NoirWolf
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Posts posted by NoirWolf
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My prediction of what's in Xenonauts's future (which is about as accurate as any other's considering the unknowable tendencies of the future) is this:
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So put a warning text in there. Are the devs supposed to say "Sorry about that" when gamers who try to abuse the system whine about their save files getting damaged as a consequence?
Sometimes I wonder if people have horse goggles on: There's such a thing as game crashes smartass, those can happen for any number of reasons, so do system crashes, power outages, something in the house suddenly deciding to short and cutting the power to all the house, etc. With your idea you'd potentially fuck with allot of people's saves just to add in a safety feature for a game mode which is optional.
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Nain, it wasn't wolfie. I have evidence of someone else setting up the fire!
Look at that sheer evil!
Enough to take a leak in your liederhosen!
Heh I zee yuf found ze Mark 1 Zuper Toodler... quitez unpredictable...ze mark 2 though...sehr gut!
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And that contradicts what the game is allowing me to do. Two scenarios.
A) Just finished a mission. UFO appears. I send a Condor at it, appears to be too difficult, lost a Condor. I can load the auto-save. I'll redo everything I did at the base, no worries (Research/Manufacturing/Equipment).
B) So I down the UFO then I send in my units to start a mission. Lost a couple of guys. No worries though I'll just load a game before the mission. I'll redo everything I did at the base, no worries (Research/Manufacturing/Equipment).
What I am curious about is if there is a possibility to include two strings in the config file in the "Documents" folder, but it is no big deal really (because I can just do it manually by tabbing out of the game and remove the auto-saves and keep 1 before I quit, as I've already stated).
Auto-Save = 1
Save & Quit = 0
Is it possible to "bind" the [save Game] or [Auto-Save] function to the [Exit Game] button?
Psuedo-Code~ for "Save & Quit"
IF [Exit Game Function] = Do [Auto-Save Function] first then [Exit Program Function] second
As for crashes and such, I'd take the risk. The game hasn't frozen and/or crashed on me yet and it's not even complete yet, which only makes me believe it'll get more stable as time progresses.
By what I know of programming Osvir if they add in anything similar to prevent save scumming via alt-f4-ing they could run into issues of permanently corrupted save files.
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Surely by that reasoning we should just disable saves entirely? The thing is, if people want to abuse Ironman mode to break it, they just will - making secure systems that are genuinely secure is very hard (I have some experience in this from previous jobs), and the resources we would have to expend to make Ironman mode un-abusable would be far in excess of the benefit. Particularly when we can just say "Hey, maybe don't abuse Ironman mode?" and anybody who really cares about having that experience will just not Alt-F4 to load saves or whatever work around they find.
By that token anyone who wants ironman mode can just not save and rely on outsaves
, just saying. -
Ja, mein zeppelin ist kaput because you guys couldn't keep your fire hoses in your lederhosen.
Ja, ja , ein firehosen issue! <.< der ist no liederhosen big enough for mein!
Also to fill outs ze derp quota <insert clever fire pun here>.
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They probaly rest as best as they can in the Chinook/Charlie in-between missions.
Its not exactly uncommon for military squads to have several missions in a row, especially in a war.
I personally dont find it that much of a problem and the fact that they retain the equipment they had at the end of the last mission at the start of the new one (alien weapons, medkits in their hands instead of their rifles) along with any seriously wounded person missing from the mission, is good enough for me as a showing of the fatigue of battle-after-battle.
If you want to get realy realistic you could have them get a penalty for doing subsequent missions in a row that reduces their max TUs, or add a "fatigue/energy" bar/timer that must be filled in base (like fuel) before they are ready for a nother mission and it takes longer to recharge if they do more than one mission in a flight, with increasing penalties.
This would be more realistic. But it would not be fun (and not in a "grenade right outside the dropship in the first turn" kind of "not-fun" but a "this is just tedious and frustrating" kind of not-fun).
PS:Im quite grateful Xenonauts doesnt have the boring energy bar of the originals. Shit was a pain when trying to relocate people to the UFO entrance after clearing out the map.
Still doesn't explain how the guys who just finished a week long project on understanding the fundamentals of alien alloys can now move directly to alien plasma technology and not blow their own balls off with a alien pistol due to fatigue.
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[video=youtube;N4vf8N6GpdM]
NEIN!
Because evil jokes are ze gut way!
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They haven't progressed farther than plasma weaponry tells us that video game design is limited by human imagination.
That's... the first time I've heard that particular brand of flawed logic considering the wealth of SF books which deal not only with plasma-level civilizations but those beyond them, Hell for the most part Star Trek depicts a future where humanity is on the cusp of surpassing plasma-level technology ( Warp reactors are after all based on matter/antimatter reactions last I checked and photon torpedoes are antimatter weapons) and I doubt anyone within the Dev team hasn't at least seen an episode from Star Trek. Beyond this we have Star Wars (not very hard sf and not a favourite but it does at least have mentions of post-plasma civilizations), Warhammer 40.000 ( antimatter weaponry is present within the lore, remnants of the Dark Age of Technology and the Imperium of man's tech is a mix and match of 3 different stages in the evolutionary history of technology, IE a majority in late laser tech, some plasma tech and a little bit of antimatter at the bleeding edge of archeotech), etc.
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No offence, but:
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S'okay.
Funny, no-one's mentioned that opened alien doors are crushable. A vehicle will permanently destroy an opened door. Not that it helps much when closed, mind.
GET ME CLOSER!
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I see what you are getting at, but auto-saving after a mission is also intended to cover the player in situations where the game crashes (hopefully not!) or their laptop runs out of batteries or whatever - too many things could go wrong for us to abandon a safety feature like that.
The Omnissiah has blessed me brotha with a STC printout for what is called a... separate post battle autosave slot (it might be a bit more exploitable but only if you get into multiple fights in short succession, otherwise it really doesn't play into the save scumming thing).
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SET THEM ABLAZE BROTHERS!
-snaps fingers- PUNY MORTAL! MY POWAH CANNOT BE TAMED BY SUCH PUNY TRICKS! -cracks knuckles and the terminator next to you keels over snapped in half at the waist-
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Would the alien flashbangs work? Because if they got the same borked ones we get I might not have a problem with that.
Alien flashbangs produce a puff of a ganja smoke anyway so the party can begin with or without ocular bleeding!
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The percentage chance of a solider being healthy/injured/dead on the destruction of a dropship can be jiggered with in config.xml, and there are separate values for a dropship taken out on friendly territory, neutral territory (i.e. water) and unfriendly territory. Would it be useful to have the percentages changed so over friendly/neutral territory there's a 0% chance of a solider dying, and make it something like 50/50 healthy/injured if over water, and 75/25 healthy/injured over friendly?
Random soldier 1: I hear you survived getting stranded over the North Sea!
Hero soldier 1: Fuck kid... I wish I was over it... spent 3 weeks in ice cold water!
Direct version: Over water it should be a 50/50 chance injured or dead and over friendly it should be 50/50 injured or healthy.
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It is exploitable, but restricting the ability to move the pointer would be likely to make people angry. What might be a way to prevent the corners from being found and permit freedom of movement is to have infinite blank borders so you can move the mouse beyond the map without realising where the edges of the map are. You wouldn't get lost as you can click on any solider icon to re-center the camera on the solider.
Or merely just have a circular camera traversable area beyond the edges of the map not much bigger but big enough for the player to have no clue where the edge is (it being circular would further decrease the odds of the player guessing the edges correctly without a fair bit of experience within the game and even then it would be a crapshoot when compared to linear borders).
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I'd be ok with night vision if the aliens got flashbangs, otherwise nope.
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Being able to land the transport doesnt really solve the problem if the transport is over water.
In case of a water landing you may be used as a flotation device.
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Well, if it becomes a choice of "Send the transport out unescorted to that terror mission halfway around the globe and hope it doesn't get shot down" or "don't do the terror site" on the occasions that the transport does get shot down you get screwed either way, doubly so if it happens while going TO the mission rather than having completed it. So each and every mission has a low risk of auto-loss, with a lower risk of auto-loss with extra punishment. In either case it could cripple a game. During a ground mission gone wrong there is always the option to retreat, and even if you don't manage you get the transport back and can once again go on missions when the new rooks arrive at the longest. For this, you not only lose the men, but have to wait... how long? Days I would assume, for the transport to be recovered. And there's no way to avoid it. Not even going to the mission start autosave and taking the correct approach to dealing with a lobsterman terror mission.
Ultimately, if we require transports to be escorted we're coming back to the continental transport argument. We never did resolve that.
This could be fixed somewhat by delaying the timing of the aggressive UFOs which hunt down transports, this way you could in theory at least have two bases and cover somewhat the transport between the two of them. Also realism FTW!
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Even the Chinook has far more range/fuel capacity than any escort, so you can't just put some fighters in a squadron with the transport and send them off to a mission. Even worse, trying I would expect to force you to RTB the whole squadron when the fighters ran low on fuel as there's no mechanic for splitting individual craft from a squadron in flight.
Then be careful how you allocate troops and resources? I know that may seem harsh but... if one city has to vanish into the gullet of a alien bug so the world doesn't get raped by greys that's a small price to pay.
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Hold on there! What I'm saying is that a commander has mostly has the option to send more troops to a situation not suddenly smarter troops. Who cares what the base level of intelligence is? The commander would still only have a choice to send more stupid aliens to fix the problem. No computer AI is going to be better than an experienced human player unless you spend a lot of time and money developing the AI and in all likelihood the hardware would not be able to handle your wunder code even if you could write it. That only leaves increasing the number of opponents or their stats/weapons as a viable solution. Even if the humans were only fighting giant ants that could only charge and do melee attacks to vary the difficulty you would still only have the choice to add more ants.
Chris is going to give us the best AI he can afford in time and money. It's still not going to be better than a mediocre human player. I think most players would much prefer to fight an enemy that is acting as intelligently as possible from the get go even on "EASY". That supports the suspension of disbelief way better than completely moronic AI that leaves you wonder how the aliens even managed to build spaceships. To "de-tune" the AI further to accomodate easier levels of play is the wrong way to go about changing the difficulty. That only leaves numbers of aliens, alien/human stats, and taking away/adding resources from aliens/humans to play with.
If the computer AI was actually much better than an average human then I could see varying the intelligence of the AI to accomodate the difficulty level. This is often done in chess programs and it works in those. But Xenonauts is not chess and would require a FAR more complex AI system to get to the level of an expert human.
My suggestion towards the AI is to have it layered and the difficulty levels split into :
Easy: Disorganized group of competent alien AIs.
Normal: Organized group of competent alien AIs, organized and commanded by a rudimentary commander level AI.
Hard: Organized group of competent alien AIs, organized and commanded by a competent commander level AI.
The commander level AI would basically make sure that the aliens wouldn't get overwhelmed so easily (it'd retreat aliens that have made contact and aren't in sufficient numbers to combat the guys you have fighting them) or stand in cover inside the ship while you open and close the entrance door of the UFO (it would make sure to move them towards the door on either side to make your life more fun) and this on rudimentary level on competent it does all that but also has a few strategies under its belt (like withdrawing his troops to draw you in or using aggressive group tactics in a wedge formation later on, or taking on a scorched Earth policy when you're pushing up, things like this, I know would probably be allot of work but still... a guy can dream
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Realism aside(being UFO would just shoot the grounded dropship from above) i rather like the idea of engaging in a ground battle instead of fighting... of course this wouldn't be able to happen with Fighters because well they're fighters but with scouts and the like i think this would be a fun gameplay element...
Fighters would just strafe your guys on the ground to death.
Does the game not have a escort option for your troop transport? If yes reload at a earlier point and send the skyranger with an escort fighter or two, the option to land would then require additional things to be scripted in to not just make it a "get out of shit free" card.
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What might be an interesting alternative here is an anti-escort mission.
You've got a group of aliens trying to traverse the map with a number of (presumably important) captives. You need to kill the aliens without killing the captives to save the day. The aliens come in two "behaviour types" - escorts and soldiers. The escorts might be carrying the captives (perhaps they need to be stunned rather than killed) or simply traveling with them, with the captives on some sort of floating stretcher that stops moving if the controlling escort is killed. The goal of the escorts is simply to get to their "extraction point". Meanwhile, the soldiers travel with them initially but adopt standard battle behaviour upon encountering your troops (attempting to tie them up and buy time for the escorts to escape with the captives).
This would make for an interesting, high-stakes, time-pressured mission with interesting choices - Do I stay and fight the guards, hoping to clean up fast enough to catch up? Do I split my forces? Do I expose my troops to enemy fire by rushing the escorts on initial contact, and hope I suffer minimal losses in the unopposed fire by the guards and can fight them off after the escorts are killed? Do I use heavy weapons and rapid fire to maximize damage output at the risk of killing the captives myself? Do I advance cautiously or rush forward trying to insure I have more time to respond?
I think it's the sort of mission that could really, really break up the the standard approach that exists as-is right now, and make things exciting and new - a change of pace that would really make the mission special.
Since the captives are presumably important, cash for each captive saved is obvious but a variety of rewards obviously present themselves. If you were told who the captives were going in, and they were noticeably different, you'd even get the fun of deciding which captive it is most important to prioritize saving.
Unfortunately, this is more work than the initial proposal - but I'd prefer to not have the initial proposal at all as it stands, since it just plain doesn't seem fun. A time-based bug hunt with minimal important decisions, the need to put my troops at risk for no immediate goal because the alien hiding in the barn is going to magically disappear next turn and it took me a bunch of wasted time to figure out he was in there behind the hay stacks? It just doesn't sound fun.
Glyph... that sounds like something they might add if they're planning on major things to add prior to release, they're going more for fluff missions they can put together with current assets but if they plan on making any addons or DLCs for the game your mission idea is one that should get put in because it sounds so... I am going to say crunchy (something that as a tactician you can really sink your teeth into as a problem).
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Well' date=' the missions into alien territory was the Xen of turn-based games. It went on for far, far too long. I do agree that Apoc, despite its many flaws, was a cool game. Invading the Cult of Sirius and setting the entire place on fire is a really fond memory of mine, as was raiding the slums and planting explosives at the base of the buildings, causing it to all come tumbling down...
One thing I'd like to see from Apoc is smoke grenades extinguishing fires. That was neat.
Noir, I'd start with the first game then go onto Apoc. Check out [u']OpenXCom[/u] to go along with it, it'll ease the pain of travelling back to a decades-old UI.
I think I will pick Apoc up on steam, I think I can get the first game to run on a tablet I am expecting to arrive soon so gonna keep that for Xcom on the go.
What's the future of Xenonauts?
in Xenonauts General Discussion
Posted
Or maybe mash your two ideas together so that you get the makings of UFO: Apocalypse type scenario where the humans went "WE HAS UNLIMITED POWAH!" until the aliens went "You guys do know this is a scout fleet, right? The main armada is 15 years away... and it's far better armed."