oatmeal

When I played the latest test build I was surprised by the immortal airplanes. In a way I could see where the devs wanted to go with this decision, but I feel it shows a lack of imagination or laziness. The way I remember the Air Combat being in the original X-Com was as a pacing mechanic. If you could keep up your research and build the latest fighter tech then you would have no trouble at all taking the aliens from the skies. If however you made a mess of your resource/research management then the aliens would win. Just as it is important to keep up with your soldier weapon/armour tech or to keep your veteran soldiers alive and train newbies. And this makes sense as the game is on a clock, if you're behind you lose! The way I experienced the AC in v18 was fine for me. The mechanics work, are fun and immersive. You get to interact with your planes now. Great! The only problem I had with the airplanes was that they're 1. too expensive 2. take too long to build 3. take too long to upgrade. What this shows us is a simple balancing issue. Not much else. As we all know most of the game is still heavily unbalanced. The issues related to the AC are, from my perspective, related mostly to time issues. Whenever you make a mistake and lose an aircraft it takes too long to replace it and it's too costly. The invasion also ramps up way too fast in regards to the tech development. The first medium ships are out before I have upgraded rockets (although now I know to rush for that tech it's a bit better) let alone any new type of alien aircraft of my own design. (This is in v18) I resolved these issues in quite a simple matter and it made the game much more playable for me. I reduced the cost for the starting aircrafts, Condor and MIG, and upped the starting budget to 2 million. Also I slowed down the invasion speed to take a fair bit longer. This allows a bit more leeway in developing the proper tech to keep up with the alien invasion and to pass the checkpoints. The only thing it did not fix was the issue that if you lose a battle then the impact and consequently are not able to take down a UFO it will heavily impact your budget from the involved nation. But this problem seems to be a different balance issue. A list of simple solutions to 'fixing' AC without a trick of immortal aircraft (which only fixes a monetary issue.....): - Make aircraft cheaper; - Make aircraft build times shorter; - Reduce health of enemy UFO/Increase weapon damage of human tech; - Move up aircraft tech in the techtree; - Reduce invasion ramp up speed. A combination of factors is probably needed as money seems to be this game's biggest problem, but reducing the ramp up speed has my preference because it has other positive effects as well. Such as that it allows for more income than just 8-12 months so that you can actually build a second base somewhere. As for how to find the proper balance for the AC. Treat it as what it is, a check point. Plot the invasion curve against the research progress curve, whenever the aliens get new aircraft the human aircraft tech should get a proportional upgrade too or should be very close to it.