Increased Sight Range

[Mask]

I increased the base sight range to 60. Now, when it's daylight, you can see across the map, as you might expect. The dynamic of the game changes quite a bit, my machine gunner and sniper both have become more key to victory.

For some maps, this also gives the feeling of dropping into a hot LZ during Vietnam... If a number of aliens are within sight of your chopper, you'll need to make a run for cover or fight your way out. In general, cover becomes far more important, and you find yourself dashing between it since the fog of war isn't all pervading.

For sight penalties, I tried setting the range to 52. And for bonuses, I tried 68. The person who suggested this to me was using a base of 56, 52 for penalized vision, and 60 for improved vision.

I recommend that you all try editing your vision ranges to something like these numbers, to see what you think of it. I feel it has really improved the game for me.

Edited July 30, 2013 by Mask

[GizmoGomez]

Huh, sounds interesting. I'd imagine it'd make it an entirely different game.

[xcomnaut]

I used 24 and it was huge difference in game play. 60 will make a new experience for sure.

[lightgemini]

This was tried/tested many times before, I myself made a mod for it. Many find this cool, some dont care much.

Using a range of 60 you will encounter some problems though.

- For start the aliens seem to have a range of engagement around 24-25 tiles. They will not fire at something beyond that, wich gives advantage to the player who may still try, so thats half the sight range being "wasted" for the aliens ( If you are incresing aliens sight too)

-Weapons range get quickly too short for so much terrain being spoted, and simply increasing its range makes the long sight more redundant. Its like playing vanilla but "big". More control of fine tuning accuracy/damage decrease past weps range is needed to better use the long sight and balance it, so actual distance to target really does matter for hitting % and 60 tiles of sight gives plenty of room to play with it.

-Theres a limit in map size of 128x128. Thats ok for a range of 60 but many maps under it (scouts,corvettes,cruisers...) will get a bit small. Being able to see the entire map seems good, but having some FOW to explore is also good and helps the aliens a bit (who still need all the help they can get). So you need to resize all the maps to be that big.

I tried many ranges and finally settled for 30 as a good/balanced range. Thats for vanilla maps and settings. For a range of 60 you really need new maps made with long range in mind to unlock all the potential. Imagine a big 128x128 map that have the player start in a farmfield, and he has to advance towards a small town were the ufo crashed. With garrisoned aliens shooting the xenonauts as they move in and assault house by house. Wouldnt it be awesome?. Vanilla maps are too small for that.

[Mask]

Mm, the weapon and engagement ranges need to be altered. The guy who first tested these numbers is testing weapon ranges, AI, and how the two are linked.

Larger maps would certainly be nice. The current ones have seemed all right in my tests thus far, and probably won't need enlarging. You can't hide by remaining distant, in the daytime--but you can use cover and buildings to surprise one and other. More houses, for this reason, would be nice.

[Black Cat]

My only real complaint with sight ranges is night time sight.

I just think it is a bit to low. Yeah that would probably require upping the daylight ranges a bit but immersion wise they are to low also. But they are livable.

[Mask]

Gemini was very right, about long sight ranges messing with the AI. Need to work out how to get aliens to fire from range and take cover properly (their idea of taking cover at the moment, is stepping into the impenetrable blackness of the fog of war--which is now too scarce for that ghostly tactic to work).

[lightgemini]

The AI is suposed to be moddable, but its still WIP and you cant change nothing about it yet. When its more finished we may see if that engagement range and many other things can be changed to fit long range or whatever setting modders can come up with.

Note: If I remeber correctly, on a quick coment when talking about a bug, the AI dev. stated that 25 was an arbitrary range set to engage that he was using for his testings. It would be logical for this value to be moddable, hopefully in a "per unit" basis since different weapons could use diferent engagement ranges. A caesan with a pistol may not want to shoot at 20 tiles away, but a sniper or plasma cannon alien would be more than happy to do so.

Edited August 2, 2013 by lightgemini

[Mask]

Ah, that further clarifies on what Chris said. He was kind enough to mention that this will eventually be moddable.

Until then, I guess my friend will look into modding other areas of the game.

Edited August 4, 2013 by Mask