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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Remembering Crafts


Extralucas

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I think it would be good to make this game to remember UFOs. What I mean - when you assualt on UFO (not recovery!) and destroy it's powersources, and then abort mission, UFO should stay in same place but this time not as landed but as downed. Game should remember battlescape too. It would be bizarre to fight same UFO but in other location. All aliens that were left on Combat Zone should stay there. I mean - if craft originally had 10 mutons of crew and you killed 6 of them, then when you come back there still should be 4 around, and six corpses too.

 

Now, I'm almost sure that original X-Com was remembering Skyranger that way. Once I went on UFO mission (don't remember was it recovery or assault) and some alien hit my craft with Blaster Bomb. After returning to base Skyranger was 10% damaged.

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Probably move UFO's survivors to rescuing UFO. (That would make rescuing UFO rich in manpower). I think that aliens should destroy then crash site. (Leaving all this stuff waiting for X-Com to just pick it up and use?).
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Actually rescue mission would demand big ships and maybe even few big ships (:P ). Instead of troubling themselves with this all they could just send another ship to do needed mission.
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They would waste more elerium getting to the small craft than they would recieve so it wouldn't be worth while. I suggested a while back that they should attempt to rescue commanders on the Battleships but otherwise it is a waste of resources. Maybe in the Alien missions the Commander takes a lot of training, so is in fact more valuble than Elerium?
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About Elerium: Is it really so precious for them? Think - if they can send 10 supply ships per month, every equiped with 200 (or was it 150?) elerium then it gives us 1500-2000 elerium units they can easly spend every month. Then what's the purpose of launching rescue missions for elerium? I agree with Jim, that only point in it is rescuing Commanders. Edited by Extralucas
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Even then they probably have another cloning vat ready to go.

 

I think that the crashed ufos should vapourize or explode if you don't get to them in time. Otherwise you would have downed ufos littering the landscape and you would be able to recover all of them.

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Well, I figure that the aliens would try to scuttle their crashed ship to prevent you from getting it.

 

About the commanders, do you know how long it must take to train a alien commander? And experience can never be trained into something, it has to be, well, expierenced.

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That's what I was thinking: What if we make it so that the Commander is their most valuble resource because it's the only thing that can't just be brought off a production line. Yeah, Elerium's rare but they do have quite a bit of it but good men ( or even aliens ) are hard to find. Prehaps they get promoted on the same basis as human soldiers, they have to show good leadership skills to become a Commander and finding that person plus giving them experience takes time. Not as long as humans because of their technology, but still a good amount of time. Plus they don't want the Humans to nab him :)
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I would think they clone them like any other alien, and in TFTD they had an item called 'Alien Learning Array' or something like that, they could just download the necessary skills and experience into the newly cloned alien's blank mind to make him a soldier or a commander or whatever.
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Well, yeah, but we don't have to include that :) That's the beauty of it, we can make any rules we want for the aliens, so the question is would it be better for gameplay if they tried to rescue the Commander? Should they try and rescue each ship? I don't know personally, but I do know that whatever is decided can be explained later.
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This looks like it's tied into the thread discussing rescue missions, where the aliens will send a rescue craft (like a med/large scout) to get the surviving aliens and ufo components from the downed craft. If the ufo is down in an alien controlled country, you'd also have human agents there to help out right away. If after 36-48 hours you haven't arrived, another ufo picks up the survivors and returns to base. Shooting it down would give you the chance to fight all the aliens, and recover the extra parts, assuming they weren't destroyed in the crash.
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Experience comes from things you have survived. What if someone will program this - put those memories into your head? Or just clone already existing commander into legions of other commnaders?

 

But Breunor's idea sounds OK. Especially if that doesn't mean any new crafts :P (IMHO wasted effort with creating new crafts for rescuing few, mass producable, alien warriors)

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Yes, it would take a long time to download experiences in such a way that you could get the brain to rewire itself to make you better able to learn from it I think. Or maybe the cloning process isn't perfect, only a few clones are perfect enough to be commander quality. We know it's nearly impossible to make a viable clone, so maybe the advanced aliens can clone, but making a perfect copy down to the brain cells' synapse wiring is nearly impossible for them? So when they get one it's very valuable, worth losing a dozen troops and even a medium scout over a possible rescue.
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Sounds reasonale to me. As long as they don't start trying to rescue every ship it could work well, not only would it not make sense but it would be incredibly annoying in terms of gameplay. Making the capture of Battleships a race against time however would be a good challenge. Considering you need the Commander to finish the game we should make it as difficult as possible without going over the top. Using this there could be an ETA of when the ship will arrive, like 50 turns or so, making the battle just a little bit of a race against time. Clear that ship soldier!
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I don't know if downloading thoughts would be the way to do it. I think that if that being bombarded with images would be like reading a book...

 

I think that the psychic conditioning would be more of an ongoing process with multisensory conditioning and propaganda fed over time.. like any military training or educational methods. This would allow the developing synapses to grow and form in ways condusive to the type of thought that the aliens are going for, just as learning and excercising your brain in different ways strengthens synaptic connections that are used to complete the excercise activities.

 

Like, you can make a clone of a body builder in a vat... but he isn't going to come out a body builder. You can even stimulate his muscles to grow with electronic pulses and feed him steroids, but there is no substutite for training. Training allows for range of movement, stretching, the hardening of specific fibres, increases bone density, lubricates joints and so on- the kind of benefit you can only derive through stress and the physical damage (on a microscopic level) of the muscles and bones themselves.

 

So, I think that in order to produce a hardened military commander or what not you have to actually put the brain through the desired mental stress and have the brain react to it as real before the desired result can be reaped.

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What I was thinking is that they would be conditioned experiencially while they develop in the vats.. so kind of like the matrix only a much more structured environment with psychics instead of machines and abstraction rather than literal interpretation..

 

Anyone ever seen Darkworld? The memory injections kind of produce the same sort of effect I was thinking of... although, none of that need be explained.

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Or maybe the aliens have developed a system like in Clockwork Orange, only because there are no underlying memories before they start. So none of the alien version of "I'm singing in the rain" ok? :LOL:
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