Chris

Deleted pages in the wiki are because I was burning out spambots.

Ugh. I've actually got to write this system up today so it can be implemented this month. So, thoughts welcome. You've got about 48 hours until the design is finalised and goes into our milestones. Thread here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php?925-New-Soldier-Recruitment-model&p=10658#post10658

It has been raised numerous times in the forums that the current hiring system is inadequate. It's basically the same as the one from X-Com, which has a number of issues with it. The first issue was that it encouraged hiring / firing soldiers until you had a squad of randomly-generated supermen, which isn't very interesting and distorts the game mechanics too much. The second issue is that you might be looking for a soldier with a high stat for some reason - maybe you want a high-strength soldier to deal with lugging a rocket launcher around or something. The current system is blind luck when it comes to whether you'll get what you need or not. Instead, I'd like to implement a new system as part of the new GUI that will allow the player to manually select soldiers from a pool of twelve soldiers. This pool is always 12 soldiers; every time you hire a soldier another is added to the pool. Possibly firing a soldier would put him back in the pool (displacing the most recent recruit), to stop exploitation. The members of the pool will be refreshed at the rate of, say, one new soldier per week. There will also be a modifier in place to punish people for losing too many soldiers per month. If more than four additional soldiers are recruited into the pool in a calendar month, the sixth will have a penalty of -1 to all his attributes. The seventh will have -2 to all his attributes, up to -4 for the tenth soldier and beyond. What do you guys think about that?

A hammer would work pretty well though - I think they're pretty brittle. But yes, I'm not a fan of the welding kit idea either.

The soldiers are the hardest part to mod. Adding new dropships or new maps is extremely easy once you know how - there's a big guide to mapping on the wiki (xenowiki.goldhawkinteractive.com).

Nice idea

(They're not in the game yet though, you won't get to play with all the toys until beta.)

Cyllan, adding lots of weapons does not make a good game. Putting in the right number of weapons makes a good game. There's a reason why you don't see cars driving around with 19 wheels on them. There's no point. If you want to mod in a million different weapons that do almost exactly the same thing and are useless beyond the first 20% of the game, be my guest. It's not difficult. But I'm not going to do it. I'm going to do as you suggest - spend my time developing the game. I appreciate this is the first time you've pre-ordered a game and I'm grateful you've done it with us (especially as a premium pre-orderer), but there wasn't much of a selection of basic weapons in X-Com either so the fact you've only got a mere seven starting weapons to choose from doesn't really count as cutting a feature. There's a lot more guns in our game than there was in X-Com.

Jean-Luc is correct. The game autosaves when you leave the game and after every major event, overwiting the previous save. You can't save manually.

There are 4 weapon tiers, either 6 or 7 armour types and I think there are six interceptors. Might be seven. I can't remember off the top of my head.

I imagine we'll have to update that part of the game when we add the other grenades ourselves. It's just the only grenades in the game at the moment are the standard ones.

Hmmm. I'd not thought of that. It's certiainly possible we could map the Geoscape alert buttons to the number keys, but it's not that high on my list of priorities right now. Maybe remind me when the game hits beta?

Yes, you can destroy UFO interior walls just like in the original.

Actually, I'll have the crash survival added to our February milestone. I think it is quite a good idea.

A ground battle isn't going to happen, it's really not the best use of our resources. Having some soldiers survive the crash and be returned to base is actually quite a good idea. Right now the loss of a transport is incredibly punishing and is basically save / load territory. It could work like this: - If shot down over friendy territory each soldier could have a 25% chance of surviving unharmed, a 25% chance of death and a 50% chance of sustaining a random amount of injury / wounding. - If shot down over enemy territory (a nation lost to the enemy) there could be a 25% chance of surviving unharmed, a 50% chance of death and a 25% chance of sustaining a random amount of injury / wounding - If shot down over the sea, all units are lost. That'd make it a bit less devastating than it currently is.

Yup, might well be - it's from star trek somewhere. It's just a placeholder, that won't be the final image.

Release is hopefully before the new Firaxis game comes out. I think they'll be out in the next 8 months, so ideally we'll be out in the next 6 months.

Uh, yeah, we're not massive advocates of piracy here for obvious reasons

Thanks for the feedback narcotic. I'll try and go through it tomorrow, it's getting late tonight and that's a big wall of text to read before bed

Nah, no traits for your soldiers I'm afraid. And yes, each alien race has a unique (or mostly unique) ability on the battlefield to spice things up a bit.

Sorry to rain on everyone's parade but the UFO hulls will be indestructible. It's not feasible to make them destructible due to the amount of tiles that would be required to do it. Plus it also wouldn't make sense you need air-to-air missiles to shoot the damn thing down but then can crack it open with personal battlefield weapons... However we will be implementing C4 charges complete with timers like in X-Com. They'll go boom, and be good fun. Just like old times.

Maybe. With the one-click unequip for equipment it's already relatively fast to unequip everything.

You're right. There's no way to transfer vehicles, aircraft or personnel between bases yet. We need to implement that really.

Yup. They're just not in yet.

I'm not sure we'd have a specific mission about this....but it is an interesting idea. If you attack a landed UFO you could find a bunch of civilians spawned inside one of the rooms with some weird machinery (or body parts) in it or something, as if you'd found an abduction in progress. I'll see if we have time for that but it would be a nice bit of atmosphere.