Chris
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Posts posted by Chris
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You obviously missed Egypt/Tunisia/Libya/Yemen/Bahrain/Syria to name a few =p
I think you're doing a disservice to the participants of the Arab Spring if you're seriously suggesting that facing down machinegun bullets is the same as camping out in front of St. Pauls cathedral for a few weeks.
Anyway, we probably shouldn't let this descend into a big old discussion on politics because I've always found there's nothing quite like hearing someone's political views to polarise your opinion of them when otherwise you'd get on absolutely fine. As a rule I tend to avoid making political comments for exactly that reason, but looks like one slipped through the net anyway
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Yes, I want to implement double turning cost when the soldier is crouched. It just didn't make sense to apply it only when the soldier was crouched in cover and not when out in the open.
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I don't even think we'll bother to explain that. I think anyone who criticises the final game for being unrealistic in that regard is possibly expecting a little too much from us
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Well, I can understand where the protestors are coming from, and it's good they've been well behaved...
However, given I worked in the City before I went full time (admittedly as a consultant rather than a banker) I don't think the issues are quite as cut and dried as they tend to make out. For example, saying things like "Tax the rich to pay for xxxx!" is a nice slogan, but if you actually look at the revenues that would be raised from even punitive taxes on the richest 5% of the population, it's usually far below the amount needed to pay for most of the examples quoted. So while I find the logic behind most of their suggestions reasonable, the actual substance of them is often pretty ill-concieved. That's why my tone might come across as a bit dismissive (basically, it'd be nice if they did their research before developing an opinion).
The hippies in tents thing is because the idea of sitting outside a landmark in a tent for literally weeks at a time is utterly alien to me, it's just very...passive, I guess. If I felt strongly about an issue, I'd happily go to a march on it, but I wouldn't cancel everything in my life for weeks at a time to just sit there. I'm sure they could be doing something much more productive to advance their cause.
I guess I've always thought that if you really want something, go and do it. If they really feel strongly about the people left behind by the recession and social inequality, then join a charity and actually go and help people. If that's not on a large enough scale for you, then start a charity and get a whole bunch of people to do it. That would genuinely help people. Sitting in a tent and complaining doesn't do that. Those are my 2 cents, anyway.
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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.
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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).
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Yeah, I've paid more than anyone else for access to the game
Hopefully we can get the linking system up very soon. Premium people should be able to select green usernames and custom user titles too.
The actual badges aren't that nice, but maybe we'll get something professional done further down the line.
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Maybe. This is quite a low priority issue though, as the majority of users will not ever see the level editor.
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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.
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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.
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Yea it's in the latest dev build, so it'll be in V8 when it arrives.
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I do intend to implement something where you can re-order the buttons on top of the GUI to put them in any order you like. It's been requested several times and I think it would be a useful feature.
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Basically everything said above is correct. For the vehicles, using them as cover would have pretty much the same effect as just standing behind them as they have a 100% stopping value (ie, they stop 100% of the shots passing through the square they occupy).
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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
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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.
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Yes, well done on fixing my broken quote too...
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I'll allow it for now, but it should really have been discussed in the Modding section.
He's finding his feet!
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Raidsoft - yup, that's what we're working on now.
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Yeah vision cone and visual range is now tied to the armours. We implemented that last week, I think...
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Yeah I'll create a subforum for it shortly.
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Yup there'll be more on the new site
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Nope, we can rule it out at this point. It'd be a LOT of effort and we'd rather just get the game finished at this point
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Ah. The old shortcut was 'W', not 'Q'. I'll go update the wiki.
Recruiting soldiers and other personnel
in Xenonauts General Discussion
Posted
Well the purpose of the 'basic training' in the system I laid out above is that it stops you having to go to battle with a complete liability in the team if you are willing to lose him for 10 days and pay the fee. Otherwise you can throw him into the grinder and hope he survives, but the training course is the same as running him on his first mission - just without the time spent by the player, the risk to the soldier himself, or the risk to the other soldiers of having a useless / dangerous companion with them on the mission.
It doesn't fully address the quality of the basic recruits later on in the game, I suppose. That's something I'm still slightly unconvinced we need to address, though.
If we did sort it out, it'd either take the form of gradually bumping up the stats of the recruits as the game advances (probably based on the alien invasion ticker) or increasing the stat gain from the training course as Tweakd suggests. I actually prefer the latter, as it would make more sense in the context of the game, I think...