UFO Hangar/Yard - alternate proposal

[Amtep]

I've read about the problems with the UFO Hangars, specifically that the larger UFOs wouldn't fit in them on the tactical screen, and that they take up too much base space.

I was also reading the description text for the UFO Hangars, where they explain that disassembling UFOs in the field is not practical and they have to be moved inside first. But then I thought "well, why not?" It seems easy enough to rope off the area and keep the public out while the workers disassemble it, and it sounds a lot more practical than to move a huge (possibly crashed and broken) UFO to a hidden base before taking it apart. I think this might lead to a fun way to handle UFO recovery:

At the end of a successful mission, the UFO decision menu pops up. It has these options:

SELL - sell the UFO to an interested nation, just like now. This grants recovery rights to that nation.

DESTROY - get rid of the UFO and clean up the site

GUARD - arrange to have guards around the UFO and keep the public out. This will cost a certain number of credits per day and will make the UFO available for study by your scientists, and will keep the UFO around for later recovery. Cost should depend on the hostility of the nation it's in, and the distance to the nearest base.

DISASSEMBLE - only available if UFO type has been researched and if you have a free Disassembly Bay (see below) in your base - send a team of workers to take the UFO apart and bring chunks of it back to base for thorough disassembly. This costs a significant amount of credits and takes several days, but the UFO parts will be worth it.

Clicking 'DISASSEMBLE' will bring up a screen that is similar to the recovery email you get now. It lists the items that may be recovered. It also lets you choose which base's Disassembly Bay to use, and the distance will affect cost and time.

After choosing GUARD or DISASSEMBLE, the UFO mission site becomes a spot on the map that you can later select again. When you select a guarded UFO you can choose to sell it or destroy it, or to disassemble it if you meet the conditions. When you select a UFO that is being disassembled you can choose to destroy it to free up the disassembly bay. (Would it make sense to allow selling of partially disassembled UFOs?) Of course, destroying or selling the last UFO of a type you haven't researched yet would interrupt your scientists until you can get a new one.

UFO sites in "No Nation" areas should cost extra because they are hard to get to (like Antarctica)

The Disassembly Bay is a base installation that replaces the UFO hangars (and can probably borrow some graphics from them). It only needs to hold parts of UFOs so size is not a problem. It is staffed with up to 10 recovery experts, and having more of them makes the recovery missions go faster. (I was thinking of keeping these entirely separate from the 'Workers' that work in workshops, to avoid the complication of allocating workers between recovery tasks and the production queue. Just assume that the Workers aren't willing to leave the safety of the base, so you need to hire people that specialize in disassembly.)  To simplify the interface, a Disassembly Bay can work on only one UFO at a time. Just "Guard" other UFOs until a bay is free again.

I think this approach will make UFOs more "real" -- they are there on the map, and you need to decide how to handle these big and awkward things. You can also decide which UFOs are worth spending money on to guard or disassemble, and which are best gotten rid of, and location on the map will affect this. It also means that you don't have to prepare or build anything special for your very first UFO -- just guard it until you've figured out what to do about it.

I'm assuming the guards are just goons from the local nation or from friendly nations, so you don't have to provide for them -- you just hire them implicitly by paying the daily "Guard" cost. They're there to keep the public out, not to fight aliens. If we make it so that UFOs can attack crash sites to interfere with recovery, then I guess it would just be another "Mission" that you can send a dropship to. It might be a bit weird that the aliens politely wait until your soldiers arrive, but they already do that for crash sites and terror missions anyway
(Alternately, UFOs could just bomb these sites and you have to fight them with SAMs or interceptors)

For costs, I'm thinking of something like ten thousand per day to guard a UFO, probably deducted in hourly increments. I'm not sure about the cost or time of disassembling one.

Ok, comments please

[Kildor]

Do you look into "Off-base installations" proposal? In wiki

[Amtep]

Yes. I'm proposing this as an alternative. UFO yards seem too easy somehow I'd like to use the geoscape more, instead of letting the player move these huge UFOs to some installation where they can be stacked like boxes and surrounded by SAMs and be close to a base.

Also, this is an easy way to make a user interface for deciding about UFOs, at least easier than designing a whole new interface for managing a UFO yard. It's just a few menus and a new worker type.

Third, a UFO yard interface could easily become very abstract, where you're just playing with numbers and arrow buttons. I think that clicking on a UFO crash site on the geoscape is more satisfying.

[RudolfoWood]

I like this idea for being more realistic than "make a pile of ufos right there"...
I don't know whether it would be good to make costs for guarding an ufo increase after some time - this way you have to decide whether it is useful to guard it (until you disassemble it later) or sell it...
A second thought: perhaps there should be a list of actual guarded ufos - in 3D geoscape you otherwise could forget an ufo position at the rear side of the world (don't know whether my gaming style is different to others, but I think I would concentrate my "work" to my first base, building other bases only as outposts. This way I won't look at the back of my planet if I have much work to do on the visible side).
New mission types (e.g. aliens willing to destroy their ufo to hinder us researching them) will make the game more diversified.

[geever]

I don't like the idea. It would overcomplicate it and add unnecessary micro-manangement.

-geever

[ghosta]

Making a sign on the world would be quite confusing. Just count how many UFOs you shoot down and how many of them you need for research? One? Two? If you want to build your own ships I would guess you could need some more parts to implement them. But until you are that far the whole world would be covered with "cleared ufo sites" icons.

[Destructavator]

I like this alternate idea - I think that this, or something like it, would be better than the current system.  This would also free up base construction squares - with the current system the player must build large UFO hangers which take up space, and I recall some talk about how there aren't enough squares to construct buildings with the current game design.

A facility for studying recovered UFOs could perhaps be staffed by scientists (the player could choose how many to take away from the labs) and be equipped with tools and machines that aid their work, with the general stores holding parts for storage.

Also, with the current system, how exactly (for the sake of realism) are some of these gigantic UFOs that were shot down supposed to be transported to a UFO hanger at a base that might not even be on the same continent?  Not only that, but how would it also be kept secret, just like other operations?  Then again, the game takes place some 80 years from now...

[ghosta]

I guess this questions shouldn't be one of realism. In 80 years every scenario is possible: Transporting it to the homebase, defending it, cloaking it with a big blanket,...
It would be more useful to think about gameplay. How does the player behave? What is more funny to play with? How does it affect research?

[Amtep]

I don't think the world would end up covered with "cleared ufo sites" icons, because it will cost credits to guard them. There's a limit to how many UFOs it is reasonable to guard. In the beginning, the player needs at least one of each UFO type in order to research them. Later on, enough UFOs should be kept around to keep the disassembly bays busy, and that number will depend on how slow disassembly is. But I expect that most UFOs will be sold just like now. (At least, I assume my habit of selling most UFOs is typical gameplay.)

[geever]

I think this is a condemned topic. I can only repeat myself: it's too much code to write AND maintain for such a feature. Too much possibility for bugs and so. It doesn't worth. Ask BTAxis, I think he will agree. Or read some other forum topics about (great?) gameplay feature requests were refused.

-geever

[BTAxis]

Yeah. I think the current plan of the UFO yards might have room for improvement, but nothing I've read here constitutes one, if only because of the complexity as geever pointed out.