This thread is (for now) a developer notes thing, meant for the presentation and possibly consultation of a future project that I'm thinking of.
I am currently the sole developer of the
Final Mod Pack, a project meant to include as much community content as possible while maintaining everything vanilla as it was (with small exceptions). I am also planning on discontinuing the project in the near future, most likely after TFTD comes out.
Now, I certainly have not gotten bored with the FMP or anything like that. Actually, it's quite the opposite: it has reached a stage where it's become too constricting for many of my ideas. The FMP is meant to preserve the vanilla feel in most regards, and I would like to do some more radical changes to the game; make it longer, bigger and more intricate, but not tedious. And this can only be done by changing a game's general design, otherwise you can only add so much new content before it turns into a pile of random crap. Besides, this project will likely require additions to the code, which is something I wouldn't accept in the FMP.
TL;DR: I am going to increase the scope of the game to make room for more factions, research, fluff and items, but primarily to present a richer storyline (but without any railroading). Details below.
WHAT WILL THIS FMP+ BE?In short, it moves the game time back into late 90's, before any serious invasion begins, but when some alien-related activities are already underway: strange happenings, secret cults, UFO sightings. This early X-Com is not a military organization yet, just a secret organization (under)funded by the UN to investigate events that may be related to aliens; basically, global X-Files. As the game progresses, X-Com gradually becomes what we know from the vanilla game and the playstyle changes according to research, time flow and special event triggers.
The general flow of the campaign is planned to look like this:
Phase 1: The AgencyX-Com agents do not have access to actual military equipment, because they're more detectives than soldiers. Their objectives are to react to phenomena around the world, investigate and subdue any resistance.
Their enemies are mostly cultists (as of now, 4 different factions with varied types of connections to the aliens), the hybrids, later Men in Black (which would be extremely powerful in comparison at this stage) and if you're (un)lucky, an occasional Sectoid.
Equipment? No military guns (except what you capture from the enemies, who mostly aren't very well-equipped either), no tanks, no uniforms (formal suits FTW). No access to radars (but there will be a Command Centre, which will act like a very crappy radar with global coverage via gathering reports), no fighters. The X-Com agency gains access to one VTOL vehicle, which is essentially a smaller and much slower (500 knots?) version of the Skyranger, and may also buy helicopters which are even poorer in stats. (I thought about ground vehicles too, but haven't found a reliable way of adding them - maybe via a transport craft which in itself isn't fit for landing near an investigation site?) Better build more bases ASAP, because those cultists on the other side of the world won't wait on you. Oh, and you can only build surface bases (see below).
Phase 2: The UFO DefenceThis stage is pretty much the starting point of the vanilla game. Advancing to this stage requires completing a number of research projects which essentially serve to expose the entirety of the threat to the UN to convince them to give you more privileges, like authorisation to officially use military equipment. Of course, the transition is smooth: the point of getting these privileges may come before or after such things like developing the Skyranger design or getting access to actual underground bases.
Phase 3: ?There are many possibilities of what to do with the X-Com project after conquering Cydonia, and all of the remain pure fantasies at this point. Travelling a galaxy map to explore and fight on various planets of the alien empire? Preparing for a second wave of the attack, now more serious? Some transition to TFTD (assuming a hybrid game would not be possible)? This phase is here just for show, really; I don't have any concrete plans.
WHAT CODE CHANGES ARE REQUIRED?First off, I am not a coder, and will be unable to code this myself (until I learn C++ in record time). But many of the required changes were already proposed or even committed though, so I think it's realistic to hope for them to happen. If they don't make it to the main code, it should be easy for most programmers on this forum to include them in a branch (like
OpenXCom Extended, which is a very promising project). And those that haven't been coded by anyone yet, they look fairly easy to do to my layman eye, if a kind soul agrees to actually do it.
1. Geoscape events.By this I mean events that are generated on the Geoscape and are not UFOs, like the Alien Terror mission. They may or may not be automatically shown to the player, I think we'll need both cases. This will almost certainly be included in the code, since TFTD requires this; let's just hope it won't be hard-coded. And OpenXCom Extended reportedly has it already to some degree.
2. Missions unlockable at a certain time, or after a special event.Right now, if you code a mission into the game, it'll become possible from month 1. This is no good, since I don't want to see many alien missions before the invasion develops! Fortunately, the code that makes this possible is already written, just not included in the main branch.
If it's possible, we could also make some missions triggerable by some special event on the players' part, for example disabling Alien Retaliation until the local cult is destroyed or seriously crippled. This would require much more work though, and I do not consider it critical at this point.
3. Killing off one faction, or making mission chances dependant on time or special event.At the beginning, you'll be fighting several human factions, with little to no aliens. But once the alien war starts for real, I would like these faction to completely or mostly fade into background, since they probably won't be much of a threat anymore. Therefore I want these factions (well, races in game terms) to be completely destroyed if you manage to research and complete a "Cult HQ or Bust" mission, or at least make them less active over time (so that cult missions appear less often). I am not aware of any piece of code that does either of these two.
4. Surface bases.Complex, expensive underground bases would be unsuitable for a mostly civilian organization like an early X-Com. A surface base works similarly, but it is composed of normal buildings on an open ground. Such a base is much cheaper to build and maintain, but also hard to defend, since the aliens spawn everywhere, and some facilities can't be built there.
I am not aware of such code, but I don't think it'd be too complex - just add a second base type to choose, and enable underground bases to be researched/unlocked by something else. And making the new graphics would be necessary, but this isn't a problem - there are many resources we can use, and more can be produced.
An additional idea is to enable a two-stage base defense for underground bases, where at first you can fight the aliens on the ground. The aliens will try to get to the buildings which lead below the earth (above the hangars and the lift), and you would get a chance to stop them there, but fighting such a battle would be harder. Any alien that reaches the exit point is removed from the mission and will be spawned in the underground base defence part; the same goes for your own units. This idea is just a fantasy though, since it'd be hard to code and a hell to balance properly.5. More bases, region-dependant bases.While I think 8 bases are more than enough for the vanilla game, perhaps it won't be enough for the FMP+. I am not sure about this, but I'll include this condition to remain on the safe side.
Perhaps base slots would be unlockable by research, to represent growing political influence?
Perhaps each slot/some slots can be assigned to a country/region, to represent political arrangements within the UN?
6. Race-dependant loadouts (alienDeployments).It's already a problem in the current version of the FMP: any race that attacks your base has the same equipment (plasmas etc.), because equipment is assigned by mission, not by race. This means that you can't make a faction that uses different equipment. It's the same problem with terror missions and pretty much any other mission, for example every UFO has the same crew and the same armoury. This makes things especially problematic for this project, since I want human factions to be able to do standard missions (like X-Com base assault), and not giving them plasmas. I am not aware of such code and this is probably the most complex change of all ideas here (excluding those which are explicitly marked as just fantasies).
7. Un-hardcoding UFO types from certain missions.Right now, only Battleships can make base assaults, and only Terror Ships can terrorize the population. Since I want human factions to do both of these, we would have to be able to define this by ruleset. (And it would be nice to have in the normal game too.) I don't know if anyone has done this.
8. Separating item access in the shop from item usability.Last but not least, there is the problem with the store: the only way to remove an item from the store is to give it a "requires:" flag, which makes it dependant on a particular research. Unfortunately, this means that this item will appear to you as an Alien Artifact and you won't be able to use it on the battlefield - if you can't buy a rifle, you can't use a rifle! This would have to be separated somehow, probably by adding a new flag for the items that are usable, but not buyable at the moment. (Of course it only applies to items that are supposed to be buyable later; there's no problem with items that simply can't be bought at all, like for example the Laser Rifle.)
Now, this wall quite a bit of text, so thanks for reaching this point.
If you have any comments, please go ahead and let me know.
