in a crashed UFO mission, it always looks as if the UFO has fallen vertically out of the sky. in xcom:apocalypse, there was usually a swath of destruction, clearly indicating that the UFO was actually travelling horizontally at the time of impact, which made a lot more sense to me.
could we implement something like that? perhaps simply applying damage to a straight path of tiles (as wide as the UFO that crashed), originating at the UFO? that shouldn't be too hard, right? I'd love to see a crash site where the UFO plowed through a field or even took out a corner of a farmhouse during the crash.
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also, maybe we could add a little consistency between geoscape and battlescape by applying damage to the crashed UFO according to the damage dealt by the interceptor?
my point is this: sometimes you shoot down a UFO with heavy weapons, and after the crash, it is hardly damaged at all. sometimes you shoot a UFO down with small weapons (say, a medium scout with laser cannons), and when you arrive, everything is destroyed. Of course there should still be a certain amount of randomness involved (UFO damaged by collision with ground, (un-)lucky hit to the power source etc.).
But: if the actual amount of destruction in the battlescape would at least be influenced by the amount of damage dealt in the geoscape, you would even have a reason to equip your interceptors with laser cannons instead of dual plasma cannons - because you would have a higher chance of getting things like UFO power sources, UFO Navigation, live Engineers and so on.
By the way: how is the damage applied to the UFO in the current game? is it completely random? do you simulate explosions in the UFO to determine the damage dealt to the UFO walls and items? do you first spawn the aliens inside the UFO and then apply damage to see which alien dies?
I kind of like how in openxcom the blast from a destroyed power source usually causes destruction swaths even outside the UFO (even though that should only be possible when the outer wall segment is destroyed - you might even say it's a bug, not a feature).
