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Impressions after playing the latest nightly

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H-Hour:
Two days ago we made a small but significant change to the math that determines how many UFOs are spawned. We're still testing it to make sure we haven't disrupted game balance elsewhere, but if I did everything right the player should see about 1/4 the number of UFOs in a given time frame.

We'd love for more people to download the latest nightly to help us test before 2.4 is released. There's probably still a lot of fine tuning to be done in our next development cycle, but our priority for the moment is to bring the number of missions back under control.

Jon_dArc:
One idea that came to me to slightly reduce the tedium of missions would be to keep a list of recently used maps and bias the map selection logic against those maps—I remember one stretch on the October 15th nightly where BigCity just kept coming up over and over and over again. Even on HEAD (well, as of a week or two ago, I've been busy) I start to forget that there are maps other than a short list (africa, bridge, druglord, farm, give or take).

~J

Sandro:

--- Quote from: Jon_dArc on January 27, 2012, 03:15:35 pm ---One idea that came to me to slightly reduce the tedium of missions would be to keep a list of recently used maps and bias the map selection logic against those maps

--- End quote ---

I second that.

geever:

--- Quote from: Jon_dArc on January 27, 2012, 03:15:35 pm ---One idea that came to me to slightly reduce the tedium of missions would be to keep a list of recently used maps and bias the map selection logic against those maps

--- End quote ---

it is done just like that! The problem with those missions were that only one map was available for the terrain-population-culture combo, so no selection were possible...

-geever

Watered_Down:

--- Quote from: H-Hour on January 26, 2012, 07:54:13 pm ---Two days ago we made a small but significant change to the math that determines how many UFOs are spawned. We're still testing it to make sure we haven't disrupted game balance elsewhere, but if I did everything right the player should see about 1/4 the number of UFOs in a given time frame.

We'd love for more people to download the latest nightly to help us test before 2.4 is released. There's probably still a lot of fine tuning to be done in our next development cycle, but our priority for the moment is to bring the number of missions back under control.

--- End quote ---

THANK YOU! I have been playing for at least a hundred hours and am just in start of August, downloading the nightly builds every week or so. After installing the latest, I went three whole days without seeing a UFO right away! Previously it was rare to go 12 hours without at least one. So, after three days, one spawned in Asia (shot down) and a few hours later another fighter spawned in USA, but it landed quickly. If anything interesting happens with spawning I'll post here.
I saw in the code changes that you guys tried to fix the bug I got frequently, which was the white cone appearing in the map and stopping pathfinding. I just played two battles and didn't see it happen.
Also, I agree with what Trashman said about alien materials and what Antkatcin said about not being able to pick your base defenders (its been said before). Perhaps these are two relatively straightforward code changes that could be tried for the next release? I read the previous discussion where the original designer of the way UFOs spawn debated the new guy who had outlined a way for UFOs to react to how well the player interrupts them (can't find the thread atm). I think it's true that the world's military/political reaction to the aliens should be fleshed out more, and then that would impact future revisions of how UFOs spawn and soldiers/cops doing their darn jobs and helping out on the battlefield (or not).  :)

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