Milestone 1 Balance Thread

[Chris]

This is a general thread where you can post your thoughts on the overall difficulty curve of the game in our new Milestone 1 Experimental build. Does it feel just about right, or are there certain missions / enemies / weapons / etc that just feel off?

Please let us know what difficulty you are playing on, too!

[Skitso]

@Chris, updated Cleaner cell mission (I only tried the European one) kinda still feels a tiny bit too difficult. I try to play "iron man" style with regular "soldier" difficulty and have been losing quite a bit of soldiers. So with less than optimal, 7 unit team, it still offered quite a bit of challenge. Not knowing where the target is and needing to comb through the relatively vast level with high number of enemies made it pretty much impossible to reach the target before the reinforcements arrived. Lost almost half of my team, but eventually made it back to the choppa. Very intense mission and I did enjoy it quite a bit.

Most of the difficulty I feel is because I need to manage wide open level and multiple fronts as I can't know where the target is located. Might I suggest narrowing the level down and adding 2-3 floors to the main building. Target at the top of a building gives a natural path for the player to follow and would also give a nice change of pace to the often flat levels.

Either that or reduce enemies by one or two, or add one turn to reinforcement timer.

 

...or I just need to learn how to play.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Skitso

[Skitso]

Btw, are reinforcements infinite or is it possible to kill them all? Is it the same way in every mission with reinforcements? 

[Chris]

2 hours ago, Skitso said:

@Chris, updated Cleaner cell mission (I only tried the European one) kinda still feels a tiny bit too difficult. I try to play "iron man" style with regular "soldier" difficulty and have been losing quite a bit of soldiers. So with less than optimal, 7 unit team, it still offered quite a bit of challenge. Not knowing where the target is and needing to comb through the relatively vast level with high number of enemies made it pretty much impossible to reach the target before the reinforcements arrived. Lost almost half of my team, but eventually made it back to the choppa. Very intense mission and I did enjoy it quite a bit.

Most of the difficulty I feel is because I need to manage wide open level and multiple fronts as I can't know where the target is located. Might I suggest narrowing the level down and adding 2-3 floors to the main building. Target at the top of a building gives a natural path for the player to follow and would also give a nice change of pace to the often flat levels.

Either that or reduce enemies by one or two, or add one turn to reinforcement timer.

 

...or I just need to learn how to play.

Thanks for the thoughts. No, you can't ever kill all the reinforcements. It does sound like the mission is pitched at roughly the right difficulty there, given you still completed it and had an exciting time despite being down two soldiers at the start (probably the optimal play would just have been to hire another couple of soldiers and delay the start of the mission by 48 hours).

However, you are an experienced player playing on Soldier difficulty, so I'd expect you to find the game reasonably easy most of the time. I think that delaying the reinforcements by 1 turn might be worthwhile; probably best to err on the side of caution.

[Emily_F]

I agree with Skitso; that early in the game when your troops are useless, it's a bit tough especially for newbies. Not sure if it's a bug but I swear even when there is a good chance to hit they miss nearly all the time. I know it's probabilistic but something seems off 

[Kamehamehayes]

5 minutes ago, Emily_F said:

I agree with Skitso; that early in the game when your troops are useless, it's a bit tough especially for newbies. Not sure if it's a bug but I swear even when there is a good chance to hit they miss nearly all the time. I know it's probabilistic but something seems off 

What do you mean by "good chance to hit"? If you referring to hit chances around 60-70%, then it should still be very common for those shots to miss. In a game where the main way of killing enemies is by relying on a percent chance to actually hit your shots, unlikely scenarios will end up happening all the time due to how often you attempt to shoot aliens. I think the problem is people are relying on these "decent" hit rates to get the job done, but they fail much more often then people think (and it gets magnified if it takes more than one shot to kill an alien). 

I think the solution is for the player to get into the habit of always coming up with a backup strategy. They should get into the the head space where they question "if this shot misses its target, what are my options afterwards"? The player can potentially use various grenades to neutralize an alien before killing it on the next turn, perform a strategic retreat to get out of the line of fire temporarily, or various other plans that can save a soldier and prevent unnecessary risk. 

Of course, this line of thinking may not be very intuitive or common among many players. I think this is mostly me coming from other tactics games like Fire Emblem where 60-70% hit rates are actually considered quite poor and attempting it is a very unnecessary risk. 

Although I have not played milestone 1 (or much of v27 for that matter) yet, so I should play more of that before returning to this thread. 

[Chris]

2 hours ago, Emily_F said:

I agree with Skitso; that early in the game when your troops are useless, it's a bit tough especially for newbies. Not sure if it's a bug but I swear even when there is a good chance to hit they miss nearly all the time. I know it's probabilistic but something seems off 

Is this in reference to the Cleaner Cells specifically, or the game as a whole?

[Kamehamehayes]

After playing a little bit of the earlygame, I don't think that the game eases you into it as well as it did in v25 and v26. Ignoring the tutorial, the beginning mission in those versions only had basic cleaners with no special abilities and only had ballistic weapons. It was not very punishing and the player could learn from their mistakes and learn the basic mechanics of the game without the punishment of losing a bunch of soldiers. 

However, now the starting mission has sectons with magnetic weapons and psionic triangulation right out of the gate. Death is easy and casualties are almost guaranteed. I preferred the original cleaner mission to ease the player into the game before ramping it up with sectons, magnetic weapons, and the like. 

[Skitso]

Haha yeah the beginning is punishing. I play ironman and last playthrough I lost 5 soldiers in the first mission. I don't complain though. Losses and recovering from them is what this game is all about. Newbies (and reviewers) might think otherwise.

That said, I agree with @Kamehamehayes that the old starter mission we had earlier was a better introduction to the tactical combat and provided smoother difficulty curve. It also didn't reveal aliens so quickly, which I liked better progression wise.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Skitso

[Emily_F]

11 hours ago, Chris said:

Is this in reference to the Cleaner Cells specifically, or the game as a whole?

Now I have played a bit more of this playthrough, I'm gonna say the early missions are FAR too hard.  I just did one of the cleaner dockyard missions and it was HARD, even with cheating and on "Soldier" difficultly!!  The MIB dudes were well overpowered and there was loads of the blighters. And that was before the cleaners turned up.  

[Chris]

Seems like the first mission just doesn't have any difficulty scaling for some reason. It's always 7 Sectons, whether you're playing on the easiest difficulty setting or the hardest. I'll probably set that to range from 5-8 Sectons in today's hotfix then.

The same is actually true for the Cleaner Cell missions, too. I'll extend the reinforcements time by 1 turn and reduce the number of Cleaners by 2 if you're playing on Soldier rather than Veteran.

 

[Skitso]

What's peoples opinion about researching magnetic weapons currently? For me it doesn't feel useful enough as laser weapon research comes available like one mission later and costs only 1 day more research time.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Skitso

[SoftwareSimian]

I've never really gotten around to researching mag weapons, research is slow and by the time I can research mag I can do laser instead.

[Emily_F]

On 6/21/2023 at 6:57 PM, Kamehamehayes said:

What do you mean by "good chance to hit"? If you referring to hit chances around 60-70%, then it should still be very common for those shots to miss. In a game where the main way of killing enemies is by relying on a percent chance to actually hit your shots, unlikely scenarios will end up happening all the time due to how often you attempt to shoot aliens. I think the problem is people are relying on these "decent" hit rates to get the job done, but they fail much more often then people think (and it gets magnified if it takes more than one shot to kill an alien). 

 

I'm talking higher like 70-90%. I have had 4 or five troops take a shit load of shots (like 10 in total) with >60% chance of hitting, from well within range (even standing a few squares away) and they have all missed.  In this situation I get super pissed off and just Ctrl+Shift+K the bastard in a pique of rage.  

[Devland99]

I think the intention is to make players have both lasers and mag to deal with different enemy types but I don't see it incentivized enough in the current build to justify using both. Laser's are just too good with their accuracy buff. Maybe make the accelerated weaponry hit harder? Not sure what the balance could be done here. I am also noticing enemies on Soldier have an almost never fail to hit chance mainly the Caesans or Psyon's my mind is drawing a blank. Their pistols are dead eye accurate in the opening even behind cover. I also noticed compared to the previous game crouching behind cover doesn't seem to give you the same cover effect it had in the prior game though I am not sure if this is intentional. Either way it is shaping up quite well from when you granted me the playtest! 

[Chris]

At the moment Lasers are just straight up better than Accelerated weapons, unless you the Lasers haven't been upgraded and the target has armour - in which case Accelerated weapons do slightly more damage on the first shot due to their greater Penetration (but after the first shot the Laser is better again due to their greater Armour Destruction).

I think maybe the answer is to buff Accelerated weapons to be on par with basic Lasers in terms of damage, but for them to maintain their higher penetration. Overall I want Lasers to be better as they are more expensive and further down the tech tree, but I'd like Accelerated weapons to be a cheap way to increase your firepower at the start of the game and have Lasers be more of a long-term bet.

I guess ideally the player wouldn't have enough resources to build Lasers and Phantoms and Guardian Armour all at once, and would have to pick cheaper / less resource expensive options in at least some cases. But I suppose that'll probably happen on Veteran or higher naturally due to the cost of replacing armour when soldiers are killed.

[SoftwareSimian]

28 minutes ago, Chris said:

Overall I want Lasers to be better as they are more expensive and further down the tech tree, but I'd like Accelerated weapons to be a cheap way to increase your firepower at the start of the game and have Lasers be more of a long-term bet.

The problem is that research takes far too long (or the game progresses too quickly) that by the time I might even consider researching Accelerated weapons I can already research lasers, so why should I bother with Accelerated?

[Skitso]

First few months of the tech tree is so packed that researching something that is not absolutely needed doesn't feel a viable option - especially something that takes so long to complete. Maybe make it an either/or choise and make them equally good but with different traits?

Edited June 24, 2023 by Skitso

[Chris]

5 hours ago, SoftwareSimian said:

The problem is that research takes far too long (or the game progresses too quickly) that by the time I might even consider researching Accelerated weapons I can already research lasers, so why should I bother with Accelerated?

 

25 minutes ago, Skitso said:

First few months of the tech tree is so packed that researching something that is not absolutely needed doesn't feel a viable option - especially something that takes so long to complete. Maybe make it an either/or choise and make them equally good but with different traits?

I think buffing the Accelerated weapons and increasing the research time on Lasers, and maybe their Alloy construction cost, should even things out.

On Veteran the early game Sebillian crash sites and the armoured Cleaner Cell / Base missions are pretty tough with just basic weapons, so leaving a potential early weapon upgrade in seems fine to me. If you're good enough at the game to be able to skip it and still win then that's great, that puts you ahead in the tech tree.

[Kamehamehayes]

I think that the earlygame needs to be slowed down and smoothed up a bit in general. Like I said previously, I feel like this is the kind of thing that earlier beta versions (like v25 and v26) did better than in the current version. 

In those versions, mission progression felt a lot more smooth. You have the initial cleaner mission while they only have ballistic weapons, then scout ufo, then destroyer ufo, an abduction mission, and then probably the Cleaner Intelligence Hub followed soon by the Cleaner Hq afterwards. It felt more gradual and allowed the player to grow more accustomed to the game's mechanics and difficult before ramping it up as the player approaches the midgame. 

In this version, you get throw into the alien research mission immediately and then the Cleaner Intelligence Hub probably before the player does their first crash site. Then you get to go through various Cleaner Cell Missions and the progression seems to get out of hand quite quickly compared to previous versions and I feel like it needs to be slowed down slightly imo.

I felt like there were too many research projects in the earlygame all at once in previous versions of the game, and I think the problem got worse as more missions and projects were added. If the earlygame was slowed down slightly, I feel like this would somewhat make the research situation more manageable. 

As for accelerated weapons vs laser weapons, I feel like the small buff to accelerated weapons and a small alloy cost nerf to laser weapons sounds reasonable to me. I also feel like forcing magnetic weapons to be a requirement for laser weapons would also curb the problem slightly as now the player will always have access to accelerated weapons while laser weapons will now be the "optional" and "unnecessary" upgrade. 

[Skitso]

9 minutes ago, Kamehamehayes said:

I think that the earlygame needs to be slowed down and smoothed up a bit in general. Like I said previously, I feel like this is the kind of thing that earlier beta versions (like v25 and v26) did better than in the current version. 

In those versions, mission progression felt a lot more smooth. You have the initial cleaner mission while they only have ballistic weapons, then scout ufo, then destroyer ufo, an abduction mission, and then probably the Cleaner Intelligence Hub followed soon by the Cleaner Hq afterwards. It felt more gradual and allowed the player to grow more accustomed to the game's mechanics and difficult before ramping it up as the player approaches the midgame. 

In this version, you get throw into the alien research mission immediately and then the Cleaner Intelligence Hub probably before the player does their first crash site. Then you get to go through various Cleaner Cell Missions and the progression seems to get out of hand quite quickly compared to previous versions and I feel like it needs to be slowed down slightly imo.

I felt like there were too many research projects in the earlygame all at once in previous versions of the game, and I think the problem got worse as more missions and projects were added. If the earlygame was slowed down slightly, I feel like this would somewhat make the research situation more manageable. 

As for accelerated weapons vs laser weapons, I feel like the small buff to accelerated weapons and a small alloy cost nerf to laser weapons sounds reasonable to me. I also feel like forcing magnetic weapons to be a requirement for laser weapons would also curb the problem slightly as now the player will always have access to accelerated weapons while laser weapons will now be the "optional" and "unnecessary" upgrade. 

Completely 100% agree

[Chris]

There being a lot of early-game research is intentional, it gives you the opportunity to try different ways to approach the game rather than it being a case of each UFO giving you 2-3 projects and you'll have completed them all by the time the next UFO rolls around. I think it's cool that once you've played the game a little, you can beeline straight for Lasers or Guardian Armour or the Phantom / Dragonfly, etc.

As for the pacing - there's a couple of ways to potentially mix this up. Just kinda rambling out loud here, but I could just tweak the timings so there's longer between missions, which makes the pace more sedate.

Or I can try to shuffle the mission order round. But that's not particularly easy, as there's lots of conflicting things to juggle. The first "proper" mission needs to give Alloys and Alien Magnetic Weapons in order to set up the early game choices in the tech tree (e.g. either armour or weapons), and as the Cleaners have ballistic weapons it therefore needs to be an alien mission.

I guess it would be possible to add in another mission before that which is just a straightforward Cleaner deathmatch mission of some kind, and then I can make the second mission an abduction mission with aliens about 10 days later so it unlocks Warden / Accelerated weapons and it's obvious to people that X2 has some new types of mission in it. Then I guess mission 3 can be the intel hub, and 4 be the first scout.

But the problem with that is what the player is meant to research before / after that first mission where they're fighting Cleaners that don't really unlock any new tech. The only starting research is the Combat Vehicles one and that won't last all week. I could make Defender Armour something you research, but then I can't make it part of the starting loadouts to make it obvious to new players that certain types of soldier should use it while others should not (and then Warden Armour would come along to replace it literally a week or so later anyway).

[Kamehamehayes]

I see, that makes sense. Having the first mission be against cleaners would not inherently give more options for the player to research. Thinking about it now, the reason the initial mission was just against basic cleaners in v25 and v26 was because there were 3 initial starting projects right? Combat vehicles, defender armor, and air combat if I remember correctly. 

Although, I think that mission can be tweaked a little bit in order to yield more research projects. For example, this mission could have a mentarch and/or a couple of sectons (with ballistic weapons) near the end of it that would yield Xenobiology at mission completion. So the player will have researched combat vehicles and most of Xenobiology by the time the next mission appears and they are able to get research for magnetic weapons and warden armor.

Although if that mission is an abduction mission, the player would get access to alienium too right? I think that would be too much research to throw at the player so early in the game. I can't remember if a scout ufo gives alienium or not, but if it doesn't, then I think the order of Cleaner Deathmatch > Scout Ufo > Cleaner Intel Hub > Alien Abduction sounds like the cleanest solution imo. 

[Skitso]

Observer UFO with wraiths felt too easy compared to missions before it and the abduction site after it. There was only 2 enemies alive inside the UFO which felt anticlimatic. Is wraiths' cloaking effect strong enough? Is Servitor sturdy enough?

EDIT: first abductor I downed seemed way too easy also. At that point I got relatively experienced full laser/warden team with 2 guardian armors and I could just run through the mission.

The trend seems to be that the crash sites are all too easy compared to other missions in the game, especially the abductions.  

Edited June 25, 2023 by Skitso

[Skitso]

Modules still feel kinda OP as they weight so little and take so little space in the inventory. Feels almost cheating I can take both extra armor AND extra accuracy. I'd set the weight to something between 18-22 instead of the 12 that they seem to be currently.

Edited June 25, 2023 by Skitso