Hi everyone,
When playing UFO:Alien Invasion I noticed that I got slightly frustrated when I had to choose a soldier from the list of available soldiers. I had no idea what stats I had to look out for and I could have needed some help to pick the right soldier for the right task. Most of the time the differences in stats seemed small, so I ended up choosing soldiers mostly at random.
This is why i propose these improvements to make choosing a soldier easier, more realistic and more fun:
1. Provide only a small list of soldiers, for example six, which are available for hire. Each day two (plus or minus one) of those soldiers will be exchanged for new soldiers. For a newbie a smaller number of soldiers will make the choice far easier and less frustrating, because he will not be overwhelmed by the sheer number of available soldiers. On the other hand, for an experienced player this adds another twist to the hiring of soldiers, because he might want to wait a few days for a better soldier to become available, but if he waits too long another good soldier might not be available anymore. There are two variations to this:
1.1. When soldiers are hired they are instantly replaced by new soldiers
1.2. When soldiers are hired they will be replaced at the rate mentioned above. (<- I prefer this one)
2. If above change is accepted, then it would be nice to display all six available soldiers on the screen next to each other (in a 3-by-2-layout, I suggest). This way it should be far easier to compare the stats of the different soldiers to each other and make the right choice.
3. The stats for the soldiers which are available for hire shouldn't be completely random (i presume they are right now, excuse me if this is not the case), instead each soldiers should prefer a certain role, for example sniper, heavy guns, rifles, medic. These prefered roles should set the available soldiers more apart from each other. Obviously these prefered roles are not fixed classes and the player can always decide to use this soldiers differently.
4. This one depends on point three. The algorithm to create new soldiers should take into account how many soldiers with a certain prefered role are already available for hire, when it determines the new soldiers prefered role. This should make sure that it cannot happen, that all of the available soldiers are good snipers and none is good a heavy gunner. This is especially important if there is only a small selection of soldiers for hire as described in the first point.
5. It would be cool to give every newly generated soldier a nickname (see my other thread for nicknames), that indicates which role this soldier prefers. A sniper could be called "lynx" or "eagle", a soldier who prefers heavy guns could be called "bulldog" or "conan" etc. This would give more personality to the soldiers and, more importantly, help newbies select the right soldier for the right task. Harder campaigns could use non-descript nicknames (or no nicknames at all) so that the player has to judge a soldier by himself.
What do you think?
Florian
