Hidden Movement Screen Time

[thothkins]

I'm still crossing my fingers for secret hope about complete skip of HM with a textbased HM-report where you can replay important actions by clicking on them to see what happened.

that seems amazingly fussy, not to mention removing a lot of the tension inherent in hidden movement. What do you see as the advantages in that approach?

[Gorlom]

People with ADD won't scream at thier screens? for those that don't care about the immersion/tension etc.

[thothkins]

well, it's screaming for a good cause. Honestly, people's attention spans thes...Look! a truck! wheeeee!

[crusherven]

I want Hidden Movement to stay (and I like the artwork for it) but IMO it has a few issues atm. For one, the civilians move before aliens, forcing you to sit through their turn before you find out if you got all the aliens or not. That's a pointless annoyance that should certainly go away.

Second, with civilians on every single mission, UFO recovery takes much longer than it might otherwise, and a lot of that time is spent watching civilians run in circles. I might not mind as much if they had some sort of AI that made sense, like, say, "run away from aliens" and "don't run into fires." I'm assuming that for the time being they're coded to move randomly and will get something more specific later (like run randomly away from aliens).

Finally, the sound effects give too much away in some cases and too little in others. If something is burning (like the UFO) I can tell if someone is moving or firing around it because the burning ambient noise plays in the background, even from the other side of the map. I shouldn't be able to hear that from so far away. On the other hand, as others have mentioned, it would make sense to hear the footsteps of aliens who are fairly near. That's not exactly a priority to implement from where I"m sitting, but the burning sound effect should probably go IMO.

[Kaguya]

For one, the civilians move before aliens, forcing you to sit through their turn before you find out if you got all the aliens or not. That's a pointless annoyance that should certainly go away.

Huh? I've never seen aliens move before civilians. Aliens, civilians and finally the local troops. For some reason it just plays a full turn for civs/militia even if the aliens are dead before ending the mission.

But yeah, civilians are the longest taking part at the moment. They use all their AP in pointless running about, and they move at the same speed as everyone else. And there's so many of them. Speeding them up a bit / eventual AI tweaks would fix it.

Edited May 15, 2012 by Kaguya

[Terkhen]

I agree, it would be great if civilians were more intelligent. In one mission two of them ran into smoke and fainted. They also like to sprint in front of aliens, and to run in circles.

[Gauddlike]

As soon as the AI is implemented that should get better.

Then they will jsut run into your line of fire and block doorways you need to get through in good old fashioned x-com style.