[SOURCEMOD] Brutal-OXCE 7.12.1

[Xilmi]

Now I have even more questions how things would interfere:
- statistical randomization, when 40% units are VAI
- weighted randomization, for other 60% BAI units, which still supposed to do some side stuff, randomly. Will it be VAI stuff? Or strange BAI stuff? How many percent of them will do so?
- dynamic aggressiveness will be starting from "don't bother take cover" or "careful advancement"?
- just got shot from other side of the map, while no sight contact is made. Regarding this: is vanilla sniper-spotter mechanism working for these 40% VAI units?
- and if so, are only VAI units eligible to see and shot into "is spotted" units?

If last two questions are "yes", then this is amazingly joyful and cool.

It's not resorting to VAI.
The 40% chance you get from Intelligence 3 works like this:
The unit still starts checking whether it can attack from where it is with BAI-attack-checks. But if not, it does a completely random move. If the unit is interrupted by finding an enemy or opening a slide-door, it will roll again. If the unit completes the random move it will also try to end it's turn there. But it may be woken up again by other units and then roll again for random move or not.

The weighted randomization also won't do VAI-stuff. It runs through the BAI-algorithms but the scores produced by that are multiplied with a random value from 0.0 to 1.0. It is not "strange BAI stuff". On average it should still result in decent moves. But it will not be the same every time. There might be outliers of bad moves but those should be rare. This happens on every single non-attacking-movement-option BAI wants to perform. The purpose here is adding variance and unpredictability rather than deliberately making bad or random moves.

Yes, that's how dynamic-aggressiveness currently works. But I'm thinking of changing the highest aggressiveness or intruducing one between, that will be okay with being not currently visible. Basically any tile that has no line of fire should be considered as cover as opposed to not considering cover at all.

No, would have to debug to say why you got hit from the other side of the map. As I said, there is no VAI involved. If Target-Mode is above 1, units can still shoot over the hole map if anyone spots for them.

[jnarical]

I'd also kinda like to know. I haven't tested this in-depth but it would be a big difference if the 48% discrepancy will likely hit and potentially destroy the cover or just miss in some unrelated way.

If I imagine aiming at the center of an enemy and having some sort of hit-cone around the center, then a lot of the off-center-shots should still hit the enemy.

But if I aim at his finger because the finger is the only thing exposed, the cone around of where I aim for would be much worse, especially if the cover is easily breakable.

So I guess the question is: Does lower exposure change where the soldiers aim at? Do they still aim at the center of the enemy or do they aim for only the exposed voxels?

Ive sent you a picture of code to Discord) Units aim to the center of exposed part. If miss is rolled. there's part of the code which looks for missing trajectory inside shooting cone, and gradually increases that cone until some limit is reached. Missing trajectory is considerd found when canTargetUnit to some voxel returns anything but V_UNIT, or returns V_UNIT but it is outside of targets boundaries.

If you're asking whether such shots will penetrate bushes and still hit the target... well, it depends of implementation. It could be done in either way, so the real question here is - do you consider % chance to hit number to include chances for to after cover penetration or not.

[Abyss]

The unit still starts checking whether it can attack from where it is with BAI-attack-checks.

All I've got from this night mission is just 3 arcing electric shots from Gillmans. Other guys were running around, making them easy targets.   

But I'm thinking of changing the highest aggressiveness

Should be 3, IMO. They all flew out of the cover towards my troops. But the distance was too high for a LoS contact.
Also, I killed like 40% of them before they actually started bothering take cover.
This mission was quite dissatisfying in terms of a challenge.

Maybe, morale shifts should be changed to 100 -> 90 -> 80 -> 60?
Also, does Brutal OXCE count overall mediocre morale or each unit's morale, hence each unit has different strategy?

I want to suggest the "Sea Battle" mechanics prior to introduction of this giant HQ assault mission.
It is aimed to achieve win condition when player nulls units TU's after each turn.
- the overall conditions are "no enemy unit is seen", condition: night
- there is definitely viable trajectory to shoot to, where enemy unit has high chance to be located.
- SB is enabled on second turn. 
- then, split into: half are spotters, half are playing SB
- units to use this are, preferably, covered by darkness or away.
- each shot goes in a line, not towards the bottom of the tile
- each shot "checks" multiple tiles in a line
- if reaction fire follows, then BAI works as usual on player units reaction-fires.
Then if SB hits enemy, there are multiple targets revealed. If not, only reaction-fired units are spotted. 
- but the most delicious part is hitting enemy, when no reaction shots follows. This enemy is then marked as "spotted" for this turn and is visible for every BAI unit on battlefield, or to some % of BAI units
- then if unit is killed - reenable sea battle. Next turn every "spotted" enemy unit disappears.
- too much grenading may shift the balance even more, but it's up to player - how he gets into the battle: prepared or not.
IMO, this will enhance the power of AI, as it performs best at offense, rather than in defense.

Other question is how AI spots the hit, far away in darkness: player can see AI units flashing red slightly or brightly. But, as I may understand, AI knows the map entirely, thus can calculate whether there should be obstacle, or not. The new obstacle is player unit, obviously.

Also, the save which involves Gillmen is below. It's Ironman, so you probably want to run guys out of Osprey and toss flares around? Kill few close enemies and wait for gillmen to make shots. 
Beware of one green guy in the north building. Although, he couldn't have seen units near the osprey's exit anyhow (arching shot flew there).
Options are also there:

P.S. I just imagined that "Bullet Scanner" name fits quite better than SB.
Also, some players would scream "what kind of BS just happened"

[Juku121]

That’s not my opinion. I wonder where did I say something like that…

Well, two orders is hyperbole, but a reduction of 2-3 times seems common, and up to one order of magnitude can happen in cluttered maps. Both can be seen in Abyss's video and there's the "90% covered" calculation example. You don't have to state your opinion if your actions speak for themselves.

And even a twofold reduction is quite significant, but I admit that without it the whole cover idea won't really work, and that seems to be a major goal.

All in all, after a little testing it doesn't seem as bad as I thought. Except for the caps, those appear to be still very much present. 111%*0.97 coverage gave me a 95% accuracy value. Waypoint autofire also seems to work, mostly.

Chainlink fences are kinda ridiculous, though, especially when the shooter is right next to them. Same for dense jungle or forest or orchards.

...do you consider % chance to hit number to include chances for to after cover penetration or not.

I would prefer not, but the cone still covers the, well, cover afterwards. I mean, it's probably not even possible to calculate the 'after cover' chance precisely, since there can be several pieces of cover quite a distance apart. And some of these can deform into new shapes after 'destruction'.



Otherwise, I agree with Xilmi that just letting the bullet 'survive' a cover hit and continue with reduced power, while cover gets destroyed as normal, seems the simplest and most natural way to do this.



Also, there are modding options that would allow you to reduce the impact of closely fought battles, like resurrecting soldiers (even without corpses!, or with functionally invulnerable corpses), giving out most score and loot for success, even one with lots of casualties, etc. It's a lot of work, granted, but far less than a full mod, and eminently doable by someone far less committed than a major modder. All it takes is an interest in both BAI and a mod. Or even vanilla, for that matter.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Feedback and questions.

Played it a little. Really amazing work! Thank you for this mod. Aliens are much more intelligent now resulting in advertised brutal combat. The only way to counter their intelligence I found so far is to use what they don't have: smoke and sensors.

One thing I could not understand is how they detect my soldiers? I place them all staring in the alien direction but no one is able to see a single peeking alien even for a second. It is like out of the silence they start shooting one of my unit. Do they know how to avoid line of sight of my units or some other micro cheating or they see farther or better through smoke?

Another thing I noticed they pre-prime grenades and throw them very often. Which is completely fine for this mod. I was just thinking would it be appropriate to rebalance explosive power and resistances and other related stuff to account for that? In fact, the question even broader. Vanilla AI is stupid but huge alien unit bonuses compensate for that. Would it be good to rebalance them and make them more equal to X-Com stats? This way it would more resemble intellect combat instead of beating the weaklings.
I sure can do this in my own mod. Just asking if anything like that was done in this one?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Anybody can explain how intelligence customization work? Is it possible to assign different intelligence to different races/types/ranks? Is it set like this by default or need to be turned on?

[Juku121]

One thing I could not understand is how they detect my soldiers? I place them all staring in the alien direction but no one is able to see a single peeking alien even for a second. It is like out of the silence they start shooting one of my unit. Do they know how to avoid line of sight of my units or some other micro cheating or they see farther or better through smoke?

Could be anything. Shooting at likely enemy positions, better infravision, psi-vision, just plain higher vision range, squadsight, even omniscience if you have that enabled.

It's just like night missions in the original without flares, with plasma shots out of the dark murderising your whole team.

Just asking if anything like that was done in this one?

No, stat changes like that are the domain of ruleset mods.

Anybody can explain how intelligence customization work? Is it possible to assign different intelligence to different races/types/ranks? Is it set like this by default or need to be turned on?

The BAI and intelligence interplay is explained here. BAI has several options for determining enemy intelligence, on of which is to use the vanilla intelligence stat. Which is indeed assigned via ruleset data.

I think BAI intelligence is turned off by default?

[Xilmi]

Also, I killed like 40% of them before they actually started bothering take cover.
This mission was quite dissatisfying in terms of a challenge.

Maybe, morale shifts should be changed to 100 -> 90 -> 80 -> 60?
Also, does Brutal OXCE count overall mediocre morale or each unit's morale, hence each unit has different strategy?

I have reworked and am still in the testing process aggressiveness 3 and also the steps from dynamic aggression.

3 works in a way, that they will take cover from units who's positions they know. But they won't predict where those units might go. Also 3 is now the max in dynamic aggression and it immediately drops down to 2 if morale goes below 100. Most of the time the morale is indeed either 100 or slightly below.

Playing with lowered intelligence makes aggressiveness meaningless for all the cases where they roll making a dumb move. The random-moves will not care about cover either way. So this will dramatically lower the challenge. Especially if the enemy has worse vision than your units.

It is based on individual morale. So a unit that just got a kill and thus gets capped to 100 again will be more aggressive than other units who haven't gotten one.

I want to suggest the "Sea Battle" mechanics prior to introduction of this giant HQ assault mission.
It is aimed to achieve win condition when player nulls units TU's after each turn.
- the overall conditions are "no enemy unit is seen", condition: night
- there is definitely viable trajectory to shoot to, where enemy unit has high chance to be located.
- SB is enabled on second turn. 
- then, split into: half are spotters, half are playing SB
- units to use this are, preferably, covered by darkness or away.
- each shot goes in a line, not towards the bottom of the tile
- each shot "checks" multiple tiles in a line
- if reaction fire follows, then BAI works as usual on player units reaction-fires.
Then if SB hits enemy, there are multiple targets revealed. If not, only reaction-fired units are spotted. 
- but the most delicious part is hitting enemy, when no reaction shots follows. This enemy is then marked as "spotted" for this turn and is visible for every BAI unit on battlefield, or to some % of BAI units
- then if unit is killed - reenable sea battle. Next turn every "spotted" enemy unit disappears.
- too much grenading may shift the balance even more, but it's up to player - how he gets into the battle: prepared or not.
IMO, this will enhance the power of AI, as it performs best at offense, rather than in defense.

This is pretty-much what I used to call blind-fire. The difficult part is to determine "where enemy unit has high chance to be located". It both has the potential of being exploitable or feel like cheating if not done right. I experimented with that in the past. I just let them shoot at where they had spotted something before. This worked well as long as the player didn't know how it works. Then the player could bait the blind-fire in order to reveal the enemies' locations while staying perfectly save themselves.

Other question is how AI spots the hit, far away in darkness: player can see AI units flashing red slightly or brightly. But, as I may understand, AI knows the map entirely, thus can calculate whether there should be obstacle, or not. The new obstacle is player unit, obviously.

Well, I would just have to call the updateEnemyKnowledge-function within the hit-method. Currently this isn't the case but if you say the player would notice when they hit something they didn't aim at, it would only be fair to let the AI notice the same. And done.

Also, the save which involves Gillmen is below. It's Ironman, so you probably want to run guys out of Osprey and toss flares around? Kill few close enemies and wait for gillmen to make shots. 
Beware of one green guy in the north building. Although, he couldn't have seen units near the osprey's exit anyhow (arching shot flew there).

Thanks, I may check it out later.

Options are also there:

Also, some players would scream "what kind of BS just happened"

As I said: If it works too well, it'll look like cheating. And if it doesn't, it'll look pathetic. "Guessing" is really hard to do with algorithms.

[Xilmi]

One thing I could not understand is how they detect my soldiers? I place them all staring in the alien direction but no one is able to see a single peeking alien even for a second. It is like out of the silence they start shooting one of my unit. Do they know how to avoid line of sight of my units or some other micro cheating or they see farther or better through smoke?

Many possibilities. The easiest way to find out what happens is to use debug-mode. It needs to be enabled in the options.cfg-file by changing the line "debug: false" to "debug: true". Then you can hit ctrl+d in the mission to see what happens. You can then observe the enemie's turn. This should tell you how and from where they spotted your units.

I tried to avoid micro-cheating. The cheating is something you have to enable deliberately. If it cheats without the option enabled, it's a bug. Except when there's stuff like we recently had on discord, where someone also accused it of cheating. He was playing with Final Modpack... And yes, it turned out it was cheating because it was modded to cheat by giving the units a stat called "Psivision", which allows it to see through walls.

Another thing I noticed they pre-prime grenades and throw them very often. Which is completely fine for this mod. I was just thinking would it be appropriate to rebalance explosive power and resistances and other related stuff to account for that? In fact, the question even broader. Vanilla AI is stupid but huge alien unit bonuses compensate for that. Would it be good to rebalance them and make them more equal to X-Com stats? This way it would more resemble intellect combat instead of beating the weaklings.
I sure can do this in my own mod. Just asking if anything like that was done in this one?

You can turn the pre-priming off as a separate option. Other than that, balance-changes are modder territory.

[Abyss]

As I said: If it works too well, it'll look like cheating. And if it doesn't, it'll look pathetic. "Guessing" is really hard to do with algorithms.

Thanks taking time to reply.
Yet, this can be occasional, not 100% determined function. The whole point is to counter players who null TU. In all other cases, BAI works well. It deals with reaction-fire, and anyhow exposed units. Yet, won't do anything if player is halfway the map in the darkness. Trying to spot with a couple of guys per turn, which getting killed halfway. 
As for player will call it cheating or abuse it - it's not.
1) If player's reaction fire units, or exposed units present - they become first priority. BS is sort of much below, because of low probability.
2) BAI tends to take cover, meaning BS mechanic will be implemented few tiles away from cover
3) Player already know where most of BAI units are in the beginning of mission, because they tend to be on key locations, mostly open, and yet exposed to flares.
16 units flare whole map in the beginning of the first turn.
4) Overall, blind shots are kind of BS, too, but designated not to scan multiple tiles, but target something precisely.
5) 10 out of 40 enemies on the map can BS under osprey and opposite position pretty well, getting at least 1-3 probability hits. Then player cannot abuse this.
I abuse this, at least.
Without it, I would have played on lower difficulty.

One thing I could not understand is how they detect my soldiers

Sectoids have psi-vision. It's not even cheat, it's their feature. The know of biological objects via psi-field. This is X-COM lore.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Could be anything. Shooting at likely enemy positions, better infravision, psi-vision, just plain higher vision range, squadsight, even omniscience if you have that enabled.

These are all unknown to me. Never touched anything like that. Where can I check if they are enabled or not?

[Abyss]

These are all unknown to me. Never touched anything like that. Where can I check if they are enabled or not?

If you play X-Piratez, get Xpedia2 from here:
https://xpedia.netlify.app/
, place it into BRUTAL OXCE folder, run xpedia.bat let it scan everything regarding ruleset, missions, research tree, enemies, etc. and get you all answers regarding installed mod, for which you will ever going to ask.
If you want to play different mod, it is suggested to use separate BOXCE or OXCE folder.
Like, X-Piratez OXCE & XCF Brutal OXCE.

Spoiler: X-Piratez already go with latest OXCE, and need only original game placed into the folder.
IDK if it works with XCF and other mods, though.

BAI uses default settings for enemies, it never changes anything. BAI soldiers are same as vanilla OXCE, except they better at killing you.

[Juku121]

Where can I check if they are enabled or not?

BAI includes blindfire and its version of squadsight, to some degree or another.

The rest are mostly unit or armour variables: 'sniper', 'spotter' (without BAI), 'psiVision', 'heatVision', 'visibilityAtDay', 'visibilityAtDark' (in conjunction with 'maxViewDistance'), various camouflage and anti-camouflage variables. Plus 'cheatTurn' and possible memory from unit 'intelligence'.

BAI has even more memory stuff under the hood that you can't touch directly.

Some mods have automated wikis, for others you need to check the rulesets yourself.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Thank you for all pointers. I am not using any special mods modifying combat mechanics. Just installed BAI and few of my mods (ruleset only) on top of it.

[Juku121]

Then it's probably either squadsight or the enemy trying to shoot at likely troop locations. Maybe omniscience, but that should be off by default.