General V24.6 Feedback

[Komandos]

36 minutes ago, Chris said:

As we've discussed already, I think I'm going to experiment with reverting the initial dropship down to 8 soldiers. You're not the only person who has mentioned they preferred the smaller teams at the start of X1.

And how many people didn't mention anything because the available team size seems normal (adequate) to them?

When a player chooses the difficulty of the game, I suggest giving the player the opportunity to choose a team size that is convenient for him. Someone likes an easier fight. Someone likes a harder fight. Someone likes the fight on the recommendation of the developers.

[Chris]

5 hours ago, Komandos said:

And how many people didn't mention anything because the available team size seems normal (adequate) to them?

When a player chooses the difficulty of the game, I suggest giving the player the opportunity to choose a team size that is convenient for him. Someone likes an easier fight. Someone likes a harder fight. Someone likes the fight on the recommendation of the developers.

The difficulty settings (once we set them up) will control the number of aliens, as this is significantly easier to change than the number of soldiers in a dropship. But it should have the same overall effect.

As to how many people silently prefer the 10-soldier dropship, I guess we'll find out after the next update. The size of the starting squad was set to 8 for more of development than it has been at 10 so it's not a change I've ever been completely convinced about.

[Solver]

On the dropship size, I like the idea of reducing it back to 8. I liked the early builds when it was 8 soldiers and I didn't like the change to 10. I've stopped complaining about that but with the early map sizes / alien counts, I suspect 8 will still feel better. Besides, the second dropship is available at a relatively early point in the game compared to X1.

Might need to reevaluate my approach to the Cleaner intelligence hub though. I have developed a very nice tactic for completing it with 10 soldiers, missing two would make that mission harder.

[Komandos]

If you look at the modifications that players create, you will see that all the modifications are trying to increase the variety of the game: modifications add new weapons, new equipment, new missions, increase the number of characters, personnel, and the scale of battles. If the game does not allow the use of modifications to increase diversity, then players find games with more diverse features.

The only obstacle that was in Xenonauts 1 and did not allow the game to get closer to UFO: 1-2 (from the point of view of combat tactics) was the inability to increase the number of the team to the number that was in UFO: 1-2. (modification of this was not possible)

I hope there is room for modifications in Xenonates 2.

In 2022, a lot of tactical games with a team size of 4-8 are going on sale. There are a lot of role-playing RPG games with a team size of 1-8 characters. Yes. It's very popular, but I want something new.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Komandos

[Chris]

3 hours ago, Komandos said:

If you look at the modifications that players create, you will see that all the modifications are trying to increase the variety of the game: modifications add new weapons, new equipment, new missions, increase the number of characters, personnel, and the scale of battles. If the game does not allow the use of modifications to increase diversity, then players find games with more diverse features.

The only obstacle that was in Xenonauts 1 and did not allow the game to get closer to UFO: 1-2 (from the point of view of combat tactics) was the inability to increase the number of the team to the number that was in UFO: 1-2. (modification of this was not possible)

I hope there is room for modifications in Xenonates 2.

In 2022, a lot of tactical games with a team size of 4-8 are going on sale. There are a lot of role-playing RPG games with a team size of 1-8 characters. Yes. It's very popular, but I want something new.

The game starts with 8 soldiers, but the second dropship holds 12 and the final dropship holds 16. Xenonauts 1 / 2 already supports way more soldiers than any similar game except openXCom.

I think going up to 26 soldiers like you could in the original X-Com is massive overkill in purely gameplay terms, and in practical terms it ends up making a lot of UI improvements impossible. There's just not enough screen space to display little info tabs on 26 soldiers, for example. It's already struggle with 16.

[Komandos]

1 hour ago, Chris said:

I think going up to 26 soldiers like you could in the original X-Com is massive overkill in purely gameplay terms,

With the game balance that Xenonates 1 had, the number of 12-16 soldiers was really enough. When rebalancing the game in the direction of increasing the number of aliens and the lethality of weapons, losses among the player's soldiers will increase. This is not critical on small missions to capture small UFOs. But this made it impossible to create too large-scale battles. For example: the final battle, or the battle to protect the Xenonauts Base from an alien invasion.

I tried to add more soldiers to the game by creating an additional interface for them on the control screen. However, this interface did not work. The task of finding a place on the control screen and placing the control button for additional soldiers there was the easiest task for me. The most difficult task was that: I couldn't get around the software limitation.

I'm not asking you to increase the number of soldiers for the main game. (This will require changing the balance of the game). No. I ask you to leave such an opportunity for future modifications of the game that players will create for themselves and their friends.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Komandos

[Komandos]

If the player is given the opportunity to sort soldiers into separate tactical groups (as is done in X-COM 3 Apocalypsys), then: 1- we will be able to appoint squad commanders and calculate the effects from their leadership; 2 - we will not need a very long tape of soldiers on the control screen.

[Grobobobo]

On 11/13/2022 at 11:21 AM, Chris said:

Regarding the increased squad size - I'm unsure if I'll keep it or not. The original reason is that alien weapons were meant to be more lethal than in Xenonauts 1, so a single shot would often kill a soldier like would happen in the classic X-Com games. In that situation having a couple of extra soldiers makes sense so the player doesn't get put in an extremely difficult situation due to a couple of lucky alien shots at the start of the mission.

But I suspect I've probably revised the balance a bit to reduce the lethality of the alien weapons (particularly against soldiers with armour) since I made that change. And yes, vehicles now only fill a single slot in the dropship too. So it might be worth moving it back down to 8.

Yes, I think 8 starting soldiers will be a good starting count. It's still pretty high, but low enough that you still want the dropship upgrades.
I definitely think that increasing the amount of aliens present, but decreasing their lethality so the one-shot isn't AS common is a good approach. Xenonauts 1 lethality was fun at the start, but as you progressed it became tedious because to minimize chances of it happening you needed to play in a pretty boring way.
As a side note, I hope that the alien special abilities will increase the difficulty in an interesting way, currently it seems that most of them are not implemented yet.

[Komandos]

21 minutes ago, Grobobobo said:

Xenonauts 1 lethality was fun at the start, but as you progressed it became tedious because to minimize chances of it happening you needed to play in a pretty boring way.

If the complexity of the battle increases, and the number and quality of aliens increases, then naturally, you have to spend more effort and attention on the game in order to save the lives of your soldiers, and the dynamics of the game are lost.

 

[Chris]

3 hours ago, Komandos said:

With the game balance that Xenonates 1 had, the number of 12-16 soldiers was really enough. When rebalancing the game in the direction of increasing the number of aliens and the lethality of weapons, losses among the player's soldiers will increase. This is not critical on small missions to capture small UFOs. But this made it impossible to create too large-scale battles. For example: the final battle, or the battle to protect the Xenonauts Base from an alien invasion.

I tried to add more soldiers to the game by creating an additional interface for them on the control screen. However, this interface did not work. The task of finding a place on the control screen and placing the control button for additional soldiers there was the easiest task for me. The most difficult task was that: I couldn't get around the software limitation.

I'm not asking you to increase the number of soldiers for the main game. (This will require changing the balance of the game). No. I ask you to leave such an opportunity for future modifications of the game that players will create for themselves and their friends.

OK. We'll have to see when we get to work on the mod tools. I'm not sure what would happen to the UI if we remove the hardcoded limits on the squad size. It might just be that certain UI elements don't work very well, or it might be that there's actual issues in the code because the entire game has been built on the assumption there's only a max of 16 soldiers. 

[Komandos]

8 hours ago, Chris said:

the entire game has been built on the assumption there's only a max of 16 soldiers. 

I was trying to create a modification for the final mission.

The mission modification was supposed to provide the player with a high level of drama and adrenaline from the large number of casualties among the warring parties. To do this, I needed four autonomous tactical groups of 6 soldiers each.

The first group of 6 soldiers was to attack right down the corridor.

The second group of 6 soldiers had to protect the rear from constantly attacking opponents.

The third group of 6 soldiers had to perform a combat mission on the left side of the corridor. (Destroy alien equipment).

The fourth group of 6 soldiers had to perform a combat mission on the right side of the corridor. (Destroy the alien equipment).

The number of aliens and the power of their guns were planned so that only 6 of the player's 24 soldiers could reach the final goal.

As a result, I was unable to create a large-scale and intense battle due to software limitations.