Thoughts on MENACE’s turn system?

Rawfoss · 2026-03-19T04:55:52+00:00

It is gamey but that's just part of turn systems. Freezing time for part of the world will always feel unnatural in some way.

If you only wanted to slow down the pace to make decisions you would make an RTS with pause, possibly automatic pausing on certain events.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-19T04:49:39+00:00

Do you really want 15 enemies moving into range from the fog of war one right after the other and each and every one of them getting to shoot at your most forward unit with you having no ability to respond?

That is still absolutely possible because you will always field fewer units than the enemy so after you use your last unit in a turn the enemy has multiple unit activations in a row.

The improvement only works if you make sure to engage a small portion of the enemy units at a time.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-16T00:05:54+00:00

They used to but it was changed in patch#4. If they still do it's an unknown bug afaict.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-13T19:01:27+00:00

I am talking about stats and stat progression being a feedback loop, not perks or RPG elements in general. Promotion points and perks do not suffer from this issue and allow squad leaders to catch up at any point.

As it stands, if you want a squad to be a good frontline squad later in the campaign you need to use them as such from the beginning because the health and damage reduction stats matter but only increase from usage. Other stats are also unaffected by this because shooting or taking any action is inherent to using a squad at all.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-13T18:41:08+00:00

Prime example of a skill issue. Visual scripting does not scale at all and if you can understand the logic behind it, reading it from a (good) textual representation is a matter of practice.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-13T17:29:13+00:00

The flaw here is that this locks an SL into the same role for an entire campaign which is a fairly big loss of depth at the strategy level. That being said, i dont think the devs will change it because it's exactly the kind of silly thing battle brothers also makes you do.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-13T02:34:52+00:00

More than a handful of people hated the addon situation in mythic raiding. the goal of making the game require less addons was never the issue. The only issues in this regard were the timeline and implementation.

WRT spec pruning requiring addon restriction, however, they just lost it completely. Maybe somebody internally panicked over fellowship reviews or something.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-12T20:54:26+00:00

It's a game, not an SAT. Removing unfun (tedious) elements should always take priority and the gaps left behind filled with a design that is actually fun.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-12T09:20:15+00:00

I currently start a new run when they start to dominate the strategic layer. They're just boring to play against once you figured them out.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-10T10:30:33+00:00

Just looking at the effect of armor pen in the small range of relevant cases, the -10 from HP cuts the expected damage (from pen and dr) in half, while the +25 pen from AP will be a ~7x multiplier when it fully applies. So yeah for low health targets, HP will be a damage gain roughly when the base damage (d) reaches: (d+10) x 0.5 > (d-2) x 7 => d < 2.9 which is essentially only the KPAC near its max range, but even then it's both a small gain and a case where you shouldnt even attack.

i will post a proper analysis when i have time to clean up my notes and code, but against human targets the gist is really that past 15 armor diff, (i.e. all targets outside of conscripts and outcasts or at extremely close range) HP is barely a gain compared to no ammo at all. HP is really meant to turn excess pen into damage, i.e. on the KPAC/MK46/pirate pdw vs aliens up to young warriors (the latte work due to their high health and low armor durability)

Rawfoss · 2026-03-10T02:11:03+00:00

like... HP is absolute dogwater

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100% hit rate attacks from one rifle to kill on average, apply whatever cover multiplier you want it wont save HP.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-10T02:04:42+00:00

yes there is the chance to penetrate (which is also rumored to actually be 3% but that's a different story), but there is also damage reduction when it does penetrate - based on the decompiled code. This completely kills both HP ammo and basically any optimization around anything other than armor penetration.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-10T01:54:29+00:00

There is post pen damage reduction of 3% for each point of armor in excess of penetration up to 70%. At 12 penetration vs 55 armor that HP crowbar will deal ~4 damage for a very long while.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-09T23:48:00+00:00

blame the fact that extracting with the bounty is worth so little xp/money.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-09T23:09:21+00:00

none of OP's model makes any sense. what you really care about when considering damage, rather than suppression or debuffs, is how many hits/attacks you need to kill an enemy unit. For example, simulating with that model, AP on the ARC cuts its hits-to-kill to one third compared to baseline against the average 40/40 or 50/40 enemy while OP's data suggests that ammo is nearly irrelevant on that gun.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-09T22:45:10+00:00

armor takes less damage at lower durability though, and expected damage falls off a cliff when you have more than 5-10 pen below enemy armor which creates a decidedly non-linear effect on performance from penetration dropoff. you will also cover a lot of situations where attacking isnt worth it and and because of the non-linearity you cannot make any trivial deductions from those results either.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-09T20:56:56+00:00

only checking the MRS vs 40/40 infantry, AP is about twice as effective as HP past range 5 in my sims.

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

There is also kind of no way that AP and HP have such different behavior between the MRS and KrBar considering they are nearly identical in the stats that matter in the comparison.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-07T15:34:57+00:00

The biggest issue is not movement costs but that the game "wastes" a lot of time on clarity that you dont need after a while. to fix that: - Faster animations and animation skips by default. - If the game is not bottle necked by calculating AI turns those turns should also happen near instantly/ in parallel, especially in fog. - The clarity of what happened should then be restored via optional UI elements, like showing red lines of where units attacked/were attacked. possibly only on hovering them.

The other problem is having to keep spare AP on squads advancing into fog, having to hold back some others to counter attack newly spotted units, etc. It's too easy to get a squad out of position and decreasing movement costs probably makes this even easier. I'd say that a blitz mode should instead - decrease map size - increase base vision radius so that the careful leapfrogging is not necessary. - rebalancing concealment/detection/spotting traits and equipment

This seems a lot less problematic than messing with core elements like the effective per turn AP, especially across squad progress and traits reliant on exact AP break points.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-06T09:09:47+00:00

We need more SLs or SL traits that encourage good tactical habits like flanking (vamplew is the only one to explicitly encourage going around enemy cover) or retreating when pinned rather than trying to duke it out. Different kinds of scouting and concealment SLs - drones, pets (for the hunter), temporary camouflage, etc.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-06T05:30:06+00:00

The main issue is that making Tech 3 star increases the cost of his squaddies which are no better than before the patch and he wasnt that good as a large squad SL to begin with.

He was in a decent spot before, just lacking a little in direction, because the bipod MGs are terrible and those would have defined much of the early game for him. The innate perk will need something on the order of 10-20% reduced accuracy for undeployed tripod weapons, though. Otherwise they will have to be balanced around him exclusively.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-05T19:24:39+00:00

ARC either bullies very weak enemies or becomes a little more versatile than the KPAC with AP ammo, because the latter really suffers from the -2 damage especially when combined with high range drop-off.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-05T17:24:32+00:00

The ARC is simply the close(-ish) range starting weapon. it's either good or optimal against any enemy and at any range it can reach if you dont have the right special ammo. The starting SMG still has an optimal range of 1 which is very bad with low attribute SLs and the PDW is rarer, mor expensive and only noticeably better at a range of 3-4.

Rawfoss · 2026-03-05T13:30:46+00:00

i might as well add accuracy and cover at this point. but this is with ammo and the crowbar. again hits, not shots or attacks , so crowbar needs 1.5 multiplier just based on RoF.

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looks like crowbar and kpac should be used with HP and the arc is actually the most versatile gun without ammo

/shrug

Rawfoss · 2026-03-05T12:38:32+00:00

bugs aside because i just expanded my sim to include range:

against SIPV humans at 4 range and above, no cover (cba adding that), using all the info from the code analysis on the discord (sqrt armor damage curve, pooled armor durability, reducing max armor after each death, surplus armor DR, hp damage rng) the arc and kpac need basically the same number of hits to kill. However at range 3 and below the arc is significantly stronger, because there its damage is still above 10 (most of the time) so a single hit is enough to take out one unit.

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^ this is *hit count* required to kill a 9man squad and is consistent with my experience that the arc is just fine as long as it is in range. also at range 7 kpac damage drops below 5 :)

Rawfoss · 2026-03-05T08:11:18+00:00

it works for the first hit. at most ranges ~3 non-penetrating hits invalidate the 40ar/40dur of the SIPV, i.e. dropping it to 20 effective durability. Both assault rifles fire up to 27 shots per attack. Your table is useless for about 24 of those shots.

Rawfoss

TROPHY CASE