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Alien roles


silencer

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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 ?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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 by Max_Caine
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  • 2 weeks later...

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).

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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...

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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

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  • 3 weeks later...

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