Hey all,
There are a number of design decisions in Long War 2 that really confuse me, and I was hoping somebody could shed some light or point me in the direction of some answers. Please feel free to answer some subset of these! I have a huge number of questions, and I'd love to hear any answers people have; you don't need to deal with everything!
Why did they change the promotion mechanics away from the old "Pick from 2 sub-classes or completely random"? It made a lot of sense, and was an excellent balance between randomness and control.
More importantly... WHY ON EARTH IS THE SOLDIER+ENEMY INFO PANEL GONE?!?!?!?! The original Long War allowed you to inspect your soldiers or the current enemies, which would reveal things such as perks and abilities that those enemies had (after you had completed the autopsy). I find it awfully irksome that I can't access this information- for instance, what does an ADVENT engineer do differently to a base soldier? Do their stats change over time? What are the exact effects of a flashbang- how much does it reduce aim and movement? Is it simply due to mechanical impossibility that the Long War team didn't include this feature?
If I recall correctly, the rocket when fired will provide you with the max scatter distance, which I assume is probably close to a normal distribution; however, what was behind the design decision to no longer provide the odds of a direct hit?
Why does flanking not always give +50% crit chance? I've commonly seen +33% before and I have no idea why- and why does low hit chance lower your crit chance? I've had 100% chance to hit before, but still had -4 crit due to "to hit"... I'm confused. Even flanking shots seem to commonly have ~17% chance to crit.
Why was height advantage nerfed so heavily, so that it only gives +10 aim now as opposed to the old +20?
Why has the damage range of so many weapons increased drastically (without damage roulette on)? Grenades used to be 3-4 damage scaling down with distance; now they're 2-5. Shotguns used to be 4-6 damage, and now they're 3-8. While this is technically a buff, the increased unreliability is horrific- I can have an assault from point-blank range fail to instantly kill a 4-hp engineer. The standard assault rifle, though, still seems to have the exact same damage range.
I'm not too far into the game so it's possible that I simply have yet to see certain features, but a lot of these design decisions baffled me; can anybody explain a few of them to me? I've done some light work with game design and written a relatively complex strategy mod before, so it's not like I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Baffling Design Decisions
Re: Baffling Design Decisions
Maybe they wanted to design a game and not port Long War 1.
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Amineri
Re: Baffling Design Decisions
The pick two thing was mostly a legacy from a hack that I added to the first version of the "8 classes" back for LW for XCOM:EU.
That one was actually using 4 perks byte-backed into an integer, so it originally wasn't quite 8 classes since the center 2 perk columns had to be shared between the two variants. With the way XCOM 2 modding worked, it was easier to just add entirely separate classes.
The info panel thing (F1) was a base XCOM EU/EW feature, not something we added for LW1. Firaxis removed that in the UI redesign for XCOM 2.
I reworked rocket scatter for LW2 based on feedback from LW1 -- it's not longer gaussian with unlimited possible scatter, but is more tile-based now. That panel description doesn't update in real-time as the cursor moves, and the targeting reticle stuff is fairly buried. There's definitely room for something QoL to show average scatter.
Flanking crit chance is now defined per unit, and is a unit stat, not a global modifier. Since unit stats can vary by difficulty, flank crit chance can also vary by difficulty. This is a change Firaxis made for XCOM 2, not something we changed for LW2.
Damage variance is no longer calculated using global algorithm in XCOM 2 -- weapons each have their own variance stat. JL took advantage of this to do something things he'd wanted to do for LW1, but couldn't because of technical limitations.
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In the end, we made LW2 as a mod for XCOM 2 -- it follows in the spirit of LW1, but isn't a direct port. One of our big goals was to expand upon the resistance them in XCOM 2 which we very VERY much like, if you couldn't tell.
That one was actually using 4 perks byte-backed into an integer, so it originally wasn't quite 8 classes since the center 2 perk columns had to be shared between the two variants. With the way XCOM 2 modding worked, it was easier to just add entirely separate classes.
The info panel thing (F1) was a base XCOM EU/EW feature, not something we added for LW1. Firaxis removed that in the UI redesign for XCOM 2.
I reworked rocket scatter for LW2 based on feedback from LW1 -- it's not longer gaussian with unlimited possible scatter, but is more tile-based now. That panel description doesn't update in real-time as the cursor moves, and the targeting reticle stuff is fairly buried. There's definitely room for something QoL to show average scatter.
Flanking crit chance is now defined per unit, and is a unit stat, not a global modifier. Since unit stats can vary by difficulty, flank crit chance can also vary by difficulty. This is a change Firaxis made for XCOM 2, not something we changed for LW2.
Damage variance is no longer calculated using global algorithm in XCOM 2 -- weapons each have their own variance stat. JL took advantage of this to do something things he'd wanted to do for LW1, but couldn't because of technical limitations.
---------------
In the end, we made LW2 as a mod for XCOM 2 -- it follows in the spirit of LW1, but isn't a direct port. One of our big goals was to expand upon the resistance them in XCOM 2 which we very VERY much like, if you couldn't tell.
Re: Baffling Design Decisions
The F1 screen is gone but you can hover over the soldier name in the Lower left to see lots of stats. You can also hover over the little red or yellow alien head icons and a similar stat panel will roll down from the top right for them.
Re: Baffling Design Decisions
Btw- I'm sorry if I came of as bitching when I wrote this! Was stressed about some other stuff and frustrated with some bad luck, so it kind of colored my response. Sorry ^^
Re: Baffling Design Decisions
To sum up and get to some of the questions you didn't get answered.Ithuriel wrote:Hey all,
There are a number of design decisions in Long War 2 that really confuse me, and I was hoping somebody could shed some light or point me in the direction of some answers. Please feel free to answer some subset of these! I have a huge number of questions, and I'd love to hear any answers people have; you don't need to deal with everything!
Why did they change the promotion mechanics away from the old "Pick from 2 sub-classes or completely random"? It made a lot of sense, and was an excellent balance between randomness and control.
More importantly... WHY ON EARTH IS THE SOLDIER+ENEMY INFO PANEL GONE?!?!?!?! The original Long War allowed you to inspect your soldiers or the current enemies, which would reveal things such as perks and abilities that those enemies had (after you had completed the autopsy). I find it awfully irksome that I can't access this information- for instance, what does an ADVENT engineer do differently to a base soldier? Do their stats change over time? What are the exact effects of a flashbang- how much does it reduce aim and movement? Is it simply due to mechanical impossibility that the Long War team didn't include this feature?
If I recall correctly, the rocket when fired will provide you with the max scatter distance, which I assume is probably close to a normal distribution; however, what was behind the design decision to no longer provide the odds of a direct hit?
Why does flanking not always give +50% crit chance? I've commonly seen +33% before and I have no idea why- and why does low hit chance lower your crit chance? I've had 100% chance to hit before, but still had -4 crit due to "to hit"... I'm confused. Even flanking shots seem to commonly have ~17% chance to crit.
Why was height advantage nerfed so heavily, so that it only gives +10 aim now as opposed to the old +20?
Why has the damage range of so many weapons increased drastically (without damage roulette on)? Grenades used to be 3-4 damage scaling down with distance; now they're 2-5. Shotguns used to be 4-6 damage, and now they're 3-8. While this is technically a buff, the increased unreliability is horrific- I can have an assault from point-blank range fail to instantly kill a 4-hp engineer. The standard assault rifle, though, still seems to have the exact same damage range.
I'm not too far into the game so it's possible that I simply have yet to see certain features, but a lot of these design decisions baffled me; can anybody explain a few of them to me? I've done some light work with game design and written a relatively complex strategy mod before, so it's not like I have no idea what I'm talking about.
So essentially, the 2 classes thing wasn't the preferred design, they did it coincidentally. They like the randomness.
The UI prevents the stats from showing reliably.
There is a formula for a direct rocket hit, but basically there is a percentage to hit every separate tile within the max scatter, that'd be too complicated to show at the moment, and again UI limitations.
The crit bonuses for flanking and the range bonuses for being close were both nerfed in Vanilla, I wouldn't ask the LW devs that. The to-hit bonus is also something I asked, you said "why does low hit chance, lower your crit chance?" well that's because originally in Vanilla XCom 2 low hit chance increased your crit chance. If you had a 50% chance to hit and 50% chance to crit you would always crit on a hit, it only used one dice roll. So oddly, what "to-hit" does is actually what you want. It reverts the functionality back to how it was in Long War 1.
The height advantage was likely nerfed because height is so much easier to get in this game than in EU/EW.
Amineri said that JL would've liked to increase damage range more in LW1 but couldn't. So, the reason is because he can. Long War in general has a partiality towards avoiding/nerfing guarantees (which seems to be why they introduced Rocket Scatter instead of 90% reliable rockets, and why they nerfed cover destruction in LW1 and outer grenade range), and encouraging more RNG. Probably the reason for this is that greater RNG increases the difficulty without really increasing it. You'll have more good moments, but you'll also have more catastrophic moments that you'll need good sense to get out of or mitigate. In essence, it seems LW has a partiality towards random-ness because it creates more dynamic gameplay.
Re: Baffling Design Decisions
I asked the question about the "to hit" crit penalty too. It can be a little confusing.
To put it succinctly - if you have 100% chance to hit, and a raw 50% chance to crit, then there is no "to-hit" penalty, because you are *actually* critting 50% of the time (since you're hitting 100% of the time).
However, if you have only 50% chance to hit and raw 50% chance to crit, your actual chance of scoring a critical hit is only 25% (because "50% crit" means that you will crit on half *of your hits*). You hit half of the shots you take in this scenario and you'll crit on half of the shots you hit.
This shows up as a 25% "to hit" crit penalty, but it's not really a penalty. It's just showing you your actual odds of scoring a critical hit once the probability of actually hitting is taken into account.
To put it succinctly - if you have 100% chance to hit, and a raw 50% chance to crit, then there is no "to-hit" penalty, because you are *actually* critting 50% of the time (since you're hitting 100% of the time).
However, if you have only 50% chance to hit and raw 50% chance to crit, your actual chance of scoring a critical hit is only 25% (because "50% crit" means that you will crit on half *of your hits*). You hit half of the shots you take in this scenario and you'll crit on half of the shots you hit.
This shows up as a 25% "to hit" crit penalty, but it's not really a penalty. It's just showing you your actual odds of scoring a critical hit once the probability of actually hitting is taken into account.
Re: Baffling Design Decisions
They actually fixed shotgun spread, now it's 4-7 on the base shotgun and I am guessting 5-10 for laser and so on