Edmon

I would never refer to anyone as a lesser player, maybe a player with more of a social life than my wife & I I guess my secondary issue, after the one of the balance curve, is just how indisposable everything is. Leading to the death spiral if you lose a few items or a team. Soldiers should be cheap as chips, every weapon being so precious just reduces the tolerence for failure. There is little room for experimentation. This is where the NPC presence can be kind of clever... if you were arming the forces of earth, what does it matter if you produce 100 laser rifles and you lose 8 of them to a wipe? But it is of course, less units to dish out to the rest of humanity to fight back with. I see the Xenonaughts as a sort of glorified research division with a tactical element. In the other games, of course, they do everything and win the day. But I am thinking, instead the game is mostly similar, but you are arming humanity for the fight so they can hold their ground and/or win the day. Goals can be set for arms and research to be provided per month, with the war eventually being won or lost based on the player taking bigger risks to acquire more samples, goodies, etc. It needs a lot of work to turn into a usable element, but I think it solves a lot of the early game issues, while also allowing you to make the game harder at the end... Just more thoughts...

I do feel like while the joy of the original XCOM was the beginning, the end just became a boring grind and what I ended up doing was playing the beginning of the game over and over again... I imagine there would be a case where, you could make UFO's need many fighters to bring down. So both you and the NPC's would need to hit them in the early game, to bring them down. You can make the game feel more like you are a part of an all-out defence force while also keeping the player from having unduely too much impact in the early game. You can't prevent a good player from snowballing out of control but at least this way, you can move that to the mid and late game.

Thanks for the detailed reply, So my thoughts here are that we are trying to make the balance curve better, by making it such that 90% of the early game is NPC threat and 10% is you. Now imagine a bad player who is a 5% player and a great player who is 15% effectiveness. So we have progression at 95% of expected and 105% of expected, since the average players expected value is 10%. In typical TBS of course, the bad player would be progress is at the 50% rate and the great player is progressing at a 150% rate, since your output is 100% from beginning to end. Really hard to balance for, especially early on. The bad player gets their interceptor shot down for example, but the NPC's are there to also have a bash and they shoot down that UFO instead. Now that bad player can have a bash at the ground combat, rather than their game just being "over" in an instant. Maybe they lose the ground combat, but the NPC's going in and finish the job, sharing some of the takings with you. Good players can be better tracked, if they are making too many kills, more of the alien attack will be diverted to deal with them. This takes the pressure off the rest of the world, but increases the pressure on a good player. Losses and damage will be taken, slowing them down. Once cut down to size, the aliens will return to their war on the planet. I imagine the NPC resistance serves as a wall that is depleted over time, but ultimately doesn't matter in the mid and late game. Both good and bad players will get full coverage eventually, NPC's cover the bad ones until they are ready and/or catch up. To this end, losses should be expected, I would imagine an approach to solider progression more along the lines of valkyria cronicles... of all things. The squad progresses "together" or soliders can be mentored by a vet, getting a part of their EXP, etc. Soliders need to be more disposable, to avoid the "A-team wipe = game over" effect in most of these games. It would be nice if losses inspired people to fight harder... A guy dies, so his brother signs up. He has great stats and a burning desire for revenge, so he's exceptionally brave, etc. You take losses, countries rally behind you as you play up the damage aliens are doing. Your country needs you type of stuff. So we can basically, compensate weaker players with ready to go replacements. Not quite Enterprise-C Enterprise-D "plenty more letters in the alphabet" type stuff, but still :). These are my thoughts atm...

At short range, people are taught to "post" grenades in the British army. Pushing it forward in a straight line and bouncing it off the floor... It makes it so that it's easy to "throw" a device through a window or door, without hitting it... Maybe you could consider using such a throw at short range, with a much higher chance to hit. Obviously, for longer range, the traditional throw is better at getting distance.

Greetings all, A little preface here on relative skill level: The issues I want to talk about get more obvious and more of an issue the better a player is, hence this preface. This is sort of an inverse of "Get gud". However, it may appear I am asking to make the game easier in general, that is not the case. I would like the game to be harder if anything, but at the end where it makes sense for it to be hard and not at the beginning where it doesn't. More on that later... A note on my own skill level: I've completed pretty much every decent strategy game on the hardest possible difficulty, that includes games like: XCOM (The originals, terror from the deep excepted as I never got into it), XCOM (The Remakes), Jagged Alliance (even the awful reloaded one), Panzer General, Peoples General, etc. Also, some hard realtime stuff like EUIV (One-tagged the world), Shogun II total war (Impossible Ironmanned it), etc. I also have a youtube where I do hardest possible turn based Ironman campaigns, though that is mostly battletech. If your interested in that or simply want to verify, you can find it at www.youtube.com/TheEdmon and I hope you enjoy it :). My two key issues with XCOM type games are thus: 1) In the early game no-one seems to know there is a war on and it determines everything. 2) Win-More, Lose-More gameplay. The early game: Most of these turns based games are won in the first 6-10 hours and the rest of the game is just a walk to the victory screen, provided you don't make some critical mistake. But if you are winning hard enough, early enough, the odds of a critical mistake drops: 1) You win early missions with no losses and get more stuff. 2) So you have more money to expand, upgrade and research faster, with no losses to replace. 3) You are powering faster than the difficulty curve due to the above and can afford more coverage (when applicible). 4) You win more easily, due to your powering, which leads to less/no future losses and more money. 5) The cycle repeats, with your A-Team carrying you to the victory screen often without any losses at all. Dont you know there is a war on? The early XCOM game has this weird tone, situational as well as gameplay issue. You start off weak, barely any better or the same as a standard military of the time period. Then the game pretends like other militaries don't exist or are unable to mount even the slightest defence. So, where you are and what coverage you can get early is all that matters. This means that (often randomly), the game is determined by how much of the early hostiles appear near you (so you can deal with them) and is a race for you to power up as quickly as possible so you can protect the earth. The game balance revolves around this, making it so that you can get more ahead very quickly because you are 100% of the force being exerted against the aliens. That 100% can be vastly different between a good player and an excellent one, let alone a weaker casual player. You are totally and 100% critical in the early game, so balancing that early game becomes very difficult. I have always thought a good way to solve this problem would be to have the player be more like 10% of the force in the early game. NPC Military, coverage, airforces, etc. So what if we do this instead: 1) NPC's have military bases, airforces, coverage just like you do. 2) There is a lot more alien activity in the early game, but NPC militaries can barely handle it. The scramble interceptors, shoot down hostiles, airstrike, etc. 3) You can place your base to try and protect a country with a weak military, like africa, or place it where activity is high to protect a stronger NPC so they are useful for longer... The early game then consists of a world at war against the aliens and actually holding it's ground. You are there, to shoot down what appears in your general area, steal technology, go on missions, etc as usual. But you are not 100% of the fight, more like 10% of it. Of course, as the game goes on, your technology improves and so does the aliens. But your human allies do not. So in the mid game, they start to lose and some very badly: 1) You can see NPC bases and interceptons getting crushed. 2) Gaps appear in earths defence, relations sour. 3) It becomes clear that you must fill in the gaps, protect your allies, etc. You can afford to make the general alien presence that much more, when there is a lot of NPC defence around to handle it. Taking the pressure off the early game. In the late game: 1) NPC presence is all but gone, now it's all down to you. 2) Difficulty can be much higher 3) You've had time to put coverage in place, but the pressure you are under can also be higher than in a normal XCOM like difficulty curve. In conclusion: The early game matters too much, player skill level cannot effectively be balanced for, due to the snowballing effect that is caused by the player being 100% of the force against the aliens. The tone is also odd, where is everyone else, don't they know there is a war going on? My thought is to try and shift this to the mid game, while also fixing the weird lore and tonal issues. What do you guys think?