Sniper Rifles can't snipe?

[RoflTank]

I find it kind of odd that you still have to close to a few feet to get a stealth kill with a sniper rifle... Isn't the entire point of such a weapon the ability to sit very far back and kill a target in one go?

As it stands, I have to give my entire team suppressed sniper rifles to even have a chance at killing a target in one go.

[Gracey Face]

On uber damage mode with the infiltrators damage buffs and the soldiers "rage pheremone spray" you should be able to take most things out in one to two shots with a sniper.


Otherwise I think the way you have to get point blank to stealth kill is more of a balance thing than anything else. If you could sit on a high place somewhere and top everyone off super sneaky mode, why would you ever bother doing anything else? :D.

[Pancakes]

Give your Infiltrator the Master Assassin perk to get the Setup ability. This gives them a substantial damage, range, and RoF boost. This should improve your success at one-shotting enemies. Playing the game with the uber damage option also helps, of course. The best sniping loadout I've got so far is:

- LS19 laser sniper rifle (42.75 damage)
- Overclocker mod (+20% laser damage)
- Infiltrator's Master Assassin skill maxed (+100% damage when Setup is active)
- Weapon Specialist maxed (+35% damage)
- Hacker's Master Technician skill maxed (+35% laser damage)

I don't know how the percentage boosts are applied, but the minimum damage out of that would be around 124, or 248 when attacking shields or mechs.

[KromeHWI]

why would you bother with anything else? good question, why would you risk any other assets if your sniper could do his job right? i do agree that it must be for ballancing purposes, i mean, your infiltrator is alreay almost the only agent you actually need... but it seems to sort of defeat the point of a sniper rifle (especailly a silenced one), if you cant shoot peeople in the head at long ranges without raising the alarm. i mean, its right there in the weapon description...

[Lavian]

You can turn on super damage on a new game, mark targets with your Support, turn on the Soldier's buff at max level to confer it on nearby allies, and have your set-up Infiltraitor shoot at things... but yeah, not super practical.

[KromeHWI]

im tempted to try the "everyone uses sniper rifles" trick, for the silent ranged oneshot kills, but i like having faster firing weapons too... maybe once i get extra weapon slots ill have everyone rock snipes in slot 3 or something....

[Gracey Face]

Originally posted by KromeHWI:

why would you bother with anything else? good question, why would you risk any other assets if your sniper could do his job right? i do agree that it must be for ballancing purposes, i mean, your infiltrator is alreay almost the only agent you actually need... but it seems to sort of defeat the point of a sniper rifle (especailly a silenced one), if you cant shoot peeople in the head at long ranges without raising the alarm. i mean, its right there in the weapon description...

The weapon description also describes them as being long range. The longest range they can shoot at in this game is about 90 meters. There are many people who can throw a sharpened stick farther than my cybernetically enhanced supersoldiers can shoot thier future sniper rifles :D.

[Gillsing]

That's what happens when people want to see their little mans running around on the screen. But with scope and/or a high Master Assassin skill it's quite possible to shoot farther than the infiltrator can see, which is where having hijacked units is handy, as they can hang around closer to a target and push back the Fog of War.

[Gracey Face]

Originally posted by Gillsing:

That's what happens when people want to see their little mans running around on the screen. But with scope and/or a high Master Assassin skill it's quite possible to shoot farther than the infiltrator can see, which is where having hijacked units is handy, as they can hang around closer to a target and push back the Fog of War.

True, but your supersoldiers with cyborernetic eyes can only see 50m, so.. :D

Our guys really suck thinking about it. They ♥♥♥♥ themselves up by running about 20m, have 20/100 or worse vision, have serious tremors which cause them to be wildly innacurate even at point blank, and often forget where they are or what they were doing.

Its like I am commanding 4 care home residents.

[Gillsing]

But they can take quite a few shots before going down. That can be pretty handy. And in all fairness, their opposition is just as impaired when it comes to sight and sense.

[KromeHWI]

and apparently corpses are such common sight in this future, that no one notices them, even when they were walking around on patrol just a few seconds before... either that or everyone in the game is a really incompetant jedi who only learned how to fade away upon dying...

still, it actaully does stealth a lot better than many other games out there... you get spotted from much farther away than the "sight cone" and the partrol routs are pretty random and can be very hard to predict. and if alarms go off guards come running from (relatively) far away, and the overall threat level seems to increase a bit. rather than the goldfish memory of many other AI guards, who simply forget you existed after a few seconds of not actually seeing you (even if you were shooting at them) and go back to their mindless patrol. these guys will even start to do search patterns once alerted to intruders, going and checking out many of the hiding spots that they previously rarely visited.

[Stv]

Originally posted by Big baby!:

On uber damage mode with the infiltrators damage buffs and the soldiers "rage pheremone spray" you should be able to take most things out in one to two shots with a sniper.


Otherwise I think the way you have to get point blank to stealth kill is more of a balance thing than anything else. If you could sit on a high place somewhere and top everyone off super sneaky mode, why would you ever bother doing anything else? :D.

Well, the point is this: It's completely irrelevant that it's a balance thing. If you have a weapon that is called "sniper rifle" certain expectations come with that. For example that it will behave like a sniper rifle: headshot people at a distance - that is why sniper rifles were created - it is their sole purpose for existing. If you have a "sniper rifle" and it doesn't do that then there's no point in having a sniper rifle in the game in the first place.

I do understand that the developer has to address balance, but this is not the way to do it. Maybe it's too OP in this game to be able to kill people silently at great distances, I get it. That doesn't change the fact that I excitedly bought the Sniper Rifle as soon as I could and when I realised that it doesn't behave like a sniper rifle I nearly quit the game right there. I felt like the game cheated me and that is never a good thing. If you don't want people to snipe, don't put sniper rifles in the game.

[Jakkar]

In simple terms, sniper rifles exist to afford the user safety and sometimes secrecy, and permit them great flexibility in the distance at which they can project force... This became attractive because humans are very good at hunting and killing people who threaten them.

In a singleplayer computer game, your enemies tend to be very bad at this, or too good at it, and striking a balance between the two is the greatest challenge facing programmers. Bar none. Programming AI is the hardest, most time-consuming, perhaps the most frustrating and quite possibly the most expensive thing in the world. It's also the most politically fraught and dangerous, if you listen to the finest minds of our time.

Satellite Reign has pretty poor AI, by an arbitrary rather than comparative standard...

If the sniper rifles were realistic, the game would be painfully bloody easy.

The obvious answer to this, to me, would have been to design the game as a melee combat/close combat game enforced by urban security systems that detect the use of firearms and respond with swift and deadly force using, perhaps, airborn drones, or tower-based drone snipers.

As it is, yeah, it's a bit weird that we've got these superpowered rifles and they don't serve the conventional role of such a thing, but I feel the setup ability under Master Assassin, and the fact AI are incapable of dealing with rooftop threats, make sniping... Adequately differentiated from normal combat that it's a good option to have your infiltrator at a good zipline roof taking the first shots while other agents move in.

It works =)

[Black Raven]

Assassin with fast firing silence pistol and upgraded cloak can 1 shot multiple hostiles in very short time, just use closk to get close and you can nail several targets before then even realised thier buddies are dead behind them

[Gracey Face]

Originally posted by Stv:

Originally posted by Big baby!:

On uber damage mode with the infiltrators damage buffs and the soldiers "rage pheremone spray" you should be able to take most things out in one to two shots with a sniper.


Otherwise I think the way you have to get point blank to stealth kill is more of a balance thing than anything else. If you could sit on a high place somewhere and top everyone off super sneaky mode, why would you ever bother doing anything else? :D.

Well, the point is this: It's completely irrelevant that it's a balance thing. If you have a weapon that is called "sniper rifle" certain expectations come with that. For example that it will behave like a sniper rifle: headshot people at a distance - that is why sniper rifles were created - it is their sole purpose for existing. If you have a "sniper rifle" and it doesn't do that then there's no point in having a sniper rifle in the game in the first place.

I do understand that the developer has to address balance, but this is not the way to do it. Maybe it's too OP in this game to be able to kill people silently at great distances, I get it. That doesn't change the fact that I excitedly bought the Sniper Rifle as soon as I could and when I realised that it doesn't behave like a sniper rifle I nearly quit the game right there. I felt like the game cheated me and that is never a good thing. If you don't want people to snipe, don't put sniper rifles in the game.

And miniguns exist to put down thousands of individually lethal shots every minute with the intent to stop people from moving or shooting. In this game no one gives a ♥♥♥♥ that they are being shot at with one and it takes several hundred rounds to down anything.

Rocket launchers exist to deliver high explosive onto a target with the goal of either delivering high volumes of high energy fragmentation or a shaped charge. In this game all they do is knock a person off thier feet.


None of the weapons in this game work as they should, every one works in the way the devs decided would be best for game balance. If you shouldnt put things in unless they behave as they do in reality none of this game would be in the game.

[Stv]

Well, maybe they shouldn't. Why should every game have a sniper rifle, rocket launcher or anything we know today? All I am saying is that you can't just put in sniper rifles and not allow people to snipe with it. I'm sorry but that is just bad design. Everyone knows what a sniper rifle is supposed to do and if it doesn't do what it is supposed to do then it isn't a sniper rifle, is it? It is defined by its purpose. Maybe instead call it a Marksman Rifle. I know the difference is semantics, but semantics is important. Marksman Rifle doesn't carry the expactation that Sniper Rifle does. That is just one example and you could call it something different entirely, it's a sci-fi world after all.

Don't get me wrong, I like the game and I enjoy playing it. I just have to call ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ when I see it. And maybe even the devs will see this and find it useful, if not, well I tried. :)

To the point of AI: Yes, the AI is very weak, but like Jakkar said, AI is by far the hardest thing to do in the game development process. Sadly this is (arguably) a stealth game = mostly dependent on good AI. The framework is there, but it is obvious that this game could have used a little more time spend polishing the rough edges like AI and optimization (it really runs very poorly). I get that budgets are tight and you can't just spend more time on anything, because it costs money. But I think they could have spent a little more money on the AI, since it is the core of a stealth game.

Now, like I said I really like what 5 Lives have done here. It could have used more polish and once you get under it skin it is still pink in the middle, but I like it overall and am having fun regardless. So, if there happens to be a kickstarter for a sequel I will happily back it in hopes that they will improve on this solid base. That is a promise 5 Lives, so make it happen. ;)

Just make the enemies smart enough to notice dead bodies and maybe sniper rifles wouldn't be overpowered at all.