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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

3 Potential Game Improvements


Guest anon e mous

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Guest anon e mous

I just wanted to mention 3 things that could be improved over the original XCom game.

 

1. SOLDIER FAVORITE EQUIPMENT BUTTON. On the screen before landing at a site equipment has to be selected for each of the soldiers. It would be nice to have a favorite equipment button on each soldiers page that saves the equipment layout chosen for the soldier. So for the next landing, the soldiers that have favorite equipment lists chosen/clicked would try and grab up what they had last time, thus avoiding snipers grabing up pistols or rocket launchers, etc.

 

2. GRAPHS THAT TOGGLE FROM MONTHLY TO DAILY. It would be nice if the graphs could be toggled from monthly to daily, as the stuff that occurred early in the month isn't too useful near the end of the month for planning daily activities.

 

3. CRAFT WAYPOINTS. It would be nice to be able to launch a craft for a patrol and set multiple waypoints at the beginning of the launch, so that the craft would automatically fly to several locations rather than having to chose a new point each step of the way.

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I just wanted to mention 3 things that could be improved over the original XCom game.

 

1. SOLDIER FAVORITE EQUIPMENT BUTTON. On the screen before landing at a site equipment has to be selected for each of the soldiers.  It would be nice to have a favorite equipment button on each soldiers page that saves the equipment layout chosen for the soldier.  So for the next landing, the soldiers that have favorite equipment lists chosen/clicked would try and grab up what they had last time, thus avoiding snipers grabing up pistols or rocket launchers, etc.

 

2. GRAPHS THAT TOGGLE FROM MONTHLY TO DAILY.  It would be nice if the graphs could be toggled from monthly to daily, as the stuff that occurred early in the month isn't too useful near the end of the month for planning daily activities.

 

3. CRAFT WAYPOINTS.  It would be nice to be able to launch a craft for a patrol and set multiple waypoints at the beginning of the launch, so that the craft would automatically fly to several locations rather than having to chose a new point each step of the way.

 

1) This would definitely be handy! :)

 

2) Not sure, didn't look at the graphs much myself.

 

3) Now -this- would be useful. An ability to make it pause and patrol at each WP would be even better, so you can have them recon out in different shapes. If the craft runs out of fuel, it returns to refuel and then continues on with it's pathing again.

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The graphs represented statistical alien activity analysis that you receive daily from all over the globe (Basically the MIBs are sending alien activity reports to you). So even if your operation fails at detecting alien activity within your general radar scanning range, you'll still be able to get a general idea of where all the activity is happening and can make future base building plans accordingly.

 

This is how it worked in the originals and was rather brilliant in its simplicity. In Apocalypse, you could view the top-10 most infiltrated organisations to get an idea of who you needed to investigate within the general area of a previous alien troop drop site so that you could minimise a pointless door to door search of aliens and making enemies in the process.

 

A general to detailed zoom levels for graph activity sounds useful if you wanted to look at the subtle differences between similar activity levels, especially if there's lot of it going on at once so that you can spot any trends in activity (rising, dropping, staying level (base) etc).

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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  • 2 months later...
If it were up to me, I would keep the game "simple" enough, or at least have more creative ways of showing the information rather than spending a lot of time improving and looking at graphs. Where is the fun in that? I never needed or used the graphs in the original and I would rather not "need" to use them in any game. If there is a lot of UFO activity in a country, I don't need a graph to tell me. Just show me ufos flying around the country. It probably means there is a base there or whatever.
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Ah, you want visual information, not statistical information. Fair enough.

 

But seeing UFOs moving about is the job of your radars. The statistic information was to show you potential UFO activity that your radars aren't able to pick up, and encourage you to investigate it. If you could see them anyway, it would be pointless to have radars. The radars were to show you what's there. The graphs where to give you a rough idea of what's there.

 

Instead of a graph, how about this. Why not make a flat map visual depiction of the globe, or perhaps just have an overlay on the geosphere, and all your sponsoring blocks or to make it even simpler - regions are displayed. Now each sponsor will be lit up depending on the level of concern of the populace. The brighter the light, the more potential alien activity in that area. A solid colour would mean that there's an extremely heavy amount of alien activity in the area.

 

You still won't see what's going on until you go and investigate.

 

You'll still be keeping all the same information as you would for the graphs. All this proposal achieves is to change the way its displayed.

 

On a side note, you could adapt this visual display of the globe to display a whole lot of other different information about your sponsors. I don't know. Rainfall? Weather? The strength of the economy? How unhappy they are at your activities?

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
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ahh, you mean like the SimCity style of highlighting areas. I like that one. So you mean like if Europe is having a lot of problems with aliens, then the appear bright red, and america is completely fine, and they are bright blue or something? from red to blue(go across the yellow though, not across purple)

Or it could just be bright red is terrible and it degresses back to the usual land colors

I like that idea, because it makes it easier to use instead of the graphs, and it also is more direct... If i remember correctly, i believe that at least some of the graphs in the graph thing are just regions of the earth, not actual nations. Also, instead of having countries different colors it could just be large blobs, to show even more accurately the locations, because especially on russia, if the entire of russia is red, then you still have to check the entire area

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> 1. SOLDIER FAVORITE EQUIPMENT BUTTON

 

I rather liked the way it was in Apocalypcis, when every soldier had personal equipment. Only improvement should be auto resupplying of grenades and spare ammo clips. So that you dress you man once and he will pick up spended/lost ammunition and equipment if available on base. And you won't mistake sniper for demolition specialist again :).

Edited by UnFleshed One
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  • 2 months later...

- on the subject of Equipment for Soldiers

 

Maybe if you could have 4 - 5 standard layouts that you could customize. Each layout was a button that you labled. Then you could select a soldier and press the layout that you wanted and it would try to equip the soldier to the layouts specifications.

 

I will admit that I never played the apocalye but I loved the original X-Com. The one thing that I always wished was that I had a way to outfit my soldier faster or that they would remeber what they had. That is *** Definately *** a feature that Xenocide should incorperate.

 

As an Implentation idea, if it was a widget style button you could drag a layout button to a section below the invidual soldiers or maybe have 2 or 3 button slots below each soldier that you could drag layout buttons to.

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  • 3 months later...
- on the subject of Equipment for Soldiers

 

Maybe if you could have 4 - 5 standard layouts that you could customize. Each layout was a button that you labled. Then you could select a soldier and press the layout that you wanted and it would try to equip the soldier to the layouts specifications.

 

I thought about this a lot the last time I re-played X-Com (three years ago?). Some concepts that might be worth considering: Have not only a set ot standard soldier equipment layouts the user can name (scout, heavy support fire, psi, etc.), but also a set of customizable squad presets which list a group of those roles and which soldiers (by name) fill them.

 

You then could set one squad preset to be the default rapid-reaction team for each skyranger; that gear would be on the plane and that squad could scramble in moments. Switching to another config would add delays (as I think happened in the original game IIRC).

 

For interfaces, I think a library/column setup similar to, say, the playlists in iTunes would be superior to a few programmable buttons. Your soldier config window would have a central editing area plus four columns: (1) soldier names (2) gear available (3) soldier equipment presets (4) squad presets. Maybe as two columns on each side of the center pane. Or, gear below like in X-COM, soldiers on the right, and two columns of presets on the left. (Or one left column showing squads above/gearsets under?)

 

If you were editing a soldier gear layout, you'd see a soldier bodyplan in the central area much like the classic X-COM interface. If you were editing a squad preset the center pane would show a skyranger floorplan onto which you could drag soldiers, gear layouts, and "spare gear" from the other columns.

 

This shouldn't really be much more difficult to code - it's essentially just a trivial relational database of four or five tables - and it provides vast flexibility to the user. Players concerned with detail could customize squad variants to their hearts' content, making different squad and gear presets for different mission profiles (terror site, jungle, underwater, night/day, different alien species, etc.).

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