RiseOfTheGeckos

Not bad! What's the plan for this site to develop given that it gets a membership to support it?

Hah! I saw you in the server a tad earlier. AFK robbed me of not one, but TWO chances to take a crack at ya. Oh cruel fate... Anyhow the team costs ever so slightly under 19K, making this the most cost-efficient team I've been able to slap together to date. When I first started up I got all excited and blinged my troupe up to the point that I could only take like 8 of them into 15k battles. I have since learned my lesson. You called it on the Scouts. Them being unarmed for now is a disciplinary measure for myself more than anything. Being spoiled by the original UFO enemy unknown I got used to sending in uniform troopers, all of whom would alternate scouting, firing, and other tasks based on nothing but their position. Kinda hard to break that "everybody does everything" habit, so the unarmed scouts helps me remember that they are not meant to seek and destroy on their own. They are strictly information gatherers and when I get used to thinking of them like that I might start giving them pistols or something. For now, though, they only cause death towards the very end of matches when there are weapons on the ground for them to pick up. I'm still in a personal dilemma with the riflemen myself, too. I go back and forth between reactions and TU for them while feeling out my style. You could say giving them 50 TUs is another disciplinary thing, where I'm trying to force myself not to have them scrambling all over the map and trying to teach myself to learn to put them into positions have them act in a more coordinated manner. That and I get somewhat envious of enemy reactions and feel the desire to pop off my own, especially if I find decent perches for my riflemen. I wanna get used to saving up TUs instead of playing around on my turn and winding up with sitting ducks at the end of it. I'll probably mold and remodel these fellas as I decide more strongly on how to go about my field tactics. I started out this game using laser rifles, but as I played and got less paranoid about ammo limits, I got used to plasma rifles, particularly under heavy use of snap shots. It's a lot more reliable in making kills than laser rifles in my experience, and single decisive shots tend to go a lot farther in this game than a flurry of laser shots. Since I only snap shot with plasma rifles anymore, by the time I run out of ammo, I can pilfer dead enemies or allies for more killing means. As for those heavy units, I stocked 'em up mostly because I found that when using autocannons before, I blew 14 shots too quickly for comfort, and I don't usually send in all three artillery men if it's a 15K match or something. Besides, they're cheaper than my other units anyhow, so I'm feeling them out and trying to keep them safely stocked on ammo. It would suck, especially in a city, to run out at a crucial moment.

Alright, so here's the info on a team I whipped up for a few quick fights. I like it, so I figured I'd share it: 4 Scouts: Flying Armor 80 TUs 80 Energy 60 Health 3 Artillery: Personal Armor 60 Health 80 Firing Accuracy 40 Strength 1 Heavy Cannon 4 HE Ammos (one loaded, two on belt, one on leg) 8 Riflemen: Personal Armor 60 Health 80 Reactions 80 Firing Accuracy 1 Plasma Rifle 1 Plasma Rifle clip (loaded) Any and all stats that aren't specified are as low as they'll go, and any equipment not specified do not exist.

I've run into two games now where I've gotten two lines of text that read: Something bad happened to remote player and he disconnected from server The only thing you can do now is return to the server chat :-[ What puzzles me is this: 1) The text is in red, not white, which means as far as I can tell it's coming from the other player and not a regular UFO 2000 notice 2) It seems to start happening when I make a lot of kills (2-5) very early in the game (by the second turn) and my opponent has made comparitively few or no kills. 3) But the message is identical coming from different people. Can anyone clear this up for me? Is this just a regular, honest UFO 2000 message or what?

Wow, homebrewed knowledge and all, eh? Pretty awesome what people can do with just some spare time. I'm actually pretty interested because I've been thinking about game development myself and I've been trying to put together some indie work myself. Problem is I'm still new with code though I'm a pretty fast learner (I've built engines for puzzle games like Bust A Move, nothing too impressive) and original graphics and the like. So you can imagine how stunned I'd be to come across the UFO 2000 project. It's really encouraging for the thought of indie game development.

I'm sure there's camo potential for lots of units. Sectoids and no-armor or power/flying armor humans would do well in X-Com bases, Mutons do well in all forms of greenery, standard armor humans would be ok in alien ships and alien bases, and so on and so forth, yadda yadda yadda. There's a lot of units that have very similar colors to various scenery, though I can't say all of them would be as well camoflaged as that there muton.

Out of curiosity, for everyone working on this project, where did you learn the skills you currently contribute to it? Do you have jobs related to what you do for it, were you schooled, or did you pick up your skills completely on your own? Is the code for this is being written from scratch? What programs do you guys use to work on this project? And, of course, Is it as fun to make as it is to play?

Ah, thanks! That did the trick.

I seem to have trouble with the minimap that usually takes up the upper-right portion of the screen. Specifically, it's not there. I'm not talking about the map display button you can click on in the actions bar, I mean the one that tells you seriously important stuff like your soldiers' visibility and whatnot. I've tried (read: mashed a few buttons) to get it back but I can't figure out what options control the appearance of the minimap in the upper right. Does anybody know about this?

Not much else to say, really. When do you usually play? I just started with this game, and my first game (against someone who didn't speak english and I didn't speak any languages they knew), although a disaster for me (I had six, they had twelve, I had them down to eight or nine before my last guy fell; my team was pretty much exclusively HE AC weilding, flying suit wearing mad bombermen and we were playing in a city map. My strategy was to launch blind fire explosives and I was pretty surprised I managed to make any kills at all.) was extremely fun, but unfortunately now I'm the odd number on the server at the moment. Now I'm not saying the above poll will help me figure out peak playing times any faster (since people are likely playing this from rather scattered ends of the globe) but I thought it would be interesting to know when everyone started playing, by their time, nontheless.