Grenade feedback

[Nomad]

Enemies throw grenades through buildings and high walls.
Quite annoying to put a solid wall behind your back just to have grenades landing at your feet through them.

Start a map. Fail repositioning.
Move my main character. Enemy moves and starts grenading the rest of my team because they've all started in a pack and haven't moved yet.
Happened so far on a Survivalist map and a Mafia map (it would be against any enemy with grenades, so it would include Cultists too).

Enemy grenade spam.
They're auto-hitting for 15 damage or so. I'm not saying that grenade damage is too high, far from it. I'm saying that the enemy is spamming them and their chance to hit appears to be 100% when a gun at that range would likely be 60-70%.
I played one map where they couldn't beat up Ray fast enough so in one round two enemies threw grenades at him to take him down.

[Daithi]

Could be a bug in the code which determines where grenades can be throw. I'll try this also, but see if you can throw one back to the same tile.

That can happen with a high initiative enemy, if you fail repositioning. Might need some tweaking, but it substantially improves the usefulness of the bypass skill.

Any suggestions on counteracting this grenade spam? Are a lot of basic enemies getting grenades, or is it specialists? They are subject to the same rules as the player team for CTH, but maybe their explosives skill is too high.

[Nomad]

Oh, I expect that I can throw grenades back... but don't think throwing through solid objects seems right. Tossing over a wall, maybe, but not through a building.

I guess this moves on to another little oddity that I find... odd...
What is the scenario here? I assumed that we were scouting around and finding bad guys and beating them up. I understand that occasionally we get ambushed, but overall I was under the impression that we were seeking them out.
Yet... I seem to start an inordinate number of maps in the middle of a bunch of hostiles with no cover in sight. Any direction I attempt to seek cover will have one or more baddies (with firearms) on the wrong side of that cover.
It's like Sam is deliberately sneaking the group into the middle of the baddies and then popping up and saying "Boo", then we do a repositioning check.
If we fail... they toss grenades at our group.

Make grenades rarer? That would be my suggestion. Definitely don't give them to basic enemies (which you probably already don't). A chance that when someone does have them, that they have less.
You know what... I guess it comes down to what you want to achieve. If you want the enemy to do everything in their power to kill the players... then leave it as is.
I personally think that it's a little unfair that I'm rolling to hit them with my gun and they can just rain instant damage and persistent fire damage, seemingly without a chance to miss. If that means that their explosive skill is too high, then maybe start with that? My team is always going to be together... so if they miss who they're aiming at, they're likely to hit someone else anyway.

[Daithi]

I'll look into the grenades being thrown through buildings. This may be more of a visual thing - I set the arc as high as possible without making it look too unnatural, but calculating arc based on obstructions will be time consuming.

Will look into the positioning of enemies, for the most part, place most of them in one direction from the player team.

Added code recently to allow more control over enemy loadouts, so will reduce it to a single grenade for most specialists, and give some specialists none.

Will lower explosives skill a bit for enemies. Checked it, and it's the lowest rated combat skill for most enemies, but it's an area which is slow to develop for player team. Would like to keep the early grenade risk - it makes repositioning a tile or two very valuable, and makes high initiative specialists a more credible threat.

[Nomad]

I'm wondering... can you use the same Line Of Sight calculations as guns?
Then, you some specific elements, like cars and man-high walls that you might want to make an exception for with grenades.
I don't know how hard any of these things would be...
I'm assuming you can't draw an arc to represent the throw and then check if that arc passes through an object?

That would be awesome. I find that I am often stuck in a variety of maps where the enemy is scattered all around me. Though it does make sense for some maps where we might have stumbled into them doing stuff.

We can try that and see how that pans out.

How much difference does the grenade skill actually make? Is it simply a 1 tile scatter if you "miss"?
Also... I noticed that they would prioritise Sam over others. Is that because he's the leader?
In situations where they could have hit three of my team mates (we failed repositioning and Sam was the only one that had moved), they instead hit Sam and one other. That happened a couple of times.
So... either they are targeting the leader to try and trigger the Ronin effect, or they were missing their grenade throws and hitting the leader by accident.
Might be something to look at. If they're not specifically targeting Sam, then the low grenade skill was having an effect as they only hit one of the three they were aiming for (and accidentally hitting Sam).

[Daithi]

It pretty much does that for interior maps, but outdoors it's pretty much just limited by distance. Will have a think about solution, possibly trying to draw the arc might be easier. Throwing over 1 story buildings is likely to be feasible, but taller buildings less so.

Concerning skill, they can miss by up to 3 tiles, depending on how severe the miss. Difficult to say why they prioritise Sam, they shouldn't if there's more potential for damage elsewhere, also since there's no indications if they missed or not, it's hard to say what their intended target it. Anyway, have reduced explosives skills a bit, and reduced the number of grenades specialists have (except for fanatic, made man and NCO).

[Nomad]

Yup. We'll give it a playtest and hopefully you get some feedback (as in from more than just me =) ).
If they should be prioritising the leader... then they just missed on two occasions and hit Sam and someone else by fluke.

[Daithi]

Yeah, let me know if you feel the lower skill has improved situation - can see how getting hit by a lot of grenades could be frustrating, and would like to avoid that to greatest extent possible.

They won't necessarily target the leader, are more interested in maximising damage. Have been thinking about some adjustments to who is targetted, possibly factoring in the amount of damage each player character is doing, and the leader.

[Nomad]

"possibly factoring in the amount of damage each player character is doing"
Having them hold some kind of grudge would be cool.

[Daithi]

Yeah, it would be interesting, also could enhance AI effectiveness, as would encourage them to focus on the highest damage dealers. Good enough chance will add something like this.