Suggestions on how to improve the mod

[Surrealistik]

Balance-wise, for when you first get it, I think it's necessary to not allow multiple gals firing it in a single turn, otherwise you wouldn't ever use grenades at all, just bombard the hell out of the whole map by a crew of gals playing pass-the-mortar.  Remember, Dioxine's point of balance is not to make sitting behind a smoke wall and shelling out everything you see the most attractive option - the closer you get, the more fast-firing options you have.  At the point you get plasma and gas mortar shells, you don't really need to fire more than once every other turn - you flatten whatever you fired at, and it takes another turn to find anything worth firing at again.

That's not what I'm proposing though; what I'm saying is that the TU cost of firing should leave just enough TU to turn a couple of times, and reload the weapon; that doesn't permit you enough to afterwords either throw the mortar, or drop it and move off from crouching so someone else can cycle in (and even if they did, they would not have enough TU to move onto the mortar tile, pick it up, crouch and then fire; if necessary the reload time can be changed to cost few enough TUs that such cycling is impossible, while firing and reloading on the same turn from a fixed position is).

That said, smoke and bombard is still optimal whenever the terrain cooperates with arcing; it's just that grenade spam is way better at it than the mortar.

I'm not arguing that the mortar is the optimal choice of fire support, but I find it worthwhile to use, even a little later in the game; it's a great situational-use weapon.  Anyways, you should want to move on from the mortar to something like the tornado rocket mortar, or tossing high explosive packs from your uber-trained ubers.

The main problem is that it has just far too narrow a window of utility atm. Early it's situational vs even HE, frag and smoke grens, and beyond that it's about entirely worthless now that it's in competition with precision accuracy lobbed HE charges, hellerium, willy pete, etc...

[Solarius Scorch]

Maybe, but the Mortar is so fucking awesome that who really cares!

[Dioxine]

I'm totally fine with some people not using the mortar. Some others will use it. Allowing it to fire each round would be against the original design idea. However indeed back then forcing people to kneel before firing was impossible, so maybe it could be revised. Also, it's crazy that grenades that aren't in hand (but in inventory) do not count down/explode (which is intesyfying the grenade spam, especially by enabling pre-priming of multiple explosives). Mortar will make much more sense when finally this problem will be erased (at least as an option); also pre-priming will be less cheesy.

[ohartenstein23]

Let's say reload+turn is 18 TUs (default reload is 15, so giving you 3 to turn), so your gal has at least 18 after firing.  Drop from hand is 2, stand up is 8, move from square is 4, total 14 TUs.  With a second gal to pick up the empty mortar, reload, and toss to a third, that third gal only needs 14 TUs to pick it up and 4 to kneel, total of 18, so she would have enough to fire.  Thus asking for fire+reload+turning is necessarily getting firing multiple times per turn, unless the reload is incredibly quick.

[ohartenstein23]

Maybe, but the Mortar is so fucking awesome that who really cares!

Also, this - I don't want a buffed mortar to get a second 'balance' pass to nerf bat it.

[Dioxine]

That's also a good point. The mortar was intended to be the pinnacle of high damage for low price. I'd rather buff said damage than make it a faster-firing weapon. I just didn't want it to have as much power as heavy rockets. However, the WP shells are already quite devastating to enemies like tanks, not to mention the insane AoE of poisonous shells.

[Dioxine]

Haha! Maybe I should have been more precise - it would make sense for "smarter" npcs to contribute more to research than other ones. The Academy Engineer might be twice as productive as a normal Brainer for your research, but he would demand a larger salary as a result, and nicer accommodations in the barracks, etc.

For starters, Academy Engineer a 'she', and by that logic, she's worth around 0.1 Brainer at best . Guild Engineers would be worth around 0.2. If they wanted to work for such technological heretics as the pirate gals in the first place! Fully agreed they would want better accomodations, though

[Alucious]

For starters, Academy Engineer a 'she', and by that logic, she's worth around 0.1 Brainer at best . Guild Engineers would be worth around 0.2. If they wanted to work for such technological heretics as the pirate gals in the first place! Fully agreed they would want better accomodations, though

For real? Brainers must be exceedingly rare in the X-Piratez universe... So then definitely buying them in unlimited quantities from the black market seems really unlikely!

[Dioxine]

It does indeed. But currently nothing can be done about that.

[Surrealistik]

Let's say reload+turn is 18 TUs (default reload is 15, so giving you 3 to turn), so your gal has at least 18 after firing.  Drop from hand is 2, stand up is 8, move from square is 4, total 14 TUs.  With a second gal to pick up the empty mortar, reload, and toss to a third, that third gal only needs 14 TUs to pick it up and 4 to kneel, total of 18, so she would have enough to fire.  Thus asking for fire+reload+turning is necessarily getting firing multiple times per turn, unless the reload is incredibly quick.

That's the plan.


Anyways, if Dioxine wants the mortar to fire every other turn yet still be useful, it will need a significant accuracy (such that even a nub will land shots with near pin-point precision from long distances when making crouched shots) and damage buff.

[khade]

IRL mortars reload EXTREMELY quickly.  If I'm remembering correctly, I'm not military trained and haven't actually gotten to use one, the reload is seriously just dropping the shell in.  The mortar itself would be positioned and set for where you want to hit already.  so in real life, the setup would be the long bit, and reloading and firing would be really quick.  But as far as I'm aware, we don't have that capacity. 

Same would go for heavy machine guns, they take a while to set up and as long as you don't have to move them, basically lock down that area completely. 
But I don't think the game mechanics would allow for either of those.

Edit

After doing a little bit more research, the difficulty of loading firing and moving mortars would depend on the style and tech you're working with, modern infantry mortars tend not to have a reload, you drop the shell in, and the firing pin on the bottom sets it off when the shell reaches it. older mortars were far heavier and closer to cannon in style, though designed to take advantage of the extreme arc.

My suggested solution would be to have multiple styles of mortars, the light ones would do less damage but be quick to fire and either have a virtual magazine of shots or have an instant reload, while heavier ones would do high damage but be heavier and slow to reload.

[Arthanor]

More over, it would be nice to see mortars retain utility beyond what is a very narrow window of the game. Plasma/Hellerium, Poison Gas, Shrapnel (aoe cutting damage) and Chem rounds would all be cool, but I also think that the TU cost needs to enable a reload and fire from the ground for starters (assuming no movement other than turning).

There are already a rather wide variety of shells for the mortar, you know? Some (many?) of the things you mention here do exist. Also, there is an upgrade to the mortar which allows you to fire every turn, and for even more damage. You just have to wait and get the upgrade. If you get the perfect long range weapon at the beginning, what's the point of upgrades?

I think the evolution of the mortar, then its replacement by the tornado rocket mortar, is entirely fine. I don't like smoke/scout/snipe tactics, so I don't tend to use the mortar (and at least back when I was considering it, it always felt like ammo was crazy expensive, but that was many versions ago), but I do use (and love) to tornado rocket mortar for my loader gal.

I do wish, however, that the loader suit (which is really not that great of a use of 2 power armor parts, compared to waiting for a 3rd to make a juggernaut suit) gave enough carrying capacity to carry both that and a vulcan, and allowed to fire them one handed. It used to work that way and that was awesomely satisfying. Now, dragonfly armor gals make use of the vulcan much better, and the loader gal is left with the tornado and not really much of an ability to do anything on turns where you don't need large scale devastation (mine has started carrying a Bozar, to take potshots while waiting for a good mortar target).

[Surrealistik]

Ah, didn't know about the additional munition types.

That said, I feel my point stands about the basic mortar having way too tiny a window of utility. I don't have access to the upgraded version, and I struggled hard to find a use for it both pre and post hellerium nade.

[Arthanor]

As I said, I also don't use it. But I don't bring very many long ranged gals generally. Back in my days, if you were going to do anything in Piratez, you needed to be in melee. This has evolved significantly now, but I'm sort of stuck in my "good old ways". When I restart, it'll be a totally new game again.

One type of munition I would love to see is stun gas, that would be lovely. I love my stun gas (except that one mission where one gal passed out in combat on turn one, dropped her pre-primed stun gas which promptly stunned more people whose stun gas grenades blew up immediately (?!) causing a chain reaction that stunned all but 2 gals out of 18. That was "less than optimal" as Ivan says.

Also, another thing that would be nice: Wench outfit for the mansion. I'm not sure why it's not allowed since other psi outfits are and I'd bet some of the people living there are the kind that enjoy special room service.

And thinking of mansions: wouldn't it be nice for some church reverend to be able to keep his favorite pet chryssalid at home? Sterilized, of course, otherwise it'd be intolerable during heat.

[ivandogovich]

That was "less than optimal" as Ivan says.

LOL!  Too True! 

Also, another thing that would be nice: Wench outfit for the mansion. I'm not sure why it's not allowed since other psi outfits are and I'd bet some of the people living there are the kind that enjoy special room service.

Hm... from what I'm seeing in the ruleset, I think it is:  in Piratez_Planet.rul line 26256, STR_LINGERIE_SET_X_UC is part of the allowedArmors.