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Basic night vision was widely available in 1979.


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I agree, flare guns would be nice. Maybe get rid of unlimited flares, give each soldier 4 or so, but add a dedicated flare gun, or simply a starlight rocket that illuminates a decent area above where you direct-fire. Like, you fire the round and it goes up and explodes above the targeted area.

Perhaps that would be too hard to implement properly, and we should just make it a rocket launched flare that has a large lit radius and a longer time to expire than handheld flares. It would have to be lighter than regular rockets for balance purposes, I'd think. Maybe even a 1x1 item, because you'd want to have a lot of them.

Handheld flares would still be used for personal illumination, and for lighting up the insides of buildings, since the rockets wouldn't work too well indoors, and they don't need a huge amount of illumination radius generally.

Modern military flares would work exactly as you explain. They explode and the ride a parachute down for a long time as they burn.

From Wikipedia: "A modern illumination shell has a fuze which ejects the "candle" (a pyrotechnic flare emitting white or infrared light) at a calculated altitude, where it slowly drifts down beneath a heat resistant parachute, illuminating the area below. These are also known as starshell or star shell.

Coloured flare shells have also been used for target marking purposes."

As for indoors, you would use a flashlight (which would also be an awesome addition to the game, btw) because flares might catch something on fire.

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Modern military flares would work exactly as you explain. They explode and the ride a parachute down for a long time as they burn.
The game mechanics don't support floating parachutes unfortunately, however, it should be possible to mod a rocket that just lits up an area for an extended period. Not as good since the light is heavily affected by terrain, but better than nothing.
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The game mechanics don't support floating parachutes unfortunately, however, it should be possible to mod a rocket that just lits up an area for an extended period. Not as good since the light is heavily affected by terrain, but better than nothing.

I know nothing about the code, but surely there is a way to place an object at a certain height above a particular grid square. If not, I don't see why it would be difficult to add. To be clear, I mean by the devs not with mods.

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I know nothing about the code, but surely there is a way to place an object at a certain height above a particular grid square. If not, I don't see why it would be difficult to add. To be clear, I mean by the devs not with mods.
I was thinking about the gradual decent.
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I was thinking about the gradual decent.

Ah, don't things like grenades currently have curved trajectories? I would totally fine with using my imagination too. Just show an animation of the soldier firing the flare gun up into the air and then have the area be illuminated (some sort of shimmering/pulsing lighting effect would be nice). There isn't any need to show the actual object.

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I would prefer to just have more light sources present on the maps, especially the towns.

Street lights, light from windows, cars with working headlights on the roads and so on.

OK so the wilderness maps would still be much darker but I can live with that.

That would increase the atmospheric feeling of night missions which I feel would be lost if you just have night vision gear to turn it into just another daytime mission.

Chris mentioned that he is looking at the sheer blackness of night missions as it is just a bit too black.

That should also be helpful.

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I would prefer to just have more light sources present on the maps, especially the towns.

Street lights, light from windows, cars with working headlights on the roads and so on.

OK so the wilderness maps would still be much darker but I can live with that.

That would increase the atmospheric feeling of night missions which I feel would be lost if you just have night vision gear to turn it into just another daytime mission.

Chris mentioned that he is looking at the sheer blackness of night missions as it is just a bit too black.

That should also be helpful.

In addition to this, it could also be argued that humans do have some night vision. We need a little ambient light (the moon usually suffices) and can only see black and white, but it's not like we are completely blind at night.

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Well, the soldiers can see around them a bit, they're not totally blind.

However, the nightvision function of humans would be pretty lessened, because there are lights to mess with your nightvision, plasma bursts, etc. If it were just brighter than pitch black, then we could see much better, but with all the light pollution, what with flares, energy weapons, street lights, etc, human nightvision would be about as useful as it currently is; a small circle around each guy.

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A single gunshot flash would gives you about an 80% reduction in your dark adaptation. Some people recover it fully in 20-30 minutes, some people take days.

Lighting a cigarette can totally kill your dark adaptation for hours.

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But you don't HAVE to do night missions...you can either wait for daylight or completely ignore them...

:confused:

Night missions are important in the real world. They allow for stealth based operations. Bombing targets, getting in and out without being seen, assassinations, abductions etc. It would never work in this game as all the aliens must has thermal vision with just their eyes. You can't sneak up on shit and your troops must be walking around with friggen torches hanging off their pockets.

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I would see night vision goggles being more of a trade off than game play replacement for flares. Such devices likely reduce the (already limited) vision angle, but improve vision distance at night, but completely dazzle in the event of a sudden bright light. Though other games in the genre include them, I'm not exactly sold on them unless scopes and binoculars were desired features. The lattermost would probably be quite a TU sink, and similarly suffer from tunnel vision (angle).

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Night missions are meant to be atmospheric and claustrophobic.

You can throw flares which will give you pools of light but the darkness will still be present around them.

Then you switch on night vision and it might as well be a daytime mission.

Narrower vision cones are only a drawback if you remain facing in one direction, as soon as you use a single AP to turn that drawback is gone.

Remember also that you can only turn in 45 degree angles so you may have completely unrealistic blindspots that you cannot turn to look at even though they are well within range.

You also only need one person with night vision to spot an enemy and squad sight allows all of your blind soldiers to shoot them so huge AP cost for activation is not a drawback.

In the same way scopes and binoculars would be very unbalancing unless you can use them in such a way that they do not allow squad sight or for others to ground target in the area.

If you can use one guy with binoculars to spot the enemy from a safe distance then scouting becomes risk free.

You just sit back out of range, click the binocular button, then hammer anyone you see flat with long range weapons.

Next turn repeat until you have cleared all visible areas.

If you were to give the enemy similar abilities for balance then you would be getting shot from massively outside your own range by enemies you could not see or react to.

That has been the case due to a bug in recent versions and nobody seems too happy to play that way.

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I think flare guns would be an awesome addition too.

I was thinking about the gradual decent.

This being a turn based game I don't think you need a gradual descent. I would just put the flare up in the highest tile possible and then go a tile lower the next turn. I think it should only burn for two turns max, this would make it a nice trade off with hand thrown flares which continue to give illumination.

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