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Grenade Damage Mutator?

The_Emperor

Grizzled Veteran
May 9, 2009
1,088
186
Milkyway
As Tripwire hasn't stated anything official on changing or keeping the blast power of handgrenades I decided to ask for a mutator which adjusts the blast power of handgrenades to the delights of the server owner.

- RO: Combined Arms (the now much hated mini nukes)
- RO: Ostfront (the nade spam one)
- RO2: Heroes of Stalingrad (the current ones)
- CoD Series (the whimp ones)

I myself am fed up with the enemy hiding in a room and gunning down one after another and happily surviving nades that should actually blast his guts out. Just recently on Pavlov's House a single Soviet smg'er gunned down 10 Germans in the cellar of Pavlov's House. Why? He survived 7 nades, all of them thrown at him and all of them landed at a distance that is actually not even close to surviving. This has got nothing to do with balancing of nade spam, this is a ****ing mess. If nades are so weak that I can't get one of those campers away from his position I better don't throw them at all and just hope I might get him with my main weapon.

Please get a mutator out, so there's finally servers that have "realistic nades" for the vets and for those who want to keep the firework crackers, they can keep the RO2 nades or even go for CoD style blasts.

Thanks!
 
When I first started playing RO2 every time I saw a nade arc towards my position I'd run half a mile or dive behind the nearest hard cover. After a few hours of game experience I quickly learned that unless the nade pretty much lands in my pocket I don't need to worry about it at all.

Firing from a window is probably the safest place to be with regard to rendering one’s self practically immune to nades thrown in from outside because there are very few rooms within the game that are small enough to place the back wall within a nade’s blast radius of a front window.

IMO nades are woefully underpowered with regard to their burst radius. In the same vein I don’t think that players would be happy with realistic representations of the effectiveness of period hand grenades. (There is a reason why 80% of all deaths throughout that battle of Stalingrad were caused by explosives.)

A compromise is probably in order:-

  • Double the burst radius.
  • Retain current damage model for targets caught within the original burst radius.
  • For targets caught within the extended burst radius apply a pistol shot wound to a random, exposed hit location.
  • Reduce the number of nades available per standard squad.

Model finesses to the above might include:-

  • F1: -50% inner radius potential damage.
  • Model 24: -50% outer radius potential damage.
 
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Surly? Beg your pardon? Do you expect me to jump for joy because I'm throwing one nade after another and still get killed by a guy that should have been dead 5 nades ago? I'm well aware of the fact that people will invest time in this request IF they are willing to work on it.
But yes, it might sound a little harsh. Sorry. :)

A poll, yes, but no on the other, it has been discussed in a thread before and as far as I recall the majority felt RO2's nades to be too weak.
This is why I decided to make this request.
 
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This is one of the items on my list of potential future projects, because the grenades jar my simulationist sensibilities rather badly. In a purely technical sense, it'd be easy to make, and make well, with fragmentation and the whole nine yards. Well, it would be easy if the game's issues with mutators that add content ever get fixed...but I digress...

The problem is that grenades have some serious issues on the design side of things. If you just drop realistically potent grenades into RO2 without changing anything else, you blow out any sort of realistic combat, because now you're looking at over 1000 grenades used per half-hour small-scale engagement, which is downright ridiculous. The simple abstraction of "reinforcements" isn't up to the task of approximating logistics in any reasonable way....so larger mechanics are needed to keep it from simply being "throw grenades, die to a grenade, repeat" gameplay, which is no more closer to realism than what we've currently got.

You also need to communicate those larger mechanics to players that may be joining a server cold, and have them behave in an intuitive manner, and so on and so forth. It's not something to dismiss lightly. I've got some ideas lined up, but I suspect no solution is likely to be very popular....just look at how violently people argue over trivial things like a bayonet mount animation. Grenades are a lot more than trivial, they're a core gameplay element.

Then there's the whole argument of gameplay consistency with the base game, which is a fairly big deal in itself and might deep-six the hopes of such a mutator getting whitelisted. We still haven't had any concrete input from TWI as to what the boundaries of whitelisting are.

Although it's all a moot point until the client mutator bugs get fixed.
 
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A mutator could make grenades more lethal, but at the same time reduce the number of nades pre person. It might be even done so that if 1 team has 200 tickets in a map, the mutator could allow 250 grenades in a match, and each time a respawn happens maybe 5 nades would be spawned aswell on the ground, or randomly at players inventory. That way we could limit the nade spam and go with higher damage.

I agree nades are very ineffective in this game.
 
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Hmm, not really an issue for me.

I've used grenades often enough to very good effect, and been taken out by more grenades than I'd care to mention - especially cooked nades.

I'd like to see them a bit more suppressive though. A good concussive knockout radius just outside of the kill-zone would be good. A nade blast that forces opponents prone, for example.

But I'm not expecting anyone to programme this. I sure as hell wouldn't know how.
 
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Yesterday playing Grainelevator as allies, reinfs were out and we were all dead except for this one guy sniping from the top floor of tower, and we all spectated him. Of course we all wanted him to die, since he did nothing except dragging out time, not caring about the objectives and not even being able to shoot any enemies from there at that point.

So at first I was glad seeing him take out his nades and trying to throw them down the opening for the ladder. Naturally he missed and both nades landed on the floor on the other side of the opening, 1-2 m away from him. And to our amazement and frustration they both went off in that tiny space and he did not recieve a scratch!

Naturally loud exclamations of disapprovement was heard on the voicechannel.

Yes, grenades needs to be fixed.
 
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I'll quote this from an interesting discussion regarding grenades in RO CLASSIC.

This thread brings up some good questions. I found some interesting info about grenades and the casualty radius aswell as the throwing distance.

Stielhandgranate

''This type of grenade, featuring a high explosive charge encased in a thin sheet steel can,is an example of an "offensive" (relying on blast effect), rather than "defensive" (fragmentation) grenade. A serrated fragmentation sleeve ("Splitterring") was adopted in 1942 which could be slid over the head of the grenade. Fragments of the sleeve would be scattered on detonation, making the grenade more effective against personnel.The stick provided a lever, significantly improving the throwing distance. The Model 24 could be thrown approximately 30 yards (27 m) to 40 yards (37 m), whereas the British Mills bomb could only be thrown about 15 yards (14 m)''

Russian F1 grenade

''The F1 was introduced during World War II and subsequently redesigned post-war. It has a steel exterior that is notched to facilitate fragmentation upon detonation and to prevent hands from slipping. The distance the grenade can be thrown is estimated at 30–45 meters. The radius of the shrapnel dispersion is up to 200 meters (effective radius is about 30 meters, by some sources (Russian)). Hence, the grenade has to be deployed from a defensive position to avoid harm.''


'The fragmentation [...] The Mills bomb or F1 grenade are examples of defensive grenades where the 30–45 m casualty radius[5] matched or exceeded the 30 m that a grenade could reasonably be thrown. Modern fragmentation grenades such as the United States M67 grenade have a wounding radius of 15 m (half that of older style grenades, which can still be encountered) and can be thrown about 40 m. Fragments may travel more than 200 m.[6]''

EDIT: Now the question is:

a) Does anyone here a clue the throwing distances in RO2?

b) Does anyone have the slightest clue about the casualty radius?


Numbers above are only rough numbers and not exact. As people already have suggested, grenades may have to become less common if they become more powerfull. As read in the information above it is important to remember the difference between fragmentation grenades and non-fragmentation since the casualty radius differs a lot. The numbers presented above do means that you have to think a lot more before throwing a grenade since they can cause serious harm (at least the fragmentations grenades) to your teammates.



Just did a quick test in singleplayer, nothing super scientific, but at around 45 degrees throwing angle, with the longest hold-back, the F1 grenade was thrown about 35metres, and the M1939 was thrown about 40metres. Hope this helps with the ideas. xd


I for one would not want realistically modeled grenades, just only a slight boost to the current ones now.


I'll get to work on the blast radiuses btw. :3

Edit: Another completely non-scientific totally reliable test proved that both Grenades have a maximum effect radius of 10 metres as is, with the german grenade giving a larger push-back effect than the F1 over any distance, but seemingly doing less damage (Hence why The_Emporer is so up-in-arms about the whole thing, what with him only playing the German side...). Used my own body for refference.

I used the Way-point marker to get the general distances by the way.


Basicly, the effect radius makes the grenades in RO2 looks like firecrackers compared to its real-life counterparts. Does anyone even know if you die from a grenade blast 6 meters away in RO2? IRL you would for sure be combat ineffective (in RO2 that would mean death instead) from a 20 meters range. I do hope the casualty radius is increased in RO CLASSIC.
 
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The maximum damage radius for either grenade is 10 meters.

The maximum kill radius for the F1 grenade, on a fully exposed, full health player, is 4.4 meters.

The stick grenade's kill radius is 5.8 meters.

That seems a bit backwards to me.

While I'm looking this stuff up, satchel charges are effective to 20 meters, with a maximum kill radius of 9 meters, but it drops off sharply, so any extra range or cover will decrease damage significantly.
 
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I think the grenades are perfect right now. Not perfectly realistic, but surely perfectly balanced for a fun and enging gameplay. Changing their explosive power without some drastic map design overhaul would achieve nothing but frustration.

Also any half-assed, counter-intuitive solution like "grenades per team" or "grenades per player" is never going to work.
 
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