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balance and statistics


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There is a kind of uncertainty principle in balancing the game. If battles are too easy, it can become boring, but if it is too hard, one can fall behind the curve and spiral into disaster. Let me illustrate with simple statistics.

Let us say for illustrative purposes that in each mission, one soldier is wounded; typically it takes about 10 days for the soldier to heal (or let us suppose that). This means that after 10 missions, one would have 10 inactive soldiers and unless one has a huge reserve, one would have no soldiers to carry out missions. Actually one would already be in trouble after 3 or 4 missions, when half of the soldiers would be out of action and one would have to carry out missions with 3 or 4 soldiers. This actually happened to me today when I found myself with only 4 active soldiers after 3 or 4 "successful" missions.

This means that one of 3 things should happen: 1) One should have a reserve of about 10 soldiers; or 2) most missions should not have any wounded soldiers at all; or 3) the game should allow one to refuse 9 out of 10 missions without any serious drawbacks. None of these seems perfectly suitable, but an approximate solution might be to slow down the pace of alien growth, thus giving the player more time to recover, or equivalently to make soldiers heal faster.

Here is another balancing problem: if by balance one means that the alien soldier should be equal to one's soldiers in combat ability, the by the well-know military fact that to win an assault against a defensive position, one should have a 3:1 advantage in numbers assuming equal strength. In this game, the aliens are always on the defensive, but are fortunately not equal in fighting ability, since one can fairly easily win a battle with equal numbers with light or no casualties. Note that "winning" in real life does not mean taking no casualties, but it often does in this game.

From the above considerations one can conclude that 1) most missions must be won with no casualties at all, or that 2) replacements should be much easier to get. My guess is that (2) is a better solution, since it would make combat more interesting.

It is my impression that in Beta 19.5, the solution has gone in the wrong direction, that is the battles have been made more difficult, aliens have been strengthened in various ways and the player weapons have been weakened.

So I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the balancing problem for this game is between keeping battles interesting and challenging, without crippling the player over the long run by the resulting casualties.

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Your observartion is correct. Compared to Xcom1994, beginning in Xenonauts(v19.5) is very difficult.

Xenonauts' light scaut is armed so player can lose interceptors right from beginning. If player manage to shoot down first UFO he face 3-5 aliens instead of 1 in Xcom. Weakest aliens in Xenonaus are much more powerful than in Xcom while player's starting guns are very weak and inaccurate. To kill alien in Xenonauts need to hit him 3-5 times while in Xcom was enough 1, very rarely 2 times. Cover system implemented in Xenonauts is huge difficulty increase for player because aliens playing very defensive. They sit in one place, they are surrounded by many cover spots, waiting for reaction fire proc. If this happens to be night mission, difficulty goes up because flares are much weaker than in Xcom. (Too) many weapons has automatic fire mode, also aliens can shoot even if they cant see you directly(I know this is feature, not bug:)). The only thing what is easier in Xenonauts is leveling stats for soldiers, even after nerf.

So sum everything up and see there is no or very little place for mistake. While this can look like very realistic this is not very fun tho. Good thing this is only beta so everything can change in another build.

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well henri5, your assumptions are valid if all the players are playing the same way.

but in reality, we don't.

some will utilise the "Golden Rule of Gaming" a.k.a "Save & Load".

for me, i will change the tactics. if i got low on soldiers, then i might take more turns to finish a mission by simply digging in cover/ camping, to form a killzone with high explosive, splash damage weaponry to overcome the odds.

or i don't even care to start the ground battle and leave the crashed UFO as it is.

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well henri5, your assumptions are valid if all the players are playing the same way.

but in reality, we don't.

some will utilise the "Golden Rule of Gaming" a.k.a "Save & Load".

for me, i will change the tactics. if i got low on soldiers, then i might take more turns to finish a mission by simply digging in cover/ camping, to form a killzone with high explosive, splash damage weaponry to overcome the odds.

or i don't even care to start the ground battle and leave the crashed UFO as it is.

You cant use "digging in cover" tactic because aliens already using it :)

You can skip crashed UFO, but this is not recommended because a) from crashed UFO you get money, b) new researches, c) skipping UFO means losing funding.

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I for one think it's quite manageable tbh, at least up until december. I started off playing on veteran, iron man mode. I got through the first month just fine, with 1 interceptor lost and -no- soldiers. Yes, it takes 2-3 hits to kill off the first aliens and sometimes even more for the snakey ones (sorry, can't seem to remember those new alien names). I had no idea what I was doing research-wise tho and in the second month I had severe problems with the medium ships coming in and me still running around with ballistic weaponry against larger forces of stronger aliens. I learned a lot and adapted tho and could much better on a second try.

I did try it again, but this time on normal difficulty, still iron man mode. I'm nearing the end of month 2, but doing much better. I lost about 5-8 soldiers, about half of them because of cheating/buggy AI firing through walls near their spacecraft where none of them actually had vision on me. I lost 2 interceptors and 1 dropship. One interceptor was lost because I was stupid and sent my badly damaged foxtrot out in front to shoot a fighter and my dropship was lost because I didn't know those could be intercepted and shot down. You live, you learn :P

All in all, although the pacing might be a bit harder at the start than the original EU, imho it's not quite -that- bad if you know what you're doing. And fyi, I always have 15 xenonauts in total, hiring new recruits the moment I lose some. I'm considering upping the total to 20 on my main base after the month ends (and I get another 100-150k extra funding). So, thus far I haven't seen the problem described by henri5, at least not on normal difficulty. Also, if you rush the research for laser tech and better explosives on veteran I suppose it won't be -that- much more difficult.

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Well Voeter you are courageous to play this game in iron man mode! The furthest I ever got was mid-December with the 19.4 beta. I could have gone on, but I was outgunned, outshipped, outmanned, and my goose was becoming cooked, and the 19.5 version came out just then.

Sectoid, I also save and reload a lot, but even then, I usually end up with one or two wounded soldiers per mission (half the time by being shot in the back by my own soldiers). Given the reloads, I don't have very many soldiers killed, but unless I use wounded soldiers on missions, the number of useable soldiers goes down fast.

Voeter, on iron man, you are lucky you didn't play one mission I played yesterday: when I landed, I had five aliens close to Charlie, and after the first move, I had five wounded soldiers! A bit later (after restarting from a save), I went into a building and stood by the door waiting for the next move to open the door and see what was on the other side. However there was an unseen alien right outside the door who beat me to it, opened the door during his turn and killed my soldier and wounded another standing behind him.

And all this was on "easy" with the stable version and the small mod by Sathra.

Edited by henri5
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Voeter, on iron man, you are lucky you didn't play one mission I played yesterday: when I landed, I had five aliens close to Charlie, and after the first move, I had five wounded soldiers! A bit later (after restarting from a save), I went into a building and stood by the door waiting for the next move to open the door and see what was on the other side. However there was an unseen alien right outside the door who beat me to it, opened the door during his turn and killed my soldier and wounded another standing behind him.

And all this was on "easy" with the stable version and the small mod by Sathra.

Haha, that has x-com syndrome written all over it ;) These things happen and force you to really play it as safe as possible. Get 5 aliens right in front of your dropship? That's why I bring a rocket launcher en lots and lots of grenades. Run up to a door with no TU's remaining? Yes, you risk alien hugging times. And even if you do everything "right" there's still that lucky (or, as it is in xenonauts not -that- lucky) shot in the face on your most elite soldier from an alien shooting from 10 miles away. Hey, at least the soldiers don't panic yet and go bonkers with their new laser scattergun in the middle of your formation... :D

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FWIW a rocket launcher would have been almost useless in this case, since the aliens were not grouped, but were spaced out not only along the front exit, but also covering the side doors. But this was a rare occurence - with this version, there is usually ONE alien in front of the main exit, which can usually be killed before he starts to shoot (if one is unlucky, the alien will shoot a reaction shot with a rocket right inside the ship - it happened to me once, but I don't remember with which version...).

I cringe to think what would happen if the aliens were played by a human - a grenade or a rocket shot into Charlie before the soldiers have time to disembark would be game over!

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You cant use "digging in cover" tactic because aliens already using it :)

You can skip crashed UFO, but this is not recommended because a) from crashed UFO you get money, b) new researches, c) skipping UFO means losing funding.

well, then i think i have to double the heavy weaponry to flush those aliens out. when i am low in man, definitely couldn't afford to use normal tactics anymore. frankly, these are my assumptions, because i have not tryout any land battle since v17 (because i don't want see all the spoilers, LOL).

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Sectoid, I also save and reload a lot, but even then, I usually end up with one or two wounded soldiers per mission (half the time by being shot in the back by my own soldiers). Given the reloads, I don't have very many soldiers killed, but unless I use wounded soldiers on missions, the number of useable soldiers goes down fast.

normally what would be the AI behaviour? would the alien actively seek and destroy? or passively diggin? or mix of both?

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I've been playing on Normal and can generally get through the first 2 months with no losses at all. In my most recent playthrough my first loss was during an alien base attack.

You can't treat this like any other game. It's not supposed to be easy, you need to learn to adjust to it. Use the gear available and crawl on through. Use cover to your advantage. Suppression mechanics are awesome, use them. The Ballistic Shield is amazing, bring 2!

My typical 8 man squad is 2 guys with shields and pistols, 2 riflemen, 2 snipers, 1 heavy weapons, and 1 shotgun. The shields count as tall cover, so as long as you keep them facing the aliens the guys holding them are pretty much invincible until the shields are destroyed. I use the guys with the shields as cover, placing my other members behind them as they all advance because the shield will survive a full burst from the alien pistol and rifle even at point blank range.

The change to alien AI in 19.5 has made things even easier for me. Half the surviving aliens on any crash are now forced to cower inside their crashed ship. This means that after mopping up a small number of aliens outside the ship I can take my time to prepare for breaching the ship since I know they won't try to come out. One of the hardest things about ground combat in X-Com was getting close to an alien ship...they weren't forced to stay inside so you'd never know when one would decide to pop out and kill 2 or 3 of your squad as you spent a couple turns trying to get them grouped up and prep'd for entering the ship. Actually breaching the ships this way in Xenonauts is super easy, everyone's right outside the door with full TUs. Make sure the guys with shields are up front and facing in and then open the door, any reaction fire can't hit your guys without going through the shields first. The recent upgrade to grenades means I can lob a flashbang into the ship once the door's open causing all the aliens inside to become suppressed, then I just move my guys in without fear of reaction fire and finish them all off. It's so easy it's becoming disappointing.

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Like in any army, I guess that would depend on their mission or orders. Since in the early game at least most alien ships have been shot down, they would clearly be unable to carry out their original mission, so it would depend on the orders they had for that situation. That most likely would be "Hold your ground and wait for rescue", or perhaps "You are on your own, so create as much chaos as you can before you die!".

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In my perspective the game is too easy. I'm playing on the highest difficulty and have been on 6 missions. 1 dead, 1 wounded and injured. I think I have 6 majors and I'm pretty close to having super soldiers soon.

The ground fights needs be more brutal. Ai needs to be vastly improved and be more coordinated and aggressive...

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In my perspective the game is too easy. I'm playing on the highest difficulty and have been on 6 missions. 1 dead, 1 wounded and injured. I think I have 6 majors and I'm pretty close to having super soldiers soon.

The ground fights needs be more brutal. Ai needs to be vastly improved and be more coordinated and aggressive...

Super soldiers after 6 missions? I think we have a differing opinion on what that means I guess :P

It's after one of my xenonauts participated in 15-20 missions that he hit one stat @100 (strength) and has 85+ TU's. He might qualify I guess...

Apart from that I for one believe that the first 6 missions should be quite winnable, even on the highest difficulty setting. Just wait until you get the aliens with the higher tier plasma weapons and see them instakill some of your elite xenonauts in 1 hit. In short: play at least a few months before saying it's too easy. Besides, max difficulty shouldn't mean impossible, right? :)

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As far as I can tell, the AI only really ever moves around much when they're on their own and chasing down some civilians, or after you've completely leave the area of engagement, for example, if you just straight-up disengage and fall back to regroup; once they spot your troops, you seem to simply hover around behind whatever cover is close at hand, sometimes not even bothering to get behind it. Even after your troops disengage, they don't seem to move around all *that* much. The AI's still behaving sort of stupidly when Xenonaut personnel are on the scene.

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