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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Covert, Not Overt


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The one feature that always bugged me about X-COM was the supreme ease of eliminating an alien by wholly and utterly flattening the building he was hiding in with blaster bombs.

 

So, I propose a feature for the score earned from a Battlescape mission. A checkbox for a gameplay option, "Property Damages", is selectable from the game start. When playing a combat operation, the amount of civilian property damaged when engaging aliens comes out of your final score -- for every $2000 (or equivalent) of property ruined exceeding $50,000 (a certain amount of collateral damage is expected), you lose 1 point from the total score for the mission, due to the necessity of government employees explaining away a crater where Johnny-Bob's farmstead used to be.

 

All destructibles would have an associated value, which the player would have to discover on their own (common sense plays a good part, of course). This includes topiaries, hedges, trees, lawns, floors, walls, livestock, etc. at generally low values, and cash registers, lightpoles, consumer products, etc. at generally high values.

 

If the amount of civilian property ruined was less than $25,000, you receive a 20 point "Covert Operations Bonus" to your score for that battle (pretty tough, given that simple exchanges of moderate weapon-fire will ruin lawns and blast holes in buildings). The governments are very pleased with how you resolved the situation and look forward to "doing business" with you again.

 

Low-stopping-power rounds like the pistol and the rifle become preferable over the laser weapons if you want to receive the covert ops bonus from the mission -- though of course you have to compromise against survivability. Taking on a Reptilian with a pistol is something the Reptilian will regale his comrades about. "Stupid hunam attack with popgun, little bead of lead shatter on my armour like his dignity. Meal you eat is left lung."

 

 

While I'm on the subject, I would absolutely adore if Xenocide had a wide range of customisable difficulty options -- similar to XCOMUTIL -- most likely in the form of a tab on the Difficulty selection screen: clicking a button on the difficulty screen chooses default options; if you choose to browse to the tab, you can see all of the specific options that your difficulty level has chosen. Enemy weapons tendency, government financing rates, alien spawning rates, numbers of aliens per battle, and so forth. You can naturally change any of these options individually to select the "Custom" difficulty. This probably deserves its own thread.

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I like the main idea here (mostly cuz I can't say no to your avatar :P ), although the details would need quite a bit of balancing. For instance, you get a bonus for it being under *only* 25k?

 

Mind Control Death Squad anyone? :P

 

Also, livestock can get rather expensive. . .if it's even implamented.

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Any evidence of plasma fire or destruction would be enough to alert any civilians. It's possible the clean-up team xcorp sends in to retrieve the ufo may take care of some of that evidence, but buildings and livestock, cars, etc, are not so easily replaced. Perhaps there should only be a penalty for "excessive" damage. Besides, there are supposed to be more civilians in this game anyway so blowing everything up already has some problems. I like the idea of a bonus for leaving no evidence of alien or xcorp intrusion. That would be hard.
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The important note is, of course, that it's an optional setting. Players don't have to choose it if they don't want it. I know that I'd play with that option on, though. ;-)
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praps its not that you get a bonus for a clean fight , but rather a cost penalty for a dirty fight IE Xcom has to fork out the cash for the replacement gear
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