Hello extremely! I hope you like to *play*.
Some *campers* are not so good for *games*.
Is it time for *playing* yet?
Alright, so I have some questions & suggestions. I know some of these have already been brought up, so I apologize if any of this has already been discussed and resolved:
— UFOpedia access from:
(a) Battlescape's inventory/equip screen
(b) Base's item lists (e.g. stores, craft's equipment screen, buy/sell lists, etc)
I don't know how hard it would be to implement this (if it was easy enough, wouldn't it have been done already?), but it would be great to be able to access each item's UFOpedia file by the right click of the mouse. This would be mostly to check out a weapon's damage and TU-cost/accuracy.
— Related to the above: how about inclusion of item's weight and whether it's one- or two-handed in UFOpedia entry as well? It's a minor addition, but adds up to content and some usefulness anyway. (I didn't even know about the 20% accuracy penalty until later!)
- Tied to the above: when dragging items in inventory/equip screen, it would be nice to display cost of move to particular inventory slot, like from the ground to the hand, or between slots. Again, a minor addition and not too important, but still nice and useful.
— Also: custom equip saves (not the same as the already awesome copy n' paste function). I believe this has been already kind of developed before? Not totally sure, but basically: allow you to save maybe 5-10 slots of custom equipment. For example, prep up a typical grenadier role and save it for easy loading on another soldier/aquanaut.
— Skyranger with side-doors (right next to the cockpit). A minor improvement which could sometimes work against you, but makes for easier/faster/better troop deployment. I'm sure this has been done already in a couple different ways, but I haven't yet found an actual ruleset for it (maybe someone can point me in the right direction?).
— Decrease TU-cost of Mind Probe and Motion Scanner to make them more viable. This may not be much of a suggestion since even I myself can make a quick and easy change on a ruleset for it (and in fact there is one mod out there which changes Motion Scanner's cost value to 5 I believe).
— Change Psi-Amp's Panic and Mind Control TU cost separately (like, say.. make Panic cost 25% and Mind Control 60% or something like that). I know the TU cost itself can be easily modified (even make it percentage-based or flat-cost). As far as I know, however, I don't believe it is possible to "split" the cost into Panic and Mind Control separately, but I'd love it if it was doable. Any thoughts on this?
— Now, this one may be a little harder: make Psi-skill decrease with range. This would be similar to Ranged-Based Accuracy for weapons. I don't know if this would be possible with psionic abilities, but full-battlescape range is a little OP (for both aliens and human players) and LOS-based psionics is a little underpowered. So how about something in the middle? Say, normal accuracy over 20 tiles with a percentile decrease every 1-2 tiles further? This would still make it (somewhat) possible to Mind Control someone at a distance (without requiring LOS) but it would be harder the further the target is.
— Make all aliens psionic. That's right—not every alien rank, but every alien race. I'd love to see psionic Mutons, for example. Same thing goes for TFTD's Lobstermen. I really like Mutons and Lobstermen, but they seem to be inferior to other aliens due to their lack of psionic proficiency.
— Perhaps Psi-Lab/MC-Lab training should be limited to 30 days only for each soldier/aquanaut (if you want to put someone in the lab again, a message could pop up saying: "this soldier/aquanaut has already been trained" or something along those lines). Any further improvements should be gained by actual psionic/MC practice & experience on the field. To make up for such low (and slow-growing) psi/MC skill, lab training could perhaps yield higher values than 16-24.
— Change kneeling and standing to 3 and 6 TUs (or maybe less?), respectively. I personally like to use kneeling, but I don't see it used very much on "Let's Play" videos. Probably because it's too costly. I also haven't looked too much into the ruleset to make these changes since I'm just barely getting familiar with all of this.
— Fix reversed hands between unit inventory/equip screen and battlescape sprite's handobs. Again, minor detail. Or maybe I'm seeing things here! But it seems item/weapon held in each hand is reversed on the field (e.g Med-kit equipped to right hand will appear on the left in the battlescape).
— Show unit status on the field. I know there's been some discussion about this one but nothing too solid, as far as I'm aware. Basically, have some sort of symbol above the unit's head to display unit's condition (particularly fatal wounds—not even the number, just the fact that unit is wounded).
— Reduce sickbay time by 1/3rd? I'm not totally sure about this one yet. I like the fact that my soldiers/aquanauts can receive such serious injuries that they require some time off in the recovery room, but isn't 30+ days (although probably realistic) a little too much? Again, not sure about this one.
— Mission Log/Journal. Just like Soldier Diaries. This one would keep track of all your missions. Nothing too fancy, but it could maybe display date, type of UFO craft, number of alien & soldiers/aquanauts involved, casualties, aliens killed, etc, etc. Kind of like the basic rundown you get after clearing each mission, just perhaps a bit more detailed.
— Research Tree screen. This one's a big one, no doubt. How about implementing a Research Tree tab? This way you'd be able to see what leads to what once you unlock various topics and branches. It should be all be completely hidden at the start, of course. Since this would be pretty large to fit into a single screen alone, perhaps it could be broken down into different tabs. Some research lines are pretty stand-alone and have no connection to others, so maybe those could be separate. Needless to say, this will require a lot of thought to properly implement in a nice and organized fashion.
— Make Power & Flying Suit manufacture more costly. Not in terms of money, but in terms of alien items required. As an example, in TFTDextender, additionally to Aqua Plastics & Zrbite cost, each Ion or Magnetic-Ion Armor requires 2 Lobstermen corpses (personally, I would have added Ion-Beam Accelerators and Magnetic Navigation to the list of requirements as well! Both of which could be manufactured at your own workshop anyway, but it makes the attainment of such powerful armors more costly overall in terms of time and resources).
— While we are on the topic of manufacturing, maybe some items (especially alien ones) could require much more than just 1 or 2 Alien Alloys/Aqua Plastics & Elerium/Zrbite. It's too easy to manufacture Plasma and Sonic weapons, respectively. Same goes for many other items. UFO components should play a bigger role in manufacturing. And as noted in the above point: make some corpses more usable rather than just for making easy money.
— Fix the Laser Cannon (or TFTD's Gauss Cannon) "cash cow." This has been discussed before. I'm not saying you shouldn't make money out of your own mass-production manufacturing (it's part of the charm!), but simply decrease selling price of Laser Cannon (and other similar items) to a more reasonable figure so that it doesn't become so easy to abuse (where's the fun/challenge in that?).
— Rainy weather! Just a minor cosmetic addition. Don't know if this is possible, but it would be nice to be able to make it randomly rain (light rain, nothing heavy) from mission to mission, just to add some variation to each battle. This doesn't have to affect visibility or mobility penalties or anything (though it could, like maybe reducing visibility by 2 tiles or something minor like that), just mostly a cosmetic add-on.
And some suggestions pertaining to TFDT's balancing (which will now be possible with the incorporation of TFTD into OpenXcom):
— Improve Gauss weapons. Either/and/or:
(a) Make aliens less resistant to Gauss damage (Guass is underpowered as it is and gives little reason to research it instead of stepping right ahead into Sonic weaponry—which is what I did in my first play, since I had already acquired and researched most alien tech earlier and just kept going down that line only to later find out Gauss was pretty weak in comparison).
(b) Maybe remove clip research completely and make it immediately available alongside each newly researched Gauss weapon (e.g. once Gauss Pistol is unlocked, so is its ammo).
(c) And how about maybe increasing clip size to make Gauss more viable? Gauss tech does not even compare to Laser in UFO/EU. It's unfortunately pretty pathetic in comparison, and I would really like Gauss weapons to be more useable.
(d) Additionally, and considering acquiring Sonic weapons is so easy, perhaps live alien research requirement could be implemented here.
— Make Drills capable of perforating UFO hulls (kinda like OpenXcom's Torch mod) and destroying inanimate objects just like regular weapons.
Anyway, that was quite a mouthful! I'm sure there's more I don't even remember and haven't even thought-up yet, but I've already made things pretty lengthy as it is. I apologize if it's too much of a long and heavy read. I'll try to revise for typos and sentence structure later for an easier read.
Just take your time, and thank you for your consideration.
Edit: removed some text to shorten post's length.
