Mod Idea: Variable flashbangs

[chrisb]

I was doing some thinking about flashbangs and the difficulty in balancing them. In their current 1.2 state they have 2 effects that are guaranteed. They shut off secondary abilities and they add an aim malus. In 1.3 a few of the late game enemies will gain an RNG roll to prevent the disorient effect from applying. In general I like the change, but I really feel it does too little, too late. Flashbangs are not even that heavily used by that point in the game, as there are far more tools available at that time, and almost all of them are more suitable than a flashbang. It does nothing to balance them early or even mid game.

I thought about simply adding to the list of enemies that would gain some RNG resistance to flash, but it didn't quite feel like it was achieving the goal of balancing. This is largely due to the binary nature it introduces. It either works completely or not at all. So I started thinking, could flashbangs be made more variable, something along the lines of Red Fog. Essentially a flashbang would always work, but it would have varying success based on a level of RNG, resistance given by the enemy template, and possibly including falloff.

First let's look at the aim malus. Here it would be easy to conceive of making flashbangs variable. Based on whatever variables were used, a flashbang could provide anywhere from -10 to -20 based on distance from the center of the flash. If the flash had a wider radius, the lower limit would be reduced, so if you had a 4 tile flash, the outer limit would be -10, but if it was a 6 tile flash, perhaps it would go down to -5. On top of this you could have an RNG roll that would increase the malus by 0-5. On top of this the enemy could have a resistance to flash that would negate anywhere from 1 to 25, allowing some aliens to be essentially immune, while others would only have partial immunity.

Thinking about it some more, I also had the thought that perhaps aim malus itself is a bit too binary, and far too stackable. This has adverse effects on the AI. One of the predominant strategies is to combine flash with suppress. With these plus other defense granting sources, it is not difficult to push aim malus to be higher than the enemy has aim in the first place, often leading to the AI completely breaking.

What if instead of just an aim malus, the victim of a flash were to receive a variable crit malus. Negative crit has basically the same effect as adding dodge similar to how giving an aim malus is similar to granting defense. In generaly I like dodge over defense because it doesn't mess up the AI so much, and it also allows for more hits to become grazes, boosting the value of armor points and ablative and removing a lot of the spiky crits.

Using the above example I could imagine a flashbang granting a -10 aim, -15 crit at the center, with a falloff to -5 aim, -10 crit at 4 tiles and -2 aim, -5 crit at 6 tiles. RNG could add something like 0-4 aim and 0-8 crit malus, giving you a best case of -14 aim, -23 crit to the center of the blast.

Finally you have the ability shut off mechanic. I think instead of making these a binary off/on they could also be made variable. Things like grenades or tongue grab could be made to have a range reduction. At the center it reduces the range to 0, basically shutting them off, at 2/4/6 tiles it reduces range by 75/50/25%, similar to the aim/crit malus falloff.

Of course, coding this is one thing, presenting it to the player is likely the more difficult part. The current implementation simply applies the disorient debuff. If the effect is variable, then it would have to display the actual effect to the player when it is triggered, and also give the player a way to find that info out after the fact. I'm sure there will be some hurdles to overcome with the vanilla UI and mechanics.

Anyway, thought I would throw out the idea and see what sort of feedback people had on the idea. I'm trying to think of different ideas that would make the game more variable without making it so binary, as often the difference between hit or miss can be quite drastic, and to me those situations scream for more variability in outcome.

[wobuffet]

What about a simple change from one "Flashbanged" status to two:

- Flashed (-30 Aim)
- Mildly Flashed (-15 Aim)

where a Flashed unit becomes Mildly Flashed after one turn, and
a Mildly Flashed unit goes back to normal after one turn.

A Flashbang could randomly assign one of the two statuses to targets (perhaps varying based on enemy type, perks affecting % chance of each, etc.)