Bobit

IIRC the damage to armor ratio is 1/6th and any damage whether it pierces or not reduces it. It's a very popular system even outside of this genre. Ablative HP and % dmg reduction are less counterable but make more sense to noobs.There are minor problems with X-division's style: Shotguns had the highest shred since it's directly based off of damage. Shred should be a separate stat. Different armor types tends to encourage spamming the same type of one weapon on an enemy. This is nice for tactics, but it meant that researching only one type of weapon often made sense. Weaknesses of that weapon type could be shored off with grenades. I never got past phase 2 though. It's completely invisible, even on the player's units. You can die to smallarms fire just because you didn't know you were shredded. Very binary. To prevent this (if it's something that should be prevented), either damage reduction should often be lower than damage, or there should be "hardiness" from ToME: armour can only reduce at most 75% of the damage. Or maybe as in TGGW, if reduction = dmg then it deals 20% damage, reduction=1.5xdmg it deals 10% damage, reduction = 2.0xdmg it deals 0% damage. This way armour still does something past dmg. Or just make shred bigger, but then I think there ought to be a way to repair armor.

The game is absurdly broken in the AI's favor if you don't use strong ability combos, and absurdly broken in yours if you do. Either way it's not even close to fair and makes 90% of stuff irrelevant. But I like the game. The real weapon aiming adds a lot of strategy, like complex cover, deciding whether lower chance to hit is worth a chance to disarm, dealing with your wounded soldiers. The geoscape has a bit too much loot and too little diplomacy, but I think it's the best one yet in an XCOM-like, there are lots of genuinely different base and diplomacy strategies even if they're not balanced. If hard-working modders get their hands on this game it will be incredible because all of the problems are balance/lack-of-content. It does fail to deliver on its promise of enemy diversity and adaptive AI, often each race has less variants than X-Division, and it frequently makes nonsense decisions with its free actions, although it understands cover well.

Yes, but that's why I said "it has a bad hardcore mode". Nightmare mode is a tacked-on fixed instaloss timer. Like XCOM2's arbitrary-cutoff "you lose!" timer which is so much worse than LW2's gradual reinforcement timer, but applied to a 40 hour campaign where it's even less clear how long things will take. It also means various pieces of content like the side bosses are not viable to attempt. I mean to some degree I think DD just lost me because of extreme lack of content compared to the traditional roguelikes (Brogue, TGGW, Cogmind) I'm used to, and StS where your character has some 30 abilities at a time. And I'm a total sucker for tons of content. But I haven't played it enough to declare it an altogether low-content game. I have played it enough to know that I disagree with that style of permadeath.

And you don't think PP isn't having the same problems with leaning right now? You don't think that '95COM's light cover (as in, anything other than a totally obstructing wall or a hull-down hill) is almost completely useless like the majority of influential OpenX modders? NuCOM's system is very soulful. Hunkering down, improving dodge chance, and similar skills will let you hug cover better, or you can go for the highground with a more aggressive route. It's very powerful to get flanked, but you can also focus on stacking cover-negation like aiming, explosives. If anything it's *too* soulful, to the point that the mechanics start to feel like an impressionistic gimmick. It's "fake", yes, and ultimately realphysik will win out once people spend more time developing it. But every approach takes a lot of work, except for the hybrid one of Xenonauts 1 which was quite good by comparison.

I don't know what he means but I think X-Division showed that Hidden Movement is unnecessary and annoying.

Trashman's #2 is nice if it's balanced right: cover is WYSIWYG, accuracy falloff makes sense. But let's all agree, in UFO defense it just meant cover was completely useless and kneeling sucked. Whereas in XCOM2, cover as a flat CTH reduction meant that hunkering in high cover was exceptionally effective, which was a nice touch. I don't think Goldhawk should bother with it, let PP spend their millions perfecting it. One thing I'm hoping for that probably won't happen (because it doesn't in any vanilla XCOM game) is getting a very different tech progression every time. Some games I want to go mostly shotguns, others rush plasma, others rush explosives. Fmpov XCOM games have always favored a more balanced/boring campaign game where you get a normal amount of everything, maybe giving each mission more room for tactical decisionmaking, but not making games very diverse.

Darkest Dungeon has character permadeath but you physically cannot lose a campaign. It feels like being sent back to level 3 when you lose on level 5.

@Coffee Potato I don't prefer random effects that are just straight bonuses. I also strongly dislike Darkest Dungeon because of its no-permadeath main mode and very poor hardcore mode.

I too would prefer Steam but clicked GoG. Also, should I have a key by now?

"Chance to be oneshot even in armor" is not too fun. Unstoppable bleed is. The damage isn't totally stopped until you make it to the ER. Permanent wounds / bravery loss are pretty cool too. Also, I'm always surprised how much a single anti-armor weapon makes it unviable to scout with armor. You simply can't manually open the front UFO door in X-division; what if they have a flamer who oneshots your shield guy? But confirming that the area is clear of anti-armor troops, and then sending your armored troops in, always feels fun and dynamic. I think Chris has a lower view of tanks (and armored units) in these games than most of us, because the vanilla implementation was not too great. But X-Div and FMP prove that they can indeed have an interesting role, though they are more difficult to balance. Ultimately whatever Chris decides is probably what he will be able to balance the best. And modders can always decide something different.

@Coffee Potato In The Last Hundred Yards (WW2 token wargame), instead of Berserk, they have the Heroic status effect, where the squad gets a large defensive boost, then charges straight towards the enemy. In cover-based games that's a little more awkward, but in that game it's just brilliant at creating sudden massive surges in the fighting line.

Honestly most of this (running, strafing, dogs, training, mutants) exists in OpenXCOM/FMP, and some other things (hard science abilities + attachments) in UFO:AL. I quite like dogs in XFiles. They are fast, deal lots of damage, highly expendable, good day vision, and the best part - can "bark" at enemies as a reaction that lowers their TUs, preventing them from acting. Hold the alien down while the squad closes in!

@Chris Keep in mind the player cheats too! The respective equivalents are: 1) Once players spot an enemy, they will send their 100% TUs allies to attack them, making for a much more rapid response. They are also capable of guessing where the enemy is. 2) Players fight 8v4 due to shared vision (they can pick off enemies) 3) Players can (in most games) fire from squadsight, and in all games share vision @Coffee Potato This is a very popular feature in OpenXCOM. Essentially a soldier can either be seen by the enemy or cannot. However all units do get halved accuracy when firing past LoS. Hit and run can be done but you have to hide all of your units.

Oooh there are multiple alien types now? This was just my second mission, it lags too much for me to play much. Can't remember much, but I got an error after almost every move.

@Trashman I'm talking about fighter radar range being a geoscape-level attribute. It exists in UFO defense where air combat is autoresolved. That's my point. It's true I cherrypicked the parts you emphasized that were geoscape level, but I don't consider weapon range to be much more interesting in manual resolution than automatic. It's an interesting attribute in UFO defense too. That's my point. Also... programming a game is not very difficult unless it's very simulation-based. In any case PhDs are barely relevant to game design (or many things really).

Game had already given me a lot of errors every time after I move a soldier. http://www.mediafire.com/file/iu86tr1xmo6x7sh/2019-06-28_100320.rar/file

There are three ways that OpenX and Xenonauts 1 allow the AI to not be picked off one by one 1) Vision through walls - psi / scent 2) More vision than humans 3) Firing on things not in their LoS Which of these do you think are currently implemented? I think none. Which do you think ought to be implemented? I think all.

@TrashMan If ground combat only rotated between ten different map+ alien combinations, would you play it? It would become tedious with an optimal solution for all the ten setups. The game would be solved sufficiently in hours. Ground combat has inherent variability to it because the setups are different. In air combat, they are not. In your following point you emphasize detection and range. Those are geoscape-level air combat attributes. Making the actual fight between aircraft more or less automatic as it is in UFO defense does not remove those, in fact it emphasizes them. From my point of view, the geoscape part of air combat is the actually interesting part, the actual combat itself becomes quickly solvable. As to your snobby sentence everyone is referencing: in general, thinking of a game design system is not so hard. Implementing it is not nearly as hard as it seems so long as you're willing to completely cut graphics and other such things required to make it marketable. Making it work well with every other system is damn near impossible and the reason both of us haven't made a game. Unless of course you just copy an old game. So you're not entirely wrong. But mostly.

Alien goods are worth a hell of a lot more than some experimental engineer making guns... in xPiratez the "sell for profit" makes quite a bit of sense, but not in any other game.

You would do it because you get paid for saving the world. This exists in the original UFO defense game. Modders in OpenX disagree on whether it is a good mechanic. It allows for "interest" and "investments" which is interesting, but does tend to reduce diversity because rushing a significant profit-maker is just so much better than other tech. Imo if we have selling for profit at all, why bother forcing people to check the price of everything when you can just manufacture a $ item?

@Crallux Evading was basically used to get right behind a UFO then spam attack it. You would basically develop an optimal algorithm for every UFO vs craft combination, then spend two minutes repeating that algorithm for every fight. It didn't actually add depth once you knew what you were doing. Charon managed to make the airgame a tiny bit more varied in X-Division, but even he said air combat would be better if it was just autoresolved. Yes, the current air combat is absolutely terrible. But that's like saying ground combat would be terrible without terrain + items. We really have no idea what they plan to add, maybe they will allow multiple ships with various active abilities. My only real concern is that it looks extremely slow right now, and they've said they plan to make it shorter, but really air combat should take under 1 min imo. About the base-building, they will likely go back to the old system after community backlash. But their reasons for "scrapping" it were the same as the air game: it really didn't work in X1, so they chose to simplify it so they can focus on other geoscape stuff like strategic ops. @DREADNAUGHT OpenXCOM mods have the piloting mechanic where soldier stats affect craft stats. It doesn't add a whole lot, but it's neat. In Xenonauts they try to give you more control over air combat. In the original XCOM you mostly just send your craft and wait for the battle to end, but the bright side is that you didn't have to micromanage something that has next to no strategy. I would definitely have auto-resolved combat if I ever made an XCOM-like. Maybe they just wanted complex air combat because it sells better.

@TrashMan 1) Allowing multiple dropships. Firstly, this is more difficult to balance than simply having different dropship size; usually if one dropship can reach the enemy, 5 can. But if a 2-man motorcycle can reach the enemy, that doesn't mean a 12-man APC can. But yes, it definitely is possible to balance, just takes a lot of other mechanics. Secondly, I do like the idea of wildly varying squad sizes, it works very well in XFiles. Thirdly, you might want to try the 40k OpenX mod, it has squad sizes up to 50, which I find tedious, but you would probably enjoy that and OpenX in general. Fourthly 40K allows you to send flying HWPs alongside a dropship, and has dropships that are also interceptors, similar to ideas you've talked about. 2)Once again Charon never meant a literal teleporter. The thematic explanation should be something else, or nothing at all. 3) Dropships are different from teleporters when the escort metagame is interesting. But it's kinda not imo. Mostly you just retreat and send interceptors once you see enemy fighters. Actual escorts aren't strong enough to defeat fighters 2v3, at least in X-division. 4) Air bombardment is a modding feature in OpenX. I don't know of mods that have actually used it (most just ignore the air game), but people generally agree it's a cool idea.

To summarise, TrashMan cares a lot about theme. See his opinions on Wraiths. In fairness, Charon/Chris's approaches make little thematic sense, tho tbh idc. There are interesting elements of splitting the barracks of different bases. For example having two teams with non-interchangeable crew is interesting, though cheap transfer makes it less so. It also lets you configure defense teams, if base defense is common. And there's the question of how many barracks bases are optimal. But yeah it's probably better to put the depth somewhere that results in more REPLAYABLE micromanagement. Base-building is not too replayable atm, you basically always take the same approach. What is replayable is losing your research base, or rushing research, or slowing research because you're about to run out of things to research. So charon's idea of making barracks and inventory but NOT facility layout global makes a lot of sense mechanically.

To clarify - by "a multi-base approach" I didn't mean what we have currently in X2. Having mini-bases which are basically just interceptors + radars makes a lot of sense to me. But having the full base-building mechanics "multi-base approach" of X1 without actually making multi-dropship viable doesn't.

Imo, a multi-base approach makes sense if an only if it's actually viable to have multiple bases with soldiers. It was not in X1. So I chose the third option. Global stores makes quite a bit of sense, since transfer costs are pretty low anyways, in most games non-global stores just mean you have to put all manufacturing in your main base.