Jump to content

Solver

Members
  • Posts

    2,523
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    49

Everything posted by Solver

  1. Stellar, that is the point. You will reach your ceiling where you take on everything that can be killed. I, for instance, discovered that Cruisers are easily killable with two sorties from a Foxtrot. So now Cruiser appearances are boring, I just send out a Foxtrot, hit, RTB to rearm, hit again. Boom.
  2. Oh, sure, you're right there. I like air combat as a break, and that is what it should be. And I like how air combat is actually a bigger part of the game than in the OG, where it was nearly entirely passive. I think the air combat now is quite well done, except maybe the fact that the nimble fighter squadrons represent a bigger escalation in difficulty than anything else, like bigger ships. But I like the minigame because I am still learning, and because quite frankly I still suck at it. The point is, that will stop being the case long before I tire of the rest of the game. I will figure out how to do air combat correctly, and I will start winning every, or very close to that, air battle that happens, and then the minigame will just get boring. Does that apply to other aspects? Well, in a way. You could say I will also get very good at ground combat at some point. But due to ground combat being far more complicated (because it's not a minigame), it will take me a far longer time to do so. Let's say that I will get really good at air combat after a month, good enough to render it irrelevant, but it would at the same rate take me a couple of years to no longer be challenged by the ground combat. And the main threat with auto resolve is, like I said, that it might not be good enough for the higher difficulty battles which would still be repetitive manually. This is an issue I have faced before. I do not have a good solution. I just want to put this out there so the point is understood.
  3. Caesans have an elegant solution ready which comes from the original and Sectoids. Higher rank Caesans have psionics, as Sectoids did in the original. So while definitely a lesser threat, their landings would still have some potency, especially if the redshirt guys are filtered out and promoted at least to the basic blueshirts. Like I've mentioned before, I'd actually like some more variation in mission difficulty at a given point, though of course there should not be landings consisting of 4 pistol-wielding redshirts into the game's third month.
  4. Your flippant response misses the point. I've seen enough of your posts to know that you know better. When you add a minigame to the design, you almost certainly fall into the trap I described. The key weakness here being duration. Anything can get old, but for a fully-fledged well designed system it may take years to do so. Not so for a minigame, which is again necessarily simpler due to the constraints placed on its design.
  5. You know, the presence of just 3 races as "primary" ones can explain why aliens feel less varied than in the original. That had five primary races. Sectoids, Floaters, Snakemen, Mutons, Ethereals. Three of them would be present from the early game, with Mutons and Ethereals joining the party later. Although the earlier races still remain when the later ones hit the game, sometimes the Sectoids vanish, but you're facing no less than 4 races after the game has progressed a bit. Not so in Xenonauts.
  6. The thing about minigames is, they are a losing proposition. A design trap. First, let me offer anecdotal experience. Bioshock and Deus Ex: HR both have minigames. I loved both games. At the beginning, minigames seemed really interesting. In the middle of the game, I was good at them, and reached the point where I would always succeed. By the end of the game, the minigames had gotten really tiring. In my second playthrough? Hated them with a passion. Now on to the design trap. Minigames are, by their very nature, simple. They have to be. Something like air combat in Xenonauts is fairly complicated for a minigame, but still simple. Fundamentally this is because of the design niche that minigames fill. They are there to provide some quick aspect of gameplay without seriously interrupting the rest of the game. By their nature, minigames must be possible to resolve in no more than a minute. This means that players eventually get very good at them because they don't offer so much complexity. This is where things get hairy. Once a player is good enough, the minigame becomes a mere annoyance. The player knows exactly what to do, and he'll win every time. The minigame is nothing more than a chore then. That is where auto-resolve comes in. Except a pretty big snag once again. The auto-resolve may actually be less favourable than the player's own skill. Consider this made-up example. I figure out how to take a fighter squadron with 2 Corsairs and no losses. I get good enough to do it every time. However, auto-resolve does not consider the situation so favourable, so auto-resolving such a fight leads to 1 Corsair lost. Thus I feel forced to manually play it out every time, which will piss me off sooner or later. The opposite is also true - if auto-resolve consistently offers better results than what can be gained by playing the mini-game, then auto-resolving becomes the way to go. This is a problem I have encountered in numerous designs, and one that is extremely hard to mitigate.
  7. I suck at the minigame. No excuses. For me it is hard to kill fighter squadrons even with a three jet squadron. But ultimately, this is why autoresolve is needed. At some point, you get to be as good at the mini game as possible, so it loses it's meaning completely and every round becomes a foregone conclusion. This is true of pretty much any mini game.
  8. In terms of aircraft costs, it is mostly the later aircrafts, Corsair and later, that have ridiculous production times.
  9. Hey Gijs-Jan, could the AI have problems with path finding caused by temporarily blocked paths? I mean when it considers a possible location to go to, and during evaluation sees the path to it as blocked because it happens to temporarily be by a soldier or NPC, so that location is not chosen as a possible destination. I have encountered that problem a few times, in some games causing back and forth running as the paths are reevaluated each turn, and in some other games just ignoring valid paths because they do not get reevaluated again for several turns. Just wondering.
  10. Idea #3 is pretty good. I strongly oppose #4 - to me it goes against the ideology of X-COM, which is that your soldiers should improve through combat, not elsewhere. #3 is probably not too difficult by doing something similar to morale. The way morale stays higher with higher ranked soldiers present, skill increase after a mission can factor squad ranks into the calculation.
  11. Ahh, hmm, haven't actually met heavy drones. A bit weird. As for the teleporting Wraith, it's a good idea but I've found them so far to mostly be a nuissance. Good idea but not implemented well. They seem to be poor at choosing when to teleport (sometimes they'll teleport away when they have a good shot on one of my troops), and their erratic behaviour just leads me to spend a bunch of extra turns chasing them down to end the mission. Though they should be one of the more fun enemies if given saner AI.
  12. It does unfortunately say Preators in the files, I'm pretty sure. I do not have the game available now but that is how I remember it. Harridans are a pretty good race but ultimately IMO not that exciting. The main thing about them is that they use sniper rifles. The cyberdisks, when they appear, are barely noticeable. What I miss is pretty much something like Sectopods, a slow, hard-hitting and near-industructible unit.
  13. I've accumulated some thoughts on replayability so far. We all know it was one of the amazing parts of X-COM, so here's a few points on it, and the variety of gameplay. 1. Map variety. In a game like this, I believe the quantity is significant. I'll hopefully be playing this for hundreds of missions, hence the need for map variety. Xenonauts does pretty well in this, except that maps are very unevenly spread, and that more maps are still needed. By an uneven spread I mean, in my current game I've maybe had 1 or 2 Arctic missions, 1 Soviet Town mission and no Mid-East town missions, with loads of the familiar Farm/Industrial. I do think that ultimately making heavier use of randomization for some maps would improve replayability by a lot, and the support is there due to the submap system. I know it is already supposed to work that way with randomization but it does not always feel like it does. At least the two terror maps that I get most of the time seem to have no random elements, I am well familiar with their buildings by now. On the upside, the underlying system is very good, and it seems relatively easy to create maps (and there's a healthy mapping community), so I am confident that this point will be very strong. 2. UFO variety. Something I mentioned briefly in another thread yesterday, I find it problematic that there is almost no overlap at any given time in the types of UFOs appearing. If it's Corvettes, then it is Corvettes until landing ships appear, which then cause Corvettes to disappear, and so on. It actually takes a lot of the fun out of air combat because it becomes too repetitive. My current game has Cruisers currently, so I know every contact is a Cruiser, so I also know I don't need any light missiles or such, that I just need to scramble jets with a full torpedo loadout. Every time. Plus of course it leads to what feels like worse map variety because you get them in clusters. Early on, you'll get the maps that are for small UFOs, then these maps disappear and you get maps of other sizes. There is no mix as the game proceeds. This is something fairly easy to fix, just by tweaking the timelines and probabilities of the different UFO types. Let me still get the occasional scout when it's cruisers flying around. 3. Aliens. Ideally, I'd like to see one more alien race. There's Caesans that correspond to Sectoids, Sebillians are Snakemen, Androns are Mutons and Preators are Ethereals. Plus some companion races. I do feel that there is one more lacking to hit the sweet spot, preferrably a race with some very scary companion, like Sectopods were. Man I miss those guys. But I realize that adding alien races is an effort due to the graphics. That said, aliens seem to suffer from a problem slightly similar to my UFO point above, though not as bad. In my current game for instance, Caesans have essentially disappeared quite quickly, almost every missions is Sebs with the occasional Andron mission. By the way, why are they called Preators and not Praetors? The latter is probably what they are intended to convey. 4. Needs more curveballs. In the long term, I think it'd be best to have occasional unpredictable events, emergent or not. Again, like the original X-COM. In it, sometimes you'd get lucky to capture an alien Navigator very early, giving you early hyperwave decoders. Or sometimes the first terror mission would come up really early requiring you to respond to it with mostly green troops. Some unpredictable elements like that would really improve replayability further. For contrast, that's poorly done in the Firaxis remake, where I know the first terror mission hits around 15th of April, that Mutons appear in the last days of April, and that my encounters before the terror mission will include a shot down small scout and a large one, and one landed scout.
  14. One problem: the game does lack guidance. It's not clear how to progress through the game. After you interrogate an alien officer, it's told you should get a leader (well, it doesn't appear on-screen, but the text in the files says so). But it doesn't say how to identify leaders or even where to find them, like it was explained for officers. Alien bases aren't mentioned either. I feel that someone who has not played the original would be at a loss for what to do.
  15. This can happen even if the faster ships get destroyed. Alien squadron of Cruiser and 2x heavy fighter. If you destroy the fighters and then retreat, the cruiser will still auto-initiate combat, even though it's not fast enough to catch up.
  16. Aliens are absolutely oblivious to the vertical dimension. They do not go up and down anything, and also I notice that aliens won't go down in the UFO. Cruisers have this bridge-like area on the 2nd floor, usually 2 aliens there. Those aliens never go down and for me they don't even seem to move. At least Sebillians don't. They will fire at my troops if they have the chance, but they don't leave the area or even move within it.
  17. I finally figured out another thing that's bugging me. There is no to little UFO variety at any given time. Game begins with light scouts and scouts. As Corvettes appear, scouts basically disappear. Then landing ships take over, then cruisers. There is almost no overlap. This is bad because it's less geoscape variety, and more predictability for air combat. It makes it more difficult to train a secondary assault team of less experienced soldiers because there are no easier missions, they're all pretty much the same. And it really makes map variety seem much worse than it is because you'll be getting maps out of a small selection at any given time. Like now, I'm playing against Cruisers, and three maps in a row it was the same map. Too familiar by now. Exit the dropship into a train yard, then a power station to the right across the road, the UFO is behind the power station.
  18. If the last alien you kill at a terror site is a zombie, the combat ends with it dead just as Chryssalid spawns. As such, the round is over but the one alien counts as "escaped" and you get a "terror site not secured" for 0 points.
  19. I just noticed that Corsairs can't perform an evasive roll. Checking the XML, I see they are supposed to be able to, while Foxtrots aren't, though in-game they can. Xenopedia confirms that is the intention. Seeing as how Corsairs come right after Foxtrots in the XML, I'm pretty sure there's an off-by-one error in the code that looks up aircraft ability to perform the move.
  20. Some research texts do not show up, giving an empty xenopedia screen, like Alien Officer interrogation. I have some immersion-related points. First, I'd suggest avoiding breaking the 4th wall in in-game descriptions. Consider the description of the plasma rifle (and other rifles). Ends with: I don't think "the game" should be mentioned. Instead I'd keep it in-character, like "the best all-around weapon our operatives can employ". Also, what's up with casualty numbers? I really like that you have a casualty number on-screen, but at the end of in-game November mine is at 1013 people. A thousand casualties after nearly 3 months of an invasion, that would amount to a bit above 4000 worldwide per year. For comparison, that's less than the yearly deaths from traffic accidents in Japan, and less that two months of traffic-related deaths in the USA. The game is intended to convey that the world militaries are helpless against the aliens. Civilian planes get shot down, navy ships are strafed and bombed, cities get terrorized, but casualties are low. My main base in in Europe, and casualties in the Europe region are a 203 after this time, basically conveying the impression that I'm dealing with the aliens so well that the chance of being killed by aliens is less than dying in a typical accident.
  21. It was a bit overdone but only because grenades were extremely powerful up to the last version a few days ago - they used to have nearly perfect accuracy and higher damage. They currently also decrease in damage the further you throw them, which, I believe, is not intended.
  22. Stability has been great for me so far. 1 crash with 18.51 HF3, and zero since going on Steam.
  23. So far expanding seems to be the hardest part. It's expensive. My initial goal when expanding would be to set up a secondary assault team, which indeed means radar + Chinook, which in turn means living quarters, stores and a hangar. Second hangar is the minimum necessary to actually shoot something down.
  24. Not sure about that, they seem to lose TUs just okay after hotfix 3. I see suppressed aliens shoot just one single shot, or barely move. Looks like low TU. Except that they sometimes fire a burst, but that may be because a plasma burst needs not too many TUs to fire.
  25. Except that cheap soldiers are even worse as scouts. The soldiers will die even more, cheap recruits will rarely survive even one hit from plasma. The Hunter will certainly take a hit, sometimes a full burst, and it will also get fully repaired after the mission if it survived at all, while a rookie will be injured and out for days if surviving. Further, the hunter is a priority target and thus you know your good soldiers won't be fired at, rookies do not give you that guarantee. Heck, you can even use a hunter as mobile cover on wide-open desert maps.
×
×
  • Create New...