Balance of bows and bullets

[karadoc]

In my first playthrough, I didn't use bows much - because I kind of assumed that rifles would be more powerful.

However, this time around I'm feeling that bows are super-strong. Their accuracy is very high and their damage is respectable - but most importantly, they can hit targets from behind cover. I find it a bit absurd that my archers can fire arrows over the top of the airbus to hit targets that they can't even see, with close to 100% accuracy; while at the same time, my soldier with a blackmarch SMG can only get ~60% with a couching aimed shot.

Meanwhile, muskets and other low-tech firearms are completely overshadowed. Better guns are plentiful, especially if the player is using bows and melee to conserve ammunition.

I want to feel like my tech is progressing forward; but at the moment I'm thinking that I'm probably going to be using bows against anything that isn't heavily armoured for a long time. I'm thinking that maybe bows could afford to have their accuracy reduced a bit. I imagine that it's easier for people to dodge longbow arrows than dodge bullets!

What do others think about this?

[Cristao]

Bows are not overpowered!! I am saying no to another nerf of bows in advance!!

[karadoc]

Let me just clarify that I'm not trying to advocate for a nerf. I'm just saying that my current style of play makes me wonder if a nerf might be warranted, because my bow soldiers are outclassing my other soldiers. (ie. I've been using bows with far greater success than I expected, and I'm wondering if bows are too good, or if its just that I'm using bow-friendly tactics.)

I'd be ok with a nerf, but what I'm really looking for is a discussion.

[legionof1]

Bows do very much favor a certain play style. One that just happens to be one the more abuse-ably effective ways to play given the limitations of the ai. Bows are actually reasonably well balanced on an even field vs other weapons. The problem is that the game itself is not an even field given how it works. The best way to avoid expensive casualties with the gals is to NEVER be seen at all. 1 day per lost hp is punishing. Armor will never completely and reliably protect a gal from harm because of the 0-200% dmg function. So how do we not get shot at? Abuse squadsight and vision because the ai is a retard when it comes to getting vision.

[Meridian]

Fact 1:
With enough experience, you can always find a weak spot in the AI.

Fact 2:
If there was no weak spot, you would always lose... which would probably happen in real life... but is not desired in a computer game.

My logical conclusion:
If you find a weak spot... enjoy it for a short time... and then stop abusing it if you wish to still enjoy the game.

[ohartenstein23]

I feel that bows are strong in that they combine the best characteristics of both sniper-style weapons and arcing-shot weapons, and are thus excellent at filling the roll of single-target long-range fire support.  I also think they are balanced by the fact they require four stats to be high to use well - TUs, stamina, throwing accuracy, and strength, and the fact that without AoE, arc-firing can be dodgy at certain angles.  Against armor though, there are much better tools - grenades, mortars, sniper gauss with high firing accuracy.

Remember your gals are uber-mutants, and anything that scales off of stats properly will be strong - just imagine the type of bow they would be drawing with all their strength, and it's no wonder weapons made for pureblood humans pale in comparison.

[Arthanor]

Remember your gals are uber-mutants, and anything that scales off of stats properly will be strong - just imagine the type of bow they would be drawing with all their strength, and it's no wonder weapons made for pureblood humans pale in comparison.

And that's the crux of it! The bows designed by the brainers are monstrous things that take advantage of Uber physiology. They are not the bow that a typical human would use (although they also don't have pulleys, so maybe modern bows could be similar). The bows in XPiratez would be harder to draw than anything a normal human could sustain doing, but the gals are stronger and recover faster, so they can do it.

By opposition, the guns you have at the beginning are weak human guns. They have to be light, because most humans don't have the strength of an Uber. Once the brainers design their own gun, you usually see a significant increase in firepower, and weight (again, taking advantage of the gals' strength).

So in a sense, you start the game and use primitive weapons (throwing weapons, bows, spears), because you are taking advantage of the gals' physique. They are stronger and faster than humans, so they use weapons that would be useless to humans, but are useful to them. Then eventually you start using your brains too, and develop weapons that are even better suited.

The only "problem" is accuracy: A long distance bow shot at a single moving target should be really hard to achieve. You have to consider the arcing trajectory which is more difficult than a straight line. The arrow doesn't travel as fast as a bullet, so the target has the possibility to move more. The increased travel time and volume of the arrow also make it more vulnerable to winds affecting the trajectory. And then, for long distance shots, no matter how fast the arrow leaves the bow, on the descent from the peak of the trajectory, the arrow can only go at terminal velocity. You can't pull harder to make it "fall faster", although you could make denser arrows requiring more pull so they reach a higher terminal velocity.

That's why I was advocating for a ranged based power reduction instead of accuracy reduction (arcing non-AoE weapons have game engine hit computation problems, which is overcompensated by having very high accuracy). Make bows a great medium range weapon (20-25 tiles), but not great sniper weapons (25+ tiles, which used to be out of direct sight)

[Bloax]

The only time arced shots are used with bows is when you are providing bombardment fire against an enemy army.
Otherwise bows are operated in a similar horizontal fashion as guns, though with more heavy adjustments for gravity.

[karadoc]

It's a good point about ubers being suited to different weapons than humans. (Although the bows are relative strong even when the girls are still weak.) I generally agree with Arthanor's thoughts on this.

I'm unaware of the arcing accuracy problem in the game. Is it something to do with hit-detection not working correctly? Whatever it is, I presume it is fixable...

[Meridian]

I'm unaware of the arcing accuracy problem in the game. Is it something to do with hit-detection not working correctly? Whatever it is, I presume it is fixable...

After shooting from a bow, look at the hit log (Ctrl+H)... from many angles, all shots will just always miss.

[karadoc]

After shooting from a bow, look at the hit log (Ctrl+H)... from many angles, all shots will just always miss.

Ok. I've been doing this a little bit recently; and I have noticed that sometimes shots that appear to hit have actually missed. (I've also noticed that some shots say "0", which I presume means a zero damage hit. I sure could have used that info in my first playthrough when I was trying to work out whether particular enemies have high resistance or just heaps of health!)

I presume this is a bug... and I expect that it's possible to fix. Is this something people want fixed, or is it so entrenched that people are use to it and the game is balanced around it and so it should just be left alone.

I'll probably have a few spare hours up my sleeve next week, and I could have a go at fixing it if there is interest. (I haven't looked at the code for this game, but I know a bit about programming, and about projectile motion. So I might be able to fix it.)


Incidentally, I suppose that this problem also affects acid flasks... which might explain why their effect often seems lacklustre. (In my first playthrough, I once threw a heap of acid flasks at an armoured car so that I'd have a better chance of killing it with auto-fire boarding gun & other weapons. The strategy was surprisingly ineffective.) I reckon acid could afford to be more accurate or more powerful, and bows could afford to be slightly less accurate (but probably not less powerful).

[Solarius Scorch]

It would be great if this was fixed, Karadoc. X-Com tactical engine is ingenious, but it has a few bugs like this.

[karadoc]

It would be great if this was fixed, Karadoc. X-Com tactical engine is ingenious, but it has a few bugs like this.

Ok. I've started looking into it now. I haven't spotted anything that's obviously wrong. The algorithms make sense, it looks like it should probably work. But there are a couple of things that I think are a bit strange. For example, it seems to forbid projectiles from hitting their target on the way up. They can only hit on the way down. I don't know why they'd make a rule like that - but I don't think its the source of our problem.

Anyway, I've got a couple of ideas and checks that that I'd like to do, but unfortunately I'm having trouble getting the thing to build.

I've used cmake to create mingw makefiles, but it's telling me

*** No rule to make target 'C:/tools/MinGW/lib/libSDL_mixer.dll.a -lwinmm'

It seems to think that libSDL_mixer.dll.a -lwinmm is a single thing, whereas to me that's meant to be two separate libraries. (And the SDL stuff does exist in that path.) I then manually edited the makefiles to fix it so that SDL_mixer and winmm were treated separately. That got it a bit further along, but then there were a bunch of undefined symbols in the final linking. So that's where I'm currently at. I'll try wrestling with it again another time.

I am interested in game mechanics, logic, and coding; but trying to fix build problems related to dependences and linking is frustrating for me. I suppose it is for everyone. I'd rather not have to completely delete all my compilers and libraries and everything just so that I can follow someone else's build instructions line-for-line; but that's what it might come to.

[edit]

I've successfully worked through the quagmire of linking problems. Just in case someone else has similar issues, I'll briefly describe what I did.

Firstly, my original problem was caused by what looks like a mistake in CMakeLists.txt.

Line 442 of CMakeLists.txt says

Code: [Select]

    set ( SDLMIXER_LIBRARY "${SDLMIXER_LIBRARY} -lwinmm" )
Presumably that's wrong. I don't see how that could ever work correctly. That's what makes "make" think there is a dependency with a weird two-part name which it doesn't know how to build. So I got rid of that line.

Secondly, there were a stack of missing functions in linking phase. I don't really know what belongs to what, so I added stuff based on guesswork and internet searches until everything worked. I ended up with this:

Code: [Select]

#(original) target_link_libraries ( openxcom ${system_libs} ${SDLIMAGE_LIBRARY} ${SDLMIXER_LIBRARY} ${SDLGFX_LIBRARY} ${SDL_LIBRARY} ${OPENGL_gl_LIBRARY} debug ${YAMLCPP_LIBRARY_DEBUG} optimized ${YAMLCPP_LIBRARY} )
target_link_libraries ( openxcom ${system_libs} ${SDLIMAGE_LIBRARY} ${SDLMIXER_LIBRARY} -lwinmm ${SDLGFX_LIBRARY} ${SDL_LIBRARY} ${OPENGL_gl_LIBRARY} debug ${YAMLCPP_LIBRARY_DEBUG} optimized ${YAMLCPP_LIBRARY} -lz -lpng -lvorbisfile -lvorbis -logg -limagehlp -lDbghelp )
Thirdly, after all that, it finally compiled - but I discovered that I was actually using the wrong branch. I was on the master branch whereas I should have been on `oxce2.9-plus-proto`. I tried stashing my changes to apply them to the correct branch, but the branches were too different for the merge to work. So I had to do them again manually.
(Also, in latest version of oxce2.9-plus-proto, savegame/CraftWeapon.cpp is missing `#include <cmath>`, which it needs for std::floor.)

And finally, with the correct branch, successfully compiled and linked, I found that the game ran really slowly. I guess it's because it compiles a debug version by default. So I told cmake to make a 'Release' version. That fixed the speed issue. I'm just mentioning that because it occurs to me that some of the stuff I added to the linker was probably only needed for the debug version; such as -Dbghelp.

In any case, I've finally got the thing built and ready to play. My intention is to just tweak things that I think look suspicious, and play through my usual game without any particular focus on testing.

As I said before, I haven't spotted any obvious mistakes, but there are a lot of things I would have done differently if I was writing it myself. So I'll start by just changing minor things and see if it makes any difference. I'll let you (someone) know if I learn anything important.

[Solarius Scorch]

Thanks for the effort and best luck!
It's a long shot, but maybe the issue is not with the projectile but the target? Something with being hit from above? No vanilla weapon does that.

[legionof1]

An issue with the target object would certainly make sense to me.  Given the peculiarities of invisibility(ie hacking the models) increasing in complexity at differing elevations.