Messages

106

Tactics / Re: How do you protect the Firebird?

« on: February 15, 2009, 12:35:49 am »

Multiple bases for more aircraft coverage will help later on, of course.  (And a second team of troops suitably placed so that your avg/max to-mission distance will be shorter).  In 2.2.1, very early on... perhaps the lesson is that you may have to delay or take a slower, wider route and let some or all civilians die rather than risk losing a dropship, your team, *and* the civilians.

As somebody who hasn't been following the game until fairly recently, I idly wonder whether or not ground transportation would fit in certain cases.  Even if a dropship is stealthy in terms of radar/heat signature and noise (and if it is, it's going to scream *military* once in visual range unless civvies have become FAR more paranoid, or if technology advances to the point where stealth is non-obvious), doing an airborne assault directly on target against unknown quantities of enemies (which might have figured out that Earth uses military aircraft, and which might leave a couple of soldiers on 'air guard' duty) and where the opposition might have decisive air superiority seems chancy.  It might be more reasonable to use the drop ship to reach a location somewhere nearby, and then take something like a truck convoy -- better yet if the trucks were supplied with hardware from a local base, given that trucks might be able to bring more equipment (or, say, limited medical facility) and should be less obvious targets unless civvie traffic is extremely sparse (e.g. far from urban areas). 

Course, unless it was massively abstracted out and maybe even then, it'd be a lot of work to design and code (I presume).  So the above is largely idle speculation.

107

Discussion / Re: Just want to say Thanks!!!

« on: February 15, 2009, 12:07:32 am »

The best I can do right now is report bugs, so I'll definitely do that as I encounter them.

I recall in the original x-com that if I walk over the corpses of one of my fellow marines or an alien I can pick stuff up from the ground that they had... I don't think I'm seeing that in this game... is that expected?

I haven't tried very often, so I couldn't tell you if the gear's usually vaporized or if it's sporadically broken, but if you access the (live) soldier's inventory management screen while he's standing on the very same square as the corpse, you should be able to pick up gear if you have the requisite action points and space.  At least in 2.2.1, it appears on the bottom box (the 'stuff on the ground' box). 

Only major inventory-related bug in 2.2.1 I've noticed was occasionally having gear vaporize when my team returned, like one time seeing multiple laser rifles (that had been brought to the mission and used -- not that the 2.2.1 aliens carry lasers to pick up anyway, methinks) vanish.  That was annoying.

108

Discussion / Re: Equip Armor?

« on: February 12, 2009, 02:52:43 am »

Alien armor:  You don't.

Nanocomposite:  It'll show up once you either make or buy some, and it's in the same base as the troops you're equipping.

109

Discussion / Re: About Improvement of Stats After Combat (And Implement Training?)

« on: February 10, 2009, 12:12:50 pm »

There actually -is- a Training Room facility mentioned in the wiki, so the concept might already be intended.

110

Feature Requests / Re: A couple of suggestions.

« on: February 10, 2009, 12:10:48 pm »

If one were positing new personal defensive equipment, "stuff that reduces chance of being hit" might be more plausible than "stuff that reduces effect of being hit" barring fairly extreme armor technologies.

Examples of the former that are in the game include -- the flashbang (less likely to be shot at successfully while opponents are blind), smoke (concealment, rather than cover... although laying down area fire through a smokescreen is not an implausible tactic if you have plenty of munitions and you think that somebody's moving *through* it.  Plus, do you have smoke that'll block all the opponent's spectra but not your own?  Or is it two-way, like thermal smoke blocking IR for both sides in modern-day warfare?).

There's also suppressive fire, but I don't know for sure that it's implemented in any form because the morale model for aliens might not be exhaustively documented in-game.

Toys that might not be completely implausible might include better camoflague (although *moving* isn't going to be good for hiding, no matter what you're wearing... nor is firing something with a nasty heat signature.  Firing a PIAT might not give you away, but are PIAT-style weapons likely to still be around?).  One could see adding scent and sound elements as well.

For what it's worth, there are presently man-portable fire-and-forget ATGMs that can deliver a decent payload.  This sort of thing is an improvement over previous anti-tank weapons, but is also useful for expensively tackling strongpoints without the operator needing to retain LOS for course correction.  See the FGM-148 for instance.  It is not entirely implausible that this sort of device would be refined in the future with, say, ways to target specific locations using triangulation from local transponders of some sort, providing a safer way to engage known or suspected strongpoints.

It might also be suggested that if one combines present-day research into sensor networks (often DARPA-funded, I believe...) with futuristic nanontechnology, it is not implausible that 'scatter cheap, really tiny sensors/communicators over the battlefield' would be a likely tactic to provide real-time battlefield intelligence.  The usual privacy qualms that would normally hamper deployment of a thorough surveillance network might be weaker than usual in the face of a planetary emergency.

111

Discussion / Re: anyone else playing a 2.3 development build?

« on: February 10, 2009, 11:35:59 am »

It might be suggested that if players are really supposed to stay away from the development version, that


(1) the wiki pages on Ninex should retain correct documentation for 2.2.1 -- examples of pages that are incorrect for 2.2.1 include the small hangar page (capacity; 2.2.1 small hangers can store multiple craft), the training simulator (not in 2.2.1 at all),  the (blank) coilgun page (not in game), some of the alien craft which don't appear at all.  This sends a somewhat mixed message about what versions people might be using.

For what it's worth, some of the in-game behavior (like gas grenades affecting robots, which presumably aren't really organic creatures) is also contradicted by the in-game text and the briefings on the wiki; it might not have been a bad idea to mention this in the game to make it clear as to whether the restriction is intended and the behavior is simply unimplemented, or whether it was intended to be implemented but isn't actually correctly so, or whether the description is obsolete and the in-game behavior is correct.  This would be good practice, anyway, rather than requiring that people actually visit the forum to find out that their strategies tailored to specific game elements (like 'this species is particularly resistant/vulnerable to particular damage types' -- unimplemented, I gather, based on chatter about armor values) are actually inappropriate because of missing features.


(2) that rather than argue about the semantics of 'playable' or 'released', it might have been more polite to suggest that major elements (such as the campaign system) are in flux and that therefore progress may be substantially more limited; not only that, but judging from the other threads, there are substantial issues with the pathfinding such as navigating stairs and ramps that limit the usability of the tactical core.  And that the development process appears to follow the "openly break vast parts and fix it at some point" plan rather than a more traditional incremental-improvement model with small deltas and numerous stable, usable if incomplete milestones (as in commercial enterprises which prefer not to terrify their client base or sales teams); or the rather secretive process associated with a certain legendary roguelike game (with minimal public chatter or access to development work, until *poof* a new version is announced).