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Different classes of landing craft


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As the title implies, how about having different "classes" of craft that have unique advantages and disadvantageous like a support that deploys turrets (and flares when doing night missions) at the landing site that remain active for x amount of turns/until destroyed but they are slower or a high speed troop transport that is faster than any other and could take on a UFO in a fight but carries less troops. 

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Not sure if I agree with landing craft actually doing stuff like firing flares or firing on enemies, but I do like the idea of several distinct kinds of landing craft, especially if you start with at least two already unlocked.

Off the top of my head, you could have one landing craft that fits more troops and perhaps has more doors and windows, like the Chinook, and a smaller craft that fits far fewer troops, but is faster and has longer range, and perhaps also has a higher chance of not being intercepted by UFOs as it flies low or has stealth technology or whatever?

Not the best example, of course, but what I'm trying to say is, it would be fun to be facing a mission and think "which helicopter/plane should I use for this one?".

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The flares and turret was just a rough example. Here are some of my sort of more thought out ones: 

"Boxer" Heavy duty class: more HP if intercepted by a UFO, the main and side doors having medium cover attached to the doors, can carry vehicles/slower then other, uses more fuel, can't carry extra troops 

"Valkyrie" Medical class: improves all healing done to troops who are inside the craft, increased chance the crew will survive a crash, decreases civilian casualties during missions and gives the civvies a chance to get knocked out instead of killed/less HP, can't carry vehicles or extra troops, uses more fuel

"Interloper" Interceptor class: Fastest dropship available and could do some good damage to UFOs, can attack and disable landed UFOs, lands closer to crashed UFOs/less HP, can't carry vehicles 

"Red Army" Carrier: carries the most troops out of any dropship, can carry vehicles at the same time and extra troops but airdrops vehicles near the landing site instead of rolling out the craft/the slowest of all the craft and uses a lot of fuel 

Still very basic but just to show the concept of it.

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For there to be a real choice, every disadvantage would have to be actually important at least some of the time. If fuel consumption is a variable, then you have to want to conserve fuel sometimes; for being slower to be noteworthy you have to care about the transportation times, if avoiding interception or surviving crashes is important than you have to be intercepted and shot down and everyone killed sometimes.

 

Fuel management, trying to meet strategic timeline schedules, and reloading after the A-list got killed by an interceptor are all things that don't add to X2's gameplay.

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Yeah, i wanted to make the disadvantages not too steep but not too small but i can see what you mean. I dunno if i made these too steep with these ones though.

"Boxer": can't carry extra troops and if the mission fails while using this craft the panic increases by a slightly higher amount then normal (Xenonauts bringing out the big guns and failing may damage local support)   

"Valkyrie": can't carry vehicles or extra troops and takes up 2 slots in your barracks (Xenonaut field medics) 

"Interloper": can't carry vehicles, takes 2x as long to refuel and instead of having a straight line exit ramp it has a very small in width but long in length snub nosed exit (Diagram below)

0000    R=exit ramp        00000000           Standard craft interior to the left, Interloper to the right

0000                              00000000

0000                              RRRRRRR

RRRR

"Red Army": no side doors, has a weight limit which means you may have to leave some heavy hitters behind if you want to have a vehicle as well

 

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Unfortunately dropships are one of the most asset-intensive things to add to the game, because you need the top-down hangar art, the Soldier Equip background art, and you also need the 3D art so that they can appear in the combat missions. There's also not really many useful variables you can play with - the big thing is how many troops they can carry into battle, and everything else is kinda unimportant.

I'm also reluctant to put any weapons on the dropship that would be used in the ground combat, because I think your soldiers should be doing the fighting rather than letting your dropship do the work. Having air-to-air weapons that allow it to fight UFOs is a possibility, although I don't really see what advantage you'd gain compared to just building an interceptor and a dropship seperately? Perhaps some kind of stealth mechanic could be a possibility; the ability to not get intercepted by UFOs when flying to a mission site is something that might actually be a useful bonus.

Ultimately though you need to have a really good in order to convince me to put a new dropship in the game because it just involves so much extra art :) 

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Shame but it makes a lot of sense, i guess someone/me could always mod in a module system when the game releases (which i hope is soon, c: hype) that doesn't change the craft art or anything like that but just gives it some stat bonuses like better fuel efficiency or unique bonuses like being harder to intercept by UFOs. Thanks for replying though. 

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Yup, the in-game properties of the aircraft can be set in the game files, so you could always change the properties of the starting dropship or duplicate it to create a second type with similar art but different stats.

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  • 3 years later...
On 5/23/2018 at 12:26 AM, Chris said:

Unfortunately dropships are one of the most asset-intensive things to add to the game, because you need the top-down hangar art, the Soldier Equip background art, and you also need the 3D art so that they can appear in the combat missions. There's also not really many useful variables you can play with - the big thing is how many troops they can carry into battle, and everything else is kinda unimportant.

The top view is not the most difficult drawing. Even simple graphics programs can handle this. For example: Illustrator.

You can use the same deployment principle as the D-54 Valkyrie to deploy troops on the ground.

7578096_maxresdefault(8).thumb.jpg.f955f49559fc647134e4b6c1a413b622.jpg

1652146019_maxresdefault(9).thumb.jpg.e75663fa0f93040338a84ccba7c8cf45.jpg

Also you have a set of tiles and an editor for creating a UFO (as in the screenshot).

105994781_maxresdefault(7).thumb.jpg.64e05e9b1c1359bb4536962e577ce310.jpg

In the first minutes of the battle, the shuttle serves as a fortress for the xenonaut soldiers. Its design, capacity, door placement are very important.

Therefore, the background for the soldiers in the hangar will not be a problem for the fans of the game (mod creators).

 

 

 

Shuttle-fortress for "OpenXcom" for battles on the map with many aliens.

1506236967_screen005.1(1).thumb.png.39305fe07793e0d05a3bd11ffab98807.png

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Have we already with more R & D more and different Landing Crafts. But maybe with DLC-Things later on there can be done Upgrades. First the Main-Game with the already testet and upgraded/ reworked / refited Features, Implementations and similar have to come on the Market, before the Steam-Community get like the Father of Queen Elisabeth I.

And all know what he had done to his Wifes, Kids and so on.

Edited by Alienkiller
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