'Serious Damage' in air combat.

[Comassion]

Right now I feel like the air combat is a little bit backwards with the 'overkill' model in terms of nuanced tactical play.

At the beginning of the game, when you're not experienced, you need to exercise more tactical nuance in air combat to avoid over-killing UFOs and leaving no crash site.

Later on, when you're more experienced, the bigger UFO's become much harder to overkill, so you can just let loose with everything you've got. This has the odd effect of actually reducing your responsibilities as a tactician as the game proceeds onward to 'harder' air combats.

What could be done instead would better simulate the sheer size of these vessels, as well as introducing a different tactical element that makes air combat more involved, rather than less involved as ships get bigger.

When a UFO takes a certain amount of damage (perhaps enough to kill it now), it becomes 'seriously damaged'. This means it can no longer go back into orbit and is certain to crash at some point, but it stays on the battle map and can still fight you at reduced effectiveness. Once you've seriously damaged something, you'll want to break off combat with it (too much more damage could bring it down catastrophically and you lose your crash site), but you'll need to do it carefully as the vessel can still hurt you as its going down. The analogy would be to a damaged B-17 - if you took out a couple engines from one of those things, it could still be flying for minutes or even hours before crashing (and sometimes even make it back to base), but during this time its machineguns can still harass and harm attacking fighters.

I notice on the battle map ground combat that they've made allowances for varying damage levels of the UFO - you could tie that in to how much damage the UFO sustains while already seriously damaged.

Bigger ships can stay in the air while 'seriously damaged' longer than smaller ships, which means they'll remain dangerous longer than the smaller ships - thus leading to a greater need for tactical nuance (planning not just your attack runs but your exit routes) as you begin to fight larger and larger vessels. Something like a Scout can still crash right away and a Corvette can remain on screen for just a second or two, but a giant battleship can stick around for 20-30 seconds or so (or even minutes or hours, if you want to let people escape from the combat and then see where it crashes in the geoscape).

Alternately, instead of a timer, being seriously damaged can introduce a percentage chance per second that the craft will crash, leading to random amounts of time before a vessel is brought down. You could do the same thing with player craft - once it's below the 50% mark in damage it needs to get out or risk crashing.

[Gorlom]

Do you mean like the UFO icon starts blinking in the aircombat and crashes after a set amount of time while still in the air combat screen? Or do you mean that it continues indefinitely in the air combat and your planes need to retreat off the edge and return to the geoscape where the UFO flies around a bit before crashing (and the bastards will probably aim for crashing out at sea just to deny you the crash site... bastards)

It does seem like a ice idea but I think it could be balanced in other ways. Having the armaments (missiles) grow exponentially in damage, OR to make the overkill threshold be a set number instead of a percentage.

[Comassion]

Do you mean like the UFO icon starts blinking in the aircombat and crashes after a set amount of time while still in the air combat screen? Or do you mean that it continues indefinitely in the air combat and your planes need to retreat off the edge and return to the geoscape where the UFO flies around a bit before crashing (and the bastards will probably aim for crashing out at sea just to deny you the crash site... bastards)

The former would probably be easier to implement, as adding a 'crash timer' (or percentage chance) in the code for the air battlemap would likely be easier than adding it into the Geoscape (since that keeps the event self-contained in the air battle).

It does seem like a ice idea but I think it could be balanced in other ways. Having the armaments (missiles) grow exponentially in damage, OR to make the overkill threshold be a set number instead of a percentage.

I considered the second option here, but decided that it didn't make all that much sense realistically. Having the armament cause exponentially higher damage could work under the current model though, and keep players careful (though I'm also not totally sold on the 'manage your weapons for a good tactical experience' thing that's going on now in general).

For now, the best 2D tactical air game that I've played is Steambirds, and happily anyone can give it a shot since it's just a flash game:

http://armorgames.com/play/5426/steambirds

Xenonaut's air combat could do worse than emulate aspects of it. I like the sort of freeform turn-based thing they have going there, and they've got a ton of unusual craft to fight against, including much larger (and more dangerous) foes.

Edited June 14, 2012 by Comassion

[Gorlom]

I considered the second option here, but decided that it didn't make all that much sense realistically.

Screw realism!

Rule of fun and all that.

You could always argue that enough damage to cause a crash breaks the crafts hull (preventing exiting the atmosphere) and anything beyond that breaks the sensitive and volatile components (ie reactor) inside causing it to explode.

[Kaguya]

I'm not sure what the issue is. The only ships really affected by this are the Scouts. The smallest scout can be dispatched by a single F-17 no problems. The two sidewinders will leave it at 90%, and the cannon doesn't deal enough damage to blow it up.

The bit larger scout is left at 90% with 4 sidewinders, so a pair of F-17s can take it out no problem (as long as you roll on their torpedoes!)

IMO the Xenonauts air combat already is cumbersome enough without adding even more hassle to deal with into it, so I'd rather not complicate it even more, personally. I just wanna make my soldiers pew pew pew, not play MR RADAR PLANE-COMMANDER 3000 half the time (esp. the way the things currently are with most of the air combats being rubbish Fighter-cleanups)

[Gorlom]

The "issue" is that Goldhawk wants to accomplish something with the overkill threshold. Presumably the feeling of fighting a losing war that they have mentioned a few times. Making overkill a non-issue by allowing players to unleash everything they got and steamroll UFOs you take away part of that feeling.

As long as the common misunderstandings are cleared out or how you should play is better hinted in the air battle, it really shouldn't be that much of an annoyance or problem. Removing the penalty associated with the overpowering offensive approach makes the air battle kind of trivial imo, and probably would make it less fun and more tireing in the long run.

[Chris]

The overkill % is going up in the next build so it's a bit more forgiving. I don't really want to complicate the air combat any further though, right now my main concern is going to be making the combat more varied and making the alien craft a bit more distinct from one another in terms of armament etc.

[Comassion]

The overkill % is going up in the next build so it's a bit more forgiving. I don't really want to complicate the air combat any further though, right now my main concern is going to be making the combat more varied and making the alien craft a bit more distinct from one another in terms of armament etc.

I hear ya. Steambirds (link above) is definitely worth looking at in that regard if you haven't seen it - they did a great job with varied craft and the overall combat system, and it's short to boot.

[Gorlom]

Comassion I think the aircombat is based on steambirds. Chris is well aware of it at least since he has mentioned it himself in earlier discussions iirc.

[Comassion]

Comassion I think the aircombat is based on steambirds. Chris is well aware of it at least since he has mentioned it himself in earlier discussions iirc.

Ah, cool. I'm late to the party, thanks for the info.