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Bobit

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Everything posted by Bobit

  1. IRL point defenses exist against ICBMs but not more nimble missiles AFAIK. Anyhow hardcoded base archetypes are mostly a fallback position if you can't get full customization to result in variety. E.g. "well everyone just used their freedom to build the same base 5x over, so we might as well introduce base types instead."
  2. I know, but the increase in fun is worth it.
  3. TLDR: lore, maps, mods, EA. Completely finishing the first months will be cool. I suggest making the 3-month campaign harder than in the final game, because most campaigns try to not kill you in the first 3 months, and a campaign where you can't lose is no fun.
  4. 30% is a bit low, but yeah it's always more fun to encourage restraint and loot. The main solution to grind-to-win is always to put a timer on the game through base assaults and losing countries. Players should be expected to participate in every mission they can get a net reward from imo. Including missions they don't plan on totally finishing unless they get really lucky. You can try to prevent players from doing all missions through fatigue, but players can simply get more soldiers, and it can make casualties too decisive. You can limit it through difficult airgame and alien fighters which attack dropships, but you don't want the air war to decide the game (unless the ground war decides the air war, meaning more expensive fighters almost always win, eww). Basically every "indirect lose condition" should be equally viable. Losing by extreme casualties, air war, relations, lack of ground tech, base assault. Just fatigue or just airwar limiting players from doing all missions will cause one lose condition to be too prevalent.
  5. Exactly, that's like 10 different random status effects, pretty complex. If you just throw those on a random roll and they just last a turn, that's going to add very little depth and maybe just luck. Random status effects aren't bad, but they should consist of a few distinct categories which change your strategy in interesting ways, like engine or rudder damage on a plane, or retreating. Complexity usually adds depth. It's just that other kinds of complexity could add more depth. For example instead of working on making this and explaining it to users, they could add variable squadsize/equipment missions or a loot-based research tree that's more of a research web like OpenXCOM mods do. If you add realspace aiming and mechanics that interact with those status effects, great. But not every game should spend its complexity on that. They have better things to do, and so do their players. In a way this is kind of the same argument against the Weapon Level system. But to me that one has a specific gameplay purpose, while this one is more "wouldn't it be cool if..."
  6. There's nothing complex about soccer/football either, except physics, which are immensely complex. Realspace/parts-based damage makes no sense in a game with no realspace accuracy. There's no way to guess how it will work, far more complex than the proposed level system. Doesn't add any depth, only makes things more random until you research them. Only upside is realism, which is not a real upside. Parts based damage makes a ton of sense in Phoenix Point, because it both has realspace damage and parts that will be wounded for the remainder of the battle and each have their own effects. But that's not simple, it needs a lot of mechanics to work well.
  7. Personally I'd prefer standalone Skirmishes to endless campaign. Like you see in OpenXCOM, but with reasonable presets that could actually occur in a campaign. Play whatever missions you want.
  8. Shred was never realistic in the first place. Armor doesn't get weaker when you shoot it twice. It gets bent when you swing a mace at it, or melts when you shoot a plasma bolt at it, but how that actually affects it is pretty complicated.That argument can be made against any other XCOM system just as much as this one. Yes, tier-based shred values with no deviation within tiers are bad. But that's not inherent to the system. The "level" word implies that, it's a terrible word. I think the intention with these sort of abstractions is to make it simple for player who just want to say "oh this gun has more anti-armor capability than the other" and don't care for the numbers, while keeping it strategically complex especially for the players that have to know everything. I don't agree with this design philosophy, because it's incredibly bad for the players in between who want to know the numbers without asking on the forums, but it is a pretty prevalent one. For example in MMOs, MOBAs, Dark Souls, Skyrim all the armour uses a complex formula that the game pretends is simple for the lazy players. ...so you don't like shred? It's a pretty interesting mechanic in X-Division and some OpenXCOM mods. Makes anti-andron strategy more complex, largely because you have to have one unit shoot before another, the same way that shotguns+stun are interesting together. And veteran players are used to it by now, so that part is not added complexity. Again, the purpose of the system is that weapons change roles from penetration to shred throughout the game depending on their tech level. You don't always use a ballistic minigun to shred. You use a plasma rifle to shred tanks or a laser rifle to pierce tanks. Then later in the game you use anti-matter for shred and plasma for pierce. Or if you see a very high-armor enemy, you have to resort to only using piercing weapons and your low-caliber weapons are completely irrelevant unless you brought C4 and position it very well. I hope you get some of what I'm saying. While resistance and armor is there to make certain weapons obviously bad against certain enemimes, shred is there to make certain weapons bad against certain enemies under certain conditions. It can bypass armor but you have to have a strategy of prepping the target, and different targets will require being prepped different ways, you can't cover all the corner cases with 100% effectiveness. I'm not saying this system is the best way to do that, but it does work.
  9. I think you misunderstand. Armor has HP but it only absorbs maybe 50% of damage and the portion of that damage which actually reduces the armor rather than being wasted is like 30%, which is the same system as X1. The level mechanic has a dumb name, but that doesn't mean it's some "horrible MMORPG" thing, nor is it as simple as you think. It's a new system, a way of merging the stats "penetration" and "shred". IIRC with +1 level differential (e.g. lvl 4 weapon and lvl 3 armor) you get most of your penetration, but you need to reach +3 level to get most of your shred. So very high-caliber rounds will shred armor altogether allowing any weapon to deal more damage to the target, while moderate-caliber will pierce which is effective only for that one shot. As opposed to the odd behavior you see in most games (X1 included) where miniguns and shotguns are the best shredders due entirely to high rate of fire and low damage. Or the gamey behavior you see in XCOM2 and Phoenix Point where shred is a fixed value regardless of whether you're shredding wood or titanium. Positional damage is a little odd if it uses realspace rather than rolling randomly regardless of your firing angle, because the game doesn't give you any info about realspace trajectories. But otherwise it's a really good system. Certainly more complex, but it aims to fix problems in the genre, and it has the appearance of being simple which is nice for some players (not me).
  10. Key thing is to make the stun weapons different. Stun gas is really cool because no lethal weapon works similarly (even the chemical grenade in X-division has a more limited role). If they add riot snipers I will riot. XCOMFiles has flashbangs that seriously enhance the stun game. They halve TUs, but they also halve melee dodge. You can also bleed out opponents or scare them into surrendering, both of which encourage a mix of lethal and nonlethal. It's probably not "stealth" missions, because that just doesn't work as a mission unless you go Invisible Inc and add tons of mechanics.
  11. All weapons can damage everything but they have to shredarmor first which takes a very long amount of time. Don't remember exactly how armor works, but the gist is that all damage is reduced by 1 for each point of armor, and every 6 points of damage (blocked by armor or no) shreds 1 point of armor permanently, so machine guns / shotguns will be the only things able to shred armor reasonably. Actually incendiary is one of the best damage types against tanks IIRC. But that mostly means grenades and high explosives are good, not flamethrowers.
  12. I think what he's talking about (and what I've heard) is that Warthunder has advanced controls designed for joystick, but you have the option to fly with the "simple control mode" which is much more powerful. And joystick is much better for flying. But only for flying. Mouse is much better than thumbsticks. But keyboard is much worse than gamepad-buttons, unless you have so many buttons that they won't fit on the pad, which is very rare when considering things like L2+A. Numpad is nice for some games.
  13. Does it really matter? The game is already purchaseable. Development has never slowed, except recently due to publisher search and coronavirus. What would realeasing it entail? Finishing the flavor text and limiting all future updates to bugfixes and modding? Then by all means, I hope they take as long as possible!
  14. This is in OpenXCOM and it works very well, but if it's done it needs to be done right: sometimes soldiers just take more stun than they do hp damage, and will bleed out unless stabilized.
  15. Codexes are cool and fun to fight. Archons are stupid, so ornate with an artillery strike that can be dodged by everyone. Faceless are too, but they would be cool if they were actual shapeshifters and not just bad chyrssalids (melees which can burrow until enemy is in range or you use a scanner). I can see why Trashman would dislike Codexes, since they are pure teleportation. But they are a digital enemy, a way to give a face to a power that doesn't actually have one, just like the Matrix. So it makes sense that they don't follow physical laws.
  16. In OpenXCOM they have your soldiers act as pilots, which seems super cool to me. Xenonauts has the most fleshed-out airgame so I'd totally support it.
  17. I'm increasingly agreeing with you... the game is awesome at first because you see all the abilities, then you replay and repeat the strategy layer grind while the combat doesn't get any better and nothing about the game really changes. The abilities stay cool, but at times it feels that's all that's left.
  18. Trashman, what I meant is if the new tier weapons are different, but also objectively better, then the lategame is different from the early game. Same goes for enemies. You can see this in X-Division's phases for example. Phase 2 players very differently because its weapons are very differently. But you only pick phase 2 weapons because they're objectively better. Preventing players from picking exactly what they want is sometimes important. Making certain things OP is one way of doing that, then you force the players to use mainly that thing, without removing other content. CCGs do this a lot. The better way to do it is making things actually balanced, or sufficiently randomized, so that you have diversity and every thing plays out well. But in some environments, like CCGs, that's not possible, so yeah settle for a more controlled experience. I don't think that's actually the reason for weapon tiers though. They're not trying to guide the player, just make things different on different phases.
  19. The only good part of making weapons completely obsolete is that the lategame will play very differently from the early. Restricting player choice is actually pretty important, otherwise players will choose to play the same way every time, because that's how you win. In XCOM usually this means putting one of every class / weapon on the battlefield, very boring. There's a balance to be had between making all strategies viable and forcing the player to pick a strategy actually results in small-scale tactical diversity. Imo all XCOM-likes have leaned too far towards forcing the player, but it is possible to lean too far the other way.
  20. It has every large gameplay element of XCOM2 in it. Research, Manufacture, Doom meter, SPARKs. Lack of character permadeath is a requirement for their "1 of each class" idea. Lack of campaign permadeath is not, and I will be upset if they don't support ironman, but it should be moddable.
  21. The gameplay in Xenonauts is very different from the gameplay in the original XCOM. It's way more cover and breach-based, and enemies can smell you before you can react. Which is great. Xenonauts doesn't really have a unique art style for its aliens though, it's just bland/"realistic", compared to freaky UFO Defense, comicbook Enemy Unknown, neon XCOM 2. Some of the armors are cool. I'm one of the guys who doesn't like the blue jumpsuit, but I see the counterargument that it's UN colors, and I don't like the UFO defense spandex jumpsuit or the plastic power armor of XCOM2.
  22. Ah, well I'm glad you think I can still contribute to society despite disagreeing with your video game opinion.
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