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Doors on alien ship


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So the doors stays open on the aliens ship if you open it up on your turn, and closes on the enemies turn. But if the aliens open the door, its closes on their turn. Should it not then close at the end of my turn, as it does for me? Feels a little unfair, and un-intuitive that the doors don't follow the same rule for me (the player) and the enemy (aliens). In the old x-coms for example, doors closes at the end of your turn, both for you and for the AI. I can see that this can be abused by the players if the AI dont know how to handle that situation. But at the moment it feels a little cheap when you are breaching the enemies ship. This is just a minor thing of course, but thought it warranted a comment.

Edited by Siniestro
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13 minutes ago, Siniestro said:

So the doors stays open on the aliens ship if you open it up on your turn, and closes on the enemies turn. But if the aliens open the door, its closes on their turn. Should it not then close at the end of my turn, as it does for me? Feels a little unfair, and un-intuitive that the doors don't follow the same rule for me (the player) and the enemy (aliens). In the old x-coms for example, doors closes at the end of your turn, both for you and for the AI. I can see that this can be abused by the players if the AI dont know how to handle that situation. But at the moment it feels a little cheap when you are breaching the enemies ship. This is just a minor thing of course, but thought it warranted a comment.

Yeah, changing it is a simple thing to do but it's intentionally set up that way. The doors autoclose because otherwise players open the door and shoot in and then close the door, which the AI struggles to deal with (particularly if it's a long way from the door and so can't actually open it anyway). They autoclose at the end of the alien turn for the same reason, because otherwise players just spend a turn shooting and are safe from return fire during their own turn. The AI could theoretically abuse this setup but it's not smart enough to do that, so it shouldn't pose too much of a problem :)

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  • 1 month later...

Alternative suggestion:

It seems unlikely to be able to just walk up to an alien ship and know how to operate their doors. Have 2 ways to open ship doors. One would be explosives, in which case the doors open perminantely. Second would be researching a technology to operate/activate some alien devices/technology (perhaps would apply to more than doors), in which case you could operate them freely. Can open and close them manually at will. To get around the AI struggling with players opening the door, shooting through the door, then closing it, simply give the AI remote control to the doors. Maybe they have remotes on their arms, or panels in the ship that can remotely operate their own doors. Bottom line is regardless of distance from the door, once the AI is aware of players outside the ship they can open/close the doors at will from a distance.

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The problem is more that it's tricky to write an AI that understands the tactical situation well enough to know when to open / close doors in order to cheese the player (even if they could open them remotely), whereas players are very good at spotting ways where they can cheese the AI :)

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Exactly Chris. That you illustrated very well.

For all which dosen´t know what Chris means. AI can be programmed in 3 Ways:

1. Way: AI is cheating (seen in the C&C-Series and other Games in the 80´s, 90´s and beginning 2k´s up to 201x)

2. Way: AI is dumb (explenation like above)

3. Way since some Tests in Mid 2k´s and introduced about the last years: AI get a compromise without Cheating and beeing dumb. Exactly that are doing the most Developers since the last Years (Battletech, new XCOM, Hearts of Iron and Xenonauts 2 for example).

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/13/2021 at 11:09 PM, madbunny said:

Alternative suggestion:

It seems unlikely to be able to just walk up to an alien ship and know how to operate their doors. Have 2 ways to open ship doors. One would be explosives, in which case the doors open perminantely. Second would be researching a technology to operate/activate some alien devices/technology (perhaps would apply to more than doors), in which case you could operate them freely. Can open and close them manually at will. To get around the AI struggling with players opening the door, shooting through the door, then closing it, simply give the AI remote control to the doors. Maybe they have remotes on their arms, or panels in the ship that can remotely operate their own doors. Bottom line is regardless of distance from the door, once the AI is aware of players outside the ship they can open/close the doors at will from a distance.

I agree. At first door opening should only be made using high explosives because the alien interface is still largely impossible to understand. As more of their tech get reverse-engineered, research can be done to open doors but some doors can be still locked from the control room. This will lead to research of a plasma lance, serving as both a weapon and a tool. It can be a devastating melee weapon that cut through androns and other aliens wearing heavy armor like butter, but also can be used go through ship hulls and doors.

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