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X2 Base Mechanics - Community Poll


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If you're using translocators to simplify stores management, why would soldier

On 6/17/2019 at 4:33 AM, Chris said:

A

 

More problematic would be not having a global pool of personnel, which would also be required if you want to have the full X1 system of only being able to assign soldiers to dropships stationed that the same base:

 

  • This makes the more in-depth building assignment system a bit of a pain, because you have to make sure the scientists / engineers you want to assign to a particular base are already in the correct base
  • You need an additional UI screen (or element) for shuffling staff between bases
  • Strategic Operations become much more awkward, because travel time is calculated from the closest base but obviously in that case you'd only be able to assign soldiers from that base to that strategic operation - which means you'd need to have more soldiers at each base, rather than having a group of operatives specialised for a particular task able to operate globally - which potentially runs the risk of making strategic operations an annoying exercise in micromanagement rather than something interesting
  • You've also got problems when a Strategic Operation recruits staff - what base do they go back to? What if the base where the team were dispatched from doesn't have any living capacity? etc

 

If you're using translocator tech to simplify inventory management, why not use it to simplify living quarters as well? If the armory doesn't have to be on the same continent as the dropship, why do the soldiers need to sleep next to one? And if there's only one dropship, wherever it it based is the primary location, and all others are merely interception/radar, or science/engineering outposts.

 

That said, is there any reason why the surface structures (radar, hangars, air defenses) can't be arranged in a top-down grid but the other stuff (living quarters, storage, labs) be buried underground in the ant farm? Split the real estate between the two views, since each of them would need less room.

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4 hours ago, Charon said:

I have been reading everything and i think these features would form the best game:

  • YES - to a single main unattackable base. This would house ALL personell, including soldiers, scientist, engineers and other possible specialists. This base will be mainly responsible for power management and other, global upgrades.

 

  • YES - to multiple (possibly infinite ) secondary bases which house radars, hangars, laboratories, workshops, possible generators, and all other, "real" tangible buildings. These are attackable bases and aliens can and will be able to attack them. Making them small, operatable bases with interesting building layouts, eg. being able to place corrdidors, and defensive structures in addition to the main buildings will make for more interesting decisions. Secondary bases are essential if you want to get any research, manufacture or other project done. It houses hangars for the aircraft which are essential to shoot down UFOs, and the planes have real range limitations ( at first - similar to X1 ). Since they are small players should be expected to place at least 2 - 3 right at the start, maybe make one science and one engineering base preloaded for the player to place at the start of the game.
  • YES - to location specific boni/mali for secondary bases. One country can give a scienc bonus, and an aircraft range mali.
  • YES - to boni for specialised bases, eg. building 2 workshops beside each other grants a +10% work efficiency and total work space - for each additional workshop.
  • When scientist/engineers/specialists are working in a secondary base they are physically transfered there. This means the omnipotent teleporter array will have to leave a port open to that specific base - which consumes energy. Energy is mainly transfered from the main base, but smaller generators can be build in that specific base to relieve some of the stress, but only in that local base. The open port can only be filled with energy from the main base. More about that in the image below.
  • If a base gets attacked, you will get asked whether or not you want to send in a team to defend your secondary base.

 

  • YES - to global personal and storage. The main point of having more than 1 dropship is to have a bigger gang roaming around. X1 had the problem with your rooster actually being distributed over physical bases, which led to a lot of micromanagement, but having a single main base housing all your soldiers, and sending one team to defend a base, while having another one doing a small crashsite is not different from having 2 dropships - just with the added bonus of easier management, global soldier selection, item management, and equipment screen.

 

  • YES - to possibly infinite dropships, or rather open teleporter arrays. Each open teleporter spot requires energy, and needs to be open as long as the ground combat is out there and fighting. So if you want to send out another team through the teleporter ( and also guarantee a way back in case of abortion ), you will need to pay the additional energy for each and every team.
  • To avoid exploitation of the system, rerouting power can take between 24 - 48 hours ( so you cant just quickly power down something else to get a triple team ). And dont give me that "But why cant we send another team to the same mission ?" crap. X1 didnt allow for 2 chinooks to land in the same mission, and there wasnt an explanation for that either.
  • Here is an original idea: I would like for ground combat missions to take up actual time. So lets say every turn is 10 minutes on the geoscape. You play for 12 turns and the mission takes up 2 hours. Once its finished you get teleported back to "when the mission started" and the geoscape will have an icon with "Team A fighting Crashsite - 3". You can resume normally, while already knowing the result of the fight. In this time you can potentially take on another mission, as long as your teleporter has enough energy. This idea would include the ground combat mission day - night state to change accordingly to the real geoscape time, eg. you can start fighting during the day, and after some time it starts to dusk.

 

Unbenannt.thumb.png.fd58959a10be0b73103a2dc77f14abae.png

 

  • Now to the side/top view issue. In this setup i wouldnt mind it running either way. If you have confidence in your engine providing a good vertical firefight than make everything a side view. If you are not, than keep the fight horizontally and make the secondary bases with a top down view. The main base can be a side view, it looks quite good that way.

Think this gent just won the day, excellent post, love the ideas!

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On ‎6‎/‎17‎/‎2019 at 12:33 PM, Chris said:

As I said, supporting multiple dropships like in X1 is something we may end up adding before development is done but it's a bigger task with more knock-on effects than most people realise so I don't want to tackle it right now. For example, it involves:

  • Quite a substantial code rewrite, as the code currently assumes that there's only ever one dropship
  • Some UI changes, because you'd need to specify which dropship to use each time you launch a ground mission
  • Potentially some changes to the Armory screen so you can manage soldier assignments to the dropship (although as soldiers aren't permanently assigned to dropships like they were in X1, this might not be too bad)

More problematic would be not having a global pool of personnel, which would also be required if you want to have the full X1 system of only being able to assign soldiers to dropships stationed that the same base:

  • This makes the more in-depth building assignment system a bit of a pain, because you have to make sure the scientists / engineers you want to assign to a particular base are already in the correct base
  • You need an additional UI screen (or element) for shuffling staff between bases
  • Strategic Operations become much more awkward, because travel time is calculated from the closest base but obviously in that case you'd only be able to assign soldiers from that base to that strategic operation - which means you'd need to have more soldiers at each base, rather than having a group of operatives specialised for a particular task able to operate globally - which potentially runs the risk of making strategic operations an annoying exercise in micromanagement rather than something interesting
  • You've also got problems when a Strategic Operation recruits staff - what base do they go back to? What if the base where the team were dispatched from doesn't have any living capacity? etc

Sure, we could work around these problems if we wanted to, but it would definitely be a lot of work. It's therefore not something I want to do as part of the main batch of changes as we don't yet know exactly how big a role the base staff assignment system or the strategic operations will play in the game. If we wait a few more months, some of the problems might solve themselves.

 

Reading everything you wrote so far and honestly... I'm dissapointed.

I'm going to be perfectly honest here, so excuse some harsh criticism, but you DEFINITELY started building Xenonauts 2 by copying the Nu-Com, which is/was a terrible idea and a giant red flag for me, since that is a big departure from the original Xenonauts and original X-Com. And now because of that you're running into problems with the code and big chunks having to be re-written.

I realize companies want to earn money and you want the game to be "accessable" (corporate speak for so simplified everyone can play.. or in other words, dumbing down for the lowest common denominator, which Nu-Com was), so I guess people like me are a dying breed.

The second issue I have is you seem to think micromanagment is a bad things, when that is the core of the game. You're running a global operation. Bases, personnel, research. It's supposed to be a lot of micromanagment. You'll find plenty of old-school players that like that. But a lot of new "gamers" have no patience for it.

 

So you really need to decide who your target audience is.

 

 

 

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On ‎6‎/‎17‎/‎2019 at 7:19 PM, luckytron said:

To be honest, most of the secondary bases will probably continue to be Aircraft Hangars and Radar Outposts, while Atlas Base will become the Research/Manufacture/A-Team Hub, since unless having certain structures in the other bases will be better than having them in the main base, they simply wont be built.

Maybe to encourage more variety, there could be buildings that have an effect on the region where the base is built, like shortening the duration of Resource missions, or increase local force presence/give bonuses to local forces, or even spawning an "ambush mission" where with help from the Xenonauts, local authorities lure Aliens into a prepared site, where (almost) any mission type can occur, except with all civilians replaced with local forces.

Or being able to construct a purely defensive structure, with more defensive deployment options (more places for turrets or other such things), which would do nothing outside of base attacks.

In any case, I thought the Side-Ways view of the main base was a nice take, as well as having the Hangar/Radar Bases, and it justified only having one dropship at any time, but being able to construct more full bases makes the One dropship rule kind of arbitrary.

I don't see a need to centralize research, since scientist working in different bases can easily coordinate over the internet. Ergo, dumping all research into one base yields no real benefit.

 

I guess what you could do is have it so that labs and engineering rooms are affected by a region or give a bonus to a region.

A lab in Asia might increase the speed at which new tech is researched in a region, and engeneering could increase it's spread (so ally solder might get laser rifles sooner and have more of them). Or placing a lab there gives YOU a bonus of somekind. Or both.

Additionally, you could make it so that 1 engeneering bay can only make 1 thing, thus stacking multiple in one base does not increase the speed at which you build that thing, but you can build several of the thing. If it takes 5 days to build a laser rifle, it takes 5 days. Throwing more money and men wont' speed it up.

OR you could make aliens target the biggest base we have, even bomb it from orbit at some point, making sure that putting your eggs in one basket is a REALLY bad idea. Ideally, even a good player should loose a base or two, but the game should provide a good player with enough resources to be able to bounce back. The fight should feel desperate.

 

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On ‎6‎/‎17‎/‎2019 at 8:08 PM, jonyjonas said:

I don't mind having to kit out multiple squads - in fact, one of the things I loved about Xenonauts 1 is that you always felt like your soldiers were expendable and easily killed, so you never relied on any one soldier too much (at least I didn't, was always leveling up rookies alongside more experienced squaddies). In XCOM, when you lose a few high-level team members everything just breaks down and you feel like you have to start all over again just because of that.

Now that you mention it, this should be a mechanic. Lower-level soldiers get an EXP bonus when deployed with higher-level ones. Like mentorship. Makes sense and would make recovering from losses easier.

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16 hours ago, Max_Caine said:

It took me a while to find when the skyranger started teleporting, (because it didn't always). It started teleporting in Build v3. To quote from the build:

If you're not keen on teleportation you aren't going to like X2 seeing as how teleportation appears to be a core tenet of the narrative and some of the mechanics. Teleportation has been tossed around as a concept on the boards for quite a while. If I remember correctly from the previous discussions, teleportation waves away a number of narrative issues such as the capability to reach crash sites at abnormally long distances, etc. If the objection to the Skyranger teleporting is a satisfying narrative reason, rather than a gameplay reason then I'm sure narratives could be spun out of thin air. I mean, off the top of my head, teleportation on the Kardashev scale could belong to a civilisation that rates much, much higher than humans so any examples of teleportation are dimly understood at best, and treated as "it just works". The Elder race trope has a long and distinguished history, no reason why X2 could drink from its well. I mean, Stargate did.  

Teleportation was a solution to the terrible 1-base decision, since you had to reach every apart of the globe from 1 location. If multi-bases are in, then teleportation is not needed.

I despise teleportation, not only because of narrative and world-building reasons and the the massive can of worms it opens, but because of the mechanical implications. (Also, Stargate turned to trash, the only thing saving it was good cast chemistry and banter. And the elder race tropes are in my opinion generally terrible - anything that treats science as magic is)

X-Com games have NOT been just about squad-level tactics. If that is what one is after, there are many games that do it a LOT better (Jagged Alliance 2 for example). Planning and logistics on a grander scale are - to me - the defining aspect of X-Com. Hence, when such is trivilized with magitech teleportation that makes logistic utterly irrelevant (base location does not matter, travel time does not matter, local resource managment does not matter) it leaves a poor taste in my mouth. Also, having a single base, a single point of faliure is a really bad idea for any military group.

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YES - to a single main unattackable base. This would house ALL personell, including soldiers, scientist, engineers and other possible specialists. This base will be mainly responsible for power management and other, global upgrades.

YES - to multiple (possibly infinite ) secondary bases which house radars, hangars, laboratories, workshops, possible generators, and all other, "real" tangible buildings. These are attackable bases and aliens can and will be able to attack them. Making them small, operatable bases with interesting building layouts, eg. being able to place corrdidors, and defensive structures in addition to the main buildings will make for more interesting decisions. Secondary bases are essential if you want to get any research, manufacture or other project done. It houses hangars for the aircraft which are essential to shoot down UFOs, and the planes have real range limitations ( at first - similar to X1 ). Since they are small players should be expected to place at least 2 - 3 right at the start, maybe make one science and one engineering base preloaded for the player to place at the start of the game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So you want small attackable bases and a single main base that is unattackable? How does that make sense? Why would the alien refuse to attack the most important place?

Seems to me you just want an easy mode that does look like one.

Every base should be attackable by the enemy. And not just by troops, but also air bombardment. This wouldn't destroy the base outright (since most facilites are underground), but would damage it, take it off-line for a while. Either the entire base could be unusable for a while (burried entrance?) or there could be a random dice roll to see which buildings were damaged, depending on how strong the attack was (how many alien craft and of which type were involved). Some buildings like hangars and airstrips would have  a higher weight to get damaged, since they are more exposed.

To me this seems like a good balance as it's not TOO punishing, especially early on. You could also make it so that a base can be fully destroyed if bombed twice (again, giving the player time and opportunity to stop it with air intercepts)

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The 1 Base thing is the best. If you wanna make a multibase-Design take that from UFO-Extraterestials, where the second bases are only Interceptor-Bases. And let the new Design we have already for the Main base. Otherwise you haven´t a reason to make Xenononauts 2.

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3 hours ago, TrashMan said:

Seems to me you just want an easy mode that does look like one.

Hm .. never thought i would be accused of trying to make things too easy. The internet is a wide place.

3 hours ago, TrashMan said:

So you want small attackable bases and a single main base that is unattackable? How does that make sense? Why would the alien refuse to attack the most important place?

Why cant i send triple dropships to a single crashsite in X1 ? Or rather 10 ? 10 dropships with 8 soldiers each makes 80 soldiers vs 6 aliens. In my book that would guarantee the likelyhood of success. Seems like a good move to me.

Im just trying to point out that applying logic to video games does not work out very well.

A main unattackable base would go well together with the proposed global personal/storage/whatever and the teleporter setting.

 

In this paragraph i would like to point out that teleportation and dropships are fundamentally the same mechanic. Whether a dropship takes 2 hours to get to a crashsite, or a teleporter needs 2 hours to zero in on the crashsite coordinance is gameplaywise the same thing. You can even add UFOs which jamm the teleporter in an radius around it to prevent taking on a crashsite before the UFO is taken out. This would be the fighter shooting down dropship equivalent. Everything has a solution.
I dont mind dropships nor teleporting. You can make the same mechanics for both of them. Faster dropships ? Just manufacture an upgrade module to faster zero in on the crashsites coordinance ( for a single connection ). Increase troop size ? Just manufacture a higher energy module. It basically really is the same thing. You just have to be creative.

Only at one point in development you have to decide whether you go with a teleporter setting, or a dropship setting. MECHANICALLY you can realise the same mechanics for both of them.

 

My 3k+ hours of Xenonauts and X-Division + the one thousand hours of various other youtubers agree on the following points below.

  • It is not viable to have more than one production base. Since items are automatically transfered to the base the dropship starts from, and you usually have your main team in your main base + shot down interceptor items are automatically recovered to the first base you put down the game doesnt incentivise you to have have more than one production base - having a global item storage which items get transfered to and from would solve that and motivate the player to experiment with more setups.
  • Getting your second/third/fourth strike team up and running is mostly a chore. And just a a candy bonus ontop - having a global pool of soldiers to choose from would mean you could build a deeper, more complex rooster of soldiers instead of saying all the time "Oh, I really would like to send soldier X on this mission. Too bad he is in another base."
  • Base attacks were arguably the least fun part of the game. Read about it here:
    https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/topic/13414-165xce-v0350-x-division-100-beta/&do=findComment&comment=173187
    having a global defensive system would make the whole thing a more fun, approachable situation, where you take on the surviving aliens after the batteries (?) reduced the numbers. Having the option to pull out would mean these kind of missions could become a well integrated part of the game, instead of either people never actually seeing a base attack because the whole threat is too weak, or base attacks killing every campaign.

I think these points represent clear improvements after this guideline:

On 6/16/2019 at 5:17 PM, Chris said:

Something I’ve said repeatedly throughout the development of Xenonauts-2 is that the changes to the first game are experiments to be tested and evaluated, and discarded if they don't represent a clear improvement on what they replaced.

 

---

 

Now after everything is said and done, i dont fundamentally disagree with your overall assessment @TrashMan. If you remove complexity and micromanagement in one place to clearly improve the game, you also have to add it in again somewhere else. Especially base locations, relationship influence on boni, specialists working in countries, and other forms of min-maxing could replace the lost micro and macro management of the feeling of leading a global organisation.

During the development of Starcraft 2 a lot of people were worried that they made the game too easy. Playing Starcraft 1 on basically ANY level is quite difficult. Now people were worried that they removed too many physically hard to execute gameplay elements to sacrifice them for the accessibility of the game. What Blizzard then did was to remove certain hard to execute mechanics from Starcraft 1, and replaced it with different hard to execute mechanics. Starcraft 2 allows one control group to contain up to 500 units, from the original 12 max, made it possible for buildings to have rally points instead of having to manually assign every drone to every mineral patch EVERY TIME you made a drone, being able to select multiple buildings at a time instead of only one, no longer having to babysit the pathing of your units, no longer having to individually select spell casters if you want to have any reasonable control over them, shift-queueing commands and friendly units moving out of the way if a worker wants to build a building. To compensate for that they added injections, chrono boosts, mules, army- moves-as-is, and many other micro management intensive mechanics. Now saying that no longer being able to move an item from one base to another removes micro management from X2 is as reasonable as saying Starcraft 2 no longer requires any skill to play. It just matters where you sneak in the the removed macro and micro management again ;).

Edited by Charon
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39 minutes ago, Charon said:

Why cant i send triple dropships to a single crashsite in X1 ? Or rather 10 ? 10 dropships with 8 soldiers each makes 80 soldiers vs 6 aliens. In my book that would guarantee the likelyhood of success. Seems like a good move to me.

Im just trying to point out that applying logic to video games does not work out very well.

10 drop ships would be a rather huge investiture of funds, considering how much other stuff you'd have to ignore spending money on in order to achieve that, but yeah, actually, limited to financial reason and some 'cap' (say, 3 or 4 drop ships, max) this could certainly be done, though I'd expect it would be in response to a larger quantity of aliens, along the lines of 20 to 30, to warrant such a 'joint exercise' between bases and drop ships.  Sort of along the lines of near 'endgame scenarios'.  Such an exercise would detract from being able to cover other possible hot spots going on at that same time elsewhere, perhaps.  There are a lot of ways the game and story could be expanded upon to add some realism / logic w/o detracting from game play.  Balance + Play Testing is the key.  As for this other comment ...

 

47 minutes ago, Charon said:

My 3k+ hours of Xenonauts and X-Division + the one thousand hours of various other youtubers agree on the following points below.

  • It is not viable to have more than one production base. Since items are automatically transfered to the base the dropship starts from, and you usually have your main team in your main base + shot down interceptor items are automatically recovered to the first base you put down the game doesnt incentivise you to have have more than one production base

It isn't viable as currently scripted, but It Could Be !  The problem with multiple production sites  really is the cost of each and the engineering expenses you'd be incurring at each base.  That all adds up fairly quickly.  But if a little tweaking went into the costs of workshops and engineers, and the player had to be concerned with events like base attacks causing parts of your base to collapse / needing to be repaired or unearthed before being able to function at 100% again, you've now done two things to the game to help provide incentive to splitting up production sites.  The same could be done with scientists and research labs.  I mean, heaven help it if the Chief Science Officer were to be, say, buried under 400 ... er ... 800 tons of rubble, but it'd be nice to think you had at least one other scientist with healthy brainwaves that could take charge, and maybe already has been doing just that at Base 2 or Base 3 ... working on secondary or tertiary research objectives while the main unit tackled Priority 1 objectives.

 

These changes to the initial game COULD make for some really fun new choices when deciding what and where to build structures.  Making the $ stretch a bit further would reduce some of the feeling of being pigeon-holed into doing things one set way to win as well.  

Addressing one other issue.  I'm not a fan of the teleportation device explanation for items or people.  At least, not unless the science had to first be recovered from the aliens and then researched and recreated by the engineers.  I never saw the shipping of useful items from Base 1 to other Bases as a chore or heavy micromanaging.  If anything, I'd be happy with the occasional, thumbnail-sized cut scene (ex., the Jagged Alliance river burial of dead mercs ...) of your better gear arriving at Base 2 or Base 3 and one of the soldiers fist pumping another that they finally got something worthwhile to fight back with.  But maybe that's just me, lol ...

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I had fully stuffed bases in the US, Brazil, Europe, Japan and Australia in the original X-Com and I would very much like to have them in this game too, since building up from "our base is up and we can now cover half of the US and parts of Central America" to "we are now a global agency and can bring the hammer down on the aliens anywhere they show their ugly face on Earth" was a ton of fun.

Of course, that would necessitate the ability to put a Skyranger in every base along with the troops needed for missions.

 

And yeah, I didn't really follow the development, so I am seriously out of the loop and have no clue if this is even remotely possible.

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To summarise, TrashMan cares a lot about theme. See his opinions on Wraiths. In fairness, Charon/Chris's approaches make little thematic sense, tho tbh idc.

There are interesting elements of splitting the barracks of different bases. For example having two teams with non-interchangeable crew is interesting, though cheap transfer makes it less so. It also lets you configure defense teams, if base defense is common. And there's the question of how many barracks bases are optimal. But yeah it's probably better to put the depth somewhere that results in more REPLAYABLE micromanagement. Base-building is not too replayable atm, you basically always take the same approach. What is replayable is losing your research base, or rushing research, or slowing research because you're about to run out of things to research. So charon's idea of making barracks and inventory but NOT facility layout global makes a lot of sense mechanically.

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On 6/17/2019 at 11:37 PM, TheGrog said:

Multiple bases only really matters from a gameplay perspective if one of two things is true:

Base assaults actually matter

You want to impose expansion costs that have a sudden jump

 

In X1 base assaults didn't really seem to matter.  Downing every UFO wasn't that hard compared to the costs of letting them do as they pleased, and base defenses seemed pretty strong.  I think base attacks that are actual threats would be interesting, since they are by far the least seen form of mission, but they also need to be recoverable from.  If you lose it needs to not be grounds or just reloading or resetting.

 

The other possibility is that the costs of securing a new base act as a expansion cost at a particular level. 

 

From a world perspective it is kind of silly that you have just one X-com base.  I suppose you could theme it as having teams of troops, interceptors, and weapons in many military locations but one central R&D/C&C location. 

I feel if multiple bases are a thing then base assaults should be something you will definitely have to contend with and be concerned about. You need a mechanic that can't be easily negated by a player being strong in one field.

Kind of borrowing from Stargate here but that isn't always a bad thing. Assume for a second that ATLAS base was set up to research an alien artefact but was mothballed when the project had its funding pulled. If when the aliens began to arrive that artefact was found to be a teleportation device (shared the same energy signature as alien arrivals?) it would make sense that it became the central base for Xenoanuts to fall back to. You could get around the inability of humans to reverse engineer the tech by requiring another gateway to be captured from an alien base and keyed in to our new teleport network before it could be used to create a new Xenonauts base. Base assaults could then take place more like Stargate assaults in SG1. The aliens hack into your network, find the codes to open your gate and bombard whatever defences you have until they break through, preventing your base from contributing to the global effort or being reinforced at the same time.

To begin with these assaults could be purely to lock down your gate and take a base temporarily offline but later in the game could lead to an all out ground assault. Research projects can be used to increase your defences, or they could help you track the hack back to an alien base with the only sure way to stop the raid being to take out its point of origin.

Either way you wouldn't be able to negate all base assaults just by shooting down too many alien craft.

 

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23 hours ago, Charon said:

Why cant i send triple dropships to a single crashsite in X1 ? Or rather 10 ? 10 dropships with 8 soldiers each makes 80 soldiers vs 6 aliens. In my book that would guarantee the likelyhood of success. Seems like a good move to me.

Im just trying to point out that applying logic to video games does not work out very well.A main unattackable base would go well together with the proposed global personal/storage/whatever and the teleporter setting.

You can apply logic to a game that has logical mechanics. For example, why NOT allow multiple dropships/squads? Would make a game too easy? Only if you're unimaginative and don't program the alien response of them responding in kind. As long as you make sure that are prices to pay for everything, and consequnces, you can go really wild.

 

 

In this paragraph i would like to point out that teleportation and dropships are fundamentally the same mechanic. Whether a dropship takes 2 hours to get to a crashsite, or a teleporter needs 2 hours to zero in on the crashsite coordinance is gameplaywise the same thing. You can even add UFOs which jamm the teleporter in an radius around it to prevent taking on a crashsite before the UFO is taken out. This would be the fighter shooting down dropship equivalent. Everything has a solution.


I dont mind dropships nor teleporting. You can make the same mechanics for both of them. Faster dropships ? Just manufacture an upgrade module to faster zero in on the crashsites coordinance ( for a single connection ). Increase troop size ? Just manufacture a higher energy module. It basically really is the same thing. You just have to be creative.

Only at one point in development you have to decide whether you go with a teleporter setting, or a dropship setting. MECHANICALLY you can realise the same mechanics for both of them.

 

 

You are fundamentally wrong. Just because they serve the same end goal (moving things), does not make them the same.

Dropships move over the worldmap, they can be intercepted AND defended. They are an ACTIVE component. At any time you can change their course, escort them. It's is not a zero-sum game with no player input, so no, it's is no the same. I could pull the dropship out in the last second, if lucky, manage to defend against a fighter, I can have multiple dropships and target several sites simoultaneously.

Also, the implication for the lore and beleviablility of the setting are vastly different.

 

Quote

    My 3k+ hours of Xenonauts and X-Division + the one thousand hours of various other youtubers agree on the following points below.

        It is not viable to have more than one production base. Since items are automatically transfered to the base the dropship starts from, and you usually have your main team in your main base + shot down interceptor items are automatically recovered to the first base you put down the game doesnt incentivise you to have have more than one production base - having a global item storage which items get transfered to and from would solve that and motivate the player to experiment with more setups.
        Getting your second/third/fourth strike team up and running is mostly a chore. And just a a candy bonus ontop - having a global pool of soldiers to choose from would mean you could build a deeper, more complex rooster of soldiers instead of saying all the time "Oh, I really would like to send soldier X on this mission. Too bad he is in another base."
        Base attacks were arguably the least fun part of the game. Read about it here:
        https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/topic/13414-165xce-v0350-x-division-100-beta/&do=findComment&comment=173187
        having a global defensive system would make the whole thing a more fun, approachable situation, where you take on the surviving aliens after the batteries (?) reduced the numbers. Having the option to pull out would mean these kind of missions could become a well integrated part of the game, instead of either people never actually seeing a base attack because the whole threat is too weak, or base attacks killing every campaign.

 

 

    Your appeal to authority/number falls on deaf ears here. Especially YouTubers that usually have the attention spawn and skill of a goldfish.

    The idea that having a single supremely optimal solution contradicts the notion of experimentation with different setups.

    Not building proper teams for you major bases is a failure on the player side and is indicitave of poor human resource managment, not a failure of the game. After all, resource managment IS what a proper commander would have to deal with. Simply removing the need for making such choices rewards lazy players with no attention spans, since they will always have everything they need (personel and materials) available at all times - this is in complete contrast with the basic concept of logistics AND in complete contrast to the whole "global strategic defense simulator"

    Base attacks were the least fun? Sez who? You jus have to do base attacks good with variosu degrees of severity, and not having it be an instant game over. I belive I posted a decent proposal of how to handle it, but so oyu dont' have to look for it, here:

    Every base should be attackable by the enemy. And not just by troops, but also air bombardment. This wouldn't destroy the base outright (since most facilites are underground), but would damage it, take it off-line for a while. Either the entire base could be unusable for a while (burried entrance?) or there could be a random dice roll to see which buildings were damaged, depending on how strong the attack was (how many alien craft and of which type were involved). Some buildings like hangars and airstrips would have  a higher weight to get damaged, since they are more exposed. To me this seems like a good balance as it's not TOO punishing, especially early on. You could also make it so that a base can be fully destroyed if bombed twice (again, giving the player time and opportunity to stop it with air intercepts)

     

 

EDIT: WTF is it with this forum and constantly messing up quotes?  I can't even edit them after. Why can't I see the post in code, with tags?

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 @TrashMan

1) Allowing multiple dropships. Firstly, this is more difficult to balance than simply having different dropship size; usually if one dropship can reach the enemy, 5 can. But if a 2-man motorcycle can reach the enemy, that doesn't mean a 12-man APC can. But yes, it definitely is possible to balance, just takes a lot of other mechanics. Secondly, I do like the idea of wildly varying squad sizes, it works very well in XFiles. Thirdly, you might want to try the 40k OpenX mod, it has squad sizes up to 50, which I find tedious, but you would probably enjoy that and OpenX in general. Fourthly 40K allows you to send flying HWPs alongside a dropship, and has dropships that are also interceptors, similar to ideas you've talked about.

2)Once again Charon never meant a literal teleporter. The thematic explanation should be something else, or nothing at all.

3) Dropships are different from teleporters when the escort metagame is interesting. But it's kinda not imo. Mostly you just retreat and send interceptors once you see enemy fighters. Actual escorts aren't strong enough to defeat fighters 2v3, at least in X-division.

4) Air bombardment is a modding feature in OpenX. I don't know of mods that have actually used it (most just ignore the air game), but people generally agree it's a cool idea.

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I played both the original X-Com and FiraXCOM and honestly, i like both base views, but i strongly in for multiple bases/dropships even though i used secondary bases just to store interceptors/base defences/radar mainly and up to 2 dropships mostly, like someone said already in this thread, i prefer having a more mundane and "realistic" approach to this game than cartoonish soldiers playing heroes. 

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When it comes to base defense missions, it's a feature I care the least about. You could make a battle outside of the base or a simple attack mechanics (e.g. power of attack/defense and assessing losses). Sometimes a UFO could land nearby and those would be like missions with higher difficulty levels. 

There are so many more important features that I wouldn't even know which to start with. Thus, I think adding this functionality would be a waste of time.

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On 6/17/2019 at 12:32 PM, Chris said:

Well, the shooting (and camera) mechanics in the game are much better suited to fighting along a horizontal plane rather than a vertical one. Line of sight and shooting between different vertical levels is always a bit of a nightmare in this sort of game.

Additionally, a side-on base view would lead to a map that was rather narrow ... a top-down base has no depth but plenty of length and width, whereas a side-on base would have plenty of length and depth but not much width. It'd be a lot like fighting in several corridors stacked on top of one another.

So you're right that it wouldn't actually be impossible, but I think the results of a base map generated from a side-on layout would be a lot worse than one generated from a top-down layout.

Thanks, this makes sense.

For side-on vertical base, I wouldn't expect line of sight and shooting to work between different vertical levels. I would rather expect elevators to move both X-com and aliens between levels, but fighting to be always in horizontal plane (or multiple horizontal planes at the same time). Your engine already supports multi-floor buildings and UFOs, as I understand.

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On 6/22/2019 at 8:14 AM, Ravn7 said:

When it comes to base defense missions, it's a feature I care the least about. You could make a battle outside of the base or a simple attack mechanics (e.g. power of attack/defense and assessing losses). Sometimes a UFO could land nearby and those would be like missions with higher difficulty levels. 

There are so many more important features that I wouldn't even know which to start with. Thus, I think adding this functionality would be a waste of time.

Actually, yes. Landing a UFO nearby and have a base attack outside the base could work really well.

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Besides, in classic X-COM I always wondered how they get right inside without a fight in front of the entrance to the base.

I can imagine a few scenarios:
UFO does some damage to the base and flies away
UFO does some damage to the base but is destroyed in the process. A player gains some alloys and other stuff
UFO crashes and it's more like a standard mission
UFO lands, leaves the aliens and flies away. Possibly, a player gets another chance to shoot it down. One last shot.
UFO lands and stays at the site
UFO lands and another one does the same. So a player gets a second mission after the first one with the same equipment.

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Besides, in classic X-COM I always wondered how they get right inside without a fight in front of the entrance to the base.

I can imagine a few scenarios:
UFO does some damage to the base and flies away
UFO does some damage to the base but is destroyed in the process. A player gains some alloys and other stuff
UFO crashes and it's more like a standard mission
UFO lands, leaves the aliens and flies away. Possibly, a player gets another chance to shoot it down. One last shot.
UFO lands and stays at the site
UFO lands and in a while another one does the same. So a player gets a second mission after the first one with the same equipment.

Also, in the game, there could be missions with a few UFOs landed. Like a squadron of three small ships or one bigger and one smaller. That would be something new in the franchise. 

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I personally like multiple bases, but there has to be some strategic play behind it.

My ideal would be to have to manage multiple squads of soldiers, each deployed from a different base. Multiple dropships as well. Have squads assigned to individual bases....and have the distance a squad/dropship has to deploy from a base actually make a difference.

It adds more strategic play to the game...and I like that. I do understand that it would require alot more work to support. I'm just talking about my ideal.

As an alternative, if we can't have that....I'd at least like to have soldiers require some downtime rest/rearm etc before they can be sent out on a mission again..... forcing the player to create and manage multiple squads.

 

 

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On 6/18/2019 at 2:42 AM, Max_Caine said:

There’s been considerable discussion about the possibility of several dropships, but I don’t believe that everyone is reading from the same playbook. From a mechanic and (if I understand correctly) a narrative perspective, the current model is that the dropship is teleported close to where the crash site lands, then the pilot lands the dropship and we proceed directly to ground combat. This instantaneous transportation of troops knocks the legs out from several reasons for having more than one dropship. If the time spent travelling between a base and the crash site is trivial, then the only limit on getting to all the crash sites are wounded soldiers and any accumulated stress and fatigue on both soldiers and the dropship. You don’t need several dropships to visit all the sites when you can teleport effortlessly backu-and-forth, picking up a fresh load of troops between each site. Currently there are no mechanics to prevent this from happening (no stress/fatigue or at least none that I have experienced). The dropship doesn’t have to worry about being intercepted (teleportation) and doesn’t have to worry about being late to crash sites (teleportation). The only value a new dropship would bring is increased capacity. To make using more than one dropship viable, there would have to be a deliberate effort to sabotage the teleporter, either through the introduction of mechanics that make the teleporter less and less valuable, or by scrapping the mechanic all together. Is that really what people want?  

Big vote in favor of dropping the teleportation mechanic altogether from me. Vastly prefer having multiple bases and dropships, having range limitations on them and requiring them to travel to mission sites on the strategic map. Just my personal opinion but I think that makes for deeper more meaningful gameplay decisions.

Where do you place your assets. What territory do you try to defend.

 

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