Person012345

I suppose it's nicer when you have more than one? Right now it doesn't have enough damage output to be useful on it's own so I have to pair it with condors, largely negating the speed benefit. And it's a dedicated fighter killer, rather than a straight upgrade to the condor (which I guess is more multirole)? Ok then, I gotcha.

The wiki says that the corsair retains the same hardpoints as the condor and the xenopedia text, whilst not outright saying it can carry light missiles, implies that it can by specifically mentioning that it can't carry heavy torpedoes. Though looking closer it does list the hardpoints as 2x cannon, so is the text misleading? And why did I just build one, how is this even an upgrade? Survivability and speed? The speed's not much use when I have to combine it with a condor anyway.

I had that a couple of days ago, the downed ship itself cut off an area that would normally be accessible and an enemy alien spawned on that side of the ship that I couldn't get to or see so I had no choice but to occupy the ship and wait it out.

It's not that you can't have both good graphics and depth. It's not that that would, in itself, cost too much. It's that graphics are expensive and depth has niche appeal. A game of a certain genre that has a lot of depth only really appeals to fans of that genre who are a priori willing to put enough time into the game to understand it and casual gamers are ruled out altogether. This limits the market and the returns. As a result, big publishers who are the ones with the kind of money required for sparkly graphics (or indeed any investor) aren't willing to put huge amounts of money into sparkly graphics. Shallow games are easier to sell, easier to pick up and play and generally have a much wider audience than deep ones, they can appeal to casuals and also people who don't necessarily have a great interest in the genre. As a result the people making deep games tend to be indie devs who don't have a great deal of cash to work with. As for the balancing thing above: equal, asymmetrical balance is possible but it's extremely difficult to get perfect and if you try to specifically do it the chances are you will a. waste a lot of time and b. ruin the game for everyone who isn't willing to abuse and game the system, who play for fun and would like a more realistic experience. Leave competition to either games that were, from the outset, designed to be played competitively or games like osu.

I like the encyclopedia entries, they're more detailed than some silly cinematic would be.

Also, of course, aimed shots are more accurate than snap shots, you have the right fire mode selected?

Nope, it's one of the factors. I did mention balancing it so that air combat was less "difficult" per given game setting than ground combat (ymmv of course but for most people at least). Although frankly I can't have much sympathy for someone who wants to be good at the game but doesn't want to learn how to be good at the game. I understand it's a remake, but it shouldn't cater just to people who "don't want to learn the skills" to play the game. imo.

And if you make it scalably easy or hard to not-lose-interceptors then everyone can have that skill. Unrealistic as opposed to having a mildly strengthened F-16 get ripped into by lasers then plummet into the middle of the atlantic ocean be ready for action again 3 days later? And losing them doesn't have an effect on the game... but now we have interceptors we can't lose at all. I think this is a pseudo-solution that is actually the same as #2.

Not really, that's why you have difficulty levels. Yes, for a veteran player, being expected to lose 4 or 5 aircraft over the course of a game when it is really easy not to lose a plane will indeed result in much excess cash. That is why it is easy and not hard. When we're at hard mode you're looking at maybe being expected to lose 2-3 (or whatever is appropriate) aircraft, and air combat also becomes more difficult with regards to how hard they are to shoot down. Thus, that same player who found air combat oh so easy on easy mode now finds it more challenging. This should surely be balancable without making them roll in cash if they lose 0. And if they're still losing none, they should consider moving on to very hard.

Honestly, I just want to know where it is at the beginning. Whilst I actually have a general idea on all the maps so far, there will be new ones added IIRC and it's frankly just irritating heading in one direction so carefully for 5 - 10 minutes and finding it's a dead end. It's easy enough to work out in strip-type maps from scrolling to the edges of the map and going in the long direction, but on the squarish maps it can get pretty tedious just trying to find the giant alien spaceship that you just flew over yet somehow have no idea where is. Perhaps, in conjunction with slightly reducing the difficulty curve of night missions compared to day ones, they could remain unknown at night time. That being said, the xenonauts can apparently barely see 20ft in front of them even on the brightest day, so it makes sense they wouldn't be able to see the crash site from a helicopter...

And I'm gonna beat the crap out of it anyway.

Well, as you said they're "annoying" to reach, which I assume means you need power-grinding to reach and therefore means I will never encounter them and therefore I have no opinion on them.

A cap on per-mission gains?

Whlst I'm not exactly a fan of the idea, this would be much preferable to a flat cap for mission XP gains for everyone.

I honestly don't see what would be so hard to balance about planes on different difficulties anyway. I think the devs are looking at it the wrong way. Right now they're looking at changing the price of the planes and are afraid it will result in planes cheaper than rifles for balance. I think we should be looking at the other aspect of air combat in order to balance it. Planes on easy shouldn't be cheap, but they should be balanced so that loosing a certain number (say 4 or 5 high tech ones, idk that would be for the balancers) should have an actual detrimental effect on your game. The crucial part of balance should be in how easily they die. Make it so that they can take a hell of a beating and have better speed than aliens of the same tier, plus make it clear using tips that damaged planes should be evac'd. Make it so that even fairly new players are not likely to take the kind of losses that would ruin their game. They would have to be doing it seriously wrong and unintuitively to actually have air combat screw up their game. To medium. Increase the cost of fighters so that losing fewer would be significant and make them tough but not too tough - a player who knows what he's doing even if not amazing should be able to take few enough losses that it won't ruin the game. You might note that this has the same essential effect as indestructible fighters - Players won't be taking the losses required to mess things up, except that in this case it's actually based on player input, requires no handwaving and doesn't dumb down the game too much, if you do it very wrong you will still suffer. Essentially replacing indestructible fighters with simply hard-to-kill fighters. Now on to hard mode - price-wise I think it should have similar balance to normal mode, but this time, planes are actually more difficult to keep alive. It would require a good player with some skills to be able to avoid the game-ending losses, hence it being hard. Finally to very hard. Very tight losses and much easier to kill aircraft. This surely solves the issue of pricing since the price balance remains fairly high. There could potentially be 2 issues I can see depending on the balance: 1. Air combat is "too easy" if we shift ground combat balance to slightly harder for a given difficulty (because ground combat is the main focus of the game), but that being said I can't see how it would be easier than not being able to lose your planes at all. 2. For the purists, it might not make sense that the human airplanes tank "so many" shots from a highly advanced UFO. I would contend that it makes a lot more sense than downed interceptors magically being repaired by the power of friendship. Plus being able to tank large amounts of shots would only apply at certain difficulties (easy, even for normal I only envision giving a player 1, 2 or maybe 3 extra shots taken in order to hit the evac button in time) and it's in the name of balance. Of course, I'm not an expert on exactly how easy this would be to balance, but I imagine it can be done and it seems that the devs haven't focused on that aspect in their rebuttals, but rather the aspect of trying to balance the cost. On the easiest difficulty this should have a similar effect to indestructibles, but without the actual indestructibility. On harder it should make air combat more than a trivial minigame with no impact on the main game.