[X:CE v0.25+] You Can't Take the Sky From Me - A Hard-Mode Air Combat Mod

[llunak]

Hmm ... what's this warm fuzzy feeling inside? I knew what to name 0.26, heh ... oh, nevermind .

[kabill]

I might be wrong, but from what you've written I think you may be attempting to play the air game like it was vanilla.

Attacking UFOs with missiles from within their field of fire generally isn't a good idea precisely because of the problems you identify. If you or the target dodges, your lock will break and this will mean any follow-up missile will be evaded as well.

The trick, then, is to attack them from behind or (ideally) the side. There's two ways you can do this. Firstly, when fighting one-on-one, you can pass the UFO at which point you'll have superior turning speed and be able to defeat the UFO. In this instance, it's the approach which is the hardest part as you're trying to pass through the UFO's field of fire without taking too much damage. Dodging can help, but also using long-range missiles can be useful against targets that can dodge as you can force them to lose their lock on you too.

Secondly, in a multi-aircraft battle, you can kite or lead targets and engage them from behind with others. The video in the first post is a good example of this.

All this said, I've not given the mod any level of testing post-0.26 so it might be that the AI changes are too problematic. I suspect the field of fire on alien fighter missiles might need narrowing too. So I imagine there are problems that need addressing. On the other hand, though, it's not a mod you can jump into and expect to do well at off-the-bat. If you've jumped in part way through a game, you've missed the earlier combats against individual UFOs which will help you get used to the new system.

EDIT: No worries. Feedback is a useful thing and I appreciate it.

EDIT 2: Also, if what I suspect is true and you're new to the mod, I really do recommend starting a new game and not playing ironman so you can get used to the mod. It's taken me several hours of practice to get 'good' at the mod and even then I don't have close to a clean record.

Edited August 12, 2014 by kabill

[kabill]

Hmm ... what's this warm fuzzy feeling inside? I knew what to name 0.26, heh ... oh, nevermind .

Yes, yes you did.

[azzim]

Yes, You right with everything....but You should give tests to 0.26 In multi-aircraft battles in 0.26 we couldn't so easily lead group of enemy and take them from behind with other jets - every member of escort will take one of your jets as a target and You are left in fighting for example corvette with only one of your jets. When it comes to fighting with 3 aliens fighters in Your mod on XCE 0.26 there is no tragedy - I've mannaged to use the tactics that You said - go pass enemy FoF, overmanouver them and shoot them down with cannons mostly as the missiles wasn't of any use - and even i didn't take any causalties so I am not so "beginner" in air combat maybe . And here is a bad news - while fights with escorts are on their way - the corvette is making a whole sea of fire on every your jet, making almost immpossible to use tactics to pass enemy fighter and use turning speed because your jets are taking fire from every place in the sky as corvette has BIG FoF...and I have a feel that turning speed of every UFO has been much more better in 0.26 than it was in 0.25 - You can't so simply overmanouver alien fighters now as it was before and even if you managed to do it there is a little problem in firing at the side or rear enemy ship becouse you jets fighting with escorts are under heavy fire from escorted ships, who are also quite more manoverable than it was in clean ver 0.25.

Edited August 12, 2014 by azzim

[azzim]

With 3 days spend on testing mod on insane level and X:CE 0.26 from my side one opinion - can't play.......to much rate of fire in case of heavy alien ships plus wide field of fire makes it more than a challange for me....

[kabill]

Well, thanks for trying it out, anyway. For what it's worth, you've prompted me to have a proper look through it so there might be some changes inbound soon!

[azzim]

Good to hear , I really find Your mod challanging and worth of try.....but it hard very much really....i have notice that even corvette had a turning ability even compared to condor - in 1 on 1 battle with corvette i couldn't overmanouver it and all I could do was flyinng around her trying to be always in 90 degrees with my plane side to her line of fire (as it was best and all of their projectiles were miss - when i was changing this to less than 90 or more than 90 I had to make rools to be not to hit). When I used 2 planes for attack corvette the second plane wasn't able to go through her massive fire from turret and beam even when it was comming from her side. As I said before I am just trying to have a good and logic hard play in this game but I am not a guy who have time to going inside the games files to mod them but since Your hard mod i was trying to change some parameters inside crafts weapon in Your mod. I took alien scout and for torpedo I gave a little bit longer range. Then I gave to beam bigger FoF and lower rate of it's fire and range(just sligthly - longer than my cannon but short than sidewinder) and finally lower turret range to half (3000) and FoF to 90 and give to it little less damage( I was take turret as some kind of ship defence for incoming missile that would be also able to fire to enemy vessels but it shouldnt be making more damage). I was making my fun only with scout and after that changes I find air combat with scout still difficult and challanging while not so hard as it was in Your's mod setting. Maybe You will take a look on Your mod and try to make this nice for insane difficulity on XCE 0.26. In my opinion try to lower range - especially for turrets as a self defence systems on short ranges (and maybe able to shot down human missiles) and lower it's damage a little bit. Make beam range less than allien torpedo and with less FoF (it should be allien cannons right). After this we could have a nice challanging mod. Saying hello from Poland!

Edited August 15, 2014 by azzim

[azzim]

AV.CORVETTETURRET range 4000, rate of fire 0,8 firing arc 135

AV.CORVETTEMISSILETURRET range 7000,rate of fire 2,4 firing arc 90

on this settings I was fighting single corvette and it was quite challanging - always had to have an eye for a plane that was drawing her fire and lowering RoF and range for turret allow me to made missile attacks from side with two another planes but i had to stay focus when they was comming close and evade "avcorvettemissileturret" fire when they were lock on target and avoid "avcorvetteturret" after first salvo.When i was comming in distance to use my gatlinglaser i was taking damage quite good becouse of short distance but no planes were losts and battle was far more difficult than XCE or vannila but a little less hopeless than in Your mod.

[kabill]

Ok, so just did some testing. Accidentally didn't save in a while and then got a base attack (which wasn't useful for my test) so didn't manage to get past Corvettes. But it highlighted a key issue: it's too easy!

To explain: Foxtrots are too good. Because they're too fast. azzim, you indicate in your last post that Condors can't outmaneuver a Corvette and you're right. But a Foxtrot can do so with relative ease. On full afterburner and flying more or less parallel to the UFO, you can avoid all it's fire and get enough turn to be able to move into its blind-spot at the rear. Staying in that blind-spot is difficult, especially as I was experimenting with a 5 second lock on torpedoes (double what it is at the moment), but I had a 100% kill rate on Corvettes using this method (and it works even better against Scouts).

In principle, this wouldn't be a problem, but there doesn't seem to be any disadvantage to the Foxtrot's supremacy. Again, due to their speed they can outfight a Light Scout where a Condor will almost certainly take heavy damage. I suspect the same would be true of a Fighter as well (that was another issue: the alien Fighter was actually easier to kill than the Light Scout!).

I'm not sure yet how to fix this. Nerfing the speed of the Foxtrot would be one solution, but that would also nerf its speed on the geoscape and part of the point of the Foxtrot is that it can catch things the Condor can't. It would also require some adjustments to alien weapons too since I think at the moment too much of the mod hangs on being able to dash past things with Foxtrots.

I suspect the answer may lie in rebalancing the turning speeds of UFOs while nerfing their weapons. When I made the mod, it was easy to mislead UFOs and they couldn't change targets, so having wide FoF was important but now they're better at targeting it might be possible to narrow them down along similar lines to the suggestions in azzim's posts.

This is likely to mean a lot of reworking, though, so it might take some time to get something new out. In the meantime, the mod's definitely playable (if you know what you're doing), but it definitely needs some changing-up.

[azzim]

You right about the Foxtrots - but as you said a player should spend some time with Your mod as any of us were using foxtrots as a heavy support to gave hard "fire&forget" kick on alliens vessel couse they didn't have evade ability and guns - not to use it as a main role fighters....As i see on close look Foxtrots now should be my main fighters when using Your mod...so when I was still using condors as my main fighters I was needed to change some allien weapons statistic as I wrote before to find Your mod more playable....must to test Your mod now with Foxtrots as a main fighter then.

[azzim]

...and I am going to try Your's armour mod...in vannila hunter scout was just a moving target

[slipper]

kabill

I have just installed the xenophobia mod compilation which contains the realistic aircraft mod. I would like to try your 'You can't take the sky from me' mod as it looks really well thought out and is a part of the game i am very interested in.

So i would like to ask would it be possible to convert your mod to work with xenophobia and the realistic aircraft mod at all please? If not could you tell me what values i need to change, what kind of new values i'm looking at, and what their effect is so that i may try to edit them myself?

I noticed that the realistic aircraft mod and your mod do not have any aircraft entries the same, could i simply copy and paste your entries into xenophobia? or would i need to adjust the values in xenophobia?

Thanks for any help

regards

slipper

[kabill]

Ugh, almost forgot to reply to this.

I think any such compatibility project is unlikely. There's so much other stuff I'm doing at the moment that even if I agreed it would be very low on my list of priorities. If someone else wants to have a look at it, I'm happy for them to do so. But I suspect I will not be doing it myself.

That said - and bearing in mind that I know next to nothing about the changes made by Realistic Aircraft of Xenophobia - I suspect the only real thing that would need adjusting are the speed and turn-rate of the new planes (and maybe HP values). Aside from that, it would probably work ok. (Actually, planes which can't roll would be useless, so you'd probably want to remove/change those. But actually it probably wouldn't be a lot of work overall to make it good enough.)

[slipper]

kabill

Thanks for the reply mate.

I suspect the only real thing that would need adjusting are the speed and turn-rate of the new planes (and maybe HP values). Aside from that, it would probably work ok. (Actually, planes which can't roll would be useless, so you'd probably want to remove/change those.

and i only need to adjust these in the relavant .xml files, yes?

regards

slipper

[kabill]

Yes, just the stuff in aircrafts.xml. I don't know if Xenophobia adds additional aircraft weapons; if it does you might also want to have a look at changing those as well.

[kabill]

This is partly for my benefit so I don't forget, but comments are welcome as well: some thoughts on changes.

- Revise differentiation between torpedoes and missiles. Torpedoes will have a long range again (though typically not longer than alien weapons range) but have long lock-times and narrow field of fire. Missiles will have shorter ranges, but also shorter lock times and field of fire. This should emphasise the role of missiles against evasive targets, as their wider field of fire and shorter lock time will make them far more useful than torpedoes.

- Reduce the range of wide-arc UFO weapons and place more emphasis on forward-firing weaponry by increasing UFO turn-rates somewhat (will need some balance testing to see if it works).

- Add in field-of-fire markers for anti-missile defences.

- See if it's at all possible to remove the slow-down exploit (slowing down you're plane's speed also slows down the speed and turnrate of UFOs targeting the plane, meaning that it's really easy to slow down when you're on the flank of a UFO and blast it to bits. I'm tempted to experiment with simply breaking the speed control slider so planes only have a choice of normal speed or afterburner speed. This will help nerf foxtrots a bit too).

[slipper]

kabill sounds good mate, looking forward to it.

Also thanks for your reply only just noticed it. By the way i have compared the aircrafts.xml and the aircraftweapons.xml from your mod and from xenophobia mod, but they are completley different, as an example the planes listed in yours are

airplane.human.f17

airplane.human.mig31

airplane.human.corsair

airplane.human.marauder

airplane.human.fury

airplane.human.chinook

airplane.human.shrike

airplane.human.valkyrie

airplane.human.base

airplane.alien.fighter

airplane.alien.heavyfighter

airplane.alien.interceptor

airplane.alien.bomber

airplane.alien.strikecruiser

airplane.alien.lightscout

airplane.alien.scout

airplane.alien.corvette

airplane.alien.landingship

airplane.alien.cruiser

airplane.alien.carrier

airplane.alien.battleship

alienbase.small

alienbase.medium

alienbase.large

airplane.human.saracen

whilst in xenophobia they are

airplane.human.f5

airplane.human.lightning

airplane.human.jaguar

airplane.human.aj37

airplane.human.f1

airplane.human.tu128

airplane.human.f12

airplane.human.mig29

airplane.human.su27

airplane.human.f16

airplane.human.f15

airplane.human.f14

airplane.human.mirage2000

airplane.human.tornado

airplane.human.mirage4000

airplane.human.sam1

airplane.human.sam2

airplane.human.recoveredfighter

airplane.human.heavyfighter

airplane.human.recoveredinterceptor

airplane.human.observationballoon

airplane.human.drone

airplane.human.boomerang

airplane.human.vtolfighter

airplane.human.gunship

does that mean it is not possible to add your values to the aircraft? I do not see any values for alien craft in the xenophobia mod so how would these be calculated? could i add your entries for alien craft below the xenophobia entries and all would work fine? or is there more to it than this?

Thanks for any response

slipper

[kabill]

If there's no UFO entries in the file, I can only assume that Xenophobia installs it modularly?

I've just had a look over the aircraft stats (based on an old version of Realistic Aircraft, mind) and they don't seem terribly out of sync with this mod. What I'd suggest doing for the aircrafts, then, is simply copy-pasting the UFO data from this mod into the Xenophobia aircrafts.xml file.

Weaponry's going to be more complicated though. If Xenophobia has new air combat weapons for the player, that's going to be the dealbreaker as these will need some balancing. You could give it a go by trying to convert Xenophobia's air combat weapons into ones which will fit with this mod, but I don't know how easy that will be to do. Alternatively, you could strip out the extra player aircraft weapons from Xenophobia and just use the basic ones that this mod uses.

[slipper]

kabill

Thanks again for your reply mate, ill just have a mess about and see what i come up with.

regards

slipper

[MortuusSum]

Sorry for necroing this thread, but I wanted to know if this mod is still being updated? The last change is a year ago, so it doesn't seem like it, but I figured I'd check.

[kabill]

It's not likely, no. I spent some time early this year trying to make a new version but could never produce something that I was happy with.

Sadly, the problem is more or less intractable. Because the air game is deterministic, one you have learned the correct knack for winning you can win indefinitely. Changing how air combat plays shakes things up by requiring the player to learn a new knack but once they have it you're back to the same place you started. That's the problem with this mod: it's harder at first but once you know what you're doing it's not much different, only it takes 10 times longer which overall makes it a net loss.

What I really want is an entirely reworked air combat game that adds some level of randomness and focuses on strategic input rather than skill. Basically, like a more sophisticated version of the air game in the original X-Com. When I was working on XCE I drafted some mechanics for such a system but while I could probably have designed the behind-the-scenes stuff I don't think I would have been able to make a UI or graphical elements to make it work in game. So not likely to happen.

[MortuusSum]

That's fair. Thanks for the quick response.

[AndreiN]

It's not likely, no. I spent some time early this year trying to make a new version but could never produce something that I was happy with.

Sadly, the problem is more or less intractable. Because the air game is deterministic, one you have learned the correct knack for winning you can win indefinitely. Changing how air combat plays shakes things up by requiring the player to learn a new knack but once they have it you're back to the same place you started. That's the problem with this mod: it's harder at first but once you know what you're doing it's not much different, only it takes 10 times longer which overall makes it a net loss.

What I really want is an entirely reworked air combat game that adds some level of randomness and focuses on strategic input rather than skill. Basically, like a more sophisticated version of the air game in the original X-Com. When I was working on XCE I drafted some mechanics for such a system but while I could probably have designed the behind-the-scenes stuff I don't think I would have been able to make a UI or graphical elements to make it work in game. So not likely to happen.

I really enjoyed this mod at the beginning, but I must sadly concur with this. When you've learned the ropes, the same close circuit tailing maneuver can be pulled out pretty constantly and doing it over and over again becomes a bit tedious. It can still be pretty punishing even for small timing mistakes, but generally it's not that much of an interesting challenge in the end.

The underlying idea of the mod is great, though, with the narrow targeting area and trading evasive rolls for maintaining weapon lock. I had an idea of maybe giving the initial facing of the aircraft more tactical meaning, so that approaching the UFO already on the geoscape from the right angle would be an extra factor. In connection to this, at least the missile weapons and most UFO weapons would be in range already at the very start of the combat, but target lock would require more time. UFO turning speeds and weapon projectile speeds should go up, so that you couldn't so easily avoid fire without using the evasive roll. This way it might become more of a long range shooting/damage trading minigame akin to the original UFO games. I've not the slightest idea how this would work in practice, though.