Corpse Distribution?

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trihero
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Corpse Distribution?

Post by trihero »

Overall I find that enemy force level/corpse progression generally makes sense, but I would enjoy the game more if some of the higher tier corpses were more reliable to find. This feedback is with respect to Rookie difficulty, although some of the lessons may apply to higher difficulties.

Now I understand corpses are a precious resource and they're meant to be scarce, but I still feel perhaps some of the upper tier corpses are a little bit too scarce when combined with the limited number of corpse-generating missions.

The issue is I find it really hard to find certain types of corpses to advance techs, specifically

- stun lancers/archons to upgrade swords. Whereas I can freely manufacture plasma-quality weapons by august/october, I am having trouble by the same time having more than 1 stun lancer corpses which I used to do research, and didn't have any leftover to make any stun level swords. It's now november and I somehow luckily have been able to make 1 fusion blade. Maybe consider dropping the corpse requirement from swords? I don't really understand why all the other classes have no corpse bottleneck on their main weapon of choice, but swords do.

-archon corpses are a huge bottleneck to trying out things like flechette/acid grenades, especially considering they already compete for swords. I don't even consider those items particularly powerful or useful, but the point is I don't even have the opportunity to try them due to archon corpse scarcity

-in my current run through, I'm at 11/30 datewise. I have 1 sectopod corpse, but have not been offered any opportunities to collect andromedon/muton elite corpses whatsoever. It just kind of feels weird that I have a higher level body while skipping out on lower level bodies. I have actually fought muton elites and 1 andromedon, but they were on unsalvageable missions.

-it's possible that having good infiltration on troop columns/supply raids actually makes it harder to find high level corpses. I always try to hit those things on light/very light nowadays, but I'm not finding very exotic corpses, mostly vipers/mutons/advent even this late in the game (november). I'm not sure I like that idea; maybe smooth things out a bit by forcing more exotic enemies into the composition even if the overall troop count level is low?

-I guess what I'm saying is it would feel better if you were more guaranteed to find higher-tier corpses at better intervals to give you the option to explore different tech paths.

In conclusion the lack of certain corpses is not really hurting my ability to finish the game whatsoever, but I find it just forces certain tech or steers you away from exploring other options when, for example, you can't make swords on par with your weapon tech, or can't find those pieces for MKIII holotargeter/bomb tech when you already have plenty of plasma. It's simply a question of variety, not power level, since I can freely without worry about corpses make plasma weapons at leisure, but I can't experiment with auxiliary pathways like acid/flechette/bomb/MKIII gauntlet etc etc etc which are limited by very hard to find corpses and aren't even more powerful than plasma so I feel like it's limiting the variety of things I can try.

Maybe these concerns don't apply to higher difficulties where the FL goes up so fast and you have generally less time to respond to infiltrations and are facing higher strengths so more enemies + higher quality enemies means you never lack any kind of tech you might want to explore, but at least I think this feedback is valid for rookie difficulty where the corpses seem a bit too few and far between for trying out higher level tech.
Tuhalu
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by Tuhalu »

Force Level actually doesn't go up faster with higher difficulty at all. They are always 15 days apart. The only difference is that the first Force Level increase is 9 days earlier on Legend than on Rookie.

As far as reinforcements go, the speed of reinforcements was actually reduced for Legend from 8 days to 10 days in 1.3. This is 14 on Rookie.

Primary Weapon tech (smg, rifle, pistol, cannon, sniper rifle, shotgun) is extremely easy to rush in this game. This leads to you rushing past the secondary weapon techs quite easily, which gives the impression those secondary weapon techs are too hard to get. In my 1.2 campaign I had Coil Gun tech in May or June, which is just ridiculous.

I'd like to see some more reliability in getting some specific corpses too, but it's maybe not as bad as it appears. Certainly they took steps to make Stun Lancers appear somewhat more regularly in Supply and Troop Columns (specifically in the "rainbow pods") in 1.3.
trihero
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by trihero »

I'm playing a second round of Rookie, and yes the corpse distribution is as bad as it appears.

This time around, I have been able to secure a few stun lancer corpses, but I am currently in mid-October with ZERO muton corpses found, and one advent mech (I can't even build a holo targeter MKII or go for bluescreen protocol since the first corpse was simply used to research the ability to construct it).

Ironically, I have 2 "farming" regions where I specifically spiked the vigiliance high and left all intel rebels in order to search for UFOs/supply raids/troop columns. I find them from time to time, but they are relatively rare, combined with the fact that I infiltrate well, meaning I'm not seeing a lot of corpses, especially the rare ones. I have plenty of troopers/vipers/sectoids.

I think it's actually a very real issue, even if just on Rookie. Based on facts, we see less corpse-generating missions than we did in 1.2, and because we're highly encouraged to infiltrate well, and as a consequence when we do we don't get a lot of corpses.

One step in the right direction would be to let Network Towers generate corpses. It only makes sense now that we get a free relay from completing it, which implies that xcom stays around long enough to dismantle or take over the tower.

But I think generally a more careful look at smoothing out corpse generation to make it on a more regular basis would be extremely welcome. I'm getting a lot less enjoyment out of the game when I get lopsided tech choices (like lacking holo 2, bluescreen, plasma grenades, archon stuff, when I'm 5+ months into the game with MSGTS and coils but basic secondary weapons due to lack of tech, etc etc etc) even though I'm trying pretty hard to generate troop/supply/UFOs. This being my second round of rookie, both of which I took a look at my corpse distribution 5+ months deep into the game, it's pretty bad and limits the fun of trying out various techs.

It is as bad as it looks, and I don't think it's just an RNG issue.

This would be my number one balance/QoL complaint that has just been sucking the fun out of my runs recently (besides bugs).
Dwarfling
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by Dwarfling »

It'd be nice if we always got a small boss pod on the Troop columns with a single high-tech Alien and say, two escorts. Put a single Archon/M.Elite/Andromedon/Gatekeeper/Sectopod in it as we advance in Alien force level.
Jadiel
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by Jadiel »

How many regions have you liberated? I've never seen a HQ without a Mech (in my experience, there's always one in the General's pod). I'm pretty sure I've never seen one without a Muton or a Stun-lancer also...
trihero
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by trihero »

In my first rookie 1.3 run, I had liberated 5 regions by late november. I was so low on stun lancer corpses I skipped the 2nd tier swords and made an archon sword when I had the corpse for that. I collected a sectopod corpse before collecting any andromedon/muton elite corpses, which is way out of wack for progression. I had plenty of supplies/alloys/elerium and was comfortably fitting out everyone in plasma weapons/warden armor and was choking on exotic corpses.

In this current rookie 1.4 run, I have liberated 1 region by october. This is quite deliberate for me to simulate what a low-liberation run looks like (which is what legend generally looks like; for instance xwynns legend play has 5 contacted regions and zero liberated I believe and he's beyond the early game I think). I am choking on zero muton corpses and no mech corpses beyond that which to merely research the ability to make things with mech corpses, even though I have 2 regions with 13 intel rebels with each at advent strength 6 scanning for raids/columns. I have made a fair amount of bank from S&Gs so my supplies/alloys/elerium aren't in terrible shape, but corpses are lacking seriously.

It affects game balance in a very arbitrary way (my holo sharpshooters are feeling like a waste of time even though they're at GSGT, because of basic holo targeters, my shinobis can't find swords to compete with plasma tier weapons, can't play around with acid grenades even though they suck badly, can't try fleche rounds even though they're probably not even OP). In addition to this, the corpse progression is very strange where you can easily find sectopod/gatekeeper corpses before finding andromedon/muton elite corpses.
seananigans
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by seananigans »

Obligatory re-post of my biggest wish-list item for LW2:

Corpse retrieval on every mission.

I don't care that it's not thematic. After watching Beagle's recent LW1 restart, I seriously miss collecting things from every mission. Make corpses retrieved from every mission, balance tech/project corpse costs and black market pricing accordingly. Problem solved (unless I'm overlooking something?). If you see an enemy in a mission, you have a reasonable assumption that you'll get its corpse, assuming you don't blow it to smithereens.

Yes, it will require a balance pass on exact numbers for costs/pricing, but that tends to be much easier than balance passes for things such as class perk balance, interaction, and such.
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8wayz
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by 8wayz »

@ seananigans -

You are overlooking Reinforcements. Missions where you can collect loot and cadavers do not have Reinforcements turned on, for a good reason. It will be almost impossible to reconcile both mechanics - having more collect missions and still viable Reinforcements that could not be farmed ad infinitum.

Or they will simply have to turn Reinforcements off completely and revert it to Long War 1 mission design.


On topic -
I am playing on Commander at the beginning of April, and I have already passed two Supply raids and one UFO. From the UFO I got 3 Stun Lancers and 1 Viper in March. On the second Supply raid I managed only 20% infiltration since I was waiting for another squad to finish their mission to be able send more soldiers.

I did manage to send a 7 person squad and faced 26 units, again with some Stun Lancers.

The main trick to getting better aliens and cadavers is triggering harder missions with pods that have 6-8 units. For example on the UFO mission I had my first 8-unit pod in 1.3, with 2 Stun Lancers in it.

Keep in mind that pod composition is also determined by difficulty - on easier difficulties you should very rarely see 8 unit pods. The aliens in them should also be of an easier variety.
seananigans
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by seananigans »

8wayz wrote:@ seananigans -

You are overlooking Reinforcements. Missions where you can collect loot and cadavers do not have Reinforcements turned on, for a good reason. It will be almost impossible to reconcile both mechanics - having more collect missions and still viable Reinforcements that could not be farmed ad infinitum.

Or they will simply have to turn Reinforcements off completely and revert it to Long War 1 mission design.
No, I'm not overlooking it. RNF's already don't drop loot items (mods/PCS/cores), so I assumed there's a way to turn off corpse dropping for them as well. If you know something I don't about how the game is coded and the limitations of mods, then be more specific. If that's true, then it falls under the "unless I'm missing something" part of my post.

But seriously, with the current "guerilla" style of X2, I don't really see any way to truly balance corpse income within the current design paradigm, and corpses are a fun part of the XCOM (particularly Long War) economy. Human psychology comes into play a lot with game design, and seeing 20 Andromedons and Archons over the course of 3 in-game months, but LITERALLY NONE of them being on corpse retrieval missions is frustrating as all hell. It's not fun.

MCRGA (Make Corpse Retrieval Great Again).
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8wayz
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by 8wayz »

Corpse retrieval works "per mission" and not "per unit". So any mission where you can retrieve corpses does not have reinforcements. Otherwise you would be able to get hundreds of corpses by farming them.

Hence why there are only a few mission types where you can get the corpses back home.

To put things into perspective, in Jagged Alliance for example there were players who wanted to be able for each and every enemy to drop loot and their weapon. It did not make sense not to be able to check the dead bodies and relieve them of their belongings. That option was later added via mods but in general the game was still balanced around limited loot, which was quite dangerous to get your hands on.

It is a balance question - do you want to make the players' life easier by letting them go only on easy missions where they have stacked the odds in their favour to get loot, or limit them to a few types of missions, dangerous, which will reward you with more and better rewards the higher you push the danger level to?
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WanWhiteWolf
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by WanWhiteWolf »

8wayz wrote:Corpse retrieval works "per mission" and not "per unit". So any mission where you can retrieve corpses does not have reinforcements. Otherwise you would be able to get hundreds of corpses by farming them.

Hence why there are only a few mission types where you can get the corpses back home.

To put things into perspective, in Jagged Alliance for example there were players who wanted to be able for each and every enemy to drop loot and their weapon. It did not make sense not to be able to check the dead bodies and relieve them of their belongings. That option was later added via mods but in general the game was still balanced around limited loot, which was quite dangerous to get your hands on.

It is a balance question - do you want to make the players' life easier by letting them go only on easy missions where they have stacked the odds in their favour to get loot, or limit them to a few types of missions, dangerous, which will reward you with more and better rewards the higher you push the danger level to?

The problem is that you are heavily reliant on RNG, rather than tactics for corpse farming.

Unless you are LUCKY, your research will be gated by lack of corpses. I already restarted 2 campaigns because I couldn't progress further with my tech / research due to lack of corpses.

It wasn't a problem in 1.2 but in 1.4, you suffer from lack of corpses. That is mostly because you can't do the 0% raids anymore and you are at the mercy of RNG to get the corpses that you need in a specific mission - that you have no control in spawning it.

They should at least add an option to carry 1 body out of the mission. They can simply add it as commander perk. Problem solved. So if you need body X to progress, you can focus on that one.

At this point, the "strategical" layer is mostly RNG based : get-or-not-get a lander UFO / suply raid with good timing.
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8wayz
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by 8wayz »

Well, you can still adjust your missions to your needs.

As pointed above, I did my second Supply raid at 20% Infiltration and the mission showed Moderate-Heavy presence.

And I did get 2 Stun Lancers from that mission at the beginning of April (!).

If you do some of the corpse retrieval missions at lower infiltration with a good squad, at least 7-8 soldiers, then you can get better corpses. Naturally, this will be recommended only in low to mid-strength regions (up to 4). Any higher and it would be pure suicide.

It is still possible though.
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WanWhiteWolf
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by WanWhiteWolf »

8wayz wrote:Well, you can still adjust your missions to your needs.

As pointed above, I did my second Supply raid at 20% Infiltration and the mission showed Moderate-Heavy presence.

And I did get 2 Stun Lancers from that mission at the beginning of April (!).

If you do some of the corpse retrieval missions at lower infiltration with a good squad, at least 7-8 soldiers, then you can get better corpses. Naturally, this will be recommended only in low to mid-strength regions (up to 4). Any higher and it would be pure suicide.

It is still possible though.
Unless you save-scum, I don't think you can do 20% infiltration supply raids reliably. At least not one 1.4 legend. Maybe you can get a solid map and cheese your way with a shinoby spotter and snipers. But that's lucky and maybe 1/10.

But 30+ enemies with 8-pods is going to - statistically - kill a starting squad tech.

Edit: Well, you could go with tons of rockets and explosives but that defeats the purpose of the mission since you destroy the corpses.
trihero
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by trihero »

Well, you can still adjust your missions to your needs.
Not really. The command pods in supply raids are missing archons/andromedons. It's also a bad idea in general to have to target low infiltration supply raids as a source for corpses. What's the point of challenging yourself with low infiltration supply raids when you can still build a lot of corpseless technology to win the game? (plasma weps).

The point of the thread isn't stun lancers only, it's that quite a few different types of corpses are hard to come by and it feels very arbitrary. It doesn't prevent you from winning the game but it makes you bet on builds that don't require corpses, in a very arbitrary manner. Feels bad when you can outfit as many rangers as you want with plasma rifles before you can even build 1 fusion blade for 1 shinobi, for example, or when you can manufacture a bajillion incendiary grenades but no acid grenades. I don't see how that's good for gameplay variety/balance.
seananigans
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by seananigans »

8wayz wrote:Corpse retrieval works "per mission" and not "per unit". So any mission where you can retrieve corpses does not have reinforcements. Otherwise you would be able to get hundreds of corpses by farming them.

Hence why there are only a few mission types where you can get the corpses back home.

To put things into perspective, in Jagged Alliance for example there were players who wanted to be able for each and every enemy to drop loot and their weapon. It did not make sense not to be able to check the dead bodies and relieve them of their belongings. That option was later added via mods but in general the game was still balanced around limited loot, which was quite dangerous to get your hands on.

It is a balance question - do you want to make the players' life easier by letting them go only on easy missions where they have stacked the odds in their favour to get loot, or limit them to a few types of missions, dangerous, which will reward you with more and better rewards the higher you push the danger level to?
Ok, so are you saying you know for certain this can't be altered? What you say is true, but you're talking correlation not causation. As I mentioned, RNFs have item drops disabled. Are you telling me you're 100% certain that corpse drops for RNFs CANNOT be disabled, that it is impossible to mod this aspect? I'm skeptical, and nobody in here has said that yes indeed this mechanic is untouchable by mods.

I'm not retarded, I understand how the game currently is set up, and what the original design decisions were (vanilla had much less focus on corpses for economy). I don't need people in here treating me like I'm a child. Clearly rebutt my proposal with facts.
trihero
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by trihero »

One thing to think about when readjusting corpse drop rates is that we're expected to have 3 teams active at once, and it's reasonable to assume that you might need one corpse-dependent item per team. I.e. maybe your lead on 3 teams is a shinobi, and that's reasonable for stealth scouting purposes, so you need 3 sword corpses to stay on par with weapon tech. Or you have various sharpshooters on each team, so you need at least 3 holo targeters, etc.

The current corpse rate drop is so out of whack and rng dependent I can barely if I'm lucky get one team that has one corpse-upgraded item like a sword or holo targeter so one of my 3 active teams can get an upgrade above basic gear (while weapon/armor is almost top notch), and there's a lot more other circumstances based on lack of archon/muton/andromedon corpses.

Maybe elerium/supplies/alloys should be the limiting factor more so than corpses. I mean I like the corpse system, it has its place, I get that it's supposed to be rare, but elerium/supplies/alloys are supposed to be the real limiting factor causing you to make choices rather than rng or scarcity of corpses at all to begin with.
justdont
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by justdont »

A reasonably easy (but not necessarily fun) way to improve the distribution is to allow black market to sell certain corpses, based on current FL. I believe it was even discussed quite a lot a few months ago.
Jacke
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by Jacke »

There's also the mod Extract Corpses. XCOM can carry out a knocked-out VIP or a wounded or dead XCOM soldier, so why not human-weight corpses? I metamod to exclude carrying the heavier aliens but also keep the Fulton Harness for future missions to haul them out.

Personally, I'd like to see this become part of LW2.
LordYanaek
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by LordYanaek »

This have been the subject of many lengthy discussions and was supposed to be improved in 1.3 but as i see from this thread and my own campaign (now early July and no stun lancer corpse, but i'm finally about to raid an HQ) it's still far from prefect.
justdont wrote:A reasonably easy (but not necessarily fun) way to improve the distribution is to allow black market to sell certain corpses, based on current FL. I believe it was even discussed quite a lot a few months ago.
I think it would indeed be the best (partially because it would be the easiest) way to solve this issue. If it's not too difficult those corpses could even depend on what you killed last "drop" (maybe you didn't have time to extract corpses but some smugglers could get a few while ADVENT was busy chasing you) but basing it purely on FL would probably be a good enough approximation.
It would allow player to have just enough corpses to get those items that require them but wouldn't break the balance by giving additional corpses to sell (you would even have to purchase them) but at least some builds wouldn't be better than others simply because their weapons are easier to produce (or more guaranteed anyway).
trihero
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by trihero »

This have been the subject of many lengthy discussions and was supposed to be improved in 1.3 but as i see from this thread and my own campaign (now early July and no stun lancer corpse, but i'm finally about to raid an HQ) it's still far from prefect.
I'm super happy to start to see a number of people actually agreeing with me, instead of the first few posters who knee-jerked "no it's fine." :D

This is one of those things that was fine in vanilla, and then we went and fixed what wasn't broken. I mean it happens, whatever, no personal attack on anyone, just saying vanilla actually did a lot of things right. The corpse progression and distribution felt great in vanilla.

Well, I'm getting close to the point where I should probably quit this mod until the next "big" version comes out. I did enjoy testing, exposing bugs,playing and giving feedback a number of issues for 1.3/1.4 though so I got my worth for the time being.
trihero
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Re: Corpse Distribution?

Post by trihero »

Just wanted to add that I don't think it's just the number of exotic corpses that is the problem, it could also be that the problem is the fairly arbitrary bottlenecks that certain items have with respect to corpses.

For instance, if you want to research/manufacture bluescreen rounds/holo targeting, they both need advent mech wrecks. Why in the world are we being forced to choose between them? Is there some overpowered world where someone wants to use both holo targeters and bluescreen rounds? Thematically it makes sense for them to require mec wrecks, but it creates a very weird bottleneck that doesn't even pit like two super powerful options versus each other, it just creates an arbitrary friction between you can either develop better holo sharpshooters, or you can have better anti-mech ammo. The choice makes no sense.

Another specific example is the archon corpse flechette rounds/acid grenades/fusion blade triad. Why are we forced to choose between them?

If anything, a lot more techs need to go corpse-free so we can have the ability to diversify if we want to, with the limiting factor being elerium/alloys/supplies.

There are lots of secondary weapons that don't require corpses like MKII gauntlets, adv nade launchers, MKII arc throwers (well 1 corpse to unlock it, but no corpse requirement per rank II built). Primary weapons like plasma rifles, etc don't need corpses yet why do sword shinobis main weapon need it? Etc.

I'm not so sure the corpse requirements + distribution were very carefully thought through, they just introduce arbitrary bottlenecks for certain tech paths. I think the corpse requirements were really put in for thematic purposes, but the requirement should be relaxed for at least the two substantive examples above. I believe some of them were relaxed back in 1.1 or something with respect to heavy weapons, for instance, we just need to keep that trend going.
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