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Chris

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Posts posted by Chris

  1. For training, it's not planned to be a full blown system any more. The micromanagement seems to be a waste of time to me. Instead, with the Drill Sergeant (or whoever we have on the Personnel screen) will have an option to put new recruits through basic training. This will take 10 days and cost $10,000 per recruit (or something) give them a few points of accuracy and a promotion to Corporal. It is not possible for anyone already promoted to Corporal.

    There won't be any further training courses, other than that one. Things like doing an autopsy on an alien will give a global +5% damage to that alien type, or something to that effect. Only the research is needed, rather than any micromanagement. I think that's definitely the best way to run the training.

    In terms of soldier recruitment, I think the eventual solution we decided on was having a pool of recruits to choose from, which would be replenished as you hire people from it. The soldiers available would change slowly with time, even if no recruits were hired. Excessive recruiting would cause a drop in the quality of recruits.

    The process would be a bit more personal with the Drill Sergeant talking to you about candidates he can requisition etc. Maybe there can be a button to autohire the 'best' X recruits (you provide the number) for people who don't care about micromanagement, where it just hires the recruits with the highest number of total stats automatically, without ranking the stats in order of usefulness.

  2. It's probably the most well behaved protest camp we've had in a long time, from the news coverage I've seen. Given the London riots kicked off outside my house about three months ago, with riot police and baton charges and people firebombing cars, I doubt some hippies in tents will disrupt us too much (although it's closed St Pauls for the first time since the Germans blew it up in WW2).

  3. Yeah, but it depends on what is classed as flammable. Stuff made of wood and cardboard would be, but vegetation grass isn't flammable per se.

    I guess we might have to divide tiles into 'flammable' and 'burnable' with the latter being destroyed if hit by fire, but not actively spreading the fire.

  4. Okay, given this thread a read. Here's my thoughts:

    Firstly, I've moved towards a manually-triggered cover system recently, completely independently of this discussion. The trigger was putting in the vaulting mechanics, which basically leads to soldiers autokneeling a lot when you're trying to jump over things and it just gets annoying. Whether or not this discussion had taken place I think I'd be looking seriously at manual triggering, so you guys are in luck as this removes the main obstacle for manual kneeling.

    AnotherDevil - your system has some good ideas in it. I don't like the extra rotation cost for being in cover, but the increased stopping value for obstacles is a good idea and probably was the missing piece of the puzzle in my head. It means that kneeling is the ideal thing to do when out in the open in big open battlefield (which would make sense), but if you're trying to snipe an alien oast several obstacles, you want to be standing up. The accuracy bonus vs the increase in cover given to the enemy is a good tradeoff in my book.

    I like the suggestion that AP turning cost could be doubled when kneeling as well as in cover too. I don't like penalising people for being behind cover specifically, but having kneeling soldiers require more APs to turn (as well as the 4AP spent kneeling and 4AP spent standing) would cancel out the suvivability gain.

    Also, we already plan to put something in where height levels give a reduction to the target's cover save, so that's already on the cards.

    In my new system, then, cover would just be a defensive bonus for anyone in that tile. They'd recieve say half of it if they were standing up, and all of it if they're crouching in that tile.

    In terms of animations, this is literally going to be the worst thing ever. We've scrapped all the kneeling fire animations, and in this case we'd have to put them all back in. That's no small ask, but I guess if we have to do it then we'd have to do it. Ugh. Something I could really do without though.

    I think we'd probably just entirely scrap the cover lean animations as needlessly confusing if we go ahead with this.

  5. Nope, we don't have any knockback weapons yet. It's an interesting idea, although we'd have to think carefully about how it would work in-game. Shooting an alien off the roof of a building would be pretty awesome though. I suspect the animations required would be too much trouble though.

    In terms of vaulting over cover and kicking people in the face, I very much doubt that'll be making an appearence in the game :)

  6. Flames have a 50% chance of disappearing and turning to smoke each turn, and smoke has a 50% chance of dissipating each time. The fire mechanics we will implement in the final game is that any flammable tile hit by a flamer is instantly destroyed and replaced with a fire, and any flammable tile that ends a turn with a flame tile next to it will automatically catch fire too. Yes, the graphics need an update, we're aware of that.

    Morale penalties - yes, this is a possibility. Bring it up in the beta testing part of the game, I think. I'll write a wiki post with the current morale values and how the system works, because I imagine that's something that we'll want to polish up some more too.

    There will be alien weapons that behave like flamethrowers, so you'll get flamer upgrades later in the game that behave the same way.

    Re: cover, the flamer ignores cover. It only bounces back off structural walls, but will ignore cover (waist high) walls for propogation purposes.

  7. Although your suggestion to let sub-maps go off the edge of the level would solve it, it'd also allow people to put buildings half on the map, which would look a bit strange. I guess that would just be bad mapping though...

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