Why so much air combat?

[IceVamp]

Well, yes, the actual money usually comes at a later time, but you can identify the impact of your action right away.
The immediate reward for going to work is you get paid for that work, however usually not right away. At least that's how I see it.
Our points of view might differ. But it's not very important.

A bit more on topic, it is kinda strange that windex would be able to go two full months without an additional ground mission. I usually get so many I think they get tedious. Chris would be able to answer this better, but I don't think what type of alien missions spawn is completely random, in which case this could happen.

[Chris]

There are too many fighters spawning at the moment.

[windex]

There are too many fighters spawning at the moment.

I think I remember you mentioning this and that's really what I wanted to know.
Glad to here it won't be like this in the finished game. If all I was doing is air combat I wouldn't want to play for long.

And no I don't hate the air combat if fact I like a few air fights before and in between going into ground combat it ties it all together and makes it more plausible. I just don't want to be doing it the whole rest of the game. What I enjoy the most is the ground combat and the research and base management each makes the other all the more exciting and interesting.

[Animal Mother]

Did you get any warning that you couldn't pay off your engineers/scientists at the end of the month? There is currently a bug that tries to withdraw their wages before the payment from the funding nations comes in. And if you are unable to pay wages 2 months in a row you lose. Despite technically being able to pay if the game would just pay you before it tried to withdraw the wages instead of other way around.

Posted it in the Bugs forum, as it got me confused also. Offcourse it could be simply an oversight or a quirk

[ditoLoco]

I have played two game months, have one ground fight and waaay too much air fights
(i build quickly second base) so right now it is hard to go one day without a message about UFO or without a fight,
if proportion between ground fight and air battle is like 1:50 it is very tedious

[Hardball]

It would be nice to get an immediate UFO bounty on shot down saucers, wouldn't it?

In my opinion there should always be a crash site as long as there is at least a little of the wreck left.
Suggestion: Only with overkill damage of 150% the UFO is completely vaporized. Plus there should be alien rescue missions to recover their downed saucers and personnel.

I personally would like the feeling of a lot of geoscape action and of being (nearly) oveerwhelmed in some periods.

[Gorlom]

It would be nice to get an immediate UFO bounty on shot down saucers, wouldn't it?

From a story or a gamemechnic point of view? (Reading your posts I can't really determine which you prioritize. You did mention "as much realism as possible" I believe)

Think of it this way: from a story point of view it would be too much administrative hassle to send a paycheck to the Xenonauts each time a UFO is shot down. It's much more convenient to tally them all up and send money once a month.

From a gamemechanic point of view it trivializes the micromangement of your funds. For most people that would impede the fun of that aspect of the game. You don't have to estimate and make sure your money lasts until next paycheck, you can just shoot down another UFO. And it would probably mean you would need to re-balance the impact it has on monthly funding to the extent that you can't increase monthly funding at all. your money would be solely dependent on how many UFOs you shot down this month.

In my opinion there should always be a crash site as long as there is at least a little of the wreck left.
Suggestion: Only with overkill damage of 150% the UFO is completely vaporized. Plus there should be alien rescue missions to recover their downed saucers and personnel.

That's already how it works, but I think it's 130% overkill or something. With 150% you probably wouldn't ever reach the threshold to completely vaporize the UFO, so there would be no point in having it in the game at all.

There might be rescue missions already, but they are much more stealthy then the scouting and research ones so our radars don't detect the rescue UFOs. But why they would commit resources to rescue Ceasan clones from a situation that could quite easily be a trap is beyond me.

I personally would like the feeling of a lot of geoscape action and of being (nearly) oveerwhelmed in some periods.

I believe that is what Goldhawk is aiming for as well... the challenge lies in making it so without causing it to be tedious. (Doesn't this conflict with your request in the "Oh my god, why.." thread? This one in particular:

- a feeling of permanent progress meaning that at least every two or three missions there should be something, anything, new, either equipment or research

What I mean is the pacing would be so swift that you would not get to use or even research the stuff you found until you already found the next item. Having a backlog of research topics and malefaction requests would make the game feel like it was stagnating despite (or rather because of?) it's brisk pace.)

Luckily the speed at which new enemies show up, how many UFOs will be on the geoscape, how much money you earn, research time (and topics) and stuff like that should be easily moddable so you can try a bunch of things out.

[Hardball]

Hi gorlom,
you have me convinced there. I just thought that getting some funds immediately after shooting down a saucer would fasten game progress and give a chance to replace your losses. With all UFO games it was usually pretty tough to replace a fully equipped plane as I remember. But the mentioned planning aspect does have a lot of appeal, I agree.

And you are completely right that the challenge is to make the game exciting without being frustrating or tedious.
When I suggested that there should be many new features of the game to research (every few couple of missions new stuff to experience being alien types, weapon, equipment or whatver and not twenty mostly similar missions in a row) I meant that there should be a permanent feeling of having many options to explore.
I think that it does not hurt if you have three or more possible research topics to choose from.
Of course there needs to be a balance between the number of missions, game aspects found, research completed and thus new equipment at the player's disposal. This balance is what I wanted to adress. Because in my experience all UFO games I played suffered from an unbalance of the too high number of (much too similar) missions in that relation.

[Gorlom]

Hopefully the balancing will be addressed quite nicely in beta, considering the number of beta testers that this game has already gathered in the form of people buying the alpha version of the game. ^^

[Skar]

I feel similar like the original poster. The air minigame is not very fun/interesting for me.

I can respect that my fighters are not fast or not strong enough (based one quipment stats etc) to shoot down an ufo, but to make it dependent on some form of arcade minigame, i simply dont like.

Thats why i dont play an real-time jump n run, but some round-based strategy title in the first place.

An "auto-resolve option" would be nice for ppl who simply dont enjoy that part.

There could be an option to "auto-resolve" integrated in the minigame start window (when its paused), so the player can chose to either control himself or let the pc do it without having another pop-up.

At this point for me a pop-up with the result of the auto-resolved battle would be enough, but of course it would be kind of cool to just watch the fight or jump in and take over control if the "auto-pilot" messes-up.
Probably takes too much effort - so a pop-up with the result is probably all you could ask for at this point of the development.

I think the possible combinations of enemies and player controlled vehicles is limited (3 on each side? with xy different ufos vehicles) and the aircraft weapons probably already have some stats etc.

Well, there is always hope this can be modded later?