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Amount, not difficulty, of ground combat


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As previously discussed in the Automatic Ground Combat thread, a large number of ground combat missions can become tedious. While I was very happy to see that the position of the development team seems to allow you to select how much ground combat you want to do, I just want to emphasize some additional points.

There won't be any penalty for not attacking a crash site. If you don't want to do a ground combat mission, don't do it.
  1. I like ground combat and I like it to be difficult. I just don't like doing very similar missions many times.
  2. I very much like the geoscape part of the game: progressing through the story and researching new technologies.
  3. I really appreciate games that are "time efficient", that are packed with interesting and difficult gameplay but do not use repetitive content as "fillers" to increase play time. (Among fans of a 20 year old game, I'm sure I'm not alone in having limited time for gaming ;)).

With these points in mind, and the quote by Chris, I just want to bring up how the amount of ground missions that you chose to do affects the progression of the game. Of course you will "miss out" on the loot and experience from these ground missions. (?) Will the story progress at the same pace anyway? Will this make it unreasonably difficult in the long run?

Maybe some thought could be given to "difficulty" settings specifically addressing this. I.e., not making combat (any single mission) easier but still making the game faster and shorter.

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You got a point there.

There may not be a penalty for not attacking a crash site but there will be penalties for not attacking infiltration, terror, and whatnot sites...

If the aliens zerg you with ground missions then you won't have a chance to get to all of them in time!

Dropships and interceptors, have flight time, need to refuel, and their ammo is limited.

But... what would you do about that?

Destroying the UFOs on the ground with cruise missiles?

That is the reasoning behind the "no crash site penalties" thing.

There would have to be a cost attached to that.

After all, you are not risking your troops and you can field a smaller air force / army, saving lots of cash.

If you still want to get a "neutral" result from these bad missions, you have to pay for that.

So... you would click the UFO landing site, select "Cruise Missile Attack", costing x $.

If the country's owners are not hostile to you, they launch missiles from a nearby city.

You get a minor negative relation hit because you're a lazy bum.

Much preferrable to the large relation hit for a successful alien attack...

This feature would be limited to 1-2 times per day.

That way you still have to do your job but if all hell breaks loose, you have a way of asking for backup.

The world would feel a little more real because it's not just you alone against the aliens. There's a whole world around you and they don't like the aliens any better...

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Another idea would be asking for a strike team to secure the site themselves from local military forces. You wouldn't get the salvage (obviously) but I think the relations adjust afterward could be geared on a random scale based off the size of the ship that crashed and losses incurred by said military.

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There seems to be at least two general approaches here:

  1. Adding features and motivations to the game as it is, to make it feasible and enjoyable to play through the game while doing fewer ground combat missions.
  2. Adapting aspects of the "story progression" to allow for faster play throughs. E.g., the alien invasion is smaller in numbers while still (at least as) aggressive.

I see a few interesting suggestions along the lines of approach 1 here. And the point about needing a smaller (cheaper, faster to train/construct, etc) force when making fewer missions is a good one. I like this discussion, but I want to suggest that approach 2 might also be worthy of consideration. I'm imagining this more like the settings in Civilization where you can customize how long you'd like the game to be. I.e., do you want to play a game that you can play through in a few evenings or one that you will have to come back to over a few months. ;)

Note that one point with a "desired approximate game length" setting is that I absolutely would like it to be possible to have a really epic playthrough that would take a lot of time etc. Ideas along approach 1 above might be good to still make this less repetitive.

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Adapting things for faster/slower playthroughs would take a bit of work, mostly in adjusting the research/manufacture speeds. I've heard people brag about having beaten X-Com in under six months gametime with no adjustment at all simply by knowing what is needed as far as research and what isn't.

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Adapting things for faster/slower playthroughs would take a bit of work, mostly in adjusting the research/manufacture speeds. I've heard people brag about having beaten X-Com in under six months gametime with no adjustment at all simply by knowing what is needed as far as research and what isn't.

Well, if it's a matter of adjusting numbers to get balanced results that should be work that beta-testers and/or modders can/should do? Can we expect to be able to play around with numbers that affect these aspects, at our own risk? :)

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Ideally the game should be paced so that there's not much in the way of unnecessary missions for filler which make the whole game 'meh' later on.

I liked how in the original it was paced pretty much perfectly;

1)You had the first few missions against weak enemies, gathered artifacts and started researching..

2)You were limited by the pace of research and the need to do ground missions to heighten your rating (not to lose funding)

3)By the time your research was progressing nicely you were starting to down large ufos, which made missions exciting because you wouldn't get to fight (or at least win against) large ufos on the ground.

4) you were sent especially to get the larger ships, too, by the plotline

5) by the time you were done on research you were ready for the final mission

And so the whole process was very nicely paced in order to not become too repetitive,

although it DID get a bit repetitive sometimes

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Yah, what you're talking about is the idea that Xenonauts is going for on the pacing and the steps 1-5. With it being Alpha we only have access to the very beginning still, so we can't see the full pacing of the game yet. Once it gets closer to release I'm sure we'll be able to see the full pacing, and they'll be balancing the game's pacing.

Right now, Alpha is about fixing game-breaking bugs, and getting the engine to the point where it's handling what it needs to handle. So, not up to the balancing pass just yet. :)

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