make the events more flexible?

[papabob]

One of the things that pissed me of the original Ufo series was the fixed timeline that every game followed. If i recall correctly, in "terror from the deep" you start in January, fight against aquatoids and the other green guys a few times, but you have to capture a certain type of alien by May to research the big armour, because by the terror attack in November you have to fight against the big big guys (months can vary, has passed ¿8? years )

Now I see in events.ufo that there is an event called "Alien stealth aircraft sighted" and I suspect that it drives the game to new enemies and makes combats more difficult as the original game did. It has to be done (always fighting against the same enemies can be boring) but it has only 50 days to ocurr.

I don't know if these events will finally be used in the stable version, but to make every game different (sometimes you have months to research and collect lots of corpses and equip, sometimes you have to do all very quickly), the range of dates should be extended.

[pete.lindsey@hotmail.com]

I think the "timeline" for campaigns could be revamped to be more dyanamic.  Lets say that there were 3 terror missions in a row where 6 aliens showed up and they didn't kill a single bystander...  It would make sense that the aliens would increase thier efforts

[Irinami]

When I read this, all I thought of was a variable "date" on these big events... but I like Pete's idea, something a bit adaptive. It could be simple, like tracking a kill ratio and basing alien numbers, equipment, and skills off that. Or it could be complex, where a player packing all sniper rifles all the time will find himself faced with grenadiers heheheheh. That could lead to intellectually ambushing the aliens: giving them a number of easy victories, then ambushing their lax and poorly armed forces (maybe they're spreading their heavy arms out now that you're suddenly easier to defeat--because, maybe, they have other enemies in the galaxy to worry about). This could be like a classic Mongol mangudai, a false retreat which is actually an ambush. Hmmm...