I suppose you all have heard about stuff which is planned. Mission types, different factions and independent havens, that there will be transports and raids between them, and the mist with aliens will be spreading from the see or other water sources. But I wonder if there will be weather effects or some cataclysmic elements included. Imagine that Pandora Virus can increase the magnitude of those events. Maybe some havens could be “offline” for some time or request help from nearby havens during such incidents. They could loose some buildings and production at least temporarily.
EDIT: Having that in mind we would need to prepare for such events with some sophisticated technology (which can be in Synedrion tech tree). Of course havens in regions affected by such event would be less attractive… so to counter this maybe they could produce more food, supplies or knowledge (or whatever resources may be on geoscape).
I have just read about hurricane hitting US coastline and wondered how huge impact it will have on population.
Another EDIT:
And this is hurricane. Mix of temperature, steam and ocean current. What if PV will have creatures of Behemoth size burrowing under ground? Whey can cause tremors or even earth quakes shattering transport and power supply. Imagine creatures sitting on the ocean bottom with enough power to hit continental plate, which will also cause huge tidal waves or tsunamis, which in return will benefit PV in acquiring more bio-mass.
Could be great to see different layers showing different stuff like:
current tactical view
civilization view with more visible day/night areas with light spots showing havens presence during the night (maybe with time zones?), with marked more important / bigger havens
influence view showing spread of different influences (our, each faction, mist etc), with havens reputation towards us
and just satellite view of lands just to admire our planet.
From the current build, the thing I don’t like is, if you gathered all the resources from a scavenging site, Is there any reason for returning to that site? if not, I will prefer this points to disappear from the map, because now, with all those places on the globe I feel it’s too saturated.
Good idea. The same with lost havens and destroyed alien bases. But I would leave them on one of the layers. Just to be able to check what was there. Some kind of history for regions.
I wonder, will we have old ruined cities as scavenging sites? Those new X2 abandoned city maps were great, very atmospheric. If we have spies/scouts/infiltrators in the game, they can be send to these city-sites and offer renewed supply missions in this very location. By the way, same can be done with ordinary scavenging sites, but those should have less “supply capacity”, and so spies will unlock just 1 or 2 more supply missions there. After that they can be erased from the map -)
PS: Those Disciples of Anu buildings look awesome .)
I’m not sure if cities can be good scavenging sites. We usually search abandoned military complexes because we want to find some weapons and military equipment. What we can find in cities, except food and materials? But well if those resources will be scarce then maybe such scavenge missions would be good source of it.
But definitely I like the idea of big scavenging sites which could require several missions to deplete them - if done in quick manner then each following mission could be with lower difficulty, but if left for some time without attendance difficulty in such site could spike drastically.
More than that - undepleted site may be still raided by the faction who controls the territory. So, once revealed, it won’t stay in such condition for eternity. Another small strategic element you’ll have to keep in mind .)
And don’t you think that names of havens which are reference to historical cities or people should be placed at least in region near original city / land? I had:
“I wonder, will we have old ruined cities as scavenging sites? Those new X2 abandoned city maps were great, very atmospheric. If we have spies/scouts/infiltrators in the game, they can be send to these city-sites and offer renewed supply missions in this very location.”
THIS! ^
I was thinking exactly the same thing. Old city ruins, would… and do, make fantastic maps. Xcom 2 done an awesome job adding them. If looking for recuits, food or non military supplies the first place I would be hitting would be the old cities.
They also help answer a stack of game lore questions a player would have in game. What happened to everyone when the attack happened? Are the cities now infested? What about inland cities or cities in dry desert areas? Are people still holding out in cities, like they are in havens?
Having the squad members chat as they land in missions, is a fantastic opportunity to cleanly explain the game lore, without the player being forced to read or look it up. City (ruin) missions helps bring all those soldier conversations to naturally come up.
That could be something for a future DLC, but certainly not for release. It’s a lot of work to include a completely new biome. It requires new building models, new props, new textures, animations. We currently have Scavenging sites, Phoenix bases, NJ Havens, Anu Heavens, Synedrion Havens, Neutral Havens and the PV lairs.
As per our Fig campaign, we’d still like to keep underwater missions on the table as a possible future expansion too.
That’s fair enough, Sounds like you have enough work to do with the current load of biomes! I didn’t realise how many were already being worked on.
I think I am with everyone else when I say, I hope this game does outstandingly well when released allowing for all the DLCs to continue it’s expansion!
On the subject of mission types, and weather events, I’d like to suggest one of my own.
Ghost ship landfall.
A ship, or mass of flotsam in the water washes up on shore, due to weather effects and general influence of the tides. Or perhaps the aliens commandeered it, and drove it onto shore themselves. This could be a lost warship (weapon caches); a supply barge carrying valuable materials (materials, derp); or a science & exploration vessel that’s been adrift at sea, and still carries some valuable and sensitive technical instruments and maybe even functioning radar/sonar (tech resources).
Bottom line: This would be a random event that creates a new scavenging site on the map, located near the shoreline. It gives you an opportunity to go investigate and see if there’s anything worth taking, but you are very likely to run into Pandora mutants running amok about the ship.
Great idea on the ghost ships Setokaiva, the missions would have fantastic atmosphere. As long as there are no last aliens that hide in the room closets that we need to search for
Adding to the original title… something the geoscape desperately needs is a locator when there is an attack. The geoscape centres on the attack when it first happens BUT then you go searching for your closest aircraft… Then you have to go searching the world for where the attack was happening again… and flick back and forth working out the closest aircraft to the attack.
When there is an attack in progress there really needs to be a message pop up saying “HAVEN UNDER ATTACK” that is clickable, to recenter the geoscape on the attack.
OR
Even better would be when there is an attack announced the geoscape draws flight lines to all your aircraft (or closest aircraft). You can get to the attack in a couple fast clicks, rather than searching the globe and tracing flight distances.
I would prefer dropdown list of available missions under the list of bases. It could contain all spotted alien bases and all scavenging sites. There could be some checkbox filtering if we want these listed. And faction attacking faction could have different colouring than alien attacking any Haven. Actually there could be two colours showing something like that:
Alien(red) [alien strength] attack on Synedrion(green) [name of haven] [Synedrion strength] - Manticore 4
New Jericho(blue) [NJ strength] attack on Anu(purple) [name of haven] [Anu strength] - Manticore 2
Alien lair - Manticore 4
Alien nest - Manticore 1
Alien nest - Manticore 4
Scavenging site - Manticore 5
And so on…
And all those list options could have listed the closest dropship, which of course could be not the best option to send, but it would always help you visualize what is where.
BTW. I saw a video of player named Xander Sweetman who told that mist zone expands when there is at least one alien base in that zone and don’t expand if we take out all of them. Is that true? I wasn’t testing that.
I like what they have done with the geoscape and understand they don’t want it cluttered with unneeded/wanted info. An over cluttered screen, that the player needs to look at most the game, is usually terrible.
There is already a pop up message saying ‘HAVEN “X” IS UNDER ATTACK’. To be honest I would be happy if they just made that a clickable button and only remains on the GUI while the mission is available.
Then all the options you have listed Yokes could be on drop down menus from the manticores list in the top left.
OR
Maybe when an attack mission drops, the map just draws a red flight line to all manticores from itself. This allows the player to locate the mission AND every manticore at once? They all disappear when the mission is finished to remove the clutter from the map space.
It would keep the screen open and uncluttered but have all the info we want to play the game with out getting lost.
