Some Thoughts on Overhauling the Geoscape

... I incorrectly interpreted my earlier test of relations impact from GC of a landed UFO. Now I'm not 100% sure as the game behaves strangely, but seems that relations bonus set in aircraft.xml is applied both for shooting the ufo and for landed ufo GC.

And there is additional parameter "crashsiteFundingBonus" which does not affect landed ufo GC, only applies for crashsites.

Atm I'm trying to find the way for the relations bonus to be applied only for landed ufos GC, but cannot do it. If I could boost the bonus for survived citizen, but how? And of course this trick has drawbacks...

Atm I'm trying to find the way for the relations bonus to be applied only for landed ufos GC, but cannot do it. If I could boost the bonus for survived citizen, but how? And of course this trick has drawbacks...

I'm not sure this is possible.

it seems possible for terror missions via terrorCivilianSurvivedBonus/terrorLocalForcesSurvivedBonus parameters, but don't see this for normal GC

and I've found the cause of "strange behaviour", looks like the number in aircrafts.xml multiplied by $500*continentMod gives the bonus for ufo taking down or GC of a landed ufo. Not sure if it's the continentMod used or some value close to it. Was unable to fully predict the behavior.

Additional parameter was probably introduced to motivate players go for crashsite GC instead of airstriking it, I think no reason to use it now

I really don't want to discard that funding thing completely or make it irrelevant. It's a too obvious part of the game and it is disappointing to see it's not working to the full extent

... another problem: I set min/maxMissionCount to 6/15 and by Dec 1 there are like 10 UFOs in a wave, half escorted, and my PC is lagging seriously. It's playable but already annoying, lags are not minor

What kind of lag? Is it continuous? I'm getting a slight lag-spike when the wave loads, but other than that it's fine.

What might help is if the UFOs aren't spawning all at the same time (which is something I was thinking of doing).

it's continuous and steady, everything moves not smooth. 12 ufos. I have Intel G850 processor and Radeon 7700 graphic card, fwiw

kabill, can you pls remind me the mechanics of escort assignment?

can't remember the exact discussion I've seen, if I don't mess it up you said there is no way to configure escort ships/time in AM_ files, right?

In basic terms, when a new UFO type starts spawning for a mission, the chance of it being escorted is 0. As the alien ticker increases towards when the next kind of UFO will start spawning for that mission type, there is an increased chance of an escort spawning. I think that it only kicks in 25% of the way through to the next UFO type and hits 100% chance at 75% of the way through, but I may be wrong about that.

This only applies for mission types that can have escorts, though. Otherwise, they never spawn escorts.

... every spawned UFO has it's own mission time ticker, the UFO goes back into space when the mission time ends. After some tests I have an impression the ticker is "stopped" while the UFO is landed, but not sure.

Can you confirm this?

Yes, I think this is right. UFOs which land stick around a lot longer than those that don't, anyway.

well, I'm pretty excited about what can be achieved with the discussed approach, though I'm just running "local" tests and there are few "unsure" spots remain, and some things I see different than kabill

will be grateful for a clarification of a couple of things:

- what is the "resilence" soldier attribute about?

- parabolicPower of a wave: does =0.5 mean linear wavesize growth? And lesser/higher shifts growth towards early/endgame?

Resilience is HP.

For the parabolic power variable - I don't think so. At least, if I remember Solver's description correctly. But I don't know for sure.

ok, found that discussion. This is to illustrate:

default value 1/2 means sqrt, 2 means power of 2. So the behaviour will be the opposite to what I wrote above - the bigger this value is the longer you will see smaller waves. Parabolic power of 1 is linear growth

Ah, well done.

any chance there is a way to cap ufo landing time? I'd like to make it maybe 6 hours max, but now they can easily sit for 12

Don't know whether there's a way to cap it exactly, but there is a variable in gamconfig that affects how long they stay landed for.

yep but it sets the minimum - minimumMissionsLandTime

it's not that crucial, though

is there some code/settings that make androns appear later than caesans/sebs, or it's just the absense on scout/lightscout.andron.xml files?

It's the absence of a crew list for Androns with the earlier UFOs, yes. You (sadly) can't set a crew list to go into the pool at a later time (so you couldn't set up a Scout UFO to have an Andron crew list but only start using that list mid-way through the game).

(Technically, you can kind of do this by creating duplicates of UFOs and having those UFOs spawn later in the game. However, this is complicated by needing to add these new UFO duplicates to maps, which isn't so bad for the default maps but problematic in terms of integrating custom map packs).

TY

It's the absence of a crew list for Androns with the earlier UFOs, yes. You (sadly) can't set a crew list to go into the pool at a later time (so you couldn't set up a Scout UFO to have an Andron crew list but only start using that list mid-way through the game).

(Technically, you can kind of do this by creating duplicates of UFOs and having those UFOs spawn later in the game. However, this is complicated by needing to add these new UFO duplicates to maps, which isn't so bad for the default maps but problematic in terms of integrating custom map packs).

Would it be possible to simply add one or two Androns to a Caesan or Sebillian UFO?

Would it be possible to simply add one or two Androns to a Caesan or Sebillian UFO?

Aye, for sure. You can even add in a whole new crew list using the Andron tag (strictly speaking, the race tag doesn't actually do anything other than serve as a label for the game code, so far as I can tell). The trouble is *not* having certain crew lists function until a particular point in the game. (E.g. if you wanted to upgrade the crew serving on a particular UFO half-way through the game, you can't do that).

... just realized that my assumption of additional UFO spawn per every human base was incorrect. Not sure where I saw this.

I wonder if alienBaseDiscoveryChance and alienBaseDiscoveryCycle affect the game in any way?

in my experience, the base is auto-detected like 5 days later no matter what these values are, and the interceptor's radar detects it immediately

I wonder if alienBaseDiscoveryChance and alienBaseDiscoveryCycle affect the game in any way?

in my experience, the base is auto-detected like 5 days later no matter what these values are, and the interceptor's radar detects it immediately

I'm fairly certain they do (the values are different in Dynamic UFOs and I've not noticed it not working).