Wraith_Magus

Wouldn't janitor/operator/mechanic/pilot pay be part of the nebulous "maintenance" costs associated with each building/machine? It's not like just keeping the lights on costs $20k a month.

Because it's working as intended? That's an improper definition of the term "bug". A bug is when a program doesn't operate as the programmer meant the code to operate. The user can expect whatever they want, but that doesn't make a product buggy if their expectations aren't met. It's quite common in unfinished games for some aspects of the game to be placeholders. Dwarf Fortress has some fairly obvious ones, such as binary permanent faction loyalty that results in a whole nation going hostile against you for kicking a chicken belonging to that nation. That's not a bug, it's just that the actual code handling anything between friendly and kill-on-sight has yet to be written. This code is likely a placeholder hack/"cheat" for when the AI for the enemy forces finally does get rewritten so as to be sophisticated enough.

This seems severely low. As in, why bother having a strength stat at all if it's going to mean basically nothing at all? The differences in strength between newly-hired rookies will mean nothing for all but the highest possible strength. Even that means only 1 extra grenade.

Could you explain why all your equipment suffers from a critical lack of existential inertia if it was dropped from more than a few feet into the air? I mean, from anything but a coding standpoint? Is that something that's permanent, or just a work-around that might be fixed later?

Well, if you look at some of the indie devs out there like the guy who does Spiderweb Games, (the Avernum series, etc.,) he out-and-out said that he charges basically half as much for his games on Steam than he does on his own website. (And that's before the games go on sale - and they'll go on sale for 50% or more off.) It's just because he was only selling to serious indie-game consumers when all he had to go on was word-of-mouth from other players of his games. When he got on Steam, however, slashing prices was the only way to go - not just because he was competing against a bunch of other cheaper indie games, but also because he was just plain getting so many more potential customers that it was better for him financially, anyway. There's a lot of games I just plain don't hear about until I see them pop up on Steam. (Xenonauts being one of them.)

True, but the game does get boring if the answer to every problem is always the same. A good strategy game will always present you with challenges that are sufficiently different to force you to constantly up your game. (The reason games like Chess or Go are still paragons of the strategic game genre centuries after their invention is that they are virtually impossible to master.) It generally comes down to making the actual volume of possible iterations of moves so fantastically high, and the long-term consequences of any given choice so difficult to properly foresee, that any specific choice seems virtually indistinguishable from other, similar choices, making the "right" choice difficult to ascertain most of the time. Chess and Go do this by making it basically impossible to complete any action of note in less than half a dozen moves, during which time the opponent has plenty of time to react. More open-ended games like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, however, tend to do this with creating such a flood of possible emergent gameplay opportunities that it's largely a matter of which one you can wrap your head around. All of which is a little too complex and abstract way of saying what I was saying before: Just make the base-building portion of the game more granular. If players can manually place internal base defenses, and have a more fine-grained opportunity to place their base components, along with some understanding of the "rules" by which alien invasions happen, (not that every alien has to follow the same rules,) you can create a far more fun base defense mission, since it's basically an opportunity for the player to build their own little "mouse trap" to catch the aliens within. (Provided, of course, they knew what sort of threat to expect, and built defenses to match...) To further what Gazz said, the X-Com 2012 game had exactly that kind of "adjacency bonus" setup to make their base-building relevant. While better than nothing, however, I think that's sort of a hack, a gimmick just to make base-building relevant in an isolated system. I much prefer seeing a system that is integrated with the rest of gameplay, because that creates far more emergent gameplay opportunities, which, in turn, create far greater options for gameplay depth without overburdening the player with complexity.

Well, if there's anything that throws me, it's how much more money is spent hiring people than it takes to build the mere labs/workshops in the first place. (Seems a little odd that it costs more to just hire a batch of scientists, much less rookie grunts than it costs to buy a new state-of-the-art jet fighter...)

If we're talking about a budget page, I'd honestly like to see the original X-Com's line-graph funding chart again. (That is, where all the nation's funding was tracked over time.) Having a similar (or simultaneous) line graph for expenses-over-time would be great. It's not strictly necessary, but having the chance to see a full overview of your growth-over-time helps get a better perspective of how the game has gone and is going.

Well, to state that another way, that is to say that giving the player any choice means that it will always be a "calculation", not a "choice", and that you therefore shouldn't bother giving the player any choice in the matter. Honestly, that sounds a little defeatist to me. Why should we have tactical ground combat, if there is going to be one decision that is going to be better than others, and lead to better outcomes? Oh, right, that's the whole point of the game. Now, I know the game's constrained constrained into being "like the original X-Com," so we aren't going to see something too spectacularly intricate in base layouts, (it's just not the core focus of the game,) but as someone who positively loves games like Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, Terraria, and other base-building games, it rather rubs me the wrong way to see blanket statements that base-building strategies can't be made fun at all. Even if restricting the aliens to only using a lift and hangars might make the base defense "too predictable", and you make players have to defend against multiple angles, regardless, you could still try to find ways where base layouts matter. Pie-in-the-sky ideal, you could break the game down into a look-at-your-base mode if you pressed some button, and have some option to manually place (and save) defensible positions in the various labs or whatever. Maybe run some "drills" where you can pre-place units or even those stationary defenses (machine gun turrets) people have been asking for. Alternately, you might come up with a finer-scale grid so that more of the base is customizable. (That is, make the grid have more tiles, but make the existing rooms take up more tiles, as well.) That way, you might be able to build smaller "rooms" that can be used for just internal base defense, like armored walls that spring up out of the floor or retract when you throw a switch.

Actually, I find a problem is that when people like things, they often don't take the time to think through why, exactly, they liked them. Without that critical analysis, they just throw up words like "tension" or "mystery" without really thinking about what they mean, or how they would translate when they considered other options. Nor, for that matter, do they consider what truly matters in such a calculation, which is the cost-benefit. In one of the other game forums I recently visited, which is a space flight simulation, most people play using keyboard and mouse, but there's a rabidly devoted following that uses their (quite top-of-the-line) joysticks for the game. Sometimes, people talk about removing certain types of controls, just because they don't use them, and "it's not popular". It doesn't hurt the keyboard players to have the option of a joystick, it certainly benefits those players who do, and the costs of leaving joystick controls in the game from a dev perspective are trivial. Why not have controls with a good amount of benefit for almost no cost at all? So to go back to this argument, you do nothing to consider the main thrust of what I was arguing: That anyone with any experience in the game will know what the solutions are, but that the newer players will not. Which is the group that is most hurt by this choice? The newer players who don't know what they're doing. Which is the group most likely to ragequit because of this choice? The newer players who don't know what they're doing. Which group is most likely to pass on negative reviews, hurt overall game sales, and overall negatively impact the success of the game? The newer players (including the reviewers who don't spend much time playing the game) that don't know what they're doing. All of this for a "benefit" that is lost for the people who have already played the game once, anyway. Cost-benefit-wise, this is a no-brainer. There's essentially no benefit for obscuring decisions from players, and plenty of cost. Saying to "just go Google it" does nothing to help those who do so enjoy the game anymore, and will severely hurt the enjoyment of some players who hate having to do so (including a lot of reviewers, I find). It's honestly the response of someone who just doesn't care what the practical results of what they say are, and are just throwing out, as you say, your own personal opinion.

Actually, upon a little thought, let me go back and argue against completely random tech trees, as well... The only way you can induce some sort of "tension" over what choices the player makes is to try to ask them to weigh incomparables. That is, currently, I am asked to decide between researching something that helps my jets, or researching armor to help my soldiers. That's a reasonably tough decision to make. It's a real choice. If you make the whole thing one big crapshoot, however, then there's no real choice, since there's no information for the player to really weigh. You just either blindly guess because one guess is as good as any other, you save-scum to find out which research path is "best", or use some other sort of exploit. Whichever way you go, however, you're not really given any sort of serious choice that makes the player sit and second-guess themselves, which is where the tension comes from. It's basically the "tension" of a slot machine: Does the game feel like randomly giving me some big payout, regardless of my own player skill? I don't know about you, but I certainly find slot machines boring. There's nothing more disgusting than losing because of just dumb luck you couldn't help, and that's exactly the sort of thing that any X-Com clone should really stand against: It should be a tough, but fair game. One where if you lose, you could figure out what it was you did wrong, and do better next time. It shouldn't just be a trashy crapshoot like FTL was, where there's no point in playing because all the major factors in whether you win or lose are random. Honestly, if you wanted randomized tech, it could make sense, but only if it was randomized for when you got the tech, not randomly rewarding one research path over another. (That is, make it random whether or not a light scout has datacores or alenium or something. Hence, keeping some tech out of player hands until some specific month or another.) Other than that, I think that giving the player at least a clue of what was around the next research branch is crucial for actually creating tension in research, because tension only occurs when you actually know what choices you are choosing, and more importantly, what you're choosing not to do.

I find a "mystery research tree" is just another way to say "punishment for new players who don't look things up". Unless you're going to do something to randomize what tech you get from what, just to keep it fresh, (and that would be a cool feature, if you did it,) then you're basically just going to have no such ambiance for the players who have played through that part of the game before, or else have done what almost everyone does in games with no good tutorials, and looked up the "right way to play the game". Trying to rely upon some sort of "mystery" over what is the most effective path to accomplish something just makes the game boring for the players who have taken the time to calculate out the min/maxed "best" path (so they'll hate it,) while punishing to the players who just try playing it blind (so they'll hate it, too). This results in the same problem as was had with the players who do every mission because that's how you get max money and stats, versus the players who only did a few missions a month: It's boring and easy for one, and oppressively difficult for the other. (And the other in this case is the group most likely to ragequit and never play the game again if they feel the game is unfairly hard.)

In the original X-Com, base building actually had some meaning, as you had to defend those bases, and the enemy would always approach through the hangars and the lift (which is now replaced with the command center). Hence, the trick was to build bases where the lift and hangars are on one side of the base, through one easily defended passage (like a radar station), and disconnected from everything else so as to be more easily defensible. I'd like to revive that. As it stands, I just start by building a barracks directly above my CC (because it gets me up to the two tiles from the top range where I can build hangars in just 5 more days) and then a radar and storehouse directly below it. Placement doesn't seem to matter so much except for whether I can cram in another workshop or not.

That would make sense if there were some sort of stealth elements in the game, and some sort of "hearing" function that your own characters could use. As it stands, that sounds like it's just some player's rationalization of an AI hack/"cheat" to make aliens face towards the "closest threat" using fairly simple code. (And that's not a "bug", StellarRat, it's a partially-implemented feature. Bugs are when the game doesn't behave as it was intended to behave when it was coded. This is the result of a developer putting in some easy code that approximates a sane AI choice with the least amount of coding necessary. Basically, it's just rushed coding and placeholder AI. But it's entirely what's supposed to happen. Maybe not in the final version, but it's what's supposed to happen now, anyway.)

That's because the digital distribution over consoles is done by a total monopoly owned by Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo, where they can keep the prices high arbitrarily, because they face no other competition. There's also a certain degree of companies like Sony just plain being really, really stupid about how they handle their online marketplaces. (Helped along by that same lack of competition to force them to innovate.) They just price-gouge and never bring prices down or give players any real incentive to want to use their service. (They even started charging money for what was supposed to be a free service at first... and then offered a month-long demo of PSN as the "we're sorry we let all your online information get hacked" thing.) Steam/GamersGate/Good ol Games/etc. are all in competition with one another, and also have a good reason to undercut prices with constant sales. (Exception given to Origin, because that's just EA trying to establish a monopoly on its own games - and I refuse to use that service because of that.) You can easily get games a couple years old at prices 20% of their original price, and it ultimately does more good to the developers that way than any other way. I wouldn't buy many games full-price, but if I see it on Steam sale for $5, I'll probably take a swing at it. Since it's a game I wouldn't have bought at any higher price than that, it's better for the devs to get $4 for the game, (Steam takes a % cut, as opposed to a flat price that retail stores take,) than nothing out of me. (And anyone who regularly uses Steam has at least a few games they bought on sale they either only played a couple minutes, or never played at all, in the "I'll get to it eventually" bin.) Anyway, if we're talking about Steam, though, there are still some vociferous hold-outs. I remember the Bethesda forums were filled with everything short of death-threats against the devs for using Steam as a distributor for Skyrim. (And the death-threats were merely deleted and banned.) In the EgoSoft forums for their new X:Rebirth, there's been at least a couple threads on the first page with 4000 posts in it arguing about the "evils" of Steam, and a poll where people literally choose options like "I would rather self-immolate than ever use Steam" getting about 11% of the vote. (Incidentally, "I like Steam," gets 78% of the vote, and there's a range of middle-ground options like "if they include a no-drm patch" that gets the rest.) There are just plain some dead-enders that will refuse to ever use Steam for utterly bizarre and conspiratorial reasons. (I.E. People seriously arguing that Steam is going to delete their accounts and "steal all their games from them" just as soon as they sign up, just to be vicious. Because it's not like it's a company trying to make money based upon selling more and more games to people, or anything.) But anyway, yes, the most important thing to consider with Steam is that they really are responsible for Digital Distribution really taking off and making Indie Development (like this very forum's parent company) possible in the first place. (Including paving the way for most of its competitors.) Even relatively larger devs like Paradox (Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, Magicka,) just plain do not distribute from brick-and-mortar retailers anymore. Hence, I doubt I'll ever come to hate Steam, even if they are doing some fairly stupid gimmicky things, recently. I.E. The Big Picture, where they're just trying to make a PC pretend to be a console... even though it does nothing you couldn't do with just hooking your PC into your TV as a monitor. That's silly, but a sideshow. (At least, hypothetically, however, it's a shot at the monopolistic practices of Microsoft and the rest. So I'll give them slack for that. If they actually force consoles back into playing fair with it - which I doubt it will take off, but if it does... - then it will achieve some pretty solid good for the console crowd.) The card thing they have now is more annoying, since people in forums are now always arguing over them, and the entire thing just reeks of deliberate ways to force people to use some stupid marketplace feature in exchange for some trivial .jpg.