PyRoT

It's amazing but the $125,000 level has been achieved. I really hope that we can reach 140k in the last ~3 days. Anything to make this great game even better! I will say though that with all this by-hand work with sprites, any future games should have a more automated process so more resources can be directed towards other things

Isn't it more realistic to have to destroy a wall using a grenade anyway? A rifle round to the side of a building should not be able to bring a wall down should it?

Yes I wanted to show that a slightly more simple effect can be done very easily.

That's right. Although, if the devs automated or made into a batch process, the sprite rendering tasks, it would also not take long to switch around textures to give soldiers guerrilla-style camo patterns. I think it would be nice to add into the game but a mod wouldn't hurt either, at least then we'd all be happy with simple recoloring.

The question is also, would we find recoloring of the sprites acceptable? I for one wouldn't mind at all, I'd welcome it with open arms. I think most of us would like it and the extra dimension would be well worth it. There have been many games that have taken greater shortcuts and done well. X-com apocalypse had only one image of a person for the equip-screen. Dragon Age 2 used the same map for every dungeon (going a bit too far there IMO). Having basic soldiers with different colors isn't a huge deal in my opinion.

I posted a suggestion a while back which I will replicate below: URL: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/2020-Hostile-Militias-Cult-Of-Sirius-Aliens-Engaging-in-psychological-warfare One objection was the time to create the new sprites. I decided to experiment and using a simple Photoshop macro, was able to change the uniform color of as many sprites as I like without any effort at all. Using this, I could recolor soldier sprites and quickly generate them for a hostile force that would need to be dealt with in terror situations or a base attack. [ATTACH=CONFIG]1221[/ATTACH] Here is a few soldier sprites. Their blue uniforms have gone Green. The Helmets a bit as well. Their skin is still the normal color. Would it be implementable?

Thanks Chris. You've crafted an excellent game so far and I look forward to seeing the progress. Especially the xenopedia autopsy pics haha. Ill be contributing soon

I finally tried playing the alpha yesterday and was incredibly impressed! The interceptor combat is really cool and the geoscape has an amazing feel. Also very impressed with the amount of detail in the writing. Love the tileset details etc. I have a few suggestions though. 1. When buying/selling/assigning researchers, it would be great to have a movable bar. It takes a long time to click the arrow to sell 80 piece of alien alloy for example. It would best, as in Apocalypse, where you can slide the bar to quickly sell everything. Assigning many scientists to a project would also help a great deal. 2. Slow down the smoke animation. It's too fast! I'd recommend even redoing it so its more dispersed less detailed as the details enhance the tiling effect so it doesn't look so good and scary. There also needs to be some more lighter smoke variations so that the smoke fades out over an area. 3. Lower alpha of walls that are in front of soldiers. 4. Make the fog of war much scarier by having more of a falloff effect like in the first two games. There absolutely must be a library available that can filter tile set colors/contrasts to get the right look, simply darkening them would definitely be good enough though. 5. Have civilians running away from the aliens. They seem to run randomly, and often towards them. As panicked as people can get, they never run towards the source of the panic. 6. Soldeirs should sometimes survive being "killed", if they don't already...

Yep pretty Much. Shifted the hue for the cyan colors. It seems to work really well and could generate alternative sprites for enemy human soldiers.

Here is a few soldier sprites. Their blue uniforms have gone Green. The Helmets a bit as well. Their skin is still the normal color. I used the same procedure on various sprite images using a macro. It could be done for all the thousands of sprites in just a few minutes.

I mentioned in my first post that this could be either way. However, I think that since these scientist are top in their field, they probably wouldn't need increasing skill over time. If skill did have to increase then I think it would be ok to keep the initial price, or at most, only increase their salaries but less than hiring someone of equal skill (this is not unusual for any company). It would add the dynamic that you need to let people go and/or replace them with cheaper lower quality recruits to keep costs down. But I'd prefer skill not increasing.

Interesting, although my hope was to revamp the research / manufacturing part of the game more so than the combat. I wonder why Chris would be against it, I thought it was quite awesome. Made it feel more like a real base / system. Although I guess since this X-COM is world based, you would be getting the best of the best scientists anyway. Still, would be fun.

This should be easy to implement. The price of a scientist, engineer or soldier could be based on their skill. Apocalypse had skill ranks but salaries were the same. Either their accumulated skill, or initial level. It would not be linear so you would have to pay a premium to get really good employees. But if you could afford it, then you would benefit from faster research, manufacturing and better soldiers. It should be very expensive to get top of the line people but worth it if you can afford it. If you can't afford it and get the top people, you'd obviously cripple your overall efforts. Thoughts?

Thank you for your reply. Would you be kind enough to point me to, or help me get a hold of some sprites to play with? I am not sure where to get them from And it sounds like I should play part 1 (I only played 2 and 3 and loved them!).

Did you ever play Apocalypse? I found it much more immersive when the cult or other enemy human factions attacked me (or I them). And I honestly don't think it will take much work to re-render human sprites with slightly different colors. You only need to regenerate the human allies, and certainly not from scratch. For example, if they are 3D models they probably use textures.. so if you simply modify the color of a few bitmaps, you can re-render every sprite pretty quickly as it will simply reference the alternate texture bitmap. This could be done in batch mode so it would be even quicker. Alternatively, you could simply create a macro in Photoshop to shift the hue of an image and resave it, then batch execute this on all the human ally sprites. More detiled functions could be performed even such as shifting the hue of only certain colors. Whether its 8 or 8000 of them, it would be the same amount of effort. Hell, I'd be willing to do it for them for free!

Yes, I think normal humans with higher quantity would be best. It seems that the Kickstarter amount will reach the Human AI Allies. If so, then it should be quite easy to create enemy humans. I mean, just change the color of some of their models and re-render, or just shift the hue if resources are limited. But it would definitely be worth it to have such a feature.

X-COM Apocalypse has this. As you sold more and more of a certain type of weapon to the market, the price would drop. I would end up hoarding a lot of items to dump them all at once at a good price I fully support this idea as it shouldn't be difficult to implement.

Would it be possible to have countries which are poor (think Africa) or broken down due to the invasion be victim to terror scenarios involving insurgent militias. In these cases, we'd have to fight humans. Perhaps we could have groups not unlike the Cult Of Sirius in Apocalypse. Such groups could arise through a Stockholm Syndrome type response to aliens taking control of their country. The aliens could be intentionally facilitating such a response through deception and promises of mercy . The aliens could therefore be more intelligent and manipulative waging psychological warfare, instead of just attacking everyone at random. So these human groups would be either "useful idiots" aiding the aliens and h ostile to X Com, or militias / pirates trying to make the most of the chaos. Thoughts?

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned or implemented, but I really like how in the original games, you would come across the downed alien craft, find random pieces of it broken off, and some dead (and maybe even injured) aliens around.

Yeah, I guess you may be right. Still, I like the idea of having this choice / mechanic simply because it would be cool. Particularly if you were playing with some Iron Man mode where you couldn't reload. Then you would have the choice of going back with another team and trying to defeat the aliens again, letting it be if the alien force is small, or flatenning the area yourself. Anyway I look forward to seeing the future.

I guess my idea involves having a mechanic where you always have the choice of flattening an area instead of fighting it. It wouldn't make sense to do it each time as it would piss off the country and lose your funding / benefits (not to mention loot). But there could be some missions where the number of aliens is just too difficult to defeat (for most). In these cases, failure or retreat would be worse than the cost of flatenning the area.

Some products are needed for much longer throughout the game like plane fuel, medi-kits, base supplies. And why should it be that all tech is made obsolete. Maybe some earth technology should always remain better. Surely we progressed in some things more than the aliens? Maybe explosives or HE / Fire rocket launchers? Those things would then always be needed. Also, to prevent getting stuck, if one country stops selling you something, you can still buy it on the market but at a higher price (same demand, lower supply). Some tech would be more exclusive and would require highly inflated black market prices to procure.

What if some scenarios are made so that they are really difficult and require you to retreat to your craft, abort and flatten the area to clear the dangerous amount of aliens? Civilians would naturally die, the nation would naturally dislike you, but it would be an option. It would also risk the country disliking you from that point. Possibly not selling you some of their products and cutting funding. The alternative would be to do nothing and allow the aliens to do their thing causing bigger problems down the track. Sure you would get funding and be able to uy their stuff for longer. But eventually, the country could be overrun anyway. The bad thing is that it would make it much more likely for nearby countries to have large alien incursions of their own, spreading the problems. A mechanic to get the country back might be possible but would require a certain amount of highly difficult missions depending on the size of the country, to get things under control. Perhaps funding the country yourself would be required to get their own forces capable of fighting back. Good idea?

What if we could only buy some products from specific countries. Tanks from Germany? Big Guns from Russia? High tech from Japan? etc. If you fall out of favor with a country or if Aliens take it over, then you would lose the ability to get those items (as well as some funding).

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/714-Suggestion-Fog-Of-War-cosmetic-polish. The Fog of War need to be made to fade in and out, and generally capture the EU / TFTD feel as that added a lot of atmosphere and creepiness. Similar to this: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/1243-V9.1-Ground-Combat-Fog-of-War?p=15507&viewfull=1#post15507