Plasma ammo plentiful

[yrizoud]

OpenXCOM uses clip optimization, similar as XcomUtil. Unless I'm mistaken, all clips of the same type get combined : those fired by XCOM + those fired by aliens. So this may be too efficient, resulting in quasi-unlimited ammo for plasma weapons :
In a typical mission, aliens will take 1-10 shots of heavy plasma. Since a heavy clip has a capacity of 35, it means the player's team can already take 25-34 shots of heavy plasma "for free", because a clip would be lost anyway. You can have 14 soldiers taking 2 heavy plasma shots each, and it costs nothing. If you tried this in vanilla, you'd use 14 clips in one mission!

IMO, the standard loadout for aliens should be reduced. Even one heavy clip per alien should be enough. Because as it is now, it's quite impossible to need to build more plasma clips.

[Solarius Scorch]

I rally liked how XComUtil handled this: for each clip there was a random chance it'll disappear after the mission, and the chance was equal to the percentage spent. So a half-empty clip had a 50% chance to disappear, a clip with 10% ammo spent had 10% chance to disappear, and so on. While it could go differently on small scales, this ensured that the ammo usage was quite well reflected in the big picture.

[yrizoud]

Really ? I just looked at the readme, and it is not very explicit. Either methods are very conservative on ammo : In vanilla, any clip with a missing bullet was discarded. Aliens carried spare clips, not because they needed to reload, but because otherwise you'd often loot an empty weapon.
When I played TFTD, I remember the sharing of clips provided by Xcomutil was very powerful, and these were 10-ammo clips. With 35-ammo clips, I feel it's overpowered if the alien supply is not reduced accordingly.
I'd like to hear from somebody who played vanilla UFO - with or without the trick of emptying weapons when mission is going to end.

[BlackLibrary]

I played pure vanilla.  I spent every mission house keeping:  Sending out men to go to a downed alien and ejecting the clip to make sure I got that ammo.  Ammo only disappeared if you left it in the rifle...if you did you due dillegence, you had decent ammo on a return trip home.

I found it a nice quirky trade off.

[yrizoud]

"Quirky" is the key word : It's the kind of trick you can't discover by yourself, you have to read FAQs to learn about it. It was an interesting risk-taking to disarm your own soldiers before end turn, without knowing if there were any more aliens left. In OpenXCOM I don't miss it because it was weird, but I feel the plasma ammo should be reduced to compensate.