My thoughts on the closed beta

[compactset]

I am making a topic to express some random thoughts on the current state of the game, if there is already an appropriate topic already present you can merge this post with that.

As for the aerial battles: seriously I cannot understand what are they about. In Xenonauts they where a real time minigame about maneuvering your craft while shooting the enemy and evading incoming fire, not elegant nor particularly complex but it made sense. Now I am presented with a turn based battle in which I can move my craft and make an attack, except I can unload two missiles but shoot the gatling only once. Now my current strategy is to shoot both missiles, approach the target then use the machine gun and hope that I deplete the UFO hp. I know that probably I am ridiculing it just because I do not like but I think it has some serious flaws: for example we are not given any indication what the distance does influence. From the animations I suppose that the closer you are the more accurate the gatling is, so it does more damage. But what about the missiles and the UFO attacks? I think if you want this to be a compelling minigame you should make more clear to the player what are the risk vs reward involved and you should obviously tie it well to the global strategic overlay of the game.

Then there are two concrete problems that you should fix:

1) you should at least display the ammo on the machine gun/ how many time I can fire it. Now it lasts only for one fight and then I have to go back to an hangar to reload, but what about if I want engage another UFO or I am attacked on the way home?

2) The bottom of the screen is labeled "escape zone" but I did not see any command to actually escape combat and I have to wait the fixed number of turns to end combat even if my fighter is in bad shape. Are you planning to add this option in the future?

Regarding the ground missions.

First of all I already noticed that the UI is almost unchanged from Xenonauts: I honestly believe there is much room for improvement. For example it lacks basic functionalities like priming grenades (and selecting how many turns it will delay before exploding), choosing ground elevation, toggling rooftops/walls and reserving TU for shots. I really hope they will be added later. Also if possible you should implement shortcuts (possibly rebindable) for the actions displayed in the UI. 

For a better inventory management on the field I suggest you as follows: when manipulating objects (swapping/leaving on the ground/picking up) do not apply the changes (and the UT cost) immediately, instead display the total cost in UT for all the actions done and add a confirmation button to finally confirm the actions. This way you eliminate any error the player makes by misclicking, present him with a better management of the soldier UT and also the solution is not at all difficult to implement: you just need to add a line showing the TU costs and a confirm button in a suitable corner of the inventory screen.  

Moreover I would change the color for displaying the damage a soldier has received: I noticed that the health bar has a darker color for the health you lost in combat but if you are planning to add bleeding or injures that temporarily lower your attributes like maximum health and maximum TU you should make it more evident. 

Finally I noticed that now the prone position does not give any to hit bonus: at first I thought that it was a bug but somewhere I read that this is a conscious design decision. Can you confirm this? If yes, what is the reasoning behind this change?

[Chris]

Thanks for your thoughts. I guess the key thing to remember right now is that the initial stages of the beta are literally just intended to test whether the inputs and outputs are working correctly - it doesn't matter too much to me right now whether the air combat is interesting or engaging in its current form, provided that you're getting the correct UFO in the combat and shooting it down causes a crash site on the strategy layer and so forth.

The reason I mention this isn't to dismiss your points, it's just that we've spent the last 2+ months working specifically on getting the foundations of the game working to the exclusion of all else. We've put the build out help test and iron out crashes that sort stuff rather than to evaluate the gameplay, which is part of the reason why I cut the content back so heavily for this release.

So, to answer your questions:

• You can actually fire the air combat weapons more than once in a combat, if they have sufficient ammo - but you can only fire each weapon once per turn. The cannon has three ammo and the missiles have one. The ammo level does need to be flagged up more obviously though as it's currently displayed by a tiny little number on the tile.
• The escape zone isn't implemented yet.
• We clearly also need a range marker for each weapon on hover over it, as each weapon does varying damage depending on the range band the aircraft is in.

Regarding the UI, most of that stuff was in Xenonauts 1, right? Not everything is implemented in the beta yet. Is there functionality that wasn't in X1 that you'd like to see here?

Crouch doesn't give any hit bonus any more simply because it was too good; it was pretty much always optimal to crouch in any situation which means something needs to change. Realistically the two options are nerf its effectiveness in some manner or to increase the TU cost of doing so and I chose the former.

[compactset]

7 hours ago, Chris said:

Thanks for your thoughts. I guess the key thing to remember right now is that the initial stages of the beta are literally just intended to test whether the inputs and outputs are working correctly - it doesn't matter too much to me right now whether the air combat is interesting or engaging in its current form, provided that you're getting the correct UFO in the combat and shooting it down causes a crash site on the strategy layer and so forth.

The reason I mention this isn't to dismiss your points, it's just that we've spent the last 2+ months working specifically on getting the foundations of the game working to the exclusion of all else. We've put the build out help test and iron out crashes that sort stuff rather than to evaluate the gameplay, which is part of the reason why I cut the content back so heavily for this release.

No offense taken, as you said repeatedly this beta is a really early stage of the game. My comments are just for sincere feedback, I am not complaining.

 

Regarding the functionalities to implement.

1) Priming grenades: if I remember correctly you could not do that in Xenonauts. Adding an option do it before trowing the explosive like it was implemented in Ufo defense/terror from the deep and Apocalypse would be very useful.

2)Changing the elevation level: this was implemented in Xenonauts and I suppose you will add it later. Also it would be nice an option to cut the walls of the buildings at half height to have a better visibility of interiors: such feature is present in Invisible Inc and I found it very helpful. Currently when one of my units goes behind a wall I have to use the UI to see where it is and select it but I cannot see directly. I do not remember how these problems where handled in the first game, so excuse me if you already had implemented similar or alternatives solutions. A roof/ceiling toggle was present in Xenonauts but now it is replaced with one for line of sight. I guess also this will be implemented in the future.

3)For inventory management during ground mission it would be helpful to display the TU cost for all the manipulations of the items on the ground or in your backpack. It would remove situations where you find yourself with not enough UT to fire/move because you misjudged the UT costs. Like for example:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=869192010

As you can see in the image the character inventory is opened during a fight, in the upper right corner (above the amulet) are displayed the AP cost of all the changes to inventory and equipped items and your current AP pool. You can freely experiment without losing AP to find the optimal setup before continuing the fight, when you are satisfied you select the Apply button at the lower right corner of the screen and all the changes you made are final. I think it should not be difficult to implement this to Xenonauts 2 (I am not an expert but it does not seem complicated).

4)Related to the base management I noticed two things. The first is that I cannot display the stats of new soldiers during one recruit screen, since this is an evident lack of information I think it is obvious you will work on it. But when I looked at the inventory screen of my soldiers when I outfit them for a mission I saw that there is no strength stat and everyone has the same carry capacity. Is this intentional?

[Chris]

Yup, you're correct you couldn't prime grenades in X1. We had that functionality on the C4 but not on grenades. I'm not completely sure we'll add it into the game if I'm honest - that's not really how modern grenades work. The timer on the C4 has also been replaced by a remote detonator that I think works better overall, although I'm willing to listen to anyone who wants to make that argument that the old priming mechanics were superior.

The elevation level controller is part of a wider discussion we need to have on how the roof hiding / elevation change camera control works. The old X1 mechanics are one option and I think I probably prefer them overall; giving the player manual control over the camera level and with a button to toggle roof hiding on and off (although some is handled automatically). The current mechanics are more like those used in XCOM where the roof hiding is controlled by whether the building is centered in the middle of the screen or not - if you point the camera at a building, the roof melts away automatically. My technical director is convinced he can make the current system work better and that it'll be superior to the old mechanics, and I suspect I'll give him some time to try that before I make a final decision (potentially also letting the community give feedback).

The predicted TU cost is something that was in X1 too, yeah - we will be bringing it back for X2 before release. For the base management stuff it's very much WIP as to how units are going to be hired in the final game right now, so don't worry about that yet. Yes, you're correct soldiers don't have strength and it is intentional - there's been a long discussion on it in one of the inventory threads I think, but the premise is to stop so much endless loadout fiddling after every mission. Adding Strength back in is a pretty easy task though, and potentially I'll decide to add it back in but make the progression work differently instead.

TBH it's kinda hard to have much of an idea of how much effect removing something has until you can actually play the game and see if you like the new way of doing things, so I'm just going to see how the balance develops and reassess my decisions as development continues.

 

[bigjackskid]

Hi Chris, have you considered implementing prone to replace crouch? prone IRL is slower to switch to. Also, Perhaps instead of making couch or not have any benefits, maybe cap it as it can only be done either in proximity to cover, or maybe make it available every other turn or every third turn. admittedly, having it available only after x amount of turns is a bit more like a board game and might hurt immersion.

[Puciek]

I personally like that you don't crouch for aiming bonus anymore, I have no clue where that idea originated, but crouching makes handling weapon quite... odd, hardly a massive accuracy boost. It makes it a bit better to control recoil but makes wielding any gun quite weird compared to just outright standing. You crouch to decrease your profile and thus get a defense bonus - which I like a lot.

[Kaiphus_Kain]

11 hours ago, Puciek said:

I personally like that you don't crouch for aiming bonus anymore, I have no clue where that idea originated, but crouching makes handling weapon quite... odd, hardly a massive accuracy boost. It makes it a bit better to control recoil but makes wielding any gun quite weird compared to just outright standing. You crouch to decrease your profile and thus get a defense bonus - which I like a lot.

Agreed though a very minor bonus on spread of burst fire could be obtained crouching due to the recoil aid but it would be tiny realistically. Defence bonus just makes much more sense, smaller target, harder to hit.

[TrionWolf]

On 12/5/2018 at 4:42 PM, Puciek said:

I personally like that you don't crouch for aiming bonus anymore, I have no clue where that idea originated, but crouching makes handling weapon quite... odd, hardly a massive accuracy boost. It makes it a bit better to control recoil but makes wielding any gun quite weird compared to just outright standing. You crouch to decrease your profile and thus get a defense bonus - which I like a lot.

Id like to point out ive done a lot of shooting over the years, specifically when i was in the Military. And the simple fact is that you are more accurate at a crouch as you can have a more stable shooting platform, with prone being even better. Its fairly difficult to shoot from standing accurately at range, especially given physiological responses to exertion. Meaning when youve been in combat and you just try to stand there and shoot your not going to be very accurate as you cant steady the weapons. When crouching you can steady the weapon using your body, resting your arms on your knees to make the weapon even steadier, or crouching behind cover you can place your weapon and arm on the cover used to make it steadier, which improves accuracy greatly. Just my two cents, oh and never try to shoot a saw from the shoulder after having run 300M well being shot at. I didnt hit the target but i scared the crap out of the birds in the sky.

[Decius]

6 hours ago, TrionWolf said:

Id like to point out ive done a lot of shooting over the years, specifically when i was in the Military. And the simple fact is that you are more accurate at a crouch as you can have a more stable shooting platform, with prone being even better. Its fairly difficult to shoot from standing accurately at range, especially given physiological responses to exertion. Meaning when youve been in combat and you just try to stand there and shoot your not going to be very accurate as you cant steady the weapons. When crouching you can steady the weapon using your body, resting your arms on your knees to make the weapon even steadier, or crouching behind cover you can place your weapon and arm on the cover used to make it steadier, which improves accuracy greatly. Just my two cents, oh and never try to shoot a saw from the shoulder after having run 300M well being shot at. I didnt hit the target but i scared the crap out of the birds in the sky.

Odd, the first time I fired the M9 from a crouch I barely managed to keep the weapon pointed downrange as I fell over backwards. Maybe there's a posture where you can use a knee as a platform and still get a sight picture, and maybe it gets taught to people with the center of gravity that allows them to fire a SAW from the shoulder while standing.

 

In any case, changing to that posture would take more time than aiming a shot.

[Puciek]

11 hours ago, TrionWolf said:

Id like to point out ive done a lot of shooting over the years, specifically when i was in the Military. And the simple fact is that you are more accurate at a crouch as you can have a more stable shooting platform, with prone being even better. Its fairly difficult to shoot from standing accurately at range, especially given physiological responses to exertion. Meaning when youve been in combat and you just try to stand there and shoot your not going to be very accurate as you cant steady the weapons. When crouching you can steady the weapon using your body, resting your arms on your knees to make the weapon even steadier, or crouching behind cover you can place your weapon and arm on the cover used to make it steadier, which improves accuracy greatly. Just my two cents, oh and never try to shoot a saw from the shoulder after having run 300M well being shot at. I didnt hit the target but i scared the crap out of the birds in the sky.

I'll yield to your expertise then, I am just a civvie shooter + airsoft player, and on the shooting range I just don't see much difference between crouching and standing for shooting single shot. Auto always leads to everyone at the range panicking and few pigeons falling down for dinner ;).

[compactset]

On 12/4/2018 at 5:44 PM, Chris said:

Yes, you're correct soldiers don't have strength and it is intentional - there's been a long discussion on it in one of the inventory threads I think, but the premise is to stop so much endless loadout fiddling after every mission. Adding Strength back in is a pretty easy task though, and potentially I'll decide to add it back in but make the progression work differently instead.

Personally I am against this because it removes one of the key parameters differentiating the soldiers, thus simplifying unnecessarily the management of your squad. Also I do not see why it should remove fiddling with the loadout: instead of looking at the soldiers with most strength and giving them the heaviest weapons or loading them with additional ammo/grenades we'll pass to giving our favorite weapons to the soldiers with better accuracy-reaction and then we will give more ammo/grenades or an extra sidearm to the soldiers with the most remaining carrying weight. But the problem of maximization and associated fiddling will remain. 

Possible solutions to the problem you said are the following:

-register for each soldier a familiarity statistic for class of weapons (pistols, smg, machineguns, assault rifles) which should increase with practice like all the other stats but could decrease if the unit uses different weapons or does not uses weapons of the class for a bit of time. A similar idea was implemented in Silent Storm. In this way then we have identified the role of a soldier after examining his statistic we would be encouraged to stick to one kind of weapon and we will consider changing it only when a better variable is available (eg we pass from ballistic assault rifle to laser rifle).

-Limit the number of weapons, spare magazines or grenades by the shape of the belt, vest or any kind of armor the soldier is wearing. For example the starting armor could have a belt with space only for 3 spare magazines and one grenade and admit a backpack for additional ammo, but the heaviest endgame armor could not admit a backpack because it is considerably bulkier and it could admit only two slots for ammo or grenades. This way we should choose between an additional magazine or a grenade.

-Add the option to create templates which we can select to equip a soldier immediately with the loadout we chose. This way we can equip immediately a replacement for a died soldier who should cover the same role, like rifleman, sniper, heavy weapon guy and so on. Also you should add the option to memorize the loadout of a soldier before a mission, so that after a ground battle the unit automatically restocks ammo, grenades or disposable gadgets if they are available in magazine. In this way you cut considerably the trivial micromanagement.

[Xenonaut]

Strength is logical to be a stat when it comes to how much weight a soldier can carry. It is the one stat that I felt was realistically represented in the way it was gained. You basically weight train your soldiers all the way since their rookie days. Accuracy? intangible like a dice roll, HP could be based partly on strength as... well taking injuries for the sake of raising HP doesn't quite make sense? but when you can finally carry that extra ammo clip or that extra grenade, boy what a bonus (and what a good job you did keeping that guy alive until this day). It is one of the most visible beneficial stat of a unit and I disagree that it is the cause of unnecessary management of squad. If you feel you are too taxed by inventory tweaking, then just do the initial load out and never look at what your unit carry again. Ammo auto filled so what tweaking are you referring to? giving your soldier better weapons? I would say that if you don't have time to give them better weapons then don't develop better weapons, not blaming it on the Strength stat.

Weight training your squad should be beneficial to Strength, Time Unit and Health Point total. There is a clear risk there when you enter a battle zone with your squads weighted down and have less time units at their disposal. The reward should be obvious when or if they survived. Please put Strength back in as it is part of an enjoyable meta game.

I noticed the training center taking over some duty in raising unit stats... will that take the soldier out of action for a month like the MC training in the original Xcom?

 

 

[Chris]

It doesn't really make sense to have your guys go on a combat mission, run around for 10 minutes and come back ready to add a couple of grenades to their loadout. And having to go through the loadouts of all your soldiers and add an extra couple of grenades after every mission (and then start all over if a new soldier joins the team) isn't super fun either.

That said, all your soldiers having identical carrying capacity isn't super fun either. But there's definitely a problem worth addressing in some form there.