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Author Topic: Feedback 2.3  (Read 29040 times)

Offline dfscott

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #45 on: August 12, 2010, 05:00:49 pm »
This bug got fixed since that.

You can start your aircraft from base with the little blue icon on aircraft screen, and then set a destination to it on the geoscape. The interface could be better though, agreed.

-geever

And just to clarify, you can also redirect aircraft that have already been given orders (or are automatically returning to base).  I didn't realize it at first and have found it really handy when a fighter pops up near a base when my Firebird is inbound from a mission.   You can turn around and run while your interceptors chase them down.

And as geever says, it's not particularly obvious.  Just ignore the pop-up screen and click on the geoscape.  You'll should see the pink course line change to where you clicked.

Offline jcjordan

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #46 on: August 13, 2010, 12:50:49 am »
And just to clarify, you can also redirect aircraft that have already been given orders (or are automatically returning to base).  I didn't realize it at first and have found it really handy when a fighter pops up near a base when my Firebird is inbound from a mission.   You can turn around and run while your interceptors chase them down.

And as geever says, it's not particularly obvious.  Just ignore the pop-up screen and click on the geoscape.  You'll should see the pink course line change to where you clicked.

Thanks, I thought all the choices I had were in the popup as like you I had a Firebird that I thought had no place to go but to it's destruction.

Lew yard - it just doesn't seem like it's working right in my game as I've watched it for things as little as Plasma Grenades though ship disassembly does seem to take too long also as I don't think I'll ever be able to disassemble all my captured ships  :P In my game I've got 3 production bases - 1 for ship disassembly & 2 for weapons or ships if no weapons are needed.

 A side question to ship disassembly - can you sell/dispose of ships in your yard? Seems like I can only destroy a shipyard instead of being able to look to see what's in a shipyard. I've got 3 shipyards full of ships that I don't think I'll ever be able to disassemble all of them before game is over but do want to disassemble just those where I can get the tech to research or parts I need out of them.

Offline geever

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #47 on: August 13, 2010, 12:42:51 pm »
A side question to ship disassembly - can you sell/dispose of ships in your yard? Seems like I can only destroy a shipyard instead of being able to look to see what's in a shipyard. I've got 3 shipyards full of ships that I don't think I'll ever be able to disassemble all of them before game is over but do want to disassemble just those where I can get the tech to research or parts I need out of them.

You will be able to sell them, once I implemented it. It is a missing feature.

-geever

Offline jcjordan

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #48 on: August 25, 2010, 12:57:12 am »
Some more feedback after playing a little longer -

How about some variance in the number of aliens faced based on the ship damage if any. In the old XCOM you could expect as little as 1 in a small ship mission if it was damaged to as many as a dozen or more in the larger ships if undamaged.

Not sure if it's been fixed or seen but when an alien uses a grenade there's no explosion graphic but the damage does occur to soldier. Also along these lines the AI doesn't seem to use them or gets them rarely in a mission, how about an increase in this aspect?

Sometimes I get odd alien behavior on tactical missions where an alien just walks up to one of my soliders or right by one totally ignoring me which allows me to "execute" them the very next turn. Not sure if it's some kind of morale thing but I've not seen any of the "gone mad" msgs when this happens nor are they going after civilians.

Offline merlinme

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #49 on: August 28, 2010, 11:34:08 pm »
Hi, I'm coming into this as someone who loved the original games, and I'm impressed by what you've done so far. I am a commercial C++ programmer, and I would like to help out when I have the time. Realistically, "if I have the time", as I have a family, but I will try.

A few proposals:

1) I gather there's no weight/ strength/ Time Units system created yet. I would have thought it would be fairly straightforward to create a simple one: an item requires two strength for each space in the inventory it takes up; perhaps there could be "light", "medium" and "heavy" items, which take up 1, 2 or 3 strength for each space in the inventory. If a soldier is over their strength limit, Time Units are reduced accordingly, rounded down. i.e. if strength 30 and they have medium items taking up 20 inventory spaces, their TUs should be reduced by ((20 * 2)- 30)/30, so they will have their TUs reduced by 1/3. I think that would be about right, as long as ammunition was rated as a "light" item then the average soldier should be able to carry primary weapon (and reload) and secondary weapon. At the moment I can't see any reason not to give every single soldier multiple reloads, a secondary weapon, medikit, infrared glasses and multiple grenades.
Strength "experience" should be significant if a soldier is carrying their maximum weight or above.

2) I know there are various proposals to resolve medikit issues. I would have thought a simple way would be to say that only half the damage inflicted in a mission can be healed by medikits. So if a soldier was hit for 20, medikits can heal a maximum of 10. Hospital healing should probably be speeded up somewhat to compensate.

3) As far as I can tell, it's no cheaper to produce something than it is to buy it. This makes producing items which you can buy pointless (I suppose you might run out of stock to buy, but I've not seen it happen). In the original game you could make a bit of money by producing things and then selling them. This gives engineers who would otherwise be idle something to do. It doesn't need to be huge, even being able to produce something for 90% of the value you can sell it for would be worthwhile.

Keep up the good work, let me know if you'd like me to flesh these ideas out more.

merlin
« Last Edit: August 28, 2010, 11:41:21 pm by merlinme »

Offline geever

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #50 on: August 29, 2010, 12:38:31 am »
Hi, I'm coming into this as someone who loved the original games, and I'm impressed by what you've done so far. I am a commercial C++ programmer, and I would like to help out when I have the time. Realistically, "if I have the time", as I have a family, but I will try.

Hi, welcome on board. I hope you can get plenty of time for UFO:AI. The more developers, the better. ;)

1) I gather there's no weight/ strength/ Time Units system created yet.

DarkRain just started to working on it, see here.

2) I know there are various proposals to resolve medikit issues.

criusmac started to work on medikit and injury system once, but he abandoned us. :( His last patch is on the tracker also discussion in the Medikit thread.
If you could pick up the line and continue his work it would be awesome!

3) As far as I can tell, it's no cheaper to produce something than it is to buy it.

That was a decision not allowing profit from producing because PHALANX is not a merchant firm but to be honest I'm not quite satisfied with the way it is done. I think is should be done with market system like the way xcom3 did: if you sell much of an item it's sell price drops dramatically. But that's something for the future.

-geever

Offline Duke

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #51 on: August 29, 2010, 01:42:20 am »
Hi Merlin and welcome from me as well :)
Well, geever was faster than me and said exactly what I wanted to say, so I saved some time ;)

As you can see from those discussions, we have numerous 'junior game designers' around here. So simple approaches like yours (to get things started) won't stand the test of discussion.

As you are a professional, I see two major areas of work for you:
1) bugfixing. We don't have so many devs that are able to fix *any* bug.
2) encapsulation. We started the tedious task to work the code towards a more OO design. Maybe one fine day (2084 ?) we can switch to C++.

You can get much applause from the users for #1. For #2, you'll 'only' get kudos from a few admins. But #2 will always fit into your time table ;)

Offline merlinme

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #52 on: August 29, 2010, 10:22:28 am »
Hi Merlin and welcome from me as well :)
Well, geever was faster than me and said exactly what I wanted to say, so I saved some time ;)

As you can see from those discussions, we have numerous 'junior game designers' around here. So simple approaches like yours (to get things started) won't stand the test of discussion.

As you are a professional, I see two major areas of work for you:
1) bugfixing. We don't have so many devs that are able to fix *any* bug.
2) encapsulation. We started the tedious task to work the code towards a more OO design. Maybe one fine day (2084 ?) we can switch to C++.

You can get much applause from the users for #1. For #2, you'll 'only' get kudos from a few admins. But #2 will always fit into your time table ;)

Hi, thanks for the responses guys. I tend to prefer simple solutions because they actually get implemented. I've had a look at the medkit diffs and there's some interesting stuff there, however I can't help thinking it would have been nice to fix what is effectively a bug for the latest release, without getting so bogged down in multiple wound locations etc. I'd have thought multiple wound locations could have been added later, e.g. when it became possible to target particular locations (which would presumably require creation of a body graphic as well, so that could be reused to show where wounds were).

I'm more than happy to bugfix, it's a significant part of what my job involves anyway. It will take me a while to get up to speed though, bearing in mind I've never programmed in C before, never used SourceForge before, etc. We use quite low level C++, so I didn't have any problems understanding the medkit diffs, but there are C vs. C++ style differences (how something is done) as much as anything else. Bug fixing would probably make more sense until I understand how you want to do encapsulation, for example. When I'm a bit more comfortable with the code I might have a look at picking up the medkit stuff.

One final point on features (and I know you have more features than you have coders!): is armour facing anywhere on the ToDo list? I always quite liked that it in the X-Com games there was a tactical element to which way your soldiers faced. If you get hit on the front then even with quite weak armour you had a chance, whereas if you got hit from behind then even with the super armour you could get damaged. It's also quite realistic, as soldiers and tanks do have stronger armour where they're most likely to be hit, i.e. on the front.

Keep up the good work- I will try to help out where I can.


Offline Kildor

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #53 on: August 29, 2010, 10:36:30 am »
If you know C++, you also can give your attention to UFORadiant, our map editor. There is many wishes and bugs in it, and we (mappers) will be very happy ;-)

Offline Precisionist

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #54 on: October 08, 2010, 04:14:59 am »
For the people having difficulty with the game, here are the 3 biggest game changers that I've found:
1. Research and build the nanocomposite armor ASAP
2. Research and build lasers, ASAP
3. Use cover!  The game gets to a point where if you dont finish your TUs with cover, expect to get hit.  #1 can usually keep those hits from getting lethal.

Make sure everyone has a medikit.  If you start getting tore up, create an "aid station" where one or two guys are in a safe spot, and you run your hurt guys to them.  The aliens are often not too aggressive so you can take time to heal up wounded folks.

As far as suggestions, I also agree with the several of the other posters about the pace of the game.  I can understand the aliens escalating their activity, but it gets to a pretty ridiculous level when it takes several IRL hours just to get through 1 game day, when you have weeks to have something researched or broken down.  I'm not sure what the best fix for this would be.

Couple of questions:
Can 2.3 save games be transfered to 2.4?

Can terror missions or crashed UFOs be ignored once in a while, or will that result in big status hits?

Offline H-Hour

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #55 on: October 08, 2010, 11:10:03 am »
Can 2.3 save games be transfered to 2.4?

No.

Offline Thrashard96

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #56 on: October 08, 2010, 08:07:49 pm »
i've found out earlier that there is a limit of 2096 employees per base (512 of each kind). Raise it! I want to finish the game as fast as possible!

Offline geever

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #57 on: October 08, 2010, 09:56:56 pm »
i've found out earlier that there is a limit of 2096 employees per base (512 of each kind). Raise it! I want to finish the game as fast as possible!

512 of each kind is not a per-base limit but overall. However I don't think it's low, we're going to remove the hard limits for other reasons.

-geever

Offline Brasher

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #58 on: November 15, 2010, 05:22:52 am »
Hi guys, I stopped playing this for a while but downloaded it again last month and damn... it's still awesome!  Can't wait for the new elements you guys are working on.  Daddy wants some heavy armor.

Pros: 
Reaction-Fire... (this would have been on the list for cons a while ago).  What ever you guys did, it actually works worth a damn.  The last time I had UFOAI on my PC, I stopped using RF after the first mission when aliens pranced across my whole squad's LOS (who all forgot they were supposed to do something), popped off a few shots, did a moon-walk to the quick-mart around the corner while singing Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and grabbed a case of bear for the trip back on their next turn.  Mouth gaping, I swore "Reaction what?  Never... again..."(as I had seen the hundreds of complaints about it and its lack of any kind of effectiveness)  Out of curiosity i decided to try it (since it had been a while) to see if anything had been changed.  An evil grin spread across my face as an alien rounded the corner on his turn and was greeted with a hail of bullets.  THANK YOU soooo much.

Effort: You guys have all put so much effort into this project and continue to for all of us to enjoy.  I personally thank you, you brought the kid out of me again with this game.  To this day, the X-COM series is my all-time favorite and this is right up there with them in my book with it's own unique elements.  Keep up the awesome work you bad@sses.

Everything else not mentioned below: Outfrickinstanding.  Daddy like.

Cons:
UFOpedia: Extreme lack of luster.  Don't get me wrong, it's well written and flows with the story-line, but the lack of a large, sweet looking image of the research just makes it dry and uninteresting to review.  Hell, I used to check out old reports in X-COM often during a game no matter how many times I beat it (even the autopsy reports were cool), but I actually found I had to force myself to read UFOAI's research reports.  I almost feel I'm being punished for finishing the R&D, boys.  5 days and 375 UFO incursions later and I'm just not excited tenough to bother reading the plasma rifle or autopsy report.  It's a shame too because whoever wrote the 'pedia and put all that effort in was almost in vain.  It's bad when even just throwing up an animated picture of Starwars Kid in the top corner of every report could make it more interesting to browse.

A.I.: I'm sure it's a monster to program, but good god... as an X-COM veteran, your AI is effing retarded.  It is predictable and not too bright, and on many maps they congregate like cattle near key locations (especially base def).  What's worse is you compensate this by making them unnaturally beefy, like what the rage-quitter mentioned in earlier posts.  Granted, he struck me as having absolutely no strategic talent if he had that much of a problem, but it's obvious what's going on when the naked Tamans suddenly can take some serious punishment with a coke and a smile after researching plasma.  Compensating poor AI with exponentially accumulating, god-like stats does not present a challenge, its just poor programming border lining the ridiculous.  I can buy them becoming sharp-shooters due to the hive-mind learning curve according to the story, but health?  How does connected intellect explain learning how to take a burst of point-blank plasma fire after losing a few of the collective to ballistic rifle fire?  (Might be another con then, weapon Imballance?)  A 98 pound Tamon in his undies is still a 98 pound Tamon even if the over-mind he's connected to tells him he's a 12 ton armored elephant thats eats plasma for breakfeast.  I wish I could offer you a solution but I'm not a programmer, it's just blatantly absurd as it is.  I, too, have had Ortnoks take pot-shots at civilians across the entire map when I have a troop 4 meters in front of it armed with a sword and a dirty look.  Not only was my troop an immediate threat, but was what I thought to be an easier target than some idiot 10 clicks away behind 4 fences and some hay.  I've also noticed Aliens force-firing at targets like civilians or my troops when they have absolutely no LOS in that direction whatsoever, and they aren’t going berserk when this happens.

UFO Spammage:  The frequency of the UFOs paying a visit... holy piss.  Hopefully that is WIP, quite a popular topic.

Maps:  Farms and Oriental districts come up way to often and are too boring for their frequency, especially when you take into account the above mentioned spamming.  Some days I play about an hour and go, "Fu#$ this, not up for the grind today."  Ugh, just thinking about another forest mission right now makes me want to drive my head through a wall.

Variety:  In essence, the lack there of.  A year into the game and I am sssssssooooooo sick of Tamons and Ortnoks I could club a baby seal.  The great thing about a "story line" is you can modify it, change it, add things, take away things, whatever, to make it better- more enjoyable... for the game's sake this is a must.  Keep in mind you guys doing all the work on this project:  Stop slapping down ideas from all these creative people flooding in to support your game, I've seen allot of things that could greatly improve every aspect of this game.  As it stands right now, the game gets unbearably monotonous.  MORE weapons, MORE enemies.  On the topic of weapons, you have too damn many useless secondary weapons that really aren’t even handy in the beginning of the game let alone later on.  I see that there MIGHT be some new armors introduced which means you have a prime opportunity to enhance the game with some shiny new gnarly $h!t. (GREAVER I have seen too many posts from you stating "it doesn’t go with the story line... it doesn’t go with... it doesn’t..." shuddafukup.  The game aint done yet, the story-line CAN be MODIFIED to accommodate better game-play which is equally, if not MORE important.)

Fuel:  yea, there isn’t much point in making the advanced aircraft.  Why spend lots of money and waste allot of resources to get an aircraft so you can take on the harvesters and prevent them from landing when you need them to land so you can get the fuel to be able to take on the harvesters... yea... doesn't really make sense considering how long it takes to disassemble a fighter for the drop of antimatter they give does it?  Did any of you take into account how many damn UFOs visit during a 24 hour period, let alone 500 frickin hours?  Some one failed beyond epic on this.  The idea of technological advancement is to ADVANCE.  Getting a Firestorm and Avenger in X-COM was a wonderful time.  Getting the starchaser and other craft in this is painful and irrational.  I could get 1-4 ufos down with advanced craft's tank in this but with absolutely no point or end-game when letting them land or using Stilettos would have been as rewarding if not more.  I'm really hoping you make an attack transport, BTW, hopefully one that resides somewhere near the realm of economic.

Civilians:  steeeeewpeeeed eeedeeots.  So stupid they often run to aliens for shelter, or towards a gunfight... I must have missed that in the story-line Greaver, did the people of the future become incredibly dumb due to red-neck inbreeding and playing with Chinese lead-painted toys?  Why don’t they panic and run hiding like the aliens after being shot at?  Can you not program them to lose morale if they are the target of gunfire and/or within a radius of an alien?  How about when phalanx troop is in their sight they head to them or something, maybe even being able to take over their actions if you get within a radius (as if your troops were telling them what to do)?  I make it a priority to have cattle prods ASAP, and NOT for the aliens, hell no.  Its for the idiots I’m sworn to protect blocking doorways and stairwells for 10 turns.  How about a "restrain civilian" option when standing next to one that puts them down?  Their avatars crack me up too, aliens landed and the chicks pose with a hand on their hip like they gunna chew some @ss out of their man cuz they caught him cheatin'.  Where is the arms flailing, cowering, screaming, pant soiling, and lamentation of de women?

Soldier Skins:  I get sick of the same 8 heads, some with glasses some without.  I’m hoping you're adding more variety there.  Out of curiosity why do most of them all pop up with Asian names every game I play?  Are they the expendable race of the future ROFL?  The US gives me all their Asians, Africa gives me all theirs, Europe and so on every time.

The chick's death screams still sound like a chipmonk being punted over a field goal by a line-backer.

Offline Mattn

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Re: Feedback 2.3
« Reply #59 on: November 15, 2010, 08:23:24 am »
thanks for your feedback. about the farm+oriental "issue" - we don't have enough maps yet. if you wanna help, download the map editor and change this ;)