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Author Topic: Some suggestion for the recuiting of soldiers  (Read 2893 times)

florian

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Some suggestion for the recuiting of soldiers
« on: March 04, 2008, 03:37:02 pm »
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

nemchenk

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Re: Some suggestion for the recuiting of soldiers
« Reply #1 on: March 04, 2008, 04:19:58 pm »
While I agree with (3), I think (4) would make the game not nearly as challenging :) For me half the fun is making a great team out of what I get given. If the game always makes sure I get a "balanced" team, IMO that would not nearly be as much fun. Besides, what is "balanced"? Depends entirely on your point of view... (another film reference ;) )

As for (3) -- and like you I have not examined the stat-generating code yet -- it would be nice to do a bell-curve rather than a flat distribution for stats. Equally, it would be nice to do a Shadowrun-type thing where every stat is given a priority of a pool of high-med-med-low (for example.) This would mean there are not too many uber-soldiers or complete weaklings, but rather each soldier has a main and sub-specialisation. Where these fall, however, I would make random, and let the player try to figure out how to make best use of a soldier with high Mind and Speed stats, but low Accuracy and Strength.


Yours,

nemchenk

Offline eleazar

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Re: Some suggestion for the recuiting of soldiers
« Reply #2 on: March 04, 2008, 07:11:25 pm »
The number of soldiers available is an important difference between difficulty levels.  At higher levels you will have a hard time keeping enough soldiers alive to man all your bases.  An abundance of available troops is supposed to be one of the benefits of the easy difficulty.  It may be true, however that there are more soldiers than necessary at easy levels.

However, assuming that the numbers of potential employees are adjusted properly the best way to deal with choosing employees is simply to make a way to sort and filter the list.

Sophisanmus

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Re: Some suggestion for the recuiting of soldiers
« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2008, 10:04:25 pm »
Perhaps the soldiers available could be tracked on a per-region basis, especially considering they report for duty at their destination base immediately upon hiring.  It could stress the importance of establishing new bases in each region funding PHALANX, as well as make the 'transfer' function and associated time considerations more prominent in base and personnel planning.