Fire in the Hole! - Destructible UFO Hulls and Dynamic UFO Assaults

[silencer]

Kabill - have you considered changing the Scout (not light) entrance? I find it quit odd. I liked the double rooms in light scout - but the 3 small rooms with one door per each in the normal scout is not that good imho.

On second thought I found that the blue thingy in the right corner just blocks the view on "lock" on the door. And now I've realized you can turn right too. Maybe moved it to the northern wall?

Edited June 8, 2014 by silencer

[kabill]

The Light Scout layout is something I've been thinking about, actually. As much as I like the small rooms, the AI doesn't deal with it very well and it's fairly simple to clear the rooms one by one without much risks now the interior doors auto-close.

I'm not 100% certain what to do about it, though. I think it might be a good idea to open up some of the rooms to make them a bit larger and increase the chance of there being multiple aliens in the rooms and provide more space for cover props which are actually useful for the aliens (a lot of them are against walls where they don't really provide any cover). Same goes for Corvettes, I could open up some of the rooms to make them a bit less small and more tactical to engage with.

[silencer]

It's strange that when your troopers are fighting outside I can hear movement inside UFO (doors opening and stuff) but once inside the aliens suddenly are paralyzed.

[kabill]

Hmm, yeah. You're right. I'm planning on looking at the interior alien's AI, but I wonder why that is.

(It doesn't help that you can block doors and stop the aliens from opening them, mind).

[Theydon Bois]

Tried this last night and it does make a difference, apart from the fact that I am now getting black areas around the ship as though I am viewing it from the level above - not the best way to explain it I know.

[TacticalDragon]

Its not necesary change the layout of the UFO but if you do more spaced and open interiors for UFOs tell me, Im waiting to see how works XNT with this great adition.

Kabill, try this one.

- Save a game when your close to an UFO, prefer Scout is a good example. Close the game.

-Go to defensive and command AI scripts

- Sight = 0.3

- Shot potential -15

- Pobabilistic search -4

- Enemy influence -2

- Allied influence -3

- Reload the game with GC editor

- Without enter the UFO load the GC edit screen and follow the behavior and dynamic of postures.

- Its possible that they leave the UFO looking for the player specislly if one of the aliens see you.

Other small details go to the XNT pack, replace "ground combat" folder.

Did you want that I set the aliens for Hull Breach?

In other hand I had other possibility UFO PortHoles, but I believe that with vanilla AI the alienz bsrelly use aggressive movements.

[kabill]

Tried this last night and it does make a difference, apart from the fact that I am now getting black areas around the ship as though I am viewing it from the level above - not the best way to explain it I know.

Can you get a screenshot? I'm not 100% sure what you mean from what you've written, sorry.

@TacticalDragon: Thanks for that. I'll take a look.

[DeviousAlpha]

I have also tested Fire in the hole, whenever I equip a breaching charge from my bag via the inventory, when I close the inventory its gone. My soldier's gun is still in his bag, but the breaching charge has vanished. Not on floor, not equipped, not in bag.

It's quite bizarre.

[TacticalDragon]

I have also tested Fire in the hole, whenever I equip a breaching charge from my bag via the inventory, when I close the inventory its gone. My soldier's gun is still in his bag, but the breaching charge has vanished. Not on floor, not equipped, not in bag.

It's quite bizarre.

Sounds similar to the old Medipack bug

Its problem of corrupted xml of the game itself, re validate or reinstall the game, apply the mod and write us back.

[kabill]

I have also tested Fire in the hole, whenever I equip a breaching charge from my bag via the inventory, when I close the inventory its gone. My soldier's gun is still in his bag, but the breaching charge has vanished. Not on floor, not equipped, not in bag.

It's quite bizarre.

I've installed the mod about a dozen times now and never had a problem like that. I'd recommend trying TD's fix (thanks for that, by the way!) and hopefully it will work. Otherwise, I literally have no idea what the problem might be.

[Akrakorn]

I have also tested Fire in the hole, whenever I equip a breaching charge from my bag via the inventory, when I close the inventory its gone. My soldier's gun is still in his bag, but the breaching charge has vanished. Not on floor, not equipped, not in bag.

It's quite bizarre.

I had that problem. It was caused by the mod being outdated and not in sync with the new version of Xenonauts. Try downloading the latest version and see if it happens again (if you haven't already).

[kabill]

Update: Mod updated for compatibility with v1.04. I've also added in the resource changes which v1.04 brought with it.

[kabill]

Warning: Long Post Containing Thoughts About Changes!

I'm hoping to spend a little time over the weekend tweaking the mod to make it work better. My major complaint, based on my recent playthrough, is that the mod makes assaulting UFOs too easy. This isn't because of the hull breaches, but the UFO layouts and AI. As a point of comparison, before the UFO doors were changed to auto-close, I was taking causalities most missions during a UFO assault and in some instances had complete squad wipes. In contrast, in my recent playthrough I lost 1 soldier *in the entire game* playing up to mid-late December.

I therefore want to run through some ideas I have about fixing it to make it more challenging.

The Problems:

These, I think, are the key issues:

1) The aliens inside the UFOs are largely static. As was observed up-thread (or maybe on the combined mod thread, aliens tend to stop moving around when you actually get to the UFO, and it's fairly rare that they'll move to attack you. The large amounts of LoS blocking are therefore wasted, since the aliens don't really use it to their advantage. In fairness, the aliens do move around, but in my experience this happens when they've actually spotted your soldiers *during their turn*. If you kill everything in sight before they get a go - which is quite easy - they don't do a lot.

2) Putting a soldier in front of a door completely stops aliens from opening it. Due to the large number of small rooms and doors, it's exceptionally easy to ensure you cannot be attacked even if the aliens were inclined to move.

3) The large number of small rooms spreads out the aliens and makes it difficult to place cover props in places where they're actually useful. Indeed, much of the cover at the moment is more or less decorative, due to not being in a position to protect units and in any case being easy to circumvent.

Possible Solutions:

Here's some ideas that might be able to cure the problem.

1) Revert to non-auto-closing doors. This would be the easiest solution to implement (indeed, this is already possible due to the patch I uploaded). I'm not very keen on it, though, because it seems pointless to have doors if they're more-or-less always going to be open.

2) More 'blown out' doors. On some of the submaps, there's doors which have been blown out by internal explosions. This could be a reasonable compromise with regards to point one, since it would make more sense in-game and add some additional randomness to the interiors. There's limits to where this can be applied, however, especially on larger ships, so it might not work as a full solution by itself.

3) AI changes: changing the AI to try and make them patrol more vigorously around the UFO would help somewhat and is something I want to experiment with. However, this won't help with door-blocking, so again won't work by itself.

4) UFO redesign. This would involve stripping out some of the interior walls and doors to make the interiors a bit more open. I'd like to keep them less open than vanilla, but trading lots of small rooms for a smaller number of larger rooms could help.

Possible UFO Layout Changes:

On the last point, here's a thought about what I'd do for each of the UFO types up to Landing Ships (I've not played the larger UFOs much with this mod, so don't want to fiddle with them yet).

1) Light Scout: There's not a lot to be done about the light scout. However, I was thinking of possibly having clear access from the front door through into one of the side rooms, and require passage through that side room into the other rather than routing everything through the front. This would give some opportunity for aliens to shoot you as you're passing through the main entrance, while restricting the space hopefully enough that it still won't be a shooting gallery like in vanilla.

2) Scouts: My suggestion for the scout is combining the entrance room and weapons rooms into a single chamber, and combing the navigation room and data-core room into a single chamber as well. In theory, the entry-room would have enough space for good cover and attacks from multiple angles (left and right) and make it hard to shoot inside without actually entering the UFO. Blocking off the navigation room would make that a possible place for aliens to sally out of during their turn.

I was also thinking, with scouts, about removing the door closest to the engine room, meaning that there's direct LoS from the first door into the engine room. This would make it more difficult to enter down that passageway.

3) Corvettes: The many small rooms need hollowing out, I think. I was wondering about using the alternative Corvette layout for inspiration, having the centre corridor lead to two engine/weapons rooms on either side and having the command room require pathing through these. These rooms should then be big enough for a few aliens to occupy with good cover.

4) Landing Ships: These should need the least change, I think. I'm inclined to roll the weapons rooms into the engine rooms, but otherwise I think it should be ok. The main entry-way is already reasonably dangerous due to the balconies, especially if there's an alien with grenades up there.

Any thoughts about any of this are most welcome.

[silencer]

Doors can be manually closed. The problem with doors is that aliens don't open them when Xenonanuts don't have a view of what's behind the door. I had a strange situation when alien just "popped" out of the door while doors where closed - if aliens didn't pop like that they would certainly opened the doors and shoot whoever is right behind.

[kabill]

Further to the discussion points above, here's a picture of my re-design of the Light Scout, Scout and Corvette. I've not tested these in play yet, but I figured I'd post them up here anyway.

I've ended up with something of a compromise between the previous layouts and the style of the vanilla ones. The UFOs are now much more open with big rooms like in vanilla, but I've tried to maintain some of the tightness using props and railings instead.

Light Scout

Scout

Corvette

[Sandyxx]

hi. got problem with dropship layout: in "cargo" room after main entrance there is two holes in the ceiling. the problem is that my soldiers can't see through them. but aliens can, and will shoot.

p.s. these layouts are better than the current

[kabill]

@Sandyxx: That's a vanilla issue (well, kind of anyway). For some reason, the game doesn't always give you vision from a lower floor to a higher one. I thought it might be to do with the railings, but I've been looking for it elsewhere and I've found equivalent instances with railings but vision is fine. So I don't know what causes it specifically, but it definitely happens elsewhere in the game too.

Without knowing what's causing it, I'm willing to treat it as a feature rather than a bug. It makes that area more dangerous, but there's ways to circumvent it (most obviously, breaching the side of the ship since this allows you to avoid the loading bay entirely). For what it's worth, it's still possible to fire/throw things up to the floor above even though you can't see, so lobbing flashbangs/grenades might be useful if you really have to get through that area. Also, if you can get vision on the area by getting a soldier up onto the first floor, then you can target attacks from the ground floor perfectly fine.

[Akrakorn]

Oh yes, these new layouts will work rather well, I think. Lots of open space and cover to satisfy the aliens' needs. Looking forward to try them out.

[Max_Caine]

The open-plan nature of the vanilla maps suggests the points you raise were considered by Aaron and Chris when they were designing the UFO interiors.As aliens don't really flow from room to room, may I suggest looking at it from another perspective? You might want to consider doors as mini-checkpoints, sort of like the safehouse from L4D so ufos are treated as a nonlinear sequence of discrete combat arenas, with each arena having a different "theme" (power plant, control room, armoury, etc.).

[kabill]

tl;dr:

- Max's point about the construction of UFOs is very good and, indeed, something which implicitly guided the re-designs I posted above.

- Redesigning the UFOs themselves doesn't seem to be sufficient in increasing the difficulty to the point that dynamic entry is actually worthwhile. Accordingly, I'm thinking of increasing the alien count inside UFOs to ensure that they're a challenge if you attack through the main entrance, making dynamic entry a more attractive choice.

---

@Max: While I don't think it was as clearly articulated in my brain as what you've written, I'm very much inclined to agree. Something like that was in the back of my mind when I was producing the re-designs posted above, but I think it's a good idea to turn that into a full-blown methodology.

As an addition, I'd argue that transitions between areas should ideally be dangerous chokepoints. Again, I've tried to do this with the re-designs above. Taking the new Corvette as an example, what I've tried to do is make each room difficult to enter without drawing fire. Moving from the entrance to the cargo bay should be dangerous since you'll have all your soldiers packed together. Moving from the cargo bay to the engine/weapons rooms should be dangerous due to lack of good cover (and the main piece being a power core, to boot!) and having to move through some open space to get into position. Moving into the command room actually isn't very good (I need to alter that a bit), but that's what I've been *trying* to achieve, anyway.

In testing, though, I've found some problems:

- Flashbangs. Even post-nerf, they're still amazing. What I've been trying to do is limit the ability to use these without another alien positioned elsewhere being able to reaction fire (c.f. the new Scout layout). However, it's very difficult to do this while also ensuring that the aliens have good enough LoS to be able to shoot you. The problem of flashbangs is also compounded by the fact that...

- There's not enough aliens. This is in part due to aliens being killed in the crash, but there's just not enough to offer a reasonable amount of resistance in any given area. For a reasonable challenge, I think you need at least two and preferably three aliens per "encounter" (ugh, it's getting very RPG now!), but often there's about that many *in the whole of the UFO*. While I think it would be a bit much to have that tough a fight in every part of a UFO, I think around 50% of the rooms being like that should be pretty reasonable.

Increasing alien numbers is something that I've been reluctant to do, as I wanted to stay away from balance changes as much as possible. However, at the moment what FitH does is add in a new feature - dynamic entry - which makes assaulting UFOs easier but doesn't actually provide any incentive to use that feature because it's quite easy to ace an assault through the regular through-the-door strategy. Since the UFO designs themselves don't seem to be making much of a difference, I wonder whether increasing the aliens inside the UFO wouldn't be a bad idea. It will make a regular entry harder/more dangerous, but the player is given tools to offset or negate this through use of breaching charges.

[KevinHann]

Could you also consider turning the control room sort of a boss battle (perhaps that could be an entirely different mod)? Say the UFO commander/captain is a distinct enemy who never leaves the last room in the UFO, way more experienced and powerful than the regular crew - if it is of any interest for you and the community and possible to work it in without drawing entirely new creatures from the ground. Perhaps it would take additional creative effort than just throwing in a new "rank" with boosted stats to make it a viable boss battle without breaking the spirit of the game though.

Just an idea, feel free to burn it to the ground if it sounds silly.

[sealjo]

Is there a way to install everything but the new layouts? I love the concept of being able to breach the hull but I find the open space and shooting gallery in vanilla fun and don't want to change the UFO layouts.

[kabill]

Is there a way to install everything but the new layouts? I love the concept of being able to breach the hull but I find the open space and shooting gallery in vanilla fun and don't want to change the UFO layouts.

No, sadly not. I'd have to remake all the UFO submaps using the vanilla interiors. It's something I might get round to in the future, but there's other things I'm working on at the moment. Although, since I'm moving to more open UFO interiors, you might find that they'll be more to you're liking if I can get them to work.

Could you also consider turning the control room sort of a boss battle (perhaps that could be an entirely different mod)? Say the UFO commander/captain is a distinct enemy who never leaves the last room in the UFO, way more experienced and powerful than the regular crew - if it is of any interest for you and the community and possible to work it in without drawing entirely new creatures from the ground. Perhaps it would take additional creative effort than just throwing in a new "rank" with boosted stats to make it a viable boss battle without breaking the spirit of the game though.

It would be easy enough to do, but I'd probably do it as a separate download. As an aside, command room aliens seem to have some odd AI issues at the moment, so it might not be worth while in any case.

[KevinHann]

It would be easy enough to do, but I'd probably do it as a separate download. As an aside, command room aliens seem to have some odd AI issues at the moment, so it might not be worth while in any case.

Yes, a separate download would make sense. The AI issues shouldn't be a long-term obstacle, I can't imagine it won't be relatively high on the priority list if indeed as bad as you described it. So I take it you would be interested in pursuing this? Would be great!

[kabill]

Yes, a separate download would make sense. The AI issues shouldn't be a long-term obstacle, I can't imagine it won't be relatively high on the priority list if indeed as bad as you described it. So I take it you would be interested in pursuing this? Would be great!

We'll see. It might not be a matter of whether they want to fix it so much as if they can. I'm experimenting without the command AI type at the moment to see if that helps.

And, in answer to your question: it's certainly something worth looking at. Command room fights are often a letdown, although I don't know now how much this is due to AI related things more than anything. It'll be difficult to pull off though in a way that makes it interesting. Just stacking more stats on something doesn't necessarily turn it into a 'boss fight'. It'd be interesting to combine it with some kind of weapons mod (a la Max_Caine's alien weapons mod) to have something a bit different to throw in there.

In other news:

I've been messing around with Scouts all day trying to make them better. I've had some success: currently aliens have a habit of camping around the entrance to the ship to murder anyone trying to use the front door. It's a bit more extreme than I'd like, but at the moment it's basically impossible to use the front entrance without getting people killed.

Some other interesting things:

- I'm experimenting at the moment with specific placements of the UFO-target-area tiles in the UFO rather than saturating the UFO with them as in vanilla. In their AI, the aliens have a strong pathing tendency to these tiles, which is what keeps them in the ship. I thought that by placing them more carefully, I'd be able to ensure that the aliens occupy sensible places in the UFO rather than sitting in stupid places (like they sometimes do). What I'm also hoping is that they might implicitly work a little like way-points and might occasionally draw aliens through the ship. Need to do more tests, but this might prove to be useful.

- Another thought I had was creating some bespoke AI parameters for UFO defending aliens. At the moment, the defensive/command AI parameters overwrite more or less all of the pathing AI of the base alien. This means that, more or less, all aliens inside a UFO are using the same AI parameters. However, I could create some alien unit clones which simply have different AI and remove all of the command/defensive overwrites, such that I could populate the interiors with aliens with different AIs. I'd probably only have a few different types, but it might be useful to specify only a few as 'door guardians', a few more as largely stationary and others as more mobile. It would also mean the AI could be varied between different alien types as well.