Some Thoughts on Overhauling the Geoscape

[kabill]

So, this is kind of a resurrection of the mod idea I posted ages ago now, but reformulated after a lot of thinking through it. It mostly relates to overhauling the geoscape so as to (hopefully) erase the issues which vanilla suffers from (in particular, the dominance of player air power, the lack of mission diversity, and an uninvolved late-game). I thought I'd post my ideas here and see if anyone has any comments or ideas.

1) Revised role of air power

In vanilla, air power is critical to the game. It is necessary in order to avoid losing the game, since it blocks funding damage. But it is also the only way to generate resources by increasing funding and producing crash missions. I believe this is the main reason for most of the other problems with the vanilla game and therefore the key thing that needs to be changed. There are several aspects.

Firstly, ground missions will be heavily rebalanced towards landed rather than crashed UFOs. This will be achieved by making UFOs harder to catch and planes much less powerful relative to UFOs. The prevalence of landings will also be increased considerably. As a subsidiary effect, this will make multiple strike teams far more valuable, otherwise catching UFOs before they take off will be difficult.

Secondly, shooting down UFOs will produce little/no funding bonuses. As such, funding will only go down. The whole funding system will be rebalanced to take account of this (see below), but the point here is that air power will only allow you to slow down, rather than stop or reverse, the alien invasion.

The consequence of this is that rather than being at the beginning of the resource chain, air power will be at the end instead. You will need to invest in troops and equipment in order to generate further resources through ground missions, while air power is a means by which excess resources can be used to slow down the alien invasion and buy yourself enough time to win the game before earth falls.

2) Increased scale of invasion

The number of UFOs spawning will be increased significantly (provisionally, I’m thinking ~10/wave at the beginning of the game scaling up to ~20 by the end, plus extras from alien bases). Partly this is aesthetic, but it is also to ensure that the player has more options in terms of the UFOs they can engage and assault. Obviously, other numbers will be balanced to take account of the larger number of UFOs.

This will also follow through to the UFO crews as well, which will generally be larger and more varied (building upon my Dynamic UFOs mod). Ground missions will probably be more difficult to encourage development of weapons and armour technology. However, at the same time the player will have much more control over the missions they do and therefore be able to take on those missions they feel ready for and not others.

3) Dynamic Invasion

UFO spawns will be dynamic and a large range of UFOs will be used from the off, albeit with a low probability of larger UFOs earlier in the game.

Furthermore, rather than advancing at a set pace, the alien invasion will scale dynamically as a result of particular alien missions. Intercepting certain UFOs is therefore a means by which the alien invasion can be slowed.

To make this work, the invasion will be flatter – as the ticker increases the probability of higher-tier UFOs will increase but more importantly more UFOs will spawn. In this way, you’ll not be left behind facing more or less impossible missions because you have not defeated enough UFOs soon enough. However, since more UFOs will mean more ticker growth, the invasion will grow increasingly more quickly as the game progresses unless you can develop a strong air force to slow down the invasion.

4) More Special Missions

Generally, the UFOs which carry these missions will be ahead of whatever air power you can muster which will make stopping them much more difficult. Regarding terror missions in particular, though, there will be some tolerance for missing or failing them.

I might update with some more things later, but these are the key points which aren’t related to other mods I’ve built already (the mod will likely include most/all of the other mods I’ve made with some tweaks). As the geoscape changes are the main ‘new’ thing, though, I wanted to focus on them here.

5) Air Combat Changes

I never managed to get You Can't Take the Sky From Me to work how I wanted, but I nevertheless want to revisit air combat to try and make it more challenging. I have some thoughts on this but experimentation is needed before I can go further.

[radek]

Sounds great! Your Dynamic UFO Spawns was a great mod. So i bet it will be as good or even better.

[dpelectric]

Wow, up to ~20 UFOs per wave? Gulp!

To me, there are two core issues with the lategame. First, mission variety. Once you have a couple of Marauders in your air force, you can shoot down just about any and every UFO, so terror missions and base missions (both offensive and defensive) disappear. This is particularly a shame because of the uniqueness of terror and base maps; I often find myself deliberately letting these missions occur, just so I can see Gollup's Grocery, the XenoMart, white picket fences, the amazing detail of mag batteries, ping-pong tables, etc., etc. When you can shoot everything down, and are monetarily driven to do so, you are left with the same recycled farm/desert/ industrial props over and over again.

Second is the lack of motivation to assault these crash sites. Once you have Marauders and a couple of soldiers in Predator, you don't really need alloys and alenium much any more. Cruiser and carrier crash sites become largely irrelevant, and so do battleships after a single GC to bag a praetor. Just shoot 'em down and call in airstrikes.

To these points you could say, so what? The game can't go on forever, and it has to begin reaching a logical conclusion. Yes, but I've already 80% reached that conclusion by the time massive ships start to appear. By grinding through a godawful number of scout-corvette-landingship missions, I'm already in the position to seize and keep the initiative. My typical game goes something like this: 40+ small and midsize GCs, maybe 5 large GCs, 1-2 base assaults, a single battleship, a single terror mission, and usually zero base defenses. The whole game is just way too front-loaded. Something just doesn't feel right when I see 17 boring caesan scout farm maps and one beautifully and painstakingly rendered terror map.

So one way to approach what I see as a problem is what you're thinking of doing: give the UFOs a much greater potential of achieving their objectives. You can do this by a number of methods:

1. As others have said, enable the enemy ships (or at least the construction, base attack and terror ones) to "beeline" for their targets

2. Buff UFO airspeed and/or reduce that of Marauders

3. Increase UFO HP

4. Increase UFO firepower ala Max's Flying Circus

5. Cause more enemy vessels to spawn

6. I wonder if there could be a way for interceptors to soften up UFOs, much like base defenses, to reduce their crew size. Jack up a battleship's HP until it's almost unstoppable. Populate it with 40-50 aliens. The utility of Marauders would then be, rather than outright downing the threat (followed by a simple airstrike), to make a successful landing site assault more feasible

Another way would be to reduce the alloy and alenium harvest from small and (particularly) mid-sized UFOs. Lower-tier weapons, such as lasers, could have their material requirements reduced correspondingly, so that balance would stay about the same. But if you wanted upper-tier weapons and armor, you'd be highly motivated to assault massive vessels, as they would be the only source that could yield the necessary supplies for mags/sentinel/etc.. You could no longer afford to merrily airstrike your way through the lategame; in fact, quite the opposite

Along the same lines, a third approach might be to give massive GCs a unique benefit (similar to that from praetors). Maybe magstorms require special accelerators only found on carriers. Maybe Valkyries can only be built from converted battleship engines. Maybe for security reasons no single praetor knows the full mothership access code. Perhaps terror ships, even if shot down, still send out their crews right where they land to create havoc anyhow (i.e. generate a terror map). Anything to motivate the player to actively engage larger ships and more dangerous missions.

Or perhaps simply, radically, increase the chances of UFO power cores exploding and wiping out most of the benefit of crash sites. Make landed and intact ships much more valuable than those that are largely destroyed. Remove base defenses from the game completely. Make Marauders so expensive you can only afford at most two. Have aliens on base attacks prioritize destroying your radars, blinding you until new ones are built (so at least the next wave has a high chance of mission success, and now you're really worried about a followup base attack, or sending your troops out at all).

Sorry, it's been a long day, and I don't know if this post makes much sense. But you did ask for ideas (without specifying that they be good ones), so, there you go

[drages]

I am very sick this days so couldn't work on XNT..

After I play XNT I nearly forgot about vanilla. So at XNT u need to shoot down ufos and take money.

So more plane tiers and more hard ufos can be good. But I am against 20 ufos at air.. with 20 carriers and battleships u can conquer earth easily

If u need to have more then 1 GC group ur beginning soldiers must be more too..

[kabill]

To me, there are two core issues with the lategame. First, mission variety....

Second is the lack of motivation to assault these crash sites. Once you have Marauders and a couple of soldiers in Predator, you don't really need alloys and alenium much any more. Cruiser and carrier crash sites become largely irrelevant, and so do battleships after a single GC to bag a praetor. Just shoot 'em down and call in airstrikes.

That's certainly the impression I've had, too.

The whole game is just way too front-loaded.

And this.

1. As others have said, enable the enemy ships (or at least the construction, base attack and terror ones) to "beeline" for their targets

Sadly not within my power as the UFO AI is all hard-coded.

2. Buff UFO airspeed and/or reduce that of Marauders

I like the idea of doing this generally across all aircraft. If most missions are based on landings rather than crashes, it doesn't matter so much if interceptions are less reliable as a result of low flight speed.

3. Increase UFO HP

4. Increase UFO firepower ala Max's Flying Circus

Changes to air combat are tough to balance. Making air combat tougher definitely makes a difference to how the game plays, but the range of skill for people playing air combat varies wildly. Also - and this is based on a conversation I had a while back with Solver - not everyone is that fussed with air combat at all. One of the advantages of the current air combat model is that it's over pretty quickly, whereas making it more difficult and involved means it takes more time and effort and it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Obviously, there's auto-calc for that. But 1) that's hard to balance in line with air combat proper; and 2) is anyone really happy with using auto-calc when the chance of winning is less than 100% (losing planes because RNG said so is frustrating, at least in my experience)?

In any case, it's definitely on the cards but I'm unsure how to deal with it at the moment.

5. Cause more enemy vessels to spawn

Already on that, obviously.

6. I wonder if there could be a way for interceptors to soften up UFOs, much like base defenses, to reduce their crew size. Jack up a battleship's HP until it's almost unstoppable. Populate it with 40-50 aliens. The utility of Marauders would then be, rather than outright downing the threat (followed by a simple airstrike), to make a successful landing site assault more feasible

Again, would be impossible without proper code-work. That said, I'm wondering how base defence damage works. I think that's supposed to reduce the attack size even if the ship isn't destroyed, but I'm not sure if it stacks with damage already done. And, on the same page, if the crew-depletion is simply based on the current damage level of the UFO, it's possible existing damage from air combat already does that (but no one would know, since being assaulted by a UFO partially damaged from air combat has to be one of the least likely things in the game).

Another way would be to reduce the alloy and alenium harvest from small and (particularly) mid-sized UFOs. Lower-tier weapons, such as lasers, could have their material requirements reduced correspondingly, so that balance would stay about the same. But if you wanted upper-tier weapons and armor, you'd be highly motivated to assault massive vessels, as they would be the only source that could yield the necessary supplies for mags/sentinel/etc.. You could no longer afford to merrily airstrike your way through the lategame; in fact, quite the opposite

Something I'm actually thinking about in relation to this is diversifying the resources needed to make things. In particular, using alien ammo clips as power sources needed by advanced weapons which takes some of the onus off of alloys and alenium as early-game resources.

Along the same lines, a third approach might be to give massive GCs a unique benefit (similar to that from praetors). Maybe magstorms require special accelerators only found on carriers. Maybe Valkyries can only be built from converted battleship engines.

Maybe. Trouble with this is that it is motivating doing difficult missions so that you can get stuff to make the difficult missions easier (when if you don't do the mission in the first place, you don't need the item you went on the mission to get!).

Maybe for security reasons no single praetor knows the full mothership access code.

That's interesting. Could possibly divide it so you need to capture a ship-commanding Praetor and a base-commanding Praetor as each has different pieces of information needed for the final assault. This would need to be factored into alien base spawning, though, so might be too complicated to get right.

Or perhaps simply, radically, increase the chances of UFO power cores exploding and wiping out most of the benefit of crash sites. Make landed and intact ships much more valuable than those that are largely destroyed.

Already on this.

Remove base defenses from the game completely.

I'd like to keep them in. However, in the mod as outlined above the idea would be to have more bases, therefore making defending them a bit more difficult/costly. Also, I'm planning on changing the size/effectiveness of many buildings so you effectively get less space per base, which will make including things like base defences costly in terms of the area they occupy.

Sorry, it's been a long day, and I don't know if this post makes much sense. But you did ask for ideas (without specifying that they be good ones), so, there you go

It's all good. Even 'poor' ideas (I'm not sure there are any here, mind!) can be turned into good ideas.

Edited November 16, 2014 by kabill

[dpelectric]

As a subsidiary effect, this will make multiple strike teams far more valuable, otherwise catching UFOs before they take off will be difficult.

How are you envisioning achieving this? Reducing the monthly costs of soldiers and base facilities? Increasing the monetary rewards of GC? You could also keep single-team playthroughs as a possibility by significantly lengthening the amount of time a UFO is touched down (though I personally like the idea of multiple teams)

Regarding terror missions in particular, though, there will be some tolerance for missing or failing them.

Perhaps terror missions could be uncoupled from strict success or failure. Remove the city-had-to-be-nuked penalty. Make each civilian/local cop worth 50 funding points. Allow the player to stun, haul onboard, and thus save them. Ignore a terror site, maybe ten innocents slaughtered, -500. Evacuate half of them, break even. Save all ten (either by stunning/carrying to safety or having them still alive at mission end) +500. A carrot-and-stick approach, rather than just a stick.

To further motivate the player to fully complete the mission, you could, say, have a grateful nation offer you their best commandos (like the improved-stat starting troops you currently get; recycle this feature to post-completed-terror-mission). Or maybe a chance that the terror praetors (ala Dynamic UFOs) possess part of the mothership access code. Perhaps increase the bravery bonus from the terror medal.

Maybe. Trouble with this is that it is motivating doing difficult missions so that you can get stuff to make the difficult missions easier (when if you don't do the mission in the first place, you don't need the item you went on the mission to get!).

Well, I said this, of course, under the assumption that you were going to make difficult missions far less avoidable

In particular, using alien ammo clips as power sources needed by advanced weapons which takes some of the onus off of alloys and alenium as early-game resources.

Now THAT could introduce a whole different dynamic. If you only have X number of mag clips at your disposal, maybe you have to risk sending some of your guys on tougher missions armed just with lasers (which would still be available with as much ammo as you can carry). That could really be interesting.

Corporal: "S-s-sir, do you r-really want me to face elite harridans w-with an assault rifle?"

Colonel: "As you were, corporal, or I'll give you snowballs for a loadout!"

Edited November 14, 2014 by dpelectric

[podbelski]

I'm not playing much, actually I have one full playthrough, 3 unfinished and a current one. So don't blame me for not having many thoughts about game improvements.

I definitely agree with main points Kabill and Dpelectric made.

I think some "problems" might be better to leave untouched, like the air combat case. Eg changing the game in a way it will be mandatory to manage several strike crews will be too much for some people. Maybe even for myself)) Just too much of a headache and management.

Base defense does not work well atm, at least b/c it's hard to not take down the attacking UFO before it lands. On the other hand, if you make it a "standard" threat for all bases it becomes necessary to accumulate soldiers at every base to avoid it being totally destroyed by a sudden attack. Then you have to manufacture additional equipment for all of them etc. I think this again unnecessary complicates the game.

If you wish, I think it's ideal to make some dumb hack that guarantees exactly one-two main base defence per playthrough. I doubt this is possible w/o coding. Or, if a secondary base attack is also a guaranteed threat, it should be possible to quickly send your main crew there. The goal is not to allow a sudden loss of a base for any reason, but forcing a player to face one-two tough fights at the base. With a very big chance for a victory, like make the goal to survive for a certain number of turns. But penalties might even be forced regardless of actual damage done by aliens in GC.

Next, the number of UFOs per wave. I'm not a fan of the feeling of a mess and chaos that might come from lots of flying UFOs... If you want to ensure some UFOs accomplish their mission I prefer making them harder to shot down rather than overwhelm you with numbers. This just makes the gameplay more comfortable and pleasant IMO, like you feel all of them are still "under your control" even if you can't ground them all. I think reducing the value of shot down UFOs in a favor of landed might also be the right path.

Low motivation to ground combat large UFOs - agreed, it's a sad drawback of the game. Some of your thoughts on this seem to make a good sense, but atm I don't see any attractive solution

Edited November 15, 2014 by podbelski
base defence updated

[podbelski]

... another way to avoid tons of UFOs but making it impossible to ground them all might be simple: seriously increase interceptor refit time, and maybe restrict taking off for even slightly damaged planes (like 80% instead of 50%). There are options here, like stronger craft refits much longer than basic condors. Or make the rearming go first and relatively quick, the refuelling after it and takes longer time. This way you still have a chance to take down additional UFOs near a base on occasion.

This actually might have a side effect of more big ships GC. Focus the most threating alien missions to be carried by big ships, and while a player can't take down all the UFOs he has to go for big ones. And then he has to go GC b/c there will be not much choice. Increasing the profit from GC of big UFOs relative to smaller will also add up to this (reduce the sell price of the weapons, reduce disassemble profit for med ships in XNT, increase alloys/etc from big ships and reduce for smaller)

Edited November 15, 2014 by podbelski
more thoughts on refitting planes...

[ScottyJ8705]

Alien attack/escalation:

May I suggest that the first wave start with only 5 ufo or so, 10 may be a bit much for only a couple aircraft to deal with. Escalate to 10 in a month or two. I fully agree the game needs a bit more difficulty, this in an ALIEN INVASION after all. I would almost suggest a base attack in the first wave, the aliens only send a very small contingent of caesans because in all honesty, they don't think much of us as a threat. It's relatively easy to beat but it has to be because all you'll have is rookies and it lets you know the aliens mean business.

Air Combat:

Make the aircraft modable, unlocking different variations of existing in game planes. Unlock a Foxtrot with a cannon (Foxtrot H) for heavy?, unlock an extra missile rack or maybe external fuel tanks for the Condor to help it get the range you need early in game. I'd say the UFOs don't need more HP; air combat doesn't need to last longer, dogfights are supposed to be quick and dangerous. I don't remember which mod it was that had the escorts turn to face you at the start of an engagement, that was definitely a step in the right direction. Air combat weapons have pretty decent balance, at least in early-mid game, the enemies just need to have more intelligence and awareness for being experienced conquerors. I also agree with there being some sort of missile defense system on the larger/largest of alien ships, intercepting 1 missile every 5 seconds or so.

Special Missions:

Any "invasion" would require ground combat and establishing bases from which to run a ground campaign. It would make sense that the alien menace would want to go for the big cities and population centers of Earth and really hammer it to us. Terror missions would obviously include heavily armed soldiers mean to go kick some serious butt. A crew should be outfitted to their specific mission. The aliens should be really quick to get bases built and stay one step ahead of the poor little earthlings.

Economic Changes:

Obvious changes like what were stated above and in other forum threads all make sense. Pay for all that your soldiers carry into battle and more or less purchase/construct it all in the workshop (ammo, grenades, weapons, equipment). Instant construction would be preferred for all these basic starting items so it's more like purchasing them for use. Vary what rewards you get in correlation to the size of ship and type of mission the UFO is on as stated by podbelski above. More alenium/alloys for larger ships, less for smaller ones. It's hard to find a mod that changes some economics and doesn't include a whole lot of other crap you don't really want. Also, make airstriking crash sites less profitable because almost everything would be destroyed and very little recovered.

Edited November 16, 2014 by ScottyJ8705
added more thoughts on economic changes

[kabill]

How are you envisioning achieving this? Reducing the monthly costs of soldiers and base facilities? Increasing the monetary rewards of GC? You could also keep single-team playthroughs as a possibility by significantly lengthening the amount of time a UFO is touched down (though I personally like the idea of multiple teams)

Eg changing the game in a way it will be mandatory to manage several strike crews will be too much for some people

The monetary costs aren't really the important part of troop costs, in my opinion. The main issue with multiple strike teams is equipping them as, at least in vanilla, its the cost of making a second set of weapons which is the main issue and a second strike team only really pays for itself in the long run.

One possible answer to this problem that I've thought of is changing the way that ground combat manufacturing works. Rather than making individual items, you build a set of weapons as a single manufacturing project, which then gives you unlimited access to those items for the rest of the game.

The original idea for this was in relation to explosives - I really dislike how explosives automatically upgrade when you research the relevant tech for free but the only solutions to that are either 1) make individual explosive items (which is fiddly and might not work very well with how the game is coded) or 2) have an explosives upgrade manufacturing project which you have to complete before the items unlock.

There's no reason why this couldn't apply to other items as well, though. E.g. when you research laser weapons you then need to complete an expensive project which then allows access to light laser weapons; the rest are unlocked by researching advanced laser weapons and completing a second project for them. Doing those projects again would give you a cache of weapons which you can sell for a profit (at the expense of manufacturing time and valuable resources).

There's several advantages to this:

1) Developing new weapons or armour has a flat cost, meaning that running several squads is no more expensive than running one in terms of equipment. (You can treat this as an disadvantage too, of course, as you can take that higher cost as a feature.)

2) Squad management is easier, because you don't have to constantly (un)equip items when rotating soldiers. This is especially useful when you have several squads.

3) Similarly, equipment management is easier, since you don't have to care about transferring items to other bases etc.

4) It also facilitates greater diversity and experimentation with weapon loadouts, since you don't need to worry about producing items to try them when there's a risk that they won't work with your approach to GC. This isn't much of an issue for the vanilla weapons, since they're just upgrades. But if I was looking to integrate something like Advanced Armouries (which I would be) it would make that work better since the weapons are more diverse.

Perhaps terror missions could be uncoupled from strict success or failure. Remove the city-had-to-be-nuked penalty. Make each civilian/local cop worth 50 funding points. Allow the player to stun, haul onboard, and thus save them. Ignore a terror site, maybe ten innocents slaughtered, -500. Evacuate half of them, break even. Save all ten (either by stunning/carrying to safety or having them still alive at mission end) +500. A carrot-and-stick approach, rather than just a stick.

To further motivate the player to fully complete the mission, you could, say, have a grateful nation offer you their best commandos (like the improved-stat starting troops you currently get; recycle this feature to post-completed-terror-mission). Or maybe a chance that the terror praetors (ala Dynamic UFOs) possess part of the mothership access code. Perhaps increase the bravery bonus from the terror medal.

Most of this, sadly, isn't possible. The only thing that there's any control over is the rewards/penalties for terror missions, which I'm unsure about. The trouble with giving a reward for doing terror missions is that it breaks the resistance-only-goes-down rule and doesn't - in my opinion anyway - make sense in the context of no other funding bonuses. A small bonus might work, though (justified as something like - local forces have first hand experience with fighting a large-scale alien attack and this allows them to improve their tactics against the aliens, or something).

In terms of linking the effects of terror sites to NPC casualties, I'm ambivalent about this. In principle I like it, but in practice there's not a lot that the player can do to affect how many civilians are killed. Usually they die pretty quickly - by the time you're in a position where you have some control over the situation there's not many left and that number will be more or less arbitrary. It *might* be possible to make this work a little better by adjusting the civilian spawn points on the maps (to make civilian and alien spawns distant from one another), however.

Now THAT could introduce a whole different dynamic. If you only have X number of mag clips at your disposal, maybe you have to risk sending some of your guys on tougher missions armed just with lasers (which would still be available with as much ammo as you can carry). That could really be interesting.

I was thinking of this in terms of weapon manufacturing rather than ammunition, primarily because there's a bug with non-infinite ammunition which means it doesn't work properly (the clip only counts as being used if it's fully depleted, and there's something that causes the game to add extra ammunition after ground missions).

Base defense does not work well atm, at least b/c it's hard to not take down the attacking UFO before it lands. On the other hand, if you make it a "standard" threat for all bases it becomes necessary to accumulate soldiers at every base to avoid it being totally destroyed by a sudden attack. Then you have to manufacture additional equipment for all of them etc. I think this again unnecessary complicates the game.

If you wish, I think it's ideal to make some dumb hack that guarantees exactly one-two main base defence per playthrough. I doubt this is possible w/o coding. Or, if a secondary base attack is also a guaranteed threat, it should be possible to quickly send your main crew there. The goal is not to allow a sudden loss of a base for any reason, but forcing a player to face one-two tough fights at the base. With a very big chance for a victory, like make the goal to survive for a certain number of turns. But penalties might even be forced regardless of actual damage done by aliens in GC.

As you say, there's not any way to do this with the game as it is. Also, I think it would move away from what I'd like to see in the game - I like the idea of more base missions and limiting them isn't something I'd be interested in doing.

Next, the number of UFOs per wave. I'm not a fan of the feeling of a mess and chaos that might come from lots of flying UFOs... If you want to ensure some UFOs accomplish their mission I prefer making them harder to shot down rather than overwhelm you with numbers. This just makes the gameplay more comfortable and pleasant IMO, like you feel all of them are still "under your control" even if you can't ground them all. I think reducing the value of shot down UFOs in a favor of landed might also be the right path.

The reason why I was looking to add so many UFOs wasn't to make it impossible to shoot them all down (although that's a kind of side-effect) but to ensure there's enough that there's a good chance of manageable UFOs landing near to bases (especially early in the game) to make landings-as-main-source-of-ground-combat work. With only a small number of UFOs, bad RNG could end up with a situation whereby you can't do any missions because they're too hard/don't appear near to your base.

May I suggest that the first wave start with only 5 ufo or so, 10 may be a bit much for only a couple aircraft to deal with. I fully agree the game needs a bit more difficulty, this in an ALIEN INVASION after all

It's also worth noting that the point of having more UFOs wouldn't be to make the game harder. The effect of each UFO would be changed significantly so that each one causes less funding damage. Furthermore, the idea would be that you by and large can't shoot down many of them, and the game would be balanced in accordance with that).

I would almost suggest a base attack in the first wave, the aliens only send a very small contingent of caesans because in all honesty, they don't think much of us as a threat. It's relatively easy to beat but it has to be because all you'll have is rookies and it lets you know the aliens mean business.

I'm undecided about when Base Attack (and Terror) missions would unlock. I quite like the idea of holding them back for a little while to allow the player to find their feet, but it's something to consider.

Make the aircraft modable, unlocking different variations of existing in game planes. Unlock a Foxtrot with a cannon (Foxtrot H) for heavy?, unlock an extra missile rack or maybe external fuel tanks for the Condor to help it get the range you need early in game. I'd say the UFOs don't need more HP; air combat doesn't need to last longer, dogfights are supposed to be quick and dangerous. I don't remember which mod it was that had the escorts turn to face you at the start of an engagement, that was definitely a step in the right direction. Air combat weapons have pretty decent balance, at least in early-mid game, the enemies just need to have more intelligence and awareness for being experienced conquerors. I also agree with there being some sort of missile defense system on the larger/largest of alien ships, intercepting 1 missile every 5 seconds or so.

There's sadly not a lot that can be done with air combat equipment at the moment, due to UI limitations and equipment being limited entirely to weapons. I have some ideas in my head, though; I might try translating them into something written down at some point.

Obvious changes like what were stated above and in other forum threads all make sense. Pay for all that your soldiers carry into battle and more or less purchase/construct it all in the workshop (ammo, grenades, weapons, equipment). Instant construction would be preferred for all these basic starting items so it's more like purchasing them for use.

At one point I kind of liked the idea of having to more fully produce equipment but I've become less convinced by it, partly due to concerns with micromanagement but also due to some bugs (with ammunition, as indicated above).

[podbelski]

The reason why I was looking to add so many UFOs wasn't to make it impossible to shoot them all down (although that's a kind of side-effect) but to ensure there's enough that there's a good chance of manageable UFOs landing near to bases (especially early in the game) to make landings-as-main-source-of-ground-combat work. With only a small number of UFOs, bad RNG could end up with a situation whereby you can't do any missions because they're too hard/don't appear near to your base.

then you probably have to reduce negative effect from successful alien missions, not sure if it's possible... or maybe not critical?

I also struggle to imagine the role of interceptors if the UFOs will be so hard to take down that you have to wait till they land. Do I understand correctly - the main reason to wait till ufo lands is not the weakness of interceptors, but almost negligable money/tech outcome from the destroyed UFO?

...and another question - do you plan to leave base defence as is?

Edited November 16, 2014 by podbelski

[drages]

Manufacturing is very brain killing when u try to make a brainstorm.. I am thinking for month.. but.. if the ammo is bugged, manufacturing weapon is easy with all way becouse u just need 2 of it maybe 3.. so if its so few, then how will u make the manufacturing original?..

The idea i mostly like, to get more then one diffierent weapons together with some live aliens.. so u need more enemy weapons.. i am doing it now.. i will give nearly 30 new weapon to enemies.. so for a new weapon u will need to get 2 x weapon 1 y and 1 z weapon for example and 2 alive alien.. so it will get more and more.. so u will be happy "yee i can craft this weapon finally"..

Make the GC weapons damage much lower.. i try to make them lower to make the fights longer rather then 1-2 shot deads.. but then the "resistance" comes into play.. most of shots get resisted.. so then i got the idea to make the armor losing from %25 to %50 maybe more.. so even there are resists, armor will get lower more faster..

I am against late game enemies at start even 1.. so the game allows us only change the crew of ufo and alien units inventory.. so sadly there is no "time" value here about the units but ufos.. so if u give a late game enemy to a beginning ufo, player reachs high tech faster or get spoiler.. then the late game wont be late anymore..

So beginning, mid and late game ufos should their unique crew.. then we get another problem here, mid ufo at beginning.. with this plan, u cant to that either... maybe one mid game ufo, with mix crew can be at start, a mix late one at mid but not more..

Another solution to this, making new ufo versions of the same ones like the enemy GC units.. I talked about this at PM.. making unique ships to carry more harder enemies.. so u can make beginning corvettes, late game scouts vs vs...

So the beginning will be: beginning scouts+beginning corvette..

mid will be : mid corvette,cruisers,landships, mid-carrier..

late will be : carrier,battleship, late-scouts, late-cruisers

final will be : uber-battleship, WTF-scouts

i hope i can explain my idea with my terrific english.. so u will control the tech improvment of the enemy and player, a real late game, surprising elements without spoilers.. U can even do nearly unbeatible super BS for terror and base attack mission so they cant be stoped even they fly for days... even player can beat it with 10 aircrafts, he will get special techs from ufo.. surprises!!!

This is not hard.. even very simple.. but its a huge work and i think noone can handle it alone.. its like an expansion wise addition..

All the ufos, enemies, weapons, techs, manufacture lines, ideas, brainstorming and TESTING.. if someone or some ppl can handle that, it will be pure awesomeness..

I am ready to go something like that.. alone modding can be very boring sometimes if u try to make something big like that...

Edited November 16, 2014 by drages

[kabill]

then you probably have to reduce negative effect from successful alien missions, not sure if it's possible... or maybe not critical?

That is the plan, yes.

I also struggle to imagine the role of interceptors if the UFOs will be so hard to take down that you have to wait till they land. Do I understand correctly - the main reason to wait till ufo lands is not the weakness of interceptors, but almost negligable money/tech outcome from the destroyed UFO?

As I envisage it at the moment, interceptors would be fairly negligible at the beginning and serve primarily as a means of defending the player's dropships from attack by UFOs on air superiority missions. As the game would go on, improved interceptor tech would make interception more viable, but primarily for the purpose of stalling the alien invasion (by reducing funding damage and slowing the alien ticker), since crash sites would give significantly less resources than landed UFOs.

...and another question - do you plan to leave base defence as is?

I'm not sure what would change, other than the frequency of attacks and their difficulty. (There's nothing else that can be modded about them).

So beginning, mid and late game ufos should their unique crew.. then we get another problem here, mid ufo at beginning.. with this plan, u cant to that either... maybe one mid game ufo, with mix crew can be at start, a mix late one at mid but not more..

It is a shame that you can't easily influence alien tech level. It's not always a problem, though - there's other ways of limiting tech then through access to pre-requisites (time, manufacturing and the research tree itself). Dynamic UFOs seems to work well even with the possibility of earlier access to certain techs, anyway.

[drages]

Dynamic Ufo is fine as the game its now.. We nearly memorise the game but try to think at gamers side.. will u want to see the nearly late game weapons at beginning.. its like fighting agaist same enemy whole game, just the numbers are different..

All peaple say "late game is easy"... becouse u get your toys earlier.. much earlier.. if i talk about vanilla, i think lasers and wolf armors are enough to beat the end game.. maybe some plasma to make it a bit faster and safer.. but MAG? its like joking with uber high tech planet invasion fleet..

Player wants to see new things against them.. "OMG wtf was that shooting at me?".. "OMG this new enemy doesnt fall..."

anyway u just quoted just my 3 lines .. i will get back from your conversation here.. maybe my game persfective different then yours..

[dpelectric]

The monetary costs aren't really the important part of troop costs, in my opinion. The main issue with multiple strike teams is equipping them as, at least in vanilla, its the cost of making a second set of weapons which is the main issue and a second strike team only really pays for itself in the long run.

Not sure about that. Playing on Veteran I have a B team if the game is going fairly well, but they function with hand-me-downs. I rarely spend any money on their equipment. The costs incurred, to me, come from the additional salaries, medical center, living quarters, storeroom and dropship, which put together can add up. Enough so that on Insane I'm forced to run with a single team.

Making weapon tiers available en masse would certainly make your B team a stronger force, perhaps more financially viable since they could attempt harder missions, but I still think you'll need to tweak their startup and operational costs.

[podbelski]

As I envisage it at the moment, interceptors would be fairly negligible at the beginning and serve primarily as a means of defending the player's dropships from attack by UFOs on air superiority missions. As the game would go on, improved interceptor tech would make interception more viable, but primarily for the purpose of stalling the alien invasion (by reducing funding damage and slowing the alien ticker), since crash sites would give significantly less resources than landed UFOs.

do you think it will be a normal thing to watch UFO on a bombing run and not being able to do anything about it most of the time?

as a side note I feel your ideas about changing the way weapons are manufactured (mass availability etc) are definitely have potential. Then again, same as with reducing "reputation damage" from alien missions, I wonder is this doable in terms of modding

Edited November 17, 2014 by podbelski

[kabill]

anyway u just quoted just my 3 lines .. i will get back from your conversation here.. maybe my game persfective different then yours..

Sorry - I'd focused on the key issue in your post as the other points are less relevant to the geoscape part of the game and I was trying to keep the discussion on-topic. The stuff on 'advanced' versions of UFOs we've discussed elsewhere - it might be worth trying but it would involve some wrangling with map-packs to make work properly.

Not sure about that. Playing on Veteran I have a B team if the game is going fairly well, but they function with hand-me-downs. I rarely spend any money on their equipment. The costs incurred, to me, come from the additional salaries, medical center, living quarters, storeroom and dropship, which put together can add up. Enough so that on Insane I'm forced to run with a single team.

Making weapon tiers available en masse would certainly make your B team a stronger force, perhaps more financially viable since they could attempt harder missions, but I still think you'll need to tweak their startup and operational costs.

Fair enough. Shall bear this in mind.

do you think it will be a normal thing to watch UFO on a bombing run and not being able to do anything about it most of the time?

Don't know exactly. It will certainly be more common to have to skip/miss such missions than in vanilla, but the penalties for doing so will be less.

as a side note I feel your ideas about changing the way weapons are manufactured (mass availability etc) are definitely have potential. Then again, same as with reducing "reputation damage" from alien missions, I wonder is this doable in terms of modding

Definitely possible (all it would involve doing is having those item types set to "unlimited on research").

[podbelski]

Definitely possible (all it would involve doing is having those item types set to "unlimited on research").

hmm... this makes weapons available after research, not manufacture? But you said earlier:

you build a set of weapons as a single manufacturing project, which then gives you unlimited access to those items

next thing, limited ammo clips for later weapons - the idea is interesting. Not sure how you see it implemented - just straight use of alien clips? Or manufacture?

And keep in mind the drawback I've already experienced in Xenophobia: the clip is replenished for free if it's not empty after GC, and AFAIK there is no way to change this w/o coding. This forces player to do some tricks to abuse this, and anyway "fair play" often will not consume clips... Another approach, when using a single bullet makes the clip "wasted" in the end of GC has own drawbacks, and I guess can't be done by modding.

last point. How exactly do you plan to reduce the value of crash-landed UFO? I think you somehow have to reduce alloys/alenium outcome, not sure if it's doable. Then remove bonuses for selling engines etc, I guess it's doable but not sure how. And the biggest $value comes from selling alien weapons (in my experience) - what's the plan? Increasing the number of dead bodies due to the crash does not affect the amount of gathered weapons. So the only way I see is to seriously reduce sell prices

Edited November 17, 2014 by podbelski

[kabill]

hmm... this makes weapons available after research, not manufacture? But you said earlier:

you build a set of weapons as a single manufacturing project, which then gives you unlimited access to those items

Ah, sorry, I see what you're getting at. It works like this:

1) Do weapons research;

2) Weapons research unlocks manufacturing project to produce a cache of new weapons;

3) When the manufacturing project is complete, the item produced is used to unlock a new research project which is completed immediately (has 0 research time) thereby unlocking the items.

next thing, limited ammo clips for later weapons - the idea is interesting. Not sure how you see it implemented - just straight use of alien clips? Or manufacture?

And keep in mind the drawback I've already experienced in Xenophobia: the clip is replenished for free if it's not empty after GC, and AFAIK there is no way to change this w/o coding. This forces player to do some tricks to abuse this, and anyway "fair play" often will not consume clips... Another approach, when using a single bullet makes the clip "wasted" in the end of GC has own drawbacks, and I guess can't be done by modding.

As I said above, the non-unlimited ammo clip thing is too buggy to be worth trying to use, think.

last point. How exactly do you plan to reduce the value of crash-landed UFO? I think you somehow have to reduce alloys/alenium outcome, not sure if it's doable. Then remove bonuses for selling engines etc, I guess it's doable but not sure how. And the biggest $value comes from selling alien weapons (in my experience) - what's the plan? Increasing the number of dead bodies due to the crash does not affect the amount of gathered weapons. So the only way I see is to seriously reduce sell prices

The materials gathered from a UFO are all held in the prop spectres used in mapping and they can be changed there. I'm also thinking of adding in a few new resources and making recovered UFO components more important in manufacturing (e.g. needed alien power sources or engines for new aircraft; recovering electronics/computer systems from consoles, etc.) so there's more room for loss in the event of a crash and damage during GC might be more important, too.

[podbelski]

Ah, sorry, I see what you're getting at. It works like this:

1) Do weapons research;

2) Weapons research unlocks manufacturing project to produce a cache of new weapons;

3) When the manufacturing project is complete, the item produced is used to unlock a new research project which is completed immediately (has 0 research time) thereby unlocking the items.

nice

As I said above, the non-unlimited ammo clip thing is too buggy to be worth trying to use, think.

oh, sorry thought it's you were advocating limited ammo, but it was DP. Agreed.

The materials gathered from a UFO are all held in the prop spectres used in mapping and they can be changed there. I'm also thinking of adding in a few new resources and making recovered UFO components more important in manufacturing (e.g. needed alien power sources or engines for new aircraft; recovering electronics/computer systems from consoles, etc.) so there's more room for loss in the event of a crash and damage during GC might be more important, too.

well I find this and other discussed things are at least worth trying. Will you briefly outline main points again, as an intermediate result of discussion?

[podbelski]

... reading through the first post again I realized this part is also a bit unclear to me:

Furthermore, rather than advancing at a set pace, the alien invasion will scale dynamically as a result of particular alien missions. Intercepting certain UFOs is therefore a means by which the alien invasion can be slowed.

I guess this is the way system works atm? At least in XNT I see values like "researchTicksPerMinute" which adds to the ticker for every minute a UFO successfully accomplishes certain mission

To make this work, the invasion will be flatter – as the ticker increases the probability of higher-tier UFOs will increase but more importantly more UFOs will spawn.

again, isn't it already implemented (at least in XNT)? And how exactly can you control the number of ufos? Can't remember seeing this in config files...

In this way, you’ll not be left behind facing more or less impossible missions because you have not defeated enough UFOs soon enough.

not sure what you mean here... is it the mix of big and small ufos (proportion changes over time) rather than spawning big ufos instead of small at certain points? I guess it's the way the Dynamic UFOs is built

... and one more question - is it possible to completely turn off the nuke strike onto a "failed" terror site?

[kabill]

I guess this is the way system works atm? At least in XNT I see values like "researchTicksPerMinute" which adds to the ticker for every minute a UFO successfully accomplishes certain mission

It's not used in vanilla - the alien ticker increases at a set pace all throughout the entire game. But yes, that's what I meant - UFOs on certain missions would cause the alien ticker to increase, so the longer they are in play the more the alien invasion advances.

It's actually something that is quite difficult to balance, as it's a good way to compound difficulty (less good players will stop fewer UFOs which will cause the game to escalate quicker and therefore make an already challenging game even more so). However, I think by toning down the importance of the alien ticker (by having it refer primarily to number rather than difficulty of UFOs) this shouldn't be so bad. Also, since there'll be less emphasis on shooting down UFOs in the early game, less skilled players are unlikely to get penalised right from the start of the game.

again, isn't it already implemented (at least in XNT)? And how exactly can you control the number of ufos? Can't remember seeing this in config files...

It's in gameconfig. There's variables for the number of UFOs at the beginning of the game, the number of UFOs by a specific ticker point (which will be when the upper limit on UFOs is reached) and a variable for how UFO numbers scale over that period.

not sure what you mean here... is it the mix of big and small ufos (proportion changes over time) rather than spawning big ufos instead of small at certain points? I guess it's the way the Dynamic UFOs is built

Yes, this goes back to the point I made above that if you do poorly early on the difficulty will compound and possibly become impossible as the game will race ahead and throw things at you that you're not up to dealing with yet.

... and one more question - is it possible to completely turn off the nuke strike onto a "failed" terror site?

Yes. You can change the relations penalty for failing/ignoring a terror mission in gameconfig. As regards to text indicating the site in nuked, this will be in strings.xml (but I don't know where exactly; probably best to use ctrl-f).

[podbelski]

ah, it seems to be the "GEOSCAPE AI VARIABLES" section. Btw do you plan to somehow modify the "parabolicPower" value? Just curious and have no clue what it does)

and again gameconfig, does the "airCombatAICurage" value affect anything? Do you see any way it can be utilized?

[kabill]

Btw do you plan to somehow modify the "parabolicPower" value? Just curious and have no clue what it does)

Solver indicated the equation used at some point, but I can't remember it. Basically, it affects the way in which the number of UFOs progresses from the lowest to highest value. But I'm uncertain exactly how it works. I suspect therefore it will remain the same.

and again gameconfig, does the "airCombatAICurage" value affect anything? Do you see any way it can be utilized?

It makes UFOs have a chance of fleeing in air combat. It's mostly pointless, because you either end up having to chain-intercept (i.e. intercept repeatedly until you can catch the UFO at a useful angle/get enough hits before it escapes) or it trivialises air combat by making the UFO attempt to escape rather than fight, thereby effectively giving you a free victory.

[podbelski]

if the UFO that fled from combat immediately escaped into space it might be useful... in the same sense that chasing landed ufo is better than trying to intercept it.

and btw what is "Can't Take the Sky From Me"? I've seen it somewhere but can't remember what is it about