Messages

46

Suggestions / Re: Sensor Mode for Proximity Grenade

« on: April 26, 2015, 03:40:08 pm »

Oh, this sounds like a really nice addition.

Well thought up!

47

Open Feedback / Re: Another newbie question, this one on radars

« on: April 23, 2015, 05:58:54 pm »

The range of the decoder is the outermost circle when you're placing your initial base. It isn't much bigger than a Large Radar but the 100% chance more than makes up for it.

Makes up for it?
It's large enough to cover most continents, if it were much bigger it would be too big in my opinion.

48

Fan-Stuff / Re: How the...

« on: April 18, 2015, 11:54:40 pm »

unfortunately i can't inject a human brain into the AI. it will never be capable of creative thinking like that.

What if we take a really, really stupid person who's not creative at all?

49

Playthroughs / Re: Jstank's Final Mod Pack Lets Play

« on: April 10, 2015, 03:05:14 pm »

Really nice mission, with some amazing moments.

I am wondering why you take so many rocket launchers. From all the rockets you shot, there was only one shot where the explosion maybe helped, and even in that case you could have been equally well off with a grenade. You could have given those soldiers a lighter weapon and a stun rod instead!

50

Suggestions / Re: Smarter Civilian AI?

« on: April 08, 2015, 09:51:42 pm »

So leave it.
OpenXcom doesn't want to please all your ideas. It meant to give non bugged and scalable REPLICA of the vanilla. Vanilla gameplay modifying "enhancements" are not really welcome.

Yet there are a ton of enhancements in the advanced options menu, amazing mod support and even changes (call them bug fixes if you must) to the vanilla gameplay.
For not wanting any enhancements, you surely enable an awful lot of them.

51

Suggestions / Re: Smarter Civilian AI?

« on: April 07, 2015, 12:15:56 pm »

Civilians can't control lines of fire. It's simply impossible. Why should they ease your life?

Civilians do a damn good job at making terror sites unique and terrifying. You hearing some plasma fire off in the distance, followed by a blood-curling scream really adds to the atmosphere of the mission.
They also do a damn good job of enticing different gameplay - you take a few more risks in order to save as many civilians as you can.
These two are very good effects of having civilians present.

But every once in a while, civilians just become a huge liability. They wander around, mess up your battle lines, get in the way of fighting and are just plain annoying. They don't break the game too much, they just add a random factor to the fight that really doesn't add anything - when a civilian is present, they may just mess up your plans and/or cause casualties.
This effect isn't good. I don't think that something that is little more than annoying has any place in a game, and as such I think this behavior is a prime candidate for some modification. Something like having spotted civilians run towards the skyranger (unless they panic, they are still civvies, after all) would be a great plan.

In short, they don't have to make my job easier. They just need to stop making my job more annoying.
(And honestly, there've been situations where I just shot a civilian because I didn't want to risk it messing up everything.)(That's bad.)

52

Suggestions / Re: Smarter Civilian AI?

« on: April 07, 2015, 08:50:14 am »

Oh, no no  no.
They don't run away from danger. They run into my damn line of fire and block my path.

Ideally, Xcom should get control of any civilian that is within line of sight of any trooper (that isn't wearing power armor). A close second would be if they used some kind of sneaky AI that made them hide from the aliens (and perhaps Xcom) more effectively.
At the very least, they shouldn't recover from being stunned (and count as alive) so I can safely stun them.

53

Suggestions / Re: globe fog of war and battlescape fog of war?

« on: April 02, 2015, 03:41:11 am »

You can't see anything going on in countries outside your radar coverage.
All fog of war would do is add large black blotches to the map, really. Every game play element of it is already implemented.

54

Suggestions / Re: globe fog of war and battlescape fog of war?

« on: April 02, 2015, 01:28:43 am »

Sounds like a horrible idea.

You already can't see things if you have no radar in the area, with the exception of discovered bases (which don't move) and terrain (which doesn't move either).

55

Suggestions / Re: Enlarged Minimap

« on: March 31, 2015, 02:51:39 pm »

Sounds like a nice idea, but it seems like it would be really complex to make.

56

Suggestions / Re: power facility that is req for other facilities to operate

« on: March 31, 2015, 02:50:25 pm »

By the same theoram we need to have a command center in the base which will serve only one purpose: As a primary target for a base assault if it gets destroyed, but that will add another uneccesary hassle simmilar to the ones of the power facility (I already explained my position).

Now, now, one hurdle at a time.
We already solved most of the hassle that comes with having to build it seperately. We can talk about comman centers later. (They should probably be part of a radar system.)

57

Work In Progress / Re: [GRAPHICS][ARMORS] Colored armor ''update'' 26/03/2015

« on: March 28, 2015, 02:51:29 pm »

I've been using these armors, and I think they are awesome.

I just had a thought. Keeping a surplus of all armors in stock is getting to be a pain, so I was thinking.
Instead of making each armor seperatly, have them all be a modified power armor.
As in, you craft the power armor first, and then give it a paint job in a new color.
(So producing a colored power armor takes 5 engineer hours and consumes a regular power armor.)

58

Suggestions / Re: power facility that is req for other facilities to operate

« on: March 28, 2015, 02:09:41 pm »

From one point of view yes, but then again it's not very elegant design. If the room is not in the game at all, it's fine, since it exists in the "sphere of abstraction", or the part of the world that is not shown at all; but if it's in the game, it should behave properly. It's a tactical game, not The Sims, and you should feel pressed into doing whatever the game allows you to do to make your job easier.

Maybe we should push the devs to make the option that doesn't allow storage above your max space a standard feature of the game. (I think it does improve the game quite a bit.)

It's not that the player won't be able to resist, I just think that giving them this opportunity is simply wrong, as it hurts immersion.

I'm not saying having some kind of penalty for not having the room would be a bad thing (something like having to fight base defense missions in hte dark would be cool), I'm just saying you shouldn't worry about cheaters. There will always be players out there who will take your design to unintended fringes. While you can't ignore them completely, I think it's silly to stress over them too much at the very early design stages.

But neither of these explanations are very persuasive, and moreover I don't understand why we need to be using alien tech from the beginning (which is really non-canon). Why can't we use a normal nuclear reactor? It's certainly good enough.

Yeah, a normal nuclear reactor would probably do just fine. We could just use one of the corners (on both floors) to make it, and make it destructible as well, but only by direct hits from blaster bombs. And if possible, it should blow up spectacularly.

With crappy explanation you get crappy gameplay.

No.
You make gameplay first. Build your concepts, make things fun. Then you come up with explanations, and they can be a little dinky (like construction yards being the only damn building with their own power supply). You should never change good gameplay for the sake of lore. It's something you see in games quite a lot, and (especially in MMOs), it gets patched sooner or later most of the time.
Of course, if your explanation is good enough, you break the rules. No rule should ever be set in stone. Well, stone is perhaps the perfect medium. It's sturdy enough that it resists half-hearted attempts at breaking it, but if you really want to, you can crack it. So set in stone, but not in adamantium.

59

Suggestions / Re: power facility that is req for other facilities to operate

« on: March 27, 2015, 08:04:50 pm »

It never happened to me either, but it's there and needs to be taken into consideration. (It's a bit of a pain really.)

I figured it out. The facilities where I do my fighting (stores and personell, mostly) are indestructible.

Yeah, I'm inclined towards the same solution. But I guess we would need some sort of a drawback for not having the facility on base, to avoid the cheat with somehow removing the building to make more space.

Don't worry about cheaters. This is an optional mod. If they don't wanna deal with it, they can just turn the mod off. If they do want to deal with it they won't cheat (unless they are being stupidsilly, and you don't care about silly people.)

That would require two different buildings, before and after the discovery of UFO Power Source... Perhaps the latter would be cheaper to run? (Pity we can't have buildings consume items on building.)

Nah, just claim that you are using an old power source from a pre-Xcom UFO scratch. It's been modified to output electricity only, and it does that in seemingly endless amounts, but they never figured out anything else about it, and the techs can't have it for disassembly since you need it for the power.
Or it's using a revolutionary new fusion reactor that somehow looks exactly like a UFO power source, aquired at great cost (or liberated) from a rogue nation. (Implying that the aliens have already had some success in infiltration and tech trade missions.)
Or it's just a general, non-revolutionary fusion reactor, but some joker thought it would be funny to make it look just like a UFO component.
Or it's a reactor of some kinds that just uses the rebuilt housing of a damaged power source, since even the housing is more effective at what it does than anything the humans can produce.
I'm sure there are other possibilities, but anything else I come up with now would be overly silly.

Remember - make the in-game explanation fit what you have in mind for the gameplay, not the other way around. Gameplay must always come first.

60

Suggestions / Re: Sneaky AI option

« on: March 27, 2015, 07:53:48 pm »

Yes! More intelligent = more sneaky.