What has been tested
Changes to the flame thrower. Its handling has been improved and more importantly it gained the ability to set alien buildables on fire. As a compensation, its range and damage output have been reduced by 20% and 13%* respectively.
* Calculation incldues the 1 damage that has been and still is dealt to a structure for being close to the missile (flight/heat damage) before the actual impact.
Outcome
The flame thrower is without doubt more useful for attacking bases. The old version suffered from the fact that the huge bounding boxes of the flamer's "missiles" often collided with the ground in front of the buildable that was attacked, leading to a very low splash damage output.
The new burn effect deals an average of 61 damage to a single structure on fire which is about the same as directly hitting a structure for a second (65 damage, 75 previously). So while a skillful use of the flamer (switching to another structure in the hope that the old target will die from the fire) does improve the overall damage output the effect of fire against a single building should not be overrated. However, when multiple targets are on fire, they will "keep the fire hot" or, technically, decrease each others chance of going out. While the flamer doesn't really do a thing the grenade isn't already capable to do, it gets especially useful when buildables are built at the ceiling or wall.
An issue with burning groups of buildables is the performance impact of the smoke and heat haze particles, especially when the player is close and the particles occupy a big portion of the screen.
Conclusion
Fire is awesome. I'm looking forward to give it a greater role in this game. The proposal to have the grangers spit stop fires sounds to good to not implement it. In the future I would like to see an incendiary grenade as well as fire sticking to floor and walls, if our engine allows this and we can keep the performance impact reasonable.
We will need to improve performance of huge transparent particles such as smoke and gas. If that's not possible we will need to adjust the particle effects for fire and the acid tube.
Observations
I was disappointed with the confidence system. While it seemed to work rather well in the previous two dev games, this time it lead to a handful of instable games, where one team could not recover from early attacks and never reached stage two. This happened to both aliens and humans and should not be related to the flame thrower changes. I blame the confidence system and will revisit it in the next weeks. My goal is to fix and simplify it at the same time, if that turns out to be possible. Otherwise I will try to find a replacement, potentially expanding the design process to stages as such.
Statistics
Individual stats. They visualize the instability/slippery slope issues we had.
Average:
Average of the last five dev games:
