Technical support > Feature Requests

Revise Initial Base Layout

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Surrealistik:
The initial base easily features one of the worst layouts I've ever seen. The designer should be fired and court martialed if at all possible.

To elaborate, two critical facilities, radar and the power plant are in extremely close proximity to points of entry (in the case of the radar station, it's adjacent to 3), while the command centre is closer to these entry points than less crucial modules such as the Workshop. This is to say nothing of the alien containment facility's dangerous placement (although because you can migrate/destroy captured specimens prior to a base assault, this isn't as problematic).

At any rate, it should be obvious that the layout is in need of serious revision. Entry points such as hangers and the main entrance should be bunched together in a corner, and buffered from the rest of the base by a single file chokepoint of living quarters (where soldiers spawn in the event of a base attack). The remaining facilities should then be linked with the quarters, and similarily arranged in single file when possible (to maintain a continuous choke) in order of least to most important, the Radar, Command Centre and Power Plant being the greatest number of facilities away from the entrance cluster.

Telok:
While I totally agree that the initial default base layout could be modified, you are lacking some critical information.

Go http://mattn.ninex.info/?page=Download and check out the 2.3 dev. This will get you into base attacks.

The information you need is that (as of the dev version I'm running) the Small Alien Hanger, Large Hanger, Radar, and Base Entrance are all entry points. Your Command Center and first Living Quarters are your squad start points, in that order. Four to eight soldiers are started in the CC with the remainder in Living, if these structures are far from your entrance you give the aliens time to spread out and filter through your base. Sniper fire and grenade spam across your labs really annoys your scientists.

My current base design has the SA-Hanger and Radar south and south-west of the Entrance, and the Large Hanger in the squares south of them. After a nasty firefight at the entrance I push my snipers past and down to the Large Hanger while the rest of the team inches up the entrance ramp with everyone having clear LoS and high reaction fire modes readied. I send the snipers on (flamers armed, rifles in pack) to the hanger because it has a three story control tower open on the north, east, and west.

I am thinking of changing my layout a bit. Placing a Living Quarters north of the Entrance, Command Center to the east, Large Hanger south of them and Small Alien Hanger and Radar at the bottom. This would give me two paths to the Entrance and fast access to that control tower.

Do you remember the base invasion in the original Xcom? If you had living quarters and hangers scattered randomly through a base you could spend hours trying to sweep every room clear of sectiods and snake-men... This base is bigger... As long as we keep them out of the base as much as possible you only have to clear the top side.

Surrealistik:
Are you sure that the radar station is an entry point? I don't recall aliens spawning from there at all, though they may seem to if your initial base is attacked, due to being surrounded by alien spawns (hangers and entrance). I also don't remember soldiers spawning at the command centre (I do have and run the most recent version of 2.3), though you might be correct about that.

My guideline layouts assume the aliens actually prioritize and attack critical base facilities (doesn't yet seem to be implimented), in addition to taking other prudent considerations into mind (spawn and entry points). This means that even though the command centre may be a spawn point, it'll be positioned far from the entrance. If the command centre IS a spawn point, it really shouldn't be; spawn points should be selectable (you do have some level of forewarning, enough to quickly post infantry to selected facilities), or at the very least limited to the living quarters, which are ideal in that they can be safely positioned in close proximity to base entrances as they're low importance facilities.

The optimal base design (at least for the purposes of defendability) features a zig zagging snake pattern of facilities in single rank and file, such that no facility has more than two entrance and exit points, with the exception of the 'head' that constitutes an annex of entry points, cut off from the rest of the base by a series of living quarters, with facilities afterwords arranged in the above manner in order of least to greatest importance.

Also, what is the point of the unbuildable tiles? Maybe they should cost more to develop, but why would they be completely inviable, and if for whatever reason they were, why on earth would PHALANX opt for a location with vast, unbuildable tracts to begin with? Further, what do they really add to the game? Maybe I'm alone in my opinion, but I find these more annoying and needless than anything else.

geever:
1. You can disable autobuild and set up your initial base as you want! (This is also a "cheat", because these buildings will be set up in no time, but whatever you build later - or to the autobuilded they will take days as usual.)
2. There is a plan about saveable base templates, AFAIR.
3. Number of blocked tiles are random in the current trunk (from 0 to 2). (I have changed it recently.) So, if you're lucky (or play with reload game) you can have a base without any.

Regards,
-geever

Telok:
Ackpth, you may be right. I just checked and found my 2.3 to be more than a month old.

In the version I have soldiers always spawn at the command center first. With an 8 man crew it's always evenly split between CC and quarters. I'll grab the latest version and check if anything has changed.

I tend to treat all the entrances as dangerous because in a couple of my first attacks I did encounter a couple of aliens at the top and exterior base of the radar structure. The radar installation isn't (I think) an alien spawn point in itself, but when it's between an alien and your soldiers they can come down it. I also constantly find one to three aliens  gibbering in a top-side corner of the map, presumably because I've managed to kill all their friends and they want to escape. Once a slightly improved AI is implemented and they start doing more than just making a bee-line to our soldiers and hiding behind corners we will need to guard all the entrances. It wouldn't be too hard to code in an alien 'mission' where they moved towards your alien containment and 'freed' (read spawned more aliens with weapons from your armory of they got into the containment room) some buddies. In that case you'd see them coming down any stairs nearest their objective instead of nearest your troops.

I would agree with your best defense base design except for one thing, we don't have enough troops to make it worth while. Under more realistic circumstances that design would allow defenders to fall back and mount a more aggressive defense closer to vital installations while they sapped the numbers of the enemy troops. Unfortunately we only get eight guys, each one is a significant loss and the alien weapons are so strong that surviving two hits counts as extreme good luck. Any fight at a choke point tends to stay fairly static until one side loses too many people to be a viable threat. I simply don't think that base design matters once you've segregated the entry points from the main base by placing your guards in the way. Even given having a place to pull pull three wounded guys back and have them form a healing circle most of the bottlenecks in a base can be held with just three or four troops.

Perhaps once we have more options in combat (UGVs, command detonated explosives, maybe some sort of in-base defense system) it would be more useful. Right now covering with MGs, SMGs, or flamers while bouncing grenade launcher shots around corners can hold a position in the base. If people start dying and you retreat to another room you're probably wasting TUs because your fallback position has the same guys and equipment as your current position.

And I think that the Command Center makes a good spot for your troops to spawn. Assuming that your soldiers are more than just grunts with ray guns it's logical for some of them to be there to help command base defenses and evaluate the threat before the fighting started. The actual room is build like a little bunker with armored walls, it looks that way to me. I like having a protected room where I know that I can count on having troops at the start of the battle. In Xcom if you had a lab or workshop heavy base you also had lots of living quarters, some of your soldiers could start halfway across the map away from the attack. I'd like selectable start points in missions, but I don't know how likely that is (beyond my small  skills to code) and I'll take a solid known position in one room over semi-random spread across possible multiple rooms.

I'm not even sure I'd run the optimal base defense design if it made a difference. We already have 15(?) different rooms, four of which are x2 size. It doesn't look like you can fit them all into one base like that.

I think we may want to sometimes preface our threads and posts with the versions we're using to prevent mistaken assumptions.

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