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Increase ticker by certain events possible


kottis

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Hey,

I am wondering if its possible to increse the global ticker value if certain events occur. The reason behind is the ability to punish the player, if he is to succesful by shooting down UFOs), by in increasing the alien progress. On the other hand you could slow the ticker a little if the players fails to much or has a bad RNG. In the gamesconfig.xml you have the possibility to increase the ticker if certain UFO are present, for example <researchTicksPerMinute value="0" comment="An alien research mission generates this many alien ticker points per minute of the UFO being on the map." />, however its set to 0 since it punish bad players even more.

Is there any varialbe which is connected to shoot down UFOs or something else what could be used to identify succesful players?

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If you've looked at gameconfigs, you'll have seen that all the geoscape generated events can generate ticks. The only events that don't have the ability to generate ticks are terror sites and base attacks, iirc. Other than that, there isn't anything else which would generate ticks.

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I don't think so, not without source code changes. The best I can think of would be to try a *negative* ticker change for UFOs in the air. But I've never tried doing this and the documentation suggests the ticker can't go down (still worth trying through).

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Of course there is a fine border, but most of the players achieve air superiority within month 3 or 4 which results in always repeating crash sites. The trick is to give players, who are to successful, new challenges and one could be an increased alien progress. If you just in increase the starting difficult level and so the alien progress too, most players will more struggling in the early month but gain air superiority later too. Of course this mechanism is nothing for the normal or easy difficult.

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I think the point would be to "scale" the game according to how well the player is doing, so as to mitigate early-game overwhelming success. The trick would be to ensure that playing well always made you come out ahead, but to soften it so that it doesn't render the late game pointless.

I'm not so certain that this matters much for Xenonauts: as Skitso's post elsewhere indicates the late game needs some adjustments but I don't think that's a factor of doing too well early on (instead, Xenonauts has a critical period around the middle of the game where you either lose, or get past and go on to win). But there's definitely games where this kind of thing can happen (I can count the number of game of Civilization I've played which weren't decided in the first 1/3 of the game on one hand)

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Xenonauts is much less prone than Civ to the early-win syndrome. This is because Xenonauts, by the nature of the game design, has events that can be huge setbacks, and a couple of those can really snowball. Assuming of course you play as intended and do not savescum. A base attack mission that costs you your best soldiers followed by a failed terror mission that drains lots of funding can really turn the game around.

I agree that the key problem here isn't that the difficulty does not scale, it is simply that everything you need is in the early missions, not the late ones. So your ground missions end up being more like 10 light scouts, 10 scouts, 5 Corvettes, 2 Landing Ships, 1 Cruiser, because of the by-now-recognized issue that late game missions lack rewards.

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One of my mods requires ufo datacores for advances weapon production. For example you need 2 light scout cores for a laser pistol, 2 corvette cores for plasma pistol and 2 cruiser cores for MAG pistol. Similar with the other weapons, up to a Battleship core for MAGStorm. So if you want the top tier weapons you have to do the ground missions. I have just started to play with these changes, so I cant say anything for balancing yet. But I think this is one way to go to make mid / late game ground missions more mandatory.

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Any game that has the AI do something or not do something based on events can and will be used to game the system. For example in UFO:Aftershock the next set of aliens won't show up until you do a certain mission so you simply don't do it until you're ready for the next wave.

That is something that I like about xenonauts. It's a rush to do as much as you can before they aliens hit you with more then you can handle. There are no cheap tricks or anything to exploit, at least as far I have been able to tell.

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