Talk:Proposals/Smoke Inhalation

• Would there be a resistance system, like the one for the gas grenades? The Power Armour is supposed to be airtight, so if a soldier wears one he cannot be affected. --ShipIt 12:16, 21 March 2013 (SAST)
  • Good point. --H-hour 16:27, 21 March 2013 (SAST)
• How about a malus for skills/stats? Standing in smoke and the resulting lack of oxygen might lower the soldiers stats by using the proposed SP-system. So instead of falling unconscious he will have e.g. a lower accuracy until recovered? --ShipIt 12:16, 21 March 2013 (SAST)
  • I don't know about this. Partly I feel like we're talking about such short bursts of time that a soldier ought to be able to be in smoke temporarily without any adverse effects. Partly I think that it would be very difficult to communicate this effect to players. On the other hand, I have thought about a basic accuracy penalty if a soldier has no line-of-sight to their target. But I've hesitated because I fear it will undermine smoke too much (and we still need it in badly). --H-hour 16:27, 21 March 2013 (SAST)
    • Hehe, I was thinking the same about the accurace without a LoS. The skill malus was just an idea. I am fine with the proposed way. --ShipIt 17:32, 21 March 2013 (SAST)

Smoke Points (SP) and Stun Damage

DarkRain brought up some important points in a PM, so I'm copying them here:

• If it is OK to (ab)use the stun damage, system it should be pretty easy, on the other hand, while implementing separate SP isn't that hard, it would be fairly more involved. (DarkRain)
  • I'd rather not use the stun damage if possible, simply because it is one of those solutions that will lend itself to a lot of questions about why the two things are linked. But I think it's fine if this doesn't make it into 2.5. It's not a necessary balancing mechanism. But since you bring up the stun damage, that will lead to some UI confusion too. Doesn't stun already cover the HP bar in grey? (H-Hour)
    • Yes, it does. And since we are discussing stun damage vs SP, what would be the relation between stun and SP damage, would they interact in any way? (DarkRain)
      • I don't know. To be honest I hadn't really thought that through. And I must confess when you said "stun" before I was confusing it with "shock". I will have to think about this some more. Maybe it's not such a bad thing for smoke to cause stun damage. We've already got stun_gas which is basically smoke that stuns. I guess the first major issue I can think of is that if a unit is stunned they should stay down for several turns, but my plan for the smoke was for it to be a pretty quick recovery once out of the smoke. But since we can't pick up soldiers and move them, maybe the smoke would accumulate and it would be several turns before a soldier recovered anyway. (H-Hour)
        • Well, since I read the proposal the first time I thought that SP was basically the same than stun damage, even if it is implemented separately (allowing smoke inhalation effects to fade faster), the fact that both stun and SP cause unconsciousness means they will have to interact somehow, maybe they could add together for checking when someone should fall unconscious or wake up? --DarkRain 04:59, 29 March 2013 (SAST)
          • From a designer's perspective I don't really like combining them all, because being electrocuted, being gassed and just being in smoke are all very different things in "real life". But on further thought I just don't think this justifies adding a new mechanic for players to track. All three can simply provide stun damage and we'll leave it at that. But it raises another issue, which is that stun gas and electrocution stunning ought to be much more effective than regular smoke, or we will render these tools obsolete. I'll have to look into the balance for the stun_* weapons, but my first thought is that they should generally, reliably incapacitate a unit in one hit, to make them valuable enough to field in addition to smoke grenades. Do they accumulate stun damage just like other weapons (ie - damage value is applied the same)? And how does recovery work for stunned units? --H-hour 15:12, 29 March 2013 (SAST)
            • From the technical point of view it should be no problem to given the smoke field a trigger that triggers stun damage. We should just define how much. --Mattn 15:16, 29 March 2013 (SAST)

Realism

Current lore depicts smoke grenade as being based on the titanium tetrachloride. This substance indeed creates thick smoke when dispersed in air, by reacting with water vapor and producing titanium oxide(IV), which creates the smoke, and hydrochloric acid fog which is responsible for both the additional "smoke", and the toxic effects of the cloud.

So, realistically, smoke grenade should cause both stun and health damage for those standing in the cloud -- unless said ones have some protective clothes, or, at least, a gas mask.

Google for "hydrochloric acid poisoning", if you want to know about actual effects.