air combat balancing

So, I've heard the beta is coming out soon and we're balancing stuff then. I think the air combat needs a pretty hefty tweak.

My first run through I focused on research and troops, built a 2nd base maybe a week in. I couldn't raise any more money when the small scouts showed up shortly after and I didn't have any aircraft that could catch up to them.

My second run through I focused entirely on air power. I build my 2nd base on day one just to get the hangars done earlier. I ran out of money before I could really get it running. My first base had 3 interceptors and two MIGs when it was finally done, though. Unfortunately, the small scouts showed up before I could finish the first MIG, so I still had 3 or four days when I couldn't do anything. I had to stare at my projected monthly income dropping with nothing I could do about it.

I think the game should be more forgiving in the first month or two. It should accommodate different strategies than a race for air power. My starting aircraft shouldn't be obsolete so quickly. And I think small scouts could be toned down a little. The fighters too. The thing about the aircraft game is, those jets are expensive. If I lose one in the first week after the small scouts show up, it's game over. I won't be able to take out the fighters when they start coming. And the fighters need to be toned down too. I use my air rolls and all my missiles and they sometimes still kill one or two of my fighters. That's 200k down per jet, that's 3 missions worth of money that I can't run anymore anyway if I've lost a fighter too early and can't defend my airways. And reliance on an expensive and all too often defenseless MIG is a terrible gamble in a stage of the game where losing it can lose you the entire game. I was careful never to send a MIG if there was a fighter in the way, but when the small scout started too close to the MIG I'd lose it anyway.

I was playing on normal difficulty. This needs some adjustments.

My first suggestion would be to make the small scouts show up after a longer amount of time, and the fighters too. My second suggestion would be to not remove the very small scouts completely. Have the small show up sometimes and the very small show up other times. And fewer or more manageable fighters. I'd lower the time it takes to fire torpedoes, there's no reason why a pilot couldn't have them armed and ready before engaging an enemy, maybe lower the time to 1 second just so they don't automatically fire straight away and I can tell the pilot to shut them off if I want. Lower the price on jets. Finally, I'd suggest slowing the small scouts down to where an f17 can catch them. One week into the game the 2nd class of scouts show up and all my f17s are good for is engaging the enemy fighters, and they kind of suck at doing that, too.

On a higher difficulty you could get away with forcing a specific build route. You shouldn't have dogfights that end in a jet down and there's nothing you can do about it. This usually happened on 3v3s. I realize that I'm up against aliens and it's not supposed to be fair, but right now it feels like the only way to progress in this game is to load an earlier save every time I lose a jet. Maybe it only feels like I'm fighting a random number generator because I suck at the dogfights or something, but they shouldn't be this punishing on normal difficulty.

Have you looked at the air mission files for the aliens and tried using those to balance your concerns?

The files contain the information the game uses when generating the aircraft on the geoscape.

I think the layout of the files was discussed previously but I haven't found a post yet.

I am not sure on exactly what the numbers in the files do but here are my assumptions:

Ticker sets the number the ticker needs to reach before this mission becomes active.

Chance is the percentage chance of this mission being generated, appears to be 0-100%.

Escort chance is the chance to generate an escort, appears to be 0-1000.

Once per wave makes the mission unique in that wave.

Craft names starting with m:airplane:alien appears to set the ticker level that a new, higher powered, craft takes over this specific mission type as the main craft.

Names starting with e:airplane:alien set the ticker level that new, more powerful, fighter craft will take over the escort duties.

Now as far as refinements go I would like to be able to set specific things to help balancing.

A maximum ticker value as well as minimum would be good, missions would then be ignored after reaching the max so weaker missions could be generated and replaced by stronger ones later.

This would replace ticker: 500 with tickerMin: 500 and tickerMax: 750 for example.

I would also like to be able to have each escort selected individually from the list of escort craft, with individual ticker values.

That would allow mixed wings of fighters as well as allowing single fighters without escorts early on.

Rather than hitting a set ticker value and all fighters being replaced with heavy fighters you would find that you would start to come across a heavy fighter accompanied by two normal ones, then later two heavies to one normal and so on.

Personally, I don't think the biggest issue is to do when Scouts turn up, because you need them for both Power Cores and all the other good stuff and delaying their appearance is really going to slow down the game (or really penalise you if the ticket rate isn't adjusted accordingly), but rather their base speed as you've noticed.

Their base speed is 2300 looks like it is too fast and your F17's don't seem able to engage in combat *at all* even if they fly head first into them.

In previous builds before V13 you'd find your F17's could engage Scouts fairly easily but something was changed (undocumented in patch notes) which made F17's completely fail to catch them from then on.

I have been doing a bit of testing recently and found that a speed value of 2100 for Scouts seems much better as F17's can engage if they fly head first into the Scouts, but can't catch up if they fall behind or start from behind/sides. This means your MIG's are still the best aircraft to use for interception, but you're not as reliant on them in the early game.

A little tip is to also never use Avalanches on the MIG when you're going Scout hunting. 4x Sidewinders will see the MIG win every air combat without isssue.

As for Fighters, apart from the fact there's a known issue with far too many Fighters currently spawning, I do have to point out that you're doing something very wrong if you're consistantly losing an F17 in every battle as F17's are faster, have more hitpoints, more armour and do more damage than Fighters.

With stock F17's using 2x Sidewinders and the Cannon, you should very rarely lose any (apart from when you get an odd starting position and the enemy Fighters fire 3 staggered missiles at a single F17 which means you can only dodge one, and even then you'll only lose a plane if you get unlucky when they close to cannon range), although you will often have one come out of a 3v3 with around 50-60% damage.

The tactic there is to use the space bar to pause the game to time your defensive rolls properly and to use one Sidewinder per Fighter to force them all to roll before quickly following up with another Sidewinder per Fighter which they then can't dodge. Finish off with cannons for sweet success.

Once you start flying with 1x Sidewinder (to make them dodge) and 1x Alenium Missile you will come out with very little damage. You'll decimate them if you also stick Scatter Lasers on them.

I'd be wary of suggesting any other balance changes as the first of the new Xenonaut fighters look to be quite a step up over starting aircraft.

The only thing I will say is that there does need to be a bit more variation involved with starting locations for each aircraft, I know aircraft fly in formation generally, but starting in close formation every single air combat does make it a bit stale. If both your planes and the Alien aircraft were spread out a bit more and at varying distances from both each other and the map edge, it should lead to less rigid tactics.

I'm okay with them flying in formation, it makes a lot of sense. And I'll try that delayed missile thing. I never got to alenium missles or laser cannons. My game bugged out after the 1 month mark and I got a crash to desktop for trying loading it. I filed a bug report on it.

Also, there's a bug where my cannons would simply stop firing until I told one of the planes to defensive roll. Come to think of it, I forgot to file that.

And slowing them to 2100 sounds like a good idea. I'll try that if I can find the right file, and see if I still have the same concerns. That and the fighters spawning less whenever that gets fixed might be enough. It still might be a good idea to lower the cost of (f17) fighters though. Losing one early cause you screwed up is very punishing.

Sometimes afterburners and move to a point can also be of good use in F17 vs. fighter fights. But that depends on the combat situation.