die and remove strategic options for player.

Well yeah, the whole purpose of civilians is that they're supposed to be a liability. You're supposed to be aggressive and take risks to save them as fast as possible. Stunning isn't a "strategic option", it's an exploit and you know it. If anything, stunning civilians removes strategy from the game. Instead of having to carefully advance and position your units, and cover civilians, you simply stun them, no risk at all. Well, even if this suggestion was implemented, you'd still be able to stun civilians and drag them to a safe spot, so it wouldn't be pointless.

Anyway, it would be useful to get the opinion of the mod makers on this matter.

[psavola]

Well yeah, the whole purpose of civilians is that they're supposed to be a liability. You're supposed to be aggressive and take risks to save them as fast as possible. Stunning isn't a "strategic option", it's an exploit and you know it. If anything, stunning civilians removes strategy from the game. Instead of having to carefully advance and position your units, and cover civilians, you simply stun them, no risk at all. Well, even if this suggestion was implemented, you'd still be able to stun civilians and drag them to a safe spot, so it wouldn't be pointless.

Anyway, it would be useful to get the opinion of the mod makers on this matter.

Another way to address this issue could be to give negative points for stunned civilians (possibly less negative than killed one). I don't know if you can do that already, but I suspect that should be possible. That should give the modders a chance to defeat the strategy. Or alternatively, make civilians susceptible to high stun, so that they could die as a result of being stunned.

[krautbernd]

Well yeah, the whole purpose of civilians is that they're supposed to be a liability. You're supposed to be aggressive and take risks to save them as fast as possible. Stunning isn't a "strategic option", it's an exploit and you know it. If anything, stunning civilians removes strategy from the game. Instead of having to carefully advance and position your units, and cover civilians, you simply stun them, no risk at all. Well, even if this suggestion was implemented, you'd still be able to stun civilians and drag them to a safe spot, so it wouldn't be pointless.

Anyway, it would be useful to get the opinion of the mod makers on this matter.

The easiest way to "address" this "exploit" is for people who think this a big issue to simply refrain from stunning civilians. You're literally complaining that people "are using an exploit" and your solution is to add....and option for people who don't want to use this "exploit"?

If you want civilians to be "a liability" you are free to treat them as such. Your "pro-players" are also free to do so. I see absolutely no reason to add this option to the game, because it's "usefulness" directly depends on players wanting to use said "exploit". It's also kind of interesting that you're complaining about aliens not killing stunned civilians instead aliens not killing stunned soldiers.

[Delian]

give negative points for stunned civilians

If the player is not using the exploit and aliens stun civilians, then this solution would punish the player, so I'm not sure if this is a good solution. Basically, the player would only have to get negative score if the player was the one that stunned a civilian, even if the civilian was later destunned with the usage of destun items. I don't think this can be modded. I also don't know how high susceptability would be possible.

You're literally complaining that people "are using an exploit" and your solution is to add....and option for people who don't want to use this "exploit"?

I wrote "I suggest modifying, or adding an option". So as far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly fine if this isn't an option but a permanent change to standard behavior.
As for the option, you seem to be misunderstanding this. The point of the option isn't for players to change it. It's so that mod authors can lock it in their mods. Similar to "UFO Extender Accuracy" or "Instant grenades", it's for the mod authors to decide whether such an option would be balanced in their mods or not.

you're complaining about aliens not killing stunned civilians instead aliens not killing stunned soldiers.

Hmm, that's an interesting idea... I like it! But it's irrelevant to this topic It's also a bit more complicated with soldiers.

[krautbernd]

I wrote "I suggest modifying, or adding an option". So as far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly fine if this isn't an option but a permanent change to standard behavior.

Yeah no, that's outright not going to happen. At that point you might as well shelf the suggestion entirely.

As for the option, you seem to be misunderstanding this. The point of the option isn't for players to change it. It's so that mod authors can lock it in their mods. Similar to "UFO Extender Accuracy" or "Instant grenades", it's for the mod authors to decide whether such an option would be balanced in their mods or not.

That still begs the question what the option would actually achieve that existing options don't, such as giving a penalty for stunned civilians.

"But what if aliens stun civilians" - I honestly don't remember aliens ever stunning civilians during terror missions, and given your justification it doesn't make sense either: If the primary goal of aliens is to kill, why would they use stun weapons to begin with? I just remember a lot of dead civvies tbh. If that's such an issue make them immune to stun damage or give them a high stun recovery rate instead. Achieves basically the same thing because it makes stunning civilians pointless.

I don't see anything that justifies the time and effort this would probably take to implement and balance, if the simple solution is just for the player to refrain from stunning civilians. This would be another matter if civilians were actually player controlled or not moving more or less randomly, but they are enough of a liability to begin with.

And "locking" mod options isn't really a thing. It's more of a suggestion. Mod authors don't get to decide what players are to consider balanced or fun 

It's also a bit more complicated with soldiers.

How so? Stunned units/corpses are treated as objects.

[ohartenstein23]

There are plenty of options available through scripting and item recovery that a modder could add a penalty for the player stunning civilians but not for the aliens, or find some other way of making it undesirable to do so.

Thus the issue is not that the tools don't exist, it's that modders don't consider this enough of an exploit to address, ot it's not worth the effort.

[Delian]

>I honestly don't remember aliens ever stunning civilians during terror missions
It doesn't happen often in vanilla, but it happens quite regularly in other larger mods that have plenty of lower-powered weapons.

>such as giving a penalty for stunned civilians
As I wrote, I don't know how to mod or write a script that would give negative points for when player stuns a civilian.

>Make them immune to stun damage or give them a high stun recovery rate instead
1. It's unrealistic that civilians would just magically be immune to stun damage and destun faster than all other units.
2. It's not practical for the mod authors, since it would require making special stun-resistant copies of all the existing civilian units.
3. Since this is a vanilla exploit, it makes more sense that the counter is implemented at a level where it can affect vanilla games as well.

>I just remember a lot of dead civvies... I don't see anything that justifies the time and effort...
Personal incredulity logical fallacy.

>"locking" mod options isn't really a thing. Mod authors don't get to decide what players are to consider balanced or fun
Yes, it is. And yes, they do.

There are plenty of options available through scripting and item recovery

Item recovery doesn't consider who stunned the civvie. And scripting... there's no end of mission hook and no functions for modifying mission points.

[krautbernd]

It doesn't happen often in vanilla[...]

Thanks, rest is pretty much irrelevant because it's down to the mod authors. As for vanilla, out of 100 terror mission - how often do civilians actually get stunned? As for "larger mods" - how often out of 100 terror missions do civilians get stunned (and not bleed to death subsequently) there?

As I wrote, I don't know how to mod or write a script that would give negative points for when player stuns a civilian.

You have yet to show that establishing who stunned a civilian is a relevant concern - or that this issue is relevant at all.

1. It's unrealistic that civilians would just magically be immune to stun damage and destun faster than all other units.

It literally is not because using "unrealistic" as an argument concerning the vanilla game, let alone mods like XCF would invalidate ~90 of the game mechanics. How "realistic" is it that X-COM is pretty much the only faction able to use squad tactics? Or the only faction able to use medkits, for that matter?

2. It's not practical for the mod authors, since it would require making special stun-resistant copies of all the existing civilian units.

How is that "not practical"? You literally only need to change two entries (damage modifiers and recovery) in the armor defintions, and this can be done as a sub-mod. You don't need to make copies of any units. This would take a max of 5 minutes even for larger mods. Instead you're asking people to waste their time - instead of yours, I take it - on something that is pointless for anybody but you, given the replies you've gotten. There is no comparison between "modifying existing armor defintions" and "having to code new AI behaviour from scratch, including balancing and debugging". Sorry, but at this point you either have no idea what you're talking about or you're simply delusional.

3. Since this is a vanilla exploit, it makes more sense that the counter is implemented at a level where it can affect vanilla games as well.

Aliens not shooting ground objects is intended behaviour. The point of OXC and OXCE is to preserve vanilla compatibility. Changing this means you're by definition not playing "vanilla X-COM".

Personal incredulity logical fallacy.

Not really, since you've yet to demonstrate that this is

a) "a problem" that needs to be "fixed"
b) the only way to "fix" this is by programming new AI behaviour (because changing armor definitions is impractical lol)

Nothing "personal" about this, given the rest of the replies.

"locking" mod options isn't really a thing. Mod authors don't get to decide what players are to consider balanced or fun

Yes, it is. And yes, they do.

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No my man, it simply isn't. Mod authors don't get to decide how their mods are played. They literally have no control over that.

If you simply can't refrain from stunning every last civilian while playing vanilla, here's a handy mod for you. Let me assure you that this is quite a bit more...practical...than changing and balancing AI behaviour