Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[R-26 Lightspeed]

For example, in a garrison, trying to shoot at a tile behind one of those blue barriers tells you the hit chance in the log, which you can then use to identify the type of robots behind and how many there are.

[Kyzrati]

I'm having trouble seeing when and where this could really help you, since you can't get this information in the log until you've actually fired, and once you fire in that scenario (a garrison barrier) it will automatically open. So that one's out, but what other scenarios can this actually tell you anything that's useful? If you can't see something, the chance to hit is almost certainly not the same as the actual chance to hit the robot itself if you could see it because the actual chance when firing is modified based on what you know.

I feel like there's a possibility you might've misinterpreted other hit chance factors at play here. I'd also be really really surprised if this is the case and no one pointed it out after all this time, but if you can show me a specific repeatable scenario with evidence of this happening by the numbers then I'll take a closer look. (All my different tests just now show hit% working as expected in these scenarios. And firing "through" a garrison barrier, by the way, actually resets your "intended target" to the barrier itself because you can't see what's behind it...)

[R-26 Lightspeed]

I know i haven't misunderstood hit chances or something like that because of how i discovered it : i was using a coil gun to shoot at an unaware cave ambush(1 programmer 2 hunters) through walls so that they couldn't fire back. After killing the programmer, i noticed that the hit chance when shooting on the programmer's now empty tile was significantly higher than when shooting at the tile right below it, where there was a hunter.

How to use effectively :
First, don't shoot at a garrison barrier, instead position yourself somewhere else so that you're shooting at a wall when doing this. I use energy weapons to avoid wasting matter.
Then, once you know what's behind the barrier, you can prepare yourself adequately before fighting them. For example, by equipping a launcher to fight swarmers, or the correct relay coupler to assimilate hunters.

You could also use that in caves when you don't have a sensor array to detect whether an outpost/checkpoint is controlled by unaware or derelicts, or to know the composition of dormant bots in an outpost(though you wouldn't be able to differentiate between dormant bots and disrupted bots)

By the way, i shoot using the mouse, maybe that's relevant somehow. I also might've had a terrain scanner with me every time, but i am not sure.(also i play on Linux using proton)
Next time i get to a garrison, i'll take a screenshot if that's not enough info.

[Kyzrati]

Haha, hilarious, so I actually dug into the source now and found this was indeed a thing, and found this gem of a comment alongside it

...meaning as is they could theoretically use it to find non-visible Ents by targeting an occupied non-FOV space which is normally empty and paying attention to the difference in hit% (doubt anyone will figure this out, though? anyway, can always change/address)

So yes, apparently someone did eventually figure this out and I'll have to put some time into expanding the system to prevent it...

In my original reply I was recalling how the system was supposed to work assuming I put in the full amount of work to protect against all abuse, but this bit was not added yet. (I tend to not add anti-cheating measures that will require a lot of work but only be discovered extremely rarely, since it's a ton of work to address absolutely everything, but eventually sometimes it's gotta be done. I actually have a list of stuff that people haven't found yet, and maybe never will, although the advent of wizard mode of course made it a lot easier to expose some of this stuff, so I've had to address a lot more of it since that came out )

Anyway, will have to file this under anti-cheese since it was working as intended but now you gotta go make me do a bunch more work xD (the method of addressing it here will actually slow the game down since it requires extra processing, which is another reason to avoid extra anti-cheese checks where possible, but it won't be too big of a hit in most cases, and now that it's out in public, I don't want people actually doing this, since it'd be boring)

Edit: In fact, when the email notification for your post came in, I was actually in the middle of adjusting another mechanic from my list that someone else just discovered a loophole in only by using wizard mode xD