svidangel

Omg mr potatohead

Yeah, I'm fine with numbers mattering on the ground, I just don't want the ground combat to be the only thing that directly changes! Good starting point though since that is where most of the game is spent.

Nice, I wonder if that was causing some of my problems when transporting troops around.

People are already artificially making the geoscape harder at the moment, though. I think that was a point earlier or maybe in another post. I get confused easily. Anyway, just by playstyle some people are getting Massive ships as early as January, probably because they didn't intercept enough UFOs or left alien bases going too long. If you adjusted the ticker so that even by intercepting most of the UFOs you get massive ships in January, you'd have increased the difficulty, your need to both expand and keep costs down, research techs in an order that works well for you, balance manufacturing, etc. It would still be very similar to the game as people are playing it now, without blowing everyone away. Just increasing the number of aliens doesn't really "change the game" much, especially if you decrease the money you get from them. You'll just be playing on easy/normal with more aliens to fight. At that point you could pretty much just program your base to build X structure when you hit Y money, preferably by Z date.. and it would be the same for every difficulty level. Also that doesn't even touch air combat, which would end up the exact same at all difficulty levels. Don't get me wrong, I want at least more aliens in ground combat at harder difficulty levels! I'd just like for the feel of the game to change a bit. Concrete example... on easy you could build up your first base, get a bunch of foxtrots, and then eventually expand to a second base in October or November without the invasion spinning out of control. On hard, if you DIDN'T expand to a second base by the second month, and maybe a third by the third month, you would get quickly overwhelmed. Stretching your resources to the limit should be as much a part of harder difficulties as shooting more things in ground combat.

TBQH, having the Shrike moved earlier in the tech tree and just be faster (maybe longer ranged) would be a huge improvement. [without any troop capacity increase] Heck, if we could research and build a small fast transport (6 troops or 4 and a jeep, or just 4 troops!), that would be fantastic. Maybe around the time you get Foxtrots. This would be especially useful if we start seeing small UFO missions being seeded into the late game.

Heh, gotta say I finally built a shrike in february, and while the maps/enemies/numbers haven't changed much, the way I approached the maps has changed dramatically. Those extra soldiers (and more once I finish the valk!) make it feel like the old xcom swarm again. No matter how many aliens are on those ships, you still only encounter a few at a time, and YOU control how many of your troops are on a given front. Now I can split into two squads of 6, and if I run into an alien I can shoot at it with 6 guys. I could only ever do that before by keeping my whole squad together. Basically, we would need massive increases in the difficulties/numbers of the enemies to offset even 4 extra troops. Largest ship I've hit is a Carrier, but the combats aren't even close anymore. And that's without blaster launchers!

Yep, he was looking for ideas though, not just we'll cram in everything everyone recommends haha. Making the geoscape portion easier on harder difficulties just seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.

Heh, try shooting really far past the target in a straight line through it!

Rocket launcher to take out the cover maybe. Just be careful you don't splatter the alien if you want his gun

I dunno, I think there should be an impact on the geoscape, base building, research etc. That's a good chunk of the game, and making that part of the game easier on the harder difficulties seems slightly ridiculous, like Superhuman was far too easy in the original due to the massive amounts of cash they threw at you after got past the first month or so. On the other hand, I dislike games that just strip you of all of your cash and options right at the start as a way of modifying the difficulty, which is why I keep advocating using the ticker. Anyway, most of these ideas haven't fit the original criteria of significantly changing the gameplay from the original post. Best response to that I think was giving you huge amounts of money to build bases with a hugely more determined alien invasion. Having to throw waves of condors at medium/large ships early on (with the cash to replace them), along with more base defenses etc wouldn't really change the elements of gameplay, but it would definitely change the tone of the entire game.

First time using a Shrike so this is not something I have multiple data points on. 1. Landing the Shrike at Qito, south america in the saved game causes the game to simply close. No error, nada. Just boom. Have completely restarted the game and gotten the same behavior. 2. Landing a nearby Charlie at Qito starts up the terror site just fine. 3. Landing the shrike at the UFO landing site next to the Terror site works just fine. Seems like the problem is with the shrike and terror site combined? https://www.dropbox.com/s/8lg0268eztolr10/2013-06-12_02.47.51.sav

Woah, didn't know about Three (which I just almost typed out). I'm questioning a couple of my game choices, although most of the alien attacks even in february consist of maybe 3-4 missions, and that's with 5 bases and 1 continent in enemy hands. Though I might have just run into a bug with a terror site. Anyone have much experience with landing the Shrike at terror missions?

This. Yeah, more programming, and maybe another variable, but it would make some sense to have a weapon tier cutoff per tech level. Ballistics and lasers can't just destroy a rock formation. Ballistics can't generally knock down a WALL (with a 3 shot burst)... though they might punch through weak wood and leave it intact (yeah, too complicated). Anyway, just an idea that some weapons simply wouldn't destroy a certain piece of terrain no matter how many times you shoot it. I can't imagine the river of machine gun ammo it would take to wear down a granite rock. Meanwhile, I can imagine plasma magically vaporizing part of the rock, an maaaybe just maybe the MAG stuff can actually blast it to pieces. Or maybe mag should do more damage, but go back to ballistic style cover destruction. Dunno, but anything like this would make the environment feel more like an environment. Not a collection of pixilated % values.

Speaking of terror sites... I understand nuking a sebillion/reaper site. 10,000 zombie reaper things from the xenopedia description, yeah that'd be a pain. But why nuke an andron/cyberdisk site? What.. they take over a BWM factory and BAM new cyberdisks, now with more purr? Or maybe they need a "toy" factory to reproduce.

Oh goody, I'll just have to skip out on destroying my cash flow then. Not that I spose it's much of an issue at this point. I REALLLLY want more marauders though.

You are supposed to have won by then apparently. It's just that winning isn't actually in the game yet. It's a feature!

Eh, playstyle I guess. I'm pretty up in the air about what I equip at a given time. Just whatever I feel like, and if I have one soldier I want to copy, I just make it the default for whatever role that soldier was (so the Sniper role has a heavy plasma, woot!) and quick apply it. Mostly they only get 3-4 types of items so it's been pretty quick. Tempted to give these fusion rockets a try just to see if they explodify bigger

A large part of the faster ticker speed could be dealt with using more cash though. At the moment it seems some people are struggling around January when massive ships start showing up, or december with the larges and heavy fighters. In my game I was very aggressive about expanding, and had the same ships showing up in February as others did in January, and thats a whole MONTH of "tickering" just based on playstyle. For example in my game, with a faster ticker from a harder difficulty, maybe I would have gotten those massive ships in January even with the number of UFOs I was able to intercept etc. On the other hand that would make unfortunate spawn positions much much more punishing. It might take fairly large increases in other areas to create the same kind of gameplay pressure you would get from increasing the ticker speed, especially as people get more used to the game.

I have never built a Corsair. Made it to Feb just fine aside from that rough spot in Dec-Early Jan. Put corsair money into expanding to 4 bases and stocking them with other stuff, one a manufacturing base with 75 engis. Haven't yet had the pleasure of a base defense, but from the sounds of the bugs I may want to wait on that anyway

Damn you reapers, finally ran into this one

It doesn't matter, it's system information.

The whole air combat thing is a balance, and it's a lot easier if you keep ahead of it. It was still difficult around late december to early january in my game, but that was also because I didn't know I could sell so many things I was stockpiling. The more bases and planes you build early, the more stuff you can shoot down, and the slower the whole invasion progresses. It's kind of a rough system when you aren't expecting it, and falling a little bit behind just causes the whole thing to snowball. Miss a few UFOs, bigger UFOs come before you can deal with them, UFOs come closer together, etc etc. Might be a good idea on the easier difficulty levels to have absolutely fixed points the invasion cannot accelerate past in order to give people who fall behind a chance.

Yep, some posts on this in the beta forum

For some reason made me think of....

Part of why I like running with pistols, specially for night missions. Though night missions will become harder once I can't just spam flares across the entire map, one end to the other.