Messages

1

Bugs in development version (2.6-dev) / Re: Language editing (English)

« on: February 11, 2021, 10:48:01 pm »

But the verb would be missing then ? That should be
"Research prerequisites of %s are not met at %s. Research halted!"
I believe.
The verb 'do' is o.k. in English sentences as opposed to e.g. German. I'm not a native speaker though.

2

Design / Re: Proposal: deep in the water

« on: February 11, 2021, 10:32:50 pm »

No.
You need to project the flight route of UFOs and plan where to shoot them down accordingly. Sometimes it's just not possible though and better to sink it before it enters a large area without radar cover.

3

Design / Re: Aliens replicate first round of fight

« on: February 11, 2021, 10:26:51 pm »

Assuming "retaliate", not "replicate".
Actually, you have a strong advantage: You get to act first!
You need to use one of
-Shoot them into the back while the shooting soldier is out of field of view of any other alien.
-Disable reaction fire with flashbangs.
-Fire from within smoke.
-Fire through a wall.

4

Bugs in development version (2.6-dev) / Re: Happiness calculation must have changed in the player's favor at some point

« on: September 22, 2020, 04:22:29 pm »

Well, it is the result of commit
8679ae58a7e12f0fbf18e3776a090373c98b5a20 (2018-02-15)
The changes were originally motivated by a bug reported by me (bug 5543).

Now my problem is: No matter how many civilians died, as long as the mission is won, performanceAlien is high enough to get a happiness gain anyway because of this victoryBonusPerAlien = 0.1. While this is not really a bug, it makes the campaign a lot easier. In particular, there is no need to actively try to save civilians in difficult missions, it's enough to wait in smoke, scout every turn and kill if some alien shows up. This generally will kill most or all civilians, but it doesn't matter much anymore, see above.
I think performanceAlien should be normalized similar to performanceCivilian, which can never be lower than -0.5 even if they're all dead, so that it is insufficient to only win the mission.

5

Bugs in development version (2.6-dev) / Happiness calculation must have changed in the player's favor at some point

« on: September 13, 2020, 10:34:35 pm »

I just won some mission with 1 out of 8 civilians surviving. I remember that such an outcome used to reduce nation happiness. It was 3/8 that was needed for avoiding happiness loss. The game got a good deal easier here it seems. It may be an in intended change of course. Perhaps it's also important that it was a crashed UFO mission, as they work differently (e.g. they don't reduce happiness at midnight). (Perhaps my memory stems from non-crashed UFO missions ?)
As a result, I managed to reach maximum happiness late July already. I recall that this is some months earlier than it used to be.

6

Tactics / Re: Survival problem using smoke - enemy attack without spotting.

« on: September 13, 2020, 10:21:32 pm »

Aliens can shoot at a soldier by chance if they attempt to hit a civilian or soldier outside of smoke and that soldier happens to be in line of fire. It never occurred to me that aliens are able to attack soldiers inside of smoke, they need a line of vision to be able to attack. It only may happen if they move right besides the target (typically using a plasma blade), or the target is (seems to be) behind smoke, rather than in it.

I also use latest master btw.

7

Tactics / Re: Survival problem using smoke - enemy attack without spotting.

« on: September 12, 2020, 12:34:18 am »

To be honest, I have problems imagining the depicted situations. Perhaps some (or a lot of small) screenshots could help.
Aliens try to hide behind corners and such when they fire on you, in an attempt to disable your reaction fire, and also move behind cover after their shot. Perhaps that's what you experience ?

On very hard, you generally can't use reaction fire, basically. Because even if you hit, the attacker still doesn't die from it, which very likely means your soldier is dead. This is because the damage (both inflicted and received) is vastly scaled in favour of the aliens. So, one loss, but still no kill. Not good enough, you'll lose.
I always put valuable soldiers right into smoke no matter how they cry about it. Generally, the mission is over before the stun damage comes into affect. The only really useful reaction fire situation is a plasma blaster, as its ball generally insta-kills a sheevar that comes running. But only cannon fodder soldiers can take on this risk.

8

Coding / Re: Using cmake to setup build env

« on: August 28, 2020, 08:21:29 pm »

That probably means that in debug mode, we should define some flag that we don't

Yes, I found it. We should add_definitions(-DDEBUG). I've submitted a patch:
https://ufoai.org/bugs/ufoalieninvasion/issues/5748

9

Linux / Re: Fedora29 Compile problem

« on: September 14, 2019, 12:58:16 pm »

The second problem likely is the result of the missing headers.

Yes, the UFO:AI source contains lots of 'embedded' libs and uses them for building. Did you get the complete source ? See https://ufoai.org/wiki/Getting_the_source

10

Discussion / Re: setting up a target, green or red

« on: May 22, 2017, 10:51:30 am »

The thickness of an obstacle tells nothing about being able to shoot through. I can shoot through hills or meters of solid rock. Other seemingly thin walls with a target right behind can be hit by coilgun or antimatter ammunition to no avail.
Red lines can still cause a hit. Especially with weapons with several or many shots such as the needler some of the shots will go through if there is not a solid obstacle but bars or something with holes like a fence.
So, to summarize, both the chance for friendly fire as well as the chance to hit can only really be told by the mind and experience of the player.

11

Discussion / Avoiding the need for battlescape saves

« on: May 04, 2017, 08:26:30 pm »

I'd like to point out that on my system at least, it works to put the computer into suspend mode. On the next evening I can continue the tactical mission and end it correctly by defeating all aliens. There is some strange behavior or bug related to music and sound, both are unusable after resuming from suspend until I restart UFO:AI. This is a problem as sounds are important for a few things such as knowing whether an alien is hit.
So, if there is only an hour or two of playing time this method can be used to "save" during a battle and to turn off the computer. The machine is a desktop btw, and OS is Lubuntu 16. Probably depends on the board and/or BIOS too. The other method (running UFO:AI in virtual box) didn't work for me, IIRC the guest system crashed after restarting the saved guest system, with an UFO:AI mission running.

12

Tactics / Re: Cannon fodder

« on: April 23, 2017, 11:46:39 am »

Problem is, the stronger you already are, the slower you become even stronger than that. I have a soldier with strength 57 at 25 missions. The lower mission count is because of strength training. A soldier gets more if he were burdened on average over the course of a mission, but I surely limit this to certain safe missions, or the end of missions, when the situation is safe enough. Not like start every mission fully packed with grenade launcher ammo. That is most strength gain then, but I can't do much with such a soldier.

13

Tactics / Re: Ninja playstyle possible?

« on: April 23, 2017, 11:26:02 am »

Thanks.
Out of trained soldiers, yes. I always put expendable cannon fodder into the front line whenever possible, so these are the ones that die, if anything, After the kill the enemy position is known so the alien is dead. Or, more often than not, the cannon fodder soldier spots the enemy before he is killed, then a trained soldier moves into killing range, and the expendable soldier survives. For this time at least.

14

Tactics / Re: Cannon fodder

« on: March 11, 2017, 09:57:23 pm »

Can you train soldiers to strengths way over 60 ?

I do explicit training only in really safe situations. For instance, if there was a crashed fighter, 5 aliens killed and one flashbanged, then everyone picks up as much as possible, and killing the alien is delayed for as long as possible.

15

Tactics / Re: Cannon fodder

« on: March 01, 2017, 07:21:49 pm »

I'd like you to try 2.6, with its insane damage scaling, and suffocation forcing you to leave the smoke.