Talk:Alien Life Forms (Long War)

Seen on Elite Mutions: Bullet swarm, hyper-reactive pupils, adaptive bone marrow (~4hp/round). Seen on Etherials: Adaptive Bone Marrow (+10hp/round), Muscle Fiber density (apparently). Berserkers: Neural Dapaning, adaptive bone marrow. --Xuncu (talk) 07:19, 14 July 2014 (EDT)

Adaptive Bone Marrow or Repair Servos seems to be common to everything after a while, I'd just lump it in with HP increase if you want to document it. I've even seen Thin Men with it. Binkyuk (talk) 08:10, 14 July 2014 (EDT)

Sectoids, too. Complete with nightmare-fuel body warping to accommodate the animation.--Xuncu (talk) 14:25, 15 July 2014 (EDT)

Motherfucking Berserkers can jump now. --Xuncu (talk) 05:49, 8 December 2014 (EST)

Formatting for Stat Tables

I'm creating this in the interest of ideas on formatting the stat tables. Currently, they seem clear if you've looked through the ini files and know what the various stats and percentages mean and you know how to read this chart, but to the common user, it appears messy and disorganized. My roommate is an avid player of LW and I'm an avid peruser of ini files for LW. I showed him this page and the various stat tables and he says that he's unsure what a lot of the information means. What are the red highlighted areas? What about the yellow? He says that he dislikes having to open the information panels for the progression, as he's often looking at it quickly as a reference, and prefers the information to be there from the start, not hidden behind extra clicks. The collapsible menus certainly keep things cleaner, but they hide the information behind a low wall that we both feel is unneeded.

On that same vein, we see why it is in a collapsible menu and that brings us to our next point. We think there's too much information in the table. The old b13 tables were clean, concise, had everything organized, but were incomplete. We all here are completing them, but by doing so are losing some of that form. We both think it's a better idea to break the leader perks away from the progression table. Since Alien Leaders aren't directly tied to the progression, and theoretically any leader could be rolled at any time, we would think it would help with the information overload if we separated it back out, like the old format had. The Navigator information can stay as it is, since those are directly tied to research, it's useful to see what kind of stats the base form has at the time the Navigator appears, and as such, is good to have incorporated with the remaining progression.

In addition to all of this: I believe the base perks and abilities of an Alien is best suited tied to their Base Stats in some way, instead of being located in the Progression tab. This helps clean up the progression tab by removing some of the information from it, and also helps to convey that they're starting abilities, especially at a glance. I think the formatting with the Sectoid portion is on the right track, but I believe that it could use some reorganization; some regrouping if you will.

I welcome the thoughts of others on this, on their ideas of how it should be set up, and their feedback on the ideas I've proposed.

--IceMaverick (talk) 12:50, 24 March 2015 (EST)

Thanks for the feedback - just unfortunate that you happened to post it while I was in the process of updating the entire page. :P

 

The b13 tables were clean yes, but also were incredibly vague. It made no mention of what navigators even were, and it was extremely unclear when aliens would get said perks. Plus, it was not very "update friendly" - everything was manually entered rather than using the LW perk templates. Also, on the background colors - yes they were not explained when you posted this comment. I removed the "legend" table that went with it temporarily, but it's now at the top giving a brief explanation of navigator and leader upgrades. A more detailed explanation should probably be featured on a separate page.

 

With that in mind, the alien upgrades are just a ton of information - I just don't see a good way to make it anymore clean/concise without sacrificing information at the same time. Really, the only reason I made the stat/perk progression tables collapsible was so that scrolling the page wasn't a huge pain. Easiest example of this is probably the muton elite progression - they get a ton of upgrades. Alien leaders do have correlation to alien research, by the way, so any level leader can't be rolled at any time. Though sure, it probably could be separated without too much trouble.

 

Two problems with including the "base perks" of an alien with the base stats table are many perks have stat upgrades tied to them, and how to define a "base perk". Some of them are there from the start without any upgrades (mindfray and psi panic on the sectoid), while others are day 0/1 99% navigator upgrades. This may just make the "base" table more cluttered as well.

 

Those are my thoughts on some of your points. One option that I've considered is to make this page a "landing page" and split all of the sections for each alien into their own pages. In that case, I'd be absolutely fine with removing the collapsible property of the stat/perk progression tables. This doesn't help with the "extra clicks problem" though.

 

--Hawkeye2777 (talk) 18:48, 25 March 2015 (EDT)

Should we maybe mark the Level 8 and 9 Leaders in purple or something similar, as those are templeship enemies and monsters?

--GamerChris9 18:12, 25 March 2015 (EST)

Marking the Temple Ship Aliens to denote that they don't spawn normally might be a good idea, but I don't think Monsters need the same denotation because there's a chance that they can spawn as leaders on any mission once the game gets late enough.

I still worry about the organization of the page as a whole.

Also I'm curious as to how you replied at 6:12PM EST today, considering it's only 3:30PM :P

--IceMaverick (talk) 15:34, 25 March 2015 (EST)