Topics

16

Suggestions / Character portraits on soldier stat screens, or gender field

« on: December 23, 2012, 11:11:22 pm »

When it comes to certain default soldier names, sometimes it's hard to distinguish men from women, which can lead those who like to rename their soldiers to sometimes giving names which are exclusive to the opposite gender. To avoid this, and to make it easier to identify soldiers in general, I would like to propose a simple two-fold solution: either add a gender field, or a character portrait in the soldier stat screen. Here's a quick MSpainted mock up:



And here's the original, in comparison

17

Suggestions / Rebalancing armor

« on: December 10, 2012, 03:35:32 am »

Since with the next version the game will be fully playable, I believe it's time for us to discuss some things that could be added to the so-called enhanced mode.

One thing I would really like to see would be a whole rebalance of armor role as to make soldier customization more strategically interesting. To put it blunty:

Personal Armor: increased mobility (superior to no armor), with only average protection
Power Suit: Strongest protection, but reduced mobility.
Flying Suit: Not-so-strong protection (inferior to power suit, but still superior to personal armor), average mobility, flying.

This rebalance essentially emphasizes soldier roles according to the armor they wear. A Scout would benefit from wearing Personal Armor over a Power Suit, for instance. Heavier armors could also reduce peripheral visibility, while having the advantage of built-in shoulder lamps which would allow easier illumination at night. Additionally, I also believe there should be a severe aiming penalty to be added, whenever a soldier is hovering with the flying suit.

Agree/disagree? Thoughts on this matter?

18

Suggestions / Quick suggestion: Ethereals without guns

« on: September 20, 2012, 09:18:24 pm »

Here's a quick suggestion to make ethereals an even more interesting and dangerous race to battle: replace all weapons (save for blaster launchers and other explosives) with some kind of psionic beam fired from their hands, which equals the damage and precision of a heavy plasma. This would make it impossible to completely disarm a Ethereal, and would also make your task extra-hard if your men are running short on ammo, and could use a few extra clips snatched from enemy corpses.

Added to that, I always thought most weapons looked a bit off on Ethereals, given their ominous, wizard-like appearance.

Love/hate? Any thoughts?

19

Suggestions / Creating a Tutorial

« on: January 20, 2012, 07:16:34 pm »

While X-COM has a fairly sizeable fan community that still manages to keep growing after all these years, I still find that most beginners seem to run into trouble with getting started with the two original games. Everytime I introduce the game to a friend, I often get bombarded with questions on how to do this or that. It is true the game's learning curve is not necessarily the steepest there is, but I also don't think it to be exactly comfortable for new players to figure it out without fully reading the game manual (which is rarely available) or asking someone for help. So I propose that we, as a community, reach out to all new players out there, and create a simplified X-COM in-game tutorial to be incorporated as part of OpenXcom.

My idea is to create a 3 part tutorial covering the following game events:

Tutorial 1

• Basic Geoscape and base management controls
• Basic research
• Simulation of a UFO interception

Tutorial 2

• Battlescape tutorial

Tutorial 3

• Advanced base management
• Advanced research tree
• Troop management and stats
• "End of the Month" screen and foreign relations