TrashMan
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Posts posted by TrashMan
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On 8/2/2019 at 9:16 PM, drages said:
John Wick kills mostly with pistol..
He is a fictional character. In movies you also have gun-kata, should we implement that?
Pistol are backup weapons in RL. SMG and shotgun offer more firewepower or greater RoF and more ammo, so there's a reason SWAT and Special Forces use them. About the only thing you are right about it that the pistol should be very accurate at short range and easy to bring about.
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Anyone play EDF? I'm thinking air raider. A laser marker or marker grenades that let's you call in support. And what support you have available is somewhat random (since it depends on allies in vicinity)
Mortar/artillery strikes and gunship support (if you have a dedicated gunship with air-to-surface weapons deployed).
It can always be balanced in terms of accuracy, collateral damage, number of uses and of course, enemy numbers.
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I made a mod, but haven't bothered to check if it's still out there. Can't even recall how I named it. I'll have to check.
It added more weapons of each type with altered balance. Also new planes and a minigun.
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Oh, if the turrets don't kill or suppress all of the enemies that can offer reaction fire into the dropship on the first turn, they don't satisfy the primary purpose for which they were proposed. Making them only as good as a machinegunner is at that job is like suggesting that someone use a machinegunner to suppress aliens to prevent reaction fire from wrecking everyone.
A machingun cannot suppress everything. You can only keep it pointed at one point at a time and if the landing zone is sorounded, you are in a pickle.. A Machingunner can keep the dropship safe-ER, but that doesn't mean completely safe.
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5 hours ago, Decius said:
Yeah, the intended gameplay change of having turrets on the dropship would be to prevent having the entire craft one-shot by good enemy positioning.
But enemy positioning can be controlled directly, and if the turrets are effective at their primary role then they will create the degenerate behavior of baiting enemies into their killzone for free kills; if the turrets aren't effective they will not accomplish their primary goal.
Primary goal? You mean supression?
Because machineguns are rather sub-bar in terms of performance. Having one or two that can fire once a turn in a limited range doesn't sound like it would influence balance or difficulty much. Especially on bigger maps.
And there are many ways to balance it - limited ammo, limited rang, enemies that keep their distance (no baiting), more enemies, etc...
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14 hours ago, Coffee Potato said:
I don't suppose there could be an effect of the landing that the parcel in question auto-suppressed all nearby units? It would be neat to have more entry options, like a gunship that suppressed the area, a ship that had cover, or even just parachuting in at the cost of having no evac tiles.
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The way I see it, dissasembly can be done in 2 ways:
ON THE LOCATION - you send scientist/engineers to the UFO, kinda like a strategic operation, but you can assign the number of people. Simpler to implement, but raises issues - you are sending people out of the base and the aliens can attack and destroy the UFO, since they know where it crashed.
STORAGE - the UFO is recovered and stored in a safe location (UFO Yard, guess it could be a facility like a radar station/sam site). THEN you dissasemble from there. I guess scientist/engineer could be transfered to the yard to work there like it was another base? OR the Yard could work like a permanent Strategic Operation Location?
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23 hours ago, Chris said:
I guess my concern about that sorta thing (and I have been experimenting with similar ideas over the past few months) is just the large amount of extra UI management it requires.
Presumably stuff like butchering corpses for materials for armour is done through a Workshop project? Is there a separate workshop project for each corpse type that produces a specific material, or is there a more elegant solution? The problem I discovered is that a complex system ends up with having dozens and dozens of workshop projects that are required to handle each possible action where the player transforms one item into another one ... and they kinda drown out the important stuff.
That's cool for players who like to have that level of detail and customisation, but not everyone wants quite that level of complexity.
UFO AI just hada simple "dissasemble" project (you would select which UFO from the UFO yard you want to dissasemble). Naturally, the time necessary would depend on the number of engineers and UFO size, and the materials you get would depend on the UFO
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Alien UFO walls should not be destroyable by small weapons fire at all.
Having said that, when it comes to cover, if you're having a 3D engine and a turn-based game, but are not using actual 3d projectiles and collision detection to work with cover (and hits in general), you are doing something wrong. The only downside is calculating chance to hit, but I never considered that important since I can guesstimate (and real soliders don't know their hit chance either)
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22 hours ago, Alienkiller said:
Use your Brain to answer your Question yourself. Then you will know why more big Bases makes no sense. And my Points are Mentiond above are the other reasons. But I will explain it to you. I have done my Military Duty, so I can answer that.
First I wanna come back to my prev. Points.
- Aliens will firstly Attack Main Military Bases to destroy Resistanceabilitys. That´s Point 2 in my prev. List. That´s not only Holywood-Fantasy, because Military Ressistance is the Main Distress.
- Secondly you need big Personal, which means that you have very high costs. That´s Point 1 in my prev. List. An Aircraftcarrier costs about 1 Million / Day to keep fully operational and is filled with only military Ranks. In the Game the Main Base (Atlas Base) is your Aircraftcarrier. There you have your Personal (Scientists, Technicans, Soldiers) and your Standard Upkeep Costs (Generators, Laboratorys, Hangar for the Transport Craft etc.) With that example you see that´s not doable incl. other Military Dutys up to the essentials.
- Thirdly the Aliens will investigate the compact Livesigns in that Areal. And if they see an military Base they will destroy it like the Standard-Military Bases in the first wave.
You see about this Points more big Bases makes no sense. But there are more.
Additional following Points:
- Big Bases needs a new big area. That won´t be unnoticed by Civilians, Police and others. That People will talk and speculate. That´s an another Reason not to build other big Bases and combines with Point 3 of my prev. Points.
- The Main Reason to the End: Xenonauts is a secret Operating Organisation. Only the highest military / political Leaders from the Financing Staates (esp. UdSSR and USA) know the existance. And they get checked and if needes seperated from the others before. That get explained (only the highest and relaiablest Politicans / Militarys) in every Game from that Gerne I have played so far. So I can´t understand why you have to build other big Bases under Water (X-Com TftD) or on Land (X-Com Enemy Unknown, UFO-Afterseries and other X-Com Clones incl. Xenonauts 1). In that Case you can say to the Aliens. Look here we are, come and destroy us.
You are wrong on all accounts. Putting all your eggs in one baskets is what makes no sense. Dispersion/redundancy is what militaries these days are aiming for. And guerilla style warfare with decentralized/spread out resources is the main way to fight a superior foe.
- Aliens have to find your bases first, and if a base is hidden it won't be easy. And given the sheer number of military baes around the world, the aliens have a LOT of work to do.
- if aliens are capable of detecting lifesigns the neither a) the secret base wont' be hidden for long, so a single one makes even LESS sense, or b) the bases will be hidden within populated areas to mask their presence
- a global defense effort against an alien invasion will require a lot of personnel anyway. Given the sizes of real world armies and miltiary budgets, especially in such a scenario, it is not only doable, but necessary
As for the other points:
- people will not gossip to aliens. And things like the A-bomb project prove that you can have big bases that remain secret.
- how can aliens tell apart a xenonauts base from a standard military base?
I suggest you quit LARPing as some military expert, since you are clearly getting everything wrong.
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15 hours ago, Keflin said:
Conceptually I like what X-Division did. Your engineers spend most of their time reclaiming ufo wreckage and corpses and turn them into raw materials to build with. The engineers are never idle.
You bring up a good point.
Ideally, you wouldn't get the materials upon securing the crash site - you'd get the UFO that needs to be stored and then dissasembled by your engineers.
I like how UFO AI is handling it. You have a UFO storage as an installation type (can be bombed by aliens if they find it) that can store a specific number/volume. Then you assign your engineers to dissasemble them for usable parts.
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On 6/28/2019 at 3:20 PM, Bobit said:
In your following point you emphasize detection and range. Those are geoscape-level air combat attributes. Making the actual fight between aircraft more or less automatic as it is in UFO defense does not remove those, in fact it emphasizes them. From my point of view, the geoscape part of air combat is the actually interesting part, the actual combat itself becomes quickly solvable.
They are both geoscape and tactical/strategic attributes. Or are you arguing that weapon range and detection range are irrelevant on the tactical map? Pistol vs. sniper anyone? While your ground radar can detect an UFO, the fighters own radar and missile range are what counts in combat.
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On 6/28/2019 at 2:58 PM, Decius said:
A few hours of reading is barely enough to learn all of the subject areas you need a PhD in to fully make a decent air combat system.
If you're talking about programing knowledge to make a game, yes.
If you're talking about phsyics, no. You don't need PHD's to understand the basics or air combat.
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On 6/28/2019 at 2:42 PM, Chris said:
Heh - yeah, literally all that is required to make a decent and interesting air combat system is a few hours of reading. Why did I never think of doing that?
That came off a bit differently than I intended. I meant mechanically (as in, planning, paper gameplay model), it doesn't take a lot to figure out the basic dogfighting rules, as in itself it is not as complicated as most people think. I mean, in a way it IS complicated, but you get down to it is really isn't.
For a simple (not 100% accurate) simulation - several variables for fighter performance and knowledge of basic dogfighting manouvers. Finding the best way to implement them and programing it in takes naturally significantly more time.
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Heck, lets get a bit more detailed. Air combat (and dogfighting) all rests on a set of simple rules that could be simulated, but that also requires roughly modeling plane performance.
It all comes down to speed, detection, manouverability (a broad category) and range.
What manouvers you want to employ and at which range you want to engage would depend on your an enemy craft and capabilities.
Capabilities of an aircraft would be things like nose authority (how easily/quickly you can bring your nose up), turning speed (air speed and air density at which your aircraft turns the best), climbing speed, endurance, thrust/weight ratio and weaponry.
If your aircraft has long-range missiles and good detection, you want to fly high (in thin air, good for missiles) and lob missiles while maintaining distance. IF not, you'd want to close the range while evading missiles (by going low, pulling the missiles into dense air where they will loose energy fast), and so on.
It sounds complicated, but it really isn't, as there aren't that many factors that go into it. Anyone who puts a few hours of research into how air combat works could make a decent and interesting system.
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On 6/23/2019 at 6:22 AM, Bobit said:
Evading was basically used to get right behind a UFO then spam attack it. You would basically develop an optimal algorithm for every UFO vs craft combination, then spend two minutes repeating that algorithm for every fight. It didn't actually add depth once you knew what you were doing. Charon managed to make the airgame a tiny bit more varied in X-Division, but even he said air combat would be better if it was just autoresolved.
If an "optimal solution" made playing games pointless then no one would paly anything. There's always an optimal choice.
Complaining that there is na optimal solution seems very weird to me. Of course there will be. There are ways to spice it up visually and tactically (I talked about it before), but at the end of the day, there will always be an optimal approach. Same holds true for ground combat.
Should we drop ground combat completely because of that?
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It makes no sense to sell for one simple reason - the countries of the world are already financing you, they are your boss. Any piece of alien tech you recover is already theirs. Why would they buy it from you?
Sending excess items to a country for bonuses makes sense. Selling does not.
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Why not simple send some equipment to a country for a boost at the end of the month (which would not only be a money boost, but also boost the AI soldiers from that country/block?)
Makes more sense than selling.
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23 hours ago, Charon said:
Why cant i send triple dropships to a single crashsite in X1 ? Or rather 10 ? 10 dropships with 8 soldiers each makes 80 soldiers vs 6 aliens. In my book that would guarantee the likelyhood of success. Seems like a good move to me.
Im just trying to point out that applying logic to video games does not work out very well.A main unattackable base would go well together with the proposed global personal/storage/whatever and the teleporter setting.
You can apply logic to a game that has logical mechanics. For example, why NOT allow multiple dropships/squads? Would make a game too easy? Only if you're unimaginative and don't program the alien response of them responding in kind. As long as you make sure that are prices to pay for everything, and consequnces, you can go really wild.
In this paragraph i would like to point out that teleportation and dropships are fundamentally the same mechanic. Whether a dropship takes 2 hours to get to a crashsite, or a teleporter needs 2 hours to zero in on the crashsite coordinance is gameplaywise the same thing. You can even add UFOs which jamm the teleporter in an radius around it to prevent taking on a crashsite before the UFO is taken out. This would be the fighter shooting down dropship equivalent. Everything has a solution.
I dont mind dropships nor teleporting. You can make the same mechanics for both of them. Faster dropships ? Just manufacture an upgrade module to faster zero in on the crashsites coordinance ( for a single connection ). Increase troop size ? Just manufacture a higher energy module. It basically really is the same thing. You just have to be creative.Only at one point in development you have to decide whether you go with a teleporter setting, or a dropship setting. MECHANICALLY you can realise the same mechanics for both of them.
You are fundamentally wrong. Just because they serve the same end goal (moving things), does not make them the same.
Dropships move over the worldmap, they can be intercepted AND defended. They are an ACTIVE component. At any time you can change their course, escort them. It's is not a zero-sum game with no player input, so no, it's is no the same. I could pull the dropship out in the last second, if lucky, manage to defend against a fighter, I can have multiple dropships and target several sites simoultaneously.
Also, the implication for the lore and beleviablility of the setting are vastly different.
QuoteMy 3k+ hours of Xenonauts and X-Division + the one thousand hours of various other youtubers agree on the following points below.
It is not viable to have more than one production base. Since items are automatically transfered to the base the dropship starts from, and you usually have your main team in your main base + shot down interceptor items are automatically recovered to the first base you put down the game doesnt incentivise you to have have more than one production base - having a global item storage which items get transfered to and from would solve that and motivate the player to experiment with more setups.
Getting your second/third/fourth strike team up and running is mostly a chore. And just a a candy bonus ontop - having a global pool of soldiers to choose from would mean you could build a deeper, more complex rooster of soldiers instead of saying all the time "Oh, I really would like to send soldier X on this mission. Too bad he is in another base."
Base attacks were arguably the least fun part of the game. Read about it here:
https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/topic/13414-165xce-v0350-x-division-100-beta/&do=findComment&comment=173187
having a global defensive system would make the whole thing a more fun, approachable situation, where you take on the surviving aliens after the batteries (?) reduced the numbers. Having the option to pull out would mean these kind of missions could become a well integrated part of the game, instead of either people never actually seeing a base attack because the whole threat is too weak, or base attacks killing every campaign.Your appeal to authority/number falls on deaf ears here. Especially YouTubers that usually have the attention spawn and skill of a goldfish.
The idea that having a single supremely optimal solution contradicts the notion of experimentation with different setups.
Not building proper teams for you major bases is a failure on the player side and is indicitave of poor human resource managment, not a failure of the game. After all, resource managment IS what a proper commander would have to deal with. Simply removing the need for making such choices rewards lazy players with no attention spans, since they will always have everything they need (personel and materials) available at all times - this is in complete contrast with the basic concept of logistics AND in complete contrast to the whole "global strategic defense simulator"
Base attacks were the least fun? Sez who? You jus have to do base attacks good with variosu degrees of severity, and not having it be an instant game over. I belive I posted a decent proposal of how to handle it, but so oyu dont' have to look for it, here:
Every base should be attackable by the enemy. And not just by troops, but also air bombardment. This wouldn't destroy the base outright (since most facilites are underground), but would damage it, take it off-line for a while. Either the entire base could be unusable for a while (burried entrance?) or there could be a random dice roll to see which buildings were damaged, depending on how strong the attack was (how many alien craft and of which type were involved). Some buildings like hangars and airstrips would have a higher weight to get damaged, since they are more exposed. To me this seems like a good balance as it's not TOO punishing, especially early on. You could also make it so that a base can be fully destroyed if bombed twice (again, giving the player time and opportunity to stop it with air intercepts)
EDIT: WTF is it with this forum and constantly messing up quotes? I can't even edit them after. Why can't I see the post in code, with tags?
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YES - to a single main unattackable base. This would house ALL personell, including soldiers, scientist, engineers and other possible specialists. This base will be mainly responsible for power management and other, global upgrades.
YES - to multiple (possibly infinite ) secondary bases which house radars, hangars, laboratories, workshops, possible generators, and all other, "real" tangible buildings. These are attackable bases and aliens can and will be able to attack them. Making them small, operatable bases with interesting building layouts, eg. being able to place corrdidors, and defensive structures in addition to the main buildings will make for more interesting decisions. Secondary bases are essential if you want to get any research, manufacture or other project done. It houses hangars for the aircraft which are essential to shoot down UFOs, and the planes have real range limitations ( at first - similar to X1 ). Since they are small players should be expected to place at least 2 - 3 right at the start, maybe make one science and one engineering base preloaded for the player to place at the start of the game.
So you want small attackable bases and a single main base that is unattackable? How does that make sense? Why would the alien refuse to attack the most important place?
Seems to me you just want an easy mode that does look like one.
Every base should be attackable by the enemy. And not just by troops, but also air bombardment. This wouldn't destroy the base outright (since most facilites are underground), but would damage it, take it off-line for a while. Either the entire base could be unusable for a while (burried entrance?) or there could be a random dice roll to see which buildings were damaged, depending on how strong the attack was (how many alien craft and of which type were involved). Some buildings like hangars and airstrips would have a higher weight to get damaged, since they are more exposed.
To me this seems like a good balance as it's not TOO punishing, especially early on. You could also make it so that a base can be fully destroyed if bombed twice (again, giving the player time and opportunity to stop it with air intercepts)
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16 hours ago, Max_Caine said:
It took me a while to find when the skyranger started teleporting, (because it didn't always). It started teleporting in Build v3. To quote from the build:
If you're not keen on teleportation you aren't going to like X2 seeing as how teleportation appears to be a core tenet of the narrative and some of the mechanics. Teleportation has been tossed around as a concept on the boards for quite a while. If I remember correctly from the previous discussions, teleportation waves away a number of narrative issues such as the capability to reach crash sites at abnormally long distances, etc. If the objection to the Skyranger teleporting is a satisfying narrative reason, rather than a gameplay reason then I'm sure narratives could be spun out of thin air. I mean, off the top of my head, teleportation on the Kardashev scale could belong to a civilisation that rates much, much higher than humans so any examples of teleportation are dimly understood at best, and treated as "it just works". The Elder race trope has a long and distinguished history, no reason why X2 could drink from its well. I mean, Stargate did.
Teleportation was a solution to the terrible 1-base decision, since you had to reach every apart of the globe from 1 location. If multi-bases are in, then teleportation is not needed.
I despise teleportation, not only because of narrative and world-building reasons and the the massive can of worms it opens, but because of the mechanical implications. (Also, Stargate turned to trash, the only thing saving it was good cast chemistry and banter. And the elder race tropes are in my opinion generally terrible - anything that treats science as magic is)
X-Com games have NOT been just about squad-level tactics. If that is what one is after, there are many games that do it a LOT better (Jagged Alliance 2 for example). Planning and logistics on a grander scale are - to me - the defining aspect of X-Com. Hence, when such is trivilized with magitech teleportation that makes logistic utterly irrelevant (base location does not matter, travel time does not matter, local resource managment does not matter) it leaves a poor taste in my mouth. Also, having a single base, a single point of faliure is a really bad idea for any military group.
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On 6/17/2019 at 8:08 PM, jonyjonas said:
I don't mind having to kit out multiple squads - in fact, one of the things I loved about Xenonauts 1 is that you always felt like your soldiers were expendable and easily killed, so you never relied on any one soldier too much (at least I didn't, was always leveling up rookies alongside more experienced squaddies). In XCOM, when you lose a few high-level team members everything just breaks down and you feel like you have to start all over again just because of that.
Now that you mention it, this should be a mechanic. Lower-level soldiers get an EXP bonus when deployed with higher-level ones. Like mentorship. Makes sense and would make recovering from losses easier.
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On 6/17/2019 at 7:19 PM, luckytron said:
To be honest, most of the secondary bases will probably continue to be Aircraft Hangars and Radar Outposts, while Atlas Base will become the Research/Manufacture/A-Team Hub, since unless having certain structures in the other bases will be better than having them in the main base, they simply wont be built.
Maybe to encourage more variety, there could be buildings that have an effect on the region where the base is built, like shortening the duration of Resource missions, or increase local force presence/give bonuses to local forces, or even spawning an "ambush mission" where with help from the Xenonauts, local authorities lure Aliens into a prepared site, where (almost) any mission type can occur, except with all civilians replaced with local forces.
Or being able to construct a purely defensive structure, with more defensive deployment options (more places for turrets or other such things), which would do nothing outside of base attacks.
In any case, I thought the Side-Ways view of the main base was a nice take, as well as having the Hangar/Radar Bases, and it justified only having one dropship at any time, but being able to construct more full bases makes the One dropship rule kind of arbitrary.
I don't see a need to centralize research, since scientist working in different bases can easily coordinate over the internet. Ergo, dumping all research into one base yields no real benefit.
I guess what you could do is have it so that labs and engineering rooms are affected by a region or give a bonus to a region.
A lab in Asia might increase the speed at which new tech is researched in a region, and engeneering could increase it's spread (so ally solder might get laser rifles sooner and have more of them). Or placing a lab there gives YOU a bonus of somekind. Or both.
Additionally, you could make it so that 1 engeneering bay can only make 1 thing, thus stacking multiple in one base does not increase the speed at which you build that thing, but you can build several of the thing. If it takes 5 days to build a laser rifle, it takes 5 days. Throwing more money and men wont' speed it up.
OR you could make aliens target the biggest base we have, even bomb it from orbit at some point, making sure that putting your eggs in one basket is a REALLY bad idea. Ideally, even a good player should loose a base or two, but the game should provide a good player with enough resources to be able to bounce back. The fight should feel desperate.
Shields, A Thought
in Xenonauts-2 General Discussion
Posted
All Armor (in theory) works the same - by trying to absorb/deflect/disperse incoming energy. Both shields and body armor should have their own status. If the incoming energy is lower than it's treshhold, then the shield/armor generally take little to no damage. If it's above, they get damaged (but would still reduce damage the wearer/user takes), and the protection they offer lessens.
Completely destroying the body armor/shield is bloody unlikely - you merely create holes/weakneses. So while I wouldn't have it break unless under super-specific circumstances (insane amount of damage, like getting hit by a tank), but have it degrade to a minium value (let's say 50%).
I really want to see individual armor part tracking - front chest, back, left/right arm, left/right leg ,head