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Community Discussion - how best to handle equipping soldiers not in dropships?


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Hello everyone - quick design question to discuss with our community that revolves around how the game should handle equipping soldiers who are not assigned to dropships. I'd like to know what system people would prefer in their game out of the three options below, given the choice.

1) If a soldier is not assigned to a dropship, they cannot be assigned equipment:
This is the current system in Xenonauts 2. If a soldier is not assigned to a dropship, you can view them in the Soldier Equip screen but all their equipment slots are greyed out and they hold no equipment. Unassigning a soldier from a dropship clears their loadout, which means all your equipment is always available when you're equipping the soldiers in a dropship (unless you've got two dropships). Assigning a soldier to a dropship attempts to auto-populate their equipment based on their loadout.

2) If a soldier is not assigned to a dropship, you can equip them as normal:
This is the system used in Xenonauts 1. You can freely equip items to soldiers who are unassigned, but this means it can be difficult keeping track of your equipment - e.g. you might have a spare Laser Rifle on one of your unassigned soldiers somewhere without realising it, and you'd have to search through them to check that isn't the case.

3) If a soldier is not assigned to a dropship, you assign them an intended loadout which is only filled when they enter the dropship:
This is a sort of experimental mix between the two setups, where you are able to assign items to soldiers who are not in a dropship but this simply represents the items that would try to use if assigned to a dropship. For example, if you have a Laser Rifle in your stores that could be assigned to all of your unassigned soldiers but when you assigned them to the dropship only the first one would actually get the Laser Rifle. This means you never "lose" items by having them not assigned to active duty soldiers ... but might be kinda confusing for the player.

Any thoughts / suggestions about those modes? The system in the original Xenonauts was the simplest and easiest to understand, but it did make it a little hard to track how many items you had sometimes (especially when certain troops would get automatically unassigned due to injury, etc). Or was that not something people had issues with?

I don't have a particular preference myself here, really, so I'm happy to listen to what the players would prefer!

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Suggestion 2 is something that was good in the Predecessor. That´s an Thing we all would accept from the Predecessor without :mad:.

Suggestion 3 would be something new and maybe the best thing we could use for Xenonaut 2.

Personaly I would have the 3rd Variant. Variant 1 is the worst Case in the Beta. You can only equip Soldiers after you have a Second Dropship for that. Variant 2 we had in Xenonauts 1, which was nice and good, but it was to easy.

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Suggestion 2.

I cant follow this argument.

>but this means it can be difficult keeping track of your equipment - e.g. you might have a spare Laser Rifle on one of your unassigned soldiers somewhere without realising it, and you'd have to search through them to check that isn't the cas

Counter example:

Unbenannt4.png.c5517e27394bf4d13a398a8fecfdd69f.png

This means

  • I have 3 sniper rifles available in total.
  • 2 sniper rifles in store, and 1 combined sniper rifle eqipped on soldiers in other subtabs.

Even better, if i want to, i can equipt all 3 snipers, where one gets automatically deequipt from the soldier in other subtab(s).

I dont know if that is functionality that XCE introduced, but thats how X-Division works currently.

This formula should be followed for all gear components: [available gear in store] + [available gear equipped on other soldiers in other subtabs]. As well as the automatic unequiping if you wish to equipt it on soldiers in the current subtab.

Edited by Charon
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Option 3 is the most intuitive to me. When a soldier isn't in a dropship, it makes sense that the assigned loadout is the desired template and not something that actually depletes your stores now. It's the most user-friendly solution, preventing "losing" items and preventing the need to repeatedly reassign equipment.

The big issue here is to make sure that's not confusing, but I imagine a graphical cue could address that. if a soldier is unassigned, draw their equipment with some transparency mask applied. It should convey the idea that the equipment isn't really "there" yet.

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When you assign a soldier a load out i.e.( Rifleman, Heavy, or Assault), if in the course of play that soldier is made unassigned, that load out is removed to storage, and if at any time that soldier is then reassigned, then they should be so equipped, and if in doing so, that equipment is not available, you can then equip them, with what is available.

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It would be much appreciated if you could also delete custom made weapons loadouts (say if you made an "Elite" class with symbol and loadout). I haven't looked recently so maybe you can now do this, but this was one thing which annoyed me slightly with zen1. You had a whole list of loadout names you no longer needed or that had become irrelevant as you progressed. Just a small thing though.

I suppose this could be negated if you chose your loadout names more wisely (i.e. Anti-Sibillian) and just updated the equipment as you progressed.

Edited by ooey
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  • 2 weeks later...

I definitely like the fact that you have equipped soldiers at base. What if your base is attacked? You would spend so much time equipping them at the beginning of each invasion because the armoury was locked and the guy on the dropship had it with him and died in the field!

Option 3 kind of sounds interesting.

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I think we can all agree that when we are in a subtab we want:

  1. To have information about ALL available equipment.
  2. To be able to equipt ALL avilable equipment, eg. all equipment that is not used in the current subtab. If a grenade is stored in the storage room or "on" a soldier is irrelevant. Im not against option 3 per se, but i fear the implementation looks ugly. I would want to have a visual distinction between a "template soldier" and a soldier carrying "real" equipment. The go-to solution would be less transparency for template items, which looks less good than a simple "storage" on soldiers.

 

I have a different problem that i frequently run into. I look at my rooster, trying out some new builds and combinations, changing up loads and equipment on individual soldiers ... once everything is done i realise that for that loadout a different class name would be more fitting, so i change the class.

Guess what happens when you change the class, the default equipment for that class gets equipted ... all my carefully, and individually equipted loadout is gone ... .

Because of this workflow i suggest that changing class doesnt automatically equipt soldier loadout, but that it only occurs when pressing the corresponding button. Usually you experiment with loadouts before you know what kinda class category that fits into, and this prevents having to reset your loadouts over and over again, just because you want to change the class name and icon.

Edited by Charon
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This probably more true than ever with X2. The add-on modules for armour mean there's a lot more options and as a consequence more room for new loadouts. When it comes to modding, I imagine the first thing modders will do is add 20+ modules per armour set!

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