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Crashed UFO timer?


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Thanks. There's not much resources in the props anyway, some have none. I'm putting it all into an excel file, here's the vanilla numbers:

Ship/Prop	Alenium	AlloysLight Scout	0	6Damaged	       0	0Scout 	       4	14Damaged	       0	3Corvette	6	20Damaged	       1	4Landingship	10	30Damaged	       2	5Cruiser	     14	      34Damaged	       2	6Battleship	24	60Damaged	       4	10Reactor	       2	3Anti-grav	0	0Fusion	       4	6Hyper	        0	0Singularity	0	0Power Source	1	2H Engine	0	1L Engine	0	2Beam	        0	1Torpedo	       1	0Fighter	       0	2H Fighter	1	4Bomber	       2	6S Cruiser	3	10Interceptor	2	6

Obviously, it's much easier to read when it's all lined up.

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There's clearly a big difference between crashed and landed. Perhaps you might need to make alloy/alenium costs for good a little higher, so say several of one item could be made from goods stockpiled previously. I remember in original flavour Xcom that the only way to keep the supply of E-115 as usable levels was to raid landed UFOs.

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There's clearly a big difference between crashed and landed. Perhaps you might need to make alloy/alenium costs for good a little higher, so say several of one item could be made from goods stockpiled previously. I remember in original flavour Xcom that the only way to keep the supply of E-115 as usable levels was to raid landed UFOs.

Aye, it's a surprisingly big difference. Add on the props as well, and there's a veritable shitload of goodies. I've just done a landed light scout, and picked up 8 alloys. 6 for the ship, and 2 for the power source. That's a lot of alloys for not much work. I'll be changing that. Half values are probably a good starting point.

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Don't know whether this matters, but I'm pretty sure your values for the Heavy Engine in the table above are wrong (for starters, they're down as being less than the Light Engine!). Might be wrong about this, but I seem to remember them being 1 alenium and 5 alloys.

On the topic of your last post: I think someone (dpelectric?) recently posted some thoughts on the final build having played all the way through and said he felt there were too many resources, especially on the lower-level UFOs which reduced the need to assault the difficult ones late game. So I think there's a good case for cutting down resources, especially in view of what you're trying to do with the mod.

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Don't know whether this matters, but I'm pretty sure your values for the Heavy Engine in the table above are wrong (for starters, they're down as being less than the Light Engine!). Might be wrong about this, but I seem to remember them being 1 alenium and 5 alloys.

On the topic of your last post: I think someone (dpelectric?) recently posted some thoughts on the final build having played all the way through and said he felt there were too many resources, especially on the lower-level UFOs which reduced the need to assault the difficult ones late game. So I think there's a good case for cutting down resources, especially in view of what you're trying to do with the mod.

Yeah, they're wrong in that table. It's 1 alenium and 5 alloys. Here's what I'll be trying out first:

Cnxv6IA.png

Damaged craft yield no resources...except for the props, so that means that care should be taken when breaching. Undamaged craft yield roughly one-third of the normal amount, plus what is in the props. Shot down fighters get alenium, no alloys.

I've also raised the chance of landings. I'm pretty sure only research missions do landings, with a 10% chance. I'll up that to 50 and go from there. There's an 80% chance of a research mission being spawned per wave. So roughly, there's a chance of getting an undamaged craft once a fortnight...as long as it spawns in radar range. It might be too low, and I might have to up the landing % to maybe 75. In theory, it should also freshen up the air war...charlie will need escorting if he's going out after a landed craft.

Edited by Mikhail Ragulin
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I've also raised the chance of landings. I'm pretty sure only research missions do landings, with a 10% chance. I'll up that to 50 and go from there. There's an 80% chance of a research mission being spawned per wave. So roughly, there's a chance of getting an undamaged craft once a fortnight...as long as it spawns in radar range. It might be too low, and I might have to up the landing % to maybe 75. In theory, it should also freshen up the air war...charlie will need escorting if he's going out after a landed craft.

Looks good, although I'm surprised by the choice of going for alenium over alloys on the fights/bombers (in my head, the reverse makes more sense lore-wise, is all).

In terms of landings, you can actually add the landing variable to UFOs of any mission type. Although Research, Scout and Ground Attack are probably the only ones that actually make sense (while Supply missions will land at the base anyway as part of their scripting). So you could make more UFO types land if you want.

Also, in my experience just tweaking the landing chance to around 35% produces quite high landing chances (the chance is checked every hour I think), so I'd be surprised if you'd need anything more than 50%. (And if you make more missions able to land, it might be worth having it lower). Also, Scouts are set up by default so that they can't land at all, so if you want them to be able to land you'll need to change this variable in aircrafts.xml (it's near the end, IIRC).

And another also: I'm not 100% sure but I'm not certain the mission spawn chances work like that. Or at least, the Scout mission chance is 200, which doesn't make any sense as a %. (I might be wrong, though. I have literally no clues as to how this works.)

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The reasoning behind having alenium and not alloys in fighters & bombers is to try and keep it fitting with the other crashes...normal crash sites yield no alloys (apart from props, as long as they are kept intact during GC), so it's like all the alloys are unusable if the craft is shot down. Something lore-wise to do with the datacore disabling components in case of capture, via the magic of electrical impulses. Also the alenium the 'nauts use is low grade/pre-owned stuff, so that can be recovered even if it's in a bit of a state.

Changing subject:

As for power core explosions, the only things that are directly affected by power core explosions are the Power Core, Alenium Reactor and Fusion Reactor props (I don't think any of the others are, anyway), although you can add/remove that property from props as you like. (I don't recommend adding it, though, as you can't control the size of the explosion and there's a bug with fire in FoW which will result in aliens inside the UFO killing themselves).

Are certain UFO types not affected by this? I've got it set to 100 (in gameconfig), but just did a downed light scout and all was intact (besides a few scratches on the bodywork). And then I thought about it, and reckon that I haven't seen a light scout with all the tell-tale signs of an explosion before.

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Re: Alenium and fighters - OK, I can see that.

Re: Power Cores: it's not the UFO per se, but the props. The only props which are by default set to be destroyed are the Power Source, Alenium Reactor and Fusion Reactor. As the Light Scout doesn't have any of those, the power core explosion chance is irrelevant.

Incidentally - I don't know whether you've looked at my Enhanced Crash Site mod or, if you have, actually like it. But as part of that mod I put some iterations of UFOs in with various props which are wrecked as a result of the crash. With the exception of the Power Core, Alenium Reactor and Fusion Reactor, I didn't remove any resources from these wrecked props as I didn't want to affect game balance*. But it occurs to me that if you wanted to have some variability in the resources available in a crash site, you could incorporate the mod and remove the resources from those wrecked props.

* I removed resources from the wrecked versions of these props as a work-around for the fact that I had to set the power core explosion chance to 100% to make the mod work. Basically, these props are wrecked on 20% of the submaps, which means that there's exactly the same chance of not getting the resources/tech from them as in the vanilla game.

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I thought that might be the case. Although if the light scout doesn't have a power source, it means I'm getting phantom alloys from somewhere. I've done a couple of crashed LC's, and finished with 2 alloys, assuming they were from the power source (as damaged LC gives no alloys, power source gives 2). What are the props inside an LC? My guess is jukebox, big chair, and big alien hairdryer, but I could be wrong.

That's a coincidence - I started thinking about your UFO crash sites mod. With more undamaged UFO missions, the idea behind the power core explosion is to give a stark difference between the two sites. I'll have a proper look sometime.

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Random thought: since most resources will be claimed from landed UFOs, it will make multiple ground teams more important as the slow speed of the dropships will make catching landed UFOs difficult outside the vicinity of your main base. I think that's a good thing.

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Kabill - I've compiled a list of props that are inside vanilla ships (props that contain alloys/alenium). I might put more resources in them, which would make it necessary to be extra careful on upon breaching. I pulled them out of maps/ufos, do they look about right? Ignore the empty "damaged" row, that's just for the datacore entries.

y2K7jCK.png

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That looks pretty much fine. Just two things:

- I think you've missed a torpedo prop off of the Scout. Certainly, the Scouts in FitH have a torpedo prop and that should have been based on the vanilla submaps.

- Your vanilla values for airstrikes over-value them in places. Don't know how much of a difference this makes for the redone values, though. You're proposed alternatives look fair enough.

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Yep, I missed a torpedo, good spot. Looks like the vanilla airstrike values have gone down somewhere between 1.03 and 1.06, just checked them. Might just nerf 'em a little bit more.

The power core explosion for all downed craft is working well. It gives more variety in the missions - there's a big difference between downed and landed ufo's, and not just in the smoke/destruction. In the smaller birds, I've not had to enter the ufo as all the crew have been cooked. It's nice to have missions that don't finish with the inevitable breach-and-shoot-the-command-turkeys. Nice gentle sweeps of the map, usually ending with a nasty bugger holed up on an upper floor of a building. Stark contrast to the fully-crewed landed ships. Downed ufo's are good for team building, and cash, and the serious stuff is in the landed ones. I've also mixed up some of the ai behaviours too, which provides even more variance.

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Cool, sounds good.

(Did I mention the fire bug? There's a bug where tiles still count as having fire on them until you get LoS on the tile, even in the event that the fire should have dissipated. This is probably what's clearing out the smaller UFOs as power core explosions cause a lot of fire. But if you're taking that as a feature rather than a bug, it's not really an issue.)

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  • 3 months later...

Just a thought on this issue of crashed alien timer... and incentive for players to attack the site as soon as they can could be the negative PR it generated in the country. I don't know if it is possible at all, but what if problems start appearing around the crash site and is viewable on the world view (village destroyed, cattle herd mutilated, etc.). So the longer players take to respond, the level of happiness in that region drops and so will their funding.

The aliens are fighting a war here and they are unlikely to just stay in one spot once crashed. What if they've decided to continue on with their mission objective (before being shot down) like moving toward a city for Terror action? It will be a reduced force, but if wait too long the terror mission will go on.

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