Topics

1

Discussion / Suspension of belief

« on: September 07, 2012, 12:59:03 pm »

Hello.

In all sci-fi there is a element of "suspension of disbelief", IE things that break the feeling, logical or item or something. Like watching Armageddon, pretty much everything was wrong in it.

So: Lets discuss about what breaks suspension of belief in UFO-AI. No long explanations, just list of things what makes things look "wrong" somehow. Devs: don't take this as blame, just what could be made better. Love the game.

I'll start:
- All beginning human techs are basically 1960-era techs. Some modernization of basic combat equipment is in order
- Aircraft designs, while nice, looks more like slow helicopter than fast jets.
- Aliens (at least in 2.4) seems to prefer killing civilians over your team.

Anything else?

2

Bugs in older version (2.4) / chars had no health

« on: August 13, 2012, 08:40:02 am »

Odd bug, can't reproduce, but figured I should inform about it anyway (if this is old I couldn't find it with search)

I got a mission about crashed fighter and pressed "auto" to get back in more interesting things. To my surprise all of my chars died, and there was "try again" button. Pressed it got in normal mission (not auto) and noticed that only two of my eight chars had weapons and armor, others had only what was in their backpack or in belt, and every single one had zero health. I think I actually got message about civilian getting killed when one of my chars died.

Every retry produced same situation, so I finally load a lot earlier game.

Only thing that was different than all the previous missions was that I had put some weapons, soldiers and other stuff in transit to other base when I got this mission, perhaps managed to transport some of the soldiers that were assigned to dropship (stuff didn't include lasers or armors, and most of my chars in dropship should have had lasers and all of them should have had armor).

2.4 final release in XP SP3, some old ATI Radeon that I can't even remember which type.

If I get this again I'll copy the savefile and attach it here.

3

Feature Requests / save and quit

« on: August 01, 2012, 09:49:57 am »

Just to confirm, I did read that saving while combat is not allowed because that has been decided. period.

However, I would like to propose "save and quit" save slot with "continue current game" button when you come back to game, which saves game and quits at any point of game.

I just got a base under attack - mission and it took me about ten times more time to find and eliminate all the aliens than usual ufo battle, and it started to get way too time consuming. I just walked around in my base for nearly a hour before I found the last few aliens. I didn't have much time so I considered to just plain quit and load situation 24 hours (game time) earlier. This is a issue which just plain has to be fixed, if not immediately then some point in future. Game with unplayable missions because real life limitations is broken IMO. If someone abuses that by making backups of that savegame I say let them do that. It's cheating, but you can also cheat by modding the game so that your characters are basically invulnerable easily enough anyway.

Other way to fix that is to ensure that there is no such long lasting missions. In my above case my soldiers spawned almost as far as it was possible from the enter points of the base and they had no idea where the aliens were. Some sort of motion detection system to alert where aliens have been detected has to be implemented. Maybe add entity "motion detector" which works as "civilian" target for aliens in corridors. When alien attacks that you might then lose the knowledge of the alien activity in that area, but you know that there has been alien in there. Haven't played game long enough to know if there are other such missions (like alien base missions in x-com), but if there is and speeding up them becomes too hard this "save and quit" becomes necessity.

If it is technically difficult, then just put it on to-do -list until someone has time to implement it. Because game is in "work in progress" -stage it doesn't matter much if that is not done this instant, but it needs to be done.

4

Feature Requests / Air combat alternative

« on: July 31, 2012, 01:25:06 pm »

Feature I miss in ufo-ai from some other ufo game is capability to track alien craft with a fighter without engaging in battle. Send a solo fighter to track big-ass ufo you can't shoot down, and if that ufo lands, then send a dropship. If the ufo decides to engage you, s*it happens, but it could be risk worth taking.

5

Feature Requests / Soldier status under soldier number

« on: July 31, 2012, 11:19:09 am »

Hello.

This is my first post so I apologize if this has been already suggested.

I would like to add indicators under soldier numbers that show following:

Soldier is wounded (health bar like with the airplanes over the number?)
Soldier has moved  (turn number blue to green to yellow or something if moved based on how many moves left? Or do this for wounds and show movement with bar?)
Soldier sees alien (tiny dot under the number?)

Especially the last one would be helpful, it would streamline the gameplay quite a bit. Currently you need to roll the landscape every which way to figure out which of your soldiers actually see aliens indicated in the alien count. (maybe also stop soldier movement if known alien comes to sight like when you first spot one).

If the wound system at someday adds bleeding wounds so that soldier might die unless healed, status of the soldier would be very important and knowing this by single glance of the screen would speed up gameplay quite a bit.

Currently with eight soldiers you need to check every soldier in case you have forgotten to move one. It's actually quite hard to remember to move each one especially if there is some disturbance during gameplay (phone rings or something).