UFO:Alien Invasion
Technical support => Feature Requests => Topic started by: slothlord on June 24, 2009, 09:57:12 pm
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Suggestion for more varied missions: enemy reinforcements/rescue.
As it is, there is an unlimited number of turns for a mission. Enemy reinforcements arriving after some time (say 20 turns) would add a little pressure to the mission. Alien commanders could get rescued before they get captured, making capture missions more difficult. This could also add another layer to strategy. Waiting for alien reinforcements and try to ambush them in order to gain more alien tech or capture a ship (the reinforcements dont simply just appear from nowhere). Of course this is pretty damn risky, but would be very cool.
It's logical as well, i mean, you would send troops to rescue a valuable commander or team that crashed right?
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There are no alien commanders.
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Considering they have a "hive mind", a commander makes no sense and no induviduals would be worth putting in risk another ship to rescue them (specially considering some aliens would be already dead from the crash).
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I remember several X-Com crashed ufo missions where all the aliens died in the crash. In UFO: Alien Invasion, this never seems to happen..
Also, in this game, the aliens always seem placed in the same positions for crashed ufos. Always 1 standing just down the ramp that dies first round, and the rest inside the ufo. I guess that can make sense from a hive mind perspective too, but, uh...
Are the aliens in a crashed ufo coded at a certain number always, or are they somewhat random?
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I guess that's already accounted for since I think you get less aliens in a crashed craft than in a landed one. Just imagine they got vaporized :)
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they may be wounded after a crash - but not dead.
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Does the game differentiate between forced to land and crashed? This could mean the difference between more aliens to kill, and shorter time the mission is available on the Geoscape, and fewer aliens and a longer availability time.
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There's landed and there's crashed. There aren't any forced landings.
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I think all the aliens would be manning 'attempting to turn humans into swiss cheese/ash/coolwhip' duty instead of attemting to call reinforcments, asking thier commanders to waste time on expendable aliens.
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There are no alien commanders.
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lol sorry, in my eyes all millitary has such a command structure(but aliens are, well, aliens)
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they may be wounded after a crash - but not dead.
Mattn,
Is this true?? Cos i see most of em fighting fit and almost takes forever to kill in later missions.
There is a coding for 'crashed UFO" missions whereby they can be hurt?
lol sorry, in my eyes all millitary has such a command structure(but aliens are, well, aliens)
Megakiller,
Perhaps u did not really understood "HIVE" mind.
This meant its collective existence..... Do u watch Star Trek? (Yupz, i am a Trekkie).
This is somewhat like the Borg. One person controlling EVERYONE and EVERYTHING w/n the collective.
Means, kill this one and all dies.
Remember Starship Trooper the lame show? This is the fat blog at the end...... our mission in UFOAI - probably to kill this one..... Else, they just keep coming.
Am i making logic? Am i representing the UFOAI concept correctly?
Stands to be corrected. :D
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Actually, you kill all of them by killing all of them.
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Megakiller,
Perhaps u did not really understood "HIVE" mind.
This meant its collective existence..... Do u watch Star Trek? (Yupz, i am a Trekkie).
This is somewhat like the Borg. One person controlling EVERYONE and EVERYTHING w/n the collective.
Means, kill this one and all dies.
Remember Starship Trooper the lame show? This is the fat blog at the end...... our mission in UFOAI - probably to kill this one..... Else, they just keep coming.
Am i making logic? Am i representing the UFOAI concept correctly?
Stands to be corrected. :D
You are correct except that's no "Master" to be killed. Since what is in control is the infection, u would have to wipe out the infection somehow from ALL hosts to kill the "Hive Mind" (yeah, maybe killing them all is easier).
they may be wounded after a crash - but not dead.
Mattn,
Is this true?? Cos i see most of em fighting fit and almost takes forever to kill in later missions.
There is a coding for 'crashed UFO" missions whereby they can be hurt?
Yeah, it would add a nice realistic effect if crashed UFOs spawned wounded aliens and maybe spawn some dead bodies (that would be added to killed ones on the end of the mission for Alien Containment storage pourpouses).
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I would like a small posobility for all the aliens to die in crashes(early on they kill my men in one shot)
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right, sorry about the alien commander, i forgot about the hive mind. this does bring up something else. i remember when researching the captured aliens and the hive mind, it said something about how the aliens seemed to get more intelligent/coordinated when grouped together. doesn't that imply that killing aliens during a mission would make the surviving aliens less efficient?
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right, sorry about the alien commander, i forgot about the hive mind. this does bring up something else. i remember when researching the captured aliens and the hive mind, it said something about how the aliens seemed to get more intelligent/coordinated when grouped together. doesn't that imply that killing aliens during a mission would make the surviving aliens less efficient?
U got a point. Maybe killing the alliens should cause greater morale loss on the other ones. Panic would be a nice simulation of dumbness and team discordination.
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right, sorry about the alien commander, i forgot about the hive mind. this does bring up something else. i remember when researching the captured aliens and the hive mind, it said something about how the aliens seemed to get more intelligent/coordinated when grouped together. doesn't that imply that killing aliens during a mission would make the surviving aliens less efficient?
Ooooooo.oooo.... that sure is interesting.... so they get dumber and start shooting their own soon? lol.
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There are no alien commanders.
hm......... a hive has normally different "units" that are from different importance. also it could be possible that the most important for the aliens hive isnt the aliens on the ship... maybe the aliens get help in a mission because of usefull items on a big ship. maybe not everything the aliens use is as easy to find again and rework on earth.
maybe the hive just decides to help the wounded aliens to use it as a chance to beat that annoying dropship of the earths defence..... who knows. i just want to say, that i like the idea and i cant see why its that unlogical.
[the borgs get back to get the deads bodys to use the rest of them again and to not give the enemy useful informations or technologies.]
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right, sorry about the alien commander, i forgot about the hive mind. this does bring up something else. i remember when researching the captured aliens and the hive mind, it said something about how the aliens seemed to get more intelligent/coordinated when grouped together. doesn't that imply that killing aliens during a mission would make the surviving aliens less efficient?
possbily aliens and PHLANAX will loose moral in great quantities if alot of thier allies die, and may loose efficentcy(possibly even surrendering) if it gets too low, because now I never had a soldier under 80 moral.
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Here is one proposal, which is not really "reinforcements" but ...
what if an alien ship crashes, and 2 aliens move away to scout the area?
then the player team attacks the ship, and the two aliens rush back to help their alien-friends out?
Not sure if that would be worth any effort but here a few ideas why this could be fun:
- Aliens could suddenly appear at the end of a map, an area the player thought he cleared it already
- Aliens that are part of such a small scout team could actually survive that onslaught, and decide that they
will terrorize a nearby village or something, so the player needs to get them down before they go rampant
- Aliens that can escape this way could perhaps engage in another mission lateron to help out other
aliens
Not sure if that is worth any effort though, but i thought it is fun to just write that down
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Here is one proposal, which is not really "reinforcements" but ...
what if an alien ship crashes, and 2 aliens move away to scout the area?
then the player team attacks the ship, and the two aliens rush back to help their alien-friends out?
Not sure if that would be worth any effort but here a few ideas why this could be fun:
- Aliens could suddenly appear at the end of a map, an area the player thought he cleared it already
- Aliens that are part of such a small scout team could actually survive that onslaught, and decide that they
will terrorize a nearby village or something, so the player needs to get them down before they go rampant
- Aliens that can escape this way could perhaps engage in another mission lateron to help out other
aliens
Not sure if that is worth any effort though, but i thought it is fun to just write that down
Well well.... not too sure if that is one intention of the dev team..... but i should think that all aliens spawnable SHOULD be in the map at the beginning, though maybe not in the ship but like XCOM original, already inside buildings (like that of the behaviour in 2.2.1). :D
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lol sorry, in my eyes all millitary has such a command structure(but aliens are, well, aliens)
Even a hive has some organization within itselfe. If this hive would only have 1 mastermind and only "workers" it has to control it's workers from a great distance and would somehow be omnipresent making it very deadly. Interrogation of a worker would be somehow useless because i would assume the hive mind would know of just the attempt and kill the worker.
If you take the borg as mentioned here they have more than 1 queen because a queens controll is not unlimited. If a queen dies all the drones under her controll die too but not all the borg that exist.
Like bee's even a hive has normally some kind of rank ;)
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Except this hivemind doesn't have any kind of leader. If I understand it correctly it is more like several computers in parallel sharing each others computing capacity and making a hivemind-like system. Granted some of them are likely to be specialised but that is basic military tactics and it will simply use it for something else. This also has the effect that everybody is equal from an intelligence perspective (at least if every alien has equally good brain) and thus is not really disposable unlike normal hive workers since if a member dies, the hivemind will be dumber by its degree and so they will not generally be suicidal.
Though if the specific member/hivemind knew something important (I understood that they can only make a hivemind with infected that are close to them, am I right with this?) the other minds could theoretically try to get it back and ie. try to rescue the hivemind. However only flying close to it and intergrating it for a mere moment to transfer all information is a "rescue" of all info and normally saving the other infected is not worth the risk if there are already PHALANX troops in the area.