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Don't you know there is a war going on?


Edmon

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Greetings all,

A little preface here on relative skill level:
The issues I want to talk about get more obvious and more of an issue the better a player is, hence this preface. This is sort of an inverse of "Get gud". However, it may appear I am asking to make the game easier in general, that is not the case. I would like the game to be harder if anything, but at the end where it makes sense for it to be hard and not at the beginning where it doesn't. More on that later...

A note on my own skill level:
I've completed pretty much every decent strategy game on the hardest possible difficulty, that includes games like: XCOM (The originals, terror from the deep excepted as I never got into it), XCOM (The Remakes), Jagged Alliance (even the awful reloaded one), Panzer General, Peoples General, etc. Also, some hard realtime stuff like EUIV (One-tagged the world), Shogun II total war (Impossible Ironmanned it), etc. I also have a youtube where I do hardest possible turn based Ironman campaigns, though that is mostly battletech. If your interested in that or simply want to verify, you can find it at www.youtube.com/TheEdmon and I hope you enjoy it :).

My two key issues with XCOM type games are thus:
1) In the early game no-one seems to know there is a war on and it determines everything.
2) Win-More, Lose-More gameplay.

The early game:
Most of these turns based games are won in the first 6-10 hours and the rest of the game is just a walk to the victory screen, provided you don't make some critical mistake. But if you are winning hard enough, early enough, the odds of a critical mistake drops:
1) You win early missions with no losses and get more stuff.
2) So you have more money to expand, upgrade and research faster, with no losses to replace.
3) You are powering faster than the difficulty curve due to the above and can afford more coverage (when applicible).
4) You win more easily, due to your powering, which leads to less/no future losses and more money.
5) The cycle repeats, with your A-Team carrying you to the victory screen often without any losses at all.

Dont you know there is a war on?
The early XCOM game has this weird tone, situational as well as gameplay issue.

You start off weak, barely any better or the same as a standard military of the time period. Then the game pretends like other militaries don't exist or are unable to mount even the slightest defence. So, where you are and what coverage you can get early is all that matters. This means that (often randomly), the game is determined by how much of the early hostiles appear near you (so you can deal with them) and is a race for you to power up as quickly as possible so you can protect the earth.

The game balance revolves around this, making it so that you can get more ahead very quickly because you are 100% of the force being exerted against the aliens. That 100% can be vastly different between a good player and an excellent one, let alone a weaker casual player. You are totally and 100% critical in the early game, so balancing that early game becomes very difficult.

I have always thought a good way to solve this problem would be to have the player be more like 10% of the force in the early game.

NPC Military, coverage, airforces, etc.
So what if we do this instead:
1) NPC's have military bases, airforces, coverage just like you do.
2) There is a lot more alien activity in the early game, but NPC militaries can barely handle it. The scramble interceptors, shoot down hostiles, airstrike, etc.
3) You can place your base to try and protect a country with a weak military, like africa, or place it where activity is high to protect a stronger NPC so they are useful for longer...

The early game then consists of a world at war against the aliens and actually holding it's ground. You are there, to shoot down what appears in your general area, steal technology, go on missions, etc as usual. But you are not 100% of the fight, more like 10% of it.

Of course, as the game goes on, your technology improves and so does the aliens. But your human allies do not. So in the mid game, they start to lose and some very badly:
1) You can see NPC bases and interceptons getting crushed.
2) Gaps appear in earths defence, relations sour.
3) It becomes clear that you must fill in the gaps, protect your allies, etc.

You can afford to make the general alien presence that much more, when there is a lot of NPC defence around to handle it. Taking the pressure off the early game.

In the late game:
1) NPC presence is all but gone, now it's all down to you.
2) Difficulty can be much higher
3) You've had time to put coverage in place, but the pressure you are under can also be higher than in a normal XCOM like difficulty curve.

In conclusion:
The early game matters too much, player skill level cannot effectively be balanced for, due to the snowballing effect that is caused by the player being 100% of the force against the aliens.

The tone is also odd, where is everyone else, don't they know there is a war going on?

My thought is to try and shift this to the mid game, while also fixing the weird lore and tonal issues.

What do you guys think?

Edited by Edmon
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Difficulty: You're right about the difficulty curve. I read a review by one of the first people to crack Firaxis xcom I/I with no solider deaths - basically, the biggest risks are in the first few missions when your soldiers are super green. Xenonauts kinda gets away from that because your soldiers' training only increases their stats, as opposed to getting abilities allowing more shots per turn. Nevertheless, with either Goldhawk or Firaxis, mission 1 is much more like the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan; and the final mission is little more than cake. It is the same with a lot of RPGs, levelling up too high feels like cheating.

The Afterlight series based some of its mechanics around the fact that many players choose not continue after soldier death. People like to play the perfect game. I can never be bothered to spend hours retraining a bunch of rookies, for me at least that is a grind. Inevitably, playing like that means you reap too much reward without any costs, so the challenge loses its edge. Unfortunately, there is not much scope in the game for upping the ante halfway through; much of the game's timeline is dictated by research projects. It'd be nice if you had the option to piss the aliens off and cause retaliations. Kinda like inducing terror missions or battleships. So if you somehow research plasmas in week two, then there is still a bar to jump over.

Don't you know there is a war going on: It'd be real nice if the geoscape had other stuff happening on it. Territories advancing and receding. Friendly scouts patrolling and getting ambushed. Not being Earth's only hope... I understand there is a lot of interest for multiple factions. It does feel quite silly having the aliens fought off by bus load of soldiers. Having said that, there is still a bunch of questions to resolve here. Are the rest of Earth's forces doing anything functional? Or are they just a barrier which slowly gets eroded? If you help the NPCs to survive for longer, wont that make the rest of the game easier? i.e the problem with the difficulty curve. 

It is quite an ambitious idea, and one I'd be interesting in thinking about; I'm always up for developing the strategy layer. But I feel that Xenonauts is more about the ground combat. And if you start trying to fix all the problems with the lore then you're opening a fair size can of worms anyway. From discussion elsewhere on the forum, I feel fairly convinced that any enemy force which can attack from space is not one that can be defeated, even you had riot shields and shotguns. 

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7 hours ago, Ninothree said:

Don't you know there is a war going on: It'd be real nice if the geoscape had other stuff happening on it. Territories advancing and receding. Friendly scouts patrolling and getting ambushed. Not being Earth's only hope... I understand there is a lot of interest for multiple factions. It does feel quite silly having the aliens fought off by bus load of soldiers. Having said that, there is still a bunch of questions to resolve here. Are the rest of Earth's forces doing anything functional? Or are they just a barrier which slowly gets eroded? If you help the NPCs to survive for longer, wont that make the rest of the game easier? i.e the problem with the difficulty curve.

Thanks for the detailed reply,

So my thoughts here are that we are trying to make the balance curve better, by making it such that 90% of the early game is NPC threat and 10% is you. Now imagine a bad player who is a 5% player and a great player who is 15% effectiveness. So we have progression at 95% of expected and 105% of expected, since the average players expected value is 10%. In typical TBS of course, the bad player would be progress is at the 50% rate and the great player is progressing at a 150% rate, since your output is 100% from beginning to end. Really hard to balance for, especially early on.

The bad player gets their interceptor shot down for example, but the NPC's are there to also have a bash and they shoot down that UFO instead. Now that bad player can have a bash at the ground combat, rather than their game just being "over" in an instant. Maybe they lose the ground combat, but the NPC's going in and finish the job, sharing some of the takings with you. Good players can be better tracked, if they are making too many kills, more of the alien attack will be diverted to deal with them. This takes the pressure off the rest of the world, but increases the pressure on a good player. Losses and damage will be taken, slowing them down. Once cut down to size, the aliens will return to their war on the planet.

I imagine the NPC resistance serves as a wall that is depleted over time, but ultimately doesn't matter in the mid and late game. Both good and bad players will get full coverage eventually, NPC's cover the bad ones until they are ready and/or catch up.

To this end, losses should be expected, I would imagine an approach to solider progression more along the lines of valkyria cronicles... of all things. The squad progresses "together" or soliders can be mentored by a vet, getting a part of their EXP, etc. Soliders need to be more disposable, to avoid the "A-team wipe = game over" effect in most of these games. It would be nice if losses inspired people to fight harder...

A guy dies, so his brother signs up. He has great stats and a burning desire for revenge, so he's exceptionally brave, etc. You take losses, countries rally behind you as you play up the damage aliens are doing. Your country needs you type of stuff.

So we can basically, compensate weaker players with ready to go replacements. Not quite Enterprise-C Enterprise-D "plenty more letters in the alphabet" type stuff, but still :).

These are my thoughts atm...

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I like the numbers part of the argument, that is convincing. But it kinda sounds like the first phase of the game would be a tutorial, or at least something where you aren't punished for your actions. Maybe that isn't just a bad thing. Part of the joy of the original xcom was the insanely hard first mission - that gauntlet inspired Firaxis to make the tutorial mission in their original remake a disaster: only one soldier survives. I think games in the genre should stay faithful to that: you don't get time to take baby steps whilst you learn why to use cover. If the first few missions are geared so that you can't bring everyone home alive, then you'll learn to accept soldier losses as normal. The mechanics are already in effect to support it - simply make the weapon's stats more of a determinant of firepower than the grunt who wields it.

Perhaps if the early game were intended to be a whitewash. So at the beginning, in every instance of ground/aerial combat you are expected to lose. The best you can do is score a few kills and hope to escape with some artefacts from the field. In Earth's desperation, funding is no constraint and you can replace all your stuff easily. Inevitably, the aliens march forward, humanity starts to capitulate, until you crack the science of laser weapons and bring the fight to them. The point would be that neither side would stick around for the battle royale, rather, they'd make a tactical retreat to preserve resources. When you start kicking back harder, then the aliens bring more force to bear. The effect of this would be that by playing better early on you'd save more of Earth from occupation - which would in turn mean that you have more territory to defend later in the game. Thus the 150% player would make a rather difficult bed to lie in.

In both of the above paragraphs I'm trying to argue that things like casualties and retreat should be made more of an active part of the game. They're a real part of combat. The problem with going the 150% playthrough is that you become listless. None of the decision making is about acceptable loses. Whilst I'm sure that mechanics to force you to retreat could end up feeling heavy handed, I do think that they'd make the combat simulator more well-rounded.

 

Also, as for the progression of soldiers vs squads, I think that officers should be the ones who get the stat boosts, so making the privates slightly more...expendable.

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I do feel like while the joy of the original XCOM was the beginning, the end just became a boring grind and what I ended up doing was playing the beginning of the game over and over again...

I imagine there would be a case where, you could make UFO's need many fighters to bring down. So both you and the NPC's would need to hit them in the early game, to bring them down.

You can make the game feel more like you are a part of an all-out defence force while also keeping the player from having unduely too much impact in the early game.

You can't prevent a good player from snowballing out of control but at least this way, you can move that to the mid and late game.

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I assume you're aware of Phoenix Point? Seems it might try to cover some of what you've spoken about which to a degree is valid. I'd say you're both better at this type of game than many others and certainly me so your criticisms to some extent don't apply as we (the lesser player) need the wiggle room to make up for our ineptitude. That, of course, is where the ironman bit comes in in most games. I believe Julian Gollop (again) did something whereby the stronger players found greater resistance in one of the X-Com games as the game counted successes v failures and adapted slightly.

You can correct the reliance on an alpha team very easily. You mentioned it, I came up with an answer immediately. I'll refrain from mentioning it, however, and it's not quite the same as a fatigue mechanic.

Reading the rest of this, it would probably be better to start with an air war which eventually drops to a ground war. The NPCs could shoot down alien craft (eventually) and then a ton of research goes on and at first is painfully slow ("New Stuff! Wut?") then can proceed in leaps and then peaks and troughs e.g. once you have armour sussed you can research other armours relatively easier but going for weapons then takes you back to the long grind. Of course NPCs should have access to the improved technology as they've paid for the research.

Then, while the air war never ceases (e.g. transports to bases), the bases (rather than being hidden) could be the staging posts for alien attacks/activity and as the good guys are able to do more they can then build new aircraft and air fights come back in and then it's a case of salvaging the precious new aircraft, possibly a couple of the crew etc. As you say, by changing the proportionate effect of the player on the game as a whole you do alter wholly how the game can develop.

I'm surprised you didn't get into TFTD as it is great fun and bloody damn hard.

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I would never refer to anyone as a lesser player, maybe a player with more of a social life than my wife & I :p

I guess my secondary issue, after the one of the balance curve, is just how indisposable everything is. Leading to the death spiral if you lose a few items or a team.

Soldiers should be cheap as chips, every weapon being so precious just reduces the tolerence for failure. There is little room for experimentation.

This is where the NPC presence can be kind of clever... if you were arming the forces of earth, what does it matter if you produce 100 laser rifles and you lose 8 of them to a wipe?

But it is of course, less units to dish out to the rest of humanity to fight back with.

I see the Xenonaughts as a sort of glorified research division with a tactical element. In the other games, of course, they do everything and win the day. But I am thinking, instead the game is mostly similar, but you are arming humanity for the fight so they can hold their ground and/or win the day.

Goals can be set for arms and research to be provided per month, with the war eventually being won or lost based on the player taking bigger risks to acquire more samples, goodies, etc.

It needs a lot of work to turn into a usable element, but I think it solves a lot of the early game issues, while also allowing you to make the game harder at the end...

Just more thoughts...

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On 1/15/2019 at 12:16 PM, Dangermouth said:

it would probably be better to start with an air war which eventually drops to a ground war.

That would make for a better large-scale combat simulator, with the war progressing through phases. But such a thing is not what xcom/xenonauts games tend to be about, where the tactical layer is often referred to as the meat (and/or potatoes) of the game. The strategy layer has meaningful activities (i.e research), yet it is pretty much just for spawning ground combat missions. I mean, compare it to any other strategy game - it is very dilute. For instance, air combat is almost entirely about having the right tier of weapons at the right time. XCOM2 got rid of it entirely and it hardly changed the game. Having said that I reckon it is worth thinking about how it could be beefed up through mods or the like.

Firstly, I'm a complete novice in the field of mods. I looked into some of what could be done in X1 but didn't get anywhere. As far as I'm aware, adding an NPC to the geoscape is beyond scope. Although maybe UFOs could be set to create a crash site sometimes instead of landing, i.e. imagining a battle with local forces. I think what you'd want is some indicators/symbols to appear around the globe to give the feel of activity. Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to have some UFOs actually be IFOs, with friendly blue coloured icons. Like I said, beyond me.

*However, as for altering the paradigm of the war, I'm pretty sure that could be done. Firstly, early-game ground combat could be made impossible by setting conventional bullet weapons to air-soft damage. Then, neuter the loss condition so you can survive on a diet of air-strikes rather than successful missions (i.e. it is much harder to lose regions). Finally, set the cost of bases, hangars and radars to something negligible so you can build a giant airforce. That would force you to stick to the air game. Something creative would need to be done to make dog fights replayable and fun, e.g. tons more aerial ordnance. The key would be controlling progression to the phase when ground combat were possible.

In xcom/xenonauts the leash is always determined by research. To move forward, the R&D of laser weapons would be the latchkey discovery. The simplest solution would be to have the laser research project require many months to complete, so you'd be well into your air war before ground combat is even approachable. Then, as @Edmon says, make soldiers and weapons cheap. A dime a dozen. You throw a dozen laser troopers at a crash site and you are finally able to hold your own, but only against Ceasan solders, or only against the lowest ranks (say if the Ceasan's health is x then other species' health is 100x). Thus, the objective is to loot the aliens, not push them back. Once you bring back enough artefacts from dead Ceasan's, you trigger plasma research. Maybe even have the construction of plasma weapons require an alien rifle (or five). Then, with plasma guns (100 times the damage), you can fight on equal terms with Sebillians... the idea is to make the stats of each alien/weapon tier an order of magnitude beyond the former. Effectively, this would all be to change the strategy from winning ground combat:

22 hours ago, Edmon said:

the war eventually being won or lost based on the player taking bigger risks to acquire more samples, goodies, etc.

The last addition I'd make would be to have enemies like Androns be immortal to all but the top tier weapons, and have those top tier weapons require some ludicrous condition for triggering the research. That way, only the most determined player could manage it. It would be a reward for pushing the envelope.

I think that everything from the * above is feasible with the settings that could be manipulated in xenonauts 1. The crucial step would be in adding strategical challenges to the strategy layer, otherwise it'd all be for nothing!

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5 hours ago, Cynical said:

...I thought that the entire concept of Xenonauts-2 is that it's a shadow war with the Aliens infiltrating governments rather than overtly attacking like they do in the first Xenonauts?

I'm, not really sure about the story of X2 or the timeline of it, is there a way to go over the existing story content? I know it's actually a bit light at the moment and so it could in theory, change a lot.

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From this thread:

 

Quote

To better employ the paranoia of the Cold War setting, the Xenonauts and the aliens are fighting a "shadow war" rather than open warfare - few people believe that aliens exist, let alone are walking among us ... and the aliens are actively trying keep it that way by deliberately covering up any evidence of their own existence. The few people that have encountered them and survived are dismissed as crazy conspiracy theorists if they try to speak out about it, then tend mysteriously disappear. Little is known of the aliens beyond this:

  • They have been interfering with human politics for decades, always in an attempt to raise global tensions towards nuclear war
  • They deploy personnel and UFOs directly to Earth via translocator technology (i.e. they don't fly here across interstellar space), and disappear after a day or two
  • Very limited numbers of aliens appear - e.g. historically only a handful of infiltrators / a single small UFO would generally appear in any given month
  • They have psionic powers, but only subtle ones - the power to influence people / limited telepathy / etc, rather than direct mind control
Edited by Cynical
Correcting thread link
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Given that they've stated that one of the design goals for their new strategic layer is that you lose games where you're losing more quickly, I don't think balance is going to be a problem.  Imagine if in X1 if you didn't follow the proper "put your first base in the middle east, immediately drop a second air-only base in central America, add a third to cover Indochina + Australasia ASAP" strategy, you just game over'd in November 1979, instead of limping to February 1980 to die there like you do now -- there wouldn't be a balance issue, you'd get it right or the game would quickly end instead of creating a really unfun 10 hours where you can't really do much.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This particular area is one where I'll happily bend the lore to fit the game mechanics, to be honest. In the upcoming build I've done that a bit - I do like the secret war idea, but I'm experimenting with moving it to a specific "phase" at the start of the game. So the "global tension" mechanic only exists for the first four to six weeks of the game, where the aliens are trying to provoke the superpowers into a nuclear war with each other. If you can survive those 4-6 weeks, the "global tension" mechanic is removed because the aliens gain the capacity to mobilise larger and more powerful UFOs and start attacking humanity directly (which means humanity rallies together).

Basically the idea is that this gives you a "building" stage at the start of the game where you can expand coverage and improve your relations with various regions - provided you spend enough resources to keep Global Tension below 100 (but not too far below 100, because the mechanic disappears in Phase 2). Then in Phase 2 the aliens shift tactics and start damaging regional relations like they do in X2. I think this will give a more interesting gameplay experience because you're trying to balance the needs of the current phase with the knowledge that the aliens will change tactics in the future. It also means we can have the full mix of missions - things like terror sites were somewhat difficult to square with the "secret war" idea, but now we can just move them to a part of the game where they are appropriate and keep the "secret war" mechanics in the first phase.

To reply specifically to the general idea in the original post - I am very interested in the idea to have local forces on the Geoscape, and I've actually had a card in my work list for a long time to look into it. The big danger I think is cluttering up the Geoscape with lots of things that are largely irrelevant most of the time, and may also be difficult to balance. How do you model the interactions between the local airbases and UFOs? Are they sending interceptors after the UFOs, potentially with enough power to shoot them down themselves? If not, do they actually provide much gameplay utility? Do we want a situation where the local forces are able to down UFOs so the player doesn't have to?

There's quite a few questions, and there's some obvious pitfalls associated with some of them. But I think the idea of local military forces existing on each region at the start of the game and gradually getting destroyed by the aliens as the game goes on is something that could really make X2 feel alive (assuming we can find a way of integrating it with existing mechanics), so it's certainly a discussion I'm happy to have.

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I currently see no real way to get past the snowball problem that comes with strategy/tactical games...

Not that you can't make the game harder as to force a series of wins..resulting in any setback causing a deathspiral that inadvertently causes a game over. but generating a system that would still allow for recovery after a setback..without giving people that have no setbacks a free pass to the finish line. while also allowing this system to function in multiple difficulties without having to HP/dmg/attack bloat the adversaries.

the main benefit of winning the fight is better strategical benefits (resources, money, relics, tech and soldier XP) that translate themselves into tactical benefits (better soldier stats from XP, better weapons from tech and rare resources, more support structures in the base from the money) losing on the other hand...well it has to mean something, so you don't get those befinits...you often even have to lose some strategical benifits to get back to where you where before you started the botched mission. the setbacks often make it harder to recover while you often don't have any way to effectively catch back up.

one way to reduce the impact of the benefits would be to ramp up alien aggressiveness to the player faster if the player deals more (overt) damage to alien activity in a relatively short span of time, but less if the player proves less effective against alien activity, or inflicts damage slower/less obvious. it does not remove the snowball problem, but will generate a optimum activity...where going on to many (smash n' grab) missions quickly would actually ramp the enemy power well above what you would gain in benefits, where a commander that would simply do everything he can do and get the maximum out of every mission, will just recklessly paint himself into a corner.

a solution for the "A-team saves the world" problem was already proposed in a fatigue/stress system (effectively though, this would just create more A-teams...but it will slow down the power ramp in every individual soldier)

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Regarding local forces - the concept can be interesting if the player has sufficient input into using local forces. If Agents are still part of the current design, then Agents can transition from spy-like activities to being military advisors. After all, the Xenonauts should be by Phase 2 the leading experts on how to fight filthy Xenos. If you provide military advisors (and of course, the higher the rank, the better the advisor), then as the player, you could direct how effectively NPCs fight, and how the NPCs fight. Perhaps you get advisors to suggest focusing on ground war, and so you see more NPC soldiers in ground combat. Or perhaps you get them to focus on the air war so UFO interceptions gain damage as they pass over certain territories? I mean, these are very simple examples, but if there was sufficient input then I could see directing NPCs as a valid playstyle. 

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6 hours ago, Chris said:

This particular area is one where I'll happily bend the lore to fit the game mechanics, to be honest. In the upcoming build I've done that a bit - I do like the secret war idea, but I'm experimenting with moving it to a specific "phase" at the start of the game. So the "global tension" mechanic only exists for the first four to six weeks of the game, where the aliens are trying to provoke the superpowers into a nuclear war with each other. If you can survive those 4-6 weeks, the "global tension" mechanic is removed because the aliens gain the capacity to mobilise larger and more powerful UFOs and start attacking humanity directly (which means humanity rallies together).

Basically the idea is that this gives you a "building" stage at the start of the game where you can expand coverage and improve your relations with various regions - provided you spend enough resources to keep Global Tension below 100 (but not too far below 100, because the mechanic disappears in Phase 2). Then in Phase 2 the aliens shift tactics and start damaging regional relations like they do in X2. I think this will give a more interesting gameplay experience because you're trying to balance the needs of the current phase with the knowledge that the aliens will change tactics in the future. It also means we can have the full mix of missions - things like terror sites were somewhat difficult to square with the "secret war" idea, but now we can just move them to a part of the game where they are appropriate and keep the "secret war" mechanics in the first phase.

To reply specifically to the general idea in the original post - I am very interested in the idea to have local forces on the Geoscape, and I've actually had a card in my work list for a long time to look into it. The big danger I think is cluttering up the Geoscape with lots of things that are largely irrelevant most of the time, and may also be difficult to balance. How do you model the interactions between the local airbases and UFOs? Are they sending interceptors after the UFOs, potentially with enough power to shoot them down themselves? If not, do they actually provide much gameplay utility? Do we want a situation where the local forces are able to down UFOs so the player doesn't have to?

There's quite a few questions, and there's some obvious pitfalls associated with some of them. But I think the idea of local military forces existing on each region at the start of the game and gradually getting destroyed by the aliens as the game goes on is something that could really make X2 feel alive (assuming we can find a way of integrating it with existing mechanics), so it's certainly a discussion I'm happy to have.

I sat down and really thought about it and here is what I came up with:

"Tension" phase:
At the start of the game, a player doesn't have to build a base out of the ether, but acquires a pre-existing one.  This is basically what happens in the first XCOM, but instead of you picking the exact location, you choose from various bases on the map that are owned by your various benefactors. Each base can be different and can affect the opening of the game (note these are just ideas and may not be balanced):

1) American Base(s):
Great in general with a lot of equipment, facilities, etc, but setting up shop in America increases tensions with everyone else, due to their pre-existing power level and the idea this is another ploy for American control. Start with additional tension in Russia, China and South America.

2) European base(s):
More workshop, research focused with acceptable military capability. Diplomatic, starting less tension with most regions, except Russia. Easy mode.

3) Russian bases(s):
Extra soldiers, aircraft and military equipment, increased tension with America. Cheaper second base as long as it's also in Russia.

4) Africa/South Americas base(s):
Bases are sparse, with only the basics but the base is inexpensive to run if nothing else. Radar quality is poor with only 50% of normal coverage. This radar will have to be demolished and replaced with advanced (normal) radar if you choose to start with one of these bases. Hard Mode.

5) Indonesia/China base(s):
The standard XCOM base, with nothing changed.

This allows tweaking of starting positions and equipment, for a more diverse beginning.

After a base is picked:
NPC bases, do what they can to defend themselves, attack aliens, etc. However, expect them to be wiped out if left unsupported which will increase tensions. Player has the choice to buy existing bases from NPC's or build their own, as they desire. Buying a base will mean buying EVERYTHING in it, whatever that may be, so could be an expensive decision rather than making your own base and customising it yourself. Or you could just make it that these bases are NPC forever and the xenonauts will have to make extra ones as "normal".

The level of interactiveness with the NPC's is really something that needs to be thought about, but I imagine them being targets for aliens after a time. Maybe a player can transfer things to NPC bases, like aircraft and tanks, so they can better defend themselves. Maybe just aircraft, making NPC bases automatic alien hunting airfields. Much like what is done in Xenonauts1 but more automated. NPC's you are friendly with may ask you if you want to attack crashed UFOs or not. Ones that don't might just airstrike them into paste. Friendly ones could share money, unfriendly or tense ones might not.

Giving them aircraft maybe reduces tension... as an additional incentive...

Just some thoughts.

Once the tension phase is over, the NPC role could largely just be in the "automated airfield" varity and/or as targets for aliens.


 

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From the Xenonauts-2 Base System Discussion Thread, post by Chris on the 7/2/2018

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Ah yes, your post reminds me of something I meant to mention in the original post - one of the big problems with having pre-existing base locations on the map (i.e. stuff you can "liberate" from the locals and re-purpose) is that the player then loses the fine control over where there bases are placed. This actually kinda matters when you're using the realtime Geoscape because planes have to fly towards their targets and having a base in a bad position just because the game wouldn't let you choose where to place it is likely to be frustrating.

You partially can get around this by offering more possible locations for bases - but then you've got a lot of useless stuff cluttering up the Geoscape. Even having 8 base locations on the map (which in reality is far less than you would need) adds a huge amount of extra clutter to the map. 

We did experiment with pre-existing bases for a bit and they ended up being kinda awkward for those reasons.

 

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17 hours ago, Max_Caine said:

Why? You could apply a regional modifier to any Xenonaut base built and allow the player to plonk that base down where they want to without going through the rigmarole of putting five possible bases down. Seems like a lot of work for nothing much in particular.

Indeed. One thing that I find is somewhat lost when you're theorycrafting a design is the enjoyment of the actual physical interaction the player gets to do - this is something that's actually caused me to change some of my ideas that seemed really great on paper but just weren't as fun as they should be in the game.

Being able to manually place your base is an example of this; it makes the game feel far more freeform and exciting than choosing from a number of pre-set locations. Similarly the current Main Base screen is less enjoyable than it should be because you're just clicking a room slot and selecting what building you want to put in there from a list like in XCOM; I think the interaction in Xenonauts 1 where you pick a building and then move it around on a grid and choose where to place it is fundamentally more satisfying even though the gameplay effect is essentially the same (we're most likely going to move to a grid-based system for that reason).

As Max says I think you can get the effect of the "starting base" choice whilst keeping the more enjoyable interaction just by giving you your bonuses based on the region you place that base in.

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1 hour ago, Chris said:

Being able to manually place your base is an example of this; it makes the game feel far more freeform and exciting than choosing from a number of pre-set locations. Similarly the current Main Base screen is less enjoyable than it should be because you're just clicking a room slot and selecting what building you want to put in there from a list like in XCOM; I think the interaction in Xenonauts 1 where you pick a building and then move it around on a grid and choose where to place it is fundamentally more satisfying even though the gameplay effect is essentially the same (we're most likely going to move to a grid-based system for that reason).

+1

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3 hours ago, Chris said:

Indeed. One thing that I find is somewhat lost when you're theorycrafting a design is the enjoyment of the actual physical interaction the player gets to do - this is something that's actually caused me to change some of my ideas that seemed really great on paper but just weren't as fun as they should be in the game.

Being able to manually place your base is an example of this; it makes the game feel far more freeform and exciting than choosing from a number of pre-set locations. Similarly the current Main Base screen is less enjoyable than it should be because you're just clicking a room slot and selecting what building you want to put in there from a list like in XCOM; I think the interaction in Xenonauts 1 where you pick a building and then move it around on a grid and choose where to place it is fundamentally more satisfying even though the gameplay effect is essentially the same (we're most likely going to move to a grid-based system for that reason).

As Max says I think you can get the effect of the "starting base" choice whilst keeping the more enjoyable interaction just by giving you your bonuses based on the region you place that base in.

Yeah that is fair enough, this is a bit of a tangent to the original topic though, which is the one of having an NPC presence to balance out the early game and mid-game. This discussion of base placement came about largely because of theorycrafting about how to give you control over the NPC positioning and then working from there. Trying to create that "part of a war" feeling which then shifts into "you are leading the war". You could also do things like have countries that hate you, intercept your interceptors and/or otherwise move against you. Which could be an interesting dymanic to the early game.

What I want to avoid at all costs is the one thing I hated about XCOM1 and Xenonauts1. UFO spawns are totally random and their movement is totally random. They could in theory, all appear where you are not and/or move away from your slower interceptors. Effectively putting you in a death spirial at the beginning of the game which is unavoidable. This issue continues to be a pest until you get a 2nd and 3rd base established, every UFO could appear in America say, while you are in Europe and IndoChina. You just have to suck it up, which sucks, because it's pure RNG. The NPC bases at least partially solve this issue in the early game, since they can do work in the regions you are not early on, giving you time to get established (unless you take the more gamey route of ensuring the UFO's or at least some of them, spawn in reach).

It is absolutely possible to lose XCOM1 and Xenonauts1 with the player having no agency in preventing it, if you are unlucky enough.

Edited by Edmon
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On 1/25/2019 at 6:07 AM, Chris said:

To reply specifically to the general idea in the original post - I am very interested in the idea to have local forces on the Geoscape, and I've actually had a card in my work list for a long time to look into it. The big danger I think is cluttering up the Geoscape with lots of things that are largely irrelevant most of the time, and may also be difficult to balance. How do you model the interactions between the local airbases and UFOs? Are they sending interceptors after the UFOs, potentially with enough power to shoot them down themselves? If not, do they actually provide much gameplay utility? Do we want a situation where the local forces are able to down UFOs so the player doesn't have to?

There's quite a few questions, and there's some obvious pitfalls associated with some of them. But I think the idea of local military forces existing on each region at the start of the game and gradually getting destroyed by the aliens as the game goes on is something that could really make X2 feel alive (assuming we can find a way of integrating it with existing mechanics), so it's certainly a discussion I'm happy to have.

I think a situation where local forces can provide enough assistance to make a difference in the air combat, but not do it by themselves, might be an interesting compromise. Something like SAM missiles that either do damage or limit the maneuverability of the UFO, or 'free' radar coverage from integration with their forces.

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Yeah - although there's two separate issues there, the first being that randomness can theoretically screw the player over and the second being whether AI forces are worth adding to the Geoscape.

It is indeed possible for every single UFO to spawn outside your base range in X1 for multiple waves at the start of the game. This causes Relations damage you can't avoid and also blocks you from making progress in the tech tree. The tech tree issue is fixed in X2 because alien raid ground missions also appear on the Geoscape from the very start of the game, so you'll always get some alien tech to research very early on.

Fundamentally though, the only way to ensure the player isn't screwed by RNG on the UFOs is just to have "smarter" spawn logic on the UFOs - perhaps spreading the UFOs evenly between the different regions (in random order)?

The local forces issue is a bigger discussion. I think I'd prefer a solution like the SAM missile sites Decius mentions; they could potentially inflict gradual damage on UFOs as they fly around the map. Shooting down a UFO when it first appears would stop it inflicting any Relations (or whatever) damage on the local region, but letting it fly around performing its mission for a bit would give your interceptors an easier fight. You can then slowly introduce alien missions that directly attack the air defences of the local region and reduce the damage future UFOs take when flying around in that region.

Exactly what form this mechanic takes, I don't know - having actual units on the Geoscape that perform attacks against nearby UFOs would be cool but might clutter things up and have some weird edge cases. Having an abstract number for the Air Defence strength of a region might work better, as you can then just inflict a specific amount of damage per minute the UFO spends over the territory of a region. Or alternatively you could set it so a UFO takes X% damage every time it successfully spawns an event that damages a region, with the % damage falling as the Air Defence score of the region is reduced.

This actually dovetails quite nicely with one of the other new mechanics we have, which is that a UFO will abandon its mission and disappear from the Geoscape (not creating a crash site) if it is reduced to 30% HP or less, but not shot down. In the early game this would naturally limit the amount of damage any given UFO can inflict on a region before it is forced to retreat, but if you let the aliens destroy the Air Defences in a region then it allows all the other UFO missions to operate for longer before they disappear (this matters less if you've got interceptor cover over the region that can shoot the UFOs down).

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