Skitso
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Posts posted by Skitso
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7 hours ago, Grobobobo said:
And chris was right. The new system does not lose out on any depth.
No. Micro managing your research queue by optimizing scientists between multiple projects to fight diminishing returns does indeed add major depth and interesting choices.
It also makes managing research easier and more intuitive to have multiple simultaneous active projects and being able to tweak reasearch personnel freely between them if the situation calls for it or circumstances change unexpectedly .
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Hmm, now that I've played a bit further, I feel the new armour system needs acc penalty back. The new system felt fine with the starter armour, but I feel the upgrade to warden was too binary. What I mean with that is that as soon as I researched it, I just manufactured 10 of them and equiped the whole team with it and switched everyone who has the carrying capacity into the heavy variant. That's it and it was a bit too one note experience with no interesting choices to make. With the old system I needed to at least consider the accuracy. I didn't want my snipers for example to wear any armour until stealth armour was available as they all decreased aim. Old heavy variant (armour module) also decreased inventory so that also added things to consider.
As the new system is indisbutably more intuitive and should be kept, what I propose is you add some acc penalty to heavy variants and make inventory grid size armour type dependant. This gives the player more interesting choices and forces you to make tough decisions about what armour to wear.
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New armour system feels nice and intuitive and a clear improvement of what we had before. Should the heavy variation decrease the accuracy a bit too like before?
Now that the autopsy is manual research, I feel it costs too many man hours to complete. Something like 1d or 36h instead of the 3d we have now.
Did I understand the system correctly: interrogation gives damage and train boost while autopsy generates multi tier manufacture project that also boosts damage?
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Started a new playthrough with prototype 2.06 and here's my thoughts about the first 3-4 hours:
Pacing feels a lot better and I really like the slow start. However, the early story beats felt like the game assumes I should know what Cleaners are and it's a bit odd their initial introduction is so self-evident. Also, going back to the original base, while a cool mission, felt out of place for me. The whole organization was on a brink of total destruction at the end of the tutorial, people just barely fleeing with their lives, and only a few days later we go back and kill everyone. Sure, it's hand-waved in the briefing text, but it felt wrong nevertheless. I'm not sure how to make it feel better.... maybe make it an intel gathering mission instead of requiring to kill everything? I'm aware it's way too early for a (timed) intel gather mission, but maybe put it a bit later and have the first mission be something else?Difficulty curve felt almost perfect. Only VIP (cleaner cell) missions still felt too punishing. Convoy ambush also took me by a surprise by giving the AI the fist turn. (which lead to a brutal blood path). More thought on these missions later.
I like that the Cleaner progression is more organic and tied to player actions/completing missions instead of a simple timer like before. As I mentioned above, I still feel the VIP (cleaner cell) missions are way harder than other missions at that point of the game. It might be a good idea to keep them persistent like before and spawn few of them at 50% progress so you can decide when to tackle them. It makes more sense lore wise for them to be persistent instead being available for only 3 days. It would also give a nice sense of progress and a change of pace at the half way point to have these bit tougher "mini boss" missions.Same with intel gathering missions, they should be persistent. Troop and reporter rescue missions, abductions, convoy ambushes make more sense to be timed. Troop rescue mission is a great idea and I just wish the map was something more distinct than just a normal deathmatch area. It might also give the mission even more of a unique feeling if you needed to play with only six units until you find the three troops and only then you gain the control of them? Convoy mission map was also a nice change of pace, but it left me thinking wouldn't it make more sense for the ambushers to have the first turn - the whole point of the ambush is the element of surprise, isn't it? The convoy map also left me wanting more higher ground and proper sniping positions.
Mixing persistent and timed missions would make the geoscape gameplay more interesting by having situations where there'd be more than one mission available and the game would feel even more dynamic and organic.
The new probe UFO is a great addition and finally downing a first real UFO after hours of Cleaner missions felt properly fascinating and rewarding.-
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Hasn't looked like this before
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6 hours ago, Chris said:
It's a bit unrelated to inventory size; the reason is so that any soldier can wear the most modern armour in the lightest variant rather than weak soldiers being unable to wear say Guardian Armour in any form. It also avoids the issue where the protection offered by the insert is unrelated to the armour it is placed in, which meant it could be relatively too weak on advanced armours and too strong on basic armour.
It also means we can give the player more overall options with fewer actual suits of armour; having the first 100 days contain the Tactical Suit, Defender Armour, Warden Armour and Guardian Armour was slight overkill. Now it's just Tactical Suit >> Warden >>> Guardian, which is clearer and more manageable.
If carry capacity ends up being too generous as a result I'd have thought we could just make modules larger to compensate.
Thanks for the detailed answer.
Few thoughts:
- Is it actually beneficial for everyone to be able to wear to most modern armour as soon as it comes available? I've felt that the units have already becoming too homogenous after few months in the campaign. Having part of your team wearing older tech (both armor and weapons) gives much needed diversity.
- Armour module buff could be a certain percentage of the armour it's attached to, instead of a flat value?
- Carrying capacity is too generous already - at least for grenade spamming. I can also have most of my troops always carry a medkit without it feeling like I need to leave something out for it.
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13 hours ago, Chris said:
- Each type of soldier armour now has a Light and Heavy variant, controlled by a checkbox. The heavy variant weighs more but offers more protection. This system replaces the Armour Insert soldier module, and the Defender Armour is now just the heavy variant of the basic Tactical Suit.
Could you open up the thinking behind this change a bit?
Soldiers have way too much carrying capacity as it is, so removing armour modules make inventory management even more trivial. I would like there to be even more choises to be made what units can carry. You could have each armour have different inventory grid size, but is it a better way to balance it?
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4 hours ago, Kouki said:
Thanks for providing the save! Yeah that's indeed a bug, we'll get it patched out!
EDIT: Talked to Chris about this and apparently the trigger is intentional and is meant so that the player is not punished for rendering the Mentarch unconscious instead of killing it.Would probably make more sense if the autopsy report is displayed after interrogation at least?
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13 hours ago, delor said:
@Skitso, I don't think actually was the case in classic X-Com if that is the benchmark. The only game guide that I can find that gives a research time formula for the old games, at least, just gives time as "project days / number of scientists" which is a formula that doesn't reward splitting your scientists. Do you have a source for your claim?
Have I mentioned original X-Com somewhere?
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Old system gets my vote. If I remember correctly, @Chris once justified the new system by saying that splitting your scientists to multiple projects just postpones everything and it's always the most optimal to focus to one one project at a time. I kinda disagree, as there was a diminishing returns in play in X1 and it was a cool little detail to try to optimize research: As the research was closing it's completition, I started to move scientists to other projects where they could contribute more effectively.
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2 minutes ago, Alienkiller said:
Yeah, that´s defenetly an Bug and shouldn´t possible. In the Versions I have tested (Betas and the so called Unstable-Versions) I couldn´t do that.
Not true. This bug has been in the game always.
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On 9/8/2023 at 12:45 AM, Raffik said:
I have been grenaded recently as well by a wraith, who's sight has been blocked by smoke screen I threw at the end of my turn to break the LOS. During AI turn, the wraith went straight into the middle of the smoke (the smoke was not broken up yet) and threw a grenade at my soldiers. Idk if he could see my soldiers through the smoke and did not think of it much, but Skitso's case kind of reminded me of the situation - I believe the LOS was broken and that the AI only attacks enemy they actually do see, but the wraith couldn't / shouldn't see through the smoke.. so he was either guestimating my position or knew my guys were there..
Smoke doesn't block LOS, but just reduces accuracy.
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Melee attack hit animations, hit reaction animations and damage/stun numbers are all out of sync. Makes it look and feel unsatisfying.
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32 minutes ago, Raffik said:
...not all people prefer the cannon fodder approach.
Hmm, yeah... but wouldn't it make more sense for those people to play Jagged Alliance or similar tactical games instead, where the point is to try to preserve your units? That kind of slow and methodical gameplay is not what xcom styled games (including Xenonauts) are about.
It's generally a bad idea to add all possible game mechanics people enjoy in a single game just because. X2 doesn't have prone for a reason, same with corner peaking. On the other hand Xenonauts have some mechanics other ganes don't have.
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43 minutes ago, DailyFrankPeter said:
- Can you add prone mechanic?
So that there is another tool for avoiding getting hit & improve your own accuracy at a cost of not having LOS over low cover.
And generally so that it feels more like you're commanding a squad of pros. Would that break anything? (It worked for X-Com Apocalypse.)
- Is it feasible to improve gun sounds, or just make them more punchy?
Currently they're about as loud as footstep sounds, also... somehow not rich enough given what one can record these days.It would certainly break the pacing as it would further encourage even slower, more careful and reaction fire dependant game style. In xcom styled games, players troops are mostly expendable cannon fodder, so why bother?
Regarding sound design, I completely agree. It kinda sucks currently.
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4 minutes ago, Jorlem said:
For a globe, to see both sides of the planet at once, you could have two globe maps side by side, locked so that when you rotate one, the other turns as well by the same amount.
Or make the globe slightly transparent? Changing the geoscape is probably out of the question at this point, but maybe a paid DLC might be a possibility?
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14 minutes ago, Chris said:
The reason for the change is having a hard loss condition in the second mission the player encounters is perhaps a bit harsh, but at the same time we do want to show one of the new mission types early to clearly signal that the game isn't just Xenonauts 1 with nicer graphics.
I'm not sure if making gameplay/campaign progress decisions based on the fear of Steam refunds is the correct way to do it. (While I certainly understand the reasoning)
....and if you really, really want to have an abduction mission as the 2nd mission, make an exception in it's rules for the first time. For the record, I personally enjoy trying to save the people while avoiding aliens as much as possible until they teleport away.
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On 9/4/2023 at 6:55 PM, Chris said:
- Jetpack: as previously, the jetpack is another toggled option. I just don't think it's useful enough that anyone would ever use it if we made it part of the Armour Module list.
This caught my eye... jetpack would be extremely useful if the maps were just more vertical and being higher grounds provided more buffs.
Changing accelerated weapons to being an upgrade to ballistics sounds like a good idea, but I'd like the upgrads to be weapon type specific. Similar upgrade path to armor doesn't sound like an improvement
Item upgrades sound sweet. More the better.
Regarding the module system, I kinda enjoy the Tetris mini game we have atm, where I need to balance my backpack between modules, weapons, grenades and other items.
Changing the abduction missions to be one more "kill all aliens" mission feels a step in a wrong direction.
Regarding the cleaner mission chain and progression: Gathering intel for intitial progress is fine and I love the mission (best map so far), but the daily automatic percentage gain after that feels somewhat gamey and boring. You should add more quick and simple cleaner missions where player could earn that progression instead, capture additional intel, capture and interrogate cleaners etc. I also suggested somewhere that cleaners could be added to crash site missions to clean the wreck and alien corpses. This would add a nice new dynamic to those missions where the more player waits before raiding the site, the more there would be cleaners. Avoiding these add-on cleaners could also push people to do these crash site missions at night, before cleaners arrive.
Edit: Here's my initial suggestion
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1 hour ago, Sunnybuns said:
Heck I love to give it a shot and help you out! With the addition of the modding tool I feel like we can help you out with your roadmap, especially when it comes to making new maps, which is a huge factor in these kinds of games.
Mapping, as far as I'm aware, is out of the scope of the modding tools unfortunately.
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I agree with above.
I've also given some thought on the other cover issues... here's two suggestions:
- cover value should decrease the further it is from the target.
- firing from higher ground should decrease cover values on lower levels. The larger the height difference, the lower the cover values.
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2 hours ago, SoftwareSimian said:
Cover next to the shooter shouldn't get in the way of shooting from behind said cover. However, if the target is hiding behind something, that cover should always count as cover, even if it's the same "something" that the shooter and target are hiding behind. In real life, hiding on the other side of a pile of bricks will make you a lot harder to hit than sitting in the open. Please re-examine this adjacent-tile mechanic.
This is true. However, as it's not a bug, I encourage you to make a suggestion of this in a relevant thread.
Edit: actually, make a new thread about shooting rules. I might also have something to add.
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2 hours ago, Kouki said:
That's weird. Tested your save and seems to be the same for me as well. Interestingly the cover works depending on how far you are shooting from. I'll talk about this with the programmers and see if we can fix it for the next patch. Thanks for the report
This seems to be correct behavior: cover that is adjacent to the shooter is not counted.
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On 8/10/2023 at 7:23 PM, Serious Sponge said:
On a side note: I also kinda think the visual design of the Reapers is a bit of a downgrade from Xenonauts 1. In my honest opinion, the Reapers in this game kinda just look like they're some dude in a suit rather than being a biological weapon of terror. The Reapers from the first game looked way more terrifying.
That being said, it does also feel like they're going for making them look similar to to the original Chrysalids from X-COM so I guess that's nice for the throwback/reference.
Yeah, X1 version:
This is much more intimidating. Now that I look those old autopsy images, I like the X1's more realistic tone.
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9 hours ago, Raffik said:
I believe there was a mod in X1 (I believe made by Skitso if I'm not mistaken), which made changes in the female soldiers appearence
It was me! Can't believe someone remembers that still
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Milestone 2.07 Released! (Experimental)
in Xenonauts-2 Releases & Patch Notes
Posted
That's amazing news Chris!
I chatted with Aleksi at Discord few weeks ago and it sounded like he was more than willing.
Please consider adding mission win/lose jingles and loading screen music. Adding a bit of silence here and there between tracks might also be a good idea.