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V24 thoughts


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I haven't been able to get very far into a V24 campaign because of crashes but I still gathered some thoughts on this iteration. I'm once again really pleased with how the game is coming together - with far less quirkiness than X1, this is looking to be a classic in the genre. 

New UI

Great job with the UI rework! The soldier action UI is much clearer than before, and the best iteration so far. It no longer displays the soldier's flags but I assume that's just an oversight. Overall the understanding of what soldiers can do, and their status, is much better than before.

I would argue for removing the very common striped pattern from UI backgrounds, however. It's very noisy visually and doesn't convey the right thing to me, my association with such a pattern is "blocked", "not available", etc. As a purely aesthetic choice, I find it very weird.

One specific feature I'm missing is an indicator of whether there's enough TUs to fire my secondary weapon. Here's a fairly common situation - a soldier fired their main gun and has some TU remaining. Can I fire the pistol or not? As it is, I have to switch to the pistol to see that, it would be really nice to have some kind of indicator showing that it can be fired.

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Many new tooltips in V24 deserve praise. I especially like the accuracy calculation tooltip, it does seem to have some issues but the idea is great and adds some excellent transparency to the game.

Combat / balancing

One point I'll repeat from V23 - demolition grenades are too effective. I think the numbers were changed after my feedback in V23 but they're just as effective as before, i.e. a demolition grenade consistently takes down an entire wall. They should be effective at making new holes in walls / cover, not large-scale demolition. Related, I disagree with the decision to remove C4, I think it's more interesting, and thematic, to have demolition grenades for small-scale stuff (blow a hole in the side of a building) and proper demolition chages (C4) for large-scale stuff or reinforced targets (UFO doors, blowing up an entire factory wall, destroying a small building).

I've been trying to make the HEVY grenadiers work but they're useless in the current iteration of the weapon. Normally the idea with that kind of weapon is that the area of effect makes it useful even with near misses. Currently, grenadiers don't even score many near misses - often the shot just flies out of the map, and sometimes they fall short of the target, destroying some useful cover or even wounding the grenadier. Basically, the gun is way too unpredictable now.

With the latest tech tree changes, there's now more options for production at the start of the game, which is good but I'd tone it down a bit. I think having too many options available on turn 1 can confuse players in a game that already takes a bit to learn, so it might be better to limit immediate production to just two options (move stun weapons to later?).

Other thoughts

Actual varied mission objectives are really cool! Abduction sites need a reward for rescuing extra civilians (is there one I missed?) but the concept's great, and I really like having a mix between Firaxis Xcom 2 style timed missions that reward aggressive play and the more traditional Xcom crash sites.

For the first scripted Alien Research site mission that pops up at the start, I'd add a couple Cleaners in there, just for the story, highlighting how Cleaners work together with the aliens.

The effect from adding more scientists (building a third lab at the base) is confusing - it does seem to speed up research a little bit but it's quite marginal and there's no good UI explanation of how much you're getting per scientist.

Technical note - could it be possible that the game's Unity builds have too much debug stuff turned on, or that the game logs too much? Even with a very good PC, load times are quite long, and I know that just enabling the dev build setting in Unity, which you need for stack traces in cloud diagnostics, doesn't normally add that much overhead. Not a big deal all in all but I'm a bit surprised at how long loading and even saving takes.

Will update if I can manage to get through a few more missions somehow.

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I hope you don't mind, but I will echo/comment on some of your thoughts:

  • Agree on patterned lines, I was confused by it too.
  • Agree on demolition grenades being too effective for what they are - maybe its damage should be kept, but its radius reduced somewhat? I think when used against a building it should bring down the wall section it is at, not bring down the entire side of the house (the wall sounds are also not equalized with the rest of the sounds, resulting in an extremely loud 'wall was brought down' noise). Also agree on keeping C4s, but Chris has already agreed to that.
  • Agree on HEVY grenadier, I wanted to use it as a smoke dispenser to cover the advance of my troops but since the grenades go WAY off course when missing, it's too unreliable to use, especially compared to just throwing grenades normally.
  • I think you get some extra alloys for every civilian rescued in an abduction site.
  • I've also experienced long loading times, with sometimes the game freezing and/or crashing if I'm alt tabbed while it happens.

 

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One more ground combat thing, we have the return of a X1 problem - grenades are way too accurate. The only limitation for grenades is range (and obstacles), not accuracy - my soldiers can reliably land grenades where wanted, and the accuracy shown is often 100%, otherwise it's >95%. This shouldn't be the case, grenades should not be a more accurate weapon than sniper rifles.

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Thanks for the thoughts. I wouldn't play too much more given there's a hotfix coming tomorrow most likely.

Brief responses to some of the points raised below:

  • Grenade accuracy is based on range. If you're only throwing grenades at relatively short range than accuracy will be 100%, but it'll drop down to 50% at the edge of the throwable range.
  • Unfortunately there's way too much UI to even think about removing the striped line patterns. I might remove it from a few specific interactive UI elements (e.g. the weapon backgrounds) if it's actively confusing people but there's just not enough dev time left to rework the UI again.
  • I guess we could show whether you have TU to fire a weapon via the overwatch toggle button; we could visually darken the toggle if that weapon does not have sufficient TU to fire (and thus can't overwatch fire anyway).
  • I think the problem with demolition grenades is that explosions are hitting walls adjacent to the blast radius tiles, because walls share a corner slot on the tile grid with adjacent walls. So even if I set a grenade to only have a 1 tile blast radius, that would take out a 3-tile section of wall because it'd also hit the two adjacent walls. I guess we'll need to look at that, but not sure if the fix is going to be simple.
  • You do get extra Alloys for each civilian rescued at the abduction site - each deactivated tube is worth 3 Alloys and you recover all the ones you deactivate. This is mentioned in the mission briefing, but I'm guessing I've not made it clear enough.
  • Yes, maybe there is too much enabled regarding the debug stuff - but remember we're not using cloud based diagnostics, we're outputting everything to a local log. But yes, everything does certainly run much faster and more smoothly in the release version of the game.

 

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21 minutes ago, Chris said:

Unfortunately there's way too much UI to even think about removing the striped line patterns. I might remove it from a few specific interactive UI elements (e.g. the weapon backgrounds) if it's actively confusing people but there's just not enough dev time left to rework the UI again.

Yes, if dev time is limited for this, I'd recommend removing it from the weapon selector and the fire mode selector at least. That would get rid of the impression that those buttons are somehow unavailable.

22 minutes ago, Chris said:

You do get extra Alloys for each civilian rescued at the abduction site - each deactivated tube is worth 3 Alloys and you recover all the ones you deactivate. This is mentioned in the mission briefing, but I'm guessing I've not made it clear enough.

My fault for reading poorly, but I think an easy fix is to make "+3 Alloys" display above the tube when you activate it, similarly to how combat status text pops up.

24 minutes ago, Chris said:

Yes, maybe there is too much enabled regarding the debug stuff - but remember we're not using cloud based diagnostics, we're outputting everything to a local log. But yes, everything does certainly run much faster and more smoothly in the release version of the game.

(For the tech team I guess) - is there something unexpected going on like using LINQ to log stuff over collections of game entities, or even reflection anywhere? Asking because we also log a fair bit in Old World but the perf impact of that is negligible, and we made several unpleasant discoveries with just how much LINQ murders perf in Unity.

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1 hour ago, Chris said:

Unfortunately there's way too much UI to even think about removing the striped line patterns. I might remove it from a few specific interactive UI elements (e.g. the weapon backgrounds) if it's actively confusing people but there's just not enough dev time left to rework the UI again.

I like the new UI too, but I was also confused by the stripy background with the weapons at first, also thinking it meant they weren't working.  Would be good to have them if you have run out out TUs to fire them though (maybe colour coded if that isn't a mission?) 

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OK, thanks. I'll have a chat to the UI artist and see if there's a better alternative we can come up with for the weapon / fire mode element that doesn't use stripes, as it sounds like that's the area where people are experiencing the most confusion.

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Those patterns have been in the game for ages, though - e.g. the topbar settings button, speed buttons and the Geoscape launch aircraft / construct base / funding report buttons all use that basic style. Did they not give you the same reaction?

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In some places it just feels like an aesthetic choice, but others like the Recruit Soldiers button definitely feel wrong.

I'm trying to figure out why and I think it has to do with UI conventions and the button state changing. When I open the Recruit Soldiers screen, the button is inactive. So I register its current appearance as inactive. Then I select a soldier, the button should be active but it's still displaying the same stripes... instead there's a very slight change in the shading. Going from just the picture I'm posted, I'm sure most people would interpret it as an inactive button due to e.g. not having the money.

So part of the problem is the pattern itself, and part is that the distinction between active and inactive buttons is really subtle. I like having a more subtle UI but buttons changing to active should be much clearer.

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On 10/13/2022 at 6:21 PM, Solver said:

(For the tech team I guess) - is there something unexpected going on like using LINQ to log stuff over collections of game entities, or even reflection anywhere? Asking because we also log a fair bit in Old World but the perf impact of that is negligible, and we made several unpleasant discoveries with just how much LINQ murders perf in Unity.

It's purely a result of extremely excessive logging (with I/O) we're doing during loading because we're trying to pin down a multithreaded bug inside Unity Engine when it comes to loading from asset bundles. Besides that, the level creation process hasn't been optimized yet because the structure of the level was very much still being changed (even now). 
The primary problem with LINQ in Unity is the memory allocation & subsequent GC that's just terribly slow - a good resource with regards to that (and allocationless LINQ libraries): https://www.sebaslab.com/zero-allocation-code-in-unity/.

With Old Worlds I hope that you're on 2021 LTS so you can at least use C# 9 & Span, sadly we're stuck on an old version of Unity :D

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If you're trying to find a bug within Unity itself, you're braver than I am!

50 minutes ago, Gijs-Jan said:

The primary problem with LINQ in Unity is the memory allocation & subsequent GC that's just terribly slow - a good resource with regards to that (and allocationless LINQ libraries): https://www.sebaslab.com/zero-allocation-code-in-unity/.

Oh yes, I'm familiar with that article :) The reason I asked about LINQ is that I'm seeing a few hitches here and there that feel like the main thread having a spike of something, so I had to mention LINQ because it causes the garbage collector to occasionally do that kind of stuff, but sounds like you've already managed to keep allocations to a minimum.

53 minutes ago, Gijs-Jan said:

With Old Worlds I hope that you're on 2021 LTS so you can at least use C# 9 & Span, sadly we're stuck on an old version of Unity :D

We're on 2020 LTS right now. I tried updating to 2021 a few weeks ago but it turns out 2021 has some kind of bug in the UI system that makes Unity hard crash as soon as out main UI canvas loads, so waiting for Unity to patch that one. That's probably karma for the earlier 2019 -> 2020 upgrade, which was perfectly smooth for us.

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A couple more thoughts.

I know grenade arcs are an incredible pain in the rear, but I find some of the current arcs unsatisfying. You can throw grenades over many tiles of intervening cover, such as over a building or over one of those jungle plant clumps on a tropical map. Such a throw means the arc would be very high at its highest point, which indeed the graphical preview confirms, but those arcs are well beyond what seems realistic. It just messes with my expectations as a player, on both sides. I was on the receiving side of a very surprising Wraith grenade on a jungle map, and I several times found my soldiers being able to make throws that intuitively felt impossible.

A height ceiling might be in order there - grenades are powerful in any case, and they probably work better if they're limited to paths that are somewhat realistic. Throwing grenades over walls or hedges is good, being able to throw them over wide buildings is too much. It's a grenade, not a mortar. 

On the economy side, I'm getting the feeling that manufacturing is impossible to keep up with. There's a lot to manufacture and, having built a third Workshop at my main base (with adjacency bonus), I'm constantly behind. It's great that you have to pick priorities and can't build everything easily, but I am not sure if the balance is right. Even the basic Angel interceptor is buildable (unlike X1), and we have to build aircraft weapons as well. Early on we get access to Accelerated guns but building a full set of those is slow so more gets researched, and some time into a campaign I find myself very behind on manufacturing. I don't have a full set of the latest weapons for my team, I don't have Alenium missiles on all my planes, I can't even think about upgrades like Alenium Generators.

Perhaps that's intentional or I'm not playing right, but my intuition is that manufacturing is about 20% too slow - though I certainly love that it's overall tougher and requires more planning than X1.

Stunning aliens is weird, you can have a nearly-dead alien survive smoke inhalation and stun gun fire. I understand they have different health/stun pools but it would feel more intuitive if the stun pool also dropped as their health drop, to some extent. A badly wounded alien shouldn't be too difficult to stun.

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1 hour ago, Solver said:

A couple more thoughts.

I know grenade arcs are an incredible pain in the rear, but I find some of the current arcs unsatisfying. You can throw grenades over many tiles of intervening cover, such as over a building or over one of those jungle plant clumps on a tropical map. Such a throw means the arc would be very high at its highest point, which indeed the graphical preview confirms, but those arcs are well beyond what seems realistic. It just messes with my expectations as a player, on both sides. I was on the receiving side of a very surprising Wraith grenade on a jungle map, and I several times found my soldiers being able to make throws that intuitively felt impossible.

A height ceiling might be in order there - grenades are powerful in any case, and they probably work better if they're limited to paths that are somewhat realistic. Throwing grenades over walls or hedges is good, being able to throw them over wide buildings is too much. It's a grenade, not a mortar. 

On the economy side, I'm getting the feeling that manufacturing is impossible to keep up with. There's a lot to manufacture and, having built a third Workshop at my main base (with adjacency bonus), I'm constantly behind. It's great that you have to pick priorities and can't build everything easily, but I am not sure if the balance is right. Even the basic Angel interceptor is buildable (unlike X1), and we have to build aircraft weapons as well. Early on we get access to Accelerated guns but building a full set of those is slow so more gets researched, and some time into a campaign I find myself very behind on manufacturing. I don't have a full set of the latest weapons for my team, I don't have Alenium missiles on all my planes, I can't even think about upgrades like Alenium Generators.

Perhaps that's intentional or I'm not playing right, but my intuition is that manufacturing is about 20% too slow - though I certainly love that it's overall tougher and requires more planning than X1.

Stunning aliens is weird, you can have a nearly-dead alien survive smoke inhalation and stun gun fire. I understand they have different health/stun pools but it would feel more intuitive if the stun pool also dropped as their health drop, to some extent. A badly wounded alien shouldn't be too difficult to stun.

The stunning thing is tricky. A unit is stunned any time the accumulated stun damage exceeds their modified max HP, so injuring an alien reduces the stun damage required to stun them by about 50% of the damage taken. We used to have a simpler system where if stun damage exceeded HP it would cause the unit to fall unconscious, but that basically meant if an alien had taken any damage from a stun weapon then they would frequently end up unconscious after being shot with a normal gun.

I'm open to suggestions here. Potentially we could add a little stun damage to conventional weapons, or we could try and change the formulae in some way.

For the grenades we can fairly easily change the arc stuff now. There's a maximum length of the arc in place now, but obviously if you throw 3 tiles rather than 13 tiles then that allows you to have an extremely tall arc. So maybe we just need to put a maximum height in place too.

Regarding the engineering stuff - I think you'd have to tell me what you're building, how far you're in the game and how many crash sites you're doing before I can comment on balance. It might just be that our playstyles are very different.

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@ChrisPersonally, I think the grenade arcs are fine as they are.  Regarding stunning - I have found the stun gun to be a waste of space; I hit a standard secton with 6 shots and it was still standing so I gave up and stabbed him to death lol.  Also, the suppression mechanic doesn't really seem to work well.  My own troops get suppressed all the time even from fire from my own troops, but it is very uncommon for even heavy weapon fire to make even weak aliens get their heads down.  I recall a discussion about this forever ago when we were talking about heavy weapon accuracy.  The point you made was that the point of them was to give high suppression, but I don't find it does.  The same should go for grenades/rockets!

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Ah, the idea of decreasing stun endurance with HP is what I wanted to suggest, but seems like it's already in place, perhaps just with suboptimal numbers. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that e.g. a 60-HP alien reduced to 5 HP will have a stun threshold of roughly 30 HP (original 60 reduced by ~50% of the 55 damage taken). That would explain my observations why the alien can still survive smoke or a stun gun shot (have to agree with Emily that they're really weak now, even accounting for the fact that stun batons are meant to be better). Perhaps a unit's stun endurance could be limited to, say, three times their current HP, in addition to limiting by max HP. If I have badly wounded an alien who's barely alive at 5 HP, it seems the alien should be stunned very easily. Might also be good to reduce the stun effect of smoke and instead let flashbangs have some stun.

A max height for grenade arcs seems like a good idea to me - I'll post screenshots of some arcs I find weird when I encounter them.

I'll get a better sample size for the engineering stuff eventually, but my bottleneck is the air force upgrades in the fourth month - with the time it takes to build a couple extra planes and weapons for them, it's a very slow process. With three workshops, regular infantry weapons like Laser Rifles take more than 2 days to produce per gun. I'm talking about the time specifically, I haven't been having alloy shortages or even many money shortages, my workshops have been producing stuff nearly constantly but even so it seems they're unable to keep up with the demand. Maybe I'll experiment with expanding production even more by setting some up at the second base - wanted to put this out there but I'm not ready to definitively state that production is too slow.

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Interesting. Yeah, the stun gun is meant to be weaker than the stun baton but maybe I've made it a bit too weak then.

I wonder if a fix for the stun might be to cause a unit to fall unconscious if they take stun damage and the accumulated amount exceeds the current HP. Just for clarity - if a unit is on 20 stun damage and gets reduced to 5 HP, they wouldn't be stunned until they took more stun damage (but even 1HP of stun damage would knock them out). This would prevent units being knocked out by non-stun weapons when they've taken previous stun damage, which the scenario I want to avoid (because it feels weird). Any thoughts on that?

@Emily_F so regarding heavy weapons specifically, I've kinda changed my view on that over the years and currently the LMG is meant to be balanced to be a more effective combat weapon and less reliable at suppression. That's the idea behind having a 3-round burst you can still use after moving a fair distance, but also the long 10-round burst if you're stationary.

The fact I've become increasingly unsure if suppression actually adds anything as a mechanic probably colours my opinion here. I think it's good that you can do it via flashbangs, particularly as it'll disable a number of the alien racial abilities we'll be introducing in the next proper build, but I'm not sure if it makes the game more fun if you're able to suppress units with normal gunfire.

But that's a long winded way of saying I should probably take another look at suppression given I've been avoiding doing it up to now. It's now being calculated based on how close the bullets pass to the target in 3D space. @Solver do you remember how it worked in X1? Initially it just applied the suppression directly to the target no matter where the bullets went but then I think we started applying it around the impact point of the bullets, didn't we?

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47 minutes ago, Chris said:

I wonder if a fix for the stun might be to cause a unit to fall unconscious if they take stun damage and the accumulated amount exceeds the current HP. Just for clarity - if a unit is on 20 stun damage and gets reduced to 5 HP, they wouldn't be stunned until they took more stun damage (but even 1HP of stun damage would knock them out). This would prevent units being knocked out by non-stun weapons when they've taken previous stun damage, which the scenario I want to avoid (because it feels weird). Any thoughts on that?

This sounds like an excellent solution to me. It accomplishes what feels right to me (near-dead aliens being easy to stun) and avoids the stunned-by-actual-guns problem.

On suppression, I'm surprised you're suddenly having second thoughts. Going back to X1, I thought suppression was one of the clear major improvements compared to the original X-Com. It's a very useful tactical tool, you spend some actions that are unlikely to kill the alien but you weaken the alien for the next turn. Suppression makes them fire less on their turn, and eliminates reaction fire, so it's great for situations when you cannot kill the alien outright.

It mostly works the same way in the final version of X1, each bullet applies a (small) amount of suppression along its trajectory, and then I think a bit more around the impact point. So the trajectory suppression lets you suppress your own soldiers by firing too close to them, and the impact-point suppression means you're likely to suppress the target by hitting the ground in front of it with a few bullets.

I like gunfire suppression as well as long as it's a dedicated gun / fire mode. The current LMG is pretty good IMO with two fire modes, but the 10-round mode is a bit too weak at suppression and the 3-round mode a bit too weak at actual combat. I'd make the 3-round burst more accurate, boosting it in a direct combat role, and I'd make the 10-round mode more reliable at suppression, though I think the current 10-round burst is almost good enough at it.

X1's mechanics resulted in the occasional suppression from concentrated non-LMG fire, too. That doesn't really feel important but an Xcom-style game benefits from such rare interactions.

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Thanks. I think what I dislike about suppression is that it feels like a "win more" mechanic to me - if you encounter an alien and have 3-4 troops nearby, you're probably going to kill the alien and if not then it'll end up suppressed just as a result of you shooting at it normally. I don't mind it so much if it's a choice where the player is deliberately choosing to use a less powerful attack to get the benefits of suppression.

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I agree - but I think you can get it to a fun place instead with numbers tweaks only. If normal weapons (not LMGs which are for suppression) don't do enough suppression to suppress aliens most of the time, but instead it happens occasionally under mass fire - think once or twice per campaign - then it goes from a "win more" mechanic to a "saving throw" mechanic, where your initial failure suddenly has a silver lining. That's similar to soldier revival mechanics then, which would be a very bad feature if the rate was too high but otherwise provide a fun saving throw.

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Tangentially related to suppression, can we have the return of the X1 feature where aliens started with half their TUs on the first turn of a combat mission? In X2 especially, aliens are often within sight of the dropship and it is IMO annoying to shoot at them and be immediately hit with reaction fire. Later on reaction fire is perfectly fine but feels more frustrating than challenging on the first turn of some missions.

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I guess I'll put my two cents in about suppression. Keep in mind, I've only played the recent demo, and not any closed beta build of any kind. I went over some of my thoughts in the demo thoughts topic, but I'll expand on it a little bit here. 

In X1, I never really saw suppression as something the player can use to benefit their fight against the aliens. It was never reliable enough to trigger whenever I wanted to, with the exception of flashbangs, and it was easier to just kill the alien outright. Thus, suppression by gun fire was never a strategic consideration for me because I have to assume that it won't happen because of how unreliable it is.

I also think that suppression was a "win more" mechanic, but not for the player. I often got ambushed by the aliens and they seem to always suppress me when I am on the backfoot. I have very little means of coming back from an ambush because my soldier do not have the tus to do much. Also, it is not uncommon for my soldiers to be suppressed 2 turns in a row if they don't die first. 

The mechanic does not benefit the player very much imo because it is too unreliable for me to use consistently and too likely to occur when it is the alien turn. 

I also saw a little bit of this happen in the recent demo, but to a smaller extent. The aliens suppressed me much more often than I did to them. 

I think suppression should be rebalanced to allow the player a little more control over the mechanic in some way. Even if it makes the game easier somewhat, I think it would be good to allow the player to better make use of such an important mechanic. 

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@Chris, regarding suppression discussion, I agree with @Solver. It worked nice enough in X1 and would be quite easy to tweak the balance from there. Artificially limiting suppression to flashbangs (and similar) just feels too gamey and something I'd expect to see in a more board game styled games like Firaxis' Xcom. 

 

I'd also argue that changing starting dropship's unit capacity from 10 to 8 would lessen the "suppress to win" situations as player wouldn't have superiority regarding unit numbers quite so often.

Edited by Skitso
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I personaly like the Version-Upgrades which get done after the big Fighting-Maps / Base-Refit (V.14 or so) and other big Refits (in one of the latest V.19 or so). It´s to long to remember what Main-Version it was.

There the Game make great Steps forward after the first big Changes in the Base- / Fighting-Maps-Refit get done. Sadly the planded Base-Stile (which were originaly planed in Kickstarter) couldn´t be done, but therefore we get other big improvements in the Game to the Rivals (old X-Com-Row, Phoenix Point, new XCOM [which get an big Upgrade in the next Years with an evtl. outsourced Firaxis-Studio] and UFO-ET-Row [which is in an big WIP too for both Games]).

Like explained in other Forum-Parts here, Xenonauts 2 have to be an Cracker against the Doable direct Rivals [new XCOM, Phoenix Point and UFO ET-Row]. Against the newest Game of that Gerne "Terra Invicta" we and the other direct Rivals can´t think to be competitive. In that Case we have to think in smaller Bread.

Since the 2 big Refit-Versions Xenonauts 2 did big Steps with the existing Features and so far implemented Features [Specials in Base-Management / Soldier-Management / Vehicle-Management incl. Fighters; more different Missions, an cool Intro] and much more. It´s still in WIP and everything can happen like it get done with V.24-Reworks here & there.

The direct Rivals don´t sleep and looking too what Goldhawk is doing. So we all (Founders, Beta-Testers and Devs) have to bring out the best Groundwork we can do; later on the Community-Feedback from the Early Access will be integrated like it get done with U-Boat in Finetuning, more new Features, overseen Bugs to put out an genius Game as Final.

What I mean with that is following: Both global Player-Games [new XCOM / Phoenix Point] have shown what is doable with the new Technology, but haven´t used it fully.

There are only 2 Studios which can make it better. Goldhawk with Xenonauts 2 and Chaos Concept with the UFO ET-Row. Both try to integrate the best possible Features [Modular Vehicles / Modular-Fighters / Transports etc.] incl. Geoscape-Options [Base-Management, Base-Buildup, Resource-Management etc.] for the conform Storyline. If they get fully finished the 2 Game-Storyline from UFO-ET-Series and the Storyline from Xenonauts 2 incl. integrated Features can be compared. Both Companys go an differnt way but it looks that both have the same direction:

Chaos Concept have sourced out every old Parts which blocked the first Game [Geoscape, Base-Defense, Soldier-Weapons, Vehicles, Enemys, Base-Buildups (the Surprise and Difference can be seen in UFO 2 ET which is only the beginning) and much more] as well as Refited them completely to make both linked Games [UFO 2 ET+ and the WIP UFO 1 ET Platinum Edition] more interessting / fun for the older Gamer-Generation and the new Gamer-Generation.

Xenonauts 2 is going an similar way [modular Soldiers, Vehicles incl. Aircrafts, Enemys, Missions (which are a new Novum in that Gerne with V24), Geoscape etc.] but with some differneces with integrating older funcitional Features [Base Concept from X1 with some light Upgrades, the old Base-Defense Concept against attacking UFOs, the older working upgraded Airfight]. 

Short said: The Devs from Goldhawk and Chaos Concept have evaluated the signs of times correctly. So we Players, Founders and Testers have to disband from an 30 Year+ old thinking which get integrated in Xenonauts 1 (2014) as the last Game and UFO 1 Standard (2007) / Gold-Upgrade (2010) with that outsourced Standard and going with the Time.

For an Development-Production-Test from both Companys it was fully OK, but if they wanna come forward they have to gear on new XCOM-Row and Phoenix Point and overflow them with technically integrateable new Features, already existing refited Features, more Storyline, better Gameplay and so on.

 

Last but not least since a short time we have an new Opponent on the Market. The big Modders for new XCOM-Row with "Long War" brought out their first Game called Terra Invicta. It´s a Hybrid from the 4X-Part, a lot of Text for Reading as well as playing on Earth & the Sol-System. From the Storyline belongs it on Aliens & Humans too, but wich a huge Difference. It affect the normal Human vs. Alien-Games inderictly, but show what is doable with the Technology we have today. 

Evtl. it´s an look worth. I personaly haven´t played it yet, but for Inspiration it could be of Interesst too.

 

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On 10/19/2022 at 7:32 AM, Kamehamehayes said:

I think suppression should be rebalanced to allow the player a little more control over the mechanic in some way. Even if it makes the game easier somewhat, I think it would be good to allow the player to better make use of such an important mechanic. 

I agree

The probability of suppression should depend on the bravery of the soldier. With a soldier's high bravery, suppression should not work.

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