Topics

1

Discussion / Aliens can freak out too

« on: June 02, 2012, 08:48:47 am »

Something pretty interesting just happened.

Remember how in UFO sometimes the aliens flipped out when their morale dropped too low, and they either dropped their weapons in panic or else gunned down team-mates after going berserk?

As far as I've sen the aliens in UFO AI go "berserk" by running forwards all guns blazing. Once in a very long time they've dropped their weapons, or charged out and not fired. I've never seen them "panic" (which was a nice touch in UFO)

Today during a harvesting mission I found most of the aliens up in the command center of the harvester. After dispatching a clump of 4 outside (they were standing together, so a heavy needler and rocket launcher took the whole cluster out) I tried breaking the glass of the cockpit and lobbing plasma grenades in using my GL.

To my surprise I managed (after 8 grenades) to kill 4 of them in 1 shot... and the last one freaked out and ran through his ship gunning down all his friends!

In the end he ran out into my waiting team and got killed by reaction fire, and when we combed the ship there was 1 last alien cowering in the stairwell and a trail of dead bodies. :\

Was this an AI glitch, or do aliens really crack like this?

2

Offtopic / let's play... xenonauts?

« on: May 28, 2012, 07:13:31 am »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mjRjHaeMAE&feature=relmfu

3

Discussion / attributes for other personnel types?

« on: May 21, 2012, 10:50:24 pm »

Just a thought, that spawned off from something previously...

I previously thought that it might be interesting if our R&D staff (scientists, engineers) had profession-specific attributes (eg the scientists have points for... perhaps innovation, scientific method, etcetc) that influence how rapidly we are able to make new scientific discoveries / come up with new ideas spawned from scientific discoveries, understand alien tech etc etc; engineers could have a similar set) as well as combat attributes (for base invasions)... perhaps we could send scientists for combat training as well (if the player wished to)

so I got to thinking the same might apply for hospital staff as well - doctors, nurses etc. And these could in turn affect the speed wounded soldiers recover, or perhaps if a soldier flies in from combat with a critical injury, whether they live or die. And dang would it be fun to assault aliens with a squad of doctors and nurses

So in short when you're at the early game the quandry becomes - do I get a lot of low cost workers for lower quality, or put all my eggs into relatively few baskets, and go for the pros? This lets people map out their game more according to what kind of people they are.

Would this be too much micromanagement for most people? Or would it be interesting?

Also would it be impossible to include in the game, or is it a possibility?

4

Discussion / Promotions

« on: May 18, 2012, 06:43:36 pm »

Going back to the XCom games --

I seem to recall some characters promoting inordinately quickly.

It made me feel happy, and gave me a sense that it was keeping the troops a bit calmer as well (to have an admiral somewhere in the hierarchy).

In combat they seemed particularly stable (fewer panic moments), but if the admiral died then all hell broke loose (which was pretty realistic)

I also worked out that quotas for promotions were somehow linked to the overall number of troops, yet also to the relative ranks of personnel in each base.

Meaning that when my combat guys hit mid-level ranks I'd shuffle them out to other bases to become pen-pushers (they still had the benefit of training rooms) and they'd still slowly climb the higher level rungs, and my newbies would fill the vacated combat ranks and benefit from protective cover in combat from the experts - pretty much the way it would work in real life. The newbies then climbed the rungs rapidly because of increasing combat experience.

I enjoyed this aspect of micromanagement, and the sense of achievement I got from winding up with two admirals was... pretty nice

It also incentivized me to go beyond two bases (why not?) -- and by the endgame I had hit something like 5 or 6 active squads.

5

Discussion / Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/ufoai

« on: May 16, 2012, 09:45:14 am »

go there. click like. then tell your friends.
every click gets you absolutely nothing. and no money goes to paralyzed puppies or endangered lizards. But hopefully it sets something big in motion in the community...

6

Feature Requests / dawn / dusk

« on: May 14, 2012, 07:05:19 am »

Would it be a difficult to implement dawn / dusk maps?

I used to be a map maker for total annihilation, and one of the last things I tried was to create overlays for maps that were transparent yellow - giving everything a "low sunset" appearance. It was a pretty simple illusion to achieve. Would this be possible?

I reckon you guys with all your bells and whistles could probably do something more sophisticated to come up with dynamic lit maps that morph slowly from dusk to darkness or some such... only if it was worth the effort of course.

7

Mac / Radiant OSX fails for me

« on: May 12, 2012, 07:14:53 am »

I'd upload the image but there doesn't seem to be any image hosting on this board.

I get a Radiant Runtime Error with a lot of rectangles as the content of the error message.

8

Mac / 2.4 stable much more stable!

« on: May 03, 2012, 04:26:52 am »

on 2.4 dev, and 2.3.x I was encountering intermittent crashes to desktop.

Also I was not able to view the textures of the world, and it was pretty much just a night view for me, forever.

I am encountering far fewer crashes since the update, and I have night / day as well as actual countries and land masses appearing on my globe.

So a big thanks to the team.

I'm on a MBP 15" 2.4 Ghz Core I7 running Lion (the most recent edition)

9

Discussion / Storyline suggestion

« on: May 02, 2012, 07:19:18 am »

Hi,
i've played the game up to the alien base (and won it once with some effort) and I've got to say this is an amazing game, given that it's free. It actually recreates a lot of the old world "X-com" feel. You guys have put some fantastic effort into it, and 2.4 vs 2.3 really shows the lengths towards which you guys are going to make it look professional.
I have no doubt it won't be long before cutscenes start appearing.

I have one request though.

I understand that you have a backstory of sorts detailing the evolution through time of humanity -- as did X-com. But one thing I think Xcom could have done better, which you guys have the chance to do - is to develop the alien backstory as well, and give it all a context, as well as give the game a certain maturity. For instance, if we found out that the aliens are a collection of conquered species bound together by a master-race xxx years ago... then somewhere along the way in game enemy humans could start appearing... or perhaps good aliens.

Or perhaps a renegade political faction of a larger confederacy which arrives later in the game dramatically to either assist humanity, or conquer it...

Also it might be nicer if a storyline continued to unfold as we played the game - at the moment the storyline is entirely made up of tech tree updates. There aren't any News events to generate human interest. It just feels like chasing down goals. (which was very much what X com was about, and is more than enough to create a good game.)

As an example, Total Annihilation (for any of you old enough to remember) had a campaign which was always preceded by a story, such that you felt really drawn into the war for good / evil.