Hostile civilians?

[Lord Valdez]

I ran across something very unexpected and I can't believe my eyes.
My soldier had a flamethrower, but the corridor was long so I dropped it and used the SMG instead.
Suddenly a civilian picked it up and torched my soldier. I didn't succeed to reproduce it.
Can civilians pick up weapons?
Why did he become hostile?

[DanielOR]

Wow. cool.  I think panicked soldiers can go beserk and kill team mates.  did not know civilians can do same.  KIDS SHOULD NOT PLAY WITH FIRE!

[steelaz]

Happened to me too, only with sniper rifle.

[sirg]

So the civilians do fight after all. To bad they teamed up with the aliens. LOL

And I thought this was under development

[DanielOR]

steelaz - sniper rifle for me as well.  A wounded soldier, before I got a chance to heal him, shot two team mates point blank in the head with a sniper rifle.  ewwww.  messy.

[Sophisanmus]

I would assume the difficulty comes from there being three "teams" right now: Aliens, Civvies, and You.   The Aliens are keyed to attack all other teams.  I would assume that this code carries over to the Civvies, though they are unarmed by default.  There is probably some element preventing them from using alien weapons dropped on the field, maybe because their 'team' hasn't researched them yet, but if they can get human default weapons dropped by your side...

Now, an interesting experiment might be seeing if you could get a Civvy to pick up a Grenade Launcher dropped by a glitch-Ort, and whether the Civvy will then attack the nearest alien, or come blindly gunning for your guys...

[DanielOR]

well, it would make sense for the civvies to go after aliens, or for crazy-scared civvies to go after anyone, i.e. nearest anything that moves.

eventually, if coding resources are available, I like the idea of "hole up in a house and hold".  Maybe once a couple aliens are dead, the civvies get bold and decide to go "help" thus fowling things up.  Nothing like having a perfect exeecuted mission get messed up by a well-meaning bystander with a grenade launcher.

[Sophisanmus]

Well, then again it's your fault for leaving that grenade launcher lying around their house (assuming the GL-Orts are fixed).  Perhaps an added option to just dropping an item, an extra 4 TUs to leave a "Do not touch!" sign on it, and an additional 2 for "This means YOU!"

[Lord Valdez]

I am glad that happens to someelse too. I was afraid that you wouldn't believe it.
Arming civilians is not bad, but I would prefer some kind of "exotic options menu", where you could find "arm civilian" or "give it to civilian" or so.
Maybe there could be a "Command Civilian" button with some simple commands that civilians either do or not, after all they are panicked.
I could imagine commands like "Get out!" (very useful ), "Take Cover!", "Take This!" and so.

[Sophisanmus]

Honestly, giving civilians weapons is a bad idea.  Perhaps the police would do that before PHALANX arrives, but not after.  They are untrained, unarmored, panicked, and about as likely to shoot PHALANX (or themselves) instead of the aliens.  Now, telling them to take cover, or to run (and where) make sense, but the last thing PHALANX is trying to do is create an automatic-weapon armed-mob situation.

[TheFatSandRat]

I find that unarmed civilians are the most passively dangerous things in the game- often, especially in the Bristol Military Base, they surround my troops entirely allowing the aliens to slaughter us all. I now have a strict 'shoot-on-sight' policy when it comes to them.
I rationalize it by pretending that the U.N. has given PHALANX authorization to destroy any form of life deemed hostile to the human race or to the mission, thus allowing for the wholesale slaughter of endangered species, as well as humans.
And then for some reason only Australia likes me... D:

[Lord Valdez]

I always tried to protect them, but not so meticulously as in former X-COMs.
I do not support arming civilians in crisis situations, but if they have the ability to arm themselves, I would be happier to know that I have some limited control over them.
In fact I would be happy, if I could only command them out of the line of fire.

[Surrealistik]

And then for some reason only Australia likes me... D:

For some reason unknown to me, and completely unspecified in the game's backstory, Australia is the nation most sympathetic towards the aliens, the hardest to satisfy, and the most likely to be corrupted/infiltrated.

[Surrealistik]

Hmm, India, the location of the Mumbai incident is apparently a part of Oceania, but it was only subject to a harvesting rather than infestation/corruption raid prior to the events of the game; the human strain of XVI was not yet developed at that point. If anything Oceania should initially harbour the most negative disposition towards the aliens.