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Suggestion for soldier loadout UI


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Just a suggestion for future patches or future games of similar gameplay:

Rather than assigning equipment to individual soldiers, I suggest assigning equipment to slots on a dropship, then have soldiers assigned to each slot. When you need to replace a soldier for whatever reason, you simply unassign the soldier from the dropship slot and replace with another soldier, and the equipment carries over. That way, you won't have to manually transfer equipment from one soldier to another every time you replace a soldier.

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You can already just create default loadouts for multiple roles and just use those instead of manually loading out each soldier.

Unfortunately the loadout is local to that specific save which means you have to re-make the loadout every time you start a new game of Xenonauts--something which can be rather annoying to Modders/Testers like me.

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Unfortunately the loadout is local to that specific save which means you have to re-make the loadout every time you start a new game of Xenonauts--something which can be rather annoying to Modders/Testers like me.

Would editing loadouts.xml be a useful option?

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Another problem with the default loadout feature is that if two default loadouts share the same equipment that is limited in quantity, you would still have to manually remove equipment from a soldier you want to swap out so that the new soldier can get all the equipment in his default loadout. If you assign equipment to slots on a dropship, this will never happen.

Speaking of which, it would also be great if there is a "remove all equipment" button, as these troops can sure carry a lot of stuff in the late game! I had to emulate that feature by setting the first default loadout as empty and renaming it as "none."

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I see two things here (both of which I've wished for myself, but not previously gotten around to posting), neither of which is addressed by role loadouts:

#1 - Selecting a role loadout does not remove gear from unassigned troops, meaning that, unless you produce enough weapons and armor to supply every single soldier in your force (instead of just enough to fill your dropship(s)), you have to go through the unassigned troops and manually strip them of their gear every time you add someone new to a dropship, unless their predecessor was injured badly enough to be unfit for duty (in which case their gear was automatically removed when they went in for surgery).

Tying gear to the dropship slot rather than to the soldier occupying it resolves this because, when you remove one soldier and replace him with another, the gear is automatically moved to the slot's new occupant.

An alternate way to resolve this would be to add an Enemy Within-style "reclaim equipment" button which removes all limited-quantity gear from all unassigned troops to make it available for assignment to active forces.

#2 - When troops are removed from dropships and replaced, the new troops don't go to the same positions as those who were removed, requiring you to manually check the deployment screen before launching the dropship to make sure everyone's in the right place. Tying gear to dropship slot would resolve this by ensuring that, e.g., if you want a row of assault troops to always be the first ones out the door, then whoever is in those slots will always be outfitted for the assault role instead of the assault troops being positioned randomly throughout the squad.

Something like this would also be helpful for making use of the side (on the chinook) or front (for the shrike) exits, since it would prevent replacement troops from all crowding as close to the rear hatch as possible.

Granted, it would also have the potential for other problems (depending on how it's implemented, soldiers' roles/loadouts could unintentionally change when they're moved to a different position; no clear way of handling loadout adjustments for weaker/stronger troops), but it would be nice to be spared the need to constantly verify who's where in the dropship.

A couple other things related to the topic of seating assignments in the dropship:

- It should be possible to rearrange positions in the dropship at any time, even when the dropship is in flight, not only when it's ready for launch. Altering crew assignments or loadouts in flight should obviously not be allowed, but I don't see any good reason why Sgt. Smith wouldn't be able to walk from the left side of the hold to the right side before landing.

- Is there a way to set facing prior to landing? If not, there should be, so that troops at the side/front exits could start off facing out those exits instead of looking at the back door and ignoring the door they're standing next to.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Personally I don't think I would like that method of allocating equipment.

I am more likely to be replacing someone on the dropship because I want a different squad setup than just simply replacing rifleman1 with rifleman2, unless it was due to injuries.

Most of my troops have equipment based on their stats so if I wanted to swap rifleman1 out for sniper1 then I would also need to go change the dropship slot equipment. This gripe could be fixed with a good UI though I think.

There does need to be an easier and more consistent way of setting dropship locations for soldiers, for example setting up smaller squads with contiguous hotkeys. That is a different issue for me though and one that the community coders may be interested in looking at.

Edited by Gauddlike
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This is not a feature I'm likely to like for one simple reason: My loadouts depend on the soldier's characteristics, not where they are on the dropship. I have role kits, and I never put limited inventory items in those role kits so that when I pull an injured soldier from a dropship, all I need to do is hit the default equipment bu- ...the um, default equipment not-quite-a-button before clicking on the assignment menu (I usually have a large pool of unassigned troopers, making them hard to find afterwards.) When I kit a trooper, I usually tweak his loadout depending on his strength and accuracy (and occasionally health, since high health troops have a slightly reduced need for armour/shield) to the maximum he can handle unencumbered, and sometimes a little beyond if it is a fast trooper in a slow squad. One of my favorite configurations is to have an ace jingling with flashbangs and smoke grenades lead a bunch of rookies, shepherding them for their first kills.

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Ya, soldier loadout is too dependent on strength, and the soldiers I bring dependent on mission. I tend to bring at least 4 newbs on easier crashsites, and they're often lower strength, some can't hardly carry more than extra ammo. Terror missions and base assaults can be more loaded out with veterans, who can carry a large kit.

I definitely agree there should have been a 'strip finite gear from unassigned' button. I have no idea how that did not make it into the base game. On non-iron veteran every alien base assault was destroyed by base lasers. That probably has to do with the fact I have 3-4 base lasers in every base. The upshot being I have gotten 0 use of my backup base-defense squads so far and so far don't need unassigned people kitted out. Which is good since they would have been WOEFULLY underequipped. This is my first game though, so maybe late game base assaults are more dangerous?

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To the best of my memory no-one asked for a strip items function during development. It isn't immediately intuitive that such a function is necessary and, in general, people who had bought into the game were waaaaaay more concerned with ground combat than they were with functions like the equip screen. We all got used to stripping gear off soliders before reassigning them to the general pool, I guess.

Unlike X-Com, base assaults can be carried out as early as corvettes, and every class of captial ship after corvettes are capable of it. Each class is harder to shoot down and carries more troops. Balanced against this is the fact that defence turrets auto-upgrade. It was mathematically worked out at one point the "sweet spot" for turrets, but I can't find it now.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I don't know if it's the perfect idea but it would be nice if there was some easier way to get actual gear on people doing missions without having to go thru and strip gear off people not going on missions.

I either have people injured or I'm rotating people fairly often and it's something that could be less clunky (like I think the default loadout thing is a great addition so it's odd that there's no equally slick way to deal with the issues you get from limited quantity gear).

Even the sloppy "free up gear" button from XCOM would be helpful - more so than manually going thru unassigned to strip gear or creating new roles that feature no/older gear.

PS - I wish the "roster" was larger on the soldier screen too - it's goofy to be scrolling constantly and have the list take up maybe 30% of the screen with so much screen available. I'm on a PC, not a phone. It has a certain style but I'm more into function. Not to mention I wish that when I sorted lists they'd stay sorted. I'm surprised none of these bits have been modded.

Edited by Voqar
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PS - I wish the "roster" was larger on the soldier screen too - it's goofy to be scrolling constantly and have the list take up maybe 30% of the screen with so much screen available. I'm on a PC, not a phone. It has a certain style but I'm more into function. Not to mention I wish that when I sorted lists they'd stay sorted. I'm surprised none of these bits have been modded.

The list is given substantially more screen real estate (maybe twice as many soldiers shown?) in CE.

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