Max_Caine

Okay folks, I need people to step back. Trashman made a valid criticism of a part of the text he didn't like. He addressed the argument (or in this case, the text), not the person. There's no need for anyone to make comments about each other.

It's great to see so many people lie firmly on the side of that they will miss any soldiers who die. For me? I'm from the Gendo Ikari school of thought. They're STILL only so many meat puppets. At the end of the day, there's nothing that one soldier can do that I won't be able replicate with enough technology, especially when you advance into exosuits and other gear that grant stat boosts. I mean, I can see it now when modding is a Real Thing and not just people like me fiddling about with data files - you'll have modular gear that will offer every stat boost under the sun and then your squaddies really will be replaceable drones where the gear you put on them is more valuable than the soliders' life.

Parcheesi is a fun game! So, regarding the silence, based on Chris's last post to a similar thread I'm guessing it's more difficult than the team thought to implement the changes they want to make.

Bobit, the difference between friendly banter and insulting someone is how well you know them. Clearly from the discussion you don't know Alienkiller that well. Don't do it again.

Parcheesi, anyone?

If you guys have savegames please post them up - they would be extremely helpful to sort the problem out.

The biggest stumbling block that I can see to archetypal bases is something that Alienkiller has brought up indirectly - cost. It's hella expensive to produce the assets for base assault missions but if you want to provide at least an X1 experience in X2 (which would be the baseline for X2), there's no choice in the matter - every building type in a base needs its own set of unique assets. The only way to minimise costs is to make base assets uniform, so what you see in one base you will see in every base, so as nice as it might be, unless some kind benefactor throws Goldhawk several million, I think costs will make it unfeasble.

Not that I wouldn't like the game to be harder, because I personally would (I'll probably be playig it on max difficulty), but I think that might give the wrong impression of the final product?

Do you have a save for that? That particular condition can be hard to contrive.

You're going to have to contact Xsolla, because Xsolla should have contacted everyone who purchased through them, and demand a key from Steam or GoG (your pref). Can you get back to us what their response is?

@mcw Back at the end August of last year Goldhawk Interactive stopped using Xsolla as a service. You should have recieved an email from Xsolla with a key to access the Beta for either Steam or GoG at around that time, between August and Setptember. Did you have any communication from Xsolla at that time?

This is actually possible (well, it isn't YET, but it almost is) in the current setup. At the moment, version 12 has a v1 and v2 of every weapon family, armour families have a v1 and v2 and also have attachable modules. The v2 weapon families just have a damage boost at the moment, but.... the version 2 upgrade could be more than that and dependent on components. The armour modules,, any version upgrades for those armour modules and any version upgrades for the armour families, could, again, be dependant on components. That then always leave a basic set for anyone to have.

That sounds like a pretty good way of doing it. If that was also applied to landed as opposed to crashed UFOs, it would defintely encourage riskier play.

Quirks and flaws of equipment families notwithstanding, Xenonauts 2 follows a linear research progression path. That is to say, the further down the tech tree you advance the objectively better equipment families become. Furthermore, the game follows a linear difficulty progression path. UFOs become larger and more difficult to fight, aliens become harder to kill, and better equipped to kill squaddies equipped with current-gen technology (e.g. aliens have three generations of weapon technology in X2). The X-Division mod for X1 formally recognised this and subdivided the game into specific Phases. As equipment families progress and alien equipment also progresses the pressure is on the player to be ahead of the technology curve. As aliens improve of the course of the game it is generally better to research and manufacture current-gen to match the threat presented by aliens at that point in the game rather than stick last-gen, which matched the threat presented by aliens at the point where last-gen was current gen. This is most prominent with the armour equipment families – it is noticeably better to have wolf armour than it is to stay with basic armour and have the heavy armour upgrade. However, in X1 it is a valid strategy to not invest in current-gen and rely on last-gen technology (the “rush plasma strategy”). The aim of this strategy is to wait for a future generation of equipment family which is significantly better than current-gen, is achievable in a timescale that does not create undue pressure for the player and can be manufactured in large numbers reasonably quickly. While waiting, resources are either horded or spent on current-gen technology in another part of the game, e.g. forgoing Ground Combat lasers to purchase more armour, a key plank of the rush plasma strategy. So, into this, we introduce components. Components as presented in the OP create economic scarcity for current-gen equipment families. If you don’t have the component, you have to pay a stiff penalty to replace the component required, so balancing resources between various current-gen equipment families becomes more pronounced and the desire to obtain components becomes sharp. Penalties for last-gen technology are apparently less than the penalties for current-gen technology. As a consequence there is a strong economic incentive to focus more on last-gen technology than current-gen as resources can be used more effciently. If a player comfortably feels that s/he can survive on upgraded last-gen as opposed to current-gen then we are already in the scenario identified by Chris without any further incentivisation required. Items drops don’t need to be made more common, because economically you can make up for the penalties more efficiently than current-gen. In this proposed scenario, making last-gen drops more common encourages investment in current-gen by the expedient of flooding the market. If components for last-gen become more common this frees up resources to invest in current-gen that would otherwise have been invested in the technologically inferior but economically superior last-gen. It would, however, from a gameplay perspective be better to make the player feel pressured that they need to invest in current-gen technology over last-gen. A considerable percentage of the playerbase for X-Division enjoy the mod because of that pressure to keep up with current alien opponents.

I'm halfway through my thesis on why increasing drop rates on old tech would be beneficial (I wish I was kidding), but what I will say about grinding is if you want to stop grinding from being the primary strategy for play, then I would suggest imposing economic penalities. You could actually use Strategic Operations or Agents for this. Fighter UFOs have in v12 a Strategic Operation where you can recover an item. Fine. Make that the norm for item drops. You don't get any item drops on a mission complete. Instead, the UFO remains on the map for X amount of time, like fighter UFOs do. You can click on the UFO and spend X amount of money for a chance to get a drop. The more money you spend, the higher the chance of a drop. Perhaps you could spend an agent for 100% chance of a drop, but then you've no longer got that agent. Edit: The basic premise - spend X resource to get Y% chance of a item drop is infinitely mutable. E.G. you could perhaps assign scientists and/or engineers as a "salvage team" to a UFO which takes game-time to salvage a UFO. The more scientists and/or engineers you assign as a salvage team, the better the chance of a drop. Heck, you be even more radical. Instead of getting any instant rewards like you do right now, all rewards cost a reource to get. Going back to the salvage team idea, you can only get rewards from a ufo once a salvage team has finished salvaging a UFO - that would impose economic penalities on grinding that could be felt through the lifespan of the game (scientists for the drop, engineers for basic resources?).