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Any midgame AI related mod/config changes to improve it?
apopov posted a topic in Modding Discussion
From this thread: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11718-The-AI-is-cheating-but-I-guess-that-s-ok "Fun fact: there are even more advanced AI capabilities that are turned off for performance reasons now, and that are good enough to guess the location of your soldiers really often." I see that there are overhauls like "X - DIVISION - Destiny Denied" and "XNT- INTO DARKNESS V6.0" which state that they made AI behavior improvements, and I plan to play through them next... But for now, I am on my first play-though on Insane (not Ironman though) and anything to make my current play-through more fun would be welcome. Main question: I don't mind waiting a few minutes for AI to decide what to do during it's turn - are there any edits to some configs I could make to improve AI performance? Secondary question about one specific AI behavior: Right now I am playing with Dynamic UFO's and Armoured Assault mods, as far as I know they don't alter this, but one of the most consistent and bewildering behaviors I am seeing are suicidal Reapers. These enemies made somewhat nervous at first when I saw how far they can move during their turn and their one hit kill attack. But during the 4 encounters with them, they have consistently used up their entire turn to run into middle of my formations, sometimes getting into blind spots of my soldiers. That's nice and all, but end result is that when I know a reaper is nearby, all I need to do is hold position, end turn, and if reaction fire doesn't kill it, next turn it will be standing behind one of my guys for easy target practice... Any way to fix this mid game?- 7 replies
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I just spent half a day playing with the free OpenXcom, which is a free much improved version of the original Xcom. Although it has been 10 years since I played the original, I don't remember it being this difficult. In my first mission, 4 of my soldiers were killed before they got their feet on the ground: as soon as a soldier steps on the ramp, he is picked off my an alien, and if he manages to jump to the side after the alien has used up his 3 shots, he is immediately picked off by one or two other aliens. I figured maybe I was just unlucky, so I continued with the next mission, which happened to be a Terror mission (daylight). My whole squad was killed before they killed a single alien - as soon as an alien came into sight, it reaction fired and killed the spotting soldier. Another mission to a crashed scout had a similar result, so I gave up. Too bad, this could be a fair aspirin until a really playable version of this one comes out. BTW, reloading a saved file is no help, because the game will just repeat what already happened. So I just hope that the devs will not make THIS game that difficult. There are players who like the original Xcom just because of this difficulty, but I am no masochist and I believe that the "easy" level should be just that.
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A few weeks we had a heated debate (I.e flame war) over air combat and it was eventually decided that an auto resolve option would be implemented but people would still be allowed to play it if they wanted. I have not played Experimental Build 5 but I played 4, and it felt like the Air Combat mini-game was made impossibly difficult in an attempt to turn public opinion against it. Missiles now had a range of automatic weapons, meaning you had to get up close and personal with the aliens. This was bad enough with Interceptors, but at least those could evasive roll. I never built a MiG because my files kept corrupting and crashing but I'm assuming they have to get close too, and since they can't dodge I assume you'd be losing you MiG every time. Even before this, alien craft always targeted the MiGs almost as if they knew they'd be taken out for sure. I still think that the solution to saving Air Combat is to break up the monotony. Give MiGs the ability to dodge. If you thought the missile range was too long (I agree, I could usually blast a UFO with a pair of MiGs and escape before the alien craft could even react). And instead of having all the planes come in from the same location, have them come from different points, so the UFO might have an easier time of targeting one. I still think there is plenty that could be done to save Air Combat, and us flight simulator adherents still really want to see this implemented in the game.
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So I played the original X-COM games and was really loving Xenonauts, until the point a few months in when the squadrons of 3 heavy fighters are introduced, as well as the medium craft with heavy fighter escorts and the heavy craft. At this point, in my opinion, it's impossibly hard to take down any alien craft, and because these are the only types of UFOs encountered, that I found (after 10-12 encounters all comprising the types above), I was unable to actually gather any resources to continue the game. I'm very concerned that the game hits such an overwhelming difficulty spike where you can go from regularly taking out UFOs and engaging them on the ground, to being unable to take down any UFO whatsoever, seemingly immediately. Even a lone medium landing ship can take all 4 of the MiG's torpedoes, all of the 2 Condor's missiles, and a bunch of gatling laser fire, and easily take down all of my aircraft. I had not yet been able to research the plasma aircraft guns, so this was the best tech that I had available. Unfortunately, at this point the game stopped being fun, and became a major frustration, to the point where I no longer want to continue that game, because I feel that I'm in an inescapable situation that the game has put on me without warning. If I had done something wrong, such as sent too few aircraft or equipped them poorly, then I would be more understanding of this failure state, but to my knowledge there's absolutely nothing I could have done better to prepare for this type of combat. Having read the forums, I understand that a better way is to focus on manufacturing earlier on, and focus on creating a Corsair, but I think that it's currently too easy to ruin an entire game, because one should be using forum posts to enhance one's play style, not to overcome unbeatable situations. A better situation would be to introduce the harder craft more gradually. A squadron of two heavy fighters, or a heavy and a light, or perhaps the medium ships should be unescorted more frequently, or even throw in a good measure of the smaller UFOs, even later on, so that players who can't or won't research and build quickly can still have a chance. Another option would be to separate out the difficulty sliders for air and ground combat, so that players struggling with one can make this part of the game easier (even midway through) rather than feel utterly beaten and give up. That's not to take anything away from the game or the developers at all. It's excellent fun and obviously the product of a tremendous amount of hard work; I will no doubt start a fresh game to continue enjoying it, but feel that I shouldn't have needed to.
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Over in a thread discussing Jackal armour, StellarRat said:- that got me thinking, what were the most challenging missions for everyone else. For me there was a big jump in alien numbers from 7-8 to 21 in my first Alien Base defence in 19/4. Not just the numbers but the alien rank increased by a couple of steps as well. As I'm using ballistic weapons, even the grenadiers were stretched at the time. I'm fairly sure that if the aliens had been slightly more aggressive, I'd have been overrun.
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I've been playing a lot of the new XCOM and one of the things I liked about it was the way that it did smooth the difficulty curve a little - such as you getting high-level soldiers as mission rewards and later in the game they joined as Squaddies instead of Rookies etc. I think Xenonauts could benefit from some gentle smoothing of the difficulty curve in places to make it a bit less unforgiving. I was wondering if people had thoughts on these two ideas: 1) The quality (stat point average / rank) of the soldiers available for recruitment in the pool should gradually increase as the game goes on, up to a cap. This will cushion the blow of losing soldiers a little, though new soldiers should always be worse than what you already have. Perhaps the new soldiers would max out at Sergeant at the end of the game. 2) There's an issue with aircraft ranges and game balance at the moment. I want to encourage players to build multiple bases in the game, so the range of interceptors and radars can't be that large at the start of the game or there's no need for them. However, this leaves a situation where at the start of the game the player quite often is not able to intercept many UFOs because they don't enter their airspace. Which means very few crash site missions for people to play. There's several ways around this - making early UFOs only spawn near the base is one thing we can do, but I don't like that level of "cheating". I like the events popping up across the world, showing you that there's a world outside your radar range that the aliens are attacking. I propose that each UFO has a % value set for it, which is the % chance that it will generate a crash site instead of escaping to space if it successfully completes its mission - the logic being that that local air forces managed to shoot down the UFO. This would initially be set high, but would rapidly tail off and would be non-existent by the mid-game. This would nevertheless give the player some breathing room. There'll always be a supply of crash sites early game (and thus stuff to research), even if the player is unlucky with their interceptors. The main change here would be that the dropship will have to have a much longer range in order to be able to deal with the crash sites, but I guess I could live with that. I did want other bases to have their own troops etc, but I'm not sure it's going to be possible to force that without gimping other aspects of the game (not being able to reach terror sites etc as in the current builds) at the same time.
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This is certainly an improvement on the new XCom which I can only describe as horrible but gameplay in this title is not well balanced making it overly difficult and frustrating when it should be fun. The core of the problem having played for a few hours is: (1)There is not enough time to develop new fighter tech before aerial combat simply becomes absurdly hard. As a result it becomes a crude numbers game where you have to slug it out hoping your fighters have enough clout to do the job. Worse still when you do outclass your opponents with a mix of tech and numbers the enemy craft are destroyed most of the time making it impossible to gain skills for your troops and money to advance your cause by visiting the wreck site. (2) Why even when your troops become officers do they have the weapons skills of five year olds? Most of them are the worst shots I have ever seen, so much so you resort to the use of grenades 90% of the time to take out or disable the enemy. It would have been nice to, to apply points to build core skills like these to enhance gameplay. For myself I gave up in frustration and walked away from this game. I wont be back unless gameplay improves markedly. I had high hopes for this title but to be honest I'm still yet to see any title that comes close to the two originals I played and still love from way back when.
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Before I say anything, I know this is early release. But, I just can't keep up. This game escalates way faster than is possible to keep up .. for me anyway, I have the top end financial support from everyone except the Americas. I had a brilliant start with my current game. 2 fully setup bases with excellent air cover, early on I can accomplish missions without any issue ( few deaths, but pvts are my cannon fodder ). I just finished outfitting most of my squads with laser tech but didn't have enough money to fully equip wolf armour, just a smattering with my higher end chaps. Within a space of a month I've gone from fighting Light scouts and scouts to fighting Cruisers with heavy fighter escorts and Aliens that shoot me well out of my range with deadly accuracy (Wolf armour does shit vs a fully auto plasma rifle) I haven't unlocked the new fighter, my condors, despite (what I think) to be some excellent micro in fights just don't do enough damage. Most of the time I send in Foxtrots to fire their torp loads then run away and hope I can re-engage quick enough again once it's returned to base and re-armed. Once I do shoot something down, the ground fights are now nigh on unwinnable. I've got everything from colonels to captains and they just can't do anything. Moving from cover to cover usually get me reaction shot into the dirt and staying in cover, despite not having any armour on my pvts with good visual range I end up getting out visual-ed and again blasted into the dirt. Either I'm missing something horribly important, or I just suck at this game. My end result, after losing all my colonels and majors I'm running around with Pvts trying to fend off an invasion I have 0% chance of winning. Like I said, I understand it's beta and I understand there's an assload of balancing happening, I just thought I'd give you the patient perspective of a steam-purchased player. (So therefore relatively new). I'm adoring the game but after my 20+ restart I just can't enjoy it. Cheers, Kel.
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I know Chris said that switching to Veteran just makes the aliens have more hit points, but I don't think that's all that happens. My guys shoot much less accurately on veteran. I think they might also move/act slower (not sure about this one though.) AND the aliens are substantially tougher like Chris said. I was losing an average of one guy per mission on Veteran. Also, the larger alien ships and critters appear much sooner. When I switched back to Normal everything pretty much seemed the same as it was in before the last couple patches. I've lost two guys in about 10 missions and one of them was a accidental move that put my guy right in front of alien the other was an autofire from an alien that was supposed to be suppressed (very rare.)
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I believe that v18.3 there wasn't any difference between the difficulty levels in terms of the AI opponent etc. Is that the case with v18.4?
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I have not yet bought this game, but I am only delaying to avoid spoiling things for myself (sounds a little strange, what with having played original X-com and the new one - how different can things be, but I mean mechanics-wise). It all looks very promising and I just have a question regarding difficulty: I'm someone who plays at the hardest settings, and enjoys the challenge. I've beaten the original on superhuman, but the newest on Ironman Impossible too - which is much harder than the original at that setting! So, will this game have a suitably high enough difficulty available, and a near-insurmountable challenge? I would love that. I only ask because I have seen a couple of videos, and there seem to be relatively few aliens - I realise its the smaller ships I'm seeing, and people are not always playing on hard difficulties, but the battlefields seem a little sparse in terms of alien numbers. Also, how is the AI shaping up? I would love seeing intelligent moves - the new XCOM has aliens that make pretty much optimal moves, admittedly that's because of the design decisions regarding a very gamey, cover-based model, which I'm sure most are familiar with, but still it IS good that they make those good moves. I understand this game isn't designed that way, but it would be great to see some clever AI movements now and then. Keep up the great work, I look forward to beating another alien invasion!
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Recently I have been thinking about difficultly and how game ramp it up. And how I think some xenonauts aspects could work. Locking the AI might work if it is a complex locking system, and not teh xcom 2012 version. So If on easy/normal the AI does not cooperate. I think this is not a very good idea. I believe it could work if the no co op is fixed by having an alien leader present. And Maybe locking more complex things like falling back, ambushes, etc. I am curious about the idea of researching aliens and getting damge bonuses. maybe on harder difficulties the bonuses could be removed. Maybe interogating leaders could bring up a text about how they atttack/think on easy/normal. Lets have debates about my ideas and your own. Thanks for reading When I thought of writing this I had more ideas but I forgot... Will edit OP
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during the first month it was easy peesy then better alien aircraft came even my migs have trouble catchin up (?!) then the figthers and their stupid missles BUT IT WAS SO MUCH FUN!!!! (yes I know fighters are glitch at the moment)
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Hi all, after playing Xenonauts V 17.1 for 2 hours i wonder why the ground combat is so easy? For the most time aliens run only around without fighting me so i only have to go to them an shoot. At my last mission my base was under attack and there where many enemys, they could whipe me out easily but i dont even lost one soldier. In the whole fight the aliens only shoot two times. Is this because of the alpha stadium of the game? I realy hope so because this is something i love on the original UFO game, it was hard and you realy have to fear for your soldiers life. Airfights on the other side are hard enough with time, to be honest after playing one hour im realy lost in airfight. There are so many ufos and with the better ones they shoot everething down i have :-) Sorry for my bad english.
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The first three game-months of playing XCOM:EU on Classic can feel like building a sandcastle when the tide is coming in. There’s a constant struggle (at least, for me there is) on the geoscape to prevent countries from up and leaving as I feverishly crank out satellites and uplinks, all the while hoping that my squaddies don’t cack it so I can build the OTS when one of them hit elltee. At the same time, the ground combat is at times littered with the corpses of new recruits as I sacrifice the meatbags to keep my precious ranked-up squaddies safe. And then... carapace/skeleton armour comes in. And lasers start becoming available. The satellites I’ve been cranking out begin to have a beneficial effect. My squad size goes up from 4 to 5, then to 6. The tide starts to withdraw... but as the game progresses from that point, it seems like the tide withdraws too far. Once I have total coverage panic among council nations drops off sharply. When I’ve cracked plasma weapons the mutons who seemed a tough challenge with lasers are much easier to deal with. Squad sight combined with a plasma sniper rifle really wreaks havoc. Even battleships tremble before a firestorm armed with an EMP cannon and bolts-ons that I can manufacture just before I launch an intercept. It can actually become tedious to do missions while waiting for my psi-troopers to level up. So, where’s the sweet spot? Where’s the balance between too much and not enough pressure on the player? I think the level of challenge, the degree of pressure put on a player can be quantified beyond individual intuitive feelings, but I’m struggling how to describe how pressure can be describe in terms other than individual intuitive feelings. The closest I can come is in plain English, and it runs to something like: “keep me hungry”. Ensure that I never have quite enough materials to do everything that I want to do. That I don’t have quite enough quality troops, or extra lives, or special weapons so I can’t afford to spend them frivolously. That if I extend myself in one direction, it comes at the cost of being able to extend myself in another. Keep me hungry, But don’t starve me, unless I ask to be starved.
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hello folks, i have played xcom 1,2 and apocalypse and i loved every game. by a fluke i saw this game and it was love at the first sight. after preordering and downloading the v16 alpha, i started playing on veteran. and now, after some hours of gameplay there are some things that confuses me: * i shot with a sniper rifle on a large distance on an alien with 50% chance to hit. ->instand kill. this was happen everytime i used the sniper. * assault rifle was the same: max. 50% chance to hit: one shot one kill. everytime. * none of the alien-shots was a hit. it seems, the weapons are too acurate and have to much power and the aliens shoots to inaccurate. on easy this is ok, but veteran? another thing: i won 15 of 16 aircraft fights with one f17 in a row against small ufos. also, the ressources on the beginning are imho to big: 4 000 000$, armored vehicles and sniper-weapons? btw. how can i buy things? i cant find any "buy"-button. otherwise, the game is great, haven´t seen a better xcom-clone before. if the difficulty would be much harder, then the game was perfect. henry p.s. how can i add this "premium preoder"-badge?
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I had no trouble in Kickstarter build - happily got to Aug/Sept before terror missions and never lost a plane. It felt too easy until corvettes and 2+1 fighters turned up. I know there is much balancing to come - this is just for discussion not bitching Oh, Veteran difficulty. However, with 12.1... scouts instakill F17s if they get in range. Before, you could take a hit or two, and they had the slow firing weapon so you could dodge (or am I remembering this wrong?). I now have to take 2 of mine for one of theirs, so I can get behind. I still did this before when possible, it was much safer. On its own, this would be fine - I have no problem with UFOs being better than my feeble starting craft. But now it seems UFOs spawn in clusters more than before - I've seen 6 targets on geoscape simultaneously by June 18th! I don't think I could field 12 F17s by then! I build two bases from the start, get hangars as fast as possible in the 2nd so I'm stopping a fair few of the early UFOs (which I believe slows invasion progress). But it's just not possible to shoot down this many. I'm getting Terror missions by late June, I simply can't stop that many UFOs at once. I'm going to experiment with a single base and 8 hangars, but I suspect I'll lose out, not stopping enough activity in other zones due to losing coverage. Alien fighters seem weaker than scouts now, bit strange. They have the slow weapon so you can dodge, and get behind 1-on-1. But they come in packs of three much sooner (it seems?), I can only field 3 craft at once, and coordinating 3 dodges is hard. UFOs are, reasonably enough, better than my 1970s crates, so I die here also. Am I using weak air combat tactics? Missing something else that's causing huge spawning?
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Having taken a break from playing the game at the start of the year I decided to jump back in and see what had changed and then reflect. Dog fights 1. Like the new look of the dog fight GUI. 2. Really love being able to change the speed of my aircraft (+) 3. Being able to change the speed of my aircraft makes dog fights really easy (-). About this third point. I have heard mention of improved AI for more advanced tactics however I'm not sure how this will really help the situation. I suspect that as the game progresses and you end up with fighter wings vs mixed ufos things will get interesting and hectic. However at the moment, engagements are quite boring. Now this isn't an issue if the ticker does (as has been stated) drop low enough that you are only fighting once every few days. But if your like me and fast forward most of the time you will end up fighting against single aircraft so often and punctuated with only occasional ground combat against pitiful forces of 1 or 2 aliens that things get boring quickly. Now I understand the need for getting new players into the game gently and have no qualms about this (it is also more lore friendly). But the question is how to make the game more interesting for other players. Could you give us the option of a quick resolve button for dogfights? *dodges bottles* The interface is already there for the intercept on the geoscape. How about giving another button for Auto-resolve with a percentage next to it of the chance of success. I think I would probably prefer this to fighting single scouts or fighters as I find the combat at present just too easy (1 vs 1) or too boring (when 3 vs 1). The percentage need only take into account the type of aircraft and number on each side and perhaps a random seed for the UFO craft which determines its pilots ability (to make things slightly less obvious). Either that or maybe an easy way to drop some tactics into the mix is to start the dogfight with a deployment zone. It doesn't have to be big and could be restricted to one or two sides of the screen but would allow you to essentially drop your aircraft into the engagement tactically (perhaps having one come in from an angle). It would add some variety to engagements. This would give you the option of deploying 1 or more aircraft together (as standard) or splitting them for a hair raising flanking afterburn while one of your aircraft plays bait. Deployment zones aren't the only idea but they do get around the fact that at present it is really difficult to manoeuvre around the smaller enemy ufos. On a different note. I still have some qualms about the Ufo Sighted pop-up screen. Often it pops up and blocks the location of the UFO in question. It makes it kind of difficult to work out whether you should be launching from you Indochina base or Europe from example. Why not either make this pop up have a very small transparency so you can just make out the UFO or say "Ufo Spotted (Europe)" etc.
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On another forum I saw a very good set of proposals for how difficulty levels could work in a very innovative way. The best comparison is to the current implementation of how alien invasion escalates based on difficulty. Instead of buffing and debuffing stats, key features change in severity. I think some of this may already be in the works, but I'm not sure.