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Potential Geo-political Mod


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Had a quick look.

You may want to be a little more positive about the pistol.

Unless you do decide to create another one handed ranged weapon it is the only one you will be using with a stun baton or combat shield in the other hand.

If you made a sawn off shotgun then it would have to be balanced carefully against the pistol so that one or the other was not useless.

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I just couldn't think of anything useful to say about it - w/o shields or anything I haven't bothered using one in game so have no idea how to balance it! Basically pistol would have a larger clip (9-15?), more accurate over range, possibly a 3 burst. Shotgun would have much less ammo (2-6) but do more damage and range would fall off faster.

A lot of the ideas on the wiki are still in the vague "thinking things out" stage, and it was written in a couple brief periods (coffee shop before a client meet, before going to bed, etc). I know there are a few things in there that are entirely dependent on the main development of the game (we won't implement our own AI bases if there's not something to jump off of in code, a possible downgrade from the rep + research thing to more standard unlocks). It also needs more input as I kind of went in my own direction a bit. Some of the concepts are antithetical to vanilla XCOM gameplay (e.g. overtly displaying your rep/rank with countries).

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I've been having a nose around this - and it seems to have grown legs and is now scuttling about my study. Having been ashamed at the sight of so much gunfondling here :) , I'm looking at some other aspects of it. Will get in touch in due course erutan, with my tuppence worth. Just wanted to mention it, in case everything scooted on past.

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I just couldn't think of anything useful to say about it - w/o shields or anything I haven't bothered using one in game so have no idea how to balance it! Basically pistol would have a larger clip (9-15?), more accurate over range, possibly a 3 burst. Shotgun would have much less ammo (2-6) but do more damage and range would fall off faster.

A lot of the ideas on the wiki are still in the vague "thinking things out" stage, and it was written in a couple brief periods (coffee shop before a client meet, before going to bed, etc). I know there are a few things in there that are entirely dependent on the main development of the game (we won't implement our own AI bases if there's not something to jump off of in code, a possible downgrade from the rep + research thing to more standard unlocks). It also needs more input as I kind of went in my own direction a bit. Some of the concepts are antithetical to vanilla XCOM gameplay (e.g. overtly displaying your rep/rank with countries).

Remember the reaction modifier.

It will make reaction shots easier, great for scouting ships and bases.

At the moment it is pretty useless yes but try to keep in mind future options otherwise its role may get overlooked, especially if you start adding new weapons that overlap with it.

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It was more a "meh I have nothing to say". I was thinking of having the sawn off to add another option in that range - I feel like every other starting weapon has a decent equivalent other than shotgun and pistol, so this could kind of add something in between the two.

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Hi all,

Unfortunately I've not had any opportunity to think about this further this weekend as I've been in bed ill since Friday night, which is a pain.

I'll work on writing up the various research topics I'd envisaged and the effects they'd have on the game for you Chris, so we can see what's doable and what's not. Thanks again for offering to take the time to look into this.

Regarding the weapon discussion - while both close range weapons, the pistol's main benefit over the shotgun is that it's one handed, so it's always there to support the use of another piece of equipment such as the breaching shield. If you want a close range weapon pure and simple, then the shotgun will be the better choice in almost every way. As you mention though, Gauddlike, the only real combat advantage the pistol will have will be a very high reaction modifier.

If it turns out there's a way to alter the damage a certain shot type does, in the same way you can increase the level of accuracy per shot type, then I'd like to include a 'headshot' option for the pistol; a high damage, low accuracy shot selection. But it remains to be seen if this is possible.

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the pistol's main benefit over the shotgun is that it's one handed, so it's always there to support the use of another piece of equipment such as the breaching shield. If you want a close range weapon pure and simple, then the shotgun will be the better choice in almost every way. As you mention though, Gauddlike, the only real combat advantage the pistol will have will be a very high reaction modifier.

That was the main reason I made a point of it.

If you begin to add other weapons, like the one handed shotgun suggested on that wiki page, then the pistol begins to lose the small niche it already has.

Just mentioned it so that it wouldn't get forgotten about :)

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It would be nice to have another 1h weapon, and I couldn't think of another shotgun offhand, so the idea of a 2 ammo sawn off shotgun seemed interesting, less ammo/range than a pistol, less reliable to use due to reloading, but more lethal. You could even have it fire both barrels at once, making it much more of a risk.

Anyways it was more of an on spot brainstorm idea, if people don't want it I feel no great loss. :)

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Hey all,

Okay Chris, here's a basic list of the ways in which I can foresee us needing to mod the geoscape aspect of the game. Would you be able to look into which of these could be altered from their default values/states upon the completion of a research project?

- Influence the level of funding provided by a nation

- Lower recruitment costs of soldiers, engineers and scientists (maybe simpler to implement on a global, rather than per region basis)

- Increase the amount of time a crash site/terror mission remains on the map. In the case of a terror site, also allow the option to retry a failed mission one more time, prior to the nuclear option being used.

- Influence the negative impact of failed missions, failed interceptions over a certain nation.

- Ability to establish a limited number of radar stations and/or SAM sites across the globe

- Ability to increase either the number of friendly AI troops which spawn in ground missions in a certain region, or, alter the level of veterency of recruits from a certain region.

- Ability to decrease the Alien invasion ticker (I'm thinking an orbital, nuclear strike by the US and Russia, targetting some of the alien's command ships would set their plans back by at least a little... ;) )

- Increase the chance of detecting Alien bases

- Reducing the negative impact of the 'news report' events which result in casualties within a region (these do have a score impact, don't they? Or are they just for show?)

- Increased chance of soldiers surviving a downed transport vehicle in a friendly region (if this functionality is due to be introduced?)

- Set up custom missions, to be opened up once a research project has been completed.

I think they're the main ones for now. A lot of these may work better providing a global benefit, rather than working on a per region basis, as that could get overly complex.

Saying that, thothkins has posted an incredibly detailed set of ideas which does look at taking the ideas we've discussed so far a step (or two...) further.

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/1982-Geopolitical-Mod

It would be great if we could work towards something like this, but even so, I think the first step needs to be knowing whether the basic functions I've listed above can be made to work.

thothkins - if you think there's extra functionality within your ideas that's not covered by the list above, could you post it here in the same format, please? Just so Chris has one list to work from? Sorry to be a pain.

erutan - I've also updated the github page you set up with this info. Thanks again for getting that up and running (even if I still have pretty much no idea what I'm doing on there...)

Thanks again to Chris for taking the time to look into this when you're blatantly stupidly busy at the minute, and thanks to everyone for their input to! <internet high five>

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I missed the post where this was being looked at by Chris :) I could have done a bullet list ?! Bah!

I can check for Thursday night. It would be nice to get an idea of just how much the variables can be altered region by region and what really has to be a global change. A lot of the shifting cold war tensions work better at a funding nation level.

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You could have, but that wouldn't have got your ideas across as well! The bullet list will just let us see what can be done. What we then actually do with it is where your thread comes in...

I definitely agree that national interactions would be great to represent the shifting Cold War tensions. I also like the idea of playing off real world events from the time period, such as Reagan's proposed Star Wars programme (I know that wasn't until the early 80s, but I bet he was thinking about it before then!) but altering them to fit the game.

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Hmmm. None of the stuff in that list is able to be done at present, I'm afraid. That's not to say that we couldn't add it - but I don't think we could do so easily. It's a fairly significant amount of work because those systems aren't really linked in any way at the moment and tying them together would be as much work as implementing more game central stuff (which we should be concentrating on instead).

Because of that, I'm probably going to have to rain on your parade and say that I doubt this will make it in. I'm happy to support modding, but I don't think these changes would be worth the time - particularly as it does seem quite specialist modding functionality that I'm not sure many other modders would use if this project did take off. Far less useful than, say, allowing weapons to have different ammunition types and far more effort.

Sorry about that!

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<deflating noise>

Ah... ah well, not to worry I guess.

Are there any moddable functions relating to the geoscape then? Maybe we could fit what can be done with the existing set up in with some of the ideas we've had, rather than making the engine fit the ideas.

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