Building new bases. Request.

[Crashdown]

When building new bases, part of said new base is unusable. Sometimes as many as four blocks. Is there a way of removing this feature from the game as I find it is irritating and senseless and really detracts from the enjoyment. Here I am running the protection of the world and my base choice seems to involve handing uncle Barney the family drunk a sixpack and some sandwiches and telling him to find a flat piece of ground to build on. Not at all realistic and no fun when you have half your new base as a screw up from word go. I am all for realism but for this can we pretend there are fewer idiots in 2084.

[Gren]

Some players like this feature (can't think why tbh) but I usually get around it by saving just before placing your base. That way, if you get a base template with more than one locked area.. you can just reload and place the base again..

Might take a few attempts, but I guess it's worth it..   

[Nutter]

To be honest I still don't get it. It just arbitrarily fucks with your construction plans.
It's not like we don't have high explosives, plasma and later antimatter to take care of any tougher rock.
And I seriously doubt there's any rock so tough that it can't be dealt with using proper heavy machinery at that depth anyway.
I mean we can shoot down orbiting alien motherships but we can't break some measly gravel?

[Telok]

Bit of a bugger isn't it?

What probably bothers me more is that after I get the sub level map, of the area my drunken monkey with a dowsing rod found for me, I can't just ditch the site and choose another. I don't mind losing the down payment on the lot. Money is falling out of the sky, after all. But I'm locked into this like a Houdini wanna-be kid stuffed into the family safe by his older brother. There's no way out, ever. I can't even build an anti-matter storage there, ship a gram over, and crater the place.

[Nutter]

...Money is falling out of the sky, after all...

Well, to be honest, it lands properly.

But what's really annoying is how it automatically places your entrance.

[TallTroll]

Well, that's the PHALANX bureaucracy for you. If there were no constraints though, you'd just develop a few standard base types, and only ever build those most efficient arrangements

>> Not at all realistic and no fun

Clearly, you've never visited a real life military base. No base commander, ever, has been 100% satisfied with the location and logistics of their facility. Also, PHALANX is meant to be at least partially secret, and not really popular with the host governments - they support it because they have to, not because they want to. So, no, you don't get the prime base sites. Their own military gets those

[homunculus]

what i found most annoying is that i cannot build a second command center in a base.
if i want to relocate the command center in the initial base, i have to make the base non-operational for almost half a month.
and command center is one of the points where soldiers can spawn, so i would want it close to the entrance point.
because i hate missions that drag for ages, just moving my soldiers.

and along the same lines, there's an offtopic suggestion to have an option to exclude large and maybe even medium maps if a smaller version of the same map is available (soldiers will get less speed, but that's what i can put up with, feeling less pain in the.... brain).

[geever]

what i found most annoying is that i cannot build a second command center in a base.
if i want to relocate the command center in the initial base, i have to make the base non-operational for almost half a month.

It's a gameplay element and won't change.

and along the same lines, there's an offtopic suggestion to have an option to exclude large and maybe even medium maps if a smaller version of the same map is available (soldiers will get less speed, but that's what i can put up with, feeling less pain in the.... brain).

It has no sense for me, sorry.

-geever

[homunculus]

yeah : )
and also, i don't see a very clear and readily visible indication about a building being an entry point in the case of base attack.
so, a player is supposed to find it out at first base attack that small hangar actually is not an entry point, and restart the game?
because it is less tedious to play the start of game again than to move soldiers through extra buildings for the whole length of the game.
well, yeah, it would have been less tedious in the end, but instead i rather quit altogether.

the whole thing makes me wonder how much the devs actually play the game.
well, maybe they do, maybe they are just enjoying moving soldiers through empty buildings, or something?
not much else comes to mind as a reason for that.
some people might enjoy shooting themselves in the foot, also, and it's their own foot, and no one has to pay, just like ufo:ai is a free game.

[Gren]

yeah : )
and also, i don't see a very clear and readily visible indication about a building being an entry point in the case of base attack.
so, a player is supposed to find it out at first base attack that small hangar actually is not an entry point, and restart the game?
because it is less tedious to play the start of game again than to move soldiers through extra buildings for the whole length of the game.
well, yeah, it would have been less tedious in the end, but instead i rather quit altogether.

the whole thing makes me wonder how much the devs actually play the game.
well, maybe they do, maybe they are just enjoying moving soldiers through empty buildings, or something?
not much else comes to mind as a reason for that.
some people might enjoy shooting themselves in the foot, also, and it's their own foot, and no one has to pay, just like ufo:ai is a free game.

Well said.. 

[Jon_dArc]

Given the state of gameplay documentation, my hunch is that it isn't so much that the devs don't play the game, but rather that they're working from a detailed knowledge of the game sufficient to mask many of these issues. Your small-hangar-building issue is a perfect example—I'd hazard a guess that any devs who play know off the top of their heads which buildings are base entry points, and probably haven't even thought about how a new player finds out about such things (or if they have, they've shuffled it down on the to-do list—which, for a work as in-progress as UFO:AI is, isn't entirely unreasonable).

Maybe if I get some time I'll see about volunteering to update some of the documentation…

~J

[homunculus]

hmm.. what is the meaning of 'most annoying' in english?
maybe i should have said 'least awesome' instead, but this does not quite capture the tedium of walking the soldiers through those two empty rooms at every base attack, just to make sure that the aliens understand that the earth is a dreadful planet where sniper bullets fly out of the ground, and when they come down the entrance the bullets continue flying out of plain walls around them (shooting through walls, if some players do not know what this is about).
this is why i would rather get it over with quickly, and relocate the command center closer to the entrance.
i wonder which one the 'gameplay element' is:
1) me having to walk those two rooms every time, before the aliens meet the most miserable death without ever getting a chance to take a shot, is somehow supposed to challenge me tactically.
2) i need to make my base non-operational for 12 days if i want to avoid the tedium.
case 2 has a major flaw in my opinion: the more competitive way of playing (not relocating the command center) is the more tedious one.
it seems that 'least awesome' might be for native english speakers, but i would rather say 'most annoying', because everything else feels better than that.

there is nothing surprising about devs not playing the game much (i don't know, just asking).
for example, i read some freecol forum, and devs were quite surprised at a few things players wrote there about playing.

[...]my hunch is that it isn't so much that the devs don't play the game[...]

could be.
but maybe they walk their soldiers a mile and think: 'this works... this also works...' etc, which might not be like the players see things.

[Jon_dArc]

hmm.. what is the meaning of 'most annoying' in english?
maybe i should have said 'least awesome' instead, but this does not quite capture the tedium[…]
it seems that 'least awesome' might be for native english speakers, but i would rather say 'most annoying', because everything else feels better than that.

It means what I think you wanted (and is used by native speakers in that context); "most bothersome", "chief amongst irritations", etc. "Least awesome" also works, but is more natural for cases where you're emphasizing that the whole is good despite a particular flaw; I don't think it's what you want here.

~J

[homunculus]

the game is playable and quite fun and it crashes extremely rarely, so i guess 'least awesome' might be what english speakers would use.

[H-Hour]

My opinion is that the campaign (the geoscape) has surged forward in development in the last two years but the tactical game (the battlescape) has not. Almost every gameplay element of the battlescape -- maps, AI, aliens, visibility, weapons -- has barely been touched in years. With the exception of bug fixes and tilli's work improving a couple of RMAs, there has been no progress developing that side of the game. (There have been serious improvements to the graphics capabilities, the graphics themselves, and the speed of RMA and pathfinding code, but these don't actually improve the game's mechanisms.)

But the game relies on the contributions of people like me who don't always have the time or the appropriate skills, so it's going to develop unevenly. Mattn and I hope to be able to improve the multiplayer side of the game for 2.5, which would focus on improvements to the battlescape, but if it is anything like 2.4 it will be another year and a half down the road.