what affects environmental damage?

battch
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Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2017 5:09 pm

what affects environmental damage?

Post by battch »

I was wondering about cover destruction and what affects environmental damage. I know Sapper says it helps, then there's combat engineer and bunker busters. But what I'm curious about is the base damage of explosives. Specifically, Biggest Booms or Boosted Cores or Plasma Grenades. Does the amount of HP damage a given explosive causes create more environmental damage? I think I heard on someone's twitch stream that they said plasma grenades don't increase the environmental damage done vs. regular grenades, and this streamer is very knowledgeable. Is that true, or did I mis-hear?

TL;DR, does the HP damage a grenade do correlate to the amount of environmental damage it also does?

Thanks,
Battch
Tuhalu
Posts: 433
Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2017 9:02 pm

Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by Tuhalu »

Frag Grenades, Plasma Grenades and Proximity Mines do 9 environmental damage. Sapper adds 3 to that. Combat Engineer adds 8 to that. Which means the max environmental damage on these grenades is 20.

Shaped Charge does 100 environmental damage.

Other types of grenade do 0 environmental damage and aren't affected by Sapper or Combat Engineer.

Rockets from the base gauntlet do 20 environmental damage. The MKII does 25 and the MKIII does 30.

Bunker Buster does 250 environmental damage.

I'm not sure about Demolish, but it sure does make stuff go away.

Flamethrowers can make exploding things explode, but have 0 environmental damage. Firestorm can destroy floors, but again I don't know what it's environmental damage rating is.

The damage done to operatives/enemies doesn't affect the environmental damage at all.
nmkaplan
Posts: 207
Joined: Thu Jan 26, 2017 5:14 pm

Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by nmkaplan »

On a similar note, do most environmental objects (ie. cover) have hidden HP that is depleted when the grenade goes off? That is to say, can a grenadier spam grenades at a cover object to eventually destroy it? My experience says "no", but I'm wondering what is the actual mechanic for deciding if a cover object is destroyed.

Even with sapper, it feels very inconsistent to me.
seananigans
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Joined: Tue Feb 07, 2017 3:03 pm

Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by seananigans »

nmkaplan wrote:On a similar note, do most environmental objects (ie. cover) have hidden HP that is depleted when the grenade goes off? That is to say, can a grenadier spam grenades at a cover object to eventually destroy it? My experience says "no", but I'm wondering what is the actual mechanic for deciding if a cover object is destroyed.

Even with sapper, it feels very inconsistent to me.
Well, sapper's value being 3 makes it pretty underwhelming to say the least, and after learning of its exact value here on the forums, my sapper woes in-game made a lot more sense. I'll be taking needle for my boomers from now on, and let combat engineer pick up the slack if I want a cover destroying Grenadier... although to be honest, I don't really mind the vanilla patch and subsequent adoption of new cover resilience by Pavonis. Original vanilla 1.0 was pretty hilarious blowing everything to smithereens, but it quickly became the dominant (by far) strategy, and it wasn't healthy for the long-term life of the game. The patch and LW2's structure is more in line with LW1, although I'd say sapper is an outlier. A LW1 sapper grenadier could actually blow up most heavy cover, with notable exception of hardy things like UFO walls, but LW2 sapper is hardly noticeable and from my experience has usually at best reduced flimsy full cover into low cover (woo hoo!), and even stuff like trees will usually just lose everything but their trunk, retaining full cover bonus.

That said, I can't answer your question re: environmental damage memory, although I'd lean toward yes it retains/remembers damage, as you can often see visual effects on "damaged" cover, even if it's still retaining its full cover status.
fowlJ
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by fowlJ »

I'm not sure exactly how it works, but based on how I've seen it described I don't believe environmental damage 'sticks' to objects, no. There is some randomization on environment damage (I believe +/- 20%?), so you can sometimes destroy an object with multiple grenades, but it's a matter of luck rather than the grenades actually stacking, and you'll never destroy something that doesn't fall within the grenade's damage range.
trihero
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by trihero »

Yeah I was watching joinrbs describe how environmental damage works, the idea is that the object doesn't remember how much damage it takes. So you have to blast its hp or more in one shot, and you cannot stack up tiny bits of damage to do it.

Sapper's +3 is not as underwhelming as it looks. Most of the half-cover you see has 10 environmental health. Since the base grenade environmental damage is 9, then Sapper takes you into the virtually guaranteed zone (again like someone mentioned, there is some kind of variance like +/- 20% or so) of blowing up most kinds of low cover.

Also recall though that environmental damage falls off from the center, so it's harder to blow up that low/high cover at the edge of your explosion than in the center.
Solomani
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by Solomani »

So what is occurring when your shinobi slashes a badie for 18 and in the process destroys the wall he was going to take cover behind? Or your ranger shoots down at an advent trooper and blows out the facade that was providing half cover. Yet grenades don't do this much damage.
trihero
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by trihero »

I think they actually did tune the weapon environmental damage down, you should only see that with higher tier weapons.
Manifest
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by Manifest »

What about sat fire?
Mavoc
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by Mavoc »

Manifest wrote:What about sat fire?
SATURATION_DESTRUCTION_CHANCE=33
So it seems each cover object in the cone has a 33% chance of being destroyed. So completely ignores the concept of environmental damage.

I assume Demolition is a 100% cover destruction for any cover the target is using that is between the target and the gunner. This could be 2 objects if target is in a corner.
Alketi
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by Alketi »

Mavoc wrote:
Manifest wrote:What about sat fire?
SATURATION_DESTRUCTION_CHANCE=33
So it seems each cover object in the cone has a 33% chance of being destroyed. So completely ignores the concept of environmental damage.
I believe the way it works for grenades is that you need to exceed the environmental HP of the object, and then you have the aforementioned "chance" at destroying the object.

It's not cumulative, as one would think it should be.

I believe this is how JonRBS explained this on his 0% supply raid where he took 1/2 a squad of Sapper grenadiers and was never able to fully destroy a tree that he kept grenading over and over.

I secretly love the fact that Sapper is so worthless, because it makes Needler, for an explosive grenadier, such an easy decision.
justdont
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by justdont »

Alketi wrote:I secretly love the fact that Sapper is so worthless, because it makes Needler, for an explosive grenadier, such an easy decision.
It works on a great deal of low cover objects. But yes, high cover objects are mostly out of question (especially trees, they're very hard to destroy) until you get either Combat Engineer or at least alien grenades.
trihero
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by trihero »

Alien grenades do the same environmental damage as the regular frag grenades.

You still need both sapper and combat engineer if you want to guaranteed rek high (most) high cover, so I wouldn't be inclined to take needler myself. I also don't tend to finish off enemies with grenades very often, and even when I do it's more often in a mission where corpses can't be collected, so needler doesn't fit my needs.
seananigans
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by seananigans »

trihero wrote:Alien grenades do the same environmental damage as the regular frag grenades.

You still need both sapper and combat engineer if you want to guaranteed rek high (most) high cover, so I wouldn't be inclined to take needler myself. I also don't tend to finish off enemies with grenades very often, and even when I do it's more often in a mission where corpses can't be collected, so needler doesn't fit my needs.
This isn't actually my experience with plasma grenades. I realize in the ini files, the environ damage is listed as the same, but my Needler tends to blow up cover fairly easily with his plasma grenades, and nobody ever really did with frag grenades, even with sapper (with exception of super easy shit like half-cover benches and stuff).
justdont
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by justdont »

seananigans wrote:This isn't actually my experience with plasma grenades. I realize in the ini files, the environ damage is listed as the same, but my Needler tends to blow up cover fairly easily with his plasma grenades, and nobody ever really did with frag grenades, even with sapper (with exception of super easy shit like half-cover benches and stuff).
That's because "environmental damage" listed in inis is a coefficient (perhaps a multiplier, but I suspect it's more complex than than) to damage, not a fixed value. Things that do more damage will do more environmental damage as well. This is what causes shots from high-tier weapons to sometimes crush walls, even though their environmental damage is very low.

PS: And yes, alien grenades do more environmental damage than frags due to increased damage.
RXTXK
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by RXTXK »

what does it take to reliably remove a tree and the resulting stump (which still provides cover) sapper and combat engineer with plasma grenades does seem to do it....
Jadiel
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by Jadiel »

Demolition generally does it. On the subject of demolition, it's been my experience that if there are two pieces of cover between gunner and target, which gets destroyed is randomly chosen, not both.
trihero
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by trihero »

That's because "environmental damage" listed in inis is a coefficient (perhaps a multiplier, but I suspect it's more complex than than) to damage, not a fixed value. Things that do more damage will do more environmental damage as well. This is what causes shots from high-tier weapons to sometimes crush walls, even though their environmental damage is very low.

PS: And yes, alien grenades do more environmental damage than frags due to increased damage.
While you could be right, can you prove it or provide evidence/tests? I've read a number of reddit posts that say environmental damage is indeed fixed (well there's a dice roll for -20/+20%), and not a coefficient, so what is the basis for your assertion?

High-tier weapons have higher environmental damage in the ini, so this casts doubt on the assertion that it's the base damage increase that is causing the breaks in environment.

I haven't noticed alien grenades doing more environmental damage myself. It's not just in the ini files, but the tooltip in game also says same environmental damage. You have to account for the basic variance in environmental damage, maybe what you guys saw is just due to the randomness.
trihero
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by trihero »

Ok I did some tests, and they are conclusively in favor of the way I thought environmental damage works. Alien grenades do the same environmental damage as regular frag grenades.

Here is what I did:

First, I changed frag grenade damage to 50, without any other changes. I loaded gatecrasher, found a high cover object (a lamppost), turned on the godmode cheat to get infinite charges of grenades, then tossed grenades at that lamppost over and over. You would expect that if the actual damage on the grenade mattered, surely 50 would instantly level the lamp post. It didn't. I had to toss 15 grenades to completely demolish the lamp post. It took 7 tosses to reduce it to half cover.

Secondly, I reverted the frag grenade damage to 3, and then changed the environmental damage to 20. 20 is what you would expect from sapper/combat engineer. I reloaded to a save on same map, same object, then tossed a frag grenade on the lamp post. It instantly vaporized without even going to half cover first in one toss.

Thirdly, for a control test, I reverted both base damage to 3 and environmental to 9 (completely original stats). It took 5 grenades to change the lamp post to low cover, and 11 total to remove the object entirely.

This completely demolishes the claim that base damage affects environmental damage. It turns out that environmental damage is straightforward - it specifically is how much damage the environment takes, has nothing to do with base damage, is not a "coefficient", although there is +/- 20% on it. The variance explains why even with the same environmental damage, it can take a different number of grenades to kill the cover.

I can understand that seaningans saw a pattern that wasn't there; probably what happened is his alien grenades rolled high and his frags rolled low so his mind created a pattern that wasn't there. In fact, alien and frags do the same environmental damage, and the difference was due to rng.

What I don't understand is why justdont just asserts complete falsities with utter confidence.
Jacke
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by Jacke »

Thanks for testing that out, trihero. It jives from what I can remember of various INI values for other weapons like Bunker Buster.
trihero wrote:What I don't understand is why justdont just asserts complete falsities with utter confidence.
I think justdont has just been subject to confirmation bias.

Oh, I also think he might be your Nemesis, trihero. :)
LordYanaek
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by LordYanaek »

trihero wrote:
That's because "environmental damage" listed in inis is a coefficient (perhaps a multiplier, but I suspect it's more complex than than) to damage, not a fixed value. Things that do more damage will do more environmental damage as well. This is what causes shots from high-tier weapons to sometimes crush walls, even though their environmental damage is very low.

PS: And yes, alien grenades do more environmental damage than frags due to increased damage.
While you could be right, can you prove it or provide evidence/tests? I've read a number of reddit posts that say environmental damage is indeed fixed (well there's a dice roll for -20/+20%), and not a coefficient, so what is the basis for your assertion?

High-tier weapons have higher environmental damage in the ini, so this casts doubt on the assertion that it's the base damage increase that is causing the breaks in environment.

I haven't noticed alien grenades doing more environmental damage myself. It's not just in the ini files, but the tooltip in game also says same environmental damage. You have to account for the basic variance in environmental damage, maybe what you guys saw is just due to the randomness.
Well, higher techs rifles have

Code: Select all

AssaultRifle_Beam_iEnvironmentDamage = 3
3 shouldn't destroy anything if a grenade with 9 isn't enough in most cases so obviously this number isn't the entire explanation.
I had a quick look at XComDestructibleActor.uc. I have some limited experience with scripting languages but know nothing of Ureal Script itself. From what i've seen i can't really give a definitive answer as i don't think the actual damage calculation occurs there but
  • Comments have those lines which confirms non targetable object's don't really take damage.

    Code: Select all

    // Targetable and fragile things use health as a bucket
    // other destructibles use health/toughness as a gating mechanism
  • Objects can be "destroyed" or "annihilated" but i'm not sure what the difference is. Maybe "destroyed" replaces the object by a new model such as damaged trees keeping only their trunk and maybe those have lower health but this is just wild guessing. However there must be something to tell a tree or wall have been damaged since they change visually and sometimes go from high to low cover.
  • There is a number of states going from Pristine to Dead but intermediate states seem temporary and call the next one. There appears to be some timer attached so i suspect this is related to cars "blowout timer".
trihero
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by trihero »

3 shouldn't destroy anything if a grenade with 9 isn't enough in most cases so obviously this number isn't the entire explanation.
Well, when's the last time you saw a plasma rifle kill the environment? I can't recall. I mean I have seen plasma weapons "melt" or "weaken" UFO walls before. Maybe weapons have higher variance, I dunno.

I don't particularly care about how the weapon environmental damage works because it's super unreliable in any case; I don't know when weapons hit the environment (do you have to miss your target? how far can your target be? is it based on line of sight? is there a separate roll even if you don't miss your target? etc I dunno). It's entirely possible that weapons have special code interacting with the environment separately from explosives. If you are interested, the best thing to do is what I'm doing with the scientific method. Change the base weapon damage, change the weapon environmental damage, etc, see what happens. I'm not interested in doing the testing for this. I would guess that you find it is the environmental damage that is the only relevant factor, and not the base damage. It seems too convoluted from a design perspective to combine both base damage with environmental damage, and this is obviously the case with grenades that they are separate.

Something that further suggests base damage has nothing to do with environmental damage is that Demolition always does maximum environmental damage even with a ballistic weapon (not true in vanilla obviously, but in LW2). This is obvious if you have ever used Demolition in practice, and is easy to test.

It's just good to know that frag grenades do the same environmental damage as alien grenades. I'm pretty sure the entire explanation is already here as demonstrated by simple tests anyone can do, for explosives.
seananigans
Posts: 88
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by seananigans »

trihero wrote:
3 shouldn't destroy anything if a grenade with 9 isn't enough in most cases so obviously this number isn't the entire explanation.
Well, when's the last time you saw a plasma rifle kill the environment? I can't recall. I mean I have seen plasma weapons "melt" or "weaken" UFO walls before. Maybe weapons have higher variance, I dunno.

I don't particularly care about how the weapon environmental damage works because it's super unreliable in any case; I don't know when weapons hit the environment (do you have to miss your target? how far can your target be? is it based on line of sight? is there a separate roll even if you don't miss your target? etc I dunno). It's entirely possible that weapons have special code interacting with the environment separately from explosives. If you are interested, the best thing to do is what I'm doing with the scientific method. Change the base weapon damage, change the weapon environmental damage, etc, see what happens. I'm not interested in doing the testing for this. I would guess that you find it is the environmental damage that is the only relevant factor, and not the base damage. It seems too convoluted from a design perspective to combine both base damage with environmental damage, and this is obviously the case with grenades that they are separate.

Something that further suggests base damage has nothing to do with environmental damage is that Demolition always does maximum environmental damage even with a ballistic weapon (not true in vanilla obviously, but in LW2). This is obvious if you have ever used Demolition in practice, and is easy to test.

It's just good to know that frag grenades do the same environmental damage as alien grenades. I'm pretty sure the entire explanation is already here as demonstrated by simple tests anyone can do, for explosives.
Thanks for the testing, trihero.

For another data point, just yesterday I had my DGG/DFA sniper blow out his low cover on his rooftop shooting at an advent at squadsight at probably a 30 degree angle (long shot, one story building) with a Mag Rifle. So if weapon environment damage is indeed 3 or less, and stuff supposedly works as you say it does, this throws a bit of a kink into the theories. I agree there's some unknown/hidden stuff happening that none of us seem to have a handle on yet.

That said, I find it absurd that alien grenades don't innately upgrade environmental damage over frag grenades, and may simply adjust my ini files. It's indeed possible what I've experienced (granted this wasn't simply a one-time anecdote, this is the combined experience of my entire campaign to date) was indeed RNG-related, but it'd be a strong outlier due to volume. Long story short, plasma should destroy cover better than frag, with as much of an investment as they are. If they don't already via the hidden mechanics we don't understand, then I'll change my ini. Meh~
Jacke
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by Jacke »

I agree, Plasma and Alien grenades should do more environmental damage than regular Frag grenades.

I can understand why HP damage and environmental damage are separate in the INIs. But they should be related, like a stronger grenade does more damage to both. But there's a few extreme differences. For example, Bunker Buster does massive damage to structures, but to bodies it's only about a point stronger than a frag grenade. And it can't shred armour. I think it should do more, at least as much as a regular rocket including shredding, if not more.
justdont
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Re: what affects environmental damage?

Post by justdont »

Quite interestingly, muton grenades do more environmental damage than your own even for basic mutons (10 vs. 9). This may add to confirmation bias, I guess. Mk2 and Mk3 muton grenades do A LOT more, on par with your rockets.

This still doesn't explain at all why non-explosive weapons, even with env. damage of 1, affect the environment quite noticeably. And those with env. damage 3 (sniper rifles all have 3, no matter their tier) do so very often. Frag grenade's 9 is only barely enough to break a tough object, such as lamppost or a tree, on a good roll. While bullets very rarely hit trees, so it's hard to test - they sometimes make holes in city center walls, which are "tough objects" as well in LW2.

I've spend some time reading the scripts of both LW2 and vanilla, but there doesn't seem to be anything indicating than projectile damage to the world is applied "specially".
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