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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?

Ground combat is good enough already even in the beta - I like it! What spoils the game for me now is an air combat. I am trying to understand whats wrong with it. I like bases and fighters management in general, so I want air combat to be in the game but something totally wrong with it now and its not even balance but smth else. Its about lack of tactic elements maybe. In ground combat I can win a battle against stronger enemy if I use my soldiers wisely but in air combat its all about raw power - I have enough power and I win, or I dont have enough power (my fighters are damaged or low of fuel) and I loose. I can do very little about it even in a manual mode. Air combat is just something which is out of my control.

Yeah, that mod is a good proof of concept. Large bombers modified to be effective against certain UFOs would be pretty cool, you'd have to be very careful and protect them against even scouts and other fast maneuverable UFOs

Sorry, Comrade. Trashman got it 100% right. Flying low over water is a death sentence inside of engagement range. You have nowhere to hide and no energy to maneuver with. Flying low avoids radar in certain circumstances, but most of those circumstances are when dealing with surface radars. If you are within detection range of an enemy aircraft, flying low will just make you easy prey, unless you're in an exceptionally mountainous area. The only time you want to fly low over water is when approaching an enemy ship or surface installation and you're trying to use the curvature of the earth to conceal yourself until the last possible moment. There are also many problems with doing it this way and arguments for approaching as high as possible instead (mainly that once they see you, you can't do anything except hope you get them first, which is why many anti-shipping missiles do this, but combat aircraft do not.) I can see altitudes being useful in a couple of different ways. You have to actually engage the UFO, so the UFO is going to generally pick the altitude where the battle takes place. UFOs typically don't react to human aircraft unless they're directly under attack or the UFOs are interceptors. A Scout UFO might be at a low altitude, scanning towns, abducting people, mutilating cattle, etc. Your aircraft/weapons could have different performance at low altitude and gain some sort of advantage from attacking from medium altitude and dropping down on top of them, etc. An AWACS plane could be in the area and provide some additional data or bonuses to attacking the UFO. This AWACS would then need to be protected from UFO interceptors which would easily destroy it if unprotected. High altitude interceptions could be necessary against more advanced UFOs and maybe even some sort of stratosphere level interceptions in the very late game or against specific rare UFOs. These are just ideas, but it's certainly possible to expand the air combat into something interesting.

I see what you're saying, but that really only makes sense in very long range engagements where you can defend against a missile by forcing it to expend all its energy and fuel trying to constantly adjust course before it reaches you. Maybe instead of having "dodge" as a maneuver, you could deploy limited counter measures, when if timed right would disrupt target lock. The aliens don't have much in the way of missiles currently, but I suppose you could include that as a more common weapon type. UFOs with countermeasures would be interesting too, an extra level of tactics around baiting them to expend their CMs before hitting them. You kinda had this in X1 where you could bait enemy fighters to launch their missiles and then break off to the overworld and then re-engage them once they were depleted for a more advantageous attack. As far as I know, the missiles in X1 are almost impossible to evade without "dodging" so it's probably fine as is, although some other way to more strategically deal with those weapons would be interesting.

It makes you quite visible on radar. Look a bit into air combat mechanics. It's very interesting. I suggest videos like these (especially the second one). The guy explains a lot of things, especially near the end, when he does the battle overview, as he explains both combatants actions.

Seeing as the X2 air combat is currently almost exactly the same as the X1 air combat, I can see how people would be dissastisfied with it. The esstial thrust of air combat in X2 is either: 1) Run straight at your opponent or 2) If you have more than 1 aircraft, kite your opponent into revealing the section of UFO that is uncovered by weapons and start shooting I spent quite a lot of time making air combat more interesting in X1, resulting in three generations of Flying Circuses, and I'm sure Charon can recount his experiences of changing up air combat for X-Division. In my case, what I aimed to do was create an interesting puzzle to crack. Each new UFO presented a different type of challenge. Perhaps it fired swarms of micro missiles. Perhaps you had to fly between multiple turrets. Not all my creations were successful. I think that if X2's air combat is to be more fun, it needs to create new problems of positioning. The rotating turret and energy shield are a good start but there's a lot more that I feel could be done. Firstly, I think that Goldhawk should steal Steambird's control mechanism for aircraft. The mechanism that the original Steambirds uses is an excellent fit for X2's air combat. You can see the turning curve for your aircraft and plan for where it's going to end up without constantly hitting the pause button every few seconds. When the aircraft reaches the end point of its planned movement, that's when you can set up the next plan. I can see this being useful for also setting up and controlling multiple aircraft at once, as you could bandbox aircraft together and set them all by the same plan. Secondly, I think Goldhawk should take a leaf from shmups, specifically the boss fights in shmups. As frantic as Boss fight shmups are, they are all about positioning and that's made possible through the wide range of projectile types that bosses have. As things currently stand, UFOs have two types of projectile - homing and non-homing. There's no continious beams, no aerial mines, no splitters. no swarmers. There's no telegraphing, no wind-up, no obvious lock-on. I'd like to see more projectile types that encourage positioning, because, at the moment, they don't, really.

I don't think terrain should be integral to air combat in any game. It's nice to have but rely on it and you just have worse land combat, because air combat after detection is mostly just "get behind the enemy". A map on a strategic level should be integral though. When UFOs just spawn randomly there is little depth. There ought to be alien bases and/or countries that do more than just give money. The core of air/naval games is logistics and detection. " Flying low over water is a death sentence. " Why?

Altitude and terrain topography should be a thing. There should be cons and pros to high and low altitude. For high altitude, you're dealing with thinner air and clouds obstructing visibility. For low altitude, you're dealing with dense air and terrain. Flying low over water is a death sentence. Hilly or mountainous terrain makes it easier to evade. Flying low over sand desert makes heat seekers less effective. Etc. Tiny bits like that could be implemented in a simple way like "what type of terrain is the aircraft over nad what altitude? Ok, apply bonuses/penalties!"

Like it or not, the air combat system in the first game was quite good. There were a lot of nuances in dealing with UFOs, especially making sure that you attacked from the correct angle on certain enemies, didn't waste fuel on unlikely interceptions and used your weapons carefully. Deciding if it was worth waiting to get them over land or just splash them in the ocean to get the rep boost and clear the skies. The UFO midgame was a great deal of fun with a well developed air defense grid, slapping UFOs down before they could cause much havoc. Escorting your own troops and preventing alien missions from taking place to break down the over all alien invasion plan. Trying to use two fighters to bait an overpowered UFO so you can get the other guy in to knock him down was always tense and the radio chatter added to the feeling that you were watching this from a command bunker somewhere trying to coordinate air efforts in real time. I fondly remember making sacrifices, such as sending in Foxbats past bingo fuel to destroy an Air Terror bomber before it destroyed Los Angeles. They delivered their payloads and saved the city, only to be destroyed by the escort fighters. That turned the tide for that region and it was a great moment of gameplay that came up because I had the options to pursue that course of action. Sending waves of fighters and bombers after a Battleship or Carrier, trying to launch and then escape the area so the second or even third squadron could arrive and add their weight to the on-going fight was great. Even being able to send in fighters to knock out escorts and then escape, opening the way for slower bombers to attack was a great element. There's some resistance to it because it was real time and not turn-based, but that's not really accurate. Since you could pause and issue orders at any time, it was effectively turn-based. You queue up your orders and react to what happens, unpause, let things play out until you need to pause again and do so. Unfortunately, the XCOM Enemy Unknown and Xenonauts 2 style of launching planes into a weird almost idle battler mode isn't fun or satisfying. If that's the style of air combat you prefer, you might as well just take it out of the game entirely and have ground based missile systems get a percent based kill on UFOs that enter the defense range. I think expanding the original model of air combat to make it more interesting with something like pilot experience, different altitudes acting as different 'battle grounds' or 'layers' to your defense (some UFOs are up too high to intercept with normal aircraft and you have to develop new planes that can get up to them and even eventually break the atmosphere into space.) as well as a more complex selection of gear for planes would really have improved the game overall. AWACs and tanker planes as well as recon planes could even have a purpose and you could launch your own bombing missions on alien installations or landed UFOs. Even something like a helicarrier would be an interesting idea for the end game. I know this will never make it into Xenonauts 2, but I think everyone should seriously consider for their XCOM-like games, the possibility of making the air war something integral and interesting rather than an afterthought.

I agree. The same air map (no map at all) is one more reason why air combat is dull - battle conditions are always the same

The problem with air combat in all XCOM-likes is that regions don't do anything special. You're fighting over a blank map, so your air strategy should only vary so much.

i'd like to be able to take NPC &/or other allied units on missions, and have them function under AI. the AI seems to play this game better than I can in a game such as the OP was describing, you could find yourself solo out on a mission with a bunch of allied NPC's all under AI control and that sounds pretty good to me.. ..and the idea when [if] I get back to base I got no idea what's coming next. right on!

Low cover is a 40% reduction in hit chance, so it's better to be standing with low cover than crouched in the open. Crouching behind low cover is 55% reduction in hits ( 1-((1-.4)*(1-.25))=.55 ) 55% reduction in number of hits taken is not nearly enough to feel safe, or to be safe, but it is enough to change your long-term K/D ratio.

I agree with this. I really like the idea of starting with 30-40 NPC RADAR sites (maybe 75% as effective as the starting XN bases at detecting UFOs in their area?) around the globe and maybe 12 air bases launching weak interceptors against UFOS... and having them slowly wink out over time as the Aliens slowly crush the weak NPC militaries. Some just go silent; some send out a "MAYDAY" call, which is ominously cut short; some succeed at repelling the attacks; some might even *appear* to repel the attacks but were compromised giving XN false info? One idea about how to handle NPC combat/events is how XCOM: Apocalypse handled it, just giving a quick "news"/log blurb like "Megapol successfully raided Cult of Sirius site".

Am I the only one who thinks geoscpae should be kinda cluttered? I mean, showing the entire world during an alien invasion, it SHOULD look like all hell is breaking loose and you can barely keep track of anything.

I don't see the "snowball" as a problem. It's a rational, logical outcome of simply being good and improving. With that said, the more the rest of the world (NPC's) are involved, the better. One nice thing might be to be able to invest (send some weapons or armor) to a country and slowly start seeing their troops gets more equipment. So basically, you can hoard things for yourself, or you can spread the love, which makes you weaker in the short term, but buffs some of your allies long-term. @Chris - regarding geospace. You could simplify it and have NPC air combat hidden/approximated, or you can actually show it on geoscape fully, or just as an icon (air combat over X). I guess the idea is that NPC nations/militaries would send fighters up, and inform you when they cannot intercept, and ask you to pitch in. So UFO's being intercepted by NPC would be marked differently on the map. Also, I guess there could a plane limit on NPC bases and a limited reinforcement and cooldown rate, so they cannot just keep sending craft up. A size 10 airfield can hold 10 fighters, with 2 lost aircraft replaced per month, with a repair cooldown of a week (each fighter tracked independently? The whole base?). Basically, keeping the number of airfields and numbers to crunch low, not that it's difficult for modern PC's, but purely to keep the simulation simple. Airfields and friendly bases could be destroyed, in which case the NPC military would try to re-build them over time, starting with a smaller base that might grow each month, depending on how good/bad the nation is doing.

You haven't played Laser Squad? Noob! :P I still dread that dog-like combat bot... but that was my 1st turn-based strategy, probably the 1st turn-based strategy ever. Played it on my C=64, PCs weren't well spread at that time yet. You probably also haven't played Battle Isle 4: Incubation. I wouldn't say that was the hardest of them all - but definitely the most intellectually challenging. You can get it for free. Final Fantasy Tactics... that was also a similar challenge, no random factor as I remember. But yeah, if you ask me which were the best, I would say JA2 and UFO: Enemy Unknown.

I like the idea of seeing friendly aircraft flying around the map. I really like the idea of watching them go down in flames, then sending my fighters to finish of the UFOs.

If local forces started the game providing a decent amount of support, but as the aliens escalate they provide less (both in absolute terms, as the number/quality of their troops drops to attrition damage, and in relative terms, as the aliens get harder), that could introduce a clock pressure element without an artificial 'end' timer; the longer you take to start dealing with the aliens, the worse the tactical situation gets.

For me personally it would be really nice to see Earth's military forces put up the best fight they can on the screen, and then gradually see them ground down in their hopeless struggle against the alien invaders. I think it's a quite visceral experience to see one allied npc aircraft after another shot down, knowing that the nations cannot replace them at the rate they are losing them. It'd strongly reinforce both the direness of the situation and the importance of the fight I am in. I also see no reason not to integrate player options into this: the allied nations send up planes to shoot down UFOs, you can send additional planes to join into a squadron. The allied nations will, sooner or later, try and deal with a crash site themselves. You can either try to be there first so you get all the loot for yourself, wait until they are there and have some allied NPCs helping you, which will then also demand some of the spoils, or just decide that you don't have the time to deal with it and the crash site disappears eventually having been cleared by the nation it is in. As far as difficulty goes - i actually made a post quite a while ago, where i looked into possibilities of keeping the difficulty adapting to player skill and keep the game engaging and challenging throughout all phases. As far as i know part of the central idea - that the AI adapts to player behaviour - is going to be part of Xenonauts 2, albeit i have no information on how significant that will be.

hi I've ordered the soldier pack for the pre-order for this game I really like the idea of this game and wish i could share it with my friends. So was thinking if I could give a helping hand for the translation for this game in korean I might not be able to give you a 100% translation, and I'm not a professional translator. but I think I could manage a rough translation for the core of this game If you provide me with the text files. I do have some experience on translating games. It might still be on closed beta but I believe there are core game parts that will not be altered to the full release. I will focus on those parts.

I'm imagining Earth's NPCs getting slowly eroded like the barriers in Space Invaders. Try as you might, they all get destroyed after enough time. All you can do is hide behind them for a while and try to hit that 500-pointer flying past. So dismal. I love it. In X1, the simulated alien invasion is essentially a clock. Just like in Space Invaders, it is a stream of random attacks that speed up over time. The player's strategy is to organise a defence that strengthens faster than the attack. There is not feeling to that. I mean, its fun, but it is empty. The key is to give it that living feeling. Maybe something like simulating a few big battles between the NPCs and the aliens. These battles would have an outcome without player intervention, but the player could get involved to swing it the other way. The point is for it to be a series of events that exists in their own right - like a film that you could just sit and watch. Or, you could get involved and feel as though you're making a difference.

Even if not a minigif, alternatively you could just add a little red cross on the right bottom of the UFO to tell the player that the UFO is engaged by the country its flying over. Again a visual scaling of how much it is engaged by would be nice. If you implement mechanics its always nice to give the player a visual representation of what is actually going. Visual design is not about realism, just about a symbolic representation of what ( in the best case ) really is going on.

I think a situation where local forces can provide enough assistance to make a difference in the air combat, but not do it by themselves, might be an interesting compromise. Something like SAM missiles that either do damage or limit the maneuverability of the UFO, or 'free' radar coverage from integration with their forces.

I just went through a terror mission and was frustrated by how civilians kept running around, and or to my helicopter, which I have abandoned. Maybe we could set up a mark/flare/smoke signal for the civilians to gather at?

That would make for a better large-scale combat simulator, with the war progressing through phases. But such a thing is not what xcom/xenonauts games tend to be about, where the tactical layer is often referred to as the meat (and/or potatoes) of the game. The strategy layer has meaningful activities (i.e research), yet it is pretty much just for spawning ground combat missions. I mean, compare it to any other strategy game - it is very dilute. For instance, air combat is almost entirely about having the right tier of weapons at the right time. XCOM2 got rid of it entirely and it hardly changed the game. Having said that I reckon it is worth thinking about how it could be beefed up through mods or the like. Firstly, I'm a complete novice in the field of mods. I looked into some of what could be done in X1 but didn't get anywhere. As far as I'm aware, adding an NPC to the geoscape is beyond scope. Although maybe UFOs could be set to create a crash site sometimes instead of landing, i.e. imagining a battle with local forces. I think what you'd want is some indicators/symbols to appear around the globe to give the feel of activity. Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to have some UFOs actually be IFOs, with friendly blue coloured icons. Like I said, beyond me. *However, as for altering the paradigm of the war, I'm pretty sure that could be done. Firstly, early-game ground combat could be made impossible by setting conventional bullet weapons to air-soft damage. Then, neuter the loss condition so you can survive on a diet of air-strikes rather than successful missions (i.e. it is much harder to lose regions). Finally, set the cost of bases, hangars and radars to something negligible so you can build a giant airforce. That would force you to stick to the air game. Something creative would need to be done to make dog fights replayable and fun, e.g. tons more aerial ordnance. The key would be controlling progression to the phase when ground combat were possible. In xcom/xenonauts the leash is always determined by research. To move forward, the R&D of laser weapons would be the latchkey discovery. The simplest solution would be to have the laser research project require many months to complete, so you'd be well into your air war before ground combat is even approachable. Then, as @Edmon says, make soldiers and weapons cheap. A dime a dozen. You throw a dozen laser troopers at a crash site and you are finally able to hold your own, but only against Ceasan solders, or only against the lowest ranks (say if the Ceasan's health is x then other species' health is 100x). Thus, the objective is to loot the aliens, not push them back. Once you bring back enough artefacts from dead Ceasan's, you trigger plasma research. Maybe even have the construction of plasma weapons require an alien rifle (or five). Then, with plasma guns (100 times the damage), you can fight on equal terms with Sebillians... the idea is to make the stats of each alien/weapon tier an order of magnitude beyond the former. Effectively, this would all be to change the strategy from winning ground combat: The last addition I'd make would be to have enemies like Androns be immortal to all but the top tier weapons, and have those top tier weapons require some ludicrous condition for triggering the research. That way, only the most determined player could manage it. It would be a reward for pushing the envelope. I think that everything from the * above is feasible with the settings that could be manipulated in xenonauts 1. The crucial step would be in adding strategical challenges to the strategy layer, otherwise it'd all be for nothing!

I would never refer to anyone as a lesser player, maybe a player with more of a social life than my wife & I I guess my secondary issue, after the one of the balance curve, is just how indisposable everything is. Leading to the death spiral if you lose a few items or a team. Soldiers should be cheap as chips, every weapon being so precious just reduces the tolerence for failure. There is little room for experimentation. This is where the NPC presence can be kind of clever... if you were arming the forces of earth, what does it matter if you produce 100 laser rifles and you lose 8 of them to a wipe? But it is of course, less units to dish out to the rest of humanity to fight back with. I see the Xenonaughts as a sort of glorified research division with a tactical element. In the other games, of course, they do everything and win the day. But I am thinking, instead the game is mostly similar, but you are arming humanity for the fight so they can hold their ground and/or win the day. Goals can be set for arms and research to be provided per month, with the war eventually being won or lost based on the player taking bigger risks to acquire more samples, goodies, etc. It needs a lot of work to turn into a usable element, but I think it solves a lot of the early game issues, while also allowing you to make the game harder at the end... Just more thoughts...

I like the numbers part of the argument, that is convincing. But it kinda sounds like the first phase of the game would be a tutorial, or at least something where you aren't punished for your actions. Maybe that isn't just a bad thing. Part of the joy of the original xcom was the insanely hard first mission - that gauntlet inspired Firaxis to make the tutorial mission in their original remake a disaster: only one soldier survives. I think games in the genre should stay faithful to that: you don't get time to take baby steps whilst you learn why to use cover. If the first few missions are geared so that you can't bring everyone home alive, then you'll learn to accept soldier losses as normal. The mechanics are already in effect to support it - simply make the weapon's stats more of a determinant of firepower than the grunt who wields it. Perhaps if the early game were intended to be a whitewash. So at the beginning, in every instance of ground/aerial combat you are expected to lose. The best you can do is score a few kills and hope to escape with some artefacts from the field. In Earth's desperation, funding is no constraint and you can replace all your stuff easily. Inevitably, the aliens march forward, humanity starts to capitulate, until you crack the science of laser weapons and bring the fight to them. The point would be that neither side would stick around for the battle royale, rather, they'd make a tactical retreat to preserve resources. When you start kicking back harder, then the aliens bring more force to bear. The effect of this would be that by playing better early on you'd save more of Earth from occupation - which would in turn mean that you have more territory to defend later in the game. Thus the 150% player would make a rather difficult bed to lie in. In both of the above paragraphs I'm trying to argue that things like casualties and retreat should be made more of an active part of the game. They're a real part of combat. The problem with going the 150% playthrough is that you become listless. None of the decision making is about acceptable loses. Whilst I'm sure that mechanics to force you to retreat could end up feeling heavy handed, I do think that they'd make the combat simulator more well-rounded. Also, as for the progression of soldiers vs squads, I think that officers should be the ones who get the stat boosts, so making the privates slightly more...expendable.

Thanks for the detailed reply, So my thoughts here are that we are trying to make the balance curve better, by making it such that 90% of the early game is NPC threat and 10% is you. Now imagine a bad player who is a 5% player and a great player who is 15% effectiveness. So we have progression at 95% of expected and 105% of expected, since the average players expected value is 10%. In typical TBS of course, the bad player would be progress is at the 50% rate and the great player is progressing at a 150% rate, since your output is 100% from beginning to end. Really hard to balance for, especially early on. The bad player gets their interceptor shot down for example, but the NPC's are there to also have a bash and they shoot down that UFO instead. Now that bad player can have a bash at the ground combat, rather than their game just being "over" in an instant. Maybe they lose the ground combat, but the NPC's going in and finish the job, sharing some of the takings with you. Good players can be better tracked, if they are making too many kills, more of the alien attack will be diverted to deal with them. This takes the pressure off the rest of the world, but increases the pressure on a good player. Losses and damage will be taken, slowing them down. Once cut down to size, the aliens will return to their war on the planet. I imagine the NPC resistance serves as a wall that is depleted over time, but ultimately doesn't matter in the mid and late game. Both good and bad players will get full coverage eventually, NPC's cover the bad ones until they are ready and/or catch up. To this end, losses should be expected, I would imagine an approach to solider progression more along the lines of valkyria cronicles... of all things. The squad progresses "together" or soliders can be mentored by a vet, getting a part of their EXP, etc. Soliders need to be more disposable, to avoid the "A-team wipe = game over" effect in most of these games. It would be nice if losses inspired people to fight harder... A guy dies, so his brother signs up. He has great stats and a burning desire for revenge, so he's exceptionally brave, etc. You take losses, countries rally behind you as you play up the damage aliens are doing. Your country needs you type of stuff. So we can basically, compensate weaker players with ready to go replacements. Not quite Enterprise-C Enterprise-D "plenty more letters in the alphabet" type stuff, but still :). These are my thoughts atm...