Messages

1

Design / Re: intro

« on: January 13, 2011, 01:50:51 am »

I liked it actually. It set the mood quite well and gave a good description of what had transpired on the planet to prompt the creation of PHALANX. Granted, I like reading stuff, so I'm more excited to read the UFOpedia entries after researching stuff than actually playing with the new toys I unlocked.

2

Feature Requests / Re: Suqqestion of a new feature!

« on: January 10, 2011, 02:58:33 pm »

Though the idea has merit, I'm not entirely comfortable with the long term implications of it. As we know them, the aliens are the enemy. They are horrible evil things that you dedicate your entire time to utterly destroying. If there was a way to somehow turn them around and make friends with them, chances are it would turn the focus of the war. Suddenly humans would not have fight for their lives but instead peace would be in grasp. You'd probably get all sorts of new age movements and organizations that claim that 'Aliens are people too' and you'd lose funding from democratic nations that suddenly decide the war is unethical because the poor aliens are just 'sick.'

Aside from that it's also like a wolf hunter using a wolf to hunt other wolves, or a Dragon-slayer riding a dragon into battle, or a communist fighting alongside a capitalist. Sure, it happens but it's a still a bit...

I feel UFO: Alien Invasion goes to great lengths to maintain some semblance of stylized realism in its interpretation of the setting. You can for instance see indications of this in the detail of the various UFOpedia entries. They appear to follow this sort of approach: "If aliens were to come to earth", "If this technology existed", "if this random thing was possible" - then this would be the outcome! I think suddenly recruiting aliens would betray that approach to realism, because in the event that it was a possibility it would theoretically change the game's objectives radically.

3

Feature Requests / Re: more strategy in 2.4

« on: January 10, 2011, 02:24:21 pm »

I do agree that the recruitment of Scientists, Workers and Pilots becomes a somewhat redundant feature unless there is an actual strategic element to recruiting them. As it stands I don't think there is. I have run into significant shortages of scientists that impede my work on staffing multiple laboratories, but other than simply restricting the speed of your research development I don't believe the requirement to hire these scientists actually add anything - which is unfortunate indeed. However for there to be an actual strategic element to their recruitment there would have to be multiple variables that makes their statistics vary from each other's. Due to the way research works, I'm not sure there's actually much room for such variation but I have a few of suggestions for such statistics nonetheless.

Scientist

Teamwork : Determines how good the scientist is at working with a group. At low levels it makes scientists less suitable for placement on projects with large quantities of scientists and labs involved, but at high levels they are more capable.

Patience : Determines how well the scientist can remain focused and interested when a project is lengthy to complete. This would require a penalty to overall efficiency on long projects that could then be adjusted or even eliminated by scientists' Patience.

Brilliance* : Determines the scientist's general contribution to research, and his capacity for hatching ideas. This makes him quite simply more efficient in any circumstance.

Administration : Determines how well the scientist can plan and lead. Only the highest Administrative statistic of involved scientists would be used, signifying the scientist as the project leader, and it would be used to reduce the inefficiency associated with complicated projects and projects that span multiple labs.

Physics : Determines how well the scientist grasps physics. It improves efficiency in weapon's and vehicle research as well as facilities.

Biology : Determines how well the scientist grasps Biology. It improves efficiency in Autopsies and helps in the studies of alien lifeforms.

Philosophy : Determines the speed of which the scientist that grasp the unknown. It improves efficiency in researching alien technology.


That's the only ones I could think of, but through these statistics you would get an element of strategy introduced to the allocation of scientists. For instance you may have hired a number of scientists that are incredibly poor at teamwork, so rather than pooling their efforts into a single project you split them over multiple projects, making individual research slower but with less loss of overall efficiency. Alternatively you might pool them together to attempt to rush an important technology, but lose some overall efficiency in the action. Do you put a highly capable Physicist to work with alien autopsies simply because his also high Administrative capabilities improves the otherwise poor teamwork of the working Biologists? Do you hire your scientists for the specific job at hand and then kick them out, or do you make your best of the scattered abilities of the scientists at your disposal? Though Brilliance remains key in what would make a scientist good, what sort of projects they are best used for would be determined by other statistics. I believe the above range of statistics could potentially be enough to add a layer of strategy to the hiring and allocation of scientists, and the statistics could with a bit of alteration probably be applied to the Workers in charge of manufacturing as well.

Pilots on the other hand would require an entirely different set of statistics.

* I picked Brilliance rather than Intelligence because intelligence would suggest that the Scientist would be more or less 'intelligent' which isn't the case at all. All scientists hired by Phalanx are presumably highly intelligent but are still more or less 'brilliant'.