A Tale of two players

Saph7
Long War 2 Crew
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by Saph7 »

Thrombozyt wrote:While I can see your point about them still being powerful statistically, I don't see why the CC part was targeted in such an inconsistent manner when clearly the damage part would have been easier to manage.
Inconsistent? Seriously? It's not enough for the things to do more damage than a point-blank shotgun with a 75% burn that's basically a death sentence, you want it to be a 100% too?
Thrombozyt wrote:I also wonder, what your justification for the Troop Column change is. Successful Troop Columns were the primary way to reduce ADVENT strength/alert - they do so now only 50% of the time. Given that Gate Crasher is a troop column and previously it was possible to have your starting region at alert 2, now you can have a alert 3 starting region on higher difficulties, which makes things significantly harder compared to the more normal alert 1 region.
As far as I know Gatecrasher doesn't reduce strength at all – campaigns don't start with Str 3 that gets reduced by Gatecrasher to 2, you just start with Strength 2 full stop. The Gatecrasher mission is a special case and doesn't play by the normal rules (8 rookies when normally you'd be lucky to get 6, scripted enemies and loot, etc).
Psieye
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by Psieye »

8wayz wrote:I truly do not wish to side track this discussion
It is time for a new thread. This tangent deserves a proper discussion.
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Zyrrashijn
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by Zyrrashijn »

Everyone keeps forgetting, that the 75% burn chance is not the only CC-effect the incendiary has. It can also set tiles aflame, speaking of space denial, or even the tile an enemy is in, resulting in a burning status if the opponent moves or on the end of his turn.
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8wayz
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by 8wayz »

I think you are omitting the part where the burn on tile effect does not trigger automatically for each and every tile in the AOE and it is still subject to random chance. Same goes for environmental damage and destruction of terrain. Oh, and the area of the grenade was nerfed to oblivion - it is currently tailor-designed to function as high-damage incendiary rocket instead of a grenade.

Both were actually nerfed to limit the crowd-control effect of this grenade, but on others as well.

I will continue in the other thread later.
Zyrrashijn
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by Zyrrashijn »

I don't think i'm omitting anything. I wrote "can" not "does". Sure there's chance in it. But it's not solely 75% as presented before.
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8wayz
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by 8wayz »

Yep, the chance is actually a lot lower due to the various variables. Changing the last 100% parameter to a variable is frankly a bridge too far concerning the main role of grenades - crowd-control.
fowlJ
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by fowlJ »

8wayz wrote:Yep, the chance is actually a lot lower due to the various variables.
That is definitely not even a little bit how math works, but sure.
Changing the last 100% parameter to a variable is frankly a bridge too far concerning the main role of grenades - crowd-control.
Incendiary Grenades aren't supposed to be crowd control. That is literally the entire point of these changes, as well as something that someone on the team, with a direct line to the actual designers of the game, has stated clearly. That the only thing anyone used them for was making it impossible for an enemy to take any actions as opposed to using them as a weapon was not supposed to happen, and so is being corrected.
Thrombozyt
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by Thrombozyt »

Saph7 wrote:
Thrombozyt wrote:While I can see your point about them still being powerful statistically, I don't see why the CC part was targeted in such an inconsistent manner when clearly the damage part would have been easier to manage.
Inconsistent? Seriously? It's not enough for the things to do more damage than a point-blank shotgun with a 75% burn that's basically a death sentence, you want it to be a 100% too?
I would like to remove the point-blank shotgun damage and keep the burn. Because 75% of the time it's a death sentence and OP, 25% of the time it will most likely leave a dangerous enemy standing and operational. So I'm taking the grenade because I'm hoping for the 75%, not because the 25% is good enough.

I'd rather see the 75% at 100% with either the cost massively increased (grenade is a consumable like combat drugs) OR the 75% at 100% with no explosion damage (basically a pause button) OR a dark event spawning 25% of biological enemies with hazmat, that I can scan for before launching the grenade OR something like a tier list where specific enemies are easier and some are harder to burn so that I can select which target to control.
Basically I want to influence the power of the grenade through good play and not hoping to roll the OP state.
Saph7 wrote:As far as I know Gatecrasher doesn't reduce strength at all – campaigns don't start with Str 3 that gets reduced by Gatecrasher to 2, you just start with Strength 2 full stop. The Gatecrasher mission is a special case and doesn't play by the normal rules (8 rookies when normally you'd be lucky to get 6, scripted enemies and loot, etc).
OK.. Sorry for distracting with Gate Crasher (not scripted as shown here).
The main question - tying into flat percentages - is:
Why was it suggested that troop columns should reduce alert only 50% of the time?

Alert/Strength reduction is the main purpose of that with resources/corpses being a secondary. There is no massive corpse shortage in the current state and smash&grab gives a good resource influx. So why push the mission away from its primary goal?
Saph7
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by Saph7 »

Thrombozyt wrote:I'd rather see the 75% at 100% with either the cost massively increased (grenade is a consumable like combat drugs) OR the 75% at 100% with no explosion damage (basically a pause button) OR a dark event spawning 25% of biological enemies with hazmat, that I can scan for before launching the grenade OR something like a tier list where specific enemies are easier and some are harder to burn so that I can select which target to control.
As far as I know JL has neither the desire nor the intention to do any of those things.
JulianSkies
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by JulianSkies »

I think the highest likelihood is for them to remove entirely the fire effect on fire grenades and add more damage than make then reliable CC
MacroNova
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by MacroNova »

Saph7 wrote:As far as I know JL has neither the desire nor the intention to do any of those things.
Hence this thread to try to convince him? Sheesh.

DerAva makes an excellent point about randomness that can't be influenced leading to highly binary and disparate outcomes. Xwynns made a very similar point about March Scout interceptions in Long War 1. If you shoot down the UFO and get a crash site, it's a training mission for your troops and a bunch of resources. If you destroy the UFO you get some money and nothing else. Xwynns pointed out that campaigns that had lucky Marches with three crash sites were wildly better-positioned going into April. JL was convinced and he made it so that all successful interceptions in March result in a crash site. He removed the randomness to prevent binary and disparate outcomes.

So he's willing to do it. We just need to convince him that taking away the reliability of fire grenades, sting grenades, combatives, and killing troop columns will have a similar enough effect. IMO, DerAva did that pretty handily in his OP.
Thrombozyt
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by Thrombozyt »

Saph7 wrote:
Thrombozyt wrote:I'd rather see the 75% at 100% with either the cost massively increased (grenade is a consumable like combat drugs) OR the 75% at 100% with no explosion damage (basically a pause button) OR a dark event spawning 25% of biological enemies with hazmat, that I can scan for before launching the grenade OR something like a tier list where specific enemies are easier and some are harder to burn so that I can select which target to control.
As far as I know JL has neither the desire nor the intention to do any of those things.
Yes. We know what JL wants to do. That's in the upcoming changes thread and that wasn't the question. The question I asked specifically was:
Why was the "It's now only OP 75% of the time" approach chosen over other approaches that leave the player in control?

And of course:
What is the reason to have Troop Columns reduce alert/strength only in 50% of the successful missions?
Saph7
Long War 2 Crew
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by Saph7 »

Thrombozyt wrote:Yes. We know what JL wants to do. That's in the upcoming changes thread and that wasn't the question. The question I asked specifically was:
Why was the "It's now only OP 75% of the time" approach chosen over other approaches that leave the player in control?

And of course:
What is the reason to have Troop Columns reduce alert/strength only in 50% of the successful missions?
I don't know, and to be honest I don't really consider these particular changes important or significant enough to be worth questioning JL about.
LordYanaek
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Re: A Tale of two players

Post by LordYanaek »

Thrombozyt wrote: What is the reason to have Troop Columns reduce alert/strength only in 50% of the successful missions?
Keep in mind that 1.5 troop columns will be both more frequent and easier to detect. That means you'll get more of those and if they kept reducing str by 1 each time you would probably quickly get negligible str and 0 challenge.

I always found it strange that killing a patrol or two was enough to remove an entire "legion" and that the much harder to detect and play supply convoys would reduce str by the same amount. Troop columns will also become an option to get rare corpses thanks to some changes to pod composition so from the look of it it seems like they are trying to change them to be a source of corpses first and an opportunity to (maybe) reduce str next rather than the current situation. Convoys will be the main way to reduce str and being much harder to detect, str will be harder to keep low. This will hopefully prevent some campaigns from turning into a Civ-like situation where you basically know by Medieval era you've won but still have to play a lot more turns to get that coveted "you won" screen :roll:

That being said, I have to say i would prefer if they reduced str by 1/2 a point (it could be done simply by doubling every str value if non-integers are not an option) rather than the statistically similar 50% chance that can make a huge difference on the first few troop columns missions, possibly making some games much harder than they should and, worse, some games much easier than they should.

Re : Fire Grenades. This have been discussed ad-nausea already. xwynns explained that they were never intended to be a hard CC but a direct damage tool. That's fair for me (i was opposed to an unreliable single target CC but it's OK if it's not supposed to be a CC tool). I'm not sure they will compete with re-usable direct damage past the early game however. Maybe they are meant to be an early game tool that becomes obsolete at some point.
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