agris

this is a very good feedback thread. i hope one of the developers has read it and circulated the main points amongst themselves. it's a shame there's no developer engagement on these forums.

This looks great, glad to see the game was successful enough commercially to warrant this kind of roadmap. Is there any chance that the 1.2 update will unlock the ability for recoil to impact subsequent bullet trajectories for select fire modes (burst, full auto)? Even if it's just a flag for modders to enable/disable, those of us looking for a more simulationist approach to JA would appreciate it.

@Bearson @chr_isso let me share a nice qol hack: https://community.jaggedalliance.com/ignore/?id=513

We already have a functionally equivalent version of this with the mercs commenting on their confidence of a shot landing. I don’t know the increments that correspond to hit chance, like if it’s low/med/hi or more/less granularity, but it exists and is in the preview builds.

weird, new illiterate aggressive guy who attacks everyone and is angry at lack of cth sounds just like old illiterate aggressive alt who attacked everyone and was banned, who sounded like original illiterate aggressive guy @anon474 weird

Yeah it was an open question whether or not the mercs commented on their ability to hit a target, I wanted to circle back and confirm since I saw it on the stream

Stream this week confirmed this, fyi.

Thank you!

I agree with the OP and some of the other observations here. From the combat dev stream the other day, around the the 35 minute mark, Boyan discussed what led them to the current burst/auto fire system. a recoil system was tested, wherein each bullet fired impacted the trajectory of the next this apparently resulted in "unpleasant gameplay effects", wherein there were too many kills this also resulted in a "cartoon" like effect where, when bursting against enemies at range (not sure if select fire or full auto), the enemy's outline would be 'painted' with bullet holes, and no bullets hitting their intended target As others have pointed out, the solution to eliminate recoil modeling and implement a boardgame-like -50% CTH/ -50% DMG to multi-shot attacks is a poor band aide to the issues identified. It's been said above, but the problem with the supposed optimal strategy being to run up to an enemy and burst-fire on them points to the need for enemy interrupts. If such a simple gameplay strategy was resulting in too many kills, that doesn't just mean that burst fire is "too strong", it can also mean that the underlying enemy spacing, map design, etc is not optimal. Finally, modeling recoil resulting in the cartoon-like situation described on the stream. Full auto fire should be inaccurate at medium to long range! Select fire burst should be less accurate the more shots that are fired. It is natural that auto and burst have niche uses in close range fighting, and are only viable at medium to long range by the most skilled and strong marksmen. Unfortunately I expect this is right. Based on the comments made by the community manager, wherein he thanked THQ Nordic for giving them time to implement the ballistics system, I expect the program manager(s) for JA3 sees no benefit in making this even more like JA2 / Silent Storm, and the devs are being pressured into making fast, easier mechanical decisions - at the expense of the tactical layer - to hurry through content production and ultimately release. Given the history of JA2 successors and the success of nuXcom, I'm honestly shocked we have ballistic simulation at all.

edit: better to not engage

@Woody time zones are a thing. This may shock you, but when it’s 5 am one place, it can be the evening in another! Re: ballistic modeling, that’s what it’s called. The developers use the term, the strategy community that cares about the nuances between probabilistic vs simulation uses the term. I’m sorry to say it reveals more about your limited vocabulary that you find this suspicious, than it does some great conspiracy. Although I do appreciate a bit more @anon474‘s paranoia in calling me solar, the stuff about Carpenter and EFNY is funny. Im afraid rather than grand conspiracy, you’ve just found a demographic of men of a certain age, interested in a certain type of game.

@Solaris_Wave another JC / EFNY fan? My brother in arms!

We definitely have a few hostile crazies, not too unusual for the net. Unfortunately it probably means the nascent dialogue with the devs about mechanics is not going any further. Most sane people would see what transpired here and run the other direction 😅

Got it. Yeah, one thing that's stuck out at me since I first started to see videos is the scale of combat encounters. They seem much smaller, more cramped, than the open maps of Arulco. I didn't catch the first part of the stream, did they talk about the fog thing? That's the strangest one for me, why reduce damage to enemies off screen?

Can you speak more about the fog thing? I haven't seen or heard of this before.

@Haemimont_Boyan thanks for talking about the AP system on the stream. It's interesting to hear you experimented with... I think you said 100 AP? system first. Can you elaborate a bit more on what didn't work with that? You said it was hard to compare cost of actions, such as firing the weapon?

Name calling and ad hominems, while avoiding discussion of the actual merits and mechanics. Not exactly covering yourselves in glory, eh?

I'd like to see JA3 succeed in its goal of being a JA2 successor, not nuXcom 3 with a south american coat of paint. Yes, one of the other forum members is unwell and perceives coordinated bot attacks against their opinion when disagreed with. Re: "hysterical and mad", anything but. It's good the community is debating things, where I can I'd like to help us do it from a common set of facts, not vague recollections and imprecise assertions. Many JA2 successors have failed chasing a mythical "wider audience", using trendy mechanics of the day. None have tried using JA2's mechanics, and as much as I think it's correct, I'll do my best to highlight why I think they're appropriate in 2023.

I don't mean to be rude, but this is fundamentally incorrect and not applicable to type of hit system used in JA3, described in this very update! IWD, Fallout, and most of the renaissance-era cRPGs used probabilistic hit systems rooted in rolling dice. In IWD and all of the Infinity Engine engine games, "chance to hit" is never displayed! All except IWD2 use something called THAC0 - To Hit Armor Class 0, a threshold reference value by which you understand your chance to hit something based on the roll of a 20-sided die. Fallout 1 & 2 used a GURPS-like system loosely based on d100 rolls. Rather than get bogged down in the minutiae of exactly why you're incorrect, I'd rather focus your attention on the fact that what was determining hits or not was the roll of dice, that's the probabilistic component. JA1, JA2, X-COM 1 & 2, and JA3 don't use this type of system. They use ballistic modeling, which computes bullet trajectories. There is a "random" component, owing to how they account for marksmanship skill and what it does to the sway of the firearm, but it is a fundamentally different system than the games you are trying to compare it to. Those fundamental differences are precisely why it makes sense for JA3 to not show CTH, and why if they wanted to show it, it isn't a simple matter of "just" displaying the value. It doesn't make much sense that way, and has a lot of pitfalls associated with it. Those pitfalls are described in this very dev diary! Rather, for a displayed CTH to make sense, it would be part of an alternate game mode involving probabilistic (nuXcom) style to-hit mechanics. That isn't JA, and I think is a waste of their time and resources. The developers are being brave, in comparison to their peers, to do something different than the current trends. I would hate to see their resolve flag and them design and implement a parallel system which dilutes their uniqueness and pushes the game more in the direction of nuXcom, away from JA. Woody, I think this comment reflects a lack of understanding of how the JA3 bullet trajectory and hit system works. You should re-read this Dev Diary and ask some questions if you need clarity, but what you've suggested here is not really compatible with the underlying mechanics. The existing bullet simulation system is why it's "easy" for the devs to compute when targeted shots miss whether they hit other body parts - it's already being computed by their bullet trajectory calculations used to determine the hit/miss! It's part of the same system that lets bullets pass through enemies and material, potentially hitting others. What's different with their targeted shots is that they've disabled the missed shot striking other parts, even if the computed trajectory says it would have. They say this could confuse players, but I don't think that's the case.

Let me bring you up to speed

That’s great, I hope it’s the case. If it is, the devs may want to tutorialize it for the press demo.

This isn’t a very sophisticated analysis and really doesn’t make sense. Showing / not showing CTH isn’t about the underlying complexity of any of these games, but involves design goals and underlying mechanics. nuXcom uses a probabilistic system, as does Arcanum. Neither are simulating ballistic or martial attacks. Both of their systems are actually more simplistic than what we know about JA3, although the Arcanum comparison is really an apples to oranges situation. Not showing CTH was a deliberate design decision for JA2, not a limitation of technology at the time. It’s a promising sign that Haemimont have a strong vision for JA3 and aren’t chasing what is safe - a chronic problem that’s led to the failure of all the JA2 sequels, including Flashback. We have an active thread on this topic in General Discussion, let’s not derail this thread. Our opinions are known and arguments made.

Exactly @Hongweibing, what comes out from a thoughtful consideration of it is that “just” showing it doesn’t make a lot of sense. The devs have to weight the pros and cons of incorporating it into another game mode. For my money, they should stick to their guns. Not divert resources chasing the few players who are interested in JA3 but only with certain nuXcom mechanics, and not ballistic modeling and fog of war regarding some decisions.