dsjolie

I don't really know/remember how missions are impacted by your response time as of now but making this more important seems like the most obvious and logical way to motivate a spread of meaningful bases. Maybe the simplest of all would be to give a (more?) significant bonus to relations for a quick response to an alien event? This would make it valuable to reduce the flight time to an event and thus to have nearby bases. I'm skeptical about suggestion #3 since these bonuses might easily become a bit too attractive and thus "force" game decisions. This might be avoided if it's really well balanced but that can be very hard to achieve indeed. I kinda like #2 and I don't really have any feelings about #1.

Hehe... Sounds good! As an additional use-case: I do all my gaming on my TV/HTPC nowadays, from the sofa with a wireless keyboard and mouse. I pull the TV closer when I need to but it would be nice to be able to read the text comfortably on a decently sized TV from a few meters away. (I have pretty sharp eyesight )

Well, if it's a matter of adjusting numbers to get balanced results that should be work that beta-testers and/or modders can/should do? Can we expect to be able to play around with numbers that affect these aspects, at our own risk?

There seems to be at least two general approaches here: Adding features and motivations to the game as it is, to make it feasible and enjoyable to play through the game while doing fewer ground combat missions. Adapting aspects of the "story progression" to allow for faster play throughs. E.g., the alien invasion is smaller in numbers while still (at least as) aggressive. I see a few interesting suggestions along the lines of approach 1 here. And the point about needing a smaller (cheaper, faster to train/construct, etc) force when making fewer missions is a good one. I like this discussion, but I want to suggest that approach 2 might also be worthy of consideration. I'm imagining this more like the settings in Civilization where you can customize how long you'd like the game to be. I.e., do you want to play a game that you can play through in a few evenings or one that you will have to come back to over a few months. Note that one point with a "desired approximate game length" setting is that I absolutely would like it to be possible to have a really epic playthrough that would take a lot of time etc. Ideas along approach 1 above might be good to still make this less repetitive.

Could someone remove this thread, in favor of http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php?1143-Amount-not-difficulty-of-ground-combat. The parenthesis in the title of this thread seems to mess the forum links up.

As previously discussed in the Automatic Ground Combat thread, a large number of ground combat missions can become tedious. While I was very happy to see that the position of the development team seems to allow you to select how much ground combat you want to do, I just want to emphasize some additional points. I like ground combat and I like it to be difficult. I just don't like doing very similar missions many times. I very much like the geoscape part of the game: progressing through the story and researching new technologies. I really appreciate games that are "time efficient", that are packed with interesting and difficult gameplay but do not use repetitive content as "fillers" to increase play time. (Among fans of a 20 year old game, I'm sure I'm not alone in having limited time for gaming ). With these points in mind, and the quote by Chris, I just want to bring up how the amount of ground missions that you chose to do affects the progression of the game. Of course you will "miss out" on the loot and experience from these ground missions. (?) Will the story progress at the same pace anyway? Will this make it unreasonably difficult in the long run? Maybe some thought could be given to "difficulty" settings specifically addressing this. I.e., not making combat (any single mission) easier but still making the game faster and shorter.

As previously discussed in the Automatic Ground Combat thread, a large number of ground combat missions can become tedious. While I was very happy to see that the position of the development team seems to allow you to select how much ground combat you want to do, I just want to emphasize some additional points. I like ground combat and I like it to be difficult. I just don't like doing very similar missions many times. I very much like the geoscape part of the game: progressing through the story and researching new technologies. I really appreciate games that are "time efficient", that are packed with interesting and difficult gameplay but do not use repetitive content as "fillers" to increase play time. (Among fans of a 20 year old game, I'm sure I'm not alone in having limited time for gaming ). With these points in mind, and the quote by Chris, I just want to bring up how the amount of ground missions that you chose to do affects the progression of the game. Of course you will "miss out" on the loot and experience from these ground missions. (?) Will the story progress at the same pace anyway? Will this make it unreasonably difficult in the long run? Maybe some thought could be given to "difficulty" settings specifically addressing this. I.e., not making combat (any single mission) easier but still making the game faster and shorter.