19 replies to this topic

[Fimbul]

What about strong alien base defense?

Normaly the aliens wouldn't do anything in the eary game if you don't see them. They have to hide themselve, human don't like them and now State who protect them.

But if you detect a base of them and would attack it they can have a strong plasma weapon to take your ships realy fast on the ground(in the early game) and if the base is more important they can also have small defense ships who clean the sky in radius around the base.

Now you wouldn't leave the base but you can't land nearby so you have to land out of range of the defense weapon and your troops have a long walk through alien contaminating areas and a strong defended entrance

What a fun

But you have to take down the defense ships, if you don't you can't came close to the base.

In later game you could fight again the defense and destroy it and also burn everything to ashes at the surface. -_- So you can land inside the base to attack the aliens (make it faster)

But the largest and most important bases have such strong defense weapons that you couldn't overmaster them. So you have also go through a realy danger area :crying:

Maybe such a strong base have also self shoot installations who you have to deactivate or to shoot down.

A helltrip

[Cpl. Facehugger]

Well, some of this has been discussed in the base defense thread,

But I don't like your idea about a super base defense, gameplay over realism. A super base defense would make it so that people only attacked 1 base, for fear that the uber defense would be there.

Anyway, welcome to the community.

[Fimbul]

Thanks for the welcome

umhh... i'm also one of this guys who want weak (only a little bit cheapper) interceptors. with this you can test if it has a defense.

Maybe not every alien base have a defense but in the early game it would be cool (for me) slain strong aliens and have a hard fight to them. Thats the point you can't land in the base and have a walk to. Like TFTD, ground mission and base mission.

In UFO i had so fast my avengers and the best armour the opponents was to weak. Yeah only the one with psi That was the reason why my troops had the strongest armor and the weakest weapons

Btw I like strong opponents and i think a alien base have to be hard to take. We have also diffrent levels of difficulty, we could also make options only at the the starting of a new game. Would you alien base defense? J/N, Would you weak interceptors? J/N etc.....

Oh jeah, the defense don't have so strong that it would kill any plane on sight! But strong protect, so you can't land in the base either. If any ship would land it shoot at this one.

Later with better planes and weapons it woudn't be a problem to take the most bases. Your scouts can also look how large the base is(how many Hangars or so) and if there are alot, maby 6 to 10 it will be a real large base! Standard would be 2 or 3, easy to take with 1 or 2 avengers.

The largest bases would be realy rare, depending at your difficulty or how long you didn't anything against a normal base or if there are a strong Nation in the back of them.

Maybe there are only unique bases of this value which are important for the storyline? There are many ways to heck

*ggg*

[fux0r666]

You don't find alien bases until later in the game when you have newer machines and equipment anyways.

[DwightMcNeil]

Hi guys I am new here but I was reading your replies and see some interesting points. When the aliens hit you you always have defenses but the aliens don't which always seemed strange to me....


Also strange was the lack of facilities. No cloning equipment, no workshops, no labs, and no armories. After a raid I always felt cheated on the equipment taken. Also never got the change to take a supply ship intact at the base.

The aliens didn't put any ships in the sky to defend their base. It would seem to me if you hit a base you would need fighters and transports. Maybe you could make bombing runs.

I would like to see both X-Com and Alien bases to be much larger and tons more gear recovered.

Also why do you have to wreck the alien base especially when your at a stage in the game where you understand so much of their technology. I would love to refit a enemy base and move in a garrison. Sure you would need time to research it and learn how it works but you would save alot of funding and show the member nations you were making progress.


Maybe bring in member nations troops/personel to help guard the place??

[grunty]

Also why do you have to wreck the alien base especially when your at a stage in the game where you understand so much of their technology. I would love to refit a enemy base and move in a garrison.  Sure you would need time to research it and learn how it works but you would save alot of funding and show the member nations you were making progress.


Maybe bring in member nations troops/personel to help guard the place??

I like the idea in Jagged Alliance 2 where there was militia that you trained (that you couldn't control only watch if you had your forces in the sector when the enemy attacked) and left to defend the former enemy sector. So I like your idea of occupying an enemy base and leaving UN troops to guard it (and pay for its maintenance)

[sir_schwick]

I also thought that if you understood Alien Navigation and built your own UFOs, you should be able to take alien ones in successful assaults. Imagine stealing and having your own Battleships rather than the Avengers.

[Snakeman]

I liked that idea as well and spoke on that a bit. I imagine with the larger ships, to even use them on certain maps/mission types, you'd have to kind of limit them in a way. One method could be a Trojan Horse concept...Use alien ships to get to previously hard to get to locales (or even for ease of infiltration in other ways). Another form of cost could come in time to refurbish it to X-COM operational specs, as well as enlarged specialized hanger facilities.

Just looking at the hanger dimentions here. Think if you only had the same kind of real estate space as you did in the first game. Now look at the shapes of the various craft and examine how that eats up your base layout options.

With small, medium and large scout sized UFOs, those I'd imagine would fit ok inside a standard X-COM hanger that's 4 squares (and two levels deep). With something on the scale of the Supply Ship, you'd probably need a new hanger that takes into account not just three levels of that craft, but the hanger length and width would be as if you'd had two X-COM hangers next to one another (8 squares but now 3 levels deep).

Now your talking a Battleship. Here again you'd need it to be three levels deep, but now your looking at the equivalent of 4 X-COM hangers in scale and connected in one big cube shape (with ships like the Abductor, which is also 2 levels high, you may still need this sort of hanger size). Its one aspect to X-COM I find fascinating, at least as far as the base management stuff goes. May not leave much space as far as sprawling out with such an endeavour, but I think there could be a work around in the design if one could build vertically (at more cost of course) up to 3-4 levels deep or so.

Just 2x, 3x or even 4x the purchase price, if not the maintenance fees and I could readily like the idea of building veritcally further underground. The rest of it is a question of how the game would allow one to use alien tech against them in varous ways, then in how maps using those would have to evolve (in addition to alien resistance) you'd have to work in there somewhere. (Your AI pathfinding routines just to name a programming hurtle etc.)

Thinking on this some more, what else I find interesting is how this can put a damper on how most of us design bases now, with choke points and such. Might have to toss that element out the window if you design a big 'ol hanger base like this. On the other hand, at least now you'd have one big 'ol wide open area to fight in during base defense

Edited by Snakeman, 28 November 2004 - 11:49 PM.

[sir_schwick]

And your using alien battleships instead of avengers. More weapons, men space, and those fancy lifts.

[Snakeman]

True, and I'd have no problem using their craft as my new standard. However I think the game should then start stacking alien opposition against you the beefier you make yourself. I liked your idea too on the gradual increase where base defense becomes more taxing on you. First time through like fourth, 1 Battleship attempts to land at your base like normal, then the more you successfully keep blowing them up with your base weapons, more Battleships start to stack with increased odds of breaching your outter defesnes to land.

What this does of course is liven up and increase the odds of more battlescapeish base defenses happening with your troops, but what it also does is make you decide "Do I scrap this base and start over a few miles away to slip under their noses or stay and fight it out?"

I mentioned this in another thread, but if it could be carried out well, I'm all for anything new that let's me think about more things tactically then the first game allowed.

Edit: Just to reiterate my point above again about the using of borrowed alien ships, the one about limitations where maps/missions come into play. Now I'm not certain how big the maps for Xenocide will be with the first or even in subsequent planned version releases, but I'll explain what I mean with regard to the larger ships that aren't the small, medium or large scout variety (i.e. whatever would squeeze into the standard 4 square X-COM hanger that thus, shouldn't pose as much problems where map generation/placement of objects goes)...

What I'm referring to is limited uses for using the much larger craft. You'd almost certainly have to develop larger maps for example if we were to be able to use something as enormous as the Battleship for "routine" crash recoveries since then your ship takes up a huge portion of the map. This rules out Battleship reocvery I'd think since then you have two Battleships squeezed into that map. Well, the "traditional X-COM map" anyway.

This point aside, there are in my mind two possibilites if the idea was to eventually truely use such large ships for your more routine recovery operations...

1) Stage Play - By this I mean the old Cydonia style 2-maps per mission angle. The mission isn't complete until you do both. What I'd propose here if this was the case is to have some maps made that when there's an appropriate trigger (because the player has chosen the Battleship as his vehicle of choice) that places the crashed UFO he's after underground on a separate level of its own. Meaning if that ship is chosen to be used, every map site is two stages or...

2) Simply has more levels to it (like bases have and buildings do on the battlescape, only now your taking subterrainian into account where appropriate). The basic logic behind each one, no matter which would be used though, is that ships that crash at high velocities (forgetting for a moment the explainations for any alien survivals at all ), chunks of ships will inevitably wind up under the surface. What this also presents is a bit of a reason to throw more aliens to shoot at, even if the ship you shot down was small. That reason is since the map is now a couple or more levels that you have to navigate, that gives the opposition time to have sent recovery teams of their own to investigate. More opposition as a pricetag (among others sited) for using a large ship sounds fun to me.

But even though this would be helluva fun, I won't go into the economic failures of doing so, such as, "Why recover a small UFO even if its intact with a Battleship class ship? Expending more Elerium to get there for one possible payout of one powersource isn't worth it." Its a choice, albeit probably not a sound economic reason for doing so That said, maybe missions could be made that offer a bit of a payout for deploying one.

However I do see possiblilties for specialized usage. Battleships we know have the ability to withstand a bit of a beating and are perfect for assaulting bases. In X-COM the aliens didn't have outter defenses, but now there's a reason to give them some not to mention the inner defenses discussed in the other thread and more bodies to target. Another was infiltration as was discussed. One thought here too could be that maybe you don't want to risk that Battleship you made right away, so you set up an infitration mission. Select a unit to do the infiltration in whatever alien garb he'll have then select the base he's to go to. His objective could be to disable the outter defenses so you could land or at least give you targetting data so that a bombardment might be more effective than just blazing on in.

Edited by Snakeman, 30 November 2004 - 12:02 AM.

[sir_schwick]

Exactly. I always thought that when you hit the aliens hard, they would hit you harder back. If one Battleship is not enough, then two are required. More is better because teh aliens have a huge numbers advantage. This means that you have to keep attacking from new direcitons, like geurillas.

[Snakeman]

Heh, looked like you were on about the same time I was when I did some editing

An added note on Infiltration missions. I liked what you mentioned before about intercepting the ships with that mission and revealing clues (if not an interrogation of a live imposter) revealing the exact location to try and thrwart countries signing pacts. I feel that this mission type probably has the most opportunities to carry off in different ways, just as with sending your own infiltrator to disable alien base defenses. Another form of infiltration could involve (hopefully with future releases of Xenocide) using alien ships only with regard to trying to establish bases on Mars (or even to slip in to obliterate any outposts they might have in the rest of the solar system).

There are just some activities I can think of where using alien tech, tech that isn't too altered in appearance on the outside, to carry these things off. In the first game when we were able to waltz in with our own hybrid or Earth transports, or showed up on Cydonia with our Avenger, the aliens clearly knew we had hybrid craft. Had they had base defenses, they'd shoot at them in a heartbeat.

I propose beginning to make those hybrids ineffective on certain parts of the game (well, recovery missions could still be good here and interceptions) such as long distance reconnaisance of the solar system and Mars to name a couple in addition to making the biggest ships the only type capable of potentially bombarding out the outter defense turrets.

[TheUnseen]

if the aliens had super stronge air defence then just use 2 or 3 APC and a tank as a support, thought you couldet use the tank in the base assult, too unbalacned, then you have a large amount of troops to use in battle, or an alien battle ship could just pass over and vaporise them, then you got no troops

Edited by TheUnseen, 25 June 2005 - 07:10 PM.

[Snakeman]

I think the trick here is that when using any ships of yours on a bombardment mission, the interface I feel definitely would need changing, so that its more similar in appearance to the standard interception window (that is, when the player is doing the bombarding). In this way, you can see your ship icon as its fighting and receiving damage and can thus know when its a good time to continue to fight or to abort.

When its just the AI doing the attempted assaults on your fixed positions, it makes sense to keep it sorta like it was (i.e. "x weapon fires - hit, x weapon fires - miss etc.)

Unless of course the idea is to expand the recovery role in the game by letting us go outside of our bases to investigate the ship that crashed on your roof. In that case, then yea, you might want to see the status of the enemy ship as your defenses target it.

Something else slightly off topic, though it relates somewhat...and I'd been thinking about this while doing a mission to a landed supply ship that was on top of its base icon.

If Xenocide will be anything like X-COM in this respect (the option of going for the transport rather than the base), I think that it's just as reasonable to extend alien base defenses in targetting you even though the base in this instance isn't your preferred objective. The ship after all is landed right outside it.

The other thing I wanted to talk about here was that if you choose to go for the transport and you've landed successfully, you should get more resistance from tanks and soldiers coming from a lift area somewhere on the map (this would be equivalent to the entrance just before the green rooms in the first game that we've never really seen but know must be there) besides the transport ship's compliment of units.

I also think that in this type of mission, you could be given the option, after having mopped up the transport ship's guards and whatever base units came out to play, of going on from that point to do the base assault. However, if you chose not to, it won't hurt your score since technically, it wasn't your main objective after all. In this way you could give yourself an extended challenge if you wanted to, or abort after having taken out the transport's crew (the main objective along with anything from the ship).

Basically the prompt at the intermission would be like before if you'd taken the ship crew out - you get the mission debriefing screen, but now you get the choice to go or stay.

[sir_schwick]

You may or may not have been following the thread where an Aeroscape mode was discussed. If you have not, the idea is that air combat is now similair to ground combat in a turn-based mode with a cubed out battlezone and multiple ships. This could be pretty seemlessly be integrated with the idea of ground defenses being players in that combat and maybe even moving units into position for receiving the alien craft. Now you would see your defenses firing and see what the aliens try to do. Also, getting into the base and then inside the base would be the same mission.

[Snakeman]

Yeah, I had been reading that and like a lot of what's in there as well. When I posted the post above, it was partly to respond to TheUnseen, but also because I wasn't quite sure where to put this

I mean, is it a "Geoscape" thing or a "Battlescape" thing, or a little of both?

The topic was alien bases, but you know these topics round her tend to bleed a bit heh

[Blood Angel]

We're forgetting, that the practical maximum size of an Xcom squad is less than or around 20. The Battleship can take, like, loads. If we had a battleship taken into combat, then not only would the battlescapes need to be vast, you would have uber amounts of Xcom troops, unholy amounts of HWPs, and basically, you would win the mission too easily, except you would still get the problem of having to search in the tiny corridors for that last sodding sectoid soldier. Except, with this 10-hectare map, there will be so many more tiny corridors. It would just take every last shred of fun out of it. Besides, you could vapourise anything in the skies with one shot.

[sir_schwick]

You do bring up a point there. It would help if battlefield management could be a bit more sectorized. What I mean is that you could automatic, 'clean up sector' duties that were easy to assign. Also you could have, 'cautious move to' commands and such. Some of the RB6 commands to handle the more tedious functions, so your guys don't die because your afraid of the auto-handling functions. This is where more use of scout drones and such would be much more useful. Expect a lot more BB though if you can find the enemy, they can find you.

[Snakeman]

Well, one of the reasons I'm for the use of Battleships for some battlescape missions is that you've got a bit more trouble spotting enemies as you disembark. Your units are funneled down the lift and out those doors as their only means (unless there are other design elements being considered, like alternate ingress/egress hatches at different points in the hull).

Granted, you or your enemy can blaster bomb some holes, but then you may have damage to deal with while you fight. In fact, this is probably one of the reasons you'd want the potential troop capacity of it to take these things into account (guys with repair kits and whatnot - i.e. it takes time units to use the kit, but probably takes X turns for the repairs to be effective for various things - or simply to have your abort button reinstated as the result or you couldn't leave).

Agreed though that using Battleships on maps needs some tweaking in terms of where its placed. I think it makes better sense that it be mostly clear on the level that its landed on, and that anything that its going up against or sent to handle is below ground 1, 2, or 3 levels deep. In this way, we may not need really sprawled out maps other than vertical structuring.

-----

Had a different thought with regards to setting up a Mars base. Perhaps the Battleship would be the best option here, with the catch being you could only send this ship as your Trojan Horse once. And you only have with you whatever you can stuff into it for the job. (i.e. pre discovery of Cydonia/Thanatos or whatever its called).

Well, maybe it wouldn't have to be the only way to get it done, but rather, one of a few methods to the approach. Its all about managing costs and so forth and what the player feels they can accomplish with their goals.