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Geoscape balance mod - seeking input


Solver

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This is a discussion/ideas/complaining thread for a balance mod I've been playing with lately, that I'd like to release a public version of soon.

What follows is first a discussion of the motivation and background, and then specific things that I have done so far. The background part is not necessarily required reading, but still recommended.

Background

What I want to accomplish is to give better balance and variety in the Geoscape. Xenonauts has a few issues with regards to such balance (especially after mid-game) and variety that I see.

  • Boring, linear mission progression. This does not require much clarification, and I am not doing much of my own here. My mod is based on kabill's excellent Dynamic UFOs mod, which adds a lot more variety, and makes the game as a whole less predictable. I have made some additional changes to the mod that will be covered later.
  • Low resource costs for things, and a lack of ongoing costs. You need a certain amount of alloys and alenium, but those requirements are fairly low. You are likely to have the alloys and alenium you need from running just a few missions, and there is little need to maintain an income. Equipment is not lost if soldiers get killed, airplanes and not lost, so you are very rarely actually replacing anything. I don't get the feeling that gathering alien resources is a big part of the game.
  • The air war matters far more than the ground war. Sure, airplanes have expensive maintenance costs, but the dominant strategy is still clearly to invest into radar coverage and planes. Most players will aim for an early second base and keep a third in mind. The first base ends up with a wide array of buildings for the ground team and labs/workshops, but subsequent bases have Hangars. A lot of them. Players will try to maximize the money available to their airforce, and will build many planes. This is effective because shooting down all UFOs means the aliens cannot do anything. This is also largely required because you need bases for radar coverage, and you need radar coverage to get crash sites, which are the main way you get relation boosts, money (airstrike or combat), resources and experience (if doing combat). This is really an aspect I would like to change, to make the ground combat more important overall to your success.
  • A second ground team is largely useless. It costs quite a bit just to start it, and what you have then is a team of poorly equipped rookies that is unsuitable for anything except simple missions. If you do not invest into them, they remain largely useless. If you do invest into them, they will still not be a net benefit even if they do a fair amount of missions.

Discussion and possible solutions

Focusing on the issue of having few ongoing costs, this is harder than it seems to resolve. Sure, you can make armour be destroyed when soldiers get killed. That means you get ongoing costs for replacing whatever your soldiers died with, but the problem here is that losing soldiers is already the worst thing that can happen in ground combat. If you tie all other negative consequences to soldier loss, then it becomes the one thing to avoid at all costs, which does not exactly increase variety very much. I do not have great ideas here.

Now, making a second ground team a reasonable investment is easier. For example, by making previous tiers of weapons cost less as you research new ones, making it reasonably cheap to have a second team that uses slightly older equipment. Okay. This is not the problem. The issue here is actually how to maintain balance without overpowering the second team. If they can be a decent team, and ground combat brings benefits, it seems that it would always be great to have a second team and do more missions, if you're good. Thus letting two-team players get ahead of the aliens much in the same way as players who are good at air warfare can get ahead now. How can this be balanced?

Another point to consider is just how much ground combat should matter, and in what ways. I am particularly looking here at alien bases. Taking your first alien base is a pivotal moment. You get the tech for a base upgrade and for quantum decryption, which is great. Subsequent base assaults just do not seem worth it. Those are difficult missions (many aliens, tight corridors, dark) and the payoff is low. kabill's mod makes fighting over bases more important because each alien base lets aliens spawn up to two more UFOs per wave. But could more be done here? One idea I've considered is requiring alien comm arrays for quantum decryption buildings.

The mod - changes so far

Here are the changes that I have made so far, with the above goals in mind. To reiterate, the Dynamic UFOs mod is the (required) base for this.

Local forces landed UFO missions. If a UFO lands somewhere you do not have radar coverage, there's a chance of it being detected by local forces.

localdetected.png

If that happens, the UFO will stay landed for longer than usual so that you may have time to assault it (handwaved away as local military assistance). This is a fairly big change, as it allows you to get missions in areas that you do not have radar coverage over. Previously, this was only possible with terror sites, but terror missions are difficult do-or-die ones, unlike these "local landing detection" missions. Finetuning is certainly needed, but this should have a positive effect on the game.

militaryassistance.png

(Max, an art screen would be beyond excellent!)

Higher resource cost and rewards. Not sure if this is the way to go, but I've increased costs for advanced technology. Most notably, plasma and MAG weapons require alenium now. I have likewise increased slightly the alenium and alloys you get from UFOs, especially landed ones (which should hopefully encourage you to do the local detection missions).

Quantum decryptors act as radars. A small change that helps in the later game and just feels right (or does to me). Quantum decryptors now also act as radars, so you can have 3-radar radius with 2 radars and a decryptor. Lets you demolish one building late in the game.

Terror and Alien Base changes compared to Dynamic UFOs: I've slightly increased the relations bonuses for saving people on terror missions, going with the overall theme of making ground combat more important, and I've decreased the difficulty of base assaults. The Dynamic UFO mod makes alien bases quite a bit tougher (more aliens, more aggressive as well), I scaled it down slightly to still be more challenging than vanilla, but a bit less so than in kabill's mod by default. This is because I want base assaults to be important but not incredibly daunting.

Xenonaut base defence. Some people have said that these are frustrating. Skitso in particular makes a very fair point that assaults on non-primary bases do not feel fair. These bases may be staffed by rookies that can't hold off a full alien force anyway. So there are in effect two changes to how this works. One is not actually my mod but a generic X:CE change, fixing how defence turrets work. They are supposed to decrease the size of the alien force if they damage the UFO, but they didn't. So thus far base turrets have been all-or-nothing. Now it will be actually possible for them to decrease the size of the alien force, and so even at a secondary base dealing with 10 aliens is a lot more possible than dealing with 20.

A feature of my mod specifically is the ability to retake your bases. If the aliens successfully take out a Xenonaut base, it's replaced by an alien base instead. From there, you have an opportunity window to retake your base - if you seize (not destroy!) the alien base within your opportunity window, you will regain the lost base. Any personnel and aircraft will be lost but you do regain the base itself and its buildings.

baselost.png

Further input and brainstorming would be appreciated. And thanks to Chris for some valuable design insights!

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Hey Solver, welcome again..

When you left this place, i came and became a modder. Thank for your effort on XCE!..

Your ideas are great.

About Dynamic UFO mod, i got an idea to improve this. Now we can add new UFO's with ground combat (thanks to Ilunak) so at Dynamic UFO, the idea is having all kind of UFO types at every phase of the game. But there is a problem here about the UFO's and their crew. Even you see a scout at late game, it would be very easy to take it down and it's crew would be very weak too.

So adding new Ufo's as versions of the defaults would be much more better fit. For example adding Heavy Scout to late game as same as normal scout but with improved stats and crew. Battlecruisers, Large Supply Ships, Dreadnoughts and much more can be added as variety.

Local force help is a great atmospheric addition too. Not only detecting, shooting some of the little ufo types would be more logical. Small size ufo's should be not hard to take down. As modding if you can softcode the UFO landings at missions would be nice touch too.. As i know there is only limited missions got UFO landing and the landing chance modding is not working. This will help your landing ufo more reward idea too.

Base retaking is very cool idea.

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About Dynamic UFO mod, i got an idea to improve this. Now we can add new UFO's with ground combat (thanks to Ilunak) so at Dynamic UFO, the idea is having all kind of UFO types at every phase of the game. But there is a problem here about the UFO's and their crew. Even you see a scout at late game, it would be very easy to take it down and it's crew would be very weak too.

I am hoping to discuss this kind of thing with kabill when he has the time. However, I am not sure if this is a problem. With Dynamic UFOs, part of the point is not merely to have different UFO types but also different difficulties throughout the game. Getting an easier UFO than normal is, for instance, a great opportunity to train your secondary team. But there's probably room for improvement here.

As i know there is only limited missions got UFO landing and the landing chance modding is not working.

Yes, while implementing the local detection, I noticed that the code is not working as expected. The landing chance doesn't affect most missions because the alien logic for missions is in the game code, not moddable, and only the research and construction missions have the logic to land. I can probably make other types of UFOs land, however.

Base retaking is very cool idea.

Have not tested it in actual gameplay (unlike local detection), but I think it should work out. Retaking a base shouldn't be too easy (it's an alien base you have to seize and you have no time for extra preparations), and even if you do retake the base, it still hurts to lose the planes and personnel.

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There is some problems about base attacks and terror missions. Probably you know them from old days. The problem is the ability to shot down an ufo with those missions. So many players destroys this ufo without noticing their missions and as a result people dont see any base attack or terror missions. The ufo's with this missions should be much more harder to shot down, like the original X-Com's battleships. BUT, because you can't give an UFO more then one crew layout, you can't assign battleship or carrier for the early missions. My "more version of the default type ufo's" solution can handle this too, with creating special ufo's for just this missions for every game phase..

Another discussion here, would i prefer to get my an early base back with endangering my crew. I would lose just about 1 million money with that kind of base. Mostly i spam base defences if i do not plan to put my squad in it. As you said about the 2. squad idea, i only use my main base for GC squad. If someone makes a big research/manufacture/aircontrol base and don't put base defenses in it, it's his fault to be honest.

About the local forces detecting a landing UFO idea, would you plan to do that with actual UFO's or a random mission respawn?

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I don't think it worked much better in the original X-Com. You could shoot down any craft with your basic interceptors and plasma cannons, until Battleships, and those arrived too late.

Is the lack of terror/base defence missions really a problem with Dynamic UFOs, though? I think kabill did a great job there by setting the missions to occur more often. I see enough terror missions with his mod. Of course there is still a problem if the player can shoot down all UFOs in a wave, but that requires an additional rethink.

Base defence turrets just don't work very well in the current iteration of the game. So they're pretty random, and you need 3 to destroy a UFO somewhat reliably. Even then it's not a sure bet. So if your secondary base with 3 turrets doesn't destroy the UFO... you still get a full team of ~20 attacking aliens, and your rookies with ballistic rifles will not hold them off, assuming you even had any. I do anticipate it being better with X:CE 0.35 as the attacking crew actually decreases.

Detected landed UFOs are actual UFOs, not random spawns. The way it works is, if a UFO lands somewhere you have no radars, there's a chance (per hour) of the UFO being detected by locals. I am currently testing out the balancing, as I only finished coding the feature yesterday. I have the chance set to 10% per hour for now, but that seems to be too much. But research missions land for at least 8 hours, so that adds up to a 56% chance for a landed mission to be detected, which seems a tad high.

And yes, it would probably benefit from having other UFO types land as well occasionally.

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At original X-Com, air plasma weapon is a late research too if you dont rush it, so at least for first months your chance to shoot down a medium terror ufo is very low. I played that game for years so i get nearly all terror sites for first 5 months. One of the biggest problem about terror ufo's, they are roaming in the sky for a long time with giving you much more time to shoot it down. Many ppl got complains or reports about not getting terror/base defense missions even with the dynamic ufo mod as i read at last 6 months.

About landing ufo's, if you give all mission's a landing chance, you can drop that %10 much less. It's very nice touch and as i said you maybe add this flying ufos detected by local forces. Like landing, it could be detected by locals and they can lock it for 1 hour about to give you time to send your interceptors. Even it's not good for you, it would be nice point for other modders.

Not: I got some little crazy ideas too, can i share them with you for adding to XCE projects via PM? thx!

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That is not quite how I remember the original. I remember basic jets with Avalanches being extremely good early on, just had to use them in pairs, and then the plasma weapons took care of anything. I guess part of the problem now is again that players rush radar coverage all over the map, so terror UFOs have a hard time spawning where the player is not paying attention. I've certainly been reading the forums even while not actively contributing, and it seems that by now everyone has figured out overwhelming air to be the optimal strategy.

While this thread is meant specifically to discuss ideas around a Geoscape/economy balance mod, there's certainly more general things that could be done in X:CE along these lines. Letting locals also detect in-flight UFOs would not be too difficult, although it's not something I am aiming for here - my immediate goal is to create a way for ground missions to come where you don't have radar coverage. But it's always fine to PM me :) - I end up doing some things that I think would be interesting for mods.

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At original X-Com, the terror and base attack mission UFO's do not fly so long and goes directly to the target. So even you notice it, there would be very limited time to catch that ufos before they start their missions. Avalanches were good but with the miss chance and terror ships fire range, there would be very hard to take it down before they reach their destination.. anyway..

I see your point. So you can add "local forces shoot down UFO chance". You can update your idea with the tech. I mean you can create some researches/manufactures for every core tech (alenium, plasma, fusion) to share with the world itself. So with every tech, the percentage of landing forces shooting UFO will be more higher. You can make this percentage per UFO type too. You can add this code to the aircraft.xml so every ufo got a default chance to get beaten by local forces and this will grow with techs. This kind of code could be used for your detection idea too.. a battleship would be much more bigger chance to detect when landed rather then a light scout..

For example scout's default change to get beaten by locals would be %10 and techs can grow this by %50...

Sry for my bad english, it's getting harder when i try to explain myself..

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It's a thought I've had. Deduct some money after missions for resupplying, or have equipment cost maintenance, but upon reflecting a bit more, I do not see that it adds a choice. You're probably never going to not take your best weapons on a mission just because there are maintenance costs. A constant expense that you have to deal with doesn't really add much to the balance, I would rather have costs that also present a choice.

In principle, I really like how it works out with terror missions. Potentially high reward (decent amount of money, plus strong relations boost), high risk (arguably the hardest missions), high incentive to attempt (bad relations hit if you ignore). I'd like to see similar choices but on a smaller scale and ongoing basis. Feels like there's an idea out there waiting to be found...

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  • 1 year later...

I like most of these ideas and I will implement variations of them in the Xenonauts X-pansion Pack I'm working on, and which I will create a thread for at a later date. One question though, is the local forces landed UFO detection in X:CE 0.34.2? I see two settings for it in the gameconfig.xml that control how long they keep it landed for, but I can't find any reference to it in strings.xml or when studying the Xenonauts.exe.

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I'm playing with this mod, so yes, landed detection is in 0.34.2, although it's perhaps not optimal.

More disappointingly, I've implemented most of the changes I wrote up here, and they're really not having the effect on the game that I had hoped for (and this is why I haven't posted the mod). The Chinook is so slow that attacking landed UFOs outside radar range is still often impractical. The higher resource costs I've implemented just make the grinding problem worse, as you need to do more ground missions in order to get equipment, and that in turn means you need to dominate air to get enough crash sites... not something I intended.

One change I've really enjoyed out of these is that Quantum Centres also act as a radar. It's a subtle but very good change when it comes into play.

The ability to retake lost bases hasn't had any actual effect.

I'm very much looking forward to your expansion ideas, it seems to me that your preferences regarding gameplay are quite similar to mine. Maybe there's something we could cooperate on, with X:CE features or otherwise. Or you can just get hop onto a train, buy me a burger and then I'll owe you some X:CE coding :)

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I would love on collaborating on a "community" expansion! It already includes many things and ideas taken from various mods both finished and unfinished, that I've rebalanced and merged with my own additions. At the moment I'm still implementing most of the new aliens, weapons, UFOs i.e new content, so I haven't personally been able to the test the Geoscape changes I've implemented but your observations are interesting. Maybe making UFOs stay grounded for a much longer period might alleviate the issue with out of range landed UFOs? 

The general goal I had in mind for the expansion is to add new things with unique purposes and try to rebalance existing content so they each have their unique purpose as well. For example I'm planning on making each vehicle viable in different situations by making the Hunter into a utility vehicle with access to different rocket types + a secondary MG. The Scimitar retains its cannon but gains a secondary MG as well and the ability to drive through walls (if the heavycrushable setting for map tile spectres even work, I haven't tested it yet - this is where you can come in and help). Lastly the Hyperion also retains its cannon and ability to drive over water, but cannot crush walls like the Scimitar + gains a cluster rocket secondary.

This is just one example but this is the general mindset I have in mind when designing this. I haven't worked on a mod with a team before, but is working via github they way to go? We could start one and I'd upload what I've got so far there and you could take a look. I don't have any proper design document for all the changes I'm thinking of yet but I could whip up some quick summary.

Edit: About UFOs, forgot to mention that I thought of making landing UFOs much more common so you don't actually have to shoot them down as much to initiate GC missions.

Edited by Policenaut
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4 minutes ago, Policenaut said:

Maybe making UFOs stay grounded for a much longer period might alleviate the issue with out of range landed UFOs? 

Hardly. I found the issue is more that it's very unsafe to fly during a UFO wave because of the possibility of your dropship being shot down. That is suboptimal. Really the whole feature is silly.

 

5 minutes ago, Policenaut said:

This is just one example but this is the general mindset I have in mind when designing this. I haven't worked on a mod with a team before, but is working via github they way to go? We could start one and I'd upload what I've got so far there and you could take a look. I don't have any proper design document for all the changes I'm thinking of yet but I could whip up some quick summary.

I like your mindset :) I think there's room for a "community expansion" mod that changes the game in ways beyond what X:CE does (which is very closely related to Goldhawk's intentions) but is not a dramatic overhaul of the game in the way that megamods like X-Division are. I don't have many plans in regards to actually modding the game in a traditional way now, but I'd be very interested in giving some feedback on your ideas, and then if you discover that you cannot implement some things because the modding framework doesn't support that, I would possibly expand that via X:CE.

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Throwing in my 50 cents here.

 

Most of the things are ones that i have addressed here:

and heres a quote:

On 9.5.2015 at 3:59 PM, Charon said:

Make the Geoscape actually more challenging. In the vanilla version and all other mods i ve played so far it is all about getting every UFO down ( and looting some crash sites but only the technology granting sites are medium important). Once you accomplish that you can virtually not lose the game anymore and its basically a " Im just grinding for the last mission " thing.

In all honesty, i think X-Division addresses all those issues, and adds a lot of content.

Heres the question: Could you make the same improvements without the content ?

The answer: Propably not.

 

One example:

A second strike team is useless because

  1. You dont need it
  2. You dont need it
  3. You dont need it
  4. Its a waste of time and you are going to win with and without it anyway, only your Team A is important

 

X- Division addresses this in a roundabout way by:

  1. Making you need more bases for the game because of the global coverage, and because you simply need more space to build labs/workshops
  2. Making Base Assaults UFOs night unbeatable
  3. More bases means you need more staff to protect them in case of a raid, means you have to moderately update your armour and weapons too
  4. The increased resource need means you need to raid more UFOs, until you find a stable balance of resource consumption and resource gain

 

Could you make this for the vanilla/XCE game ? Propably not, because you simply would change the game too much. This is the main problem - the vanilla game is just the vanilla game. Its the best solution for what it wants to achieve.

All that the vanilla game is about is

  1. Achieving air supremacy
  2. Raid technological granting crashsites
  3. Train your team for the last mission

Thats the vanilla Xenonauts in a nutshell.

If you would change this you would change the basics of the game, and thuse drift away from the vanilla experience.

 

On 31.10.2015 at 6:48 PM, Solver said:

The air war matters far more than the ground war. Sure, airplanes have expensive maintenance costs, but the dominant strategy is still clearly to invest into radar coverage and planes. Most players will aim for an early second base and keep a third in mind. The first base ends up with a wide array of buildings for the ground team and labs/workshops, but subsequent bases have Hangars. A lot of them. Players will try to maximize the money available to their airforce, and will build many planes. This is effective because shooting down all UFOs means the aliens cannot do anything. This is also largely required because you need bases for radar coverage, and you need radar coverage to get crash sites, which are the main way you get relation boosts, money (airstrike or combat), resources and experience (if doing combat). This is really an aspect I would like to change, to make the ground combat more important overall to your success.

What i can think of off the hook is

  1. Increase airplane maintenance cost so that it is no longer sustainable to build airplanes, but that GC loot has to balance out the negative cost. - Or another method of making airplanes not viable.
  2. Increase GC loot money
  3. Increase the landing chance, duration and UFOs that can land
  4. Make the dropships faster, OPTIONALLY with less range so more dropships have to be ready any time to cover the whole globe. Dont forget to fix the valkyrie so it can pull out. Give the dropships about radar range for this, or a bit more.
  5. Increase the air supremacy missions to force the player to have anti fighter aircraft if he wants to take off with his dropships. Buff the the interceptors and their numbers.
  6. Increase the bomber mission UFOs, which never land, to force the player to build anti bomber aircraft and thuse have a high maintenance cost.
  7. Increase bombing relationship damage
  8. OPTIONALLY make the game harder

The idea behind this is that the player needs anti fighter aircraft, to even send dropships to the landed "normal" UFOs. Thuse bringing his maintenance into the red.
Additonally, he needs some anti bomber to prevent the bombing UFOs from simply bombing him out of this playthrough > the balance gets even more in the red.
To balance this out he has to make successful GC missions.
Because of the low range he needs more than 1 squad
More than 1 squad means he needs more ressources

Put all of this together and tweak the individual points and there you go !

Heres a picture to illustrate this:

Solver.png

 

Now someone only has to make a mod out of this idea, and balance it and you are halfway on it to majorly change the game.
 

You can thank me later for suggesting this.

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You're right, it's very difficult to change the Geoscape a lot without massive new content like X-Division. But that's something I am interested in. X-Division is almost a different game, and it's massive. Vanilla/XCE could still improve though, I think. Largely because the current Geoscape balance is not intentional. Chris didn't want for air combat to be so much more important than ground, he didn't intend for players to build extra bases with 6 interceptors in them, and he also didn't intend for players to grind 80 crash sites for cash.

UFO disassemblies in X-Division are a good way of making a second strike team more important, along with adding a new element to the economy. But that's a pretty dramatic change.

The issue in vanilla is that where you get missions is very closely related to your base locations and base ranges. Most ground missions are crash sites and therefore typically occur within the radius of your bases - and always occur thanks to air combat. There are very few missions that pop up for other reasons, and you generally want to prevent them. Hence my thought with local landing detection - it's a way of providing missions that are not tied to air combat, and that don't carry the disastrous consequences of terror missions if failed.

The difficulty for me of course is that I don't want a huge change to the game. There's already x-Division for that, with its own design. I am looking for something that improves on the basic vanilla design of Xenonauts.

At the same time, it creates problems for economic solutions. Increasing airplane maintenance and/or ground loot sounds good (I've done the latter, slightly). I've made more UFOs land. But all of that will just lead players to grind more missions for the maintenance money. I want ground combat to be important, but I don't want a grind where you have to do every mission. Even in vanilla, people typically do many crash sites exactly as a result of high maintenance costs for airplanes, which were introduced pre-release to try and counter this very problem.

Difficult stuff :D

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15 minutes ago, Policenaut said:

The general goal I had in mind for the expansion is to add new things with unique purposes and try to rebalance existing content so they each have their unique purpose as well. For example I'm planning on making each vehicle viable in different situations by making the Hunter into a utility vehicle with access to different rocket types + a secondary MG. The Scimitar retains its cannon but gains a secondary MG as well and the ability to drive through walls (if the heavycrushable setting for map tile spectres even work, I haven't tested it yet - this is where you can come in and help). Lastly the Hyperion also retains its cannon and ability to drive over water, but cannot crush walls like the Scimitar + gains a cluster rocket secondary.

This is exactly like X-Division started too. A few changes here, some tweaks there, and all of a sudden you see the necessity for feature X, and some balance at point Y, and ofcourse some unique things.

17 minutes ago, Policenaut said:

I would love on collaborating on a "community" expansion! It already includes many things and ideas taken from various mods both finished and unfinished, that I've rebalanced and merged with my own additions. At the moment I'm still implementing most of the new aliens, weapons, UFOs i.e new content, so I haven't personally been able to the test the Geoscape changes I've implemented but your observations are interesting. Maybe making UFOs stay grounded for a much longer period might alleviate the issue with out of range landed UFOs? 

This is what i want to, and what X-Division basically is, or rather my vision of it is.

I see X-Division of a project where EVERYBODY can contribute to a experience, no matter how small or big it is, and a lot of people are doing this right now. This is why i want you for the team @Policenaut. If you make some content  why not integrate it into X-Division, a joint project ?

The main reason i want to integrate everything into 1 experience is because the modloader system simply doesnt cut it. We have people asking on reddit what mods to use and which are compatible with what. AND they are right about this.

To fully understand if something is compatible means you have to look into the code, and check for yourself, but first you have to understand the code. 95% of people wont do that, and it shouldnt be necessary for them.

 

There are so many mods for xenonauts, but its mostly about people asking  if mod X is compatible with mod Y. I believe the reason why this whole modding fails is because there wasnt a joint venture in all of this., and i dont know about XNT, although i have played it as a part of Xenophobia.
Sure Armored Assault is a great mod and expands the vanilla experience, but as soon as you want to add another vehicel changing mod you will most likely get an error that you cant cope with.
And thats the way with most mods here, they are all fractured and nobody is even sure if those 3 mods fit together.

I want to see all the content here merged into 1 experience, where people get support, and not 200 fractured and outdated mods. So i am all for a middle step between the vanilla experience and X-Division, where you put in as much content as you see fit. But this also needs some maintenance over the years, and some people caring about this.

34 minutes ago, Policenaut said:

This is just one example but this is the general mindset I have in mind when designing this. I haven't worked on a mod with a team before, but is working via github they way to go? We could start one and I'd upload what I've got so far there and you could take a look. I don't have any proper design document for all the changes I'm thinking of yet but I could whip up some quick summary.

Like i said, X-Division is a structured team, why not take advantage of a structure and support which is already there ? Nobody will force you to do things you dont want to. Its rather a give and take where you can do the things you like, with the people who know something, and the testers who want to have a better game.

24 minutes ago, Solver said:

I like your mindset :) I think there's room for a "community expansion" mod that changes the game in ways beyond what X:CE does (which is very closely related to Goldhawk's intentions) but is not a dramatic overhaul of the game in the way that megamods like X-Division are. I don't have many plans in regards to actually modding the game in a traditional way now, but I'd be very interested in giving some feedback on your ideas, and then if you discover that you cannot implement some things because the modding framework doesn't support that, I would possibly expand that via X:CE.

Ditto, read what i wrote.

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Alright, I will PM you later with the WIP (which is not exactly playable, just so you can look at the stuff I've got so far) and a document with the ideas I had in mind Solver, so you can look it over and give your input and feedback. One thing I can directly think of is better support for secondary vehicle weapons. I've got a work around so far that works, but requires me moving around the ammo counters in the GUI and adding a new button which activates secondary weapon fire (normally it is only accessible by pushing the L key but this will confuse a lot of players). It's also not possible to change secondary vehicle weapons but I might not need this, though it's still a useful feature to have.

About dropships not reaching the out of range landing sites, perhaps giving them countermeasures or something similar that lets you escape in manual aircombat might be something worth experimenting with.

@Charon

Thanks for the input on Geoscape balancing. I too am thinking of merging things that could conflict to make it as easy as possible for players. The reason I want to work on this project instead of joining the X-division team is because we have different ideas when it comes to gameplay design. I want to create an expansion that retains the general feel of the Vanilla Xenonauts while expanding upon it with new content that each has its own niche and rebalancing various flaws. However, you are allowed to use content I've made for this project in X-division, just be sure to credit appropriately. I particularily think you might find the "Glowing Orb" new alien type I've made interesting...

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6 minutes ago, Solver said:

You're right, it's very difficult to change the Geoscape a lot without massive new content like X-Division. But that's something I am interested in. X-Division is almost a different game, and it's massive. Vanilla/XCE could still improve though, I think. Largely because the current Geoscape balance is not intentional. Chris didn't want for air combat to be so much more important than ground, he didn't intend for players to build extra bases with 6 interceptors in them, and he also didn't intend for players to grind 80 crash sites for cash.

Like i said, the suggested mod is the minimum of difference to the vanilla game, and the maximum of teh things you want to achieve. Read them.

 

9 minutes ago, Solver said:

UFO disassemblies in X-Division are a good way of making a second strike team more important, along with adding a new element to the economy. But that's a pretty dramatic change.

I think you miss the point. UFO DSBs are not about a second strike team. PERSONALLY i believe it to be a VERY BAD game designing step to let the player grind for more resources simply because they need to so to be successfull.

No, the second strike team is necessary because of the diversity of the mod, and because it is so hard.

Let me stress one thing here: Pulling out is an often and necessary tactical choice, which should be used if you need it. Its part of the game.

Let me elaborate.

At the beginning of each phase, and they are 4 of them, there will UFOs spawn which you wont be able to beat. Be it because you simply dont know their features or because your arsenal is simply 1 phase behind. It could be because you dont have enough anti fighter aircraft, or for different reasons.

Whatever the reasons, at the beginning of a phase there will be UFOs you can shoot down, and some you cant. There is a lot of diversity in this, and there is an incredible spawn from weak UFO crews and army strong UFO crews. You naturally start with the UFOs you can get down, where there are a lot of differences as well. And from the ones you get down you start with the GC ones you can actually be succesfull in.

From them you aquire a bit better tech, and have a bit more chances in either the GC or Aircombat.

The point im making here is that the faster you get your hands on better technology the faster you have better options available to battle the invasion.  A dropship can maximally do 2 missions per wave, and not everything goes as planned. Sometimes you experience a squadwipe. And all of this is part of the game. A squadwipe is not the end of the game, it just happens.

This way you slowly claw your way up, until you might have a team that can take on a Battle Cruiser Crew, or a Bomber Carrier UFO Crew.

Then the next phase starts and your options and possibilities depend on how well you performed in teh last phase. If you performed well you will have more room to approach the challenges. If you failed last phase you will propably face an even tougher uphill battle.

You are always gradually losing or winning. The game isnt about to leisurely and stupidly grinding for the last mission. In X-Division its a normal sight that you lose a soldier and dont think: "OMG, i need to grind for this again." There is no winning button anymore, and there is no instantly loseing button anymore. The whole experience is made up by thousand little decisions you do all the time.

If you need a second strike team or not, that is up to you.

27 minutes ago, Solver said:

The difficulty for me of course is that I don't want a huge change to the game. There's already x-Division for that, with its own design. I am looking for something that improves on the basic vanilla design of Xenonauts.

This chains you Solver. I already gave you the perfect solution for the vanilla game and you seem to dismiss it as "Not close enough to vanilla". Like i said, the vanilla and XCE experience is as close as you can get to the game idea. Without changing something, there might be no improvement, and even if, it would be an mini itsy bitsy teenie weenie ... i think you get the idea.

29 minutes ago, Solver said:

At the same time, it creates problems for economic solutions. Increasing airplane maintenance and/or ground loot sounds good (I've done the latter, slightly). I've made more UFOs land. But all of that will just lead players to grind more missions for the maintenance money. I want ground combat to be important, but I don't want a grind where you have to do every mission. Even in vanilla, people typically do many crash sites exactly as a result of high maintenance costs for airplanes, which were introduced pre-release to try and counter this very problem.

Difficult stuff :D

Than you have to introduce reasons why GC is important.

Like i said, the only reason GC is important is

  1. To get access to new technologies
  2. To grind for the last mission

 

If you dont change up those factors you will never change anything. But changing those factors means to change the vanilla game. Realise your demise, you aint getting out of it otherwise.

 

Possible factors for the GC are

  1. Relationsship bonues. This more or less equals money, but its a special kind of money as it gets awarded in iterations
  2. GC loot. = money again
  3. To aquire unique loot to make unique weapons, to have different tools to have fun with in more GC missions. The DIABLO principle. Fight to get better equipment and use better equipment to get a different experience to fight for better equipment. Again this leads you away from the vanilla game.
  4. Thats actually it. Apart from grinding for better game performance

If you follow these steps consequently you will arrive to what X-Division is today. If you dont change up the vanilla game you wont change its flaw, BECAUSE the vanilla game is already the best working experience in itself. You can barely improve on that.

 

If you want my honest oppinion, i believe the thing which offers the biggest improvement to the vanilla game is my 164 high quality sound aircomabt chatters. This changes 0 things and puts the whole game to new hights of enjoyment. Easy as that.

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23 minutes ago, Policenaut said:

@Charon

Thanks for the input on Geoscape balancing. I too am thinking of merging things that could conflict to make it as easy as possible for players. The reason I want to work on this project instead of joining the X-division team is because we have different ideas when it comes to gameplay design. I want to create an expansion that retains the general feel of the Vanilla Xenonauts while expanding upon it with new content that each has its own niche and rebalancing various flaws. However, you are allowed to use content I've made for this project in X-division, just be sure to credit appropriately. I particularily think you might find the "Glowing Orb" new alien type I've made interesting...

Being part of the team means that you have your own thing you want to contribute with. Everything is welcome, as long as it fits.

We are currently looking for a mapmaker to totally rebalance and build every single map from scratch, and this is the place i would like you to have, although i understand you want to do different things.

 

As soon as you want to contribute with something you can get access to everything, im working on my own mod apart from X-Division too. Ill keep my ears open for you.

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Regarding the relationship bonus for completing GC crash sites that X:CE adds the possibiliy for, does it apply to landed UFOs as well? Making GC missions give a much larger relations boost than just shooting down UFOs might give an incentitve to do GC missions more for funding rather than just going all out in the air war for the relations.

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@Charon It's like I said, my ideas are of a much smaller scope than X-Division. Sure X-Division started as a small bunch of tweaks, but by now it's no longer a tweaked vanilla game. It's a game with a different design, and it adds stuff because it's a different game, not just to fix some vanilla balance issues. All the new weapons, enemies, manufactures, etc., it's a major rework. Not a "let me fix the Hunter" type of mod. Or you may be right and perhaps vanilla really cannot be taken any further without changing the basics.

8 minutes ago, Charon said:

Like i said, the suggested mod is the minimum of difference to the vanilla game, and the maximum of teh things you want to achieve. Read them.

And I did read that ;) Tried some of them before, even. Still unsure. Let me be more specific:

 

1 hour ago, Charon said:
  • Increase airplane maintenance cost so that it is no longer sustainable to build airplanes, but that GC loot has to balance out the negative cost. - Or another method of making airplanes not viable.
  • Increase GC loot money
  • Increase the landing chance, duration and UFOs that can land
  • Make the dropships faster, OPTIONALLY with less range so more dropships have to be ready any time to cover the whole globe. Dont forget to fix the valkyrie so it can pull out. Give the dropships about radar range for this, or a bit more.
  • Increase the air supremacy missions to force the player to have anti fighter aircraft if he wants to take off with his dropships. Buff the the interceptors and their numbers.
  • Increase the bomber mission UFOs, which never land, to force the player to build anti bomber aircraft and thuse have a high maintenance cost.
  • Increase bombing relationship damage
  • OPTIONALLY make the game harder

Maintenance costs, more loot money: already wrote about these. Makes more grinding.

Increased landing chances and types dramatically - tried that. Some improvement but not very much. Largely because of the shootdown danger. Even the landed UFO can shoot you down if it happens to take off just as you're next to it!

Improving dropship speed could be helpful in combination with that, though.

Buffing UFO interceptors in strength or numbers isn't productive. This is because we cannot launch dropships with escorts. If we could, it would be much better.

But yes I do like your thinking :)

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Just now, Policenaut said:

Regarding the relationship bonus for completing GC crash sites that X:CE adds the possibiliy for, does it apply to landed UFOs as well? Making GC missions give a much larger relations boost than just shooting down UFOs might give an incentitve to do GC missions more for funding rather than just going all out in the air war for the relations.

I am not sure if I remember right, but I think landed UFOs give the bonus even in vanilla!

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That bodes well. Here's a quick idea, slightly lower the relationship shootdown bonuses for UFOs, increase the GC mission relationship bonus and increase the chance for landing UFOs. Give dropships limited countermeasures to protect them when going for landing sites and make crashed UFO GC missions give much less resources so that going for landed UFOs is more preferable, though they will be harder to complete still making crash sites relevant.

This might be something worth experimenting with.

Edit: Make it possible to attach interceptor escorts when sending a dropship directly to a GC mission/terror site/alien base. It will share the range value of the dropship so they don't suddenly return to base when the escort normally run out of fuel. Make it so you can't change destination to exploit as well, you can only continue to GC mission or go back to base.

Edited by Policenaut
clarified edit
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8 minutes ago, Solver said:

I am not sure if I remember right, but I think landed UFOs give the bonus even in vanilla!

X-Division already uses that. 50% of the aircomabt relationsshipbonus gets added upon a successful GC to smooth things out. But its an interesting idea to actually make it the major income source.

You could make the UFO relationshipbonus incredibly small and the GC bonus gain to an appropriate level, like 1000%, to make a difference.

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