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.

Yay, lets make all soldiers the same and remove any sign of individuality from people's games. Sorry for the sarcasm, but it seems to me you're intent on turning this game into an utterly linear experience. Every game you play will be the same: Fighters are no longer destroyed meaning there will be no variation in what you have game to game unless you make a deliberate decision to gimp yourself, if your soldiers all gain abilities at the same rate because they're not physically capable of gaining them any faster then they'll all end up being the same but with different names. I read in the difficulty thread that you're considering making the only difference between difficulty levels that of having more aliens per crash. Is the final game going to have any individuality and replayability at all? Yeah I'm aware you didn't state anything definite, I just don't like the decision to make fighters indestructable and I also don't like this proposed change or the proposed way of changing "difficulty" either.

How about: The aliens feel so bad about having shot down your plane that they offer to fabricate you a new one using their special alieny tech, but it takes 72hrs to complete. Kinda like star trek replicators.

As far as alien abilities go, I'd be in favour of keeping them at the same level for normal and hard then reduce it slightly for easy mode. I don't support making aliens godmode. However, if indeed the only difference they make between easy medium and hard is alien numbers then I will probably not end up playing the game very much and will most likely regret my purchase. Unless they pull some amazing balancing act with the economy that I very much doubt is possible. Yes ground combat is the main part of the game, but it's not the only part of the game and has to work with all the other parts of the game. If all the other components are balanced around a single difficulty, that's about half the game that will be either too easy or too hard for most people. People will either be failing the game due to not being able/willing to game the economics thus pulling focus away from ground combat, or they'll have so much money that ground combat will become trivial. Moar aliens won't solve that and even if it does it'll make the rest of the game a mere sideshow. If you want to make everything except ground combat utterly trivial then why even include it. You might as well just make the entire game a "skirmish" mode. These are just my thoughts and obviously we won't know exactly how it balances until they implement it fully. But from what I can think right now, simply adding more aliens to harder difficulties and changing nothing else is a lazy way of doing it and won't make for a very fulfilling game.

I should rephrase my comment to "as many variables as feasible should change". Yes it will require effort, but making a game people want to play is worth it. The changes your espousing are extremely narrow viewed - they only cater to your one view and don't take into account that other people may enjoy the game for different reasons and find different aspects hard. For your comment, it doesn't matter how many aliens are on board a ship if you're having difficulty shooting them down in the first place. If you fail before you even get beyond light ships with few crew due to being bad at economic management then having 50,000 aliens on board a battleship would not make the game harder or more enjoyable. Yes, the game should punish you for being bad at it, but the point of easy is that it's more forgiving and, well, easy. If it's exactly the same for you as on hard because you never even get to face "more aliens" due to the rest of the game being identical to hardmode whilst you're a newbie, then more aliens doesn't matter. That is, ignoring the fact that simply adding more aliens in a brute force attempt to make the game harder is rather... inelegant at the least, and I seriously doubt would make the game as fun as you seem to think it would. I certainly don't necessarily agree (in all circumstances) with the mantra "more aliens = more fun". Edit: If you're saying balance the geoscape specifically around easy, then add "more aliens" to harder mode, then I don't think that would make for a very enjoyable game for most people. The economics would be too easy for someone who wanted a challenge and if they're very good they'll just end up stomping the aliens anyway due to having all the money and all the equipment, no matter how many aliens you throw at them (not to mention the fact that it would seem unrealistic and immersion-breaking to balance all alien weapons around easy mode then just send more). I honestly think you're severely underestimating the disparity in skill between a good player and a baddie.

I would however prefer a system like this, where every option is customizable to the user.

I take the opposite view. I think most variable should change. The overall experience should be easy on easy (well, this is xenonaughts so maybe not "easy" per se), normal on normal and hard on hard. Being not as good at a certain aspect of the game doesn't mean that that one single thing should therefore make your experience no different than on hard mode. If you're a whizz at ground combat, but air combat stumps you, if air combat is the place you fail every time and doesn't scale with difficulty, then playing easy will be the same as playing hard. To my mind that doesn't make sense. All "parts" of the game should have at least one component that scales with difficulty so that all parts do. I also think escalation speed is an obvious candidate for difficulty scaling. Things that happen on the geoscape have a knock on effect on the entire rest of the game, so if we want to just modify a few things to change difficulty, it should start there (since reducing difficulty of the geoscape aspects makes the entire game easier).

Perhaps, I may have followed it and assumed it was a new post. >.< My bad.

The fact that we're fighting for our very existence against aliens might mean that we don't have quite such stringent safety standards as a modern at-peace military force, in a pinch.

The hunter is based on the Ferret IIRC, and they didn't have "electronic targeting" whatever that is supposed to be, afaik. The machinegun was a machinegun and was aimed like a machinegun and if we assume that the "rockets" you can mount are modified swingfire missiles, those things are either MCLOS or SACLOS (depending on version), which would certainly depend on operator skill. If we assume they are some fictional unguided rocket armament or something, then again operator skill would matter. This is based in the cold war era remember.