DNK

I usually drop speed to minimum, beam the target, then fire off torpedoes one every second. The problem with your approach is that the fighters can dodge multiple times. Usually it's the 3rd and 4th torpedoes that hit, meaning I have to wait several seconds to launch them all. It's usually very hard to get the Foxtrots out of range of the fighters before the Foxtrots' missiles hit, meaning they get shot down often even when they shoot down the fighters also.That said, the missiles are really slow in this game. It's another one of those "simple fixes" where an extra/less 25% to missile speed or range would make a huge difficulty difference and negate the need for whole new mechanics (not naming any in particular...). As it stands, it's very intolerant of minor timing mistakes.

I've said all I have to say here: Allow fuel/speed/AB management in the geoscape to allow Xeno craft to outrun or catch up to alien craft. Allow Xeno craft to 'ditch stores' for increased fuel efficiency and speed. Rebalance aircraft abilities, including a much reduced roll distance for all craft (but especially aliens'). Greatly increase mission rewards. Allow for resource-limited profitable production. Increase nation funding. Reduce ease of losing nations to aliens. Allow off-base landings (similar to "patrol", but you are invisible to enemies and get refueled - simulates friendly airfields you can land at throughout the world). http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/6286-Balancing-Campaign-Difficulty-without-Magic-Interceptors

I've said all I have to say here: Allow fuel/speed/AB management in the geoscape to allow Xeno craft to outrun or catch up to alien craft. Allow Xeno craft to 'ditch stores' for increased fuel efficiency and speed. Rebalance aircraft abilities, including a much reduced roll distance for all craft (but especially aliens'). Greatly increase mission rewards. Allow for resource-limited profitable production. Increase nation funding. Reduce ease of losing nations to aliens. Allow off-base landings (similar to "patrol", but you are invisible to enemies and get refueled - simulates friendly airfields you can land at throughout the world). http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/6286-Balancing-Campaign-Difficulty-without-Magic-Interceptors

Here is the short version (long version in spoilers). The campaign is too difficult compared to XCOM:EU because the air combat is too difficult and the economics are equally WAY harder. Advice for the V18 build (ignoring what's happened in V19): Allow fuel/speed/AB management in the geoscape to allow Xeno craft to outrun or catch up to alien craft. Allow Xeno craft to 'ditch stores' for increased fuel efficiency and speed. Rebalance aircraft abilities, including a much reduced roll distance for all craft (but especially aliens'). Greatly increase mission rewards. Allow for resource-limited profitable production. Increase nation funding. Reduce ease of losing nations to aliens. Allow off-base landings (similar to "patrol", but you are invisible to enemies and get refueled - simulates friendly airfields you can land at throughout the world). Aaand the long version, well-written, clearly explained supporting argument for the above.

The only fix is to remove it.The best way to fix the campaign difficulty (in particular the air war) is to simply retweak costs and build times. Particularly base costs and new plane costs. Troop transports in particular shouldn't cost multiple Foxtrots' worth just to slightly decrease ground combat difficulty. Prices are out of whack, and I see that the new build does tweak them more into reasonable territory, but what about bases or starting funds?

They'd be fine as currently (V18) implemented if they were a bit easier to take down. I've not yet figured out how to consistently take down a 3-fighter flight without losing one, or many times all, of my own planes. With 2 as escorts it's usually a lot easier, but still there's too high of a loss rate on my end without reloads. Minor tweaks, like reducing how far they roll out or decreasing lock-on time for torpedoes (or increasing range of missiles) by just 25% would help tremendously.

The real issue is that the campaign is currently way too hard (V18). This is 1/2 my fault and 1/2 the game's. It's my fault because I simply haven't built enough workshops to rapidly pump out necessary replacements and new aircraft types. It's my first play-through, so it's to be expected. I didn't specialize my bases enough, and I ended up with a filled-up generalist base that has no spare room for more manufacturing. The game's fault, however, is the extreme expense of new aircraft (aside from manufacturing requirements) AND new bases. Why new bases, you ask? Because at the outset of the game you just can't afford to build that many (1, maybe 2 by the second month), and you end up losing out on a lot of missions for it for each stage of the invasion. Later, you lose large amounts of funding not only for poor ratings but for permanent territory loss. Too many important things cost too much money. The overall money balance needs to be fixed. With that fixed, players then just need to realize that 2 workshops won't cut it for production after Corsairs come into play. One base will need to be dedicated to pushing out aircraft constantly to fill up the hangars in all the others. Oh, and additionally the "losing territories" mechanic is way too harsh and unforgiving. I lose a ton of funding because, again, bases are too expensive, plus base attack missions are nigh impossible without a 12 or 14 man squad, which itself requires a, what, $750K investment just for the aircraft? Again, the real issue is just how unforgiving and challenging the overall campaign is. That's basic balance. This new mechanic is unnecessary, and once it's in place, all new balancing has to include it.

150-200 I forget how much exactly. Probably did at least 10 missions in the first month. I base in central China.

Yet people still have all sorts of issues with specific hardware configurations in games. Like 85% of players have no issues, then 15% have horrible performance for no apparent reason. It's just their specific setup doesn't play well with however the game or drivers for the game have been coded.You're creating something that's going to be run across half a dozen plus CPU architectures, a similar number of GPU architectures, chipsets, storage setups, and operating systems. You think APIs are a magic bullet for that mess? This is an issue with using PCs for gaming. It's not something that can realistically be avoided. Yeah, there are some real lemons that get released and shouldn't be, even from major studios, but claiming all games should be 100% done on release is excessive. I normally get served dinners that could be considered far less than 95% of what I would like in terms of quality. I also don't pay $100 a plate for them. I prefer this scenario as I cannot afford to pay $50-100 for perfect meals every time. But, damn, I guess you go out for 4.5-5 star every single time. Probably complain anyway and stand up on your table and claim they're indicative of a restaurant industry in a dismal state of poor standards...

Making them cheaper and quicker to build would be a hell of a lot of a better idea. There is no way in hell a crashed and blown up aircraft is ever going to see service again in the real world. It's gamey as anything and a huge step away from the permanent consequences seriousness of the OG. I can understand salvaging it for alenium/alloys (if it's on land in friendly territory), but getting a brand new replacement (basically) is ridiculous. I understand the issue, though: in this game the air war is actually challenging both in terms of skill, alien tactics, and money/resource management, and it necessarily needs to be more challenging than the ground war in terms of the latter issue. I have no simple solutions, but fine-tuning what's already there for costs/buildtimes is better than this, that's for sure imo. Yeah, that's when it gets damaged on the screen. When it gets destroyed on the screen, that's because he didn't (or wasn't able to) disengage soon enough. Ever see one of those videos of a plane being hit by a missile (usually, that's all it takes)? They explode, any pilot would likely die if he didn't eject within 1-2 seconds, and the airframe is irreparably damaged at the very least. And those are human missiles, not "alenium torpedoes", which would probably have an explosion that looked like a 2,000-lb bomb going off.[video=youtube_share;0VBiqsQ2CjY] And, yeah, when real world pilots get shot down they literally get shot down, into the ground, in a ball of fire. That's where the expression comes from: getting shot, and then going down, into the ground... Yeah, sometimes there are successful emergency landings with heavy damage. And in the game, sometimes "very red" planes make it out of combat alive. That's the simulation version of a successful emergency landing (and really, there should still be airframe post-combat loss for heavily damaged planes that can't be fully repaired, as well as crash landings a certain % of the time for different levels of damage, but no the air war doesn't need to be more difficult).

First, what Mytheos said 100%.Second, and with more snark, how can they bugtest a game on every combination of hardware before a release exactly? Game companies are what we call "businesses", and as such have to deal with things called "finances". "Money" does not grow on digital trees, and so they cannot afford to pay 20,000 people to test the games for glitches and bugs on 20,000 different hardware configurations. They also cannot afford to keep a game in development for an extra like 25% of its current cycle just to fix every last little minor issue. There is this thing called "diminishing returns", and given that the marketplace has decided that "95% (or so) is 'good enough'", they usually will find that a good enough place to stop, if their finances don't dictate it as such a point first anyway. Once they release and get flush with cash, they can afford to pay for continued improvements and fixes. So, not only can they not find many issues until after release, but many times they couldn't afford to pay to fix them before release anyway.

No, I use spare alloys for profitable manufacture, and I have no use for alenium until much later in the game. What can you use it for in the first months exactly?

I elaborated more in another thread, but the idea is that after like 8 missions the auto-resolve is available. It would then compare the expected score on the missions (as calculated by its formula) and compare it with the player's actual scores, then create an average "player multiplier" effect of some sort. If the player chooses to auto-resolve before doing 8 missions, then it would weight his success with whatever the default success rate is (likely lower unless the player is worse than AI).It gives players a choice in both grind/casual and in focusing on strategy/airwar or groundwar for their gameplay time.

This is good.I think special forces have different rank structures and different entrypoints for rank, though.

They're not necessarily more "skilled", but I would say in terms of defending the Earth they're "superior" all else being equal. And grinding should be rewarded. If grinders want challenges, that's exactly what the difficulty levels and personal "house rules"/modding (eg 'no Foxtrots' or 'lasers only' or '5 man teams only') are for.It also can be a crutch, grinding, in that if someone starts getting behind they can make up for it by grinding more to catch up. How else can you catch up without spontaneously becoming more skillful? I thought that was exactly what grinding was supposed to accomplish in any game where it's a choice. I would suggest: auto-resolve for ground missions (the anti-grind choice). If you grind through successfully playing it out, you keep the ticker from advancing. However, if you use auto-resolve (which would have its success formula adjust for player performance in previous missions) then the ticker goes up anyway. Usable for both air and ground combat, it would allow players to "snooze" a bit after grinding/succeeding up, but eventually finding themselves behind again as the aliens' advancement notches up significantly. It shouldn't be too hard to implement in terms of coding (a GUI addition and a formula), just hard to fine-tune the formula. Like, "how valuable is a laser rifle over a plasma carbine" and "how much does having 25% more troops add to success" are hard to really quantify (but doable, perhaps with some *science*), but if it can be done, that's the real challenge of adding the feature, right? A final point: players may not realize this ticker effect, so having auto-resolve carry some parallel penalties like lowered loot would make it both intuitively known as a "lazy, costly measure" for players AND make it further "anti-grind". You could frame it as "letting local forces command the Xenonauts", and those local forces then have to be allowed to take some of the loot as spoils. In terms of game design, I think it's important to remember that Xenonauts is definitely a "cleaner" type game, in which clearing out aliens and keeping the Earth 'clean' is sort of the intuitive and subconscious goal of the whole enterprise (as much as progression, strategic/tactical success, and management are). Including an auto-resolve feature allows players to feel the reward of "cleaning" without having to go through the grind, once they've figured out the strategy and tactics necessary to be successful in battle. It also allows strategy gamers to avoid ground combat and focus on what they like, and visa-versa. It's such a win-win-win-win feature, it has to be included at some point.

Definitions are vague. They seem to be changing a good bit lately in the industry. What's the point of this semantics argument anyway? Point is that the game is not a final release and it's still very much a WIP that is being given the pre-release "community testers" treatment. I've never played a released/gold/final game that didn't have bugs/crashes occasionally. No company is going to take a modern game, with all it's complexity, and get rid of EVERY SINGLE BUG before final release. I think that 90% is a bit low, but 95% is, yeah, reality. I'm not aware of any game released at 100%, just games with terrible post-release support where the final release is basically the FINAL release, regardless of how bugged it is.

Really? I had like 200 alenium after the first month and had nothing to do with it except sell it. I'm in January and still find myself regularly selling off 100s of units of excess.

Agree that it's probably best to separate these two things a bit. The ticker has it's own logic to determine both available craft and overall difficulty, and the actual mix of available flights and missions is more flexible and responsive to player actions. Regarding the ticker, one point: all older ships shouldn't disappear outright when newer ships come into play. This is going back again to that variance theme - it helps keep the gameplay from getting repetitive/boring. For example, I'm in the "carrier phase" and basically every single craft is either (A) air superiority or (B) carriers. Scouting, research, whatever, all have been totally phased out. Additionally, older craft no longer show up, like basic fighters or such. This is both boredom-inducing and a bit unrealistic. Real-world militaries continue to use older designs and less powerful ships in campaigns. Like, despite how old the A10 and B52 are, they're still used regularly alongside the F22 and late-generation F15s/16s/18s. If a ship was good enough for the start of the campaign, it's certainly good enough for the later campaign, especially when those light scouts and other craft have highly advanced air-superiority fighters and bombers supporting them. Additionally, a point on waves. It's a great idea, but it would be nice to have some non-wave flights as well. I understand wanting to avoid the unending attack late-game in XCOM, but just keep the frequency of non-wave flights steady. Put a hard ceiling on how often you can have them to prevent it from becoming excessive. Again, variety and balancing instead of all-or-nothing and on/off. Also, for losing nations, given how expensive it is to set up bases in the early game right now, it's way too easy to lose nations to the aliens. I would suggest either making it harder OR making it reversible. Say, if you destroy all alien bases in a region AND have your own base there, you can flip it back once it's been lost. I never liked that "permanent region loss" of the original, and would find it a really good way to include an offensive element to the player's strategy. Currently, it's pure defense.

More structures would be nice, yes. I would have hoped for an increase in structure types rather than a simplification. That was not one of the over-complicated parts of XCOM. Having separate living quarters for soldiers and other people would be nice, with the soldiers' having training quarters attached, while normal living quarters had more rec space and book storage (it was the 70/80s after all). Other things might be that you need to have clear 1-tile wide access (hallways) between the workshops and hangars/gargaes to be able to build craft/vehicles. Adding hallways also adds a bit of fun to base design. Having additional spaces just for relaxation/etc would also be nice. Cheap places that give soldiers/engineers/researchers benefits but cost little. Just taking up space and allowing for more base specialization and perhaps personal aesthetics. I imagine this stuff can be modded in fairly easily, though it's a bit early for it right now in the development process. I think the most important thing to making base design more challenging/fun and requiring more bases is space restrictions, either through limiting the amount of people who can work/live in a given building, or just making the bases smaller, or perhaps making specific structures (hangars) larger.

Seen it also with sentinel armor.

@Knightpt I think they'd be fairly easy. I'm guessing the game already keeps track of the various factors for funding. This system is basically: Take raw monthly data, analyze for various levels of success for each region After creating a "score" for each factor, lookup a premade letter fragment for that region\factor\successlevel. Have a few random choices to add variety for each. Also have overall success ratings decide the opening and closing of the letter to give the overall tone and do the same lookup. Each letter fragment has a few spots that might need to be filled in with a number/percentage/etc. Use the raw data to fill them in appropriately. Stitch it together based on a few randomized forms. Profit? The coding for the actual system should be very straightforward and light. Adding the GUI elements might be the bigger task, which itself isn't too much I think. If you have, say, 5 levels of success for 6 different factors and 2 variants per level for 10 regions, that's 600 fragments. Seems like a lot, but if each fragment is just 1-2 sentences, it's not too much (but still a good bit of writing). Yes, selectable but not forced to be seen. Something like having tabs at the top for each, but having the overview tab (current screen) as default.Yes, and realtime updates are great, too.

Not a huge fan of simplicity personally

Followed it step-by-step. Guess I could delete them and try again.

I'm having a rendering issue with the editor that's making it a bit hard to use. The picture says it all. Kind of hard to make everything fit right when I can't really figure out where things are.

Yes, everything EXCEPT hangers DOESN'T require a center. In other words, ONLY hangars require centers.What was the objective in XCOM? Kill all or be killed, I recall. Seemed to work just fine.