Varitt
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Posts posted by Varitt
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XCOM 2012 had an experience system tied to alien kills where base stats did not improve, but you unlocked new abilities instead.
Actually, base soldier stats do improve when you rank up in XCOM. http://xcom.wikia.com/wiki/Stat_Growth
[RANT]
Personally, out of all the stats of the original games, the one I dislike the most is reflexes, by far.
In my opinion its over complicated and has no sense whatsoever. It also forces you to have a great deal of knowledge of the game mechanics and be incredibly careful before making a move, EVEN if you happen to know where enemies are located and how many unused TUs they have (which you very rarely do).
XCOM2012 overwatch system on the contraire, is a thousand times better in my opinion.
[/RANT]
Anyways if you want to keep the reflex stat, you might as well rename it Agility and also link it to mobility. Instead of a save if hit as you mentioned, I believe it would be easier to just add a few "defense/evade" points? So if a soldier with 10 agility standing in the open has a 80% of being hit, a soldier with 20 agility would have a 75%.
Bravery had sense in the original games due to psionics. If you dont like them/dont plan on implementing them, I would just remove it entirely and proceed as you mentioned, by having all soldiers start with 100 morale and getting it affected by events in the battle (+5 for every alien killed, -15 for every ally lost, going into panic checks after it has gone down to a certain amount).
it might be interesting if the base Accuracy stat doesn't increase, but soldiers earn accuracy bonuses for specific weapons via weapon familiarisation. Spend a lot of time using a laser rifle and you'll naturally get much better with it; but switch to a laser shotgun or a plasma rifle and you're back to your base accuracy stat.I really like this, but I would consider weapon type rather than weapon family. So people gets familiarized to rifles or sniper rifles, with a varied penalties whenever there is a new weapon family.
About perks, I don't have much to add, it sounds nice
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Hmm... On ways to limit amount of combat missions to avoid grinding feel... What about fatigue mechanic like what Long War mod has? So soldiers can't be in too many missions or their effectiveness will drop too much.
The problem is that if you have a global team of only 6 people, if you fatigue them you're basically committing too much.
The mechanic work in LW cause you have a roster of 50+ soldiers. It's supposed to avoid power-leveling rather than setting pace (although it does set the pace sometimes).
That's kinda the point though - the idea is that the local teams don't have grade-A equipment, and have to make do with hand-me-downs or mass produced cheaper / less effective gear. If they all had the same gear then the global / local missions would feel too similar.I dont think it'll feel similar. On one hand you'll have missions of 4 members with worse equipment, trying to do chirurgical objectives, probably trying to avoid going into open firefights, and on the other hand you'll have squads of 6/8 well equipped soldiers going on the classic "eliminate all forces and retrieve the equipment" mission.
I know that you're not supposed to equip them all, but depending on the tech development pace, I doubt you'll be able to give more than 2 pieces of new equipment per region before you start to focus on something else/get to a resource bottleneck. That's why I though less would be more manageable, since if you get bad luck with missions in a region you have absolutely no good tech it's going to be a pain. And of course you probably wont remember the names of most soldiers in the squad when you have a roster of 36 people you barely use.
In the first game you were meant to only do a couple of crash sites per UFO size and airstrike the rest, but people found they could "farm" them for profit and did far more missions than they were meant to ... then they complained about the repetitive experience of the game missions. The lesson I've learned is that if people feel they can gain any strategic advantage through grinding missions, some people will feel obliged to do it even if it results in the game being less fun for them.
That's why I want a hard cap on the number of missions. I'm then relying on the other possible non-combat event solutions to make the system feel less arbitrary than it does in XCOM 2012 where there's nothing you can do about the other two missions you choose not to play.
Oh, and regarding the soldier perks / stats - that's a good point and it reminds me that I should post something up about trying to combine the two systems!
I absolutely agree here. However, note that the system Xcom2012 did with the abductions (chose 1 out of 3) was not met with good critics, as it was too forced.
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I really like the direction where this is heading, which is a very different direction than XCOM 2 mind you.
My only 2 comments:
* I believe a local squad of 6 might be too much. I would lower it down to 4 and then maybe make the global strike team 8. My reasoning here is that whenever you get a new technology, you would (ideally) want to equip all your soldiers. 7 teams of 6 soldiers amount to 42 units to equip. That is just too much. Considering that the first 6 are kind of obligatory.. you would have to buy at least 18 more pieces of equipment to have half of your local teams equipped. If you do 6/8 + 4 instead, you would have to build 8 for the global team and then 12, which is significantly less. Another reason to support this is that if you really want to go "characters" vs "faceless", having 36 soldiers that you only take in a mission every now and then goes against this. I feel like 24 is a much more manageable number.
* I feel like in this setup, having squadron fleets per region (rather than globally) would make a lot more sense.
I still dont quite get why would they want to ravish the planet if they cant really escape, unless the resources they need to "refuel" do not get destroyed by the nuclear war and they just wanted to escape the planet.
Maybe nuking down the planet would be like plan B, in case everything goes wrong and their are originally just trying to subdue humans.. they were coming to occupy the earth anyways so..
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If you decide to go the way of the aliens conquering territory and setting up a base (pretty much what the Long War Mod does) it gets trickier to balance, yes, because so far a full radar coverage from the get go is planned (right?).
If not, you could just have the AI take one or two bases outside radar coverage and then start moving to countries on cover. That way you would definitely fight all kind of missions but the game might drag on too long.
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Well, to be honest, if the maps are well done and the objective's not tedious, it may not be repetitive.
Look at how XCOM tackled some Council/DLC missions.. The maps are the same everytime but I still have a blast playing them.
As for the chain of events, as Max suggested, it would be really interesting to see some kind of infiltration attempts going on, and the infiltration developing to the point one of the regions start sabotaging the other countries/your base. Apocalypse's "investigate" feature was really neat and could be applied here. Like if you shot down a few UFOs flying by Argentina, you could "investigate" the country by doing a NOE scan with one of your interceptors over the major cities, at the risk of political repercussions if you fail, and a mission to reduce the infiltration level if you succeed.
Like you say, one feature that would really suit this premise would be to revamp the alien capture system. The interrogations of live aliens could give the player intel about on-going infiltration/alien plans that alien knows of. So if you capture a Caesean by shooting down a UFO leaving Argentina, he would have intel of where in Argentina the aliens are focusing and what are they planning.
About the actual missions.. well, you could try to switch it up a bit and for example have a mission where the juggernaut tries to destroy the radar facilities of a country, so you would have to stop him before he reaches his destination. Or the Sebilians invading one of your factories, or the caesians infiltrating one of your Research labs. Having the buildings distributed by country give you the chance to implement missions with different repercussions when losing/scoring badly other than just increasing panic.
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I really like all the new ideas, except maybe the part where you can only shoot down the UFOs after they've triggered the event, but I see what you're trying to do.
In your example, what would happen if you eliminate the infiltrators?
I mean.. would you see the landed UFO in the mission? If so, would you get the rewards of a landed UFO?
Maybe the technologies you mentioned that would "automatize" a lot of missions can instead let you see the UFO incoming? When you see it, you could decide to alert the concerned party or go try down it yourself before the event ever happening (for this you would have to AT LEAST experience the event once, so you wouldn't be "missing out" completely, and you could balance it around that the rewards of letting the event go through and then attack would have better rewards than shot down/alert).
Otherwise once you researched the technology you would never see those kind of missions anymore (if understood correctly)?
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Why, yes, I do think a squad-based tactics game could support this sort of thing, though I think it means parting with the traditional XCOM Geoscape mechanic. I don't think that this is a bad idea, because the XCOM Geoscape (that is, everything outside of the Battlescape, which includes research and production), never offered very much strategic depth or replay value.
I love most of your ideas here!
I would only suggest small changes:
- Make sure the research labs and factories stay linked but remain separate buildings (so that the aliens can chose to attack/bombard one or the other).
- Give the player a little bit more of choice when regards to radar coverage and lab main field (i would have the player chose the field of expertise when the base is initialized).
- I would still maintain a budget, otherwise the pacing of the game would be ruined (in the sense that you could start research of all fields as soon as you boot up the game). Maintaining a budget makes sure you can only start with one or two base/radars.
I was thinking about that idea, and thought of a nice system where the aliens would attack the different countries and their garrisons based on attack scores.
So.. every [N - M] days a wave of ufos would descend into earth. Let say every 8 to 12 days.
In the tutorial (wave 0) there would be a single scout that was just testing the earth's atmosphere and got downed by us).
Wave 1 would be mostly scouts with a few corvettes. Imagine a situation basically where there are like 50 ufos coming down to earth at once, attacking different parts of the earth in squadron formations. Each squadron would have N fighters escorting N ships with a ground force.
Embracing the idea where you were able to command squadrons of interceptors (rather than single) you could maybe intercept one of these attacks, probably the one closest to your base. There's your mission (it would be very neat to see in the battlescape several downed ufos at once (mostly decorative/fighters with just one or two aliens inside and - it would create some very unique maps).
Otherwise you can just make most of the ships explode mid-air leaving nothing but some recoverable items, and one that gets to the ground for your mission.
For the rest of the world, I was thinking of something like this:
Each country/region would have an anti-air Attack score.
Each alien attack would have a Defense score.
We compare these scores and then process casualties for both sides. So for example, Southafrica would have an score of 6000, incoming an Alien wave of 8000. SA's AntiAir would strike down 3/4ths of the initial alien wave before they get to the ground. Let's say that two small carriers got to the ground. These small carriers would host alien troops that would also be measured in score. In this case an Attack score. Southafrica would have a number of garrisoned troops, that would act in this case as their Defense score. So again, for the sake of the example lets say that the landed troops add up to an score of 8000 (we can calculate this assigning an score to each unit + its equipment). Southafrica's troops would be ill-equipped in this first wave, so let's say they have 10000 troops, each with a score of 5 (so a Def score of 50000). This would mean that 1200 SA soldiers would die in this battle, reducing their effective garrison score to 8400. THIS WOULD BE THE NEW PANIC SCORE. The garrison would slowly regenerate, but if more powerful waves arrive and the SA's troops don't get better equipment, the odds will start to look bad. One the garrison is depleted, the aliens would have overran the country/region.
Alien troops could also decide to focus the attack in one country, killing all their troops and making a forward base. A forward base would put a much bigger strain to neighbor countries, since ufo transport would not be a necessity.
Different alien attacks like bombarding would also directly reduce the garrison and its regeneration rate.
The Xenonauts' role would be to carefully choose their attacks, picking off the small alien groups and shooting down the ufos making sure they dont explode mid-air, so that they can go retrieve their technology. This technology, using the ideas presented by lemm would be developed into new equipement and distributed among all countries (as long as there is enough production capacity) or to some countries for more funding. The funding would then be used to improve the facilities, open up new ones, or donated to a certain country to improve its defenses. All while trying to figure out how to drive out the aliens once and for all.
God, i would love to develop this.
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Mmhm.. maybe if the aliens realize that there is this cold war, they can do sabotage missions and make it look like it was something done by the opposite alliance? Maybe by mind controlling a few agents and leaving intentional proof.
So for example the aliens mind control a US agent to go sabotage some Russian weapon station (or whatever). The Russians just dont know the agent was mind controlled (and backed up by a contingent of aliens) so they will start to consider going on a guerrilla war with the US (or the Xenonauts for that matter) while the invasion is taking place.
The aliens could also manipulate the Russians (if this happen) into making them think they're on their side, hence this would kinda give a believable scenario of humans siding with aliens.
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I guess that at the very least there would be the need to create an interface to select a squad with a system that uses some kind of points to equip them or choosing certain alien units.
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Forcing Missions:
Yes, you can "force" a specific mission by using a powerful UFO to spawn it but it's not a very good way of doing it. This is what Xenonauts already does, albeit in a somewhat limited manner.
In short, if a player is capable of shooting the UFO down they will obviously do so and so experienced players will still be able to get ahead in the air war and effectively shut down the invasion, missing out on the associated content. If it's not possible to shoot down the powerful UFO, then you may as well have just hardcoded it.
Not really. Look at what the guys from the Long War (Firaxis' XCOM Mod) did. Basically you start seeing Large UFOs from the start of the game, that are on their way to do particular missions. You are not supposed to be able to stop them until later in the game, and it also makes a lot of sense in this scenario of an Alien invasion. You can only shoot down the small stuff in the begging and you will have to deal with the big ones in a different matter (or don't deal with them) until you get to their level.
Eventually you will be able to avoid these missions, yes. But that should be a good thing, as it gives the player a sense of overachieving.
The whole point of this setup is that both sides are trying to co-operate to defeat the aliens and save humanity, but do so without letting their arch-enemy get the advantage over them. And once the conflict turns against the aliens and one of the major powers inevitably achieves dominance over the other, perhaps the idea of making an alliance with the remaining (and increasingly desperate) aliens would suddenly seem much more attractive than it did at the start of the war.I don't think this makes any sense as long as the alien's objectives are to kill/enslave all mankind.
How would they get in touch with the alien leaders anyway?
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The only good multiplayer would be a co-op mode, balanced around having 2 Xenonauts commanders working at the same time against the alien invasion, but that would take too much coordination to pull off even if it was somehow coded in.
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Yes, I also really liked the class distinction in theory, but in game it felt little more than a recoloring.
Further separating classes and roles within each alien race would go a long way to increase the game's replayability in general.
I liked how this was done in the original game, although maybe it would make more sense to change up the names a little bit.
For example I would like to see something like:
Crew - Most basic unit
Navigator - UFO operator
Soldiers - Specialized combat unit, that as Max mentioned can be further divided into combat roles
Guard - Noble Escort
Noble/Commander - Specialized unit (depending on race, for example psionic for Caesean), VIP.
Elite Guard - Most powerful offensive units (higher aim/armor/hp) of the race
Lord/General - Most powerful ability units (in case of Caesean for example, the highest psionic capacity)
Although 7 units per race may be too much, I kind of like how this would progress (it makes a lot of sense IMO)
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It's not going to be a trivial amount of effort to create the maps and systems required to support human vs. human conflict, and it doesn't then seem sensible to have an entire class of missions and content that only happens occasionally and possibly only if you're losing the game.
Why should they be different maps tho? Does this mean you are ruling off procedural gen altogether?
IF you are ruling it off indeed, what should be possible to do is to create the map and then specify the "landing" spots. Much like the different ships in X1, you would change the tileset for that region to be either the crashed human/ufo ship depending on the type of mission.
People have mentioned that it was a bit lame you could shut down base attack, base defence and terror attacks by getting ahead of the air war in Xenonauts 1 because you miss out on a lot of content by doing it. If you want a more varied game then you can't leave it all to chance.There are three options to "force" these missions.
1- You hard script them. Not the best option imo.
2- You have the UFOs that go execute the mission be REALLY hard to shoot down until you get like super advanced tech (and even so, with all upgrades, make them still a challenge to shoot down, possibly requiring more than one interception per fully upped ship).
3- Make the ships that execute this mission have a new stealth technology to them, that makes it incredibly hard to notice by our radars (of course you will then have to justify why not every ship have this).
Sure, you can have an EXALT-style group of alien-supporting humans that pose less of a threat than a major power, but then that's not really using the Cold War theme at all. Similarly, if you're not playing as a major power you miss out on the chance of competing with another similar organisation for influence in the rest of the world.Aaaand this was what I loved the most about XCOM apoc. You didnt really needed an excuse. Aliens were a nuisance, yes.. but the politics of the whole world (or city) kept on going. It's not as simple as "I wont fund you anymore" but "I will create my own group to combat this, you suck, and I will fight you for resources".
Maybe if you somehow make it that the aliens are not keen on just destroying earth and this becomes apparent (like my previous suggestion of them being here just to war (kinda like transformers) or to get a particular important item and leave, or to use the earth as an arena.. etc), you can focus a LOT more on what will happen after the aliens leave. How will the technology contaminate earth and how will it affect politics.
THAT will differentiate this new game from every other game in the genre, and in my opinion it will add a whole lot of depth to it. Of course, there are a lot of details to polish but I hope you see what Im trying to say.
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So.. let's see. I mostly agree on a complete graphic overhaul on most of the aliens except maybe Reptilians and Caeseans.
Psionics could be a little bit more spread-out; if they are indeed a group one would expect them to try to get what's better from one race and put it on the other races. So for example.. in order to amplify this, Reptillian Medics or Commanders could give a regen Aura, boosting the regeneration of nearby allies.
Harridans can fully become the technicians, boosting the performance and AI of every robotic unit in a medium range.
They can also repair them and use support abilities, besides being just "obnoxious flying snipers".
Androns on the other hand can be more prone to use explosives.. That would differentiate them from Sebillians quite a lot (apart from damage resistances). Maybe they should not be AS tanky in order to balance them out.
In my opinion Wraiths could drop teleportation and opt for stealth.
Being harder (but not impossible) to detect while cloaked would give them a really distinct ability, specially if they would coordinate an attack.
There is a huge room for improvement here, as the aliens had basically no abilities. They just shot.
Praetors are this huge psionic entity, and I think they worked a lot, except for their first iteration with infinite range mind-control.
I would not add too many species if you are also planning to give each race subclasses tho, as it would be too much cluttering in my oppinion.
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Well maybe there's a progression to the technology.
A new jet uses well known technology, that although can be expensive, it is easy to replicate.
The new weapons, armors and eventually jets are prototypes for the most part, and will remain prototypes for most of the war.
Even if you were to balance things out between these, think that new jets would re-use a lot of "old tech", and only small modules would incorporate alien-tech.
Also, a lot of the components of the new vehicles/jets could be extracted directly from the UFOs, hence they have no actual cost, and you just pay for the ensambling.
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The two things that annoyed me the most about the first game where the ending and the lack of maps.
The ending really restrained you, too.. and the fact that you structured the way you did meant that we only got to see a few praetors in action before the last mission (where you could one-shot him from afar with the right team, at least in the 2nd difficulty).
I guess that if you do set out to make a remake, procedural or semi-procedural map generation should be a priority. You have no idea how much replay-ability that alone gives to a game.
I agree with you that you should really focus on making the maps in general more attractive, as they were a little bit bland in a lot of scenarios... And if possible aim for 100% destructibility.
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Well, I had though of an scenario that would merge quite well with the first game's lore, and that would provide a completely new experience.
Consider an alternate reality where the aliens get to earth not to conquer, but to use as an arena of sort, and wage war against each other. This could be the way they settle their disputes in their multi-racial culture, just for entertaining themselves or maybe a rite of passage for the different alien overlords.
Anyways, you would have Caeseans (psionic sensible), Reptilians (great physical attributes), Wraiths (small in number but deadly, kinda like assassins), Harridans with their andron puppets (once the puppetmaster is dead all bots deactivate?). Reapers can be used as lions in the colosseum, stirring things up. The Praetors would act like the "arbiters", only starting to appear very late in the game when the human presence stopped being a fun obstacle, but rather a defining force.
Basically, with the above races you would have 4 groups battling each other, and humanity got caught in the cross-fire. This can be developed in several ways, including battles of more than aliens vs humans, but for Caeseans vs Reptilians vs Humans for example. Once our elite task force start to get a hold of what's going on, and once interrogations start, the different alien commanders could get in touch with you to ask for your favor in exchange of certain technologies and free-passage through the territory.
This would also allow a huge diversity in the aerial game, each race having their unique trait not only in the battlefield, but in the air. In the battle-field, there should be real distinction between each class of enemies, and each race should have various soldier roles, going for a different strategy.
I believe that the above concept would be a really fresh approach to the genre, while still maintaining a lot of what made the first game great.
Xenonauts 2 - Soldier Stats / Progression
in Xenonauts 2 Discussion / Suggestions
Posted · Edited by Varitt
To be fair rookie soldiers are still the very best the Earth has to offer
A solution to that would be to associate Morale to ranks. So an officer would have 120 Morale vs a Rookie with 100 (magic numbering for the sake of examples
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I agree with you that Strenght's rather useless.
The overwatch system... the annoying thing is to set up for an ambush when you know they're coming but the soldier not shooting on site, waiting until they dance in front of him and unload their weapons before reacting. If instead of the reflex calculation the soldier would just shoot when the enemy appears and tries to move while on sight, that would a fantastic improvement.
Just have the player decide which is the preferred overwatch shot and done.