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Messages - MKSheppard

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196
Work In Progress / Re: [Experimental] Modular rulesets
« on: March 19, 2013, 02:32:00 am »
Any progress towards replacement text strings in the rulesets or are you just waiting until after OXCOM is finally pretty much completable and done for this "chrome"?

197
Work In Progress / Re: [Experimental] Modular rulesets
« on: March 18, 2013, 11:42:12 pm »
Can you comment in Rulesets, e.g.:

https://This is a comment?

198
Offtopic / Re: Detailed Critique of UFO 2012 Remake by Firaxis
« on: December 31, 2012, 08:22:19 am »
I think this is less "I want you to make hard decisions!" and more "I want you to use classes!". Supports get perks to carry extra medkits, Heavies get perks to carry extra grenades, etc.

That makes no sense. It would make more logical sense to have it so that everyone has the option to carry extra grenades or medikits at the cost of less weapons -- and concentrate the classes/perks on actual skills; like there being a perk for the 'General' class that goes:

I'm a Doctor, not a... in which medikits heal 2-3x the HP of normal use.

etc.

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I think there's even an "extra item slot" perk, so once your rookies level up the inventory system isn't limiting at all, you just have to put the right equipment on the right class.

Checking the UFOPedia; the extra item slot perk is found only on the Support Class, and you have to reach Major rank to unlock it.

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This is exactly what happens in all games with classes. :P I think it's a gameplay vs. realism thing. If you don't force players to value particular classes by making them clearly distinct, they will just start min-maxing the hell out of their average classes into the one-size-fits-all perfect builds, instead of actually choosing depending on the situation and dealing with opportunity costs.

That's why you make the obvious classes have obvious perks, like the heavy weapons class has 30% accuracy to firing heavy weapons and 30% more damage with heavy weapons from the start.

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I understand only the Heavy can hold heavy weapons and only the Sniper can properly aim sniper weapons. What I don't get is why they can't hold anything else. It should be "this weapon can only be used by this class", not "this class can only use this weapon". Why can't my Heavy use a regular rifle? Are his arms too bulky and musclar to be able to hold a regular rifle without snapping it in two? Using a worse weapon should be penalty enough.

This is actually pretty bad, because I once had a mission where everyone but my sniper died during an UFO assault, and I couldn't have him drop his scoped rifle for something more appropriate for close quarters combat inside the UFO.

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This problem rears its ugly head when you're researching new weapons, because you need to research every type individually. This means when you get Laser Rifles, which are by all means better than old dusty human weapons, only 50% of your classes can actually use them, and the other 50% will just sit on their shitty weapons until they get their particular brand of Heavy Laser or Laser Sniper or whatever.

I actually had this problem to an extent. I was able to equip everyone with plasma weapons (Pistol, rifle, light rifle, heavy plasma, Plasma Cannon for fighters), but my Snipers continued to use laser rifles because I didn't have enough weapon fragments to research the sniper rifle!

Uhhh....I'd think after researching 90% of the Plasma tech tree, my researchers would seem to know how to design a plasma sniper rifle!

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And when you reach the endgame you find yourself still carrying old starting game Rocket Launchers because their only replacement has a 1:1000000000000000000000 chance of showing up at all.

Or might not even show up at all I think if you're playing on easy.

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Um, there's plenty of perks that give you more actions (shoot twice, shoot after dash, reaction fire twice, snipe twice, etc).

Those are fairly late-soldier perks. Which basically leave you screwed if you lose your high ranking classed-up troops.

This is what I hate the most in the game -- that they didn't listen to eighteen years of suggestions for X-COM regarding soldier management -- like adding a barracks management menu screen where I could have set up a rotation pattern, so that everyone would be moving ahead in the ranks fairly uniformly, instead of five guys getting all the kills because it was too much work to manually change out your squad before each mission.

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And lighter armors let you move more.

So that stupid 'grapple hook' armor is actually useful for more than a grapple hook? I never researched it because I didn't need that dumb gimmick that I saw in the Research blurb.

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Despite the performance screen you get at the end of the month, the only thing that makes countries panic in the new XCOM is ignored/failed missions.

With Alien Abductions, etc. you get given a choice of three missions. You can only do one; and thus lower panic in that country/continent. Panic then rises in the other two countries/continents that you didn't save.

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And to clarify, easier difficulties do reduce the amount of aliens you can simultaneously engage, just not the total.

I don't seem to think it's working that way; not with the enormous number of targets that got thrown at me in the late game phase on easy.

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And Chrysalids do not lose their Implantation ability on easier difficulties, they just have a reduced chance of zombifying off-screen (eg. terror missions).

In the old original series; Chryssalids in a terror site would result in a lot of chryssalid zombies, which would then spawn. I got the zombies, but not the "burst free of zombie corpse when you kill it."

Who knows, it might be a bug or something.

199
Offtopic / Re: Detailed Critique of UFO 2012 Remake by Firaxis
« on: December 31, 2012, 07:44:56 am »
wasn't the XBox was released in 2001?

Yes, the original XBrick was released then. But it's with the XBrick 360 that things got pretty insane. I tend to date the XBrick 360 as when consolization became mainstream, due to the enormous costs required up front to develop for a next-gen console.

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yay and nay, i'd say it's done more harm than good. while it has forced developers to "simplify" their control schemes, it has also forced them to do the same to the interface.

It's actually quite painful to try to change large amounts of troop equipment out, due to the way they do it like this (see attachment).

There's no way to bring up a spreadsheet like screen where you can rapidly use drop down menus to change equipment over large amounts of personnel; important if you have 30 men, and just 5 high end suits of armor, which you need to reallocate between people as people get wounded.

BTW; if you look at the second attached JPEG, you'll see why I got so pissed off by the inflexibility of the slot system -- it's clear that she's got a frag grenade strapped to her left leg, and a pistol strapped to her right leg; so why can't I leave the pistol at home for another frag grenade or medikit?????

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2 actions per turn is a concept any idiot can comprehend, 30 time units and percentage calculations are completely abstract concepts that you'd need some sort of education to grasp.

Actually, simplifying the actions worked out pretty well and they integrated it well with the user interface -- when you select a unit, you see two radiuses of tiles around them -- BLUE and YELLOW. Blue represents how far you can move in one action point -- yellow is if you use all two APs.

So if you want to stop and do overwatch, move within the inner blue radius. If you want to dash as fast as you can, move in the outer yellow radius.

They just needed to work on the system a little bit more to add a touch more granularity to the system, such as maybe one more action point or going to a four AP system (based off the 25% TU per shot for the original XCOM1 rifle) and adjusting things around that.

I also liked the new cover system, where people automatically knelt down and took cover when they were next to something, without you having to click on a "kneel" button.

Now that I think about it, my big gripe about the new movement system is that overwatch was not the default state if you didn't issue an order.

It should have been rekeyed so that overwatch was the default state, and you had to push a button/key to do nothing. This would represent the actual use of the commands more; because you'll use overwatch ALL the time, whereas you won't want your guys to do anything only a few times -- like when you want them to hold fire so that they don't kill a critically wounded alien, so that you can stun it with an arc thrower.

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do you have any idea how many numbers are involved there? lots of them, really big ones too.

To be honest, I never actually counted TUs. I just set my 'reserve TU counter' to 'reserve TUs for snapshot' and moved my units.

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besides, that's WAY too much text to put on one screen. you'd have to make the font smaller, and since everyone will be sitting on the couch on the other side of the room when they play this, that's clearly not an option.

That's actually a serious point to be made about the UI. It was clearly designed to be visible on 720p resolution from across the room, and as such, wastes a lot of valuable interface space for that.

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the chryssalids? ok, now i'm mad. grenades, sure, but neutering Chryssalids? unforgivable

I know!

200
Offtopic / Re: Detailed Critique of UFO 2012 Remake by Firaxis
« on: December 29, 2012, 04:02:08 am »
Oh god, I can't believe I completely forgot the aerial interception business.

You can't gang up on a battleship with more than one craft anymore!

You instead, have to send interceptor after interceptor piecemeal each one slowly whittling away at the enemy craft; until you down it, with all of the interceptors sustaining heavy damage as a result, instead of sending multiple interceptors to split the enemy fire so that each one takes less damage.

HWP/SHIV

I'm kind of mixed on this. I like the fact that your SHIVs get upgraded with the latest weaponry automatically, once you research that -- e.g. no having to re-buy or re-build your SHIVs from mini guns to lasers when they come out -- but they really should be available from the start of the game, particularly since XCOM EU is set in 2015; and we've had all sorts of drones deployed in the various wars in the middle east in real life, and a lot of countries are experimenting right now with armed ground vehicles for installation defense.

201
Offtopic / Detailed Critique of UFO 2012 Remake by Firaxis
« on: December 29, 2012, 03:44:22 am »
My brother passed me over his copy, and I just beat it after about 25 hours.

This game is a good example of how consoles have helped and hurt PC gaming over the last what, six years.

We've been helped because consoles have forced an oasis of stability into the PC gaming world for a long time -- I've been able to play a lot of A++ titles on my PC for the last couple of years, despite my PC having been built circa 2007.

[I splurged and got 8GB of RAM and a Core 2 Quad, paid a little bit more for long term sustainability]

The limited controllability of console gamepads compared to a Keyboard+Mouse has also forced game designers to simplify their schemes. This has been for the most part, somewhat useful.

Why?

Because it forces designers to consider what is important and what's not in terms of detail; something I approve of, now that I'm in my thirties, and I find my patience for irritating stuff much reduced over my teenage years.

Back then, I could put up with a lot of irritating clicky clicky stuff.

Now?

Putting up with that kind of stuff feels too much like work.

The problem is that 'consolitis' at times goes overboard and destroys useful options/stuff; and you see this issue throughout XCOM ENEMY UNKNOWN.

The most blatant example of 'consolitis' that appears in the game is the completely stupid geoscape base system and satellite system. There's no reason for it really to exist, when UFO/TFTD managed to do the job just fine nearly 20 years ago and allowed us to place our starting base exactly anywhere in the world that we wanted.

Area 51? Done.
Superman-like Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic? Done.
Hidden in the Swiss Alps? Done.

And it also let you place the base near your home, for added role playing 'involvement'.

So why is the XCOM EU base placement system the way it is, with much less functionality? Here's a hint -- because XCOM EU came out for 360 and PS3.

Try accurately placing a new base on a world map with a controller. It's really tricky and hard.

The new base selection screen and satellite system not coincidentally can be done with the restricted non-precision control that a console player with a gamepad has.

Onto more specific issues:

The streamlining of the inventory system into slots and other suchlike.

I liked the fact that you no longer needed to build storage space, or have to keep track of your initial starting stuff like Avalanche Missiles, LMGs, or rifle clips.

This made sense because an international unit of elite operatives funded by the entire world would not run out of warehouse space to store the Ark of the Covenant and they'd most certainly wouldn't run out of 7.62mm ammunition or machine guns.

I also liked some of the aspects of the inventory system streamlining related to your operatives themselves, in terms of reducing inventory to a bunch of slots; which were:

Slot 1: Main Weapon (Class Specific)
Slot 2: Sidearm
Slot 3: Class Specific Item (Rocket Launcher/Smoke Grenade)
Slot 4: Miscellaneous (Medkit, Grenade, etc)

The problem was the slot system was totally inflexible. It meant you couldn't carry a frag grenade and a medikit at the same time.

Shep: "Hey, Mr. Solomon, why can't we carry a grenade and medikit at the same time?"

Jake Solomon: "Because I want you to make hard decisions!"

Shep: "If making hard decisions is what you want, why can't we swap out other slots, such as the sidearm or class-specific items? Your character could carry a medikit and frag grenade at the same time, or up to three medikits, but you'd have to give up item slots -- like your heavy weapons soldier would have to give up his sidearm and rocket launcher?"

Jake Solomon: "Because I want you to make hard decisions!"

Shep: "Uh, you also do realize that there's all sorts of stuff like load-bearing vests in real life that integrate pouches and rings that you can clip stuff onto to increase your load carrying capability?"

Jake Solomon: "STFU, you'll get that single special item slot and you'll like it!"

With the new inventory system, a major gameplay element of the original was also removed. In the original, you could have your soldiers pick up items on the battlescape and equip them.

This led to many fun possibilities:

1.) You could actually execute a snatch and grab mission in UFO/TFTD that was not about recovering an UFO, but sending your men out to tag and bag an alien whose corpse/unconscious body would be picked up and humped onto the Skyranger and the mission aborted. You wouldn't get the full points value of recovering the UFO, but you'd get vitally needed researchable items.

2.) Reallocating weapons amongst the squad due to losses. This enabled you to keep specialist weapons even if the person originally carrying them was killed.

This was highly useful during alien capture missions because if your 'stunner' was killed, you could pick up the weapon and continue on with the mission.

In XCOM EU if your Arc Thrower equipped squaddie is killed; you're screwed. Reload the game or just accept that you've failed the mission objectives.

It's a major suspension of disbelief breaker to believe that a highly trained operative can't pick up items on the ground. It also leads to unnecessary mission deaths which could be avoided in the original -- e.g. a soldier picks up a medikit that a bleeding-out fallen soldier was carrying, and applies it to keep them from bleeding out -- something you can't do in the remake due to the locked inventory.

The Class System for Soldiers.

At first glance, the class based system has a lot to recommend it. It enables you to keep all the weapons useful throughout the game, instead of everyone going for the Heavy Plasma and ignoring everything else.

The problem is, like the inventory slot system, the class-system is so inflexible.

Snipers are the only ones who can fire a sniper rifle,
Heavies are the only ones who can fire a rocket launcher or LMG/Heavy Laser/Heavy Plasma, etc.

In real life, there's a lot of cross-training between special forces operators (which is what XCOM would be drawing its soldiers from); in order to accomodate possible mission losses -- if your mission was to blow a bridge on a river up, you wouldn't want to abort the mission because your demolitions guy's parachute didn't open during insertion.

If your only sniper gets killed early on in a mission, that's it. There's no flexibility in the system that allows you to have a heavy weapons soldier pick up the dropped sniper rifle and fire it (albet with a penalty).

Also, there's too many classes -- while it's easy to find a plausible explanation for the Sniper and Heavy classes, due to the specialized training/physical skills needed (fine motor control to snipe and physical strength to lug a 20+ pound LMG across a field)...

...why are Assault and Support separate classes?

Wouldn't it be better to combine them into a "Standard" class that can do either role, depending on their equipment?

The new movement/fire system

After a lot of initial irritation, I actually got used to it and it worked pretty well, particularly once I remapped the "overwatch" button to be the spacebar.

The problem was that it was so limited. You were always limited to two actions, no matter what. You couldn't gain a perk that gave you three actions, or powered armor that boosted your movement.

----------------------------

Major Issues I Had

Squaddies having to gain experience to get a class assigned

This was something that was kind of cool at the beginning of the game, then quickly became irritating, moreso when you send out four rookies on a mission to get experience and find out their classes...and ALL FOUR BECOME SNIPERS.

This is kind of tied into the trope of 'XCOM hires rookies'.

As director of XCOM, you should be able to send out requests for personnel and get a monthly roster of people from contributing countries to pick from -- like this month, the USA has Lt. Schmuckatelli available, he's a SEAL Team Six trained sniper, blah blah blah.

Player no longer has freedom to hire/fire scientists/engineers

This reduces your free will and forces even more pre-planning onto the player; since a lot of stuff now has minimum requirements to be built/researched, etc.

You must choose from three abduction/terror sites at a time, and can only complete one mission at a time

This basically means no matter what happens, even on the easiest mode, countries start dropping out fairly early. This is pretty irritating, because it's not due to your actions, but due to game design decisions.

I mean, I could understand it if I couldn't complete a terror site mission because I didn't budget for a second skyranger to handle simultaneous raids, or because I was so wasteful with my soldiers that I didn't have enough men left to fight a terror mission, but this? This is punching me in the face!

Nerfed AI

This is a major issue I have. Apparently on the easiest level (which is still pretty damned hard), they turn off a lot of the AI, and disable most grenade use and special attacks like Chyssalid Implantations.

Meanwhile, it appears they still keep the same amount of aliens in a crashed ship as they do on the harder difficulty levels.

So...yeah.

Sloooow speed of movement

There's no option for "fast movement" or "Fast combat", particularly important if you want to make a methodical advance to avoid casualties. I guess Firaxis had to find their "25+ hour gameplay" metric somewhere, and this was it....watching people walk over and over and over....ugh.

202
Suggestions / Re: (after 1.0) Sun and Moon
« on: December 18, 2012, 05:04:29 pm »
show the moon? where? like moon phase "sign" or like 5 pixels occasionally showing in narrow sector far behing the Earth when rotating planet (with no zoom)?

I like the moon phase sign. It's simple, clear and unambiguous -- we're all familiar with how the phases of the moon work in real life. It would become another factor in executing a mission -- "Yeah, it's at night, BUT it's a full moon, meaning we can see better."

203
Suggestions / Automated Skyranger Squad Adjustment in between missions
« on: December 18, 2012, 05:02:08 pm »
I've been playing the XCOM reboot on Steam recently (my brother apparently gifted me his copy); and one thing that would be a very desired feature for Open XCOM after 1.0 is this:

Automatic Skyranger Squad Adjustment Option

When toggled ON, after each mission, have the game juggle in and out troopers according to some parameters you set (how many veterans do you want in a squad, etc) so that you have a fresh rotating mixture of rookies/lower ranking soldiers and old hands on each mission, instead of five really good guys getting all the kills; and thus leaving you boned if you lose them.

Yes, you can do this all by hand in the Original XCOM, Open XCOM, and the XCOM Steam Reboot; but it gets a bit tedious.

204
Open Feedback / Re: Next version number (0.5)
« on: December 09, 2012, 03:25:50 pm »
If I was doing it, I'd go:

0.75 -- Completable game. We *think* we got all the bugs.

0.9 -- So we missed a couple things; like the game reformatting your hard drive:

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Myth II installer bug

The original version of the Myth II: Soulblighter contained a serious bug. The bug was that the CD contained an uninstaller which would remove Myth from a computer by deleting the directory in which it had been installed. If the user had overridden the default and installed Myth to the root level of his hard drive, the uninstaller would delete the entire contents of the user's hard drive.
 
This bug was caught after Myth II CDs had been sent out and also duplicated and boxed to ship to stores. Bungie employees went to the factory, tore open the boxes, and replaced the faulty CDs with new CDs on which the uninstaller bug had been fixed. Luckily, only the marketing person who discovered the bug had his hard drive wiped. Martin O' Donnell confirmed all this data in an episode of the Bungie Podcast.

But we fixed them; so enjoy 0.9!

1.0 -- No major bugs have emerged since 0.9 was released; so here's 1.0.

It's worth noting that OpenTTD; one of the best Open Source games, took three years (2007-2010) to go from 0.5x to 1.0x releases; and the full reimplementation was released as 0.1x

{rambling off}

205
Work In Progress / Re: OpenXcom - War
« on: November 22, 2012, 01:07:00 am »
Another thing that could be tried out is an unique type of weapon that replaces WeaponType: STUN for Warboy Mod:

Let me explain:

Currently, the stun weapon that humanity starts the game out is kind of dumb.

It's literally a cattle prod; despite the fact that in 1999, we had taser guns, rubber bullets, bean bag rounds, etc in police arsenals to try and stop people non lethally.

In 1999, Taser International developed an "ergonomically handgun-shaped device called the ADVANCED TASER M-series systems"

In military arsenals, there were a couple of gas weapons of possible use for an X-COM type organisation:

BZ Gas --In small doses, this makes you stupid, literally. You take your clothes off and mumble incoherently. At higher doses, you get knocked unconscious. Available since at least the 1960s.

Kolokol-1 Agent -- Kolokol-1 takes effect within one to three seconds, rendering the subject unconscious for two to six hours. Kills a certain amount of people anyway. Available since at least the 1980s in USSR arsenals.

The problem with just giving humanity a ranged stun weapon from the start of the game from a game design standpoint is this:

If you can just buy tasers or stun grenades off the shelf from the X-COM purchase menu and they are sufficiently good enough...who will ever research/use the Small Launcher?

Thus it becomes an orphaned weapon, like the heavy cannon -- why use it when you can just use the autocannon?

A solution to this would be to more closely define WHAT stun does.

Currently, it's a magic 'knock people unconscious with no ill effects' rating; implemented as such for the stun rod:

Code: [Select]
power: 65
damageType: 6

But what if you coded the game so that stun weapons were more like this?

Code: [Select]
damageType: 666 <-stand in for NEWSTUN
StunPower:  <-- How much stunning power the weapon has
HurtPower:  <-- How much hurt power the weapon has
HumanReaction: <-- Percentage of times that they have an adverse reaction to it
HumanModifier: <-- Multiplier of damage vs that type
SectoidReaction: <-- Percentage of times that they have an adverse reaction to it
SectoidModifier: <-- Multiplier of damage vs that type
MutonReac...
MutonMod...
...
.etc

Basically, you could then implement something like rubber bullets for existing X-COM weapons:

Code: [Select]
damageType: 666 <-stand in for NEWSTUN
StunPower: 7  <-- How much stunning power the weapon has
HurtPower: 4 <-- How much hurt power the weapon has
HumanReaction: 0.18 <-- You have a 18% chance of an incredibly adverse reaction which leads to death each time you use it. For a rubber bullet, it's hitting someone in the head.
HumanModifier: 1 <-- Humans are standard.
SectoidReaction: 0.25 <-- Due to larger head to body ratio of sectoid, you're more likely to cause brain damage with each shot.
SectoidModifier: 1.25 <-- Due to sectoid weak pasty bodies, they get hurt more when shot with rubber bullets
MutonReaction: 0.05 <-- because of their incredible built in body armor, and general stupidity; it's really hard to kill a muton with rubber bullets.
MutonModifier: 0.25 <-- because of their built in body armor, they really don't feel rubber bullets at all.

So basically, a good shot can inflict 7 stun at the same time it subtracts 4 HP from the target's HP reserve; meaning you could actually kill someone, especially if you roll a reaction modifier.

For human BZ-1 knockout gas, it could be something like this:

Code: [Select]
damageType: 666 <-stand in for NEWSTUN
StunPower: 25
HurtPower: 10
HumanReaction: 0.50 <-- You have a 50% chance of an adverse reaction
HumanModifier: 1 <-- Humans are standard.
...

With some variation for each alien race. So it could lead to some unintended hilarity like you find an Ethereal commander and try to stun him with a Gas Grenade; only to find out that he got an adverse reaction to the BZ-1/Kolokol-1 and died, or killing a bunch of civilians who were in a house along with a sectoid...

...and of course, Mutons wading through clouds of BZ-1, completely unaffected.

This way, you could have a range of human stun weapons going from:

Electro-Stun Pistol -- Replaces Cattle Prod as the 1 square stunning weapon. Cheap, lightweight; no X-COM operative should be without one. Mutons are invulnerable due to their thick skin preventing the TASER (the name is copyrighted, so Electro-Stun in game) darts from penetrating, etc. Can stun an alien or human without killing them generally.

Blunt Trauma Clips -- You could have rubber bullets for rifles and bean bag rounds for larger caliber weapons like grenade launchers. This is humanity's early ranged stun device. Kind of a mixed dice. You could knock someone to the ground or you could hit them in the head and kill them. Kind of a roll of a dice.

Gas Grenades -- Wide area, persistent weapon. Could use color-remapped smoke texture. Problem is, the effects would be cumulative like smoke inhalation currently is in the game. So you could end up killing people if you leave them in the gas cloud long enough to have an adverse reaction -- and some targets just die anyway.

And on the Alien side, you'd have the Small Launcher, with it's 100% reliable and safe stun that works on everything, from humans to Mutons without hurting/killing the target; giving players a reason to research and use the small launcher for extremely high value target takedown.

Course, there's a lot more refinement that needs to be done to this idea -- it has to be thrashed out and talked about a lot more, since this would be a major gameplay change, and we don't want to rush into that kind of thing willy-nilly.

206
Work In Progress / Re: OpenXcom - War
« on: November 17, 2012, 06:18:56 pm »
3.) Enhanced Proximity Grenades and Motion Detector.

Let me explain.

As it is, researching and autopsying aliens currently is useful for some fluff, but we all know what is what by heart by now and we just autopsy them for the points boost at the end of the month; and capturing live aliens gives you no benefit except for the crucial COMMANDER(s) that you need to unlock Cydonia.

But what if we made autopsies/alien captures unlock better equipment? One area where better equipment comes to mind (and could be accomplished with sprite recoloring) is the Motion Detector and Proximity Grenade:

Motion Detector/Prox Grenade Mk I: As we have them in XCOM now. Unable to differentiate between civilians/aliens. Blow up anyone who passes nearby.

Motion Detector/Prox Grenade Mk II: We've videotaped and analyzed the motion, gait, IR signature, etc of aliens that we have captured; so we now offer you this new model. It can tell you if that's a human or alien. Likewise, the prox grenade shouldn't blow up a human. Most of the time....(error rate of 50% or so). Maybe a bit more range.

Motion Detector/Prox Grenade Mk III: Accuracy has improved, and we can now tell what type of alien we detected. Grenades can be set to a specific species of alien, so you can have prox grenades target chyssalids only. A little bit more range over the Mk II.

207
Work In Progress / Re: OpenXcom - War
« on: November 17, 2012, 06:12:43 pm »
So WarBoy, since you're coding stuff; how about these suggestions?

1.) Adding multiple weapons (Up to say four?) for HWPs.

Basically, making HWPs a bit more useful; in that you have something that can roll out the Skyranger ramp, start hosing down the landscape with HE shells, then seamlessly switch over to IN shells to set on fire a building. Then a bunch of sectoids wander into your HWP's FoV and you fire off a large rocket at them.

In real life, many autocannons (and some heavy machine guns) have dual feeds; allowing you to switch from AP rounds to HE rounds with a flick of a switch; and an increasing amount of light vehicles now carry expendable ATGM launchers on the sides of their turrets.

2.) Making some kind of directional blast grenade code -- one idea I had was to replace the current kind of useless HIGH EXPLOSIVE charge with a more useful item that is directional, and can breach UFO walls; making that item useful to the player -- instead of throwing the charge, you can walk up to an UFO exterior wall, face it, prime the SHAPE CHARGE, drop it, and the next turn it fires and has a 50% chance of knocking down an alien wall in front of it.

208
Work In Progress / Re: [Experimental] Modular rulesets
« on: October 20, 2012, 05:14:50 pm »
Luke83, that picture is... :o ;D

209
Work In Progress / Re: [Experimental] Modular rulesets
« on: October 18, 2012, 11:58:22 pm »
Would it be possible to combine this with the UFOPedia entry as well? e.g. you can add the following string at the end of your definition:

Code: [Select]
STR_INTERCEPTOR_UFOPEDIA
COMBAT AIRCRAFT WITH HYDROGEN TURBORAMJET ENGINES AND SPECIALLY SHIELDED ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS.  THE BEST AVAILABLE EARTH BASED TECHNOLOGY.

It would replace the stock text?

210
Suggestions / Re: Quick suggestion: Ethereals without guns
« on: September 30, 2012, 08:01:33 pm »
I like it. Alternately, you could make a variant of this where the Ethereals are completely weaponless except for their psonic powers, which have been beefed up a bit or reduced in TU cost, so they can attack you more often.

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