silencer Posted August 23, 2014 Share Posted August 23, 2014 Ok I want to double the number of aliens on mission, as I think their numbers are too few. In each XML file there are few types of aliens. Aggressive, Defensive Passive and Command. I would like to know which aliens are spawned were. I assume Command spawns in command room, Passive probably in UFO ? Are Aggressive only outside UFO ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kabill Posted August 23, 2014 Share Posted August 23, 2014 Aggressive and Passive spawn outside the UFO. Aggressive tend to move around and move towards your soldiers while passive tend to stay put and patrol in a very small area. Defensive and Command aliens spawn inside the UFO. Defensive will spawn anywhere (maybe not in the command room?) and Command will spawn in the Command room if there is one. I'm not sure what the Defensive and Command aliens do in terms of AI during non-UFO missions (i.e. Base Attack and Terror). I suspect they work like passive aliens. It's worth bearing in mind that more aliens will mean longer turn times. Might be worth doing +50% with some higher ranking ones instead, maybe? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steelpoint Posted August 23, 2014 Share Posted August 23, 2014 AFAIK Command Aliens will remain inside a UFOs bridge no matter what, and will never leave. Defensive Aliens simply just hang around inside the UFO. So don't go overboard with Command Aliens, else you'll end up with a dozen Aliens clustered in the bridge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silencer Posted August 23, 2014 Author Share Posted August 23, 2014 I don't agree with it, or maybe it's just in the FitH. I've seen alien officers moving outside the command room. In my last cruiser mission for example Caesan leader was near the anti gravity thing. Each alien type has their own some sort of patrol route. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kabill Posted August 23, 2014 Share Posted August 23, 2014 That specific example might be the map design rather than the AI (one of the cruiser maps has the command group set on the bottom level). Nevertheless, I think the command AI units can move out of the command room in the same way that defensive aliens can move out of the UFO (i.e. there's a random chance of the command/UFO tiles being 'extended' to nearby tiles as well). Not 100% certain, but I think this is the case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max_Caine Posted August 23, 2014 Share Posted August 23, 2014 (edited) kabill, you'd know more about this than I would, but don't aliens with the Command subtype appear on a Command tile (I'm certain you can paint specific tiles on submaps as Command tiles), and are required to keep near to Command tiles. Wasn't that how Chris finally got aliens to hang around in the engine room in the scout? If you look at the caesan and sebillian alien types in the scout files, several noncoms and a guard are listed as command types, and those appear in the engine room. EDIT: In fact, aren't command tiles a way to make things like guard posts by assuring a designer that he can guarantee that X number of aliens will appear in X room? Edited August 23, 2014 by Max_Caine Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kabill Posted August 23, 2014 Share Posted August 23, 2014 Yes, sorry, that's what I meant by 'command room' above. It's the area designated by command tiles; it may or may not be the actual command room of the UFO in terms of appearance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
podbelski Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 helpful clarifications, just two more things: 1) the Viper under "command" role still runs outside the UFO. Might be some other aliens behave similarly 2) there is one more role "guard", can someone clarify what is it about? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kabill Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 Regarding 2) from what I can tell its an AI type similar to passive but which explicitly patrols the area around the spawn. It's not used in the vanilla game, however, so I've not really seen it in action and can't really tell how much different it would be to passive. Regarding 1) there's a chance that the UFO (and I assume Command) tiles will 'expand' temporarily on a turn to allow defensive/command aliens to sometimes move out of their spawn areas. I also think the the alien aggression trigger can sometimes override the UFO tile bias (I had a mission yesterday where after sniping at me for several turns from the door way of a Light Scout, an alien suddenly rushed out to shoot someone who'd I'd assumed would be safe and out of sight). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
podbelski Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 re 2) my impression so far is "guard" behaves similarly to "defensive", but could not notice the difference. Looking through aiprops, sections related to behavior, probably "guard" might act similar to "aggressive" but stay inside UFO/near the entrance. But this is a very rough guess maybe you can shed some light on one more thing: in ufocontents, a particular alien person is coded like "2-2 Sebillian_Guard_Aggressive". I'm still guessing what's the purpose of the 2nd number? I haven't seen it differ from the 1st one, which has to be the spawn quantity... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max_Caine Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 Those state the minimum and maximum number of aliens of that type in that field entry. 1-2 would mean a minimum of 1, a maximum of 2. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kabill Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 There's two numbers because at one point it was made possible for there to be a random number of aliens of a particular type. E.g. if you had 2-4 the game would randomly spawn 2, 3 or 4 aliens of that type. In vanilla, this isn't actually used (except for one crew list, but I'm assuming that is actually an oversight) but it's something I've made some use of in Dynamic UFOs. EDIT: Ninja'd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Max_Caine Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 Woh-paaaah! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
podbelski Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 wow, somehow I overlooked your "Dynamic UFOs" I actually doing exactly the "crew loadouts" part of it by myself! Good that I'm not too far into it, hope your mod will be good enough Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
podbelski Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 one more re numbers: if I set "0-1 blah_blah_blah", the game will spawn the alien with 50% chance right? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kabill Posted September 1, 2014 Share Posted September 1, 2014 Yes. (I assume it's an even distribution). Something you might want to consider: if you're using XCE, the format of the ufocontents files has changed so you might want to consider using the files from that instead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
silencer Posted September 16, 2014 Author Share Posted September 16, 2014 Does anyone know where that Guard type AI spawns? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.