2 Suggestions/requests to enhance AI allies

[Waladil]

Okay, as I've been playing through there are a couple ideas that occur to me that'd make dealing with the AI-controlled humans a lot more pleasant.

1.) Especially for the terror missions, it'd be awesome if you could give the civilians and local forces general orders -- things like "get behind us" and "protect those civilians!" It'd allow you to play the terror missions a lot more like the new XCOM, but without magical civilian invulnerability the second you get close to one. As you sweep through order all the civilians to take shelter by the dropship, and order the local forces to cover them.

As it is now (and I know the AI is being improved), the locals don't do anything that makes sense to me: If I were a civilian, with some freaky aliens to one direction murdering my family, and some heavily-geared humans waving me toward them on the other, I know which direction I'm heading (Hint: It's not towards the aliens). Similarly, I'm sure the local forces would be ecstatic to receive orders that both feel really important but are relatively safe. "Oh, just guard these civilians while you go do all the real work, allowing me to come through alive AND with all five extremities intact? Sounds good."

On crash site missions being able to give some general orders to local forces would also be nice: Things like "Stick near us, we could use the help." This would be even nicer with the other suggestion, which is:

2.) Add 3 bars to each region, probably hidden from the player (or possibly one global set, but it doesn't seem much harder to do one per region), that track three aspects of the local military: Numbers, Equipment, and Command chain.

Then, those three bars are consulted during the random generation of local forces on missions. Numbers and equipment are obvious, they'd control how many troops there are and how well they're equipped.

Command chain would be more complicated, requiring a bunch of AI things (but they could probably be repurposed from alien AI code), and the higher that bar is, the more coordinated and communicative the local forces are. At high levels they're more willing to listen to Xenonaut orders, rather than haring off (either in suicidal bravery or abject cowardice), and might even share important information. Yelling out "Sebilisian to the north-west!" for example. Possibly also giving some scouting intel at the very start of the mission (crashed light scout has a default 4 troops, so they might say something like "We saw two Caesans leave the vessel, and one Caesan corpse inside" so now the player knows there are two or three active enemies. Keeping it useful but vague would be really nice).

These three bars would each be governed by different things:

Terror missions would have the strongest effects on the Numbers bar, with sweeping successes kicking it up a lot as recruitment swells and complete failures causing it to plummet as morale drops and desertions are common.

Equipment would be benefited by shooting down and clearing UFOs, as the troops scavenge what the Xenonauts leave behind, and possibly also arms sales of some sort. The equipment bar would slowly drop, and any local force TPWs would take a heavy toll on it. (If someone survives they call for pickup which means the gear is recovered: Nobody survives and the stuff is abandoned.)

Command chain would be best kept high by maintaining air superiority, which means shooting down UFOs, even if you don't clear them on the ground. Especially preventing the alien fighters from hanging around, and the UFOs that create those "events" on the geoscape. Generally preventing the aliens from getting a foothold would allow the humans to establish and maintain their command chains, so that bar would naturally rise (and the aliens would have to actively beat it down).

The bottom line is that landing in territory for terror or ship capture would start to reflect how well-protected it is. Land somewhere that's got all 3 bars low (trying to reclaim the region, for example) and you've got no help, or it's scattered, scared, and ill-equipped. Land someplace well-established and guarded and you'll have a squad of heavily armed locals report to you, give you the preliminary scouting reports, and allow you to order them about as an auxiliary force. They might even send help for base assaults.

(Side note: This general functionality also seems like it'd be very useful if Chris wanted to up the scope and scale of battles without horribly outnumbering the Xenonauts or upping the squad size to something like 15+tank. By having "a squad" of humans that are given imprecise orders, battles could be roughly doubled in size without overwhelming the player.)

I know a lot of this is probably too ambitious to be added this late in development... although there may be potential for a later mod adding it in, I suppose.

EDIT: This was originally not intended to be this long. Sorry for the wall of text, guys! (I'm not sorry, that's a lie.)

[crusherven]

Hmm. There's a lot here. Are you aware that local forces already start to equip laser weapons and such as time goes by?

1. I don't know that we need a way to give civvies commands, but it would definitely be nice if they were smarter. It's particularly annoying when they camp out next to aliens. Civvies: run away. Aliens: kill the civvies; don't make me do it for you. I'd be happy if unarmed civilians just try to make their way toward the Chinook, and armed ones follow my troops or something, watching their backs.

2. Ehh, I'm not sure I want civilians to be much more powerful than they are. Currently, they score a kill ever so often. That's a nice touch. I don't want them to be much more dangerous than that, though.

[Waladil]

Yes I do know that the locals slowly get laser weapons. I hear they eventually get plasma, too. (I may have actually stolen my first laser weapons from local forces rather than produced them myself.)

The change in how the equipment bar would work here is that rather than a universal changeover (since it seems to be tied to either your research level or the game ticker), it'd be piecemeal, random, and vary from one region to another, so forces in one place may have plasma tech, while forces in another are still toting ballistics.

1. Being able to give them commands is kind of just an extension of them being smarter. The commands would be very vague and might be better described as stance commands. Civilians would probably just have two: "Go to the dropship!" and "find cover!" (for use if the dropship might not be safe.) Aside from that it'd be up to the AI. Soldiers, a bit more complex: "Cover the civilians!" "Stick near us!" and "Fan out and find the last few." Or in terms of stance commands; defensive, tactical, and aggressive.

2. Your opinion is certainly a valid one, but I'll just point out that it's primarily a balance point which is of course still up in the air for much of the game. Also local forces wont necessarily be more powerful: under these conditions an insufficiently-protected region would have forces far weaker than you'd see normally, using the most basic gear and barely even able to make token appearances. (Like one guy at a terror sight rather than the usual 3-5.)

[Jean-Luc]

I've no idea what plans Gijs-Jan has for local forces AI but I've been thinking about the "fear grid" that's he's talked about that influences civilian behaviour making them avoid danger and seek cover.

A similar thing could be applied to local forces to make them become "attracted" to Xenonauts so that you can sort of pick them up by getting close and have the npc soldiers (cautiously) follow you around. The set of priorities for local forces would be something like fight aliens -> follow xenonauts -> herp derp.

This would allow the player to indirectly direct npc combatants into battle without breaking their autonomy (or the illusion thereof) and make sure that local forces not engaged at the start don't spend the remainder of the battle just standing around.

[Sathra]

Would be infuriating at times, with the local forces 'accuracy'. I'm sure a few people have had fun with local forces shooting their troops in the back.

[svidangel]

On the other hand, on easier modes you could have the local forces beef up on failure with the attitude of "well we can't rely on anyone else, that's for sure" ;p

[Bromley86]

A big thanks to the local machinegunner who kindly took on the Reaper that finished his turn next to 4 of my guys. He missed the Reaper and suppressed all 4 troops, but it's the thought that counts.

I'd like to see the civilians moving towards the dropship, obviously running in the other direction if they bump into aliens. The local forces would move fairly randomly until they find a civilian to protect, at which point they'd follow them. If they see 2 civilians, they head for the one furthest from the dropship. In an ideal world, that'd encourage all the NPCs to fall back to the (presumably) safest position on the map with the local forces covering the retreat.

[thothkins]

Perhaps he thought the Reaper would come after him next, if he didn't do something to distract it. Guess, he wasn't paying attention when they mentioned zombies.

who knows how long it would have taken me to notice the locals had laser weapons if the first shot hadn't crippled one of my Xenonauts.

If you were a local soldier and you saw and Andron facing off against advanced Xeno-Armour, would you be picky who you shot at?