First, let me say; loving the game to this point. I’ll do my best to break it in the coming weeks, so that the game will be ready for next year’s launch. I’ve already run across a feature that I think needs vast improvement. I realize it’s still early, but since it’s our first look at it, we have to start somewhere.
Base inventory management is a mess. With the loot I’m bringing in from missions, this is quickly getting out of hand and difficult to sort through. I like the simplicity of drag and drop inventory management. It worked for UFO Defense, and I think it works now. That being said, I want to see like items stack. Why have five slots full of Pistol ammo, when we can just have one slot with a counter on it? I can understand it better when talking about personal inventory. But when we’ve got stacks of goods in the base, can we please sort this out a little better?
That said, even a sort function that would at least group the same items together might be helpful. The ability to only see two rows of five objects in the inventory screen makes it cumbersome to scroll through, in my opinion. Seems that making that box larger would enable us to manage the items better, if nothing else.
I hope we aren’t flooding you with too many issues at once. Thanks for the hard work you folks are putting in, I’m proud to back this Project. Cheers everyone and happy gaming.
It is supposed to have stacking - we just didn’t finish it in time. The inventory management will be going through a major revision shortly. One thing we need to consider is the unique item status. The problem is this - during a tactical mission equipment and armour may become damaged, or ammo and charges are partially used. This makes items ‘unique’ (i.e. having a unique state) and therefore ‘unstackable’. At the moment I am considering a simple division - items carried by soldiers/vehicles maintain there state until they are returned to base stores. At this point ammo is unloaded and any damage must be repaired or the item scrapped (broken down in exchange for some resrouces). This means that base stores will be stackable, but not soldier inventory. We will also show the damage state of weapons in the soldier inventory. A partial approach would be to allow generic items - magazines, grenades - to be stackable, but not weapons or larger items.
Oh, that sounds really cool! But you know, now that you mention it, given the risks to weapons in the field of battle–it’d be really sad if a bunch of lucky shots destroyed a great grenade launcher, for instance–are there any plans for Technicians to repair weapons during levels? :o
Hi Julian. In soldiers inventory you should leave it as it is (except of all bugs). But in base stores or aircraft cargo hold (as there should be something like that) I would say that all items should be stackable along with maintaining uniqueness of all items in terms of beind damaged. Weapon magazines should be unloaded when taken to stores or cargo hold. Partially used magazines could just be summed up and stacked and only one magazine of each kind will be partially full (with option to pay for filling it up for part of a price).
I suppose that players won’t hold 100 partially damaged items without repairing them. And even so filters (item type like two-handed weapon/one-handed weapon/attachement, ballistic/explosive/melee, armour for head/torso/legs/hands, equipment for healing/scanning/boosting stats etc) and sorting should help here.
There could also be icons to ‘repair all’ and/or ‘refill all’ of them at once which will help clean up mess in those places.
There is a question. Will there be an option to transfer items between bases with some separate aircraft? I mean some other vehicles than dropships carrying soldiers. Those can be just some moving icon on the geoscape - you don’t need to model it in any way unless they could be in some missions as an objective or something.
I know that admitting that I enjoyed the UFO:After series makes me a heretic in some circles, but I would like to second yokes suggesting to eliminate “partially loaded” magazines at least. Aftershock and Afterlight would count the remaining rounds and add them to a pool, and when you drew a magazine the pool was reduced by that much. Pooling rounds and thereby forming new full magazines was a successful way of eliminating fractional mags you had to track. Possibly this could work with weapons too, albeit not automatically: instead of giving the player only the option to repair a weapon using the resource pool, give the option of cannabilizing broken weapons to make “fresh” whole ones of the same type.
Of course, I say this with no idea of how much trouble it would be to implement. Less trouble than developing a system to track tons and tons of unique items perhaps?
I would ask for a bigger base inventory box, with a search function and divided in pages, each for a different catagory: ammo, range weapons, melee weapons, armor,… In which new items stack and damages items don’t, or move the damaged items in a proper new page. For the partially used ammo clips, I think a “refill all weapons/ammo clips” option at the end of the mission would be preferable. So that you have to micro manage these things only in time of need (e.g. no more materials available! We have to rationalize ammo, WWI style) or when you salvage damaged goods from destroyed Havens or scavaging sites (and maybe research them to understand how to produce some, or combine a few partially used ammo clips to get full ones) so that micromanagement is required only in specific and interesting situations.
Will we have the weapon personalization features present in the Firaxis XComs? That is something that requires the “unique weapons” line of thinking.
Thanks for clearing some of that up Julian, appreciate the reply.
As to the partial mags discussion, it seems reasonable that if we are tracking individual rounds (before, during and after missions) the soldiers would be emptying partial clips, dropping rounds into a bin, and refilling clips as needed. Consolidation would be natural for anyone keeping track of ammo. You certainly wouldn’t send out a clip with only one round in it, when another was next to it full to the brim.
Regarding tracking weapon/item/armor health and status… We definitely need a way to track and manage these things. If it’s currently happening in BB3, I don’t know how to see or plan for it. If I can take out an assault rifle that is brand new, versus one that is one hit away from destruction… a soldier wouldn’t think twice. As the commander in charge of everything, I need to be able to see and track this metric.
A thought; it might be nice to have a feature where any damaged items get automatically repaired once they’ve been back to a PP base. Knowing that on site staff would do repairs while the items were in storage, or gear from a “docked” soldier would allow me to add that into my strategy. Maybe the gear would have a counter, like wounded soldiers do. Maybe this could even be a base upgrade. You pay X resources and X tech to have this repair ability added to a PP base.
If we are going to micromanage gear and have dozens of unique (based on damage) but identical weapons, then give us the tool to manage that resource. Maybe it’ll be in BB4. If you don’t want to deal with all that, then give us an easy way to repair damaged goods please.
Repair should cost something, or at least take some time with some special facility which will have build cost (but latter solution is too simple in my opinion).
I would gladly see some sell/recycle option for not used items, available not only during aircraft return to base like here:
I would gladly scrap all NJ Pistol Magazines instead of hoarding hundreds of them in my store. Even if we will receive only 1 or 2 units of material for each magazine.