Author Topic: [Suggestion] "full refit" option in battlescape.  (Read 483 times)

Offline Zesty

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[Suggestion] "full refit" option in battlescape.
« on: October 16, 2024, 06:40:58 pm »
I'm guessing everyone who has played X-Com mods for long as had this problem. You forgot to equip a soldier, or reached a mission and found that you really would have preferred a different equipment set for some or all of your team, or the wrong ammo was auto-loaded into your weapons. Right now its really annoying to do the "shuffle around the weapon pile" game when soldiers can take 2-3 turns to drop everything they are wearing and pick it up again. If enemies are at all near the starting area this goes from annoying to almost suicidal.

Proposal: Have a button available in the inventory screen of a character who is in the player spawning area. Pressing this button will require 90% of the character's TUs. After pressing it, for the rest of the turn, the character is allowed access to all equipment on the floor of the spawning area as if it was directly under them and all item movement into and out of inventory costs 0 TUs.

This feels fair to me, essentially losing a full turn (two turns if you have to run inside the craft, wait and do it on the next turn). It would be a huge QoL for players. As it is if I mess up equipping stuff I usually just reload to before the mission and fix it up that way.

Online Meridian

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Re: "full refit" option in battlescape.
« Reply #1 on: October 16, 2024, 07:09:23 pm »
I'm guessing everyone who has played X-Com mods for long as had this problem.

I never had this problem (not even once), but I'm curious to hear other people's feedback.

Proposal: Have a button available in the inventory screen of a character who is in the player spawning area. Pressing this button will require 90% of the character's TUs. After pressing it, for the rest of the turn, the character is allowed access to all equipment on the floor of the spawning area as if it was directly under them and all item movement into and out of inventory costs 0 TUs.

Atm, I honestly don't see a reason why I should implement this.

("I'm bad at the game, halp!" is not a reason.)

Offline psavola

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Re: "full refit" option in battlescape.
« Reply #2 on: October 16, 2024, 07:45:53 pm »
As for accidentally starting the mission unequipped:

I have rarely accidentally hit 'ESC' or clicked 'OK' (if you use mouse in that direction of the screen, e.g. to move back and forth between soldiers; this is a newbie problem, advanced players usually use keyboard hotkeys directly), leading to completely or mostly unequipped (or auto-equipped, if that option is enabled) teams. I suppose there could be a use case for going back to the equip screen, but that would likely also break the balance somewhat. So I don't really advocate that. I have taken my medicine as a result of me being sloppy.

As for the need to re-equip the team afterwards:

In many mods and lesser degree vanilla you don't necessarily know in advance of the mission which equipment is the best for the enemy units before you know what they are. And your strategy of whether you try to capture the enemies alive or kill them might also change based on the information you get once the mission starts. (A concrete example in XCF: out of a couple of dozen identical "environmental alert missions", you will want to catch the shadowbats and rats alive, essentially all other animals you want to kill after obtaining some samples.) So you definitely would love to see a way to change the equipment quickly.

But not knowing what to expect is also one excitement of the game and you could argue that you could break the game balance if you could just go back to equip screen and do everything from scratch easily.

As it is, I usually try to equip the team with the equipment which is most likely the best or most reliable for the situation, or in some cases duplicates. For example in some XCF missions I equip the teams to wield two guns that fit different purposes, and have everyone drop the second one once I learn of what the enemies are and thus what my tactic for the mission will be.

If XCOM was written from scratch:

If XCOM was written from scratch the game certainly could have the option the OP describes, i.e. that you can redo the equipping screen easily, possibly with some restrictions (e.g. you can no longer re-equip with the stuff carried by someone else). But because OXC/OXCE is mainly concerned with keeping the feel of the original, I'd certainly understand if  this kind of engine redesign would be deemed out of scope.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2024, 08:07:14 am by psavola »

Offline shinr

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Re: "full refit" option in battlescape.
« Reply #3 on: October 16, 2024, 08:25:12 pm »
Maybe a pop-up screen after the briefing but before the initial loadout screen, to the effect of:

Sighting upon touchdown: X

Where X is Unknown/Hidden, New Race, or a Known Researched Race.
« Last Edit: October 16, 2024, 08:27:54 pm by shinr »

Offline Zesty

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Re: "full refit" option in battlescape.
« Reply #4 on: October 17, 2024, 07:25:27 am »
The problem is that dropping and picking up multiple items in X-Com isn't really priced well in TU turns. If you have to move, pick up a gun, and pick up ammo for the gun, you've basically used your whole turn. And because every character has to pick up from the same spot you can probably only move 3-5 characters over the pile per turn.

It's not really a buff to the player because its trivial to simply reload your pre-mission save and redo everything. It is just convenience, but then aren't a huge number of OXC features that? We have features like nightvision mode which is purely there to help the player out.
« Last Edit: October 17, 2024, 07:32:31 am by Zesty »

Online Meridian

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Re: "full refit" option in battlescape.
« Reply #5 on: November 03, 2024, 03:30:33 pm »
1/ I can imagine implementing kind of "are you sure?" dialog, when some soldier doesn't have any equipment... to prevent misclicks I guess

2/ reequipping AFTER realizing you have wrong equipment for the mission is not an engine problem... it happened either because the player is lazy, or because the player doesn't know what kind of mission and/or enemy is awaiting him... which is normal (and desired), not a bug. Any suggested "QoL" here is a cheat in my opinion, not a QoL. If you don't consider it a cheat, you already have the option to reload and reequip your troops for free.

3/ if picking up items and reloading are not well priced, they can be easily modded


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