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Pumpkinhead

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What happens if you alter the unit table so that the civilians appear before the soldiers?

 

Although this has little to do with civilians as such, it'd also be interesting to see if mind controlled aliens are a preferred target.

I'll have to give this a shot soon. Right now I'm testing out something I stumbled upon the other day.

 

Here's what happened: I was at a Floater Terror Site recently but unfortunately didn't bring along any shooting weapons. The maximum firepower my guys had were grenades. Being too lazy to restart the mission with weapons, I decided to see how far I could get. The Floaters stayed on the ground, so a couple well-placed grenades finished them off easily. Unfortunately, the Reapers were being a pain in the rear and decided civilians were a good target. This didn't make me happy, so in a moment of futility I grabbed a Small Launcher off a Floater and stunned the civies who had ventured too close to the beasts. Still, I wanted to finish the mission but those Reapers would not move away from the civilian corpses. So I tossed a grenade smack dab in the middle of 3 Reapers and 4 stunned civilians. Boom! Two Reapers went down. Threw another grenade and the remaining Reaper died. The stunned civilians were of course vaporized in the explosions. When the mission ended, I checked the result. Not bad. But from what I could determine, the stunned-then-vaporized civilians were not counted against me.

 

Today I decided to test this out. Being way too lazy to wait fir a terror site to happen naturally, I converted the first landed alien ship into one via some editing in LOC.DAT. Since it was a Medium Scout, only 3 Sectoids spawned along with 15 civilians. So I killed 2 of the bugs and rooted one to a spot in UNITREF.DAT. Then I cornered 3 unsuspecting civilians in a house, stunned them and blew up the bodies with a grenade and killed the remaining alien. Result? The blown-up, stunned civilians were not counted in the end-of-mission summary (12 made it out alive). This is another tactic to cut your losses on a mission if the aliens are killing all the civilians in sight. Suppose it wouldn't be really useful until you have stand-off stun capability with Small Launchers as your guys would have a tough time stunning the civies with the ol' cattle prods. :D

 

I have to test out some other scenarios with civilians tonight (such as MD'd civies, blown-up stunned MC'd civies etc). Might be interesting to compare against the studies I did on soldiers a while back. :D

 

- Zombie

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Zombie, you should document these findings in the Wiki. It brings a whole new diabolical twist to the art of 'saving' civilians. :D

 

Actually, I can't remember at the moment, but what does this do to stunned MC'd X-Com soldiers?

 

- NKF

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Zombie, you should document these findings in the Wiki. It brings a whole new diabolical twist to the art of 'saving' civilians. :D

LOL, that's why I want to research this a little bit. Saving civilians aren't my #1 priority on a terror mission, but any natural strategies for keeping them alive is certainly helpful. :)

 

Actually, I can't remember at the moment, but what does this do to stunned MC'd X-Com soldiers?

Roger, that can be found in this post. Seems I missed a scenario: a stunned, MC'd, blown up X-COM soldier inside or outside the craft. Whoopsie, that'll be my next test. :D

 

- Zombie

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Ok, here's some results with civilians. Basically everything I tried resulted in the civilian(s) not showing up as "saved" in the EOM report. So you don't have to go through the hassle of stunning and blowing up if you don't want to.

 

Status	 Stunned   MC'd   Blown Up   Result (EOM)
Civilian	  X						Does Not Exist (DNE)
Civilian	  X				 X	  DNE
X-COM		 X		X			   DNE
X-COM		 X		X		X	  DNE
X-COM				  X			   DNE (Must kill to end mission)
X-COM				  X		X	  DNE
Alien		 X		X			   DNE
Alien		 X		X		X	  DNE
Alien				  X			   DNE (Must kill to end mission)
Alien				  X		X	  DNE

Status indicates which group the civilian belongs to. The MC'd row thus has to be ticked if the group is X-COM or alien. DNE= the civilian isn't shown on the EOM report.

 

Civilians which are stunned wake up as civilian. I can't stress this enough as some people claimed in the past that stunned civilians are alien when they wake up. Doesn't matter how they come to either. The result is the same whether they wake up on their own or if you give them a hand with stim shots. :D

 

Civilians which are MC'd and under X-COM control always wake up as Alien. Civilians which are MC'd and under alien control also wake up as Alien. To finish the mission, you must kill these units. Killing those alien civilians don't net you any points so it really doesn't matter what happens to them. MC'd civilians under X-COM control also are DNE if killed. So there is no penalty for shooting your own unit. Interesting. Did I miss any scenarios? Hope not. :D

 

- Zombie

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This may be surprising or it may not: MC'd civilians net you kills for your soldiers. They are also great for training your troops. You heard me. Soldier experience counters increase for each MC'd civilian you kill. And because civie stats are relatively low, your rookies reap the rewards. Of course, in order to train troops in this manner you need one (or more) soldiers who have psionic abilities. But even then, civies are easy to MC so basically any old soldier will probably do. :D

 

By the way, I noticed that civilians tend to congregate together after some time passes. At least that is what I observed. Don't know if this is intentional AI or just how the spawn points came out. The civilians which spawned inside the large warehouse never finished their (the aliens) round outside the building. The small warehouse had one civilian which refused to come out too. Other than that, I waited 100+ rounds and most civilians exited the buildings and tended to group together. You know what they always say: "birds of a feather flock together". In the case of civilians this indeed appears to be true. :D

 

- Zombie

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It would be an interesting insight into the workings of civilian "AI" if you were somehow able to track their per-turn movements.

 

From what I observed, it seemed their movements were completely random, but if what you said about them "gathering" is true, it would suggest some form of basic AI.

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Viewing them turn by turn is do-able, it's watching them during the turns that's the hard part.

 

As I understand it, aliens romp between waypoints until such time as they encounter a target to battle with.

 

Civilians, on the other hand, don't battle - They don't have guns, and even if you hand them some they'll only use them for reaction fire (against both you and the aliens).

 

Does an unarmed alien act like a civilian? Humor would be if they tried to blend in with the civilian groups, in an attempt to "hide" from your soldiers... :D

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From what I've seen, they just behave in the same as they normally do. They just lose their option of fighting back. They'll probably flock towards the nearest soldier.

 

One good way to test this is to start a new mission, de-claw the aliens by editing the obpos.dat file and either remove or drop their ammo to 0 and remove or change all grenades into something harmless. Then just keep ending the turn and see where the aliens end up.

 

A most intresting social study indeed! :D

 

- NKF

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Well, I did a little bit of testing on this just before. Went into obpos.dat and got lazy. Instead of editing all the alien items to go to a location on the map (like 1,1,0) I decided to make them all spawn on my lone soldier instead. Can you say "massive stacking"? :D Anyhow, it wasn't that big of a deal since I was using my "fake" terror site with only 5 aliens. That kept the number of items under control. Still, I had to crank my soldier up to 200 TU to get rid of all the excess equipment. It scared me that the aliens appeared to be holding weapons yet, but that was due to not updating unitref.dat.

 

So after I sorted that mess out I skipped ahead 200 rounds. I half expected that there would be 3 or 4 aliens clustered around my soldier's location outside the Avenger. When I turned him around, nothing. He exited the craft and looked for evidence of aliens. Found 4 wandering around a large park. The last one was hanging out with a civilian inside a house drinking a beer and watching the game on TV. :) *shrugs* At least with this scenario, the aliens didn't cluster much. Could be because an alien scout spotted my soldier and decided to hold the reinforcements back. Could also be because of the lack of weapons. I'm unsure at this point so more tests are necessary.

 

In my "fake" terror site scenario, 9 civilians spawned. So imagine how happy I was to see that my theory of civilian clustering was hard at work:

 

Civilian_group.png

 

I count 7 of the 9 civilians clustered around the entrance/exit to a large apartment building. However, I still need to run more tests on this because in this map there were few buildings. Few buildings = fewer spawn points for the civilians = more clustering. But it does show that the civilians will, over time, tend to move together. :D

 

- Zombie

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Few buildings = fewer spawn points for the civilians = more clustering.

So do they only cluster around spawn points?

 

I wonder if the location of the aliens effects the behaviour of the civilians?

 

It always bugged me when an alien would approach a civilian and they would just stand there as if just waiting to be shot. Always felt like yelling, "RUN" :D

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So do they only cluster around spawn points?

Not really. At least not directly. In my apartment building example, the closest civilian spawn point is in the kitchen on the first floor. There are a couple routing points just inside the door but those are just for movement/scouting. But, there is an alien spawn point directly outside the main door. And if you are really observant, you can just barely make out the head of a Sectoid Soldier above the Psi-Amp in the pic above. This leads me to your next point.

 

I wonder if the location of the aliens effects the behaviour of the civilians?

I think it does, but it is only conjecture at this time. What I should probably do is isolate the aliens somewhere and then check to see what the civilians do. :D

 

What I'm thinking is that the Sectoid Soldier kept the civilians corralled inside the apartment building somehow. See, there are plenty of places the civilians could go once they exit the building, but they chose to stay inside (for the most part). And I'm pretty sure that in an earlier test I ran this week that civilians exited the building just fine and even ventured out into the street (the nearest alien in that scenario was about 30 tiles away). But they still stuck together like a mob... :D

 

- Zombie

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In that image, what I'm seeing is two seperate groups around two seperate doors.

 

I'm thinking members on one side are trying to reach a waypoint on the other, and vice versa for the guys on the other side.

 

Because the civilians are blocking each other, neither can get to where they're going so they all stay more or less where they are. More and more civilians join them as time goes on, clogging the bottleneck further.

 

Are doorways a common factor to the other clumping scenarios you've seen? Do you get any clumps out in the open, where civilians can't block each others progress?

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I thought of the bottleneck idea. It's possible that is what is playing a role, but I had civilians in the large apartment building before and they all exited fine. They ended up clumping in a street to the east of it. I also had a large warehouse where the civilians clumped together smack dab in the middle. They made no effort to exit through the large doors either. However, in that scenario I had rooted the Sectoid Soldier to one spot at the lower east side of the building by the window. So it's more likely that the presence of aliens nearby triggers this behavior. Alien close to civilians = civilians refuse to leave building.

 

As I said before, I'll have to move the alien somewhere on the map where civilians aren't nearby. If I can ever get my Avenger to land on a corner of the map with nothing around it but parks, that would be the perfect scenario to test as civilians never spawn outside. Then I could move the alien inside my craft and keep him under wraps. :D

 

- Zombie

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Zombie, can you use your logging techniques to record the positions of each civilian for each turn? If so, it would be possible to plot their movements across the whole map and get a more detailed insight into their behaviour, rather than simply saying, "IF alien is here THEN civilians cluster here." :D
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Well, the way it stands right now, Bomb Blokes logging program only logs values in UNITREF.DAT. We'd need the program to log values from UNITPOS.DAT instead. It's certainly possible, but BB will need to add that capability in. :D

 

- Zombie

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Logging where units are is simple enough, but I can also see which waypoint they've aimed themselves at.

 

The catch is that, at least in the case of aliens, waypoints go out the window when they see an X-Com trooper. How civilians react to soldiers and/or aliens, or how aliens react to civilians, I dunno - I'm still pretty shakey in concern of what aliens do when they spot your men.

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It makes sense for the civilians to recycle most of the AI used by the aliens. They just don't get any routines that tell them to actively attack their enemies (you and the aliens).

 

- NKF

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