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Author Topic: Details worth un-hiding from the user?  (Read 1887 times)

Offline Lew Yard

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Details worth un-hiding from the user?
« on: August 05, 2010, 08:36:56 pm »
1- Original stats for characters (or more directly, the delta).

e.g. 'Speed 45' -> 'Speed 48 (28+17)' or the like.

This matters a fair bit as long as XP costs are related to the delta rather than the absolute value, but doesn't seem accessible unless the user records them.


2- Spread values when crouched. 

This can be read from the .ufo files, but I wouldn't be surprised if many players never read them.  Without reading them, it's not necessarily obvious that e.g. crouching with a sniper rifle or laser rifle reduces spread 50%, that crouching with a plasma rifle reduces spread by only 30%, and crouching has no effect on accuracy w/ the grenade launcher.  This magnifies differences in accuracy and might affect weapon choices.


3- Availability of elites.

Given that there's a 1% chance of a recruitment candidate being qualitatively rather head-and-shoulders above all the rest, it might not be entirely unreasonable to generate an e-mail mentioning these by name when they appear.


4- Impact of armor and randomness on damage.

Right now, the damage values presented (per the firing mode descriptions et al -- there's nothing target/armor-specific) are on a total-for-all-shots-assuming-all-shots-hit, no-armor-reduction basis.    This can be misleading for e.g. fast-firing light-damage-per-shot weapons vs. medium armor, so some in-game information might be useful.

e.g. -- UFOPedia containing a generated table for # shot, per-shot damage of (researched weapon vs. researched armor) pairs; or perhaps a min-mean-max damage triplet displayed when the targeting cursor is over a target (and both the target and the target's armor are fully identified).  For simplicity, the latter would assume all shots hit.  That triplet doesn't require any tracing, so should be quite quick to compute (I'd be more worried about intelligible display *shrug*).


Offline geever

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Re: Details worth un-hiding from the user?
« Reply #1 on: August 05, 2010, 08:55:45 pm »
3- Availability of elites.
Given that there's a 1% chance of a recruitment candidate being qualitatively rather head-and-shoulders above all the rest, it might not be entirely unreasonable to generate an e-mail mentioning these by name when they appear.

No mail. Elites are rare and player should hunt them up himself.

-geever