More Notes on Custom Soldier Skill/Perk Trees

[graaa]

These are good trees.

 

I would like to know why you got rid of snapshot myself. Personally, not a big fan of too many overwatch buffs on snipers, but that probably comes with my own personal play style. Also I'd advise against giving rapid reaction to the heavy so soon at corporal - keep in mind balance issues - early game your Heavy is going to 1-shot kill enemies so giving it 1-2 ranks later would make more sense. Otherwise the skill it useless early game as it won't see use until May. Same with close and personal for assault; 1-2 ranks later I think because you don't need criticals to kill enemies until May. Does your mod plan on editing the armors to allow 2 small item slots? If so, you may not need Deep Pockets at all. Finally, I find Rapid Fire to be the most powerful offence abilty in the game making any choice opposite it completely forsakable unless it is the 2nd most powerful offence ability in the game... In the Zone. Might I recommend this bifurcation for your assault? =)

Edited February 21, 2013 by graaa

[Yzaxtol]

You made some good points,

 

Support now has Flush(Corporal) + Rapid Fire(opposite Savior). (5th line is now Combat DrugSmokes or More Smokes, Dense Smoke(equivalent) is now a Psi only ability)

Sniper, replaced DGG with Snapshot

 

Heavy was changed quite considerably:

 

Rocket

Covering Fire - Tactical Sense

Shredder Rocket - Bullet Swarm

HEAT Ammo - Supression

Danger Zone - Executioner

Mayhem

Rocketeer - In The Zone

 

with my Assault's agressive tree(on the right) is now more like:

 

-

Grenadier

C+P

Bring 'em On

Killer instinct

-

Rapid Fire

 

With this I feel like they're more balanced, especially with everyone getting atleast 1 multi-shot ability for Colonel

 

EDIT: Why do my edits suddenly convert into HTML code and back again?

Edited February 22, 2013 by Yzaxtol

[graaa]

 

EDIT: Why do my edits suddenly convert into HTML code and back again?

Lol I know, something is bugged here with the quick reply. Use the full editor to edit comments and this won't happen, I noticed.

 

1 comment about the new heavy tree - I think It is important that the single skill at the Major rank be useful to the soldier no matter what choices you made before he hit Major. With your tree, if someone managed to avoid picking any rocket perks or suppression, getting Mayhem would be essentially useless ( giving them +3 damage ONCE per mission on ONE rocket is a throwaway in my opinion). The solution to this would be to put a suppression vs rocket choice somewhere so the player is forced into picking a 2nd skill that Mayhem would build upon or picking an entirely new skill at major.

 

Otherwise nice trees! Rememeber to test them from beginning game to at least mid game against cyberdiscs and berserkers to see if you like them.

Edited February 22, 2013 by graaa

[Yzaxtol]

Aye, you make another good point. Switching HEAT Ammo and Shredder Rocket. Now going to change my UPK files for my mod. for v.02

 

I think you deserve credit for the HEX BYTE code for the abilities and helping me design the perk trees :wink:

 

Also, because of the excellent advice from BlackAlpha, I just designed myself a nice easy to read .txt file for creating Perk Trees quick and fast.

Edited February 23, 2013 by Yzaxtol

[Yzaxtol]

Bah, changing a Assault Rifle to eWP_Sniper and giving it Disabling Shot really messes the animation up something awful. It's a shame because I wish I could allow players to have sniper take assault rifles as a more mobile option to the slow/accurate sniper rifles, but apparently most of the abilities will bug out if used on anything but a sniper rifle.

[graaa]

I've just tested out what you did.

 

- Replaced ewp_rifle with ewp_sniper and added ewp_anyclass as a 2nd property to the assault rifle weapon in the .ini

 

You are correct. The animiation is a bit... broken.

http://i1299.photobucket.com/albums/ag70/thefreeking/2013-02-26_00020_zps88427ced.jpg

 

Furthermore, I've discovered some more things about the sniper perks when I did this.

 

1) When you edit the assault rifle in the .ini the way I outlined above, you can have any class that can use the assault rifle use Disabling Shot and Headshot with the assault rifle (Headshot would be a good Assault skill, I'm thinking!)

2) Squadsight also works with assault rifle and somehow without editing anything else I can hit squadsighted enemies.

3) Doubletap has some good news and bad news. Good news is you can use doubletap with assault rifle for SNIPER class only. Bad news, my support soldier with doubletap still can't use Doubletap, It seems like it is hardcoded to only work with the sniper class and not the weapon.

Edited February 26, 2013 by graaa

[Yzaxtol]

Unfortunately i've added immersion as a selling point for my mod so most of these options are out the windows :(

 

To add abit more variety in gameplay I've added the sniper and assault trait to the alien weapons instead, pretty much making thin-men into snipers and floaters into assaults.

Hopefully the AI won't herp/derp and be able to play with the new values.

[SeraphicLaw]

Hello all; I'm coming in to the discussion a little late, but what started as an attempt to remove the aim and crit bonus from the AI in Classic difficulty ended up with a complete rebalance of several areas of the game, from some minor stat 'smoothing' to armor overhauling and finally skill trees. I wanted to share my final trees and see what others thought of them.

 

I approached reworking the skill trees after playing an entire game on normal and realizing I used only one build of each class ever - the skill choices simply seemed too obvious in most cases and I wanted to provied two distinct builds for each class (with some variations being viable) based around an 'offense or defense' outlook for each. I also modified all armor after skeleton to have two item slots, so Deep Pockets got removed entirely; since this is simple to do and really doesn't effect the game terribly I would suggest it anyway. I made all of the 'forced' skills (those at the first and fifth ranks) linear upgrades so that the initial class skill gave the 'feel' of the class while the second 'forced' improved this skill somehow.

 

Heavy

The heavy class is split between an all-out offensive with several different options for laying down hurt or removing cover and a more defensive build centering around suppression skills.

 

Fire Rocket

Bullet Swarm - Opportunist

Flush - Suppression

HEAT ammo - Will to Survive

Shredder Rocket - Danger Zone

Rocketeer

Mayhem - Extra Conditioning

 

Assault

As the only class able to actually choose their primary weapon, I focused the assault class around an up-close shotgun approach and a more defensive rifle build.

 

Run & Gun

Tac Sense - Aggression

Lightning Reflexes - Sprint

Grenadier - Rapid Fire

C.C. Specialist - Close & Personal

Killer Instinct

Resilience - Bring Em On

 

Sniper

Whoever made the design choice not to put Squadsight as the primary sniper skill needs a serious kick in the jaw. The choices here are between a hunter style sniper who goes looking for his target or an overwatch style sniper who finds high ground and covers the team's rear.

 

Squadsight

Headshot - Disabling Shot

Low Profile - Damn Good Ground

Snap Shot - Gunslinger

Executioner - Opportunist

In The Zone

Double Tap - Sentinel

 

Support

Support got the biggest changes to make the 'suppression' option appealing against the benefit of having a dedicated medic. The smoke skill is still the 'core' of the class, but overall you'll be deciding between healer or buffer here.

 

Smoke Grenade

Field Medic - Covering Fire

Battle Scanner - Rifle Suppression

Revive - Holo-Targetting

Dense Smoke - Combat Drugs

Smoke and Mirrors

Savior - Rapid Reaction

 

As you can see, I tried not to change the classes too much; I wasn't looking to alter the game too drastically, only make some of the choices more viable and make a bit more sense as some skills simply didnt match the classes they are initially assigned to.

Edited March 2, 2013 by SeraphicLaw

[Yzaxtol]

some nice trees, the idea of having the mandatory skills based on each other is a good one.

 

some of the choices are bit obvious however:

 

Rapid Reaction as a final perk, without even opportunist? I chose rapid-fire as my ultimate skill (both for support and assault because it's just that powerful) with the sniper being VERY good at overwatch do you think Support needs those overwatch skills? There's nothing that stops you from using a perk multiple times :D

[SeraphicLaw]

some nice trees, the idea of having the mandatory skills based on each other is a good one.

 

some of the choices are bit obvious however:

 

Rapid Reaction as a final perk, without even opportunist? I chose rapid-fire as my ultimate skill (both for support and assault because it's just that powerful) with the sniper being VERY good at overwatch do you think Support needs those overwatch skills? There's nothing that stops you from using a perk multiple times :biggrin:

I wanted to avoid too much overlap - Id have to start dropping skills and didn't want to change the classes too much; as it is, three classes can be built to excell at 'reaction fire'; Heavy and Support use suppression and both Heavy and Snipers can be used for general overwatching - I gave Heavy opportunist because of their innately low AIM making it difficult to land any shots, much less reactionaries while the Support class gets covering fire and holo-targetting to make them sortof 'buff' based and excell at trying to pin down individual targets, and since they would theoretically be closer to the frontline and have decent AIM stats as is, opportunist didn't seem necessary - rapid reaction gives their suppression extra teeth to keep an enemy from even trying to fire on you. [EDIT]: As for using Sniper vs Support as overwatch, moving Squadsight to the Snipers' primary gives him the ability to hang back and act as a more 'wide range' overwatcher while the Support class provides front-line overwatch and suppression for Heavies and Assaults; this was the reasoning for moving holo-targetting to the Support tree.

 

Rapid fire isnt as powerful for a rifle-based Assault who won't be as close to the action, wheras extra grenades can come in very handy. Although I am aware some of these choices arent completely obvious even within their 'builds' - I actually hardly ever used rapid fire in my first playthrough since I stopped using shotguns outright after losing too many assaults who overextended trying to get too close to use those shotguns.

Edited March 3, 2013 by SeraphicLaw