I’m on my second playthough (normal, just like the first time) and while I still feel they’re too difficult, they certainty feel easier after finishing the game once. I’ve gotten down to saving my grenades, MP5 frags, and magnum ammo for these guys. When they’re bunched together, that’s the time to throw an explosive their way. They’ll either scatter and quite likely take some damage from it as well. Aim for their heads with the magnum if they’re farther away. Or even the 9mm pistol too. If they get close to you, take out your SPAS-12 and fire at the head once, or their chest twice/double barrel. It’s irritating and needs to be fixed, but there are some really nice strategies out there. Just don’t depend on the MP5 so much and use some other weapons at your disposal until/if this ever gets fixed.
Fixed? There’s no problem. lol
Also give bullsquids and ichys more health plz, they die way too easy
Bullsquids are okay. But Ickies are way too easy to kill.
Two crossbow shots on hard? That just makes them hardly more than an annoyance. Not a true threat. If anything, I should be FEARFUL of every jump I make into deep water. :fffuuu:
Bullsquids used to take 2 double shots with shotty, now they just take one. Easy peasy
Not in my playthrough they didn’t. If you’re close enough (10 feet, give or take) a double-barreled shotgun blast will take them out on the original Half-Life. Single Magnum shot, as well. Trouble is, they aren’t as aggressive in charging the player any more, and will instead take cover if they can’t see the player.
I agree. I encountered multiple instances where the soldier were ridiculously hard (that surface tension level you are describing being the worst) There were some sections of the game that I had no choice but to enable God mode.
This however did not ruin the experience. I still loved the game. But there are definitely some areas that should be fixed if possible. (All soldier AI related)
Its kind of funny how every single alien AI is in the game is so great besides the soldiers. Every single enemy encounter in Black Mesa is better than the original Half Life AI excluding the Soldiers. Hope the devs can fix this issue. Can’t wait till they release it on steam so updating it isn’t as difficult.
but ya the Hound eyes, Bull squids, and Female Assassins were actually enjoyable to fight against. absolutely incredible.
I really love this game. I have the setting in normal mode but seriously the computer AI really ruins it for me. They are impossible to kill, as soon as they see you they start shooting. Like its been said, its like playing against a aimbot.
As I said elsewhere, I think part of the problem with “accuracy” is the Marines are prone to shooting at long distance where their aim would normally be poor, but because all of them do it, you end up taking stray lucky shots all the time. I think a good fix for the AI would be to limit the distance that SMG Marines will fire, and if they’re beyond this distance, either they’ll stay put or advance forward until they ARE within firing range. It would eliminate them “sniping” at Gordon from miles and probably make their accuracy not such an issue.
And even then, I’d like to see their accuracy match that of my own SMG.
Not sure if this is a good idea. Your own MP5 inherently has less spread via burst fire than the grunts. That means you are already far more accurate than they are.
Humans, when operating within standard parameters, have a .3 second reaction time, at the low end. There are rare individuals who have slightly faster reaction times. By rare, I mean special forces squads are lucky to have a single person that deviates significantly. .1 seconds is only possible for a computer, or perhaps an alien; certainly not a whole bloody division of marines. I can understand accuracy, not god-like reaction times and, seeing out of the back of your head.
Edit: Note, I mean to translate into complex motion, such as spinning around, leveling a fire-arm, taking aim, and firing. .15 is the minimum on simple tasks like a mouse-click.
The marines stop shooting and get to cover when you harm them. After I got the hivehand I spend lots of fights where I had low health hiding in a corner shooting bees. They would run to me, get harmed and run back to cover resulting in no shooting me at all.
I’m basing everything off of hard mode just so you know, in the original game it took 2 double shotgun blasts from pretty close range to take out and 3 357 shots. Now from around mid-close range on hard you can insta kill them with shotgun most of the time. They don’t charge you, but they do a lot of damage with their spit attack and if you do get close they do massive damage both from spit and their melee, so I think that it’s fine, just give them more hp.
As for human grunts, it’s pretty easy to take them out with one shot with the 357 because they stand still to shoot at you/reload most of the time, and the mp5 can take them out very easy mid range and shotgun just devastates their shit as well as explosives. I think the human grunts are completely fine.
Bullshit. They take cover when you stop firing at them and retreat. But I’ve had several take multiple bullets on the chest and sometimes head while they kept shooting at me. And I could tell they were getting damage because there was blood being spread.
If the marines would be programmed to not shoot at the player from a long distance that would be more realistic as they shouldn’t themselves be aware that they have infinite ammo and use it to their advantage. However this can create a problem; if they don’t smartly run for cover and try to narrow the gap between them and the player quickly they will be an easy target from a distance. Gordon’s weapons are much more accurate and powerful than the marines’, after all.
EDIT: And I just saw AI fail in Powerup, where a marine just stood there with his back halfway turned towards me. I was able to take careful aim at his head with the .357. This wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for the pile of bodies, gunsounds and loud explosions that just occured seconds earlier…
Stides actually I’ve had a problem most often where you fight the first tank, I usually come up from the hole that’s all the way at the back, and by the time the fight is over, there’s usually 1-2 marines still chilling in the front behind the tank. Sometimes with the inability to see me even if I go around it and shoot them, and usually one marine is stuck against the wall. I’ll get a screenshot when I get back there. Already on my third playthrough on hard. I’ve found some interesting tricks/glitches I should show on here too
While I’m okay with how they perform in direct combat, but the AI isn’t top tier. In WGH a soldier spotted me instantly from 40 meters away through a small doorway and down a hallway, and apparently alerted every soldier in the room where I was via telepathy. I closed the Fire Door, but they all just bunched up outside and waited for me to open it. When I did, I tossed a grenade under it, but they did not make any attempt to avoid it, they just stood there until it exploded and killed every one of them.
Overall their behavior seems pretty basic; they fire as soon as there’s a clear shot at you no-matter what, when alerted they will always know where you are, and they make no attempt to preserve themselves. Kinda reminds me of SNPC’s in Gmod.
That kind of AI shows up a lot in games, some of the Splinter Cell games have AI that can alert everybody as soon as you touch them, even if you take them out before they say anything.
Conviction now has it so that you can actually get a chance to take them out, even if they yell; as long as they don’t open fire or have friendlies nearby, you can still take them out stealthily.
I don’t mean to imply it’s bad, it’s just not all that advanced. Even though Combine AI code is a mess, they seemed to have better AI overall, at least imo. Then again, I’ve had much more experience with their AI than with these Soldiers, and a huge part of AI in Source is proper node graphing and scripting.
Ideally, I’d say the Soldiers could be more ‘realistic’ by basing their reaction time on distance. Say you jump out 2 feet infront of one, his reaction would be almost instantaneous, as it is now. But if you pop out some 40 meters away, there could be about a second before you are noticed. At extreme ranges (The Dam), it could take them upwards of 10 seconds before someone spots you, allowing you to observe from afar while giving you the feeling that they’re alert enough to see you at a distance, but aren’t godlike.
When it comes to combat, there should be a maximum distance and a minimum distance (though shotgunners shall simply rush the player and fire when they reach ~30 meters). The max distance could be somewhere around 150 meters, give or take. Soldiers will not waste ammunition on a target that’s too far to reliably hit, and will instead attempt to close the distance. The minimum distance would be roughly 3-5 meters, where being too close would be ‘uncomfortable’, and they’d prefer to keep a reasonable distance from you, helping to prevent friendly fire, but also preventing them from blindly rushing you or melee based enemies and getting hurt.
When spotted, they alert their teammates immediately, however it may take a second or two before everyone knows where you are. When you disappear from sight, they could attack your last known position with grenades. While multiple soldiers are engaging you, one may throw a grenade to keep you on your toes while the fight goes on.
Unfortunately, I understand this is all very much harder and more complex than it seems and won’t ever happen, but it was nice to get my thoughts out on the matter. 
I’m beginning to realise that a lot of our complaints with the Marines really stem from Half-Life 2 itself, and from the precedent that sets. Remember the “ai_reaction_delay_idle” console command. Well, the AI in Half-Life 2 is set, by default, to 0.3 idle, 0.1 alert, same as in Black Mesa. And in many ways, the Combine AI works with similar problems can’t be a coincidence. I heard tell of the developers basically scrapping the Combine AI and writing theirs from scratch, but I’m beginning to suspect the Source engine may simply not allow for sufficient tools to replicate what the original Half-Life had.
Here’s what I mean, from experience having replayed Half-Life 2 just yesterday:
The Combine AI is terrible. There’s no surprising these guys. If you show up within line of sight of their positions, they activate. They’ll shoot at you from any distance where they have line of fire, and they won’t look for “cover” so much as they’ll try to avoid line of sight of you, even if that means playing peek-a-boo around a pillar. They will shoot every time you instantly every time you can see them, and they’ll basically try to strafe in and out of cover.
Here’s the problem, though - Half-Life 2 isn’t intended to work like a modern military shooter. Almost all of the game’s weapons have crap accuracy (even the crossbow has severe dropoff) but you get ridiculous amounts of ammo for all of them. None of the weapons have various degrees of accuracy, either, so you can’t fire in “bursts.” You’re meant to play the game like you’d play, say, Quake - tank enemy damage and overwhelm them with superior firepower and greater armour. I basically played the entire game since Follow Freeman almost exclusively using the Combine machinegun - plenty of ammo for it, and enough kick to make up for the wasted shots, plus accuracy isn’t bad.
I think where the problem comes in is that’s not how Black Mesa is trying to play itself. Combat looks more geared towards it being a tactical shooter, with weapons being less accurate, enemies being tougher and their shots being more hurtful. In Half-Life 2, I can charge a squad of white-armour Combine soldiers and take all five of them down before I lose more than half of my HEV power. In Black Mesa, this is a situation I may or may not survive at all. I’m supposed to play tactically, but the game’s AI and weapon balancing doesn’t lend itself to a tactical game. You can’t sneak around, you can’t surprise them, you can’t hide from them, you can’t flak them. About the only things you can do are either snipe them and take a little damage or charge them and take a lot of damage.
Either the AI needs some tweaks, or othrwise weapon and critter balance need some tweaks.
…And this is what I miss (underlined part).
You’ve explained it better than I ever could.