Team Loadouts [Feature Suggestion]

[Sheepy]

You have equipments.  You have soldiers.  You combine them to form team, and you select which team to deploy every time.
i.e. Team is a combination of available soldiers and available equipments, without locking them from other teams.

Example
  You may have a team of soldiers equipped for UFO missions, and a team of soldiers equipped for terror missions.
  The same soldier may be in both teams and wield a shotgun in team A, but a rocket launcher in team B.
  Or the single laser rifle is the hands of soldier C for team A, but hands it over to another soldier for team B.

Pros:
  Player can create specialised teams without manually re-equiping soldiers every time.

Cons:
  Mainly in internal coding.  The interface is roughly the same.
  If X1, in equipment and vehicle screen you replace dropship with teams, and in launch screen you list each vehicle once for each team or use a dropbox.

Note:
  This feature runs best with single "dropship".  Multiple dropships works, but the burden is on the player to create independent teams to send them in parallel.

Edited January 27, 2017 by Sheepy

[thixotrop]

I like your idea but maybe change it to mission preferences combined with soldier abilities.

What if certain roles are required for the mission, like shield-man or rocket-man, and none of your soldiers can do that but is equipped nevertheless? This might lead to a soldier dragging a rocket launcher with them with two steps each round and cannot fire at all.

One example: Mission to breach a stranded UFO that might require explosives or the rocket launcher.
The game gives advice of what to bring to the battlefield or better you can create preselections of soldier equipment; 1 sniper, 2 shotgunner, 2 riflemen, 2 rocketter/explosiv specialists and other. Maybe even with item propositions, C4 or satchels but better no incendiary.

If your chosen/available soldiers are not able to fulfill all roles you can/have to change equipment or have to chsoe different soldiers. This would sure mean to plan for different soldier characteristics.

 

[Sheepy]

8 hours ago, thixotrop said:

I like your idea but maybe change it to mission preferences combined with soldier abilities.

What if certain roles are required for the mission, like shield-man or rocket-man, and none of your soldiers can do that but is equipped nevertheless? This might lead to a soldier dragging a rocket launcher with them with two steps each round and cannot fire at all.

Hmm. Not sure how I can state it more clearly, but I'm copying Afterlight's team feature, which is very important in that game because you need very different weapons to deal with different aliens, or even different map.  The player have total control over who is in the team and how to equip them.

If a soldier cannot join the mission, the team will be one man less on deploy.  The game will not grab a replacement on your behave.
But as long as the deploy screen shows number of soldiers in the team, the players only have themselves to blame if they didn't notice it.

Edited January 27, 2017 by Sheepy

[Chris]

It depends how much the mission variables change really - if missions always have similar numbers of soldiers (e.g. in X1 the Chinook carries 8 soldiers so you almost always have 8 soldiers on a mission) then this is potentially workable.

But if the variables are more changeable this time around then this is something that you'd probably find easier through the existing soldier loadout system, because you can use the standard roles to swap between weapons, and also create a Plasma Rifleman and a Laser Rifleman etc if you need to swap between tech levels.

[RustyNayle]

Yes I actually suggested this in another thread, without knowing it was already here.  It's a great idea, and taking something that Xe1 did well, and taking it further.