Ship Layouts

[Surrealistik]

Just want to complement the person who did the Bomber ship layout (probably Dioxide); I actually held off on killing the last remaining drone to fully explore it; pretty cool, with logical internals whose purpose made perfect sense at a glance.

About the only thing I've been disappointed with in terms of ship layouts thus far is the Cruiser which seems untouched from the original with all of its myriad pointless rooms/spaces.

[ohartenstein23]

Just wait until you see the interior of a battleship - it is quite the sight to behold and then clear out.

[KateMicucci]

I got my first bomber mission and my first smoke forest mission at the same time, at night. That was a memorable experience.

[Dioxine]

Just want to complement the person who did the Bomber ship layout

Thank you. I still consider it one of my best maps, although I like the brutality of Destroyer design, also can't help but be proud of the Battleship

Speaking of, fine! There are varied vanilla ship layout variants available in other big mods, I can port them here too (like I ported variants for the 2 smallest ships, Cutter and Roundabout). With Cruiser, I'm not sure though, since the sheer brutality of 4-way entrance has its charm (and I haven't seen a modified map where the 4-way was kept alone and only the small room layout was changed).

[Surrealistik]

I love the Cruiser's hull and several of its core elements, but man, it's like whoever made it totally ran out of ideas after the engines, holodeck, central shaft and main halls (I hate the third floor halls; so much wasted/dead space). It also needs a proper and impressive bridge, as opposed to that painfully lame solitary round table on the third.

[Solarius Scorch]

I love the Cruiser's hull and several of its core elements, but man, it's like whoever made it totally ran out of ideas after the engines, holodeck, central shaft and main halls (I hate the third floor halls; so much wasted/dead space). It also needs a proper and impressive bridge, as opposed to that painfully lame solitary round table on the third.

I'm inclined to agree. Though it's not really much different from most other vanilla UFOs, it's just bigger and therefore the emptiness is more obvious. I think TFTD floor plans were more logical.
Hellrazor and Cooper did some vanilla Battleship variants, I'll have another look at them.

[Dioxine]

TFTD designs were sheer evil Such designs should be reserved for top-tier enemies

[Solarius Scorch]

TFTD designs were sheer evil Such designs should be reserved for top-tier enemies

No doubt. The entire game was pure evil.
But I really liked how more natural the ships looked than the ones in UFO: EU. Less unexplained empty space.

[Surrealistik]

The thing that really made TFTD annoying was the Lobstermen since you couldn't just lazily grenade them into oblivion; blaster bombs and MC still made a joke of the game though if you permitted yourself to abuse them. I did manage to win on SH Ironman with the alien weapon self-destruct and without using MC or BBs. T'Leth was tense because you had to be _very_ careful to avoid getting blaster bombed (i.e. have a door or other obstacle between yourself and a trajectory).

Cruiser needs some weapon bay areas with the glowy plasma tanks (it kind of has one, it just looks like shit), a briefing area, proper bridge, medbay (stasis chambers and surgery would do for this), food/life support module, storage facility, and living quarters, maybe even a brig.

[Solarius Scorch]

The thing that really made TFTD annoying was the Lobstermen since you couldn't just lazily grenade them into oblivion; blaster bombs and MC still made a joke of the game though if you permitted yourself to abuse them. I did manage to win on SH Ironman with the alien weapon self-destruct and without using MC or BBs. T'Leth was tense because you had to be _very_ careful to avoid getting blaster bombed (i.e. have a door or other obstacle between yourself and a trajectory).

No, that wasn't the main reason why the game was evil. The main reason was it was carefully designed to be as trolling as possible, with the given mechanics. I was in this case referring to the way USOs were constructed, so that any storming X-Com agents would get pelted with shots. So it was kind of logical, but it was using the "X-Com physics" (the map engine, with all its limitations and simplifications) instead of RL physics. So it was often misleading to the player.

Cruiser needs some weapon bay areas with the glowy plasma tanks (it kind of has one, it just looks like shit), a briefing area, proper bridge, medbay (stasis chambers and surgery would do for this), food/life support module, storage facility, and living quarters, maybe even a brig.

It would be cool, yes.

[Boltgun]

OpenXcom made TFTD a lot more enjoyable, yet the cruise liner attack was the most boring x-com experience I ever had. I just completed the lower deck. Never again.

This game's ships are evil, without alternate movement methods it's plain sacrifice.

[Surrealistik]

No, that wasn't the main reason why the game was evil. The main reason was it was carefully designed to be as trolling as possible, with the given mechanics. I was in this case referring to the way USOs were constructed, so that any storming X-Com agents would get pelted with shots. So it was kind of logical, but it was using the "X-Com physics" (the map engine, with all its limitations and simplifications) instead of RL physics. So it was often misleading to the player.

I never had an issue with the layouts; I think there was one time I got fucked by a tentaculat matrixing a bunch of reaction fire when it came out of one of the custom purposed raised alcoves on a USO, but that's about it. Far more annoying was definitely the mid-late  game typical explosive immune enemy that robbed you of the single most effective approach to winning tacticals (smoke and bomb) while taking multiple sonic cannon blasts to kill and blaster bombs that would punish you terribly for daring to provide a line of ingress for a missile whose launcher location would often be impossible to know.


Mansion missions remind me of the cruise liner; what an unbelievable PITA grind.

[Solarius Scorch]

I dunno, the Lobstermen never seemed very threatening to me. Taking a bit long to kill, but I definitely preferred them to Tasoth. Lobstermen were just stupid.

[Boltgun]

I dunno, the Lobstermen never seemed very threatening to me. Taking a bit long to kill, but I definitely preferred them to Tasoth. Lobstermen were just stupid.

What's stupid is that you need a calcinite to research melee weapons and those are likely to never spawn. I guess I'll have to use tasers and thermal shock launchers instead but those are cumbersome.

[Surrealistik]

It's not that Lobstermen were especially deadly, it's that they were tedious in that I forbade myself from using their best counter (MC), so I couldn't be basically flippant when fighting them because they would require more than a pulsar/sonic cannon shot or two to put down. If you ever overextended and these guys were outside of melee range, they usually made you pay for it because you couldn't kill them before they had a chance to open fire, whereas Tasoths you could put down with relatively little effort. Thermal shok launchers helped, but they weren't always in a position to be shot by one.