Squadrons & Convoys

[Cpl. Facehugger]

But that would require a number of hangars per base, or the splitting up of the squadron between 2 bases.

[fux0r666]

It would require multiple hangars anyways. And having definable wings would only require setting a flag for each interceptor window.

[Guest Jim69]

Say, three wings are the maximum ( say for the sake of argument we had 9 craft as the max ). There could be 3 boxes next to the aircraft picture that Breunor has posted ( looks like it could work well BTW ) that work like radial buttons. When one is pressed it moves the selection from the old box to the new, and the colour defines the wing. When minimised as shown in Breunor's drawing if there are 2 wings selected then 2 aircraft are shown from each wing. That could work I think.

[[dipstick]]

9 avengers - the possibilities, oh the possibilities.

 

maybe 12 aircraft max?? In 4 wings? or squadrons? or bananas? (did I say that out loud?)

[Cpl. Facehugger]

Yeah the possibilities of 9 avengers abound, but, how would you get the elerium needed to keep them in the air for any legnth of time?

[Guest Jim69]

There's a balancer right there. All very well and good having loads of aircraft, but can you keep them in the air? That's why a need for a mixed group of fighters becomes necessary, that doesn't rely on a resource that is hard to get hold of.

[Breunor]

I'd stick to 6 or maybe 9 craft in wings of up to three like described above. You could say a wing must stay at the same base for logistics, and it would require additional hangars. Remember that after v1, we'll look at larger freeform bases, so the space limits won't be such an issue as they are now. When the intercept screen pops up and you have ufos at the top and wings at the bottom, you could click and drag a wing onto a ufo to target it, or maybe have a 'select target' button on each wing. There should be 3 bars to represent damage levels for each craft, and an option to return a wounded craft to base. After you select it, maybe it takes a couple seconds for it to disappear, representing the chance the ufo has to hit it as it breaks off. I agree that 9 avengers would be cost prohibitive.

[Cpl. Facehugger]

And time/ engineer prohibitative. And how excactly are we going to do freeform bases. It looks like a good idea, but the art dept may have to work a lot harder to make all those models...

[fux0r666]

Again, since this is post v1 and not part of the current milestone it's not really something to lose sleep over right now. What we mean by freeform bases is that your base can be tiled in ways that do not conform to the same box system that xcom has... All it would require is a lot of prefabs, and since the current boxes are already full of prefabs, once you make all the necessary boxes you have most of the models available.

[Breunor]

Yes, v1 bases are 6x6 squares that connect with central doors, v2 will likely be something like 20x20 to prevent outrageous designs, with facilities still connecting by central doors or perhaps hallways, v3++ would allow doors near corners or the player has the option where to place, or not to place them so long as every facility has at least one path to the access lift. So adjacent facilities wouldn't necessarily have a connecting door, requiring some pretty fancy coding and modeling placement to do. You could also make the base 10 stories deep, or have 50 facilities all in a row in a 1x50 layout. That's total speculation on my part as to the when or what, but just examples of what freeform design could allow you to do.

[fux0r666]

By v1 do you mean v1.0b or full version 1.0? I've always been a bit hazy as far as that goes.