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No more positive points from ground combat - implications?


StK

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I haven't played much since I finished v19 stable. I've tinkered around with a couple of the early v20 experimentals, but never made it much farther than laser tech, as I've been waiting on the final release.

Basically I just wanted to add my $.02 that some of these new changes I'm reading for v6 are rather alarming. Ground combat is definitely the meat of the game and should not be penalized in favor of airstrikes, period. These should only be for lazy/jaded (mission repetition) players or for those crash sites you just couldn't make it to, and I thought that's what the original intentions were.

The Condor nerfing also seems extremely harsh. I'm throwing my hat in with the "don't let them equip later weapons" solution.

I never used (abused?) them in the mid to late game anyway, as I personally love corsairs and upgraded ASAP. The added difficulty to air combat I noticed in the early v20 builds combined with this make me wonder if the early game can even be any fun to play at all at this point.

Which at the end of the day is what this game is supposed to be. Fun.

I know Xcom is a bit of a masochistic game, but I think the difficulty thing is going a bit too far now.

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I'm kind of at a loss as to what point you're trying to make.
My point is that since ground combat recovery missions have never been required I see little change if they aren't performance rated. The only reason to run a recovery mission is to advance your technology and give your troops some operational experience. That should the reward in and of itself. I've argued in the past that technology advances ought to move your relations up as the political leaders will see that there is a little more hope of killing the aliens with each advance. Obviously, the nations should be far more interested in shooting down the aliens BEFORE they land and have a chance to cause "trouble". In ground combat there ought to be big relations bonuses for winning terror missions and destroying enemy bases, but that's about it. In fact, the biggest bonus ought to come from shooting down a terror mission ship BEFORE it lands or shooting down an alien ship that is carrying the parts to start an alien base. Edited by StellarRat
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Ground combat is definitely the meat of the game and should not be penalized in favor of airstrikes...
It's not penalized. You still more out of running the recovery instead of using the airstrike option. However, considering that there can be close to a dozen recovery missions to run with each wave of aliens doing them all is bit much IMO specially when you've already done them for a particular type of alien ship. GH has stated in past that they want the game to with completable with 40 or so ground missions. Airstrike just makes it possible to gain something even if you don't want to play the ground mission. Edited by StellarRat
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My point is that since ground combat recovery missions have never been required I see little change if they aren't performance rated.

Okay, I understand, but I'm saying that ground combat should be required, because that's the whole point. The player shouldn't want to put his little soldiers in harm's way so that he can be "rewarded" with technology and money. He should have no choice* but to send his soldiers to recover the UFO, even if it's dangerous, stressful, and potentially very costly. Tension and fear of failure in ground combat is what makes this game — and what made the original UFO — so exciting.

Some guy no one's ever heard of called Julian Gollop sums it up quite nicely in this video, at 16:32

[video=youtube;z8zZsecTRfM]

There are definitely too many light scouts (and early ground missions in general), but I think best solution would be to lessen the number of missions, not lessen the impact of the player's performance.

* I'm speaking generally. I actually like the idea of airstrikes and don't see anything wrong with skipping a few ground missions here and there.

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Yes, you do have to do some ground missions to win the game, but you shouldn't have to do hundreds of them IMO. Even in the OG you only needed to do the missions to obtain the key parts and aliens to get to the final mission. Obviously, wiping out terror sites and aliens bases is crucial if you want to make it to the end game. I never liked the fact in the OG that I had to do so many recovery missions just to maintain nation funding.

There were less missions a few builds ago, but the majority of players wanted to have some Lt. Scout and Scout missions continue throughout the game, so you'd have some easy "rebuilding" missions to go on if your squad was wiped out.

If I were designing a game like this I'd make the alien attacks far more strategic so you could plainly see the reason why you have to respond. Like they'd land at a nuclear reactor and try to cause a melt down or they're trying to destroy the capital of some country, that type of thing. The problem with the OG and Xenonauts is most of the alien missions seem completely random except for terror, base building and attacking Xenonaut bases. If the map actually showed strategic sites and that the aliens were headed there to destroy them it would make a lot more sense (to me anyway.)

Edited by StellarRat
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@StellarRat

That has never been my argument. My argument is that this system screws with player funding when there is no interception part to the mission i.e local forces took care of it or the alien craft landed and since noone answered me on this i'm still not sure if i will get any relations bonus for terror missions, because in the beginning i have no way to get to the terror-UFO neither.

A landed UFO should be an opportunity but with "no interception = no funding bonus" its a liability and I _will_ have my interceptors circle it to shoot it down when it tries to get airborne again.

Sometimes the changes that are made by the developers seem a bit awkward.

This change was made so Airstriking a few missions wouldn't make the player fall _too much_ behind in funding to make it unviable in the first place.

Well the change achieves that but it also penalizes the player for going after landed UFOs or UFOs that were brought down by local forces, which wasnt intended and imho needs to be fixed.

Edited by StK
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@StellarRat

That has never been my argument. My argument is that this system screws with player funding when there is no interception part to the mission i.e local forces took care of it or the alien craft landed and since noone answered me on this i'm still not sure if i will get any relations bonus for terror missions, because in the beginning i have no way to get to the terror-UFO neither.

Yes, but the number of UFOs downed by local forces is tiny. The only reason it is done is to make the player has a chance to get some alien tech at the beginning of the game even if they don't have any operational interceptors. That way if things go totally wrong in ATA at the start of the game it doesn't put the player so far behind the tech curve that he/she can't ever catch up. It's not going to mess up anyone's game and you don't even get the opportunity to shoot them down in the first place as far as I know. I don't feel this is really a problem in any way. It's just a help for newbies.
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The discussion behind the implementation of airstrikes has already been had at length. If you have less UFOs spawning then you only need a couple of interceptors throughout the entire game and I don't want Xenonauts to be a game where only two dozen UFOs appear throughout the entire thing. That wouldn't be much of an invasion. But then something needs to be done about all these extra crash sites. Missions are less tense if they become a repetitive grind, no matter how dangerous they may be.

I'm not sure there are actually many people arguing with the fundamental idea of airstrikes, and I think they're a good addition to the game. I therefore think some of the responses do seem a little dramatic. The balance isn't final and will be updated so the player isn't penalised for doing ground missions or other common-sense "good" things to do, but it just takes a little time for the changes to work through the system.

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Taking out a landed UFO or thwarting a terror attack or destroying an alien base will grant you a national relations bonus - we just haven't had the system to do this implemented yet.
Will shooting down a UFO that is on the way to execute the missions you mentioned also give a national relations bonus at least equal to defeating them on the ground? I would hope that is the case. I would think that is an even better outcome than having to stop them on the ground where property damage, civilian casualities and terrified citizens will be the outcome. Edited by StellarRat
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Huh, not played for a while, but I did know airstrikes were being implemented.

What's suprising is that by judging from this thread, their implementation hasn't followed the original discussions whereby we were told the meat of the game was the ground missions and therefore if you wanted to skip them by using airstrikes or letting local forces deal with them, then you weren't going to get any rewards either.

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Huh, not played for a while, but I did know airstrikes were being implemented.

What's suprising is that by judging from this thread, their implementation hasn't followed the original discussions whereby we were told the meat of the game was the ground missions and therefore if you wanted to skip them by using airstrikes or letting local forces deal with them, then you weren't going to get any rewards either.

The problem was that if there were no rewards at all players wouldn't use them. So, you get some reward in money, but shy of what you would get by doing a full recovery.
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Huh, not played for a while, but I did know airstrikes were being implemented.

What's suprising is that by judging from this thread, their implementation hasn't followed the original discussions whereby we were told the meat of the game was the ground missions and therefore if you wanted to skip them by using airstrikes or letting local forces deal with them, then you weren't going to get any rewards either.

Hi Buzzles,

To save you reading a very long thread on the subject, the devs decided that the game was becoming a little grindy as players felt they had to assault every crashed UFO in order to get resources/training for troops/money/rating with owning country. So the decision was made to

1) move the nation rating boost to the interception stage.

2) allow an option to airstrike a UFO, which grants cash but no other reward.

If you want the full 20 page discussion you can find it here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/7314-Doing-Every-Mission-Solution

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The updated mission end screen won't have scoring on it, it'll just be informative - it's not really for the game to tell you whether a mission was "good" or "bad". You can figure that out yourself. Nor does it makes sense your score would affect your monthly funding - why would a mission where you lost half your squad give you more funding increase than one where you lost nobody? The nation wouldn't care (and so forth).

This is something I can't agree with. Like said, the ground combat is the meat and bones of the game. No, scratch that. It is THE GAME. There should be feedback from it. Game should recognize when you do well and when you fail spectacularly. I don't agree with this modern definition of "deferred success" where a major fuck-up isn't recognized for what it is. It is exactly for the game to tell the player if they are doing well or not. The player can lie to himself, but the game will tell the truth.

Now, would the funding nations care? I don't know, if they see you constantly carrying more than half of the squad out in body bags, what do you think? Doesn't exactly inspire confidence, now does it?

By design, the air combat is just a chore and gimmicky mini-game (no offence). There are no real stakes in losing aircraft and fighter pilots.

In contrast, the ground combat should be where the stakes are high and failure is not an option. By removing the ratings, you're making it less important. To me, X-Com is not a game where you nuke things from orbit and manage spreadsheets. Airstrike is a great option, but it should be approached with care: even before this patch I found myself just doing terror and base missions. At this rate the ground combat will just become a mandatory training camp for your troops.

TL;DR, please don't remove the ratings. If you must, make them just informative.

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We will probably have a simple indication of how well you did in certain areas, but it will be based on very straight forward things like how many aliens you killed (vs. escaped), how many troops you lost and how many civilians lived/died.

@StellarRat, shooting down a terror/base UFO won't give you the same bonus as resolving and actual terror or base mission. Taking out a crashed UFO is significantly easier than either of those mission types because many of the occupants will be dead. There's an issue where players could then choose to let a terror attack happen, then defeat it, in order to get the funding boost - but that can realistically only happen once you have unlocked the Quantum Cryptology Center and can see UFO missions, as terror mission UFOs should now follow a similar trajectory to normal UFOs and not be so blatantly obvious.

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There's an issue where players could then choose to let a terror attack happen, then defeat it, in order to get the funding boost - but that can realistically only happen once you have unlocked the Quantum Cryptology Center and can see UFO missions, as terror mission UFOs should now follow a similar trajectory to normal UFOs and not be so blatantly obvious.

For what it's worth, I'd see that as a feature anyway. The idea of the Xenonaut Commander deliberately allowing the aliens to commence their attack so his soldiers can ride in and save the day in a very obvious manner has a cynical appeal to me.

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This is something I can't agree with. Like said, the ground combat is the meat and bones of the game. No, scratch that. It is THE GAME. There should be feedback from it. Game should recognize when you do well and when you fail spectacularly. I don't agree with this modern definition of "deferred success" where a major fuck-up isn't recognized for what it is. It is exactly for the game to tell the player if they are doing well or not. The player can lie to himself, but the game will tell the truth.

Now, would the funding nations care? I don't know, if they see you constantly carrying more than half of the squad out in body bags, what do you think? Doesn't exactly inspire confidence, now does it?

By design, the air combat is just a chore and gimmicky mini-game (no offence). There are no real stakes in losing aircraft and fighter pilots.

In contrast, the ground combat should be where the stakes are high and failure is not an option. By removing the ratings, you're making it less important. To me, X-Com is not a game where you nuke things from orbit and manage spreadsheets. Airstrike is a great option, but it should be approached with care: even before this patch I found myself just doing terror and base missions. At this rate the ground combat will just become a mandatory training camp for your troops.

TL;DR, please don't remove the ratings. If you must, make them just informative.

You misunderstand my point. The point is that a rating system doesn't understand context. If you lose all but one of your squad members completing a terror site that could be a pyrrhic victory or it could be a heroic victory depending on how well the rest of the game has gone and how strategically important the terror site was, but you'd get the same rating in either case.

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OK, so after playing a few combats with the new system, I can say for sure: I don't like it.

I see this whole game as a way of setting up ground combats. Ground combat is the reason that you want to play this game.

The air combat is cool, and getting to manage the whole planetary defense is awesome, but the reason you do these things is to give context to a bunch of turn based ground combats.

Research and production are great, but again, you do them to improve your ground combat missions.

With only a penalty available for carrying out a UFO recovery, players are discouraged from doing ground combat. If I shoot it down and air strike it, I get the maximum monthly funding bonus, because I do not risk any civilian or local forces losses.

I understand that you only get half of the instant money but consider this:

A region is getting very close to stopping funding all together. Now you had better stop recovering UFOs that you shoot down in the area. How does that make sense?

Surely a smaller boost from both operations would be a better solution.

I really don't think there should ever be a penalty for playing the core part of the game.

(I mean only the chance of penalty with no chance of a boost)

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Taking out a landed UFO or thwarting a terror attack or destroying an alien base will grant you a national relations bonus - we just haven't had the system to do this implemented yet.

Okay, good. That's all I've wanted to know in all of these discussions.

Beyond that, it's all just balancing of the cash value and income changes so that the numbers make sense.

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I understand that you only get half of the instant money but consider this:

A region is getting very close to stopping funding all together. Now you had better stop recovering UFOs that you shoot down in the area. How does that make sense?

Personally I think you've overestimating the cost of civilian deaths, as that situation would almost never occur. You get a lot more points for general interception work (or failure) than you do from the small penalty for killing / failing to save civilians.

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Personally I think you've overestimating the cost of civilian deaths, as that situation would almost never occur. You get a lot more points for general interception work (or failure) than you do from the small penalty for killing / failing to save civilians.

It's perception that matters though. The players will believe doing ground mission over airstrike will result in notable funding decrease unless the game directly states it not to be true, in which case we are back to the problem of no one really caring about what happens to the civilians. I still believe saved civilians should grant +1 bonus to counter -2 hit from dead civilians (which is very common); this should help alleviate the misconception and shouldn't have significant impact on the game since, as you said, civilian cost is barely relevant.

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@StellarRat, shooting down a terror/base UFO won't give you the same bonus as resolving and actual terror or base mission. Taking out a crashed UFO is significantly easier than either of those mission types because many of the occupants will be dead. There's an issue where players could then choose to let a terror attack happen, then defeat it, in order to get the funding boost - but that can realistically only happen once you have unlocked the Quantum Cryptology Center and can see UFO missions, as terror mission UFOs should now follow a similar trajectory to normal UFOs and not be so blatantly obvious.
I understand that a recovery mission is easier than a full terror or base assault, but if your jets destroy an inbound UFO on a terror mission it seems to me that you've already won terror mission even if you don't put boots on the ground and should get the full relations bonus for a terror victory (or base assault.) The headlines would read, "XCom reports great air victory in fight against aliens!" or something like that, sort of like winning the Battle of Britain. It's fine if you don't want to do that, but I think it's wrong.
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The new screen isn't going to explicitly show the funding increase / decrease on it. It'll probably just have separate Good / Bad / etc ratings for the aliens killed, civilians and local forces surviving and xenonaut units lost. I'll probably just have "civilian losses slightly reduce nation funding" as a loading screen tip. I'll release some concepts at some point, as it's a bit difficult to have this discussion without you guys knowing what it looks like.

@StellarRat - that logic only works everyone knew that particular UFO was going to perform a terror attack, though. If the US had shot Bin Laden a year before 9/11 it wouldn't have been celebrated anywhere near as much as it actually was.

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@StellarRat - that logic only works everyone knew that particular UFO was going to perform a terror attack, though. If the US had shot Bin Laden a year before 9/11 it wouldn't have been celebrated anywhere near as much as it actually was.
True enough, but doesn't the Quantum Cryptology Center allow you know that? I've never built one, yet. Also, just as a side point, for the civilian population "visible" victories are all that matter, but in the intelligence community including the policitians that approve funding, behind the scenes victories are just as important IMO. They know whether a secret program is working and whether it deserves more funding even if the public is totally in the dark. Edited by StellarRat
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