First Look: Mortars

Hi everyone. With development marching on, I'm happy to finally start sharing details about later-stage mechanics.

Mortars on Mars

Mortars are a mid/late game weapon. They are introduced to Mars by mercenaries hired by the corporation to put down the labor rebellion.

Good effect on target.

Mortars work as you probably imagine: deploy the launcher, load the shell, aim, and fire. They can target any location on the battlefield regardless of distance, which adds a whole new dimension to engagements.

Currently, mortars support explosive and smoke shells. These have similar stats to frag and smoke grenades. However, explosive shells cause suppression over a wider area than frag grenades.

Explosive shells also deform the terrain, creating little craters that units can dive into for cover.

Teamwork

However, mortars have big downsides which require teamwork to overcome.

For starters, mortars are very heavy and bulky. A soldier carrying nothing but a mortar launcher can only move 5 tiles vs the usual 8 tiles. And that's just the launcher. You'll still need someone to carry the shells.

Mortars also require more action points to use than a standard weapon:

• deploy (2 AP) = must be performed once before firing can commence

• reload (1 AP) = can be performed on any launcher within 1 tile range

• aim and fire (2 AP)

Steam post image In my testing I found ideally you need 2 soldiers to operate a mortar effectively: one loading and the other shooting. But you can get even more efficient like in this screenshot.

Accuracy

Another big weakness is accuracy. When aiming your mortar, you will see a ring representing the radius of where the shell can land. The farther away you're targeting, the bigger this ring becomes.

Firing on the same location does improve accuracy, but this is a limited buff as your targets are unlikely to sit still. So overall, mortars are quite inaccurate by default.

The yellow ring indicates where the shell can land. The farther you aim, the less accurate you get.

But here too, you can make-up for crappy accuracy with teamwork. FPV drones and other equipment can use the "Forward Observer" action to mark an area of the map. Mortars targeting inside these observed areas are more accurate.

The blue circle indicates a "forward observed" area. Targeting inside this area greatly improves accuracy.

Defending Against Mortars

From the mid game, you will begin facing enemy squads with mortars in some missions. As mentioned above, these engagements have a whole different dimension to them. You'll have to adapt new tactics and counter-measures to keep your troops alive:

1. Suppression: mortars require 2 AP to fire, so suppressing enemy mortarmen down to 1 AP will prevent them from firing this turn. However, getting close enough to suppress is not easy.

2. Break LOS: the enemy only fires at areas its faction can see directly. So if you break line-of-sight with all of their units, you are safe. Just be sure you didn't miss any pesky enemy FPV drones that might be watching your position. And don't forget that enemy orbital coverage gives them visibility over the whole battlefield. So you'll want to hack or destroy enemy satellites before a big offensive.

3. Smoke: mortarmen cannot see or fire from inside smoke. So during mortar vs mortar engagements, you can try dropping smoke shells on enemy mortar teams to neutralize them for a few turns until the smoke clears. And since smoke disperses over a pretty wide area, this tactic requires less precision than hitting them with explosive shells.

Dropping smokes on an enemy mortar team. If they can't see, they can't fire.

Overall, I'm excited for you guys to try mortars. I think they really add a new dimension to battles which as a long-time Xcom player I honestly haven't felt before. And since projectiles in this game are all physical, I just love watching the shells streak across the map and go boom. Even when they miss, it's quite satisfying.

Let me know if you have questions. And please check out this video. I'm having a lot of fun making these music videos. Thanks again for supporting the game.

-Yuji (MH)