Solver

I'm a gamer and a programmer. Believe me, I know all about the least possible amount of social life

3 people in less than an hour, nice So the three of you, please message me the required info.

So it's more or less holiday season, and v20 is about to become official on Steam To celebrate the fact, the first 3 people here who post a fresh screenshot of their main base can also message me for a celebratory present. Choose a game on Steam and I will send it to you, make sure to include your email or Steam name. To preserve a modicum of sanity, please choose among Steam games that cost no more than 35 currency units on the EUR/USD stores.

I also posted about this the other day. The occasional lone UFO would be an improvement just to add a bit of unpredictability to the whole thing, as opposed to knowing that UFOs always come in waves, and that nothing happens between waves.

Allowing Wraiths to only teleport at the end of their term seems like the best solution. It solves the actual problem of them mitigating all defenses to fire on you, and that's what the game research text says anyway, that they can not move or shoot after teleporting.

This is evil, I have a very interesting ongoing playthrough and it's a shame to lose save compatibility now.

Does reaction fire happen before an action that triggers it or right after? What I'm getting at is, perhaps there could be reaction fire for closing the door. Then trying to close it could lead to being fire upon before you shut it, while avoiding the cheapness of open-peek-close and still allowing a fair approach of open-grenade-shoot.

Eh, I think the point here was that door opening not triggering reaction fire (similar to the original's mutual surprise rule) is a good thing. It does make doors a bit easier to assault, but being cut down by reaction fire from 3 aliens as you open a door will feel unfair and frustrating. As for the plasma cannon, it's simply an over-buffed weapon that was recently useless. It should be fireable once per turn only, and it should also leave your soldiers with some chance of surviving. Whether alien ammo adds anything or not is up for debate, but I think it'd be great to at least simulate alien ammo by making them reload occasionally, even if it's otherwise infinite.

I do not think it's necessary to spam explosives per se, but it's by far the easiest approach. Tight hallways, high concentrations of aliens, it all means your soldiers are more at risk and explosives simply work very well. Except the command room, there explosives are essentially a must to avoid a very serious risk of fatalities. There should perhaps be a higher payoff for not blowing everything up. How about more fluff items being captured from bases that you can sell for money? I really liked this in the original, and in the Firaxis remake, that taking out an alien base provided a very sweet sum of money.

The original definitely has poor balance in retrospect. Manfuactured Laser Cannons take care of your economy, you go either directly to Heavy Plasma or first through Laser Rifles, in the air interceptors with Plasma Cannons are guaranteed to shoot down anything except a Battleship with 0 damage, and a lot of techs and items are completely irrelevant. That's true. So the original definitely has the pitfall that there's a best way to play the game, and it becomes easy if you follow that. Still, balance flaws should not overshadow the aspects that are done amazingly well. Xenonauts departs from the original in a few significant ways, most of which are, in my opinion, extremely good. The decision to take away for-profit manufacturing is great. There's nothing good about how the original made the funding nations irrelevant. The whole concept of nation funding and national relations simply didn't matter. So this is a good choice in Xeno. Another difference is the massive amount of UFOs in Xeno, which is also a good thing. It feels more like an invasion, and it requires you to choose targets because you can't shoot down every UFO. It's an alien invasion, not a turkey shoot. I would like some slight adjustments to the wave system, but it's a good one. Once you change your mindset a bit anyway. The current focus on air is the only recent intentional departure that I dislike, and even then I believe it's easily fixed just by toning it down a bit. Base management is better in Xeno than in the original. Ground combat is mostly better, aside from a few points. Air combat is much better - it was barely there in the original. It just feels like the game has forgotten that its ground combat is the main part.

I find the initial funding loss to be okay. You lose funding in the first month, but can already make some back in the second. When you have 2 bases capable of shooting down UFOs, that becomes a possibility. My main problem economy-wise so far is money to manufacture equipment. I'm getting funding from the nations, enough to slowly build up my bases and expand radar/hangar capabilities, but then there's very little left for making equipment.

In the current build the aliens seem to charge into the first room. I clear it, then aliens keep streaming in, so that by the end, pretty much every alien except those in the command room is dead in the first room. But yeah, the best approach to dealing with bases is a highly explosive one. A rocket on any clump of aliens. C4 vs. all doors. Then a rocket through the door. Reach the command room and grenade the hell out of it before storming in. Really the crazy plasma cannons are the biggest threat now, but those will surely be reduced to reasonable damage values.

I played some more last night, and again, the benefits of land combat seemed underwhelming. I'm doing fine with the nations, except for Australia, all nations either increase my funding or keep it at the same level, most of the funding anyway goes towards the (now vastly larger) maintenance costs, and the payoff from ground combat remains limited. Ground combat should remain interesting throughout the game for three reasons. One is map variety (where the original is unsurpassed), the other is progression of your and alien equipment/soldiers, and the third is overall pacing. This last point means that the amount of missions you do before reaching the endgame feels good. I'd say it is currently too high in Xeno.

I played some more last night, and again, the benefits of land combat seemed underwhelming. I'm doing fine with the nations, except for Australia, all nations either increase my funding or keep it at the same level, most of the funding anyway goes towards the (now vastly larger) maintenance costs, and the payoff from ground combat remains limited. Ground combat should remain interesting throughout the game for three reasons. One is map variety (where the original is unsurpassed), the other is progression of your and alien equipment/soldiers, and the third is overall pacing. This last point means that the amount of missions you do before reaching the endgame feels good. I'd say it is currently too high in Xeno.

I do in fact agree that we should not play hundreds of missions. I do not want that. I do not even want a hundred. But I'd like to point out that with my estimate numbers from a few posts up, a 6 UFO wave where you shoot down 1 and do its mission, and let 5 go, would increase your relations slightly. As long as you either shoot down 3 out of 6 UFOs without doing any missions, or do at least one crash site, your relations would go up. Then again, I do not think the current balance is fine at all. I want nation relations to matter, among other things, and I want ground performance to be more important than air. You should have to have an air strategy, absolutely, but you shouldn't feel compelled to airstrike most crash sites because they only give you a small benefit. The air game is absolutely better than in X-Com. So is the whole funding scheme in fact, but it should not be possible to keep all nations happy just by having many interceptors.

Aaron, have you checked if the base-attack bias formula realistically allows a possibility of a newer base being attacked? I still have never had any base other than my first attacked, including 2nd bases that I found within a month of the game's start.

I think the relations points right after a mission should only affect the money slightly, which is okay, though the relations points should have a very big effect on end-of-month funding. Though upping the rewards for saved civilians a bit would seem appropriate.

That way of opening doors only worked in TFTD or with one of the unofficial X-Com patches like UFOextender, I'm pretty sure it never worked in the original DOS X-Com. I may of course be remembering wrong.

Aaron, I would still suggest those are distinct problems. Alloys/Alenium are forgettable beyond the initial research, that's one problem. The amount of UFOs, missions and their corresponding monetary/relations rewards are another problem. I'd suggest a few points. To generally improve the pacing, add occasional UFOs outside of waves. I currently always know that a UFO means more will immediately follow because there's a wave, and that there's a longer downtime after it. Occasional single UFOs (implemented as 1-UFO waves I guess) would be good to throw the balance off a bit. There are, as you say, more UFOs than you should do missions. That should be achieved primarily through the inability to shoot down most UFOs. You shouldn't be able to shoot down a whole wave, but you should be able to do missions for most UFOs that you shoot down. Getting missions and not doing them feels contrary to the spirit of the game. Grinding national relations should not be feasible because of the risks involved. Getting those relation points from yet another Scout should not be worth the risk of losing a good soldier. The missions should become worth it by a combination of rewards. Soldier stat increases, money, relations, alien resources. Those should together - but not individually - outweigh the risks such as losing soldiers or getting them wounded so they have to skip a few missions. Plus, national relations should be (or already are?) capped at some maximum, so doing them repeatedly doesn't gain you anything when a nation already has great relations. And finally, the main boosts should come from missions that can not be grinded because they appear more randomly. That is, terror and alien base missions. Those should be much more significant than crash sites for relations, my gut feeling would be to say about 5 times more important. To further complicate matters, overall tech progression can add to the feeling of grinding if it's not well balanced. A few builds ago (20.2 maybe), I felt like I was grinding because I was in fact doing too well. I was doing well, shooting down UFOs and doing missions, but only small alien bases were showing up. Which prevented me from capturing an alien leader to progress in the story. Here are some relations that might feel good to me, again, gut feeling: Baseline -> relations boost for clearing a crash site is X. Shooting down a UFO is about 0.25X. Not shooting down a UFO is about -0.2X. Completing a terror mission / alien base is about 5X. Failing/ignoring a terror site is damaging by about 5X. The difference between best possible relations (they love you and give you lots of money) and the worst possible relations (they give up on you completely) are about 11X. Would actually be interesting to run some numerical simulation if there's data on relation points and UFO waves.

Oh yeah. Good catch. I do basically forget about those because they're not a limiting factor in my experience. That first Scout mission to get my first Alenium is really important because I want it researched ASAP. But other than that, I seem to consume those resources at a much slower pace than I gain them. The primary pressure to do crash site missions comes, in my experience, from trying to level soldiers up. Experienced soldiers are much better than rookies, and soldiers only get better through missions. But of course they are also the primary risk in missions, as any soldier can get killed due to you miscalculating or simply getting unlucky. The game essentially has several kinds of resources. Money, country relations, soldiers, tech. It's good for certain actions to be resource-asymmetric, that is, provide a possible payoff in one resource while risking another.

Let's not forget that X-Com had another huge problem with doors, which was that you could not just open them, you had to go through. The mutual surprise exception was good and necessary for the gameplay, but it sucked when you were ready to breach a UFO and had to order a guy inside in order to get the door open.

Even though ground missions do not give negative points, I'm convinced the current way is wrong and is one of the few mistakes made in recent development. Relations should primarily be determined by ground missions and ground events. Shooting down UFOs should give you a relations boost, but a minor one. The main boosts should be from ground missions, especially from terror sites / alien bases, while the worst penalties should come from the presence of alien bases and ignored/failed terror sites. Unharmed UFOs should be dangerous in that they slightly reduce your relations, but mostly in that they speed up alien progress as the aliens build and supply bases, and otherwise get points. But the focus of the game should remain on the ground missions, not suddenly shift to interceptions.

Even though ground missions do not give negative points, I'm convinced the current way is wrong and is one of the few mistakes made in recent development. Relations should primarily be determined by ground missions and ground events. Shooting down UFOs should give you a relations boost, but a minor one. The main boosts should be from ground missions, especially from terror sites / alien bases, while the worst penalties should come from the presence of alien bases and ignored/failed terror sites. Unharmed UFOs should be dangerous in that they slightly reduce your relations, but mostly in that they speed up alien progress as the aliens build and supply bases, and otherwise get points. But the focus of the game should remain on the ground missions, not suddenly shift to interceptions.

I'm also a bit further into the game, and more convinced that accuracy needs to be toned down a bit. My shield soldier with a pistol has amazing accuracy. My riflemen do not need the 40 TU aimed shots because they reach amazing accuracy with 30 TU shots. Even my heavy weapons guys are hitting quite a lot. 1.25X should feel better.

Yeah, realistic accuracy would be simply unplayable. Realistic accuracy would be even higher than it is now in game. Elite soldier vs. a larger-than-human alien at 20m distance? Not going to miss. So since realism has to be somewhat overlooked anyway, accuracy feels like it needs to be toned down a bit.