Yeah I have to say, after using the Machine Gunner / Rocket Launcher / Shield Grenadier combo, I'm not finding the HUGE advantages being spoken of. I still lost guys. Plus I spent a lot of turns missing things and just doing damage to the trees with my squad of Rookies, Lieutenants and Sergeants. Not to mention reloading or just moving.
Yeah, but it's not just turns spent, but the TYPE of turns spent. Turns spent groping around in enemy contact are stressful and demanding. Turns spent moving and reloading, pass quickly. It may help if you don't behave quite so aggressively and play it cool. There's no hurry.
But forget carrying extra shields. Shields can only be equipped into hands (they don't fit anywhere else) which means you need your non-Shield Grenadiers to carry them into a mission and drop them on the floor of the ship.
... and then run back to the ship when your Shield breaks. By which point you're generally taking that man out of action or putting him to the back of the unit anyway as he's also low on health. And if you're spending that many turns running back to the ship, well you could spend as many doing a "safe" conservative ship assault anyway.
I *WAS* doing a safe, conservative assault. This makes it SAFER.
Rocket Launchers just cause too much damage - and after having confirmed a few times now - yes, what you blow up does reduce your take-home end of mission pay.
Destroying ship furniture definitely has an effect, but I'm a bit more iffy about its correlation to aliens. Like I said: I noticed a VERY LARGE discrepancy between items taken home and items I physically picked up on the field, and when I reloaded it to experiment, I found that nothing I did mattered.
And if you're putting a "Rocket through the eye" of aliens at distance, then you could have done the same at twice the distance with a Sniper Rifle, with much more finesse and without destroying the alien corpse and lowering your mission income.
There are 3 things you've overlooked:
1. Rockets don't have to explode, there are also Stun Rockets, which work real nice early game, both for accomplishing live captures and neutralizing foes without even needing LOS, so they can't even shoot back when you wrap the gas around corners.
2. Sure, you could land a single sniper rifle shot as well...but that's not gonna faze him, not until you get the good rifles, and even then, you'll likely need two shots.
3. Rockets can hit even when they miss, or at least accomplish something. If I fire a sniper shot, and I miss and hit the wall instead, the job is no easier for the next guy. If I do this with a rocket, the explosion may severely injure the offending alien, and the wall that was blocking me isn't there anymore. I've made the next guy's job easier.
At the low-end, their ammo is heavy and unless your guys are close, they'll miss.
Yeah, but what else were they gonna carry? Those pansyases need their strength exercises! I've had guys carrying rockets even when they don't have rocket launchers, for ballast and to resupply the rocketmans.
Then they need to spend a whole turn reloading. You may as well take aimed Rifle shots or bursts at distance.
One rifle shot ain't gonna do jack shit, hit or miss. Rifles get a lot better with MAG and become the line weapon, but not Earthling rifle, that thing is shit. Rockets, on the other hand, hit or miss, do SOMETHING, even if that something is creating a purple fog of area denial.
My good Snipers can take an aimed and a snap at distance, and will often hit with both (or take an aimed and get to cover). A Rocket would take two turns just to fire once and leaves your guy standing in the open for two turns.
It also creates a cloud of purple fog or destroys the enemy's cover. Or the enemy. Depending on what you're loading.
Likewise if your Machine Gunners are hitting 30% of the time, chances are that with Rifles at the same distance, they'd be able to not only take a nice aimed shot, but then move back into cover as well afterwards.
30% MG accuracy is VERY GOOD and means an average of 3 bullets on target, plus however many bullets weren't on target but hit someone anyway, plus suppression. 30% rifle accuracy? You MIGHT hit ONE bullet, which is gonna do fuck all. I'm usually unloading at the 15-20% range, and I still get lots of kills. Remember, if your accuracy is shit at that range, so's theirs, and you've got a lot more bullets to unload than they do!
Definite advantage in their suppression capability and just "firing into the dark" those times when shots appear from too far away for you to safely scout though. But... they're heavy and it means a lot of turns moving into place. And once you've fired, you don't have far to run.
Pssh. Run? They're the ones doing the running, since you're unloading 3 or 4 machineguns at them while the next team advances into a new firing position so that they can take up the dakka.
You could burst at the same distance with a Rifleman and then get him back around the corner into cover for about the same amount of turns. Great advantage up close and personal, although here Shotguns achieve much the same effect with plenty of time to retreat.
I see it more as as case of bullets-per-AP. As far as maximum bullets fired per AP goes, the MG beats all of them.
So overall, I have to say the game's weapons so far are actually fairly balanced. That is, whatever you're happy with is most likely going to be as viable a strategy as any other. You're still going to lose guys whatever you do (until they git gud) and you're still going to be reasonably challenged (I'm assuming until you get the good armour, at which point nothing will matter as per usual).
The problem here is I did, and not by choice. I was literally at the point of beginning to manufacture Lasers when "Hey, you've got Plasma!" popped up and so just started manufacturing those instead. I am on Normal though, so perhaps on Hard that's better balanced?
Nope. Hard changes nothing there. In fact, it makes it worse: You're too BROKE to afford anything new before the next thing becomes available.
I have to say, after another game month has gone by, that this seems to be more accurate. The extra income I'm getting from the Ruskies and Africa balanced out North America in my budget, resulting in an increase of about $600k that I wasn't expecting. That coupled with my mission earnings means my third base is already going into North America as we speak. Perhaps I'll lose it, but time will tell.
Yeah, you don't want to LOSE North America, or ANY of the major regions, but where you go FIRST is up to you. I would immediately begin constructing coverage over whatever you don't choose first, though.
I think this is the main difference between your play-style and mine. I'm much more the Sniper. I'm all about distance, accuracy and cover.
Yeah, you see, my style actually closely matches your style, and our methods kinda converge later on. The difference is, I'm accustomed to the idea that I won't get my preference early on. So I fall back on plan B. You try to snipe early on, you discover that your puny dink gun just isn't gonna faze them, and your troopers are too shit at sniping to snipe. It's not like the later game when I have a MAG Sniper and 90% to-hit odds due to my roster of 100-acc troops. The early game is spray and pray, and I just accept that and roll with it. When I have to choose between a 50% chance of hitting with one bullet, and a 15% chance of hitting with 10 bullets, which one of these is going to give me more bullets on target?
Once I've spotted an enemy with my Rookie scout, it's the 3 guys still at distance who are taking shots. With my approach, I don't worry too much about Strength, mostly just TUs and Accuracy. Where-as you're much more distance + inaccuracy. The spray and pay style. Keeping your guys back far enough that the aliens don't see them / can't hit them and letting the Rockets and Machine Gun fire rain down.
It's not so much a what-I-am as it is a what-I'm-given. I am GIVEN a bunch of shitty guns and guys who can't shoot for shit. I make the best of it by hosing the range in lead. Once the performance of my dudes improves to tolerable levels due to experience and better hardware, my strategy converges towards your higher-precision strategy...but once you've tasted the dakka, you never quite give it up, and even though I eventually start to issue MAG Snipers in significant percentages of the force, I still use a lot of MGs, because, frankly, MGs STILL log a better shoot-orders-to-kills ratio. With MAG Sniper, it takes maybe one or two shots to down an alien...which you may or may not get. The MG? Pretty much always kills 'em dead. Not only is the offending target alien now Swiss cheese, but all his buddies are cowering in terror, a thing that the Sniper Rifle just doesn't do.
And given they are fairly high damage weapons, I can see them lasting a lot longer into the end game, while my strategy demands a higher level of weapons research and building kit.
Yeah, your sniping strategy doesn't really pay off until you get the good guns, and the good troops.
It's just a pity you aren't penalised financially for blowing up the terrain and causing collateral damage. That'd fuck your shit up.
Like in X-Com Apocalypse, you mean?
Strangely enough, my favored weapon there was...the MACHINE GUN again. The Earthling Machine Gun actually caused a very low level of collateral damage. It also caused a relatively low level of damage, period, but each shot cost you all of 1 TU until your guys started to get a lot of TUs (at which point it suddenly jumped to 2 and became crap), and was pretty much an awesome weapon until then.
Yeah, though I think the % of TUs bugged me in the first X-Com too. Makes no sense for one guy to be firing with 8 TUs while carrying 18 metric fuck tonnes of shit on his back, while another takes 60 to "setup, position" and then fire the same gun when his pack is empty.I'd prefer something like a hard "50 TUs to burst fire this weapon" limit (and actually the Machine Gun should have a "setup" and "pack-up" cost too but whatever), with people who are carrying more requiring more TUs to fire. Xenonauts seems ass-about this way. A guy with a fuck tonne of shit can still setup and fire a Machine Gun in the same "turn" a stronger guy carrying much less can? Not bloody likely...
I think the logic behind %-TU is that a faster, more agile guy, doesn't actually make the gun cycle faster, but the entire combined-AP system really kinda results in weird things, like the inability to move while reloading. I dunno about you, but in real life, I tend to reload on the move specifically because the accuracy drawbacks of moving do not impact you when you are simply reloading anyway and therefore not shooting.
You clearly never had to run through that fucking seaweed shit in TFTD. And oh God, the multi-map missions. The start of every second turn was spent just ending turns a few times so everyone could rest up.
Ah, that's where you and I differ, then. My guys typically only move every other turn, because they move one turn, and then they cover the other half of the team the next turn.
Yeah, I can see your strategy being pretty sound for late-game play. Even my Rookies at out-of-sight range could usually hit at least 1 in 10 with the Machine Gun, or at least suppress the enemy on most occasions (albeit that used a fuck tonne of ammo). If they were good, well fuck me, there'd be a lot of dead exploding aliens everywhere.
My strategy is what GETS me to the late game where I can afford to snipe like we want to. We actually both want the same things, but I recognize that the cards I'm given won't permit it to be done effectively. And yeah, hitting one in ten with the machine gun means you practically always hit, and the suppression mechanic means even your misses are worth points. Hitting one in ten with the sniper rifle means you always miss, and it does fuck all for you when you miss.
Rockets and Machine Guns do some pretty solid damage if they hit.
They do solid damage if they hit, but more importantly, they do solid damage when they miss, too, since they rip up enemy cover, have blast AOEs, and cause suppression and area denial from purple clouds of stun fog.
Plus I could totally see their shots taking out / suppressing multiple enemies while Shotguns or Rifles only take the one you're aiming at. Throw in a few extra TUs to move another step or two, and they're highly effective. And why spend the money on Laser / Plasma if you're killing things as it is?
Exactly. The money saved goes towards playing the Air Superiority game which gets me more money.
