I played a game where I killed all the enemies and the queen but the game didn’t end. I was confused as my soldiers had been across the entire map during the course of the fight, mostly running from the queen and scavenging extra grenades and ammo for killing her. Sure enough though after doing another full sweep of the map I found a crabman hidden away in the corner of a building in the corner of the map, impossible to see unless you go down a one way street and peer into the building.
So, my suggestion would be to have a system like Xcom where enemies move around before being alerted, or are alerted by gunfire and move to where they heard it. Alternatively add in a sound hint, again like Xcom, to show players roughly where the final enemies are.
I remember bigger, more complex maps in Terror From the Deep and Deep Ones sometimes hiding in weird, small places. Looking for last enemy could have been really time-consuming
Yeah that was one of the fun, if sometimes frustrating things in XCOM 1-2, where sometimes one cabin on the terror mission cruise ship still had one Bio-Drone floating merrily while you are looking everywhere.
Finding the last dude can be tough. On the Discord Chat this morning, it was proposed alternatively that they flee the map when obviously beaten. I prefer the alternative, they go crazy and come right for you!
It could depend on type of unit. More aggressive and fierce ones definitely should attack you in suicidal attack, even with increased stats (adrenaline!)
Yeah that’s fair. I think it could be done either way justifiably. If the devs wanted to go for what would realistically happen then the enemy should flee when left alone. (maybe they could have all units lose 1 wp every turn they can’t see a friendly unit). Or they could come at it from the ‘players want loot’ side and make all enemies stay and fight. Meaning you get an extra alien corpse for studying or whatnot.
As much as I cherish the memories of painstakingly hunting down “that last sectoid” in the original xcom, I think this kind of gameplay becomes quite a chore after a while.
I like the idea of enemies fleeing. So how about this: when enemy count drops, say, either below 10% of the original number of enemies or to 2 enemies or less, whichever is smaller, their morale drops dramatically without the ability to recover and their behaviour enters some kind of “panic mode”. Simplistic, drone-like enemies, like crab men, might charge mindlessly at any soldier; we can treat this as a hive mind failure or something, lore-wise. More intelligent enemies(rival faction members for instance), might flee the battlefield. And , of course, we can have special enemy types which will be unaffected by this morale drop and will require careful hunting to find and eliminate.
This way we will prevent PP from having the “last alien” problem while avoiding the more artificial ways of countering it, like automatically revealing enemy positions when enemy count drops.
I think devs wouldn’t leave the last alien problem unsolved. You are right that memories of playing hide&seek with last aliens are priceless, but I can’t imagine things like that in modern games (ok, maybe a bit)
Many ways to avoid this: sound waves (a’la XCOM), heat signatures or just fleeing/attacking.
It could be fun if specific aggressive mutants would grow in strength (literally) while being last standing unit. It would produce more tension and sometimes element of surprise. But, on second thoughts, also sounds like gimmick rather than something necessary
I think that Pandora virus gives devs great opportunity to surprise us many times, by various means.
On another note though, perhaps enemies could absorb fallen buddies to heal or to increase in power. Meaning, the last guy left alive would have a lot of resources to buff himself up if he wasn’t found and destroyed quickly.
Sounds great and I can even imagine how last enemy is looking for some corpses to absorb them before his final attack. But for the balance’s sake he could absorb only certain amount of them: I would rather see him as a tank unit in more than average size but not the boss size!
And what do you say to have mutants specialized in situations like that, so they usually would be very weak but when all his buddys lost in the battle they change into some fricking, buffed and really ugly badass ? They could even have some special skills added. But they shouldn’t be as strong and tough as bosses
Yeah, haha. I was joking about the surprise boss. Though I think they should be able to reach boss proportions if they absorb 5 or so corpses. I mean, if you don’t notice the steadily growing monstrosity running around the map gathering corpses then you kind deserve it.
I would say they shouldn’t be able to absorb more than 1 corpse per turn and that after they reach that boss type level each corpse only restores maybe 3 health and maybe one piece of armour.
Your description reminds me of Goliath enemies from Borderlands 2. They’re pretty strong themselves but if they go crazy and kill their own buddies they level up and get even tougher. So you could have variations of powering up monsters, one that finishes off low health buddies and immediately powers up, for example. Or one that is purely a scavenger and stays back until something dies.
On another note, perhaps monsters could infect your dead soldiers and turn them into crabman after 3 turns. Or so something similar to chysallids in Xcom, where they turned them into zombies for a few turns until they eventually fully transformed.
I believe there will be some iteration of chryssalid in the game, maybe even something more frightful.
Nice idea with scavenging units: scavenge would be their common behaviour on the battlefield to increase survive chances.
Xenonauts had an elegant way to deal with the issue. Occupy the crashed UFO’s cockpit for a few turns and mission’s a win. Don’t remember how they justified it though, and it may not be feasible to all kinds of missions, but it’s something to consider.
This was solved in X-COM Apocalypse with the aliens fleeing when they were about to lose, so I’m sure Mr. Gollop has some ideas how to deal with this. Lots of good ideas in this thread, though. One thing that was a problem in Apocalypse, if I remember correctly, was aliens getting stuck in holes that they couldn’t climb out of. Not sure if this is a potential problem in PP. Maybe they could commit suicide, in that case.
For now it is, since anybody going down to the lower levels will be stuck there, be they Aliens or Jericho operatives. Had to hunt the odd crabman getting stuck there. However, that is obviously a pre-alpha issue that’s bound to get fixed.
Yeah, if anything you can be thankful that it’s such an obvious issue so early on in the development. The boss being unable to reach you really messes up the gameplay so I don’t doubt they’ll be quick to fix this. Since they’re working on the boss I assume they’ll cover every enemy too. Though I think the crabmen are already fine in this regard since, in a few demo videos, the crabmen jumped down off the guard wall, showing they can move between different height levels.
