No damage indicator against alien for Insane difficulty?

After clearing Xenonauts with veteran difficulty, I started trying Insane Ironman difficulty.

The Insane difficulty explanation is just 'good luck-and so on', so I just thought there will be no changes for gameplay mechanics.

But, at the first mission, I shot a sebillian, and there was NO DAMAGE INDICATOR.

When I saw that, I thought 'Oh, I installed several mods from steam workshop, and that might be problem!'.

And I wasted several hours finding out that missing indicator was not bug, but the feature of Insane difficulty.(thanks to insane difficulty play video from

.)

I mean, it's good feature to hide damage indicator at higher difficulty, but not mentioning about it a single time is bad.

I think it might be better to mention about these changes, like 'There will be some game mechanic changes.'.

Yeah, that happened to me too. I ended up manually changing it in the config files, where I realized that it was a feature and not a bug.

I'm going to lead off by saying that I believe Goldhawk got more right than wrong with Xenonauts, and that it is a good game overall. Now, a couple carriage returns and a deep breath...

...Xenonauts has been a demonstration of how to get several things inexcusably wrong, and my least favorite is that I check "Run windowed" in the launcher and it NEVER runs windowed. If it is unable to run windowed and they know (and I've discussed this with Chris, I know they already knew) the checkbox should be either greyed out or nonexistent. The program lies to me, and I'm offended (lying hardware and software is condemned in the Bible at least five times!) Other things are less offensive, but when I'm used to playing games that have the features that I like (Minecraft, Civ4, GalCiv2, X-COM: UFO Defense, X-COM: Apocalypse, Doom 3, and my all-time favorite Kerbal Space Program), the lack of granularity in the difficulty settings in Xenonauts is quite grating. (Granted, this is also an issue of Doom 3, but it is well excused as a linear shooter.) There is a heck of a lot of room on the screen for a panel that exposes all the options and shows the four existing difficulty levels as presets. One of these could be the starting state of the invasion ticker, which could lead to the truly "Insane" starting with Corvettes. Others, such as starting funds, starting base configuration, starting squad stats, general starting stats (imagine leading troops into battle with starting stats 20-40), the progression of each stat with experience (e.g. slow down or speed up experience progression - I've noticed that reflexes and bravery are essentially frozen.) Or, imagine for your first mission, with no ("Basic") armour and derpy ballistics, facing top-grade elite forces emerging from the light scouts. I'd call it "

". I'd love to be able to adjust labour rates in science and workshop. My non-story Veteran game has 39 science teams (down from 60, I laid a bunch off) sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the first Dreadnought while a total of five (soon to be six) fully loaded workshops are in a mad panic to build enough Marauders, armour, MAC - sorry, MAG weapons (cue Halo theme) to equip three bases. Changing these balances could be quite interesting. And, of course, hit indicators.

No, the difficulty settings are presented without options because they're meant to be played that way. It's the developer's job to put together a gameplay experience for the player...otherwise why would we have any difficulty settings at all? All we'd need to do is present a wall of options to the player and they could pick whatever they want. Of course, most players have absolutely no interest in doing that, particularly if it's their first playthrough.

Pretty much everything you want to change is easily customisable with a text editor in about three game files, the majority being in gameconfig.xml, provided you're aware that you're not playing the intended experience. Remember, if we put options and sliders into the main menu for every possible customisable option in the game, we have to support every possible combination of options or people will blame us when it doesn't work / play properly.

Rather like the way you're annoyed that the Windowed Mode checkbox doesn't work if you don't use a resolution smaller than your native desktop resolution and so think we shouldn't have included that, in fact.

Chris, just because I almost never tweak KSP difficulty presets, and never actually play any full games with such tweaked presets, doesn't mean that I don't want to see them. It certainly doesn't mean I don't want them to be visible; I want to know what "Easy", "Normal", and "Hard" mean, and even if they couldn't be adjusted in KSP, being able to see them is extremely useful. There is very, very little in Xenonauts to indicate what "Easy", "Normal", "Veteran" and "Insane" actually mean. One of the very first things I did was start a new game in each to see if there were any changes in starting funds or base configurations. For the others reading this thread, I'm going to say this was very unrevealing!

Chris, please remember that when I lay down money for a game (heck, even when I don't - yay fog.com), I'm not looking for your intended experience, I'm looking for my intended experience. To this end, Minecraft is today, very, very different from what Notch imagined it would be. While there is obviously some agreement between what Notch intended and what the players intended, it was ultimately the latter that drove its development and success. Ask yourself this: Why did you make Xenonauts? Why isn't Xenonauts an exact clone of X-COM? Does the fact that some aspects of X-COM (e.g. the grenade relay) irked you play into this? (By the way, one of the things I really miss about X-COM vs. Xenonauts is the ability to throw literally anything - it took a particularly gifted soldier to be able to throw an autocannon more than one tile. Most commonly, I threw ammunition. I still transfer ammunition between soldiers in Xenonauts, especially in the Predator/Sentinel era, which is why I keep noticing this inability to throw it.) Also, support for every possible combination of options would be both a motivation for and result of a robust game design that took care to make sure that invalid inputs didn't lead to a crash - it would also make it easier to expand content, such a having twenty types of interceptors with extended range missiles and omnidirectional gun mounts.

The windowed mode checkbox never works, no matter how much lower I specify the resolution than that of my desktop (e.g. 1024x768 doesn't run windowed on a 1280x800 desktop.) If you want it that way, the checkbox should grey out, indicating that windowed mode is not available at the selected resolution. Of all the games I have ever played, Xenonauts is the only one that behaves in this way that pisses me off so much - this includes a couple of games from the 1990s that implemented their own windows environments in DOS protected mode!

Hmm, you say this would just motivate us to come up with a robust game design to take care of every eventuality, but that presumes we weren't sufficiently motivated to avoid issues before and that we had the time / resources / capability available to us to do everything in the best possible way. It's easy to say all that stuff in hindsight but we never promised a game system that would allow everyone to create their own X-Com experience, we just promised them a fun and reasonably polished X-Com successor. That's why most people bought the game, not because they wanted a toolbox.

Of course you don't buy Minecraft or a set of Lego to build the basic models, you build them to create your own creations - but both of them are specifically set up that way and you can't expect everything else to hold to that standard. Even extremely moddable games like Half Life and Starcraft didn't just have sliders that allowed you to enable "Counterstrike Mode", people who wanted to make changes to the game had to dive below the main menu and get their hands dirty with the code and scripting.

Really, having all the setup options only happens in sandbox games like Minecraft and 4X games like Civ and MOO where all the factions are human-playable and therefore changing the global parameters affects all the sides *roughly* equally, keeping everything roughly playable. It's really not a common feature at all, and the original X-Com didn't offer such features either - likely because they knew people would use them to screw up the game balance and then complain that the developers didn't balance the game properly.

Yes, the game maybe should show the differences between difficulty settings better but you're extrapolating too much from that point. Should I have included an option in the game to play as the aliens? I mean, a *lot* of people wanted that. At what point is the developer allowed to say "no, that's not the intended experience"? Do I have to cater to everyone wanting to play the game their way, or at some point do I get to define the default experience and then expect people to play that?

I do get what you mean, but you have to realise that as soon as you expect the developer to cater to your specific needs they'll also be expected to the specific needs of everyone else who buys the game (and it's pretty obvious that's unworkable).

Hmm, you say this would just motivate us to come up with a robust game design to take care of every eventuality, but that presumes we weren't sufficiently motivated to avoid issues before and that we had the time / resources / capability available to us to do everything in the best possible way.

I want to make sure you didn't miss something I said in what you appear to be responding to: "make sure that invalid inputs don't lead to a crash."

I'm not a particularly well qualified individual for saying such a thing, but I will admit that I took four terms of a DeVry Computer Information Systems program that would have given me a B.Sc in Computer Science had I completed the full nine terms. I thought I had learned input checking the hard way, but experience with software, especially Xenonauts, teaches me that perhaps I didn't learn it as hard as most actual programmers (i.e. I've never actually had a programming job ) I started getting into making my own headers quite early and figured out C's built-in input checking capabilities (e.g. investigating what "fflush(stdin);" was for and how it worked), which lead to me writing my programs (never large enough to challenge the resources of x86 real mode) with robust modules that communicated with each other in specific ways. Whenever it was possible (and in a couple cases where it wasn't) to send a function an input that could crash it (and by extension, the rest of the program), I had the function vet the input and return a NULL before it had the chance to blow the core or otherwise piss off the OS. This sort of checking led to the remarkable situation that nearly everything I wrote "exited properly" when it crashed, leaving an output telling me almost exactly where I screwed up. I imagine that if my career developed, it is very likely that fine tuning well-tested and mature code would probably include removing input checking from functions in the inner loop code of release software, but it didn't get that far. The built-in ease of doing this in Java probably goes a long way in explaining why Minecraft has been so stable for me until it started disagreeing with my system's lamentable Crestline GPU.

One of the things that testing for and vetting input ranges allows me to do boldly is experiment with the entire range of inputs just to see what sort of wacky and wonderful glitches might result without fear of

. Both Minecraft and KSP appear to be written in this way, such that doing unusual things doesn't crash the program, but leads to results that players now describe as "classic". Minecraft generates obsidian when you place redstone where it would generate cobblestone in an empty block.

The astonishing thing about this video is that it still appears to be the best cast redstone portal tutorial on Youtube ...the only one, which might have something to do with it. Nearly every Minecraft video I watch is far better than those I make myself.

For Kerbal Space Program, I present what I call Khandresekhar Limit:

(Note: I named it after the real Chandresekhar Limit, where a white dwarf can't get any heavier because the electrons within it can't exceed the speed of light. Their movement generates the pressure which keeps a dwarf star from imploding from its own gravity. Their real-life motivation, the quantum (or Heisenberg) uncertainty principle is approximated by standard-issue floating point uncertainties in the game manifesting, in this particular case, in the unholy collection of "cubic octagonal struts" that is Scott Manley's IQ Minmus rover. The "speed of light" is imposed by Deadly Reentry g-limits, and is much higher (and proportionately more hilarious) in vanilla KSP.)

Should I have included an option in the game to play as the aliens? I mean, a *lot* of people wanted that.

Please, please don't kick me for advertising, sir... someone did that.

A better example of what I meant would be this: consider the LOS ranges of soldiers. It's so hilariously short and narrow in Xenonauts that it's absurd when you think about it, and people frequently complain about it. If you gave people a slider for LOS range they'd probably set it to unlimited as that's pretty much how things work in real life and most people assume realistic is better.

However, the fact your soldiers are essentially blind is a key component of the game because it generates that claustrophobic X-Com feeling and allows aliens to be RIGHT THERE when you turn around. The average gamer doesn't realise this, but they *would* notice if Xenonauts didn't feel like X-Com, and they'd blame the developers for not adequately capturing the magic of X-Com. They wouldn't realise it was down to their own choices.

It's therefore actively damaging to the game to give people such options. We'd have to divert resources away from the core gameplay experience to code a feature that would, in all probability, lower the review scores of the game. We'd also have to deal with the effects on connected issues if we wanted to allow the game to support it natively, like how the AI speeds up turn times by moving units that aren't visible. I therefore don't see the value in doing that, especially when we have limited resources and sight ranges can already be changed in about five minutes using Notepad.

Minecraft and KSP do support some awesome stuff in that area, but in both games the primary point of the game is to allow you do so - that's not the case for Xenonauts (or most games) so it's not really fair to hold us to those standards. But we're kinda just repeating ourselves at this point, but hopefully now you know why we don't give players control over the gameplay parameters unless they want to mod the game.

Going back to the original topic, it would be nice if the tooltip info on the difficulty window mentioned that damage text would disappear. It's a little bit confusing as is.

A better example of what I meant would be this: consider the LOS ranges of soldiers. It's so hilariously short and narrow in Xenonauts that it's absurd when you think about it, and people frequently complain about it. If you gave people a slider for LOS range they'd probably set it to unlimited as that's pretty much how things work in real life and most people assume realistic is better.

Depending on what you assume is the tile size, something always gets absurd. One thing that I think would have been much better is if detecting aliens were treated differently than detecting terrain. So, yeah, maybe you can see the whole map right off the bat (since I have them all memorized...) which is in fitting with er... didn't they take a look out the windows just before they landed? But if you can't see the aliens right away when you see the terrain, that would make the game a lot more interesting. This could be used to introduce such things as sensor and stealth suits, motion sensors perhaps (I remember those in X-COM.)

However, the fact your soldiers are essentially blind is a key component of the game because it generates that claustrophobic X-Com feeling and allows aliens to be RIGHT THERE when you turn around. The average gamer doesn't realise this, but they *would* notice if Xenonauts didn't feel like X-Com, and they'd blame the developers for not adequately capturing the magic of X-Com. They wouldn't realise it was down to their own choices.

Actually, I did realize, and consciously knowing it's part of that "magic" (I'd use a different word) is why I haven't belly-ached about it.

Minecraft and KSP do support some awesome stuff in that area, but in both games the primary point of the game is to allow you do so - that's not the case for Xenonauts (or most games) so it's not really fair to hold us to those standards. But we're kinda just repeating ourselves at this point, but hopefully now you know why we don't give players control over the gameplay parameters unless they want to mod the game.

Just remember that it isn't so much about being able to change things related to difficulty, but simply telling us what they are. The damage indicators vanishing without anything in the manual or on the difficulty screen saying anything at all is what caught OP off guard.

Just remember that it isn't so much about being able to change things related to difficulty, but simply telling us what they are. The damage indicators vanishing without anything in the manual or on the difficulty screen saying anything at all is what caught OP off guard.

If your earlier posts had actually said that there wouldn't have been any argument - it's true that the description for Insane difficulty could be a bit more descriptive about what it changes.

However you raised perceived issues with the game not letting players easily customise all the difficulty options and game parameters from the menu screen (like you can in Minecraft and 4X games), and there are plenty of perfectly good reasons why we don't allow that.

However you raised perceived issues with the game not letting players easily customise all the difficulty options and game parameters from the menu screen (like you can in Minecraft and 4X games), and there are plenty of perfectly good reasons why we don't allow that.

I hope you didn't miss the game lying to me with "Run Windowed". As for the lack of customization ...why should games like Minecraft and 4X strategy games have them while squad-oriented global strategic defense simulators like X-COM and Xenonauts don't? KSP actually has an interesting excuse: It's rocket science. Literally. (KSP and Minecraft are actually about as different as two games can get, which is why whenever the headline "Kerbal Space Program: Minecraft in Space" appears, the entire subreddit collapses in laughter.) Also, I'm guessing you aren't too familiar with how to customize the difficulty in Minecraft, or you would have pointed out that it is actually pretty much the same as you do in Xenonauts: custom mods and maps ...well, Xenonauts doesn't have open source hot-moddable multiplayer servers. Yet. On the other hand, I've never been able to get the map editors to work - they open up and run, but I haven't been able to get them to do anything useful (and all I wanted to do was take the roof off a UFO submap so I could figure out which one was the 'alt'.)