aliens

Author Topic: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs  (Read 7794 times)

Offline Harald_Gray

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[UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« on: July 20, 2015, 11:29:01 pm »
The purpose of this mod is to give the player the option of using miniature 1x1-sized armed Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs, somewhat similar to real-world TALON bots. I'm still not sure there's much need for that but I wouldn't be able to test the idea without actually creating the mod, so...

Any feedback, both positive and negative, is welcome. Try to be gentle regarding the graphics, though. My pixel-art skills suck so I've resorted to 3D modelling the thing; resizing the results and forcing them into the XCOM color palette leaves something to be desired. I'm numbering the first published version 0.5 even though it should work right out of the box. I've playtested it a little, yes, but not well enough to call it 0.8 or somesuch.

The mod should be found here:
https://www.openxcom.com/mod/ugvs

The UGVs are much lighter than X-COM HWPs but also noticeably cheaper, hopefully creating a viable scouting option that has some firepower too. A basic UGV is about as tough as a soldier wearing Personal Armor, making it (I guess) a reasonable early-game compromise between using HWPs and using rookies. The downside is that any hits scored by UGVs mean less experience for living soldiers and UGV stats never improve.

Weapon options are a machine gun, a grenade launcher (which has arcing shots) and later a laser rifle.

The mod also contains upgraded versions of those basic UGVs that use alien alloys to improve performance. Even those are less armored than basic HWPs, though.

The mod should be compatible with most other mods. However, UGVs count as HWPs for the purpose of determining aircraft capacity, meaning that a classic Skyranger can only carry three of them (or a two plus one HWP/UGV combo ) and HWP capacity 1 aircraft would have to sacrifice HWP capacity to carry UGVs.

Any comments?

Offline ivandogovich

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2015, 11:47:11 pm »
The scout drone mod already does alot of this.

I have seen threads with machine gun, and grenade launcher armed scouts like this too.

A 1X1 with personal armor toughness may be unbalanced.  Make sure you play test it well.  The classic scout drone with its High Reactions can be a bit OP in itself.

Offline Harald_Gray

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #2 on: July 21, 2015, 12:44:48 am »
Yes, I do know the scout drone mod, but I never liked the fact that the drone is basically unarmed. The Enforcer and Power-suit drones are late-game mods, requiring research like Sectopod autopsy or power suits. And all the other 1x1 drones I can recall are alien units, not something xcom can buy off the shelf.

So maybe there's been some talk about such drones but I'm unaware of there being existing downloadable working mods that do what my mod does. But if they do exist I'll gladly give them a try too.

As for this being owerpowered, well, that's one of the reasons I'm calling this version 0.5. Front armor 45 plus health 40 make these resistant but not immune to plasma pistols, one-hit front-arc deathl probability against plasma rifles is approx. 47% compared to 72% for an unarmored rookie. But even the cheapest UGV costs 60000, which is more than a sacrificial rookie, and it can't perform many of the things a rookie can. And UGVs never gain experience and you can never up-armor them to the powersuit levels.

So I'd say they have both their ups and their downs and the concept needs some playtesting to balance it. And changing things like armor values is easy once the mod works.

Offline ivandogovich

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #3 on: July 21, 2015, 12:53:56 am »
It was last summer that I remember seeing the thread with the MG and GL equipped drone.  I don't recall, may have been ryskellini ... 

It probably in the modding experiments forum somewhere, but if you find it, you may be able to get some graphics from it. :)

I liked the idea of these little guys when I was considering a "Heavy Metal" series where you could play with HWPs only. :)

Offline new_civilian

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Offline Harald_Gray

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #5 on: July 21, 2015, 10:22:51 pm »
@new_civilian: yes, I do know those, in fact I've already mentioned the TALON, which SWORDS is based on. Added bonus is that the TALON was available roughly around the same time as the game begins  8)

Truth is SWORDS was one of the reasons I've decided to create this mod.

Offline hellrazor

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #6 on: July 21, 2015, 10:26:43 pm »
I am wondering how those units would be fitting in into my Mod.

I could make Tanks Researchable and let the player start with those Small robots for example, but just a thought/idea.

Offline Harald_Gray

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #7 on: July 21, 2015, 10:54:24 pm »
I am wondering how those units would be fitting in into my Mod.

I could make Tanks Researchable and let the player start with those Small robots for example, but just a thought/idea.

Feel free to reuse/rewrite the mod (or parts of it) however you see fit. All the stats, prices etc are now just wild guesses, so the mod probably needs testing and balancing, but that might be less of an issue if you nerf them a bit and remake them into stepping stones towards full HWPs.

Offline hellrazor

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #8 on: July 22, 2015, 04:48:35 am »
Feel free to reuse/rewrite the mod (or parts of it) however you see fit. All the stats, prices etc are now just wild guesses, so the mod probably needs testing and balancing, but that might be less of an issue if you nerf them a bit and remake them into stepping stones towards full HWPs.

Yeah maybe i will play around with it a litte, when i find the time.

Offline new_civilian

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #9 on: July 22, 2015, 12:34:20 pm »
A small hover vehicle would be nice, too!  :) A hover SHIV like in EU2012, even though i never played it.  :)

Offline Mr. Quiet

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #10 on: July 23, 2015, 08:30:04 pm »
Great to see a mod that adds to the human arsenal at start. I have so many choices and more are welcome to keep the start of the game interesting. I also would like to see laser weapons taking longer so I can depend on early tech since I have so much of it installed.

Would you be able to add drones to the aliens with your mod or make a separate mod if you're interested enough? Maybe a flying drone that spots for the aliens, such as those HL2 combine camera drones. I don't know what they're called. Stuff like that would be interesting. I just wanna see more stuff like alien races and Solar's alien weapons mod to give new content to the aliens.

The grenade launcher drone looks like something you could have all the way through. What's its ammo capacity? Would you be able to give it ammo to reload itself? I would say, so long as an operative is next to the drone both of them will use up TUs when you reload ammo for the drone within the inv. Might not be viable to have an op as a mule haha carrying huge rockets unless you have the smaller rockets mod. Just an idea.

Offline Harald_Gray

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #11 on: July 24, 2015, 10:31:22 am »
Would you be able to add drones to the aliens with your mod or make a separate mod if you're interested enough?

One could only add a drone to an existing alien race by having it replace one of the existing ranks, e.g. I could replace some cyberdiscs by drones. Terrorist units are a good candidate for this, as most races have two ranks using the same unit, but it would mean there'd be lower numbers of the original units in missions.

And yes, it would be better to do this as a separate mod. No sense in forcing a player to accept a change in alien races to be able to use some new early-game human tech.

Maybe a flying drone that spots for the aliens, such as those HL2 combine camera drones.

Okay, I'll admit I've been thinking about some early- to mid-game flying human units too. But I keep running into game balance issues. Easily replacable, psi-immune, unarmored flying scouting drones that can even be used indoors would give the player a significant advantage. Making such drones prohibitively expensive makes no logical sense. So I don't want to make the game this much easier by creating such units.

The grenade launcher drone looks like something you could have all the way through. What's its ammo capacity? Would you be able to give it ammo to reload itself? I would say, so long as an operative is next to the drone both of them will use up TUs when you reload ammo for the drone within the inv. Might not be viable to have an op as a mule haha carrying huge rockets unless you have the smaller rockets mod. Just an idea.

The GL variant has power 40, even less than a grenade, making it unsuitable for late game. Its accuracy is absolutely horrible, but what would you expect from a turn-of-the-millenium remote-controlled mini-drone? And the ammo capacity is 15, meaning it is quite easy to run it dry.

Sure, increasing the ammo capacity is just a matter of rewriting one number, but a huge ammo capacity makes little sense both logic-wise and balance-wise. Realoading it by having a soldier reload it is currently beyond the limits of modding, indeed beyond the limits of the code.

As for a mule drone, the problem is that the inventory is the same for all units, which means you have to either make the inventory unavailable (like with UGVs) or accept the fact that the mule could use any item you give it (so you could have the mule use medkits or fire weapons).

Offline SIMON BAILIE

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Re: [UNITS] Unmanned Ground Vehicles, or UGVs
« Reply #12 on: July 28, 2015, 04:32:28 pm »
Using your mod at the minute on my run through of hardmode and like the ugv g/l especially but was wondering if you're considering one that dispenses smoke (less powerful than smoke grenades) or adding a smoke dispenser as a second auxillary weapon if that wouldn't be op.