Author Topic: Various thoughts and suggestions  (Read 2648 times)

Offline Thorbear

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Various thoughts and suggestions
« on: October 09, 2021, 12:38:51 pm »
I recently updated from version 1.7b to version 2.0.1 and started a brand new campaign. With this new campaign I started making some notes to myself while playing, about things I think could improve the game. I've checked a few pages of topics to see if anyone else suggested the same things, but haven't searched very thoroughly, so feel free to disregard any suggestions you've heard and rejected before.

1. Manufacturing items for selling
Quite often through my game there is nothing I want/need to manufacture, but I don't want my engineers to sit idle, so I've found an item that can be manufactured and auto-sold to make a little bit of money. However it bothers me a little that I don't know if I've chosen the item that will actually make me the most money. I started going through the list, selecting one item at a time and checking how much money it will make, but the list feels too long to go through, and it keeps expanding as I research more items.
Could there be some way to automate this? For example if I could sort the manufacturing items by "amount made if manufactured and sold", then I can just pick the top item and rest easy in the knowledge that my enigneers are being used efficiently.

2. Psionic screening
I think I do this in every playthrough, as soon as I've researched far enough to get the psi strength for my agents, I start hiring a lot of new agents, and immediately fire the ones that have psi strength below some threshold (80 or 90, depending on how far into the game I am and how much money I have to spare). Could there be some way to automate this? For example if I could set up "hire 10 new agents every 5 days and fire anyone below X psi strength". Or there could be a way to hire psi troopers specifically at a premium, paying 10x the cost of an agent to get the psi-strength 75-100 distributed instead of 0-100 distributed for example. There could even be multiple levels of this: 10x/75+, 50x/80+, 100x/85+, 200x/90+ or something like that.
I don't want to make it easier or cheaper to get psi agents, just less tedious, firing 100 agents requires a lot of mindless clicks.

3. Researching human weapons
It's quick, but very numerous. Even if each weapon research takes 1 scientist 1 day, there are so many of them, and it's all just to get the stats for an ak47 in the ufopedia. Could these be more grouped somehow? For example researching "Red Dawn Weapons" to get stats for all of the weapons used by red dawn? Maybe there is already such a mechanic, and I've just missed it?
My main issue here is that I'm a bit overwhelmed by the number of topics to research at the start of the game, and usually end up skipping some monster research in favor of knowing how a P90 stacks up against my current standard rifle.

4. Could there be a way to compare stats between items in the ufopedia?
Without having to memorize the numbers for one and then looking up the other. Especially the "stats for nerds" section contains a lot of info that is difficult to memorize. I could just take a screenshot of one to compare, but it would be nice to have a feature in the game for this too.

5. Is there a way to search the entire ufopedia?
I know that I can search within a category, but often times I don't know which category to search.

6. Notifications about healed agents
In the newer games (XCOM/XCOM2) you get some form of notification when one of your agents have recovered from their wounds, would that be possible here too? If my favorite agent has 1 day left of recovery and a new mission just appeared, I might want to wait for him to recover before I start the mission, and right now that means I have to wait for the correct hour and stop the time there (in between the multitude of other notifications that appear through an xcom day). It would be better if I could just wait for the notification about recovery and then send the mission.

Offline Nord

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Re: Various thoughts and suggestions
« Reply #1 on: October 09, 2021, 03:18:56 pm »
1. No, if not creating special money-earning items.
2. Possible by adding new soldier type.
3. Possible, but hard because it will break game style. If you will know all the weapons, well... it is realistic, but gameplay will suffer, i think.
4. Not possible now.
5. Not possible now.
6. Not possible now.

Offline termidor

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Re: Various thoughts and suggestions
« Reply #2 on: October 09, 2021, 04:50:34 pm »
Refering to 4, i think information could be presented in a more clear way regarding some important stats. For example, I think that ranges could be moved to the main page of the weapons.

Offline Nord

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Re: Various thoughts and suggestions
« Reply #3 on: October 10, 2021, 03:10:57 pm »
Refering to 4, i think information could be presented in a more clear way regarding some important stats. For example, I think that ranges could be moved to the main page of the weapons.
Ufopedia articles are hardcoded in Open X-Com game engine. Changing this will need a lot of work.

Offline Finnik

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Re: Various thoughts and suggestions
« Reply #4 on: October 10, 2021, 06:13:52 pm »
About 4 - That would be even harder than stats for nerds feature. Tho, could be handy. What do you think @Yankes?

Offline Yankes

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Re: Various thoughts and suggestions
« Reply #5 on: October 12, 2021, 11:58:09 am »
To making comparing two article is equal to rewrite whole ufopedia code from scratch, on other hand SfN in theory could support some simple version of compaction of stats as it handle pars of names and values, probably only limitation is screen space available.

Offline Finnik

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Re: Various thoughts and suggestions
« Reply #6 on: October 12, 2021, 01:36:37 pm »
To making comparing two article is equal to rewrite whole ufopedia code from scratch, on other hand SfN in theory could support some simple version of compaction of stats as it handle pars of names and values, probably only limitation is screen space available.

Oh, I was speaking about SfN of course, not the pedia article itself.