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Offline geisthund

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attributes for other personnel types?
« on: May 21, 2012, 10:50:24 pm »
Just a thought, that spawned off from something previously...

I previously thought that it might be interesting if our R&D staff (scientists, engineers) had profession-specific attributes (eg the scientists have points for... perhaps innovation, scientific method, etcetc) that influence how rapidly we are able to make new scientific discoveries / come up with new ideas spawned from scientific discoveries, understand alien tech etc etc; engineers could have a similar set) as well as combat attributes (for base invasions)... perhaps we could send scientists for combat training as well (if the player wished to)

so I got to thinking the same might apply for hospital staff as well - doctors, nurses etc. And these could in turn affect the speed wounded soldiers recover, or perhaps if a soldier flies in from combat with a critical injury, whether they live or die. And dang would it be fun to assault aliens with a squad of doctors and nurses :D

So in short when you're at the early game the quandry becomes - do I get a lot of low cost workers for lower quality, or put all my eggs into relatively few baskets, and go for the pros? This lets people map out their game more according to what kind of people they are.

Would this be too much micromanagement for most people? Or would it be interesting?

Also would it be impossible to include in the game, or is it a possibility?

« Last Edit: May 21, 2012, 10:51:56 pm by geisthund »

Offline Battlescared

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #1 on: May 22, 2012, 12:05:51 am »
I would like it.  Scientists and workers used to have stats, but they were the same as soldiers and didn't make much sense, as I recall.  I would like to see stats on them too and have it impact development time.  I also liked the idea of XCOM that we had to protect them in base attacks.  I wish that was in here too.

It it too much micromanagement?  Probably.  I would still like it though. :)

Offline Jon_dArc

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #2 on: May 22, 2012, 12:21:04 am »
I feel like the subgames involved simply aren't rich enough to justify stats—at least without some significant modifications in how research and production work, I'd actually suggest the other way and replace the current named-units-with-checkbox system with a spinner like inventory for workers and scientists. Pilots also don't have a rich subgame, but at least you don't need to deal with a lot of them.

~J

Offline Battlescared

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #3 on: May 22, 2012, 02:38:27 am »
I feel like the subgames involved simply aren't rich enough to justify stats—at least without some significant modifications in how research and production work, I'd actually suggest the other way and replace the current named-units-with-checkbox system with a spinner like inventory for workers and scientists. Pilots also don't have a rich subgame, but at least you don't need to deal with a lot of them.

~J

Yeah, I agree.  As it is right now, spinners would be easier than having to select each one.  The end result is the same.

My overall vote would be to define stats for workers/scientists/pilots and have them develop over time.  Perhaps in harder games make them scarcer from the countries, maybe no more than one a month  from each country, and again, have to protect them during base raids.  Aliens could be programmed to go after the better workers/scientists to knock them off and set back production.  If researchers and engineering stats increased over time, then it would be an impact to lose one as you'd have to develop new ones to replace them to get production levels back up.

Offline rodo

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #4 on: May 22, 2012, 04:52:29 am »
Why not go ahead and do something like in Apocalypse, have your scientist feature lvls in a certain area of expertise like lvl 80 on engineering or 97 on biochimestry then have'em play like civi's on base attack missions, this way you should try to save your scientists/workers.... cause you know, it's hard to get one with high lvl's.

They should not lvl up or anything after finishing work, the lvl is just there to make them desirable to be saved, aside from saving the base keeping your civ's alive would be a secondary objective.

Offline geisthund

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #5 on: May 22, 2012, 04:54:02 am »
sounds good. could give them peashooter pistol thingies to help a little a tiny, tiny bit...

Offline Salvo

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #6 on: May 22, 2012, 08:40:42 am »
It just makes me wonder why they even let scientists and engineers have individual names, if they're not going to have attributes, and they're unavailable in base defense missions. Might as well go back to the old X-Com system when scientists were just a number and not individuals. Although the individual hiring makes the end-of-the-month salary/firing exploit bit more tedious, and therefore it works as a deterrent.


I think that during base defense, should all your soldiers die, then the fight should go into auto-mission mode, and the number of civilians and firearms in the base, including the quality of the firearms there, should determine the outcome. And even if you survive, you would still lose a bunch of scientists and engineers in the fight, since they're not exactly trained for combat. But at least you'd get to keep the base.


I don't understand why each firearm hasn't been assigned a hidden auto-mission value that would determine its effectiveness in auto-missions. I guess it's not that high a priority. I mean, surely some kind of index could be calculated from weapon damage, firing rate, range, clip size, etc. Or just manually input numbers for each weapon that "feel right", without any elaborate formula.


For combat purposes, I feel that attributes for other personnel is irrelevant, since they'd all be simply below any acceptable limits. Only the headcount and gear level would be any real factors.


Although I'd love to see a scientist named Gordon Freeman waste a few aliens in UFO:AI...


You know, for a while I played with the idea of specialised research branches (specialised buildings, individual specialised scientists), but I concluded that it might make the game unpleasantly elaborate to play, and to code, even with just a few scientific subdivisions. But now it occurred to me that it would be kind of beautiful to have the individual specialised scientists, and name them after famous real-life counterparts, using their last names, as a homage to science itself. Who would NOT want to hire people named such as Jennifer Tesla or Heinrich Oppenheimer, the descendants of, well... you know who.


On the other hand, if we don't require specialised buildings to conduct various research, it might still make it interesting to make each technology to fall under a category, such as Weapons, Microbiology etc., and then let scientists have the similarily named skills like Weapons Research, Microbiology, Aerospace Engineering, Astrophysics, etc. Even while the research with non-specialised crew would be slower, they might at least learn in the process.

Offline headdie

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #7 on: May 22, 2012, 09:03:12 am »
How about just having a simple randomly selected strength/weakness for each scientist/worker.  Basically they work like now but for their specialist field they a 5% bonus and a 5% penalty in their area of weakness

Offline H-Hour

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #8 on: May 22, 2012, 09:34:24 am »
I don't understand why each firearm hasn't been assigned a hidden auto-mission value that would determine its effectiveness in auto-missions. I guess it's not that high a priority. I mean, surely some kind of index could be calculated from weapon damage, firing rate, range, clip size, etc. Or just manually input numbers for each weapon that "feel right", without any elaborate formula.

This is planned. Automission is still getting worked out.

Offline rodo

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #9 on: May 22, 2012, 03:37:09 pm »
I think that during base defense, should all your soldiers die, then the fight should go into auto-mission mode, and the number of civilians and firearms in the base, including the quality of the firearms there, should determine the outcome. And even if you survive, you would still lose a bunch of scientists and engineers in the fight, since they're not exactly trained for combat. But at least you'd get to keep the base.

Nah, that makes no sense, when all trained soldiers die, everybody should die.

We're talking here about a bunch of angry aliens against 10? 20? scientists, they don't have a chance against aliens. Remember they almost leveled an entire city like mumbai even with trained soldiers in the field defending the population.
Sure, they didn't have the tech but I don't think it gives that much of an advantage either way.

Offline Salvo

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #10 on: May 22, 2012, 04:04:33 pm »
On the other hand, PHALANX is specialised in fighting the aliens.

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #11 on: June 03, 2012, 12:37:12 am »
So, there is still a lot of posts I haven't read on the forum, so please forgive me if I've posted anything that has been discussed before.  :)



How about for Workers: Repair, Maintenance and Manufacturing?
  • Repair - Anything that might ever need to be repaired (aircraft, tanks, etc.) would have a certain repair points per health point cost, where it would cost a given number of repair points to restore a single hp. This attribute would be the amount of said repair points a worker can produce in a set time period (1 hour?). If a base doesn't have any workers, it uses some small hard-coded value which would represent workers sent from U.N.
  • Maintenance - Each building in base and some of the bigger equipment (such as aircraft) would have a monthly maintenance cost (this would be separate from the current upkeep cost; upkeep = spare parts, etc., maintenance = time spent replacing/cleaning/inspecting). All your workers maintenance points would be summed, and for every point the base falls short would have to be paid in cash instead (1k or 10k credits per point?). This calculation could be done together with the monthly upkeep. If done right it would discourage players from firing their workers just before the end of the month.
  • Manufacturing - Basically, each item that can be produced would have a construction cost. This attribute would determine how many of said points a worker contributes in a production cycle.

Also I think that instead of calculating the staff salaries at the end of a month, it might be better for each base to have an integer for each of the personnel type that can be hired which would track the salary to be paid so far, and have some sort of daily or hourly cycle when this gets incremented based on current personnel. This would definitely stop all but the most hardcore cheaters from using the fire/hire method of avoiding paying salaries.

With the above the Maintenance thing could be changed so that the maintenance cost of items and buildings would be set somewhat high at the beginning of each month, and would be decreased by the total maintenance points of all workers each time the owed salary is incremented.

======================

Regarding pilots, if they'll have any attributes, I've seen it discussed elsewhere in the forum (an old post) that it may be difficult to use a similar approach to soldiers for leveling them. Therefore I propose that their attributes instead be tied/hard-coded to rank, and would only change as the pilot gets promoted. They would gain experience points for every hour in the air, for every 10 seconds of combat and for every kill (so not for hitting a ufo or evading their attacks).

======================

Another way to make personnel unique is by special skills/training (could be displayed as some sort of badges). They could have 3 grades which would be reflected in the color of their icon (bronze, silver, gold). Some examples:
Soldiers
  • <Environment> Combat Training (e.g. <Desert, Urban, Woodland, etc.> Combat Training - 5%, 10% or 15% bonus to attributes for bronze, silver and gold grade respectively). Perhaps some types of environments could also be divided into how extreme they are, giving a 5%, 10% or 15% penalty to attributes, and could then be negated by the appropriate training. For instance in a desert with 10% penalty, a soldier with gold Desert Combat Training badge (+15%) would get a 5% bonus to attributes.
  • Field Medic - Bronze grade would decrease the TU cost of using a medkit (might have to set the cost higher for untrained soldiers), Silver would increase the amount healed and Gold would increase the number of charges for a medkit (it could have 4 charges, but below gold grade would cost 2 charges to use, thus giving 2 uses for "untrained" and 4 uses for the trained soldiers).

Workers
  • Golden Touch - 5%, 15% and 30% boost to repair attribute.
  • Engineer - 5%, 10% and 20% boost to manufacturing attribute. Couldn't come up with a better name for this, but since they're called workers instead of engineers...

Etc...

Personnel would sometimes come with one or two of those, but they could all be gained through experience/training. Gaining them through experience should be very slow, and a little unpredictable (e.g. some soldiers would get a bronze Field Medic after restoring 200 hit points, others after restoring 300). On the other hand, sending someone to dedicated training would always give the attribute upon completion, and it would always take the same amount of time.

There should also be a big difference in requirements between bronze and silver, and even higher between silver and gold. Sending someone to training should make them unavailable for the duration (I can imagine silver to gold upgrade taking 6 months or so).

======================

Also I would like to propose a new attribute for all the types of personnel, Fatigue.
It would be used slightly differently for each of the types.
Soldiers
  • Every 20 - 30 TU's used would add 1 fatigue point. Some actions/events would also add extra fatigue points, for instance firing a weapon would add 1 extra fatigue point, while getting hit would add 1-4 points, depending on hp lost.
  • Once fatigue reaches a certain level, it will decrease the number of TUs available to the soldier each turn (down to a certain minimum, perhaps enough to fire a pistol once and move 2 squares?). If the fatigue reaches critical levels, the soldier will suffer penalties to his attributes (up to 50%?).
  • Every hour spent outside the base (for instance traveling to/from missions) would also cost 1 fatigue point. Whereas every hour spent at the base would decrease fatigue by 1 point. If fatigue is above certain level, perhaps give player an option to put the soldier into the hospital for a couple of days. This would make him unavailable for the duration, but would remove all their fatigue.
  • Using a medkit to administer a stim would remove some of the fatigue points accumulated so far, for the duration of the mission, but would add a lot after the mission.

Pilots
  • Every 30 minutes in the air would add a fatigue point. Every 10 seconds of combat would add 2-4.
  • After the fatigue reaches a certain level, their speed would start to decrease. If fatigue gets high enough it will also start affecting other attributes of the aircraft, like to-hit and to-evade chances.

Scientists and Workers
  • This will need the player to be able to set the length of work-shifts. There would be either 3 or 5 options. The middle value would be the "normal" shift, the value(s) below that would be shorter shifts - decrease fatigue and add a penalty to work efficiency - while the ones above would be longer shifts - add fatigue but also give a bonus to production/research. The bonus/penalties wouldn't be equal, for example switching to longer shifts might give a 10% bonus to production and increase fatigue by 3, switching to shorter shifts in order to recover fatigue might instead give a 20% penalty to production and only remove 2 fatigue points.
  • In order to motivate players to keep their workers fatigue low, besides the attribute penalty at higher fatigue levels, their salary could also be modified by fatigue (basically paying them overtime?).

The idea behind fatigue for soldiers and pilots is to add another layer of resource management. With limited replacement personnel, and a lot of alien activity the player may have to make hard choices, possibly forcing him to ignore most missions in order to keep his men fresh and ready for the ones he thinks more important, or in case of soldiers, sending fewer on a mission than he would otherwise in order to be able to do more missions.

Offline geever

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #12 on: June 03, 2012, 01:11:56 am »
So, there is still a lot of posts I haven't read on the forum, so please forgive me if I've posted anything that has been discussed before.  :)

We're repeating ourselves many times but it's just fine tonight. ;)

How about for Workers: Repair, Maintenance and Manufacturing?

Most players (and some devs) think it's too much micro-management, so it will not happen. Even if I don't share it. The most I can do is keep the possibility in the code to add skills to workers and scientists but the official design is to remove the individual worker/scientist hiring and make them numbers as they were in X-COM 1/2.

Also I think that instead of calculating the staff salaries at the end of a month, it might be better for each base to have an integer for each of the personnel type that can be hired which would track the salary to be paid so far, and have some sort of daily or hourly cycle when this gets incremented based on current personnel. This would definitely stop all but the most hardcore cheaters from using the fire/hire method of avoiding paying salaries.

I'm going to make employee pre-paid, so when you hire them, you pay their first (one month's) wage and in each month you pay the next. Just until the User Interface doesn' t let you cancelling a hire action I don't feel it fair.

Regarding pilots, if they'll have any attributes, I've seen it discussed elsewhere in the forum (an old post) that it may be difficult to use a similar approach to soldiers for leveling them. Therefore I propose that their attributes instead be tied/hard-coded to rank, and would only change as the pilot gets promoted. They would gain experience points for every hour in the air, for every 10 seconds of combat and for every kill (so not for hitting a ufo or evading their attacks).

Pilot's will have one stat, it is planned. It will affect airfights, and surviving chances.

-geever

Offline Jon_dArc

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Re: attributes for other personnel types?
« Reply #13 on: June 03, 2012, 03:08:50 pm »
Sending someone to training should make them unavailable for the duration (I can imagine silver to gold upgrade taking 6 months or so).
I can't. That's well over a third of the game—even two weeks seems on the long side for anything not game-breakingly powerful.

~J