Ground battles get repetitive fast - make them more interesting in the long term

[DrazharLn]

OTOH, I can pick up all sorts of great games on steam during the sales for <$10 and as a typical gamer have a backlog of hundreds of unplayed or barely played games I could play.

If Xenonauts were slightly more expensive I wouldn't have bought it (without an up to date demo, at least).

[Solver]

Drazhar, you wandered here right from WPC Typical gamer, right.

I would not have bought Xenonauts at a high price when it was early beta, because I couldn't be at all sure about the quality, but knowing what I know now about the final game, I'd happily pay 50 or 60. The gameplay's worth that, sure the production quality is quite obviously low budget, but I'm a gameplay-first guy.

I agree however that more modern games need proper demos. Short but representative of the gameplay, especially when the game is more in the regular price range of 40+ dollars. For Xenonauts, I suppose a decent demo could be just something that lets you play the first 2 months of the game without post-lasers technology, larger UFOs or later alien types.

[DrazharLn]

Solver, I am the same DrazharLn of WPC

I think I'm fairly typical of gamers, Alpha Centauri isn't the only game I play

With a demo and a fix for not being able to merge/separate squadrons I might have paid up to £25 for the game, but that's really pushing it. I think $20 is a fair price.

[dpelectric]

Solver: dead on

[screeg]

It's a hell of a deal for what you get IMO. I think you could have charged $30 easily.

Price points are a funny thing. Personally I think Chris will make more money charging $20 than $30. Lots of indie devs get emotionally attached to their games, instead of thinking about the big picture, and charge too much.

[andreasg]

Back to the topic?

I also think it would be nice if some more randomness in the ground missions would be possible, like the aliens not always camping down the UFO.

Not sure what is possible with modding though.

[dpelectric]

There used to be "zerg rushes" in the game, where all or most of the aliens outside the UFO would charge your dropship. Certainly made things interesting. The problem was that this was happening on almost every mission, and after howls of protest, GH cut them out entirely. I wish this all-or-nothing approach would/could be reconsidered, as I feel that an occasional enemy charge would definitely add an element of suspense to GC. I tried playing with the game files myself to achieve this, but couldn't get it to happen...

[Dogdoc]

Bear in mind XCOM also cost three times the price of Xenonauts at release, too. The average player gets 40-45 hours of gameplay from Xenonauts, which is decent enough for $20.

40-45 hours of gameplay? According to Steam's data, I've spent 162 hours playing Xenonauts going back to when it initially appeared on Steam. Chris, do I owe you for these extra hours of enjoyment? I've had a blast with it and is a bargain for $20 - I would have happily paid twice that.

[KevinHann]

40-45 hours of gameplay makes me thing Chris missed a 0 or two there. I've spent way more than that on each version I've played so far. Done over 500 crash sites combined, and quite a few of those were the Lag Carriers. Although that probably doesn't count as extended gameplay

[Sentelin]

Back to the topic?

I also think it would be nice if some more randomness in the ground missions would be possible, like the aliens not always camping down the UFO.

Not sure what is possible with modding though.

If you take at look at XNT ... you will find out that this is quite possible and that AI is now very modable because GJ made a lot of AI behaviors which can be tweaked.

[andreasg]

If you take at look at XNT ... you will find out that this is quite possible and that AI is now very modable because GJ made a lot of AI behaviors which can be tweaked.

Can the AI tweaks run standalone? I really do not care for the additional changes that are in the XNT mod.

[kabill]

Can the AI tweaks run standalone? I really do not care for the additional changes that are in the XNT mod.

Yeah, you'd be able to copy/paste the AI into the vanilla aiprops file and it should be fine.

[Sentelin]

It's possible but not recommended.If you don't care about XNT content fine,I never said played it I said look at it (I referred for you to take look at airprops.xml but I didn't make that clear).TD didn't just change AI behaviors he also change a lot of stats and added few additional behaviors to Alien races which in vanilla aliens don't have.So what you are going to get is rather challenging,more advanced AI who is going to handle your ass because it's not designed in mind for vanilla.Also TD divided Reaper alien race into 2 additional and .. well Gargols are based on Reapers ability to turn soldiers into Zombies,only here they are "new" alien species and spawn as any other race now.

Edited June 13, 2014 by Sentelin

[cybrbeast]

There used to be "zerg rushes" in the game, where all or most of the aliens outside the UFO would charge your dropship. Certainly made things interesting. The problem was that this was happening on almost every mission, and after howls of protest, GH cut them out entirely. I wish this all-or-nothing approach would/could be reconsidered, as I feel that an occasional enemy charge would definitely add an element of suspense to GC. I tried playing with the game files myself to achieve this, but couldn't get it to happen...

Indeed, variety would be so much better if AI could switch up their tactics every now and then. Since 'Zerg' has already been programmed it shouldn't be to hard to put it back in right? Then just decide on a percentage of times that AI applies 10%-20% sounds good.