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Abduction missions plan


Aaron

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The colors are immaterial. While the machine is active, it should seem active (motion, blinking lights, flashing colors, etc). When you shut it down, it should stop showing signs of activity. The colors don't matter as long as the active sprites look more alive than the inert ones.

I agree that the colours are not important, except when they are reason for confusion. :)

The issue has been blown out of proportion and I suspect you (the reader, not EoA specifically) for some reason think I'm very adamant of the use of colours. I don't really car3e I was just cautioning against the specific use of colours that was suggested.

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Something like that?

Your original concept should also be incorporated:

Destroy/deactivate no teleporters: mission failed, the country lowers your funding, go drink pee.

Destroy/deactivate one teleporter: the country's funding level is unchanged.

Destroy/deactivate two teleporters: the country's funding level is slightly increased.

Destroy/deactivate three teleporters: the country's funding level is significantly increased.

+

Disabled Teleporter: X alien alloys/alenium per desabled teleporter.

Destroyed Pod: 1 killed civilian in mission summary. - ultimately reducing relationship if the whole mission is getting a bad summary

A player can go ahead and destroy every teleporter, don't bother with deactivating them but will risk killing civilians in the process due to the pods nearby and also will not get any alien alloys and alenium

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If the abduction missions were only carried out by researcher Caesians and maybe a guard or two, I don't think even a chopper of rookies only would have a problem, even if they were rushing around.

Yeah, slow and cautious is usually best, but we can't always operate in ideal situations.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I did not know that Aaron has already planned a turn limit mission. So I decided to transfer my idea here. If this is not the right place I will delete it. No offence will be taken. :D

Hey guys

I've always wondered why there was no turn limit when your troops attack a crash site. In this game, you know from the start what is the current damage on the UFO. So let's say that from minor damage to undamaged, the alien could restart their engine and leave you there ?

What would it bring to the game ?

- Force the player to move faster if he wants to reach the UFO in time.

- Add some new strategy : like using smoke to cover your advance to the ufo and much more !

- Use a vehicles to cover your troops to move faster ?

Let's say, for example, that you drop a light scout and it has minor damage. Maybe you could have 10/15 turns to reach the Ufo and disable the cpu or kill the crew inside ?

If you win, you recover much more resources than if the UFO had severe damage.

If you fail, the UFO lift up and flee to space.

The goal here is just to add some fun to the mission we do hundreds of time and to use less airstrike :)

What do you guys think about that ?

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I don't think adding a timed element to the UFO missions would be a good idea at this stage - the idea of the timed missions was to offer some different mission types to spice things up a bit, if we made them all timed it wouldn't make sense. Also having to secure a UFO in a dynamically chosen time frame sounds like a balancing nightmare.

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Lots of good suggestions here. I tried to think something else and came up with this.

This sounds like good change to develep bit of story inside these missions.

What is the aliens motives of abducting? Would be fun to discover more and more, bit by bit.

I think this could be really nice change to tell us bit more, story style.

I for one enjoy the game when I get reports and all kinds of bits of information.

This would strongly boost instrest to play the game.

National standing by stopping these aliens and get report after these missions is simple enough reward.

I feel that the story to unveil the alien intentions of abductions is strong reward itself.

Also I would be intrested to do follow up missions, like maybe after some amount of these missions done a new option would become available. Attacking one of these teleport aircrafts could be really intresting.

Example:

Lets say you do 20-40 missions and gain enough teleporting devices.. get enough information how to use em.. triangulate, or something the location of alien cloaked abducter craft.. then you can move certain amount of soldiers to attack these abducting ships in orbit and make a escape, if you succeed.

I am thinking that this process is possible to repeat alternative stuff could be gained from diffrent abducter ships.

Alternative reward idea: (From attacking one of the alien teleport craft)

Mayhaps you could free some alien, entirely diffrent specie, that could fight in your squad.. I would love to see one of those :P

These other alien specie could be form already invaded world, far, far, far, far... away.

And hey, they work for free because they are so motivated!

Attacking some more these abducting ships could revail us something more aswell.

This don't have to involve research mayhaps. Just report style progress.

Just a idea anyway :)

Btw, here is link to my xenonauts playlist:

Have fun, I hope you guys enjoy the game as much as I do.

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I like the idea of the abduction missions, but I also liked the idea someone else had about allowing the alien non combatants to repair the UFO and escape back into space. Maybe that would work as another way to spice up the early scout missions. Similar to what you are already suggesting with the abduction missions, this would be the exception, rather than the rule.

Every once in awhile when you shoot down a scout, it's only slightly damaged and the entire crew survives. The crew engineers go out with tool kits that work the same way as health kits, but they add points to the ships health. Maybe the ship needs 500 points of repair and the engineers expend their AP's and tool kit resources fixing it. Once the ship is ready to fly, all living aliens must be on board for it to take off.

The alien warriors wouldn't want to venture very far from the ship in such a case, so they would be pretty dug in around the ship and the player could advance pretty quickly to find the ship. The player could kill any hope of escape by blowing up the ships engine, but if a soldier was caught inside when it took off, the player would lose that soldier, or maybe, even set up a future rescue mission to get that solder back.......

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I like the idea of the abduction missions, but I also liked the idea someone else had about allowing the alien non combatants to repair the UFO and escape back into space. Maybe that would work as another way to spice up the early scout missions. Similar to what you are already suggesting with the abduction missions, this would be the exception, rather than the rule.

Every once in awhile when you shoot down a scout, it's only slightly damaged and the entire crew survives. The crew engineers go out with tool kits that work the same way as health kits, but they add points to the ships health. Maybe the ship needs 500 points of repair and the engineers expend their AP's and tool kit resources fixing it. Once the ship is ready to fly, all living aliens must be on board for it to take off.

The alien warriors wouldn't want to venture very far from the ship in such a case, so they would be pretty dug in around the ship and the player could advance pretty quickly to find the ship. The player could kill any hope of escape by blowing up the ships engine, but if a soldier was caught inside when it took off, the player would lose that soldier, or maybe, even set up a future rescue mission to get that solder back.......

That would be kind of cool. I still like my idea of having a super civilian (like a Rambo, Arnold, or Die Hard type) show up on terror maps and recovery maps every once in a great while. It would be super easy to implement.
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@aaron

Money. Plain and simple money, plus a relationship boost with the country you performed the mission in. The early game is too focused on making money off of selling alien technology imo. The governments should be rewarding xenonauts with bonuses for intervening and saving their civillians. The amount of money you get depends on how well you did the mission.

It doesn't have to be a lot. Just enough to hire a few more scientists/soldiers or whatnot if you need it.

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I'm late to this thread, but I gotta say, I love what I'm reading. I'd really enjoy missions as Aaron proposes, with the suggestion of having scaling rewards (in terms of relations boost and alien tech received) depending on how many teleportors you shut down within the time limit.

Also, with regards to missions where the aliens are attacking a military base or research facility, as Aaron mentioned at first. Yes. Please, yes. Indoor facilities, outdoor military bases, whatever. Me want.

I absolutely adore base defense missions (at least when they attack a base that has my A-team in it). I love holding a control point against attacking aliens. It's a very refreshing change of pace compared to the Search & Destroy modus operandi that nearly all mission types have. Problem is, I almost never get to see them because they entail letting a UFO attack my base. I'm not likely to faff about while there's a UFO coming at me, I'm going to scramble interceptors and shoot that bugger down. So, a mission-type that serves as kind of a pseudo-base-defense mission would be right up my alley.

Of course, there's kind of a conceptual problem there: how would you know about the alien attack early enough to have time to arrive and set up in a defensive position, but not have enough time to intercept the attacking force in the air? I'd suggest that a mission like this would have a timed urgency in the Geoscape. Some local forces alert you that aliens have landed and are preparing to attack, and you have a fairly narrow window to arrive in time to assist in the defense. It can't be too narrow, because Chinooks aren't very fast, but narrow enough to get the sense that you need to act ASAP.

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Or it could simply be that a UFO enters atmosphere, drops the invading force at a distance, and they are moving in on foot specifically to avoid any possible air defenses or getting shot down by xenonauts?

Heck, it would probably be pretty interesting to have some sort of not seen but told "alien orbital drop pods" that accomplish this. So the base sees them come down, sends out a call for help, but has time to respond while the invasion force gathers back together on the ground and prepares to storm the base.

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That works, too. Either way, I just want more opportunities to get my guys on the defense. Terror missions are described as being defense of a city, but they really don't play that way: you're just attacking a large alien force that's scattered through an urban area, as opposed to an alien force that's scattered around a crashed ship. Everything in this game (and in the original) has your team on the offensive, aside from the rare base defense missions. The prospect of changing that makes me salivate.

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What if there were reverse crash site missions, guys?

Hear me out: you failed to provide sufficient air supremacy in your base's AO, and there are fighters prowling the skies within radar range. A vital military/government aircraft carrying something essential to the war effort (high ranking personnel, captured alien equipment, prototypes, etc) is shot down by fighters with EMP/other less-destructive weaponry, and apparently an alien strike force conspicuously similar to ours is moving in to secure the crash site and take the hardware/personnel.

It's extremely time-sensitive: you get there in time, you get to array your forces nice and strategically like a base defense mission, and there are plenty of survivors ready to help you defend it. You drag your feet and don't make it there fast enough, it's a blitzkrieg rush to hopefully reach the downed plane...or hell, downed Charlie, I feel like it would save you boys some time with the artwork...before the aliens finish their collection.

I think it would be really cool to occasionally find yourself in a role-reversal situation, in which you are the one with the crash site and they're the ones trying to kick you out. Victory conditions: wipe out aliens. Loss conditions: lose all men, they control crash site for five turns.

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It sounds interesting, but to be honest it is going to be a strech for us to get these Abduction missions in - and they are going in for a specific reason. We don't really have the development slack to try other ideas with there being a really specific reason.

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