Groups and Formations for the battlescape

[krilain]

Hello,

I would like to post here a feature proposal. But I don't doubt that it will necessarily be pushed on in his time, if it hadn't already been. So let's considere that as a reminder. For this reason I made some effort to expose the thing clearly with the help of pictures.

So what is it about? Let's begin by a concrete case. We all know this urban map where the alien ship stands on the top of a some streets slope. I dont express to well so I will suppose you see what I mean... So, generally in this map you have to move your soldiers one by one until you reach the alien ship entrance because aliens wont come at your encouter. This leads into successive boring turns, boring in the sense that you have to drive each soldier one by one where you would prefere to lead the whole team in few actions.

To be solved this issue calls one or two related features :
1- a possibility to group your soldiers into one team, or a few sub-teams.
2- a possibilty to move your (sub-)team in one click. This leads to the concept of formation. You know what I mean, many military games provide this feature and triangle formations, circle ones, and so on...

Once we said that, lets picture it. Imagine we are in the "top-street-alien-ship-urban-map" I said before. 


A/ Begining : initial position
As usual we begin the battlescape mission aboard the Phallanx vessel (Firebird for instance). Then we are exepted to move out.


B/ Moving : today system, each soldier has to be moved independantly
You recognize for the moment the classical configuration. The soldiers are spread off one by one. Of course that is a good option for many cases, but not in the top-street map, and many others. The player may want another option. Here it is.


C/ New option : grouping
I supposed here the possibility to make 2 sub-groups. I except to be able to make 1 whole team group or 2 sub-groups. For me there is no need for more. It is only for moving purposes.
Note that I represented the grouping action by a squared fillet. But that's not necessary. A "shift+soldier" to add in a team and "ctrl+soldier" to remove is also an option.
The only sure thing thing is that making a team, composing it, and disbanding it will need a proper interface. Just remember it will be necessary to make a keyboard access as well than a mouse one. After making a group, we should be able to set some style of grouping, what I called a "formation".


C/ Formation : Set of constraints between soldiers
Just to make a standard example, I supposed here that the important criterion is the range of distances between the soldiers. It could be an internal setting, or given to the players choice. Whatever it should be always the best fit and not an absolute constraint, that's why a preview is needed, just as the path preview we have for a lonely soldier move.

That would lead in possible variants.


D/ Group moving : variant 1


E/ Moving : variant 2

To conclude, before you give me any feedback, I would say one more thing. The aliens behaviour should win something if a similar system was built for coordinating small groups movements. Today we often can feel the alien as being a collection of unrelated people Ok, not often, but sometimes and this for one good reason : close aliens will detect the same things and react accordingly as one man.

For the developpers, I will say that I know that there is some prerequesite before any feature can be added, and I'm conscious that I dont have any idea of what are here the prerequesites. I admit so that this suggestion can stay pure theory, at least for today. So let's take it for a comfort proposal, not a top priority one. It is all about keeping it in mind as an orientation for the future.

[H-Hour]

I know this isn't directly related to your post, but just so you know aliens will appear throughout that map (+hills) in 2.5. Not just in the UFO. This should be the case for all maps in 2.5 (thanks to ShipIt).

In general, I am not in favour of a system like you propose because it encourages the player to play badly. It would be hard to implement it in a way that didn't imply that the developers thought the player ought to be using groups like this. But our battlefield is very tactical, which means grouping your soldiers in any standard orientation like historic melee-based games (line, circle) will only expose your soldiers in tactically vulnerable positions.

Winning on the battlefield is more about cover and concealment, and it would be nearly impossible to write a strong AI in which the game was able to choose appropriate cover positions for your soldiers on its own (games that have tried to do this -- the Ghost Recon or COD series, for instance -- often end up giving your NPC allies special survivability conditions to overcome their poor tactical positioning). As a player of several of these games, I can tell you that AAA studios have not yet come up with an AI smart enough not to expose itself in very stupid ways.

I appreciate that your proposal is more about moving lots of soldiers more easily when there is no risk to them (no aliens around, let me just get these guys across the battlefield). In this case, I would prefer to either fix the problem from the other end (like making sure maps don't have large useless areas) or implementing some kind of multi-turn command (like "go to this point as fast as possible, with automatic moving on subsequent turns until it reaches its destination").

[krilain]

Hi H-Hour, thanks for your comprehensive answer. I think I can say in my words now how you see the tactical map in UFOAI. For me, and let me know if I am wrong, you considere that the scene begins immediatly when human/alien contact is already established. In this case, you are right, even if the aliens are taking cover hidden somewhere (they have time for this during the human ship landing), we should play carefuly and so use every soldier as a single ressource. In fact, that is not my feeling for the moment (I still play 2.4). I can't figure my team like being suddenly parachute-dropped on a hot tactical map.

Many reasons for this. Those 3 for instance :

• The time notion first. In 2.4 at least there is no difference between a mission on which I can jump immediately, or another one over which I jump only 3 days later (or even more when my ships are all in travel). That doesn't help to feel the urge on the contact.
  
• I always figured that it should be 3 map-scales in this game, the geoscape scale, a zone scale (for instance characterized by a landscape unity), and then the battlescape as a sample of the second level.
  For me, the 2 last levels are melted in UFOAI. And I felt as necessary that we should generally have an exploration phase before contact. This is one of the point I wished to discuss early since I began playing this excellent game, because that is my sincere feeling.
  
• If we should be on scramble most of time, some missions doesn't allow this way of thinking. For instance the rescue missions.
  

Ok. My point was just to give you my player's feeling. I know there is nothing deadly here for the game survival, but I know you always need feedbacks. The only fault I may have done was to give you a fix to an issue that is only based on a feeling before I asked myself if everyone shared it. Whatever the explanations finally come.

In general, I am not in favour of a system like you propose because it encourages the player to play badly. It would be hard to implement it in a way that didn't imply that the developers thought the player ought to be using groups like this. But our battlefield is very tactical, which means grouping your soldiers in any standard orientation like historic melee-based games (line, circle) will only expose your soldiers in tactically vulnerable positions.

I see. If the battlescapes remains not too big, and if the maps are dedicated for immediate contact that can work quite well. In 2.4 however, we chain the battlescape's mission so much that sometimes we're in need for some options to accelerate the action. In the future it could be balanced by a large amount of different maps to kill the repetition, or by less but better choosen mission. With what I read around here, I know you work at least in those 2 directions.

Winning on the battlefield is more about cover and concealment, and it would be nearly impossible to write a strong AI in which the game was able to choose appropriate cover positions for your soldiers on its own (games that have tried to do this -- the Ghost Recon or COD series, for instance -- often end up giving your NPC allies special survivability conditions to overcome their poor tactical positioning). As a player of several of these games, I can tell you that AAA studios have not yet come up with an AI smart enough not to expose itself in very stupid ways.

I don't know. I played Ghost Recon myself and I perfectly agree with you. The multiplayer mode was the only interesting option, and you should play in LAN.
But for you dont misunederstand me, I was not looking for a feature pretending to be used in combat. Unless you are sure you will dominate the aliens.

I appreciate that your proposal is more about moving lots of soldiers more easily when there is no risk to them (no aliens around, let me just get these guys across the battlefield). In this case, I would prefer to either fix the problem from the other end (like making sure maps don't have large useless areas) or implementing some kind of multi-turn command (like "go to this point as fast as possible, with automatic moving on subsequent turns until it reaches its destination").

That's it !
A comfort feature indeed And an unuseful option if the maps are tuned to be of a "fast action" type in the future.