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I loved it so much :( (Air combat)


Changes of Air Combat System  

12 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you like the new air combat system?

    • Yes!
      1
    • Yes, but it needs changes
      4
    • Not really, could be better
      0
    • No, I prefer the old system
      1
    • No, I prefer the old system but better balanced
      6


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Hey people,

I looked through the forums and saw that quite a few people like the new air combat system... But when I look on youtube, most people complain about it, including me. I do understand that people want this game to be purely a turn based game, but as it is now, the combat is really dull.

It reminds me of old games like zelda or pokemon "it's very effective" style which I think is really not the theme of this game. The mini game we had in X1 was fun to slalom around alien aircrafts. People complain it was either too hard and you had to click too much, or too easy once you found out what you had to do. I don't know what difficulty you play but I found it always challenging in insane difficulty mainly because you don't have that much aircrafts because of lack of money. It got easier the more you reduced difficulty.

I suggest that you either add both feature and let the player decide what they want, or you keep the old system and tweak it a bit to make it more interesting. You could also make it dependent on difficulty. Like on insane difficulty, the alien can turn faster and has more hp.

I really don't know why you would scrap that feature completly... There are other features that you scraped but they are off topic and I'll discuss them in a different topic once I played some more.

Please I beg you, don't do this to me and many people who purchased your awesome first game Xenonauts 1 and who loved this system. For me this new system is like a dumbed down mini game, like "2 dimensional fight? Nah players are too stupid to handle that, let's make it one dimensional because they're so stupid" (No offense to anyone who likes this system, this is merely what I feel about this feature for me)

 

I hope the poll works. I purchased the game today and I immediatly had to make an account here to say this because I really like xenonauts but this breaks my heart :(

 

Links of people complaining: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQPQVvOd324

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6q-Bgf9nw0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcOAO97Z-NA

Edited by Crallux
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Seeing these videos i m kinda confused as to how air combat works.I dont say its bad or good because i havent played the game yet,but i want to ask why not just copy either original xcoms air combat?

 

If you want to improve air combat in some way or change it or whatever,maybe add pilots who have experience,eg an exerienced pilot with a less advanced aircraft can down a slightly better ufo

 

In the original xcoms you could put the latest weapons on the original interceptors but with one two hits down went the interceptor,even with the best ones you had a tough time downing those battleships

 

 

that said the game looks great,if air combat is the only problem then Chris and team did an awesome job

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1 hour ago, DREADNAUGHT said:

Seeing these videos i m kinda confused as to how air combat works.I dont say its bad or good because i havent played the game yet,but i want to ask why not just copy either original xcoms air combat?

 

If you want to improve air combat in some way or change it or whatever,maybe add pilots who have experience,eg an exerienced pilot with a less advanced aircraft can down a slightly better ufo

 

In the original xcoms you could put the latest weapons on the original interceptors but with one two hits down went the interceptor,even with the best ones you had a tough time downing those battleships

 

 

that said the game looks great,if air combat is the only problem then Chris and team did an awesome job

Sadly there are other issues which I didn't want to discuss here. But the base building has been scraped and a new system has been put in place. The combat system is a turn based mini-game, where you can move your aircraft and shoot the alien. The closer you get, the more accurate your weapons will be. You can't do anything like evade (maybe I missed it?) just a one dimensional fight which is for me really boring.

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@Crallux

Evading was basically used to get right behind a UFO then spam attack it. You would basically develop an optimal algorithm for every UFO vs craft combination, then spend two minutes repeating that algorithm for every fight. It didn't actually add depth once you knew what you were doing. Charon managed to make the airgame a tiny bit more varied in X-Division, but even he said air combat would be better if it was just autoresolved.

Yes, the current air combat is absolutely terrible. But that's like saying ground combat would be terrible without terrain + items. We really have no idea what they plan to add, maybe they will allow multiple ships with various active abilities. My only real concern is that it looks extremely slow right now, and they've said they plan to make it shorter, but really air combat should take under 1 min imo.

About the base-building, they will likely go back to the old system after community backlash. But their reasons for "scrapping" it were the same as the air game: it really didn't work in X1, so they chose to simplify it so they can focus on other geoscape stuff like strategic ops.

@DREADNAUGHT

OpenXCOM mods have the piloting mechanic where soldier stats affect craft stats. It doesn't add a whole lot, but it's neat.

In Xenonauts they try to give you more control over air combat. In the original XCOM you mostly just send your craft and wait for the battle to end, but the bright side is that you didn't have to micromanage something that has next to no strategy. I would definitely have auto-resolved combat if I ever made an XCOM-like. Maybe they just wanted complex air combat because it sells better.

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I didn't vote because none of the options really covered my feelings. I am not 100% on board with the current air combat model yet but I absolutely hated the X1 air combat. It was the absolute low point of the game for me so I am really happy they will be changing it. Bobit covers it pretty well above. If the current very basic air combat gets a few more feature passes and the kind of polish the rest of the game looks like getting then I don't see how it can fail to be an improvement. At worst I will continue ignoring the air combat and autoresolving every fight as in X1.

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Yeah, the X2 air combat in the current builds is indeed terrible but it's nowhere near finished and so it's impossible to make a proper comparison with the finished X1 air combat right now.

The next build of X2 has quite a substantial air combat upgrade coming. It's still not yet as complete as the X1 air combat you're comparing it to, but it's certainly an improvement over previous builds. In any case we can always revert to the X1 model if we want to, but honestly I think the X2 model is a much better foundation for an air combat system.

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You could make it feel more dynamic by upgrading audiovisuals. Similarly to classic X-COM where we had those radar waves and good appropriate music. Because as it is now, it just feels dull and empty. Even if it's not in reality.

 

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On ‎6‎/‎23‎/‎2019 at 6:22 AM, Bobit said:

@Crallux

Evading was basically used to get right behind a UFO then spam attack it. You would basically develop an optimal algorithm for every UFO vs craft combination, then spend two minutes repeating that algorithm for every fight. It didn't actually add depth once you knew what you were doing. Charon managed to make the airgame a tiny bit more varied in X-Division, but even he said air combat would be better if it was just autoresolved.

If an "optimal solution" made playing games pointless then no one would paly anything. There's always an optimal choice.

Complaining that there is na optimal solution seems very weird to me. Of course there will be. There are ways to spice it up visually and tactically (I talked about it before), but at the end of the day, there will always be an optimal approach. Same holds true for ground combat.

Should we drop ground combat completely because of that?

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Heck, lets get a bit more detailed. Air combat (and dogfighting) all rests on a set of simple rules that could be simulated, but that also requires roughly modeling plane performance.

It all comes down to speed, detection, manouverability (a broad category) and range.

What manouvers you want to employ and at which range you want to engage would depend on your an enemy craft and capabilities.

Capabilities of an aircraft would be things like nose authority (how easily/quickly you can bring your nose up), turning speed (air speed and air density at which your aircraft turns the best), climbing speed, endurance, thrust/weight ratio and weaponry.

If your aircraft has long-range missiles and good detection, you want to fly high (in thin air, good for missiles) and lob missiles while maintaining distance. IF not, you'd want to close the range while evading missiles (by going low, pulling the missiles into dense air where they will loose energy fast), and so on.

 

It sounds complicated, but it really isn't, as there aren't that many factors that go into it. Anyone who puts a few hours of research into how air combat works could make a decent and interesting system.

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4 hours ago, TrashMan said:

It sounds complicated, but it really isn't, as there aren't that many factors that go into it. Anyone who puts a few hours of research into how air combat works could make a decent and interesting system.

Heh - yeah, literally all that is required to make a decent and interesting air combat system is a few hours of reading. Why did I never think of doing that?

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15 minutes ago, Chris said:

Heh - yeah, literally all that is required to make a decent and interesting air combat system is a few hours of reading. Why did I never think of doing that?

A few hours of reading is barely enough to learn all of the subject areas you need a PhD in to fully make a decent air combat system.

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@TrashMan

If ground combat only rotated between ten different map+ alien combinations, would you play it? It would become tedious with an optimal solution for all the ten setups. The game would be solved sufficiently in hours. Ground combat has inherent variability to it because the setups are different. In air combat, they are not.

In your following point you emphasize detection and range. Those are geoscape-level air combat attributes. Making the actual fight between aircraft more or less automatic as it is in UFO defense does not remove those, in fact it emphasizes them. From my point of view, the geoscape part of air combat is the actually interesting part, the actual combat itself becomes quickly solvable.

As to your snobby sentence everyone is referencing: in general, thinking of a game design system is not  so hard. Implementing it is not nearly as hard as it seems so long as you're willing to completely cut graphics and other such things required to make it marketable. Making it work well with every other system is damn near impossible and the reason both of us haven't made a game. Unless of course you just copy an old game. So you're not entirely wrong. But mostly.

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2 hours ago, Chris said:

Heh - yeah, literally all that is required to make a decent and interesting air combat system is a few hours of reading. Why did I never think of doing that?

If you wouldnt have written that statement, i would have ><.

Edited by Charon
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I've tried the latest version (beta)

 

It's awful. I hate this new system. There's almost no interaction at all. You just set your orders and wait to see what happens. I might as well just autoresolve every time.

 

I really loved the old air combat. It was one of the things I thought Xenonauts improved on over the classic XCOM formula and to see it turned in this leaves me very dissatisfied and disappointed with the direction of this game.

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And look at the popularity of auto chess games :D

It will be changed.

Personally, I think the X1 air combat system didn't fit in a classic (non-RTS) strategy game. I'd be happy to welcome a revamped system.

Although it's not the most important part of the game so I can live with it.

Edited by Ravn7
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On ‎6‎/‎28‎/‎2019 at 2:42 PM, Chris said:

Heh - yeah, literally all that is required to make a decent and interesting air combat system is a few hours of reading. Why did I never think of doing that?

 

That came off a bit differently than I intended. I meant mechanically (as in, planning, paper gameplay model), it doesn't take a lot to figure out the basic dogfighting rules, as in itself it is not as complicated as most people think. I mean, in a way it IS complicated, but you get down to it is really isn't.

For a simple (not 100% accurate) simulation - several variables for fighter performance and knowledge of basic dogfighting manouvers. Finding the best way to implement them and programing it in takes naturally significantly more time.

 

 

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On ‎6‎/‎28‎/‎2019 at 2:58 PM, Decius said:

A few hours of reading is barely enough to learn all of the subject areas you need a PhD in to fully make a decent air combat system.

If you're talking about programing knowledge to make a game, yes.

If you're talking about phsyics, no. You don't need PHD's to understand the basics or air combat.

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On ‎6‎/‎28‎/‎2019 at 3:20 PM, Bobit said:

@TrashMan

In your following point you emphasize detection and range. Those are geoscape-level air combat attributes. Making the actual fight between aircraft more or less automatic as it is in UFO defense does not remove those, in fact it emphasizes them. From my point of view, the geoscape part of air combat is the actually interesting part, the actual combat itself becomes quickly solvable.

They are both geoscape and tactical/strategic attributes. Or are you arguing that weapon range and detection range are irrelevant on the tactical map? Pistol vs. sniper anyone? While your ground radar can detect an UFO, the fighters own radar and missile range are what counts in combat.

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@Trashman

I'm talking about fighter radar range being a geoscape-level attribute. It exists in UFO defense where air combat is autoresolved. That's my point. It's true I cherrypicked the parts you emphasized that were geoscape level, but I don't consider weapon range to be much more interesting in manual resolution than automatic. It's an interesting attribute in UFO defense too. That's my point.

Also... programming a game is not very difficult unless it's very simulation-based. In any case PhDs are barely relevant to game design (or many things really).

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