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Hostile Militias / Cults


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I posted a suggestion a while back which I will replicate below:

Would it be possible to have countries which are poor (think Africa) or broken down due to the invasion be victim to terror scenarios involving insurgent militias. In these cases, we'd have to fight humans.

Perhaps we could have groups not unlike the Cult Of Sirius in Apocalypse. Such groups could arise through a Stockholm Syndrome type response to aliens taking control of their country. The aliens could be intentionally facilitating such a response through deception and promises of mercy . The aliens could therefore be more intelligent and manipulative waging psychological warfare, instead of just attacking everyone at random. So these human groups would be either "useful idiots" aiding the aliens and h ostile to X Com, or militias / pirates trying to make the most of the chaos.

URL: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/2020-Hostile-Militias-Cult-Of-Sirius-Aliens-Engaging-in-psychological-warfare

One objection was the time to create the new sprites. I decided to experiment and using a simple Photoshop macro, was able to change the uniform color of as many sprites as I like without any effort at all. Using this, I could recolor soldier sprites and quickly generate them for a hostile force that would need to be dealt with in terror situations or a base attack.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1221[/ATTACH]

Here is a few soldier sprites. Their blue uniforms have gone Green. The Helmets a bit as well. Their skin is still the normal color.

Would it be implementable?

Edited by PyRoT
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I played a vaguely X-COMesque game called Terraphoenix, and it had you fighting aliens as well as anarchists. (The Terraphoenix world was post-nuclear, so you can imagine anarchists weren't too happy about the forces of law and order being at their doorstep.) I quite enjoyed that, and being able to fight off anarchists and terrorists taking advantage of the invasion or being controlled by the aliens would be something I'd like in Xenonauts.

That said, I don't know if the developers would consider recolors of the Xenonauts or local forces to be good enough, sprite-wise, for this to be implementable.

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That said, I don't know if the developers would consider recolors of the Xenonauts or local forces to be good enough, sprite-wise, for this to be implementable.

The question is also, would we find recoloring of the sprites acceptable? I for one wouldn't mind at all, I'd welcome it with open arms. I think most of us would like it and the extra dimension would be well worth it. There have been many games that have taken greater shortcuts and done well. X-com apocalypse had only one image of a person for the equip-screen. Dragon Age 2 used the same map for every dungeon (going a bit too far there IMO). Having basic soldiers with different colors isn't a huge deal in my opinion.

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Just recolouring the sprites in Photoshop isn't as good as recolouring the textures and re-rendering them, and we want to avoid that where possible. I'm also not keen on putting cults in the game, I don't think it fits with our vision.

That said, adding the cults as an extra alien race wouldn't necessarily be that difficult. You could engineer them so they only appeared on terror sites, so they wouldn't look like they were flying about in UFOs too.

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Chris what about hostile civvies (that you get minus points for killing). They could either be mindcontrolled or just hostile because the funding block lost faith in Xenonauts. That way the civvies could be hostile but you as a saviour can't justify killing them, so you have to take them out through nonleathal means or kill all the real baddies without harming the civvies.

Now that people are keen on recolours It would seem possible to mod as long as there is a bit of ground work (allowing for special terror missions in areas that are about to drop their funding... and maybe a mission over triggr for blowing up an alien artefact if that isnt in already).

Edited by Gorlom
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I agree with Gorlom in that this doesn't sound like a bad idea, I like the idea that people who lose faith in the Xenonauts start rebelling against them and hating them, however I don't know if it would be a little bit frustrating having to deal with Civilians too (if the funding drops) as well as the Alien menace. Xenonauts aren't a Peacekeeper organisation so it may not work for the actual game but it could be a good mod idea.

Edited by MrSisterShotgun
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I like the idea of normal civilian sprites being used for cultists.

I think the way combating them should work is, killing them should cost extra, and taking them alive should earn extra, but adjusted for the fact that you were called in to specifically fight civilians. With the former, the government looks bad and is forced by the public to dislike you, and the latter makes the government look good, so they reward you. The risk could be offset by the cultists mostly being normal people armed with basic weapons.

An occasional wild card might have a military or law enforcement background, even rarer cultists might use alien pistols without handicaps, and occasionally a well armed alien might be present.

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I'm doubting civvies sprites fighting you. There are no civilian sprites with weapons atm, are there? It would essentially be extra work while using the local forces or fan recolours of local forces would seem to be not as demanding workload.

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I'm doubting civvies sprites fighting you. There are no civilian sprites with weapons atm, are there? It would essentially be extra work while using the local forces or fan recolours of local forces would seem to be not as demanding workload.

That's right. Although, if the devs automated or made into a batch process, the sprite rendering tasks, it would also not take long to switch around textures to give soldiers guerrilla-style camo patterns. I think it would be nice to add into the game but a mod wouldn't hurt either, at least then we'd all be happy with simple recoloring.

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Guaddlike made it seem like much more trouble then PyRoT though. Possibly because Gauddlike was trying to edit only half of the uniform while PyRoT simply recolourd the whole uniform.

Yes I wanted to show that a slightly more simple effect can be done very easily.

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Yeah you can get a basic colour shift quite easily.

I don't think it looks great in most situations, although if you wanted to get a sort of military green it is fine.

It only works well for the first armour tier as well.

I will probably just dedicate a bit of time to it in beta and make my own armour sets then.

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I think straight-up attacking other humans would take the focus off the main game and be un-thematic. Xenonauts as an organization has their hands full fighting an alien invasion - dealing with insurgent groups are well beyond the scope of their jurisdiction.

The only place I could see this being an interesting feature is when a militia or elite government forces are also trying to get the goodies at a crash site before the 'official' organization does. Since they are already implementing native soldiers, it might not be too difficult to make them hostile to both sides.

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I think straight-up attacking other humans would take the focus off the main game and be un-thematic. Xenonauts as an organization has their hands full fighting an alien invasion - dealing with insurgent groups are well beyond the scope of their jurisdiction.

The only place I could see this being an interesting feature is when a militia or elite government forces are also trying to get the goodies at a crash site before the 'official' organization does. Since they are already implementing native soldiers, it might not be too difficult to make them hostile to both sides.

What about when the aliens are mind controlling humans to carry out their nefarious plan? Shouldn't Xenonauts be able to interfere and stop that? You would obviously have to stun them rather then shoot them :P

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