Night combat improvements

[tarkalak]

1. A flashlight that works like a searchlight of sort. You use it to illuminate an area briefly and then it's off (after the turn). You can have one guy with a powerful flashlight that illuminates the enemies and draws fire while the rest stay in the dark. That is a bit like night naval combat during WWII.

2. A 1x1 helmet slot for headlamps, night vision goggles, etc. It will allow those capabilities to be separated from the armor.

3. The ability to switch on/off flares and similar items (like some mod's flashlights).

4. The ability to shut down the landing craft's lights.

[Bobit]

1) Exists in XCOM-files.

2) Extremely difficult to implement. Why not just have two armor variants, one with NVG, the other without?

3) You can already prime/unprime a flare, and pick it up I think. Flashlights are generally "off" when you're not holding them.

4) In XCOM-files, it's off by default, I think. Not sure why you would want a toggle or how that would be implemented. Keep in mind that some lights  (like personal lights from default armor) are actually only visible by the player.

[tarkalak]

1) Exists in XCOM-files.

2) Extremely difficult to implement. Why not just have two armor variants, one with NVG, the other without?

3) You can already prime/unprime a flare, and pick it up I think. Flashlights are generally "off" when you're not holding them.

4) In XCOM-files, it's off by default, I think. Not sure why you would want a toggle or how that would be implemented. Keep in mind that some lights  (like personal lights from default armor) are actually only visible by the player.

1) I mean a different type of flashlight. Imagine it as a gun that shoots at a point and that point is illuminated.

2) To have better control. A headlight is something that you can put on any type of armor, so each armor needs to have headlight variant, stronger headlight variant, nightvision variant, etc.

3) In Xcomfiles the flashlight is ON all the time unless you put it in a pocket. It is the only item you can have too many of.

4) The DRAGONFLY in Xcom files has lights (as part of the landing craft itself) that illuminate the surrounding except the ramp and under the craft which isn't ideal if you want to walk away from it.

[Bobit]

1) Ok, flare gun exists in Xcom-files, not sure exactly how it works as I prefer normal flares

2) What does it add to the game to simply swap out night vision for day vision? Why not just make completely different armors with their own strengths+weaknesses specialized for day+night? Yes, NVG would be useful to implement in case people want to use it, but it seems mostly like complexity for the sake of complexity without adding depth.

3) Yeah. It's probably impossible to implement non-armor items with toggleable lights. But I think putting away the flashlight adds a little depth to the inventory management anyways.

4) Okay, interesting. I'm not sure if that's intended to make it weaker in night missions. In general it seems like helicopters work better in night, dragonfly better  in day, cuz you can pre-smoke the landing ramp. I'm still not sure whether day or night is better in general, just that helicopters are more night-focused than dragonflies.

[tarkalak]

1) If you shoot at something that doesn't catch on fire yeah the flare works the same, otherwise fires are pretty unpredictable.

2) It separates the night vision/lighting from the armor itself.

3) Yeah, that works as well.

4) Being able to control the craft's lights and using them to your advantage makes sense to me.

I am not sure that any of these will be cost efficient to make, but decided to drop them here.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

There's a fun way you can already play night vision games in openxcom. If your soldiers are dressed in night ops armor which turns off their personal lights, and their ability to see the aliens is only a bit worse than the aliens' ability to see your soldiers, then you can play the following strategy: move in the dark with flares or incendiary weapons. Set lighting at strategic locations in order to highlight aliens while keeping your own soldiers under cover of darkness. Then also be ready to snuff out lights you no longer want, such as with explosives, or perhaps you can deploy smoke to areas for cover even when there is light.

The smaller the advantage the aliens have over your soldiers at night, the easier it is to play this strategy, but it can potentially work even at very strong differences--as long as the map is large enough that it's possible to be deep enough in the dark to not be seen. If aliens' night vision is excessively large, the strategy does not work. On the other hand if your soldiers can see better in the dark than the aliens can, then it's usually just better to advance on them without creating light.

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Another trick you can do is make a toggle-able light source on the map. You can set a lamp which emits light to change into a lamp which doesn't emit light when destroyed, and the dark lamp can turn into the lit lamp when it is destroyed. This way, you can shoot the lamp to change its light status.

[N7Kopper]

There's a fun way you can already play night vision games in openxcom...

In general, if you mod the AI to not have a night vision advantage, you can play all sorts of games with lighting. The lighting tactics in vanilla are so simple purely because aliens aren't hurt by the darkness.

This would also show the inherent value of NV gear over torches - the illumination point of a handheld torch stems from the wielder, and will make you very vulnerable to ambush from the very foes you're searching for. Like life. Of course, to truly make use of this, you would need a patrol AI that takes lighting into account and throws flares at you.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

That's a really cool idea! It would be a lot of fun (and possibly very scary) to have the AI try to blow your cover by throwing light sources around. It'd be very difficult to write an AI that could do that very well, however.