Messages

1

Discussion / Re: Shotgun in 2.6 dev

« on: November 11, 2015, 07:56:31 pm »

My experience with the shotgun is based on 2.5, but I found it useful for more than just reaction fire.  Yes, at the extreme of its range it's not terribly accurate, but it is quite damaging.  Much more so than the assault rifle.

Remember also, the shotgun slugs aren't super accurate at range, but they are still highly damaging. 

The grenade launcher is really good, no question about that.

Where the shotgun especially shines is in houses, alien ships, and other confined areas.  Out in the open, like you said, the grenade launcher is better.  But it's almost impossible to shoot the grenade launcher inside a house or alien ship due to the ceilings blocking the shot's arc.

And, the shotgun is absolutely fantastic for RF in situations where you're covering a door, or any situation where the alien has to get right in your face.  Nothing can sneak in under its 8 tu shot, even a plasma pistol needs 2 tu to move into sight, then 6 tu to fire, so you'll typically kill them before they get a chance to fire.

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Discussion / Re: Do you want a save&quit option from the battlescape?

« on: November 03, 2015, 09:33:26 pm »

If you give the players a save/load option, that they can use at will, you can guarantee at least some will use it to painstakingly replay turns for the best outcome.  Not only that, since it's offered by the game, it's a legitimate way to play.  Not only that, but because it's legitimate, and provides the best possible outcome, it's the optimal way to play this game.  This is a problem!
This results in players having to choose between trying their best to win, but not having much fun, as it's a tedious exercise, or choosing to purposely handicap themselves, in an effort to avoid the tedium.  Generally this takes some of the fun out of the game too, because you know you're holding yourself back from really trying your best to win.

Nowhere in there do we have to consider the player using a memory editing program to give his soldiers infinite health, it's only about what the game itself communicates to the player.  If someone wants to take extraordinary measures outside the game to ruin their own fun (or for that matter, if they actually have fun cheating) then oh well, they certainly can't come to this board and complain that the game isn't any fun to play with infinite health!

So, if you give the players a save&quit option, and automatically restore this save on the next play session, you no longer have to consider the player who saves & loads each and every turn for the perfect outcome, because the game doesn't offer this option.  It doesn't matter if it's really easy to cheat such a system, as long as the game itself doesn't give you the option to do so.  That's really as far as you should go to "protect the player from himself".

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Discussion / Re: Do you want a save&quit option from the battlescape?

« on: November 03, 2015, 06:15:21 pm »

Yeah, trying to prevent cheating in a single player game is just lying to yourself.  Not making it super easy is the most a dev should really do, if the player is determined to cheat, you can't stop him, and it's a real waste of your effort to try.  Basically, if something is cheating, the most you can do is make it clear in the game that it's cheating, then it's up to the players themselves to play by the rules.

If someone really wants to savescum turn by turn in the battlescape, it's already possible via VM.

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Discussion / Re: Do you want a save&quit option from the battlescape?

« on: November 02, 2015, 08:57:23 pm »

Pete, the idea isn't about making the battlescape any easier, or even any faster.  It's about the fact that sometimes real life demands our attention, and it would be nice to be able to come back to a battle in progress, rather than having to start all over again, or play in a sub-optimal way, losing good soldiers, just to keep the mission time reasonable.

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Discussion / Re: Do you want a save&quit option from the battlescape?

« on: November 02, 2015, 04:45:39 pm »

Yeah, in the thread where I brought this up originally, Geever brought up an important point, if this were to get submitted as a patch and accepted, the dev team would then need to keep it maintained whenever the battlescape variables change.  So due to that, any battlescape saving code would have to be a seperate fork, meaning it would be lost when the next version comes out.

Of course, since it seems to take a while between releases, the code would last for a while before it was obsolete. 

I am probably underestimating the work involved here, but wouldn't a battlescape save, at its most barebones level, just need to be able to dump all the battlescape information from memory into a file, and then on load, dump the contents of that file back into memory?  I guess I'm wondering if this battlefield info is all sitting in a structure, or if it's more scattered than that.

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Discussion / Re: New user, with a suggestion you've heard 100 times, and some feedback

« on: October 30, 2015, 04:42:22 pm »

That's really cool, objectives really help tighten the tactical situation, and create a lot more tension by forcing conflict over a specific part of the map.  Suddenly I can't take 100 turns to move 10 steps, throwing smoke grenades the whole way(Not that I actually do this, but it would be more optimal than how I really play).  Patient tactics are boring, rushing tactics are much more fun!

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Discussion / Re: New user, with a suggestion you've heard 100 times, and some feedback

« on: October 30, 2015, 03:06:57 pm »

I experience occasional battlescape crashes when ending my turn sometimes, where it just crashes right back to the world map, and it's like the mission never happened, the firebird is at the ufo site, idling, with all the soldiers, even the ones who were killed in the mission that crashed.  If there was a save for the turn before this happened, it's be a lot easier to reproduce. 

Obviously, battlescape saves don't solve all the problems, nor does it make the battlescape situation any more fun (Not that I don't think it is fun now, but it could be even more fun). 

What I've noticed are the most fun maps are the ones that are largely open, with a buildings here and there.  What seems to happen is the aliens can all move toward you each turn, but due to the landscape, they end up coming from different angles and at different times, although they do end up covering each other quite a bit. 

The extremely open maps, like the farm one, aren't bad, but the openness tends to remove some of the tactical play, meaning you're mostly just shooting at each other from long distances.  Smoke grenades keep these maps from being truly unfair, but adding a barn or some small buildings would probably make these maps a bit more fun.

The least fun maps tend to be very large, with complex hallways, like the military base mission, where the aliens mostly just get stuck in various rooms, and you have to tediously hunt them down in this giant complex.  It's hard to keep patient through 20-30 turns with no action.

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Design / Re: Scientists/workers skills, and a way to impact research/production times

« on: October 29, 2015, 11:48:54 pm »

If the goal is simply to prevent hiring/firing at the end of the month, just pay the full month's salary when you fire a worker or scientist. 

If you want to get clever, you could prorate the salary based on how much of the month they worked, but it doesn't seem necessary.

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Discussion / Re: New user, with a suggestion you've heard 100 times, and some feedback

« on: October 29, 2015, 03:22:13 pm »

Yes, more consistent map size and better alien AI would help with long mission times, but still, battlescape saves are always going to be a helpful thing, you never know when you'll be interrupted to deal with real life, or maybe you have 20-30 mins to play sometimes, but can't commit to a full battle. 

I know this is a big task, but it would be nice if the game didn't select big maps, like the military base, or the military bunker, when there's only 3-4 aliens to fight.  They're easy scenarios, but it's not a fight to overcome the aliens, it's a fight to continue playing safely for 2 hours instead of just having my guys run around like idiots so I can just finish the mission already.  I have lost quite a few soldiers that way, and it's unfortunate that the most optimal way to play is so tedious on those sparsely populated maps.

Still, from what I understand the AI is much better than it was in 2.4, so obviously you guys are making improvements. 

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Discussion / Do you want a save&quit option from the battlescape?

« on: October 28, 2015, 10:05:57 pm »

After my previous feedback thread, it seems that the dev team is willing to accept patches for a save&quit option from the battlescape.  Essentially, a player should be able to do a battlescape scenario over several playthroughs, but should not be able to easily savescum.  So the only option should be "Save & Quit".  This would need to save the current battlescape situation, write into the campaign save that a battlescape save exists, then exit the program.

The next time this campaign save is loaded, it needs to load the battlescape save, then delete it.  Think of a roguelike here, where you can save and quit, but once you reload, the save is deleted, thus preventing the player from reloading that save again to get a better result.

So, firstly, is there a great desire in the player base for a feature like this? I personally have trouble fitting a long battlescape scenario into the time I have to play games, so it would be great for me.  But I also can't code it!

So I figured it makes sense to see if the community is interested in something like this, and then maybe we can nail down how it should be implemented.  Finally, maybe we can actually create a patch to submit to the dev team to bring this feature into the game.  I think it would open the game to more people who can't devote long chunks of time, but still want to play the game.

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Discussion / Re: New user, with a suggestion you've heard 100 times, and some feedback

« on: October 28, 2015, 09:57:53 pm »

Oh, that's interesting.  I saw a post by Geever that pretty much said no, we don't want battlescape saving.  Perhaps that was just an old post or something.

Ok then, so it's resource scarcity thing rather than a design philosophy thing.  That's a big improvement in my mind!  The community can provide resources, but they can't go against the design philosophy.

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Discussion / Re: New user, with a suggestion you've heard 100 times, and some feedback

« on: October 28, 2015, 07:27:51 pm »

I get you, screenshots and specific examples would obviously be more helpful than general complaints. Fair enough.

Back to the subject of battlescape saves, I know it's contentious, and I'm not trying to pick fights, just present the reality that I (and I assume lots of other people) don't necessarily have big contiguous blocks of time to devote to a game, but nevertheless, we enjoy games that take more than 10 minutes to play.  So a roguelike system of saving seems to address the primary concern of creating a new tedious but optimal way to play, while also addressing the concern that not everyone can spend 3 hours on a big battle.

I'm aware there are ways to cheat that, but as it's a single player game, there's no getting around that, and who cares if someone cheats on their own anyway? By keeping that opportunity out of the game's interface, at least the game itself doesn't encourage it, which is the most you should really try to do anyway.  In nethack I can back up my character if I really want to, but there's no button in the game to do so, so most people don't.  And nobody can complain to the nethack devs that it's boring to keep reloading their save and trying a tough battle again, because they didn't offer that option in the first place.

I know implementing battlescape saving takes work, and that the dev team is plenty busy on other stuff, but I think if the team would just say "Patches welcome for battlescape save&quit function" it might encourage someone to do it, rather than the current dev line of "We don't want it and it would ruin the game because you'll play in a boring way".  In other words, I'm asking for a small change to the project philosophy, not a change to the game itself. I'm hoping the change in philosophy might allow someone else to take it upon themselves to actually do the work, knowing it'll get into the game, rather than being relegated to a "cheat mod".

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my comments.  And like I said, great work so far, this is a fun game even as is, which only makes me want to help in whatever small way I can to polish it and make it even better. 

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Discussion / New user, with a suggestion you've heard 100 times, and some feedback

« on: October 27, 2015, 05:37:28 pm »

Hi Guys,

I just tried this game (version 2.5 release) over this weekend, and it's a lot of fun.  Great job!

I have some feedback, it's a bit rambling but oh well:

1. Reaction Fire mechanics aren't very well explained in game.  There's already a battlescape tutorial, perhaps a little more explanation on how RF works, how to choose a fire mode, etc would help.  That picture on the forum with all the callouts to the various elements is really helpful, it'd be great if that could be integrated into the game.

2. UFO Types: I'm not great at remembering things just by a picture.  I know my interceptors can shoot down some ships, but they're too weak for others. Unfortunately, if I haven't captured a ship yet, the game doesn't tell me what type it is, so the only way I can figure out to differentiate them is their top speed, which I think isn't unique to any given UFO.  It'd be nice if the unknown UFO types had some kind of descriptor, even if it's just Large, medium, and small, so I can stop suiciding my interceptors on UFOs they can't possibly beat.

3. Maps & Cover: From reading here, I know it's a known problem, but I want to stress that some maps have just brutal layouts, where your troops are just standing out in the middle of a field with aliens around when you start the mission.  Some maps just don't seem to have enough cover available.  I know smoke grenades can help with that to a degree, but it would be nice if the maps were a bit more neutral, instead of favoring the aliens so much.

4. Battlescape Saving: I know, I know, it's a taboo, with good reasons, but hear me out.  If you read on this forum how people play the game, and how slowly you have to play sometimes to be safe, it's not unheard of for people to say some missions, when played well, take upwards of 3-5 hours.  Most people don't just have blocks of 3-5 hours to devote to a game, so their only choice is to either leave the program running, or to save it in a VM.  However, there are plenty of roguelike games that prevent save scumming, yet still realize their players might not be able to finish the entire game in a sitting.  That's why my proposal is that the battlescape should allow a "Save&Quit" function, and when you reload that save, the game would delete it.  This prevents savescumming, while still allowing someone with limited time to fully enjoy this game, just like how most roguelikes do it.

That's all I have.  I saved the best for last, really the ability to play out extended battlescape situations over multiple play sessions would be huge.  I haven't seen this exact proposal before, so I thought it was at least worth throwing out there.