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Geoscape ruleset


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Few idea I have to put a few new rules in place (remember that I hate Battlescape :P)

 

- Huger base map.

- Add Medical room.

- Add biologist/medic.

 

Few idea about research tree:

- Add cybernetic.

- Add some alien slavery. :P

 

And add an automatic battlescape! (disabled in multiplayer game)

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Guest stewart
Few idea I have to put a few new rules in place (remember that I hate Battlescape :P)

 

- Huger base map.

- Add Medical room.

- Add biologist/medic.

 

Few idea about research tree:

- Add cybernetic.

- Add some alien slavery. :P

 

And add an automatic battlescape! (disabled in multiplayer game)

We could make the bases bigger but honestly I think 8x6x6 spaces is way more than enough. This would really unbalance things I think.

 

I like the medical room, if you mean it's more or less a hospital. Then if you don't have one you have to sack soldiers once they're damaged.

 

Is that what you are thinking or did you have something else in mind? What does a medic do?

 

For battlescape, I'd like to be able to record battles for replay, showing both sides as their turns are run.

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Idea:

With the new Geoscape rules, agents wouldn't recover fully from an injury - their health bar will recharge very slowly over time, back to about 75% of max. With a medical room (must have a proper medical staff), injured agents recover faster and will reach full health.

 

Medical room could also be used for cybernetic implantation (must research the appropriate tech first). Think Syndicate. Picture an agent with cybernetic targeting system and enhanced senses... perch him on a rooftop and spot bugs anywhere on the battlescape.

 

The problem with this idea is that almost anything achievable by cybernetic implantation can also be done with a properly-equipped Power Suit, without any of the dangers or moral grey areas.

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Guest stewart
Idea:

With the new Geoscape rules, agents wouldn't recover fully from an injury - their health bar will recharge very slowly over time, back to about 75% of max. With a medical room (must have a proper medical staff), injured agents recover faster and will reach full health.

 

Medical room could also be used for cybernetic implantation (must research the appropriate tech first). Think Syndicate. Picture an agent with cybernetic targeting system and enhanced senses... perch him on a rooftop and spot bugs anywhere on the battlescape.

 

The problem with this idea is that almost anything achievable by cybernetic implantation can also be done with a properly-equipped Power Suit, without any of the dangers or moral grey areas.

I wouldn't want to go nuts with the cybernetic stuff though and unbalance the game but maybe an implant to say improve Reactions might not be bad.

 

I like the dual roll of the hospital you suggest. But I would be harsher, no recovery until hospitalized.

 

Oh anouther idea, no alien will live in the alien containment until you've researched their corpse first. So they show up alive then die, until you know about their inner workings.

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Yup be harsher on the medical bit. :) also I might go back on that one base per team bit because I'm thinking about players like timil that only want to do the geoscope. How about one skyranger base per team and a couple of reginal defense bases with interceptors. Also there should be diplomats, spies, aliences and so forth in the geoscope. As previously mentioned somewhere else the reasearch tree should be huge
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Guest stewart

If all possible jobs are spelled out and people can be assigned multiple jobs then we can do anything. Diplomats and spys may sound neat at first but they have to be playable and fun or else what's the point.

 

Kind of reminds of a particular Starwars action figure, actually.

 

The Chancellor Veloram action figure. He wears his Senatorial Robe and Carries the Republics Senatorial Mace. That's nice. Now remember folks this is supposed to be a toy that children play with. So how do you play "Chancellor Velorum"?

 

Child 1 Playing CV: "No the chair does not recognize the memeber from Alderan, I'm the supreme chencellor, mwa ha ha ha."

 

Child 2 playing CV: "According chapter 2 paragraph 3 subsection 14 of Roberts Rules of Order, YOU are out-of-line and must yield the floor. The chair seizes the floor and recognizes the trade federation representative, cry me a river"

 

Or perhaps Chancellor Velorum runs around whacking people with his cerimonial mace all the while his robbes are flapping about.

 

Ahem, anyway we want avoid that. :rolleyes:

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Guest stewart
Also we should define more countires than are defined in X-Com.  The funding you get is dependent on how many countries are in your circle of influence.

That might be tricky without a supreme commander.

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If all possible jobs are spelled out and people can be assigned multiple jobs then we can do anything.  Diplomats and spys may sound neat at first but they have to be playable and fun or else what's the point.

 

I was thinking they be more used like scientist and techniciants. I think players control more the functions of a base and the functions he controls can be assigned out by the leader or everyone gets one in a democracy.

 

Kind of reminds of a particular Starwars action figure, actually.

 

The Chancellor Veloram action figure.  He wears his Senatorial Robe and Carries the Republics Senatorial Mace.  That's nice.  Now remember folks this is supposed to be a toy that children play with.  So how do you play "Chancellor Velorum"?

 

:) actually The chancellor makes a great hostage or a target for an assasination. ;) He's always the fall guy.

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Guest stewart

Spy n stuff:

 

Okay, so they are NPC's that'll work provided it adds to game play.

 

Velorum:

So, how do you ask dad to shell out the doe for a hostage figurine.

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im ok With the medcal room.and u need medics in it to heal your soldiers.

 

While talkin about live aliens capture, why not getting like surgeons. to open them while they are alive or dead to see the body in side and then describe the information to us. And then lke you said. Execution. kill him after the info. u send a special agent, and shoot it :P its training .

 

 

while talkin about training. why not add a shooting range facility :P . it would help the soldiers improove there shooting skills. and something with bravery.

 

 

for the fundings, yes why not add ayyy more countries ?

 

liek Timil said, why needing spies.. its true, every1 is with you, suporting u and offering cash .

but with a spy, u "can" lets say send a spy in an alian base to see liek whats the race, how many aliens in the base( aprox 40 :P ) whats there Job--> research, abduction? tests on humain. probing humans?

 

sometiems aliens we could make the alien stop the spy we sent.

 

 

eheh ill leave you with that. :)

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Well getting global funding makes sense in a single player game. But in a multiplayer game you might want to do things that cause competition between the diffrent teams. Like you can make funding based on sphere of influence that the team has. Also each country would fund each team diffrently based how well that team performs in that country.
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Spy's could like give you diffrent kind of information like perhaps the location of on of that teams skyrangers flying through the sky, steal some technology, or see a ufo through their radars.

I would imagine the aliens would have HWD immediately. So that would take care of watching the skies once they have a base.

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Guest stewart
im ok With the medcal room.and u need medics in it to heal your soldiers.

 

While talkin about live aliens capture, why not getting like surgeons. to open them while they are alive or dead to see the body in side and then describe the information to us. And then lke you said. Execution. kill him after the info. u send a special agent, and shoot it  :P  its training .

 

 

while talkin about training. why not add a shooting range facility :P . it would help the soldiers improove there shooting skills. and something with bravery.

 

 

for the fundings, yes why not add ayyy more countries ?

 

liek Timil said, why needing spies.. its true, every1 is with you, suporting u and offering cash .

but with a spy, u "can" lets say send a spy in an alian base to see liek whats the race, how many aliens in the base( aprox 40 :P ) whats there Job--> research, abduction? tests on humain. probing humans?

 

sometiems aliens we could make the alien stop the spy we sent.

 

 

eheh ill leave you with that. :)

While opening them up might be cool the first time to see, in terms of game play that would get old fast; is it worth the added complexity?

 

I like the idea of hospitals too, maybe they hold 10 soldiers (we may not actually need doctor NPCs though) unless you want to say that in this universe adding more doctors to a patient makes them magically heal faster or something like that.

 

I like the training room idea too. Right now it just takes too long to build up stats. Sure you can do my revive-the-alien-and-train-in-farmer-bobs-field but that's really boring. What I'd do for training room (keeping it simple) is say it holds 10 soldiers. At the end of the month the best score for each particular stat is found among the ten soldiers. Each soldiers new stat for each particular stat is the average (rounded up) of their present score and the best of the group. This kind of simulates the soldiers teaching each other and training against each other. Also, when people learn they learn at lot quickly then the new stuff comes slower and slower. This would be the same effect. The nice thing is the training room becomes a way to store and preserve your stats.

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Guest stewart
Well getting global funding makes sense in a single player game.  But in a multiplayer game you might want to do things that cause competition between the diffrent teams.  Like you can make funding based on sphere of influence that the team has.  Also each country would fund each team diffrently based how well that team performs in that country.

That might be okay for the aliens (except they don't have funding, maybe they have "favor" vis-a-vis the "Brain") it would help explain how defeated retaliation requires the aliens to rediscover your base. The aliens don't tell each other because they are competing for Brains favors. On the other hand how do we explain mixed crews then?

 

But as for XCOM, while from a pure gaming point of view the competition would provide a fun challenge, it's not how a real XCOM would be set-up.

 

In fact this idea that the aliens compete and that XCOM does not might be a good hook to design around. It gives both side a completely different feel.

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Also I would like to see human vs human battles in a multiplayer game.

You don't have to specifically code for that, it will happen naturally. I mean in those 3D shoot-'em-up's has any coop game ever successfully completed with out it degenerating into a frag festin' death match?

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Give the aliens the ability to cooperate as well as compete. Say, let them trade troops with each other, so you might see discs accompanying an Ethereal terror squad for example.

hehe i would enjoy that, Elite Shock Troops in a base :P :D

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:P I still don't like the idea of alien gameplay. I mean an alien player could get real powerful in like maybe 1 turn even if you limit the supplies you give them. It's like the blasterbomb thing in the current x-com, you can stock up on them just by defeating the aliens a couple of times. All the player has to do is attack enough AI aliens to get all the weapons they need and then they are way better than the humans since they don't need to reasearch and have special abilities. The only thing that makes X-Com 1 such an easy game is crappy Alien AI now with Human power intelligence the aliens have a real advantage. And what you going to start the alien players off with? human weapons? Aliens start off with plasma weapons they don't even bother with laser weapons.
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Guest stewart
Give the aliens the ability to cooperate as well as compete. Say, let them trade troops with each other, so you might see discs accompanying an Ethereal terror squad for example.

TFTD has mixed crews, I think we can still throw them in; maveric groups based on something other that racial affinity, or whatever.

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:P I still don't like the idea of alien gameplay.  I mean an alien player could get real powerful in like maybe 1 turn even if you limit the supplies you give them.  It's like the blasterbomb thing in the current x-com, you can stock up on them just by defeating the aliens a couple of times.  All the player has to do is attack enough AI aliens to get all the weapons they need and then they are way better than the humans since they don't need to reasearch and have special abilities.  The only thing that makes X-Com 1 such an easy game is crappy Alien AI now with Human power intelligence the aliens have a real advantage.  And what you going to start the alien players off with? human weapons?  Aliens start off with plasma weapons they don't even bother with laser weapons.

Well the supply thing was just one idea for limiting the aliens, but there could be several others. Maybe when played by people the aliens must begin at Mars, launching everything from there, hense wanting to set up bases, to make there activities more time efficient. The computer can be made to not be concerned with this. Maybe the human played aliens have a fixed supply of Elerium or fixed resupply rate of Elerium, the computer does not. This could probably be made to work.

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How about if we do implement the alien side at the same time it is only playable by the ops of the game until deemed worth for general use? That way we can implement it and test it but it won't effect the game play until it is ready for the general public?
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Well of course when I say we should write it first and make it fair later, I'm speaking of a debug version of the thing. If can't be made to work soon enough we can, turn things off for the release version. But still keep them to work on for later releases.
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:) that sound good. I suggest to forget about making a debug version and put it in the regular version in an op system like used in muds. The people involved in this project could all have op access on the server while the general public has regular accounts. It is a good idea to have ops in a multiplayer game to kick of sleeping or stupid players and other things ops do in those Mud games.
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Uh, no, that's not a good way to do software. You first do a debug version first, then you make the first release version then you profile it and finalize the release version. I think all compilers now are setup to do at least debug and release compiles.
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well I'm not talking about not doing alpha, beta and release versions during the process. It is more a thing of building parts of the debug into the game. Someone with op access could turn a debug feature on for himself whereas a normal user can't. There games that already do this noteably zangband has a wizard mode which is the debug mode. Also in some old sega genesis and computer games you could go into a debug mode if you knew the code. This sort of thing has been used in game developing before.
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I don't think you understand how this works. Debug, Release, and Profile versions are completely separate compiles of the code. Code specific to each target type are segrated with #ifdef-#else-#endifs. If people are given the Release version of something they will not have access to any of the stuff conditionally compiled under the DEBUG flag, because it simply is not compiled since the compiler parses it into white space. This is one of the things that is different about professional software developement and school code.
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:P I understand how the debug thing works. but there is more than one way to debug besides using and #if #endif tree. That is a way to turn on debug with the precompiler. But who is to say that is the only way to turn on debug code? Another way that has been used (also professionally) is to activate certain debug code in a release version. I've seen this done in some commercial games. It makes sense here too because some things can only be tested in an real world enviornment. Why shouldn't an op be able to turn on alien code for himself and say play the aliens in a running game to test out the code in a real battle? I'm sure the developers of zangband use the debug mode to test things out in that game. That's not to say all debug code should be implemented that way you still can have your #if #endif stuff or assert(blahblahblah); and so forth.
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Guest stewart
:P I understand how the debug thing works.  but there is more than one way to debug besides using and #if #endif tree.  That is a way to turn on debug with the precompiler.  But who is to say that is the only way to turn on debug code?  Another way that has been used (also professionally) is to activate certain debug code in a release version.  I've seen this done in some commercial games.  It makes sense here too because some things can only be tested in an real world enviornment.  Why shouldn't an op be able to turn on alien code for himself and say play the aliens in a running game to test out the code in a real battle?  I'm sure the developers of zangband use the debug mode to test things out in that game.  That's not to say all debug code should be implemented that way you still can have your #if #endif stuff or assert(blahblahblah); and so forth.

Then it's not really debug code in the sense as part of the debug target, it is code used for debugging. Code like that would only be nessessary for debugging errors that only occur in the release version. It's considered good coding to practise to be able to avoid that. However if it must be then that kind of code should be removed before that particular build could be called a true release version.

 

When I talk about debug version I mean in the target/conditional compile sense, I don't mean typing in password to enable god-mode or soemthing like that.

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:LOL: well I think the thing is that people want us to put a server up asap. pretty much the server we'll run at first will be the debug version anyway. but I think the alien game play should be put at first as you say God mode. It will take a bit to perfect and the only way to do that is with trial and error.
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:LOL: well I think the thing is that people want us to put a server up asap.  pretty much the server we'll run at first will be the debug version anyway.  but I think the alien game play should be put at first as you say God mode.  It will take a bit to perfect and the only way to do that is with trial and error.

Good software production would say not to have cheat codes in the release version but gaming fans expect stuff like that, though.

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Well. I mean we have complete control of the code so working on being able to play aliens and have XCOM be the computer, as options, just isn't going to be a problem.
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you think that we can design the game so we don't have to take it offline to introduce changes?  Seems harder to do but it might be good if we only have one server at first and people also use it to play the game on.

What's the big deal about that?

 

"Hey everybody were gonna be upgrading the game tommorow. It will be off-line for a while. Sorry for the inconvenience."

 

Done.

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you think that we can design the game so we don't have to take it offline to introduce changes?  Seems harder to do but it might be good if we only have one server at first and people also use it to play the game on.

What's the big deal about that?

 

"Hey everybody were gonna be upgrading the game tommorow. It will be off-line for a while. Sorry for the inconvenience."

 

Done.

guess not then :P :)

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On the topic of improvements, how about if we implemented the commendation system, like in Incubation? In other words, if you perform particularly well in a mission (saving most of the civilians in a terror site, or capturing 200 Elerium units or an alien leader, or something) you get a commendation, which you can award to one of your troopers who went on that mission to raise his/her stats.
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well the player shouldn't be able to choose who gets the accomidation.. should be done by the game. I like that X-Com picks who gets promoted and note. Often times I have someone who does nothing getting high rank and I think that is how it would be in real life :)
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  • 1 year later...

Reacting to an old post but...

 

BASE SIZE

I think we cound enhance the atmosphere by letting the base owner pay for what they have, i.e. you pay for the room available at your base. (Plus government should have the right to limit the size depending on the action of the XCOM in the country. We are hosted by the country after all, are we not?)

This way we can get the players to start in a "small underground cabinet" and you get the feeling that they are few, they can be really cornered in there, and it is a gloomy place to live in.

Yuk.

 

My 3 cents...

 

Yan

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