OpenXcom Forum
Modding => Released Mods => XPiratez => Topic started by: Meridian on August 22, 2016, 04:33:51 pm
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Starving Poet 1 hour ago (edited)
It would be great if after turn 30 and aliens == 1, we could get knowledge of its position - something like "satellite/awacs is in position" You could even tech-gate it so it makes sense lore-wise.
Would anyone be interested in this?
If yes, add your ideas how should it work in your opinion...
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Would anyone be interested in this?
If yes, add your ideas how should it work in your opinion...
Certainly not as the default setting. MAYBE as some form of special case, but the number of exceptions would be longer than a Pirate Queen's kills list.
I understand that searching for the last alien in the toilet can be a problem, but I think it begs for a different kind of solution. For example, I once proposed mechanics for surrender, it was briefly discussed; I can rewrite it.
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Surrender/Escape mechanics makes more sense as it doesn't flush gamer's immersion into the toilet. Also, why 1? It's often the hunt for the last 2, or 3, or 5...
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Surrender/Escape mechanics makes more sense as it doesn't flush gamer's immersion into the toilet. Also, why 1? It's often the hunt for the last 2, or 3, or 5...
A % of the starting number makes sense.
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The basic idea was simple. If every remaining enemy unit on the field has panicked, the AI turn ends with player's victory, and all remaining AI units count as captured.
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The basic idea was simple. If every remaining enemy unit on the field has panicked, the AI turn ends with player's victory, and all remaining AI units count as captured.
Panicking/morale is probably not the best criterion.
The enemies tend to panic when you kill many of them at the beginning/in the middle of the battle.
But once there are only a few left, and you search for them, they regain their morale (very quickly) and won't panic anymore.
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Overall, I very much like the idea of being able to end the combat at somepoint rather than continuing a tedious grind to find that last one or two remaining enemies.
As written in the opening post, I'd be fine with that.
Another way to consider this might be by enemy intelligence. Use a ratio of the total of all remaining enemy intelligence scores and number of turns elapsed to determine if the enemy "surrender" or not.
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Also, just realized that the last enemy (resp. last two enemies) are allowed to cheat... and in unmodded xcom, they are by far the most dangerous foes... at least for me... accounting for 60-70% of all my losses (20-30% first turn reaction shots, and 10-20% the rest).
So, whatever we implement should somehow try to figure out if they are still capable of killing you or not.
E.g.:
- do they have a weapon?
- if yes, do they have a weapon that can penetrate your armor?
- if no, are they able to pick up a weapon somewhere nearby?
- are they locked in a room without doors?
- are they 2x2 units locked in a place with 1x1 corridors only?
There really might not be a solution to this dilemma, but please keep the feedback coming.
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I guess the % chance would make sense in some missions, as a winning condition. But not in every mission ever, since it would get in the way of many mechanics.
Regarding surrender: good point about the too high morale at late mission stages. I guess any surrender feature (which I will still support as a general concept) would need something more above the current mechanics. Maybe something like this:
- check all enemy units' Bravery every turn,
- If the % losses of their side is greater or equal the Bravery, make them "willing to surrender" (until the next turn),
- If all units are "willing to surrender", they do and the battle ends.
Note that this is irrespective of current morale, which already has different roles.
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I guess the % chance would make sense in some missions, as a winning condition. But not in every mission ever, since it would get in the way of many mechanics.
Regarding surrender: good point about the too high morale at late mission stages. I guess any surrender feature (which I will still support as a general concept) would need something more above the current mechanics. Maybe something like this:
- check all enemy units' Bravery every turn,
- If the % losses of their side is greater or equal the Bravery, make them "willing to surrender" (until the next turn),
- If all units are "willing to surrender", they do and the battle ends.
Note that this is irrespective of current morale, which already has different roles.
In otherwords, make damn sure you kill the robots.
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Yes, as annoying as it is to hunt the last one, they can also be quite dangerous, both because they can cheat and because one tends to get sloppy at the end.
I like the "has no weapon and none in immediate LoS" check, as that's a good way to check if the enemy is still dangerous. Maybe a "hasPanicked" flag for battlescape units, which must be true for the unit to be allowed to surrender?
Another thing that was discussed before was a "can surrender" property, set to false by default in unit definitions. This allows modders to decide which units can surrender (GOs, Hostesses, Researchers, etc. Maybe none of the church because they are too indoctrinated) and which can't (chryssalids, mercs, etc.).
If only units that can surrender remain, and less than X% of the starting units remain, then a surrender occurs. Can add the "has weapon" check, but since it is possible to keep a weapon when panicking (ex.: by going berserk), I think the "has panicked" check might work better.
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I think it should be a selectable option.
Yes, there's a point to be made that the straggler bughunts can inflict casualties in CQC and with RF; on the flipside, the quality of life improvement is worth disposing of that IMO, particularly for a game as long and combat heavy as PirateZ.
I prefer Bravery to % of casualty comparisons as the basis for determining surrender. 'Mindless/beastial' units like robots/Reapers should probably follow the directives of their masters (i.e. they don't count for determining whether or not the enemy surrenders, unless no masters remain in which case they're a cockblock), though having them cockblock surrenders outright wouldn't be too upsetting (though it would defy verisimilitude somewhat).
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Panicking/morale is probably not the best criterion.
The enemies tend to panic when you kill many of them at the beginning/in the middle of the battle.
This would favor 'shock and awe' tactics. Indeed their regain of Morale is strong, unless with lo-end AI Bravery (60-70). An alternate option would be: each time enemy panics, he takes a second, % Bravery check. If fails that one, has a 'broken' flag. If all survivors are 'broken', everyone surrenders.
Sure it's unreliable, and requires a new flag, but...
Also enemies can get double Morale hits from your kills if their current number is 5 or less.
That's a bunch of ideas, still imperfect.
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I'd rather multiply the last enemies aggressiveness so they bum rush you. Or if they have no weapons and are not withing a gal's LOS, just make them disappear because they fled. And this starts under 2 enemies.
Or you can mark all enemies who panicked and notify that the enemy is routed, so you can end the battle early but with less kills and capture because your gals took your preference for quicker loot and let them flee. But that does not fix the problem if the last guy indeed did not panic.
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Thus far my vote goes to Scorch with the caveat that robot/mindless/beast flagged aliens don't count for the surrender check unless they're the only ones left, and you can refuse surrender (if you do, you won't get another chance to accept).
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I'd say if only HWPs remain, surrender is unconditional, since there's no one left to control them
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I proposed something like this, rather than all panicked enemies counting as captured however, I proposed that the game ask the player if they want to end the mission, and counting all remaining enemies as escaped.
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I'd say if only HWPs remain, surrender is unconditional, since there's no one left to control them
That's what I proposed as a caveat to Scorch's solution.
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Aye - I just threw those numbers out - I like the idea of setting flags and giving the option to accept the surrender after a certain threshold is met.
Maybe instead of attaching it to a fixed turn number, you can have it tied the aliens lowest turnssincespotted flag.
I am aware that most deaths come during the final couple turns, but there is always a mission when you're playing and 10+ turns pass without seeing any hostiles.
This can, of course still be gamed, but what can't?
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I would make it operate on 2 conditions, has it been more then x turns since player has seen anything plus sufficient fraction of total enemies dead.
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That's what I proposed as a caveat to Scorch's solution.
The HWP and other mindless units have 110 bravery to prevent panic. I think it's something we can base it on instead of adding another flag to rulesets that are getting really complicated.
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Maybe a "flee" condition would be better than a "surrender" one?
With either, you potentially escape the deadly encounter with the last enemy, when you finally encounter it. However, with a "flee" condition, the enemies just leave with everything they carry, thus reducing the reward, compared to the "surrender" condition giving you captives for every unit left, which is the best possible reward (captives being the best kind of way to take out enemies). There isn't much of a choice if the enemy offers surrender. There's no downside to it except that you can't exploit training xp on the last few units (which isn't much of an issue with the gym).
By opposition, a "flee" option gives you less reward for the diminished risk since you lose the opportunity to capture/kill/loot the fleeing units. This way there is a cost to the option. Make enemies flee automatically if a certain % (based on the average bravery of the remaining units?) have been killed and there has been no encounter with the player's force for X turn (meaning the player lost contact) instead of a decision for the player and you get an extra incentive for not camping. Why the hell would GOs and researchers sit around if you deploy, hide behind smoke and wait to snipe them? You're not following, so they should just run for their lives and get the hell away from the crazy gals with big guns!
HWPs are either more or less mindless or are remote controlled, so self preservation shouldn't be an issue for them and thus they won't flee. Basing things on bravery becomes more believable (if you have a tank/monster still kicking on your side, you're more likely to think you can make it). Or they simply don't disappear when the fleeing units run away.
In fact, if the % and fleeing likelihood were checked for each units, you could do something like:
- Beginning of enemy turn: calculate the % of units remaining
- Upon activation of a given unit, check if unit panics:
- If the unit panic and there are more units than (100-bravery)% of units, panic as usual.
- If the unit panics and there are fewer units remaining than (100-bravery)% of units, unit drops what's in its hands and runs away (unit is removed from the battlefield with all it still carries) (could be limited by requiring that no player units see this unit or having another check with a % chance to run away, something like 100-Current%/Treshold%, so the fewer there are, the more likely units are to run away instead of panicking).
- If the unit doesn't panic but there are less than (100-bravery)/2 % units left, loose some morale. This avoids the "I'm the last one of 20, but nobody died recently so I'm invincible!" syndrome. Over time, this may make isolated but otherwise brave units run away any ways, as even the most iron willed soldier should eventually recognize defeat. The truly brainwashed can be given bravery 100+ which makes it impossible for the unit to flee (can't have less than 0% of units left if that unit is left))
- Otherwise (no panic, lots of units left) business as usual.
Doing this, you get rid of the annoying last GO/Researcher/Neophyte sulking in the toilets (but also lose their loot/ransom, although that's not much of a loss), but the last chryssalid/merc is likely to stay and mess you up. And you get situations like Researchers running away while the Osiron security guards and cyberdiscs cover them. You can also use the mechanic with animals (scorpions? And some of Solarius' beasties in the XCom-Files potentially) as they would flee from danger, even though surrender makes little sense for them.
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Ideally we should have both mechanics.
- Enemies who recognize there is no point in further fighting, would escape (no, without throwing their weapons away). They try to disengage, and if everyone left alive is disengaged, they will flee. Or they can flee individually by reaching the edge of the map or their deploy points?
- Enemies who cannot escape/do not believe in escaping would try to surrender. (Enemies who dropped weapons at least once. either due to panic or dropping unconscious, count as willing to surrender?). Naturally there are voices that the player should be able to go all 'murder them ALL!' option and refuse. But if surrender was forced on the player, it'd be harder to play 'shoot Muton with pistols for Reactions' game.
- Mindless beasts like Reapers, if bereft of masters, are too stupid to surrender or flee. Robotic drones like tanks, and monsters like Chryssalids do not fear anything. Both groups will fight to the death, out of stupidity or programming.
Threshold conditions for escape/surrender are naturally not easy to fine-tune.
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I was seeing "fleeing" as more of a "OMG let's get out of here everyone is getting murdered" type response than "hang onto your gun and retreat", given that even normal panicking units do drop their guns currently. Of course, there could be a "retreat" behavior (where units keep their guns and potentially shoot back on the way out) on top of "flee" (drop the gun and run for it, hence why I suggested the unit just disappears, but running to the map edge works too) and "surrender".
I did not take the time to distinguish between retreat and flee, because the difference is not that big for adding yet another layer to the AI. Same with surrendering. Of all the mechanic, flee encompasses the most to me, and allows to reduce the boredom while remaining some cost (as opposed to surrender, which has no cost).
But I understand that your response started with "Ideally", so if we're dreaming up a system, we might as well dream up a big one with all the different responses :D
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Well, I've always interpreted dropping guns as willingness to surrender (although there is no mechanic for that)... It simply cannot be logically explained otherwise. If you were chased by some murderous bastards, and fleeing for your life, dropping your gun would be the last thing you'd do...
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But what if it made you run faster?
Arguably, guns may not be all that encumbering, but I'd still expect untrained people to drop them and run. Especially in Piratez where the gals are often pretty much immune to the guns of panicky units (or in vanilla facing alien terrors playing with your brains in the dark). Dropping it may only increases your chance to run away by 1%, but if it has 0.1% chance of taking out the threat before you get killed, it's still the wiser choice.
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- Mindless beasts like Reapers, if bereft of masters, are too stupid to surrender or flee. Robotic drones like tanks, and monsters like Chryssalids do not fear anything. Both groups will fight to the death, out of stupidity or programming.
Just to clarify, I assume that drones/Chryssalids will surrender with their masters though, like Reapers?
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Having a Huge, Slavering, Bipedal, Stomping, Eating Machine on your side tends to lend a certain amount of temporary courage to a situation, I feel :D
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But what if it made you run faster?
Dropping it may only increases your chance to run away by 1%, but if it has 0.1% chance of taking out the threat before you get killed, it's still the wiser choice.
True, as the last thing, you'll drop it, maybe... But what benefit is from escaping, if you end up lost in the wilderness without a gun? And while citing border cases (untrained, stupid, scared out of their minds people) lends credibility to this, they're just that - border cases, not a typical battle situation. An engine should, IMO, focus on typical situations, not border cases. Sure, it might be different for vanilla X-Com - there dropping guns can be interpreted as supreme confusion reaction, not that uncommon when fighting alien horrors that play with your mind (or when being a disoriented battle-clone shown outta ship to kill some weirdos on an alien world).
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I guess living in the 26th century Piratez world is quite different from living in 21st century Canada ;)
Good point! Expecting Piratez "civilian" units to behave in the middle of nowhere like I'd expect Canadians to behave in Canada isn't quite accurate.
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Possible conditions for surrender.
- The player occupies the objective (if one exists) and no active enemies are occupying the objective. (UFO, Temple, Warehouse, ect)
- If no geographical objective exists, At least half of the enemies are dead or unconscious.
- The player has taken proportionately less losses than the enemy (IE, if the player had 8 gals, and four are dead/unconscious, then they have taken 50% losses. If there are 16 enemies, than the player will have to kill or disable at least 9 of them)
- None of the player's Gals are have panicked, berserked, or been mind controlled on the last turn.
- The enemy has not been seen (and visa versa) for several turns.
Alternately, all remaining enemies panicking on the same turn is an interesting compromise.
At any rate, the player should be given the choice of ending the mission or not, and escaped units should not be worth points. IDK about dropping loot or not.
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My only issue with all enemies panicking is that on mansion missions that last person that i spend forever tracking down doesn't like to panic usually. Might be a good idea though.
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How about a triangulation feature? If you manage to drop a triangulation device in all four corners of the map, you get the location of all enemy units.
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How about a triangulation feature? If you manage to drop a triangulation device in all four corners of the map, you get the location of all enemy units.
That's actually clever!
Good points:
- Only useable if you really dominate the map.
- Even if you do not dominate, the information is limited.
Bad points:
- The corner may be blocked. Oh well, tough.
I think this idea deserves some thought, with two additions:
1) The enemy location isn't absolute, only approximated.
2) The device can be placed near the corner, not necessarily on the very edge.
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Well, this is like a motion scanner with longer range that also picks up stationary units?
You don't need to encircle something by triangulation, you just need three readings (and even two will go a long way). Tweaking the current motion scanner interface to enable longer range and recognition of allied units would be good. Then you can make an item that uses 100% of tus to add one "scan", when you reach 3 scans, the UI pop-up, scaled for the whole map (or the minimap pops with enemy units marked).
The problem is that you could use this from first turn, so I guess the idea of requiring corners is pretty necessary despite having no mathematical basis. It would work if direction is said to be really inaccurate.
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I think automatic recognition of allied units would defeat their purpose... Confusing the player.
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Feature: Trivial mission check
If they have no weapons that can harm your best armor, the mission should be an autowin with everything captured. Because you could just run around with that invincible gal and knock everything unconscious.
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But how would you grind up risk free Reactions by beating the shit out of civvies with your Fun Police(tm)? ...aside from of course gaming the system by having someone use a baseline armour/outfit.
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Anything that cuts down on some of the tedium that comes with the mod is great.
I like the idea of enemy surrender when everyone has panicked. We are supposed to be pirates, after all. At some point the Royal Navy throws down their muskets and gives up the ship without us having to knock them all on the head.
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But how would you grind up risk free Reactions by beating the shit out of civvies with your Fun Police(tm)? ...aside from of course gaming the system by having someone use a baseline armour/outfit.
If you can't be hurt, you're not stressed, you're not training. Which is shortened into: showing up, immediate surrender because nobody can hurt you. The "trivial mission" check is a pretty good idea. Although many enemies have grenades and it might not happen very often that they have nothing that can hurt anyone.
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Easiest it would be to make it score-related. Each deployment would have some score value, and if your last month or compounded, or some sort of hidden derived score (multipled by your numbers, for example) is high enough, you auto-win (with some random rolls involved). If no score value, autowin is disabled.
The same deploy-score mechanics can be used for surrender mechanics. As soon as average enemy Morale is say, 40 or less, at the start of their turn, they make a roll, only against double or 1.5 score. If they fail, you get a prompt with plea to surrender, ending mission with full capture if you accept, and continuing with some score hit if you don't.
If we add a time limit to board a landed UFO, we'll have a much smoother gameplay altogether.
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If you can't be hurt, you're not stressed, you're not training. Which is shortened into: showing up, immediate surrender because nobody can hurt you. The "trivial mission" check is a pretty good idea. Although many enemies have grenades and it might not happen very often that they have nothing that can hurt anyone.
Beating up on a dummy counts as training, especially if it's moving and trying to dodge your vicious blows.
I do like the surrender probability being a function of your infamy though.
That said, if you refuse an enemy surrender, crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBGOQ7SsJrw), wouldn't that effectively _increase_ your score as a function of infamy (also would reward you for doing things the 'hard way')?
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Hard way? More like farm way, lol.
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Hard way? More like farm way, lol.
Hey man, you roll the dice enough and bad shit eventually happens.