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Greetings all, A little preface here on relative skill level: The issues I want to talk about get more obvious and more of an issue the better a player is, hence this preface. This is sort of an inverse of "Get gud". However, it may appear I am asking to make the game easier in general, that is not the case. I would like the game to be harder if anything, but at the end where it makes sense for it to be hard and not at the beginning where it doesn't. More on that later... A note on my own skill level: I've completed pretty much every decent strategy game on the hardest possible difficulty, that includes games like: XCOM (The originals, terror from the deep excepted as I never got into it), XCOM (The Remakes), Jagged Alliance (even the awful reloaded one), Panzer General, Peoples General, etc. Also, some hard realtime stuff like EUIV (One-tagged the world), Shogun II total war (Impossible Ironmanned it), etc. I also have a youtube where I do hardest possible turn based Ironman campaigns, though that is mostly battletech. If your interested in that or simply want to verify, you can find it at www.youtube.com/TheEdmon and I hope you enjoy it :). My two key issues with XCOM type games are thus: 1) In the early game no-one seems to know there is a war on and it determines everything. 2) Win-More, Lose-More gameplay. The early game: Most of these turns based games are won in the first 6-10 hours and the rest of the game is just a walk to the victory screen, provided you don't make some critical mistake. But if you are winning hard enough, early enough, the odds of a critical mistake drops: 1) You win early missions with no losses and get more stuff. 2) So you have more money to expand, upgrade and research faster, with no losses to replace. 3) You are powering faster than the difficulty curve due to the above and can afford more coverage (when applicible). 4) You win more easily, due to your powering, which leads to less/no future losses and more money. 5) The cycle repeats, with your A-Team carrying you to the victory screen often without any losses at all. Dont you know there is a war on? The early XCOM game has this weird tone, situational as well as gameplay issue. You start off weak, barely any better or the same as a standard military of the time period. Then the game pretends like other militaries don't exist or are unable to mount even the slightest defence. So, where you are and what coverage you can get early is all that matters. This means that (often randomly), the game is determined by how much of the early hostiles appear near you (so you can deal with them) and is a race for you to power up as quickly as possible so you can protect the earth. The game balance revolves around this, making it so that you can get more ahead very quickly because you are 100% of the force being exerted against the aliens. That 100% can be vastly different between a good player and an excellent one, let alone a weaker casual player. You are totally and 100% critical in the early game, so balancing that early game becomes very difficult. I have always thought a good way to solve this problem would be to have the player be more like 10% of the force in the early game. NPC Military, coverage, airforces, etc. So what if we do this instead: 1) NPC's have military bases, airforces, coverage just like you do. 2) There is a lot more alien activity in the early game, but NPC militaries can barely handle it. The scramble interceptors, shoot down hostiles, airstrike, etc. 3) You can place your base to try and protect a country with a weak military, like africa, or place it where activity is high to protect a stronger NPC so they are useful for longer... The early game then consists of a world at war against the aliens and actually holding it's ground. You are there, to shoot down what appears in your general area, steal technology, go on missions, etc as usual. But you are not 100% of the fight, more like 10% of it. Of course, as the game goes on, your technology improves and so does the aliens. But your human allies do not. So in the mid game, they start to lose and some very badly: 1) You can see NPC bases and interceptons getting crushed. 2) Gaps appear in earths defence, relations sour. 3) It becomes clear that you must fill in the gaps, protect your allies, etc. You can afford to make the general alien presence that much more, when there is a lot of NPC defence around to handle it. Taking the pressure off the early game. In the late game: 1) NPC presence is all but gone, now it's all down to you. 2) Difficulty can be much higher 3) You've had time to put coverage in place, but the pressure you are under can also be higher than in a normal XCOM like difficulty curve. In conclusion: The early game matters too much, player skill level cannot effectively be balanced for, due to the snowballing effect that is caused by the player being 100% of the force against the aliens. The tone is also odd, where is everyone else, don't they know there is a war going on? My thought is to try and shift this to the mid game, while also fixing the weird lore and tonal issues. What do you guys think?