Feature Request

[zoltic]

Hello,

As I am a prudent player, I have in my first base only one firebird and 14 soldiers to train newbies and send good crews to new created bases. This pool of soldiers can also replace wounded people after missions.
After a very catastrophic mission, I lost my firebird and the 8 soldiers aboard. But.... I still have 6 soldiers in base.
As I am really unlucky, my base is under attack and I would like to equip my soldiers.
How can I do it ?

This little story is here just to show that it would be very good to have the possibility to equip soldiers outside an aircraft.
And, maybe, if the soldiers had their own equipment always with them, could they be transfered with it and this equipment could be retired from the stock and not sold by mistake. Actually it is very difficult to know exactly how many pieces of this or that we need because we must know how many ammunitions, for exemple, are affected to soldiers and how many are really in the storage room. At a high difficulty level when you don't have many money to make or buy weapons, it is very "touchy".

In the original UFO it was not possible but maybe this rewrite could it be better than the original.

[BTAxis]

We plan to change it in the future.

[homunculus]

[...] And, maybe, if the soldiers had their own equipment always with them, could they be transfered with it [...] In the original UFO it was not possible but maybe this rewrite could it be better than the original.

as far as i have seen, ufo:ai is mostly based on xcom:apocalypse which you can download for free, i think it was on www.abandonia.com, and that version of xcom not only has the equipment system you requested, but also has more, like the option to play real-time in missions.

xcom:apoc equipment system still made you search for some piece of equipment on a soldier that was not currently in use, and it was a somewhat tedious gui as far as my opinion goes (much better than xcom:eu, though).
luckily we don't have armor in 5 pieces in ufo:ai, and we can right-click! how could that have happened?

assuming there will be some way to defend the base, i think the current system is ok, i mean the system that you equip soldiers when you assign them to dropship, and equips is removed otherwise.
but i would like soldiers to remember what equips they had last time and automatically try to equip when i assign them to dropship.
and maybe the template things are going to help us.

as for the shopping problems, maybe a soldier could be asked to stay equipped even while not assigned to dropship, like being assigned to base quard, or to guard the door to your office (equipped items would not appear in storage and 'for sale').

so, a soldier would need to remember what items he will want to take when he needs to get equipped, and whether he needs to unequip when removed from dropship.

[Destructavator]

I brought this up myself some time ago, defending a base without a dropship, and I do hope it makes it into 2.3 when it finally gets released.

I remember someone talking about modifying the .ufo files to add an "aircraft" in the base menu that really isn't an aircraft but actually allocated base patrol, so a player could assign soldiers and equip them to be ready at any time to defend a base.  I attempted to implement this myself by playing around with the .ufo files some time ago and couldn't quite make it work, so I'm guessing the code will have to be tweaked a bit to allow such a thing.  I remember I did come close though (with just the .ufo files alone), although that was several months ago, before a lot of code changes and updates.

[geever]

You can defend your base wo a dropship already in the current trunk. (Just don't forget equipping them.)

About "soldiers keep their equipment". We will do once, but not for 2.3. It can (and will ) cause serious bugs.

-geever