something that has always annoyed me is the state of downed UFOs being totally random and independent of geoscape actions. especially the fact that regardless of how long ago the crash has been, you might always find the wreckage smoking and burning and the aliens running around aimlessly.
while terror missions are painfully short-lived on the geoscape, you can wait for something like 3 days before a crash mission will disappear.
I often use this (and others probably do, too) to wait for daytime before landing near a crashed UFO. However, I think there should be a penalty for this, as well as some changes to the battlefield in general.
- There should be no more smoke and fires after a few hours, or perhaps some huge wildfires (or later, ashes from wildfires) if the crash happened in a corn field.
- If we implement civilians in farm areas, they should be already killed or perhaps held "hostage" if you arrive too late.
- The aliens might also fortify their positions, though perhaps only if a higher-ranking alien survived the crash.
- If half the alien crew died, the remaining aliens shouldn't be the ones running around with plasma pistols after more than a few hours. They would grab the better guns from the dead ones, wouldn't they?
- And the other way around: If you shoot down a UFO with an interceptor/transport hybrid and immediately land afterwards, you shouldn't find ANY aliens outside of the UFO (unless it was severely disintegrated and they were ejected in the crash, which should kill all but the toughest aliens)
... you get the idea.
anyone for or against this? of course it's not a vanilla thing. but I guess the game already keeps track of the crash site's "age", since it does disappear eventually, so it might not be too hard to implement.
