RPS interview going up tomorrow RE: Lethality, GlamCam, Soldier Oneliners!

[DazzD]

Good point Aknazer, reading it through again it does sound like the stun gun might get dropped. Jake sounds keen on the more gutsy approach of the cattle prod charge and I am totally with him on that. It sucks in game when you are not sure if the alien has enough damage to drop, but that makes the best edge of seat experience as a player. Those 'all or nothing' chances that in the old game with more soldiers could be saved... with 4-6 pairs of boots on ground, there will be far more of them in this one. I for one are looking forwards to it

[Aegeri]

Turning off VA and the health indicators were both important to me: Pleased about that!

I am still not sold on only having six at max squad members. I feel eight would be a far better number, but we're just going to have to see at this point how it will work out. Maybe it will or maybe it won't: Hard to say for certain. I am really happy with the overall design and direction of the game, so I'm definitely not unhappy with my preorder for when it comes out.

[Being]

Allrighty then, time for my guesswork.. (and because I like fiddling with numbers like this)

22 deaths over the course of the game.
4-6 squadmembers
2-3 of the best soldiers had 40-50 kills by the end.
One of the 22 dead had 20 missions at time of death.

Is it safe to assume that the best soldiers were active from start to end? I don't think so. They must have been shuffled in and out for rookie training or injuries, so I'll arbitrarily say they were on 50% of the missions.
They were best soldiers so got a bigger chunk of the kills per mission, I'll count them as two "regular" soldiers, giving them a share of 2/5 (5 being the average of squad size 4-6, and ignoring that a mission could be full of "best" soldiers) of the kills per mission.

Also to those who compare kill values of old game to new game, don't forget you probably used more soldiers..

If average alien amounts on a mission are.. 12, these soldiers would be killing ~5 aliens per mission and that'd indicate playthrough mission numbers of 17 to 21 missions (8 to 11 missions for the soldiers, but they were only on half the missions). This is clearly not the case as one of the deceased had more.

With average alien amounts of 6 (I think it's higher, as gas station demo had 6 but is a small map) the number would be 33 to 42 missions.

I'd be extremely disappointed if average alien amounts are less than 6 and if aliens are such pushovers that your team could face worse odds than 6 soldiers against 18 aliens (I'm assuming linear progression here from 6 alien starters to 18 alien endgame missions, for an average of 12), so I won't consider beyond those points.

The extremes of these guesses have us with 22 deaths to 21 (because of the one deceased soldier with lots of missions) or 42 missions, for a death/mission ratio of 0.53 to 1.04 (9/13% to 17/26% with 6/4man squads respectively).
Of course deaths won't happen based on averages, they happen in clumps. When you suddenly lost 16 to 25% of your squad, the rest are more likely to die as well.

Jake played on Normal difficulty, whatever that means.

Too much guesswork and bad math here, but I guess lethality might be tuned ok for the squad sizes.
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Quite a lot of new info in those interviews, I'm happy. It's almost like they are reading this forum and asked the questions we've been debating. </conspiracy>

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edit: With 25% missionattendance (considering 12 soldiers alive to 22 deaths total, injuries etc), total mission counts would be doubled to what I had above there of course.

Additionally, and still guessing, if they are designing to keep action levels between various maps somewhat similar and the small map (6aliens) was considered 20x20x2 (just arbitrarily, I haven't counted) and heights are more pronounced on many maps (I seem to have read something like this) the large map (18 aliens) would maybe be just 25x25x4. I do think large maps wouldn't be quite as actionpacked however, so I guess they'll be more like 30x30x4 or something. This all just relatively speaking of course, not in actual square sizes (hell, the van is 5 "squares" in length in the demo).

Feel free to ignore my rambling, I think better when I type.. and I got to thinking about XCOM

[rharris]

Being - i'd like to think your maths is wrong.... I'm not saying they are, I'm more hoping and that isn't against you buddy..

just thinking along the lines of average 5 aliens per mission, 45 missions, (for exapmle) 225 Aliens right?
so, if we are going to break them down into missions. So for terror missions, Averaging 1 in 10 normally missions... we know that there are 10 -12 aliens, so take 44, away from that 225.. 181.

Now, as we dont know... but say for example there are two or three alien bases (15 aliens a piece) so again take away 45 from 181.. 136 left.

Taking away the terror and base missions (7 in total), we are left with 136 Aliens in 38 missions... 3.5 average per 'Normal or UFO missions' Hence the reason I think the squad numbers have been capped so dramatically...

Lets be honest. if we DID have larger squads, you dont need plasma's.. You need pitch forks, a posse, and just shout "Witch Hunt!!!"

[alexey7891]

Being - i'd like to think your maths is wrong.... I'm not saying they are, I'm more hoping and that isn't against you buddy..

just thinking along the lines of average 5 aliens per mission, 45 missions, (for exapmle) 225 Aliens right?
so, if we are going to break them down into missions. So for terror missions, Averaging 1 in 10 normally missions... we know that there are 10 -12 aliens, so take 44, away from that 225.. 181.

Now, as we dont know... but say for example there are two or three alien bases (15 aliens a piece) so again take away 45 from 181.. 136 left.

Taking away the terror and base missions (7 in total), we are left with 136 Aliens in 38 missions... 3.5 average per 'Normal or UFO missions' Hence the reason I think the squad numbers have been capped so dramatically...

Lets be honest. if we DID have larger squads, you dont need plasma's.. You need pitch forks, a posse, and just shout "Witch Hunt!!!"

actually you whould need laser rifles ...free amo ftw

[katscan]

Sorry for the late response, but I just got back from vacation. I'm sure everyone missed me.

But I have to say a massive HURRAY ! about the RPS interview and the options to turn off glam-cam and soldier one liners. WOOHOO!!

Now this will be the best game ever

[Inkidu]

Sorry for the late response, but I just got back from vacation. I'm sure everyone missed me.

But I have to say a massive HURRAY ! about the RPS interview and the options to turn off glam-cam and soldier one liners. WOOHOO!!

Now this will be the best game ever

Okay, but you've got to promise me one thing, Katscan, you've got to at least try three missions with both things on. Just for the sake of a fair shake.