Brainstorming: Ideas about nerfing the human air supremacy strategy

[Charon]

The title almost says it all.

I was thinking left and right, but most of the gameplay no matter if it is the vanilla game, X-pansion Pack or X-Division consists of reaching that ultimate state where you are capable of shooting down every UFO, and in the best case as fast as possible.

The minimalist Minipatch mod on steam made it so that every xenonaut base increases the maximum UFO count by 1 which is an interesting point.

Since shooting down everything is always the best option there is little room for geostrategic decisions, and makes it something like the Golden Gun, everything else becomes irrelevant once you get it.

So here is the question, which tools do we have available to prevent this one strategy from becomeing the overkill of the game ? What do you think @Solver and @Policenaut ?

 

I was thinking ... .... ... maybe the

  <maxMissionHumanBaseModifier value = "0" comment = "Add this much to maxMissionCount for every human base on the map" />

could be 2 ?

The basic issue we are facing here is that we dont want to make it viable to simply build more interceptors. Since aircraft always pays for itself, by shooting down the troublemakers and providing income with the generated crashsites, we want to put something like a potential softlock, similar to dimishing returns.

• I dont think increasing the maintenance costs for aircraft is the desired solution because they are static and therefore a hardlock - aircraft either is worthwhile, or it is not in this concept, but there is no middleground

So what do guys think ?

 

PS: I also think this question would solve the over importance issue of air supremacy.

[Charon]

Im thinking ... this is a basic elder scroll problem. If the level of enemies is constant there will always be a way to become more powerful than them. If the enemies level will always be something adjusted according to your own level ... than there is not a big motivation to become stronger. No matter if you are lvl 65 or 200 if the enemies stay equally difficult there is little motivation to increase your level, and a lot motivation to cheese.

[Charon]

One solution would be to totally transfer the shotdown bonus to the crashsite and almost completely remove it from shooting it down. This would make the number one relationship gain the actual crashsites.

So lets say you shoot down a lot of UFOs. Since you may not want to do all of them you will have to choose which one to do. Similarly to the 2012 XCOM you may look which country needs help the most ( panic level ), but doesnt limit you from sending troopers into all of them - if you desire so.
Additonally, in X-Division you will have a lot of different UFOs to choose from, ranging from small to very big UFOs all over the place, which will increase the strategic options you have. Do i go for the small armoured scout which datacore i need ? Or do i do the mission in the country which needs my help the most ?

 

I really like this idea, the only downside is that this would make for a total different game, and would need another development cycle to see if it is fun.

[Charon]

If you increase the crashsite bonus to something like 3 times the current shotdown bonus every successful mission would count so much more ... especially in comparasion to the aircraft supremacy.

[Komandos]

On 4/12/2017 at 12:34 AM, Charon said:

So what do guys think ?  ?

The number of UFOs increases every month, regardless of the number of player bases.