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airstrike and grind factor


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Hey,

It came to me that there would be something worth of investigation here... That would be that sending an airstrike against a downed UFO would bring on average MORE money than doing a mission, and not the contrary.

This would be achieved by upping what the airstrike provide but also by reducing the worth of the alien salvages.

This way you would have a fair choice, either do the mission to train your soldier and gain some money, at your own risk, or do an airstrike to get slightly more money, but no training or risks.

And that would remove also the grind factor. I don't know about you, but I'm reluctant to do air strikes, even if this will be again 'yet another mission' because we get more money plus training.

by the way, if someone knows if airstrike income and salvage worth is moddable, that would be great :)

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I'm pretty sure it's moddable, but the reason air-strikes give less money is because they are no risk alternatives to clearing a site. There's a 0% chance of you losing veterans if you air-strike, so the reward is lower. As far as grinding is concerned, the answer is to air-strike, just don't expect to get the same rewards as GC.

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not sure about airstrikes, but salvage values are saved in the props as i understand it. if airstrikes are not a pretty easily modifiable location i would be shocked.

as to grind factor it self, frankly i don't know why you play the game. don't get me wrong here i understand not wanting to do an entire wave but in general wounded soldiers and drop ship speed prevent me from "everything". i do find it useful however to have more then one squad, right now i am playing 3 main bases effectively( haven't gotten squad 3 up just yet) and i take about 2-4 missions per wave, however to keep up with production, i am cheating my way past air combat to keep it pretty much on par with the original games air combat

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I think the choice is fair right now, you either get in there, get your hands dirty and get a bit more money and training, or you just sit at home with a finger up your *** getting money for nothing and the chicks for free.

Yeah, the risk-return sounds good on paper, but in practice the risk of losing soldiers on a ground mission is very manageable. This makes ground missions the better option every time. The only reason to ever click the airstrike button is if a) you can't get a proper crew there before it despawns or b) you don't feel like doing the ground mission.

B happens a lot because of the sheer number of UFOs and lack of variety in the missions. By the time I gained access to the final mission, I had shot down nearly 200 UFOs. That's an absurd amount of ground missions to do, and yet I felt like I had to do them all else be penalized with opportunity costs. That's bad design.

It would work much better if airstrikes were the preferred option for dealing with downed UFOs. This can be done by having them award the player significantly more money than ground missions. This way, the player only needs to do ground missions for alien materials and/or soldier experience. Considering how many materials are needed throughout the game this would still result in the player having incentive to do a fair number of ground missions, but without feeling like he's being penalized for not doing every single one.

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I think they're fine as is. I really don't see them as opportunity loss, rather more of a "I can get something out of this crash before it disappears" aspect since I'm somewhat johnny-on-the-spot with shooting down as many things as possible.

This allows my salvage teams to concentrate on the bigger payoffs (Corvettes over Scouts, Carriers over Corvettes, etc) since I generally have 2-3 crash sites awaiting me at any time later in the game.

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I think they're fine as is. I really don't see them as opportunity loss, rather more of a "I can get something out of this crash before it disappears" aspect since I'm somewhat johnny-on-the-spot with shooting down as many things as possible.

This allows my salvage teams to concentrate on the bigger payoffs (Corvettes over Scouts, Carriers over Corvettes, etc) since I generally have 2-3 crash sites awaiting me at any time later in the game.

But why wouldn't you do every crash site that you possibly can? Every time you click the airstrike button when you're capable of getting a team there you're throwing away money, materials, and soldier experience.

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Because they're already on their way to another mission.

It's not as if time flows on the geoscape while you're in a mission, or dropship fuel is a limiting factor, or soldiers don't fully rearm between missions. Unless the crash sites are a continent apart there's plenty of time, fuel, and ammo to go from site to site with the same dropship. The only reason not to go to all of them is if you're insufficiently manned due to causalities (which can mostly be prevented with proper play) or, what is likely the more common reason, you simply don't want or feel like doing another ground mission, which is understandable since they are time consuming and largely repetitive.

This means that the player is essentially forced to choose between fun and in-game bonuses. "I don't feel like doing another ground mission right now, even though it would be more fruitful, so I'll take the penalty to my cash, materials, and soldier experience instead;" that's often the decision the player is making when they click the airstrike button.

Wouldn't it be more interesting to make a choice between money and materials/experience?

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I believe Kentsfield summed up pretty well what I wanted to convey. Don't mistake me, I really enjoy the game and I enjoy generally doing the tac missions, they are the heart of the game, but somehow when you reach the 150-ish mission you are presented with a choice each time, which is : 'save real-world time and do an airstrike' or 'maximize my in-game assets and do a tac mission'.

Some to the point quote:

By the time I gained access to the final mission, I had shot down nearly 200 UFOs. That's an absurd amount of ground missions to do, and yet I felt like I had to do them all else be penalized with opportunity costs. That's bad design.

and

This means that the player is essentially forced to choose between fun and in-game bonuses. "I don't feel like doing another ground mission right now, even though it would be more fruitful, so I'll take the penalty to my cash, materials, and soldier experience instead;" that's often the decision the player is making when they click the airstrike button.

Sure, no one really force us to click on airstrike. But who has not suffered at least a bit from the 'grind experience' in Xenonauts, where you know this is again a 'Downed medium UFO' mission without much fear of losing anything, still you'll ''want'' to do it because it gives more profit in game and you can't compel yourself in clicking Airstrike...

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This idea was discussed (at length if I recall correctly) when the feature was added. There was a complaint from some of the players that having the cash value be too high would devalue the ground combat, which is the core feature of the game* and so should not be so easily skippable.

*Their words, not mine

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I see there is another thread about that. I know we can mod the selling value of all aliens stuff, so by toning them down, we can render airstrike more interesting. The game difficulty will be higher, so something to compensate like a slight reduction in upkeep of all base facilities can be used if need be.

Best thing would be if Solver exports the airstrike variable, it is not exposed right now, that would be simpler and would satisfy people like me thinking that airstrike should be a viable option and not a last ditch effort. No game should force upon you grinding...

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I personally prefer the strategic side of the game; managing resources, researching, manufacture etc., and consider it equally important to what makes the game what it is. That's one reason that I prefer Xenonauts to the XCOM remake, as that significantly reduced the importance of the strategic side of the game.

But I'm also one of the heathens that didn't mind X-Com Interceptor (other than the fact that the fighter controls were terribly managed).

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Yeah, the risk-return sounds good on paper, but in practice the risk of losing soldiers on a ground mission is very manageable. This makes ground missions the better option every time. The only reason to ever click the airstrike button is if a) you can't get a proper crew there before it despawns or b) you don't feel like doing the ground mission.

B happens a lot because of the sheer number of UFOs and lack of variety in the missions. By the time I gained access to the final mission, I had shot down nearly 200 UFOs. That's an absurd amount of ground missions to do, and yet I felt like I had to do them all else be penalized with opportunity costs. That's bad design.

It would work much better if airstrikes were the preferred option for dealing with downed UFOs. This can be done by having them award the player significantly more money than ground missions. This way, the player only needs to do ground missions for alien materials and/or soldier experience. Considering how many materials are needed throughout the game this would still result in the player having incentive to do a fair number of ground missions, but without feeling like he's being penalized for not doing every single one.

It would be bad design if there was no reason to do GC other than soldier experience. It could be argued that the game can be successfully completed with rookies as long as your tech is up to date. Air strikes giving as much money as GC would allow this, since why would I ever bother doing GC again?

Granted, I'm sure you can just mod the game to your preference. As long as you're not one of those players who consider the game as broken/incomplete since it doesn't have what you want, there shouldn't be a problem. You can ask about it in the modding section.

Edited by ViewThePhenom
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I was having tremendous fun with the game during my first experience with it in 21 Stable. Played about a week before going out with some friends and sharing how good I find it. Next day a dude came back to me saying he completed it easily and it wasn't that big of a deal. He just airstroke nearly every crash site. That completely ruined it for me. So no, I'll never support any shape of neglecting GC in favor of any other aspects of the game, cool or not.

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I think the whole issue of airstrike/GC balance, and GC profits in general, is one of the most difficult issues in the game.

On the one hand, I understand that Chris does not want players pressured into doing every single crash site. Doing 3-4 sites per wave, and ending with 100 missions by the time you get to the end of the tech three, that is probably not enjoyable to most players. On the other hand, just like the original X-Com, the ground combat is of course the best and most important part of the game, and it also doesn't feel right if the optimal way to play is to first do 5-6 missions to build soldier experience, and then only secure 1-2 of each UFO.

Consider this - you only really need to assault one alien base, to get the very useful base upgrade and quantum center. You also should assault each UFO type once to get the tech. As for capturing aliens, you can get a Leader from a Cruiser or an alien base, and a Praetor from an alien base or Battleship. Which means that as far as Battleships go, you don't want to assault more than one! One gives you the Praetor (if not taken from an alien base), and the tech, but subsequent ones have low rewards. The cash is nice but probably not worth the risk, as losing high-level soldiers is painful, and quite likely when you're attacking a ship with a full complement of elite aliens.

In the original game, however, assaulting high-level UFOs was almost alright. The for-profit manufacture broke all economy, but in the absence of that, a single Battleship provided a lot of useful money.

This is a tough issue to solve. Perhaps there could be mods that address the issue specifically with regards to high-risk missions such as alien bases and late-game UFOs, by significantly increasing the rewards from those missions compared to early and mid-game missions. Like notice how Battleships were supposed to have an additional use in terms of providing Singularity Cores for Furies, but the Fury is in itself not that desirable.

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I am not so worried about how many missions you need, more about how many are beneficial.

You only need to capture the different aliens to finish the game, but doing more missions is of course beneficial. That's okay. Attacking an alien base once is not strictly needed, but is definitely beneficial. Same with early game UFOs, it's definitely advantageous to attack several. It is fine if players can go for a minimalist playthrough as long as it is more difficult.

But with the late game, I think it breaks down. Assaulting a second Carrier/Battleship is of very questionable benefit. They don't give you that much money, and you risk losing soldiers because you are by then facing a cadre of super-tough Sebillian Elites, or several mind controlling aliens, and so on, for that questionable benefit.

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Thing is how many of these missions do you really need to do to complete the game? It's not like no Quantum Cryptology makes it impossible, right?

Assuming you need Sentinel armor + MAG weapons to beat the final mission, quite a few I'd think. You'd need the captured aliens, the parts for research, and the materials to manufacture all the gear for your soldiers. I'd also imagine you'd need some semblance of air superiority to prevent your funding from tanking. It's hard to estimate, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were looking at 30+ ground combats at the minimum. Which is plenty for a single playthrough, in my opinion.

I also think making assaults on the player's base a legitimate threat throughout the game would go a long way in ensuring the player's participation.

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Assuming you need Sentinel armor + MAG weapons to beat the final mission, quite a few I'd think. You'd need the captured aliens, the parts for research, and the materials to manufacture all the gear for your soldiers. I'd also imagine you'd need some semblance of air superiority to prevent your funding from tanking. It's hard to estimate, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were looking at 30+ ground combats at the minimum. Which is plenty for a single playthrough, in my opinion.

I also think making assaults on the player's base a legitimate threat throughout the game would go a long way in ensuring the player's participation.

I'll bet you you don't need anywhere 30+ ground combats to beat the game. Additionally GC isn't the only source of both alien alloys and alenium.

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Well, I'm pretty sure that dude did not go through 30 GC in a single night, although I might be wrong. Of course I tend to underestimate the early game GC as it goes so smooth and fast, it's upwards of Corvette that slows down the pace. Would you settle on way under 30 past Corvette?

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