Hello all,
Thanks to everyone who makes this community excellent!! I am constantly impressed by what you all create and how tirelessly you are work to create interesting and thoughtful enhancements for these games.
I hope this is the right place to ask about this. I have always noticed that at the end of a successful mission, I still get warning messages about how I am low on ammo or guns or something needed to fully re-equip my squad.
The line of reasoning for the game's behavior makes sense to me for most cases:
- Mission failed, and everyone dies: all lives and ammo/guns are lost, and so is the craft (or even your base).
- Mission aborted, some recruits escaped: all ammo/guns left on the battlefield are lost, but any corpses, artifacts, live aliens, wounded/stunned recruits on board the ship when aborting are saved/collected.
- Mission successful, no one dies: all (not destroyed) loot/corpses are collected, and any fired-off ammo is subtracted from your stores (I have no idea how this has been implemented for the ammo: is it an exact count? or only half-empty magazines are lost?)
- Mission successful, some recruits died: 'a standard end of mission' screen shows you the loot/corpses/artifacts/live aliens you collected, and anyone not dead is saved. However, all dead recruits guns/ammo which have not been deliberately picked up by another recruit during the mission is lost.
This last scenario is what I would like to discuss. So if we are to believe a clean-up crew sweeps the site after a successful mission (or even if the last recruit(s) does it) and collects all the not-blown-up (not destroyed) artifacts, ammo, and corpses, why won't they also grab any X-com guns/ammo/equipment?
Of course, bodies and guns/ammo that get blown up/blown away shouldn't be available to retrieve, and in fact, I love that about the game. How many times have you thrown a grenade near a stunned recruit (who you thought was dead) only to accidentally finish them off? OOPS! By the way, whoever created the new
zzZ icon over stunned bodies is a genius/superhuman.
But for those piles of X-com loot scattered throughout the site (sometimes easily spotted because they are marked with a
dead human being), can't we recover those? Perhaps the half-used magazines could be ignored, or a percentage of items could be considered 'lost' because the clean-up crew won't spend hours looking for e.g. a single primed proximity mine (better to let a civilian child find it).
So I guess you understand what I am asking about: why doesn't the 'clean-up crew' collect all (or most) of the remaining X-com equipment after the missions?
I am a little embarrassed to admit this, but I can't tell you how many chemical flares I have picked up off the ground during the last few turns when I know the mission will be a success. It's pathetic, I know. But I have also run out and fetched sonic cannons from nearby dead aliens just before aborting a mission just to try to pay the next meat shield's salary for a few months. Here's to all the X-Com penny pincher's out there!
I would love to hear people's thoughts about this.
