Chefsbrian

If this could become a thing.... I would want to, nay, have to, make the classic pokemon theme song the end of battle success debrief music.

I always just hand waved it as "Exhaustion from combat activity" and accepted it at that .

Well from a reality standpoint, the real danger of an alien weapon isn't the impact force, but the heat. Regular armor is useless because Kevlar just melts under heat, which then melts through your poor soldiers. Nasty stuff. Jackal Armor uses Ceramic plates that Vaporize away as they dissipate the heat, hence their ability to mitigate the damage. Holding a metal shield in front of you, the metal may be able to survive the heat from one blast, and since your not making contact with the now very hot metal, your not going to burn. With enough fire, The whole thing eventually melts away or distorts significantly enough to be useless. Alien Ceramic armors and shields just fare better because alien materials handle heat so much better. In a gameplay standpoint, I'm playing around with the one 'reasonable' shield use, which is to make your stun troops not completely suicidal without relying on gas grenades. So I made the shields two handed, and I'm about to see if giving them a stun attack causes any game crashes. If not, I'll just transition over the baton stats and say that a trooper can hold a baton behind it effectively, but the shield is impossible to aim around and keep upright. Maybe raise the weight a bit too if it is still too strong. Holy wall of text.

I wouldn't see much use for Mines, as deploying them would expose troops to fire, which is not a good plan. I've been tinkering the config files for armor and alien armor to the point where getting shot in basic is a death sentance, and Jackal MAYBE stops one shot on normal. So I'd rather not expose myself to any undue fire. I'd see more use from something akin to a grenade launcher, think lightweight RPG with range farther than hand grenades, but same sized explosion. Good area denial weapon like a Mine, but makes more sense in a gameplay and tactical perspective.

Well, the only full proof way to reduce the turn length is to reduce the alien numbers, as their movement is really what takes most of the time. The AI calculates the value of hundreds of tiles at the moment of movement to decide exactly what it wants to do, weighing off about a dozen or so values per tile, plus debating shooting percentages on each tile. Its alot of math, and each Alien and Local Forces needs to do them. So you can either kill them really quickly, Modify the game files to reduce the number of Aliens on ships (But thats no fun now, is it?), or add more power to you computer. To a certain extent, a more powerful computer can run these numbers faster, to a limit of course. I find turns very reasonable, but I do also use a second display running Youtube all the time.

Considering it uses finger gestures to help direct flight, I imagine pulling a trigger would be HIGHLY detrimental to flight control.

Oh man that old scout ship.... Serious nostalgia about breaching those two side doors and worrying about hitting that Power core....

If your doing more than a colour shift, it would be a little insane, there are 104 sprite sheets for the AK on basic armor, for example, with anywhere from 1(?) to ~65 characters. The workload multiplies as more weapons and armor happen... However, if they released the tool they use to convert models to sprites instead of their models... Well that would be a massive boon for the community, I'd say.

I haven't played the v20 runs, but I have been swarmed through doors before, hence why my door breaches are always in a concave shape.