Messages

16

Discussion / Re: Rich selection of maps

« on: September 29, 2012, 04:57:26 pm »

Or in other words, if that fix will be part of 2.5, the maps that are currently rarely used will see more play 

If it is classified as a fix rather than a feature, it might still end up in a version 2.4.1.

17

Coding / Re: What features are still missing for UGVs?

« on: September 27, 2012, 05:40:53 pm »

I think if we create a UGV with better armor and excellent long-range accuracy, then nerf the human tech weapons, we'll just end up turning the UGV into a super-soldier, making other soldiers less relevant. This is the balancing problem I was asking about.

Sorry I wasn't very clear. What I mean is in general the rule is, you have to make the player's options less effective to make up for the AI's dumbness. So if you add a human heavy UGV "tank", then you have to give it 75% or the armor and 75% of the firepower it would have if the AI was competent or this was a multiplayer only game. Or give the aliens more powerful weapons, like an early game tank and anti-armor weapon of their own.

Then later on, when the AI becomes more smart and modern, using heat maps and such, you must rebalance the arsenal's stats more in favor of earth weaponry. But whatever you do, UGVs don't make any special difference, you just have to balance them up or down for the AI, like you would any infantry weapon or equipment.

Your ideas around the scout UGV are interesting -- particularly the remotely piloted bomb. We'd have to get the economics right on that one so it wasn't too easy to just buy 1 or 2 UGVs to blow up each mission. But it could be an interesting piece of equipment to deploy in special circumstances. The main difficulty will be figuring out how to keep it from rendering Close specialists obsolete.

Because it takes up an entire soldier slot, can only be used once and has no ranged ability whatsoever (versus CQC specialists who can carry a laser sidearm for example).

My main consideration when I consider "balancing" issues is: how do I add to the arsenal of options without making any existing options obsolete? Close specialists are a difficult breed to keep useful, because they necessarily run higher risks and have more narrow utility. The return on investment needs to be higher than, say, an explosives expert who can do alright in the open or indoors or even indirectly.

Well that's where a "breacher" UGV comes in. It goes on point during room clearing and takes the brunt of the alien ambush, possibly sacrificing it's nonliving self, and then the CQC specialist(s) follow immediately behind and do a lot of lower risk killing. That would help one big problem with using CQC specialists, that they don't survive well.

The other problems they have are not directly related to UGVs. Probably hand grenades and grenade launchers are too effective, and thus effectively replace CQC weapons. Or that CQC weapons cost too much TU and do too little damage to make up for such limited range. Or that there aren't any good long range side arms besides the laser pistol. Having UGVs can't help or hurt any of these potential imbalances.


In general terms UGVs are semi-expendable super-specialists. When they die you only lose money, not experience. And while they generally can have a better something than a human soldier can carry, they are also bound to it. A CQC or fire support guy can have a rifle, a sidearm, a knife, several hand grenades, and can pick up other weapons/ammo from fallen comrades and aliens, all in addition to his staple weapon. He can quickly shift from one role to another on the battlefield. But UGVs are locked into using one weapon, maybe two. They are committed to doing one thing especially well versus a non-veteran human specialist. And so they make you think more carefully about their deployment, both before you launch your dropship and while in the battlescape.

18

Artwork / Re: Armor model updates

« on: September 26, 2012, 05:00:09 pm »

I agree that the shiny black looks better in those renders.

But to really see what you are dealing with, you would need to get screenshots of those both in game on a modern graphics card. Things like real time rendering with specular and normal mapping and the minimum distance the game allows you to get the camera up to a unit, could all make the option that looks better in a controlled environment, actually look like the worse option in-game.

19

Artwork / Re: Military Equipment Reference Pictures

« on: September 26, 2012, 04:54:14 pm »

Shots of the newest equipment would probably be the most desirable, since the game is set in the distant future.

20

Coding / Re: What features are still missing for UGVs?

« on: September 26, 2012, 04:30:26 pm »

How would you suggest tanks dominate open ground? How do you envision accomplishing this? By giving them excellent long-range accuracy?

Yes that, combined with better armor that allows them to survive sometime in the open.

How do we make the tank perform poorly in tightly cluttered areas? I can't think of a game mechanic that can be used to achieve this (2x2 may keep them out of the cluttered areas, but it doesn't effect their performance), but there may be one I'm missing.

There are many possible ways. The 2x2 is of course one of them. Or having a special map tile tag for "rough terrain" that doesn't affect infantry but slows down "vehicles". Those are examples of hindering mobility. Another approach is to make them vulnerable to cluttered environments where they can be ambushed from many directions. Directional armor is used by many games for this purpose, which makes the vehicle more easily penetrated by attacks not against it's frontal armor. Requiring additional TUs for turning the vehicle or turret relative to infantry further limits it when enemies can come from many angles.

But those would need to be down the road implementations, I highly recommend not hinging UGV implementation on the development of further features like those above. That's been a recipe for indefinite postponement.

How do we do this without imbalancing the battlescape (alien AI sucks at long-range encounters -- can't find cover, fires away at unrealistic distances)?

That's a tangential problem. It is countered by giving human technology used at the same stage of the game, poorer stats overall.

A slow scout vehicle would be little more than a kamikaze machine for checking indoor areas. It's not adding a very interesting game mechanic and could really slow down and narrow battlescape play.

If it is slow but armed and with fairly heavy survivability, that is one option. It would be like a modern bomb disposal robot in design, but useful for making the initial break-through into a concentrated alien ambush. Another option is a fast vehicle, lightly armed or armored, that truly is a low cost scout. Or a true kamikaze weapon that runs in and blows itself up / launches grenades in every direction.

It is my humble opinion that a unit like one of these suggestions could actually speed up play by making the "clear the crashed harvester of camping aliens" type missions much less tedious.

I see an incentive for players to spend their time moving the scout UGV around while the soldiers just cluster behind it.

Only when you know all the aliens are hiding in that one room, in front of you. Otherwise you might deploy the scout behind you to make sure you don't get ambushed from behind. Or deploy it near the aliens' backdoor in case they try to make a run for it.

21

Coding / Re: What features are still missing for UGVs?

« on: September 26, 2012, 02:16:45 am »

First we should sit down and decide how UGV should work including if the UGV should have replaceable turret and which tag should be used for it and other things also.

Well this is just as good of a place as any to sit down and flesh this stuff out.

Would it help to put together a preliminary specification and then pass it around to everyone so they can propose changes?

(the alternative, using UGVs like a "soldier" only adds more difficult work restructuring the concept of a squad in the code).

Why is that? Because of the eventual unusual space requirement of 2x2 units? For most of the issues you bring up it seems like piggy-backing the UGVs off the existing functionality for soldiers would be the way to start.

6. Special equipping UI to select and equip UGVs (even at the bare minimum, you need a system to prevent non-UGV weapons from being equipped on a UGV -- but really you need a separate interface, because they won't have right hand, left hand, holster, belt and backpack spaces)

Good point.

I struggle to really understand what kind of benefit they would bring other than the "cool" factor.

What fighting machines offer as far as game play is a way to add more specialized and diverse units to the playable "earth" faction in the battlescape. The alien opponents can come in any shape and size and have most any special abilities and disadvantages, and it all makes sense. But with strictly human infantry you might have some variety with powered armor or jump jet suits, but can't get away with nearly as much.

Vehicle types things are also interesting in that they are generally good at doing just one or two things really well, whereas infantry can more easily shift roles but suffer more trying to do any particular one. For examples, a tank can dominate open ground, but does poorly in tight cluttered areas and can't enter most structures at all. A small scout vehicle on the other hand might be the best at exploring or hiding within a building but is too slow and has too poor of standoff fighting ability to survive long outdoors.

22

Coding / Re: What features are still missing for UGVs?

« on: September 25, 2012, 09:30:47 pm »

Alright so now it looks like UGVs are no longer on the 2.5 TODO list either. So they've been pushed back to a later version for three or four major versions in a row at this point. The content for them is there, so what is the hold up?

I believe the hold up is demanding too much at once from development of UGV support. Like the ideas that UGVs must be 2x2 with the associated path-finding issues solved, must have separately rotating turrets, must have separate transport space or separate spawn locations on maps, etc. Things like this are not necessary and can be added later as desired.

All that is needed right now is a minimum feature set for UGVs to work in game, in skirmish and campaign, and then to have this minimum of features added to the 2.5 road map and then implemented before that release. Someone please correct me if there are more but I believe we only need two things:

1. The ability to buy and/or manufacture a special "soldier" that has no skills and a very simplified healing mechanic:
2. A special tag for weapons and equipment that distinguishes between infantry and UGV outfits.

23

Discussion / Re: UFO: AI 2.4/2.5 Lets Plays

« on: September 25, 2012, 08:00:23 pm »

That GermWelfareNewMedia guy is politically incorrect in a rather hilarious way

Hahah, that guy is awesome.

24

Tactics / Re: Civilian-Kill-Count in 2.4?

« on: September 25, 2012, 07:14:38 pm »

as for reducing civilian kill count, dropping ufo-s in the sea should therefore be effective.

In 2.3 at least, I found killing UFOs over water to be the only way to go. Constantly clearing crash sites really slowed down the game flow and offered no valuable salvage. Made me really wish that some significant percentage of UFOs would fully destruct midair or on impact rather than always creating a crash site that requires a ground battle. And then those that did make a crash landing would still be carrying salvageable antimatter. (Unless I recall incorrectly, you cannot get antimatter from crashed, damaged UFOs).

25

Discussion / Re: Suspension of belief

« on: September 16, 2012, 06:13:17 pm »

Isn't it based off the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle?

Indeed it is. I was instructed to model it off of that real-world weapon system. If there are no special licensing issues, it might even make sense for it to be explicitly identified as such, in game.

One of the game's premises is that earthly smart weapons are easily defeated by alien countermeasures somehow. So simple, robust and overpowered weapons from previous generations of warfare are brought back into service to be used against them.

26

Tactics / Re: 2.5 dev combat

« on: September 16, 2012, 05:59:19 pm »

I have to say that one thing that's really bothered me since maybe v2.2, is that the rocket launcher / recoiless rifle is your heaviest weapon, but is essentially ineffective against heavy aliens like the cyborg ortnok. Making a direct hit with a weapon that fires one shot every two turns with modest accuracy and only a handful of extra rounds, should at least temporarily incapacitate an opponent that isn't literally a light tank or heavy UGV.

27

Design / Re: Things to learn from Xenonauts?

« on: July 07, 2012, 05:26:25 pm »

As it is, the Taman, Shevaar and Ortnok all have very humanoid hand/arm/eye relationships, and all of the models for alien weapons are pretty similar to human weapons.

Calling it "uncomfortable" for human use would look like a cheap hack unless it was backed up by the appearance of the aliens and weapons in-game.

I agree and would recommend making plans to change these things in the future. The existing alien weapon models can be used as the human-made, human-ergonomic versions that you have to research for your squads. Then new, non-anthropomorphic aliens and xeno-ergonomic weapons can be used for the enemy.

The existing models are ancient and will best be replaced at some point anyway, so at that point there's an opportunity to give a truly alien look to both the weapons and the alien creatures themselves. You could even match the ergonomics of a particular weapon with the alien species that typically uses it. A creature with four arms featuring a radial array of a dozen digits would use a very different grip from one with eight flexible tentacles or a human.

28

Artwork / Re: license discussion

« on: May 15, 2012, 09:42:32 pm »

That means you steal his "amount of work he done".

But that simply isn't the case here. You still have your work. The open source community still has access to your work. You can still do whatever you want with your work, including selling copies of it yourself.

So nothing has been stolen from you. All that has happened is an untalented, not very honorable person somewhere used a copy of your work to scam dumb people out of a small amount of cash. If the dishonorable person had honor, he would have offered you a cut of the money and if the dumb people were smart, they would have downloaded a copy of your work for free. But you still haven't lost or gained anything from these few, flawed individuals out there someplace.

29

Design / Re: Alien Tank designs ideas and proposals

« on: May 14, 2012, 06:02:39 pm »

Great, really great job. If there is any accepted by main devs design, it's needed to be there (a pic).

No it doesn't.

Because first of all, the concept art itself has to be compatibly licensed, you can't just go randomly pulling other folk's IP off of deviant art and expect to be able to make derivative works from them legally. Uploading those pics to the wiki would be a bad and risky idea.

Secondly a pic is just one possible idea. What could be more helpful is written down per-unit visual design requirements so artists know what aspects of the design are must-haves for inclusion and by omission what features they are free to play around with.

30

Design / Re: storyline question: Why is phalanx a secret organization?

« on: May 14, 2012, 03:45:32 pm »

That would be super cool, but probably would be quite a lot of work to implement. Remembering that much simpler changes to the same effect have already been shot down for being too laborious to make.

You mean like destructible 3D environments? That's because the devs hadn't yet heard about Voronoi Shatter. Oh yeah, baby!