Stories within systems in Xenonauts

[Aaron]

I have just read this interesting article on the strategy gaming blog Flash of Steel, and though it doesn't mention X-Com style games it could easily been written about them. The article is worth a read by itself, but is also a good opener for a specific discussion on Xenonauts.

For those not interested in reading the whole thing: it talks about random elements in strategy games and how these elements can prevent singleplayer strategy games from becoming boring and rote in the long term and also how they lead to the dynamic generation of "stories" in these games.

X-Com and its descendants are very good at using random elements to stay interesting after the player has mastered the core game systems. They are also notorious for being occasionally violently unfair, but interestingly these moments of cruelty are rarely as annoying as they are in other games; the crucial difference in X-Com games, I believe, is that almost all of the random elements can be adapted to by the player in some way.

This is what creates the dramatic tension of the missions, and prevents them becoming repetitive; even experienced players can find themselves in an unwinnable situation, created by a combination of random elements. Those dynamic "stories" the article mentions are created when the player find themselves in one of those no-win situations and then uses everything at their disposal to win anyway.

I'm interested in other people thoughts on this; do you agree that the randomisation of the player challenge is one of the key ingredients to the X-Com (and by extension, Xenonauts) formula? What are the ways they use random elements that work best and provide interesting but surmountable challenges? In which ways do they work the least well, simply being annoying with no way for the player to fight back?

My personal view is this: X-Com was released as "UFO Enemy Unknown" in the UK, and that title was very deliberate - the most important aspect of randomisation in the game isn't the inaccuracy of shooting, or the random maps - it's the aliens themselves. In ground combat, the real trick to winning is unmasking the alien force - once you have found out who they are, how many they are and where they are then victory is almost assured - the real challenge is uncovering that information before your forces are picked off from the shadows.

This consequently means once the player has, after a first playthrough, figured out the order the alien races appear in and their relative abilities the challenge is lessened significantly. I wonder if these elements could be randomised on a per-playthrough basis to increase replayability and maintain that fear of the unkown?

Perhaps the first time you play the intitial enemies are mostly Sectoid style aliens, and rely on long range weapons - but maybe the next time you play the game adjusts the stats of a different alien race, and gives them nasty close range weapons (and you meet the Sectoids-alikes later in a more powerful form). Maybe sometimes they will have weapons platforms, maybe sometimes hoards of weaker troops.

You could introduce a minor chance that an more powerful alien race could make a one off appearance earlier in the game than they normally would - so you shoot down a UFO expecting it to be full of Sectoid-alikes, but instead get a hive of Chrysalids-beasts - do you run away, fight them? Imagine if you fought them and won!

Perhaps you could even lock out entire enemy types in each playthrough - imagine playing through the game a second time and meeting an enemy unit, weapon or even entire race that you had never seen before!

Anyway, I hope this was interesting and generates some discussion. To be clear, I put this in general discussion because I specifically wanted to avoid it turning into a "We have decided it should be like XYZ in Xenonauts, Chris!"; I'm more interested in just talking about these ideas.

[Sathra]

The aliens in Xenonauts won't be quite like X-com though (well, maybe Apoc). There are a number of 'core' races, which act like grunts basically. They make up the main forces of every mission (and only 1 core race per mission I think). They also never stop appearing either, they just get tougher and better equipped. All the other races act as auxiliaries to the core races (this include vehicles), and I think Chris mentioned that there could be up to 2 Aux-races per mission.

Other than that, sounds pretty good. Maybe not the "locking-out" but changing the spawn rate, frequency per game and class percentages could be interesting (especially since Androns are apparently one of the Core races...).

[anotherdevil]

also each of the races have special characteristics that make them stand out. For instance the Androns don't crouch for cover, but are harder to kill. Sebilians are CQC specialists, and can recover from seemingly fatal wounds. Etc. So not only do you have to find the aliens, once you've found them your tactics may change accordingly, and how well this works with you current weapon loadout really can keep the game fresh

[Aaron]

That's cool - so it sounds like that kind of randomisation of alien forces will be much more prevalent in Xenonauts than in X-Com. I particularly like the idea of a different mix of alien forces in each mission, but with common "core" races; it should really keep the player on their toes.

[Jean-Luc]

Haven't read the article yet but when you mentioned randomization and how it can generate the game's story, I immediately thought of Dwarf Fortress and similar games.

I'd love to see an X-Com style game featuring that kind of dynamic randomization-based world.

Basically it'd need to be a sandbox game where you defend a randomly generated world/planet from alien invasion. Things like special places, events, technologies, resources, NPC aliens/factions, artifacts, end-game scenarios etc. would need to be seeded randomly but within certain parameters to make the game playable. It feels like a very difficult game to conceptualize but I dunno.

Edited November 26, 2011 by Jean-Luc

[Sathra]

Yeah, it sounds good but they can be incredibly hard to balance but keep fun (proper fun, not 'casual' fun).

Hmm, I can't remember if the Aux races are exclusively linked to different Core races...hope not. Well, maybe some can be, but not all of them.

[Aaron]

@Jean-Luc: This may not be exactly what you are looking for, but this chap is working on an X-Com roguelike which might feature those sort of dynamically generated systems: X@Com

I do hope they auxiliary types of aliens that will appear with each core type are randomised, either at the start of each ground battle or (better) at the start of each campaign.

To elaborate, the reason I keep saying these variables should be randomised per-campaign (by campaign I mean complete playthrough) is I think there is a bit of a weakness in the X-Com formula - specifically replayability.

Consider the campaigns in strategy games like Civilisation or Total War; these are games that are very replayable because each time you play you are choosing a different country, initial conditions, location and, to a lesser extent, tech tree. Playing as England or India in Empire Total War are very different experiences, for example.

X-Com is at a disadvantage here - every game you play is going to be similar; your forces, enemy forces, technologies etc... and that is why I suggest random elements which are set at the start of each campaign (even including locking entire pieces of the game from appearing) would provide an interesting way of giving each playthrough a unique flavour. For certain it would be a bold move, but I think the payoff when you play the game for a second time and come across an alien race (and by extension, technology) you have never seen before would be totally worth it.

[Sathra]

Would be better if they were randomised when the ship was generated. Its just odd otherwise. Could have a mix though. The 'reserved' Aux vehicles (I assume that there will be more vehicles than Aux races) can be randomly determined at campaign start, with some limits so you don't end up against the end-game-grade ones a month into the game. All the other Aux races and vehicles can be assigned on a per-mission basis. Possibly on a purely per-mission basis (certain vehicles ONLY appearing in particular mission types).

There's a time/financing constraint though to complete per-campaign randomisation. Specifically creating stuff that might not even be seen by most players isn't really a good expense, especially in a flagship game.

Edited November 29, 2011 by Sathra
fixin'

[anotherdevil]

Yeah.

Also the game can be randomised by you by building bases in different areas, and playing the game differently (more emphasis on cqc, or not save-loading etc.)

[Sathra]

And how well you actually do. The invasion will probably go slower if you do really well.

Could also add what X-com had for randomness. Every alien race had a chance to generate missions every month. Depending on the month the chances differed with the tougher races getting higher chances as time went on. This meant you could have a first mission against mutons (Happened to me once, lost 4 people and beat the muton unconscious with bullets). There's just a much higher chance of it being the easy aliens (Floaters/Sectoids).

[Aaron]

Would be better if they were randomised when the ship was generated. Its just odd otherwise. Could have a mix though. The 'reserved' Aux vehicles (I assume that there will be more vehicles than Aux races) can be randomly determined at mission start, with some limits so you don't end up against the end-game-grade ones a month into the game. All the other Aux races and vehicles can be assigned on a per-mission basis. Possibly on a purely per-mission basis (certain vehicles ONLY appearing in particular mission types).

There's a time/financing constraint though to complete per-campaign randomisation. Specifically creating stuff that might not even be seen by most players isn't really a good expense, especially in a flagship game.

Indeed, you would definitely want to have both per-campaign and per-mission randomisation together. Not knowing which enemies you will face in each ground battle is a great strength of the X-Com formula, it greatly extends the time it takes to "master" those battles, and thus the game remains fun for longer; extending those random elements to the entire campaign would again lengthen the time it takes to master the game, and thus increase the enjoyment one gets from it.

You are correct that locking entire races and tech trees out is probably not the right approach for Xenonauts, given the limited development resources; however if you wanted to implement some of these ideas you could simply make different variants of the existing races without needing to generate new art assets e.g. Sectoids could have one variant where they are weak individually, but more numerous; another where they try to rely on long range sniping weapons and another where they are fewer in number but posses more psionic powers. One variant of each of the races would then be chosen for each campaign playthrough.

That story about having to fight Mutons in your first mission is a great example of the kind of systematically created stories these kinds of random elements in a game system can produce - you now specifically remember that because it was so cool and unexpected.

@anotherdevil: The thing is, you can do those things in any strategy game. However people usually don't bother because in other strategy games like Civ or Total War the game designer gave the player built in ways to make new playthroughs fresh and interesting i.e. pick a different nation, fight different civs, have a totally different map etc...

(You mention stopping the player saving/loading the game; is that what Iron mode in Xenonauts is going to do? I don't think I've seen Chris say)

[Sathra]

Yes, iron-man mode only allows auto-saves at session end. It deletes the save when you start the next session of the campaign. Or something like that.

Also, I messed up my spiel. Its meant to be "The 'reserved' Aux vehicles (I assume that there will be more vehicles than Aux races) can be randomly determined at campaign start". Basically it means that some of the vehicles will only occur with one Core race, but which race is semi-randomly determined. So only the Caesans will have AlienVehicle2, only the Sebillians will have AlienVehicle3, etc, etc with AlienVehicle1/5/6/7 being able to appear with any Core race depending on appropriateness. So you wouldn't have the LightOfJudgement Warstrider appearing in Research missions.

Or maybe it would ONLY appear in those missions. But it probably shouldn't.

Limitations to the randomness are just as important as the shuffling. There's a part of being a devoted player that is enjoying knowing what will and won't happen. Could have the stat randomising as an 'advanced options' part of campaign creation.

[Chris]

There's nothing like this in the current system. It's a nice idea but I think the time spent on getting the balance right would be better spent elsewhere. At the moment I've not fully decided whether to pair off the core races with auxilliary units or not - probably the vehicles will be, but there'll be an element of crossover with the core races and the actual auxilliary races which might support more than one core race in battle. But yeah, not finalised yet. That's what the beta is for.

That having been said, I imagine we could add functionality so others can mod in what you've been discussing.

[Sathra]

I really would like there to be some element of randomness though. It avoid the whole: Mutons on a Terror Mission, ah, easy time. Because their Aux races were so crap.

I assume that the vehicles are Tiered? Could arrange them that way. Vehicles can appear with a certain list of races at an appropriate ticker level, but their appearance determined at mission creation (preferably when the ship spawns). So they can all appear with Caesans at some point, its just weighted towards certain vehicles.

[anotherdevil]

Depends on how the vehicles are piloted. If they are creatures in and of themselves they may fit better (storywise) with certain races. If they need to be piloted, then they should only fit with the species that would be able to pilot them. If they are robots (or piloted by special androns) they I see no reason they wouldn't be able to accompany all races (unless the very fact that they are robotic makes them fit better with one other race...

[Aaron]

As Chris suggests, many of these things could probably be implemented in a fairly simple manner as a mod. I haven't looked closely at the data files, but so long as the variables that would need to be modified are dynamically read from configuration files rather than hard coded it should be practical.

The mod could take the form of a launcher for Xenonauts; the first time it is run it swaps out the default configuration files with ones it has automatically modified to randomise the various enemy aspects we have been discussing. Then each time you run Xenonauts using that launcher it would keep those settings until you wanted to start a new playthrough, at which time you would ask it to randomise the configs again.

I'm not much of an application coder but I might well have a go at that, once Xenonauts has been out for a few months and the basic balance issues have shaken themselves out.

@Chris: as said, the best way to make sure that these kind of changes are be possible would be to ensure there are as few hard coded variables as possible. It would be no use changing the combat strength of each alien race if, for example, the game was hard coded with the ticker number they will always appear at or which other races/vehicles they will appear with.