Greetings. I have now played the release version after having lots of fun with BB4 and 5. There was some talk of having base defenders in the missions when you go to help out. I haven’t seen a single one. What I HAVE seen are the same unarmed helpless civilians as before. Not a problem. It’s basically Terror missions from the Original Xcom Ufo Defense and Terror from the Deep. No worries. If they get in the way of my shooting they die. Except you can now rescue them and control them if you go up to the little circles. AND if they get killed by the aliens YOU lose will on your soldiers. That is not fun at all. So, here are my suggestions:
Aliens attacking havens should be the same as if Phoenix Point attacks the havens. Meaning they are fully armed and angry. We should HELP, not do things FOR them, unless they are seriously overmatched.
OR
We take control of the F"$$%" civs from round one so we can order them to run the hell away instead of running circles like lambs for the slaughter.
OR
We don’t lose will if they die. They are collateral damage. Acceptable losses. If they are stupid and run into the firing line that’s their own fault. I don’t care one bit.
Here is what I DON’T Effin like. Idiot civs on the other side of the map snuggling up to the aliens EVERY DAMN TIME and when the culling starts all my will is gone. If it’s kill based, maybe I GAIN will from killing them? I have to try that sometime. Smash the effin bastuds with a zerker hammer.
I expect the combat power ratio to matter. If Attacker is 10 and Defender is 5 I expect the combat forces on the ground to be half of the aliens, NOT ZERO and a liability to my will. Hell, even in Origina Xcom the civs only affected your score at the end, they didn’t cripple your damn squad. *Unless they got zombiefied by Chryssalids, but there was still no morale loss for just killing everything that moved to keep more Chrysallids from spawning.
Arm them, remove them, or remove the will loss if they die.
But the bug is not there when it comes to those missions where you have to take out renegades or thieves? Cuz they use weapons no problem. What is so hard about setting Enemy=Pandorans instead of Enemies=Phoenix Point or whatever wording they use?
Anyway, option 1 is off the table. Then just fix/implement one of the other two options. We control the civs from the start, OR their loss doesn’t cripple our will.
Return them to the senseless cannon fodder of every other Xcom game. And by that I mean original, not Firaxcom. Have their losses affect end mission score. With a serious penalty (both resources and reputation,) for every civ killed by xcom for whatever reason.
The haven defenders are supposed to have dynamic relations. In other words they should be able to go from friendly to hostile and vise versa. I think the bug was that they were always hostile even if you had 100 rep with the faction and haven.
…What in the name of… HOW can they have messed that up??? It’s literally an if statement.
if (relations < 0) isEnemy = 1;
As it is, even if you’re normally enemies, since you came to their base to help them fight the aliens, they should act as your allies for that battle. Even terrible enemies will fight against foreign invaders.
It is supposed also take into account your actions in the battle. So if you collapse a building on their civilians they’d suddenly not think of you as allies, but as other enemies.
As for why it isn’t working, I have no idea. I don’t have access to the code and I’m not a coder
That shouldn’t make it any different. Either check for that at the start of every round, or check for it whenever the player does something they don’t like. You can make it if(relations + recentEvents < 0) isEnemy = 1;
It would be better to let the player have some fun shooting their own allies and the civilians for no reason, than to just not include the allies in battle, at any rate. They should’ve disabled the side switching feature if they can’t get it working.
The main issue remains. No matter who kills them, every Civ dead costs every squad member will. Meaning that if the idiot civs are all up and snuggly with the aliens at the start (which they are, cuz they are too effin stupid to run towards the nice guys with guns for protection,) you can lose a lot of them in the first two three rounds without the chance to get to them. Meaning your will drops fast, and before you even manage to wing an alien your squad is close to panicking. Of course there is randomness to it. You might end up with most of the civs near and easy to rescue, or right in the middle of the aliens. You can say play better and hurry, which is not all taht tempting when you have to just dead run towards the morons with nasties all around.
It’s very simple. Until whatever problem keeps the defenders from being armed according to faction and able to fight back, just remove the will component from losing them. Hell, they don’t have to fight back. Just give us control of geared soldiers at the start of the mission. Even if they are in bad positions at least they can bite back and actually be some help.
Cuz the way it stands now, I am only defending havens that serve a useful purpose. My chosen allies, and any haven with useful recruits. The rest are just a liability. A risk of losing soldiers due to idiot will loss. They just buy me time, cuz every liability haven that gets struck by the Pandies means one of the useful ones isn’t. It’s a real shame, all those men, women and children being murdered by Pandies. I cry lots of tears, honestly I do. But if all they are going to do is make it HARDER to save them, maybe they don’t deserve to be saved. Shame that. I will tell the leader of New Jericho that there is no need to raid them. All we have to do is wait and watch them die from a distance where their losses won’t cripple my squad’s will.
I am going back to Xenonauts. The best Original X-Com remake out there. The cops and soldier civs might be cannon fodder, but at least they try to fight back, and their losses only affect overall score, they don’t cripple my troops.
I feel the same… not that the missions where that “hard” so far, but a savescum festival.
Attacker have a reating of 25 Defender of 20 - I thought to myself this is an easy training mission.
Ended up with 20+ Enemys against my 7 Rookies… without any of the 20 Strenght rated deferders…
Every Civ which goes down hurts the Rookies even more, as they have low will… unplayable that way.