Base defense missions and how to make them better

[Skitso]

I love base defense missions - in theory at least. They are tough, tense and offer nice variation between offense oriented missions.

 

However, current X2 base defense missions are somewhat dull and one note assaults where the bulk of the conflict is often resolved in one huge, non tactical firefight in on one or two of the hangars. Here's few thoughts to improve them:

• Add a command room to defend like in X1
• Aliens should have other objectives than to just kill all Xenonaut units like destroy rooms to disable them so the player needs to repair them later, assault command room for direct loss, kill scientists etc. to force player to be active defending them.
• Aliens should have few free turns at the start to better spread out.
• AI improvements needed of course.
• Room design is a bit dull and repetitive. Especially with adjacency bonuses, you often have three or four identical rooms side by side which looks fake and makes gameplay boring.

On geoscape, UFO's on the base attack mission should spawn later in the wave to be more of a threat and be possibly companied with air superiority UFO's. (Same with terror and base build missions which spawn too infrequently)

Thoughts?

Edited July 27, 2023 by Skitso

[Boris Eysbroek]

3 hours ago, Skitso said:

I love base defense missions - in theory at least. They are tough, tense and offer nice variation between offense oriented missions.

 

However, current X2 base defense missions are somewhat dull and one note assaults where the bulk of the conflict is often resolved in one huge, non tactical firefight in on one or two of the hangars. Here's few thoughts to improve them:

• There's no command room to defend like in X1
• Aliens should have other objectives than to just kill all Xenonaut units like destroy rooms to disable them so the player needs to repair them later, assault command room for direct loss, kill scientists etc to force player to be active
• Aliens should have few free turns at the start to better spread out.
• AI improvements needed
• Room design is a bit dull and repetitive. Especially with adjacency bonuses, you often have three of four identical rooms side by side which looks dull and makes gameplay boring.

On geoscape, UFO's on the base attack mission should spawn later in the wave to be more of a threat and be possibly companied with air superiority UFO's. (Same with terror and base build missions which spawn too infrequently)

Thoughts?

That sounds great. It would be cool to have your scientists and engineers fleeing from aliens during a base defense. Like a terror mission, but with a personal stake.

[doubleskulls]

43 minutes ago, Boris Eysbroek said:

That sounds great. It would be cool to have your scientists and engineers fleeing from aliens during a base defense. Like a terror mission, but with a personal stake.

Having scientists / engineers being the civilians running amok and getting killed (and needing to rehire if they die) would be nice flavour. 

Do bases actually take damage from the attack? That also could make it more interesting - destroy a lab with HE and you have to repair it. So deciding whether to use laser weapons and carry a higher repair bill for every missed shot would add to the decision making. 

[Shadeth]

I don't know about some of these ideas, it would piss me off greatly if my so-called smart scientists died running around like they have an IQ of 60, and it delays my research.  So I am opposed to that, unless the scientist AI is way better and they actually hide or run the hell away from danger and not run around like a chicken with its head cut off.  Same with base rooms getting damaged.  If the base attack is too costly / risky, I think the optimal strategy will just to be to build a lot of base defenses, and then most people who know what they are doing will never even need to fight in the base at all, negating the dev work on this except to punish newbies.

[Skitso]

4 hours ago, Shadeth said:

I don't know about some of these ideas, it would piss me off greatly if my so-called smart scientists died running around like they have an IQ of 60, and it delays my research.  So I am opposed to that, unless the scientist AI is way better and they actually hide or run the hell away from danger and not run around like a chicken with its head cut off.  Same with base rooms getting damaged.  If the base attack is too costly / risky, I think the optimal strategy will just to be to build a lot of base defenses, and then most people who know what they are doing will never even need to fight in the base at all, negating the dev work on this except to punish newbies.

So your solution is to just have the current half-assed / boring game mechanic in game just because making it better and more interesting with more tactical depth, some people might not get to experience it? IMO this is the same thing with any content in the game, flesh it out and make it proper. After that, it's a question of balancing it out to make it work.

I think the base defense missions are currently rather boring as it doesn't tie in the overall geoscape strategy at all and the consequences are too binary: you either win and lose nothing or are defeated and lose everything.

@Chris any thoughts on this?

Edited July 27, 2023 by Skitso

[cman1983]

What about changing the new turrets and having sensored laser guns built to be in each room corner so that 

1.the aliens need destroy 

2.we would néed to re-build thees sensored guns 

3.we would have to use more soldiers to defend as just now it can be done with min  12 turrets and 4 men (1.25)

 

Also some other thoughts

 

1. like X1 the spaces in squad taken up by MARS unint maybe every 2 mars is a person space like in X1  1 took up a squad space and they were (4x4) units

2. The reaper balance compared X1 seems completely different as in X1 the reapers were deadly compared to X2

3. Having some use of human soldiers in the terror missions and if they survive get free xenonaut private

4. Also have base defence aliens random inserts as well as main majority in hangers as to get that far they have bombed or fought our defences and won to get to land 

Just some food for thought guys what you guys think 

 

 

Edited July 27, 2023 by cman1983
Didn't look right

[Shadeth]

I mean, I get there are a lot of things that could be added to the base defense.  Technically a whole new game could be built around elaborate base defense mechanics and traps and objectives to defend.  But, I think they have a lot of other more pressing matters to add first.  I had one base attack in the current build on steam, and I saw it coming and actually let it attack my base just to see what would happen.  It wasn't too bad, but they had some big eye looking tank that was hard to deal with because of its reaction fire and immense health compared to my weapon damage output.  About the only thing I found annoying is that it is supposed to be a "defense", but the aliens basically just stay in one place and make me attack them.  Would be more interesting without any major upgrades if they just had the aliens try to push more rather than just camp the hangers. 

[doubleskulls]

It terms of working on specific missions I think base defence is relatively rare, maybe one or two per campaign? If the devs have time to improve mission diversity I'd like to see a more variety in the more regularly occurring missions - especially UFO capture. XCOM2 had a lot of additional mission types which could be good to try and inspire new ones for X2. 

[Raimon]

In my opinion when you defend there is somebody atacking not just chilling expecting you to open doors. aliens should be looking for you door to door and making you fighting and backing room from room. also some equipmen like barricades and so on wuld beinteresting

[cman1983]

Yeh true like when we go to alien bases we attack them n they look for us so should be similar reckon 

[doubleskulls]

19 hours ago, Raimon said:

In my opinion when you defend there is somebody atacking not just chilling expecting you to open doors. aliens should be looking for you door to door and making you fighting and backing room from room. also some equipmen like barricades and so on wuld beinteresting

Chris has stated there is significant AI rework planned during EA, so hopefully more aggressive AI behaviour is part of that. 

[Komandos]

On 7/26/2023 at 10:31 AM, Skitso said:

Aliens should have few free turns at the start to better spread out.

If the player has the right of the first move when attacking, then it is logical that the aliens should have the right of the first move when attacking.

On 7/26/2023 at 10:31 AM, Skitso said:

Aliens should have other objectives than to just kill all Xenonaut units like destroy rooms to disable them so the player needs to repair them later, assault command room for direct loss, kill scientists etc. to force player to be active defending them.

The saddest thing is that the aliens, when attacking the player's Base, have neither tactics nor strategies capable of damaging the player. The player does not even have a task: to minimize the damage that the aliens will cause.

There are no serious tasks for the parties to the conflict in the mission to protect the base. The aliens don't even have a task they can solve.

 

I think the game should alternate missions, with two types of tasks: 1. the player must strive to achieve maximum winnings. 2 - the player should strive to minimize his losses. And the initial conditions should vary in such a way that it is impossible to predict in advance: what is the maximum gain and what is the minimum loss. That is, in one case: the minimum loss in the battle to protect the Base will be the injury of several soldiers, in the other case - the minimum loss will be the destruction of buildings of half of the Base.

[GIraaa]

Personally, I haven't had a chance to play a base defense mission as all UFOs would get destroyed by my base cannons (just 2 cannons on base get the job done), which I think needs to be adjusted, as it's just way too easy to avoid a base defense mission. Regardless, I made a post in another thread about introducing AI controlled combat through "generals" that have their own skills and leveling ramp, so in essence, as a commander, and before the mission starts, you give out the strategic orders of what kind of strategy you want your base defenders to take, and your general executes it tactically. All you got to do is grab some popcorn and watch your soldiers eliminate the alien intrusion, I think this would be a very fun and entertaining experience through being able to simulate different combinations of weapons and different strategies and simply watch them in execution without having to micromanage every single move on your own. Obviously, there are many different ways to possibly tweak this base defense experience, like adding security stations, cameras, turrets, and other in base upgrades which can give you an edge once the base defense battle is on.

[Ogilvy the Astronomer]

5 hours ago, GIraaa said:

Personally, I haven't had a chance to play a base defense mission as all UFOs would get destroyed by my base cannons (just 2 cannons on base get the job done), which I think needs to be adjusted, as it's just way too easy to avoid a base defense mission. Regardless, I made a post in another thread about introducing AI controlled combat through "generals" that have their own skills and leveling ramp, so in essence, as a commander, and before the mission starts, you give out the strategic orders of what kind of strategy you want your base defenders to take, and your general executes it tactically. All you got to do is grab some popcorn and watch your soldiers eliminate the alien intrusion, I think this would be a very fun and entertaining experience through being able to simulate different combinations of weapons and different strategies and simply watch them in execution without having to micromanage every single move on your own. Obviously, there are many different ways to possibly tweak this base defense experience, like adding security stations, cameras, turrets, and other in base upgrades which can give you an edge once the base defense battle is on.

Hmm, I can't say I'd enjoy delegating base defence missions entirely to AI and just watching the game play out. But this is interesting in that it highlights how different people want to play the game in different ways, and the developers seem keen to allow this whenever possible.

With this in mind, what if there was an extra unit you could recruit -- Base Defence Guard -- that's essentially an AI controlled "local forces" kind of soldier, just for base missions. Maybe you hire them in squads of five, and maybe they need their own special barracks building in a base. In any case, for your kind of ideal scenario, you could just hire loads of these troops and let them fight out the aliens without any input from you -- you just watch it, popcorn in hand as you say! My style would be to have a few squads of these troops, backed up by a couple of Xenonauts that I'd be controlling. These Base Defence Guards could be a nice alternative / complement to the sentry guns, which I think are currently a bit too good (and look ridiculous on their tea-trolley castor wheels!)

[doubleskulls]

Is that just sentry guns with AI? Given how poor the AI is right now, I don't want to delegate anything to the AI I can do myself! 

For me, watching the AI play out something like Age of Wonders 4 is sometimes quite interesting. AoW4 is a 'symmetrical' game, in that the AI for a player and for the computer opponents would be identical, and has to be good enough too. So it needs to know how to use the units, spells etc in an effective way. However X2 isn't a symmetrical game. The player tactics are different to alien tactics so the team here would need to spend a bit of time developing AI just for 'player' tactics, weapons and equipment. Right now the AI does not need to worry about med kits or ammunition, smoke & flashbangs and has pretty limited use of grenades or varied troop types (e.g. using shields to scout, and then using snipers to kill).  I think there are lots of things they ought to have higher up their list. 

[Komandos]

19 minutes ago, Ogilvy the Astronomer said:

With this in mind, what if there was an extra unit you could recruit -- Base Defence Guard -- that's essentially an AI controlled "local forces" kind of soldier, just for base missions.

For the development of the strategic level of the game, it would not be bad to have several detachments of soldiers for various tactical tasks. (At the moment, the game has one universal squad for all cases).

These several detachments should not only be hired and armed, but also trained. The player must invest part of the forces, funds, resources in the preparation and training of these units.

Before the squad begins to perform its tactical tasks, the player must make a number of important choices that will determine the capabilities of these units. And the outcome of the battle will depend on the correctness of these elections.

I agree that it should be possible to create a permanent garrison at each base.

The problem is that with the help of recruits, a player in X2 can cope with any opponent. Training of soldiers and detachments before the battle is not mandatory.

At the moment, in the game, we have one universal squad that is able to perform absolutely all tasks and control all locations of the globe.

This ability: to keep up everywhere, and cope with any difficulties - must be taken away.

I will be happy if the player needs 3 squads in the game to get to all the locations and complete all the tasks. Three squads is not so much.

[GIraaa]

Base defense guard is also a good idea, btw, what I am suggesting is an option, you can use AI to combat aliens, or you can manually micromanage everything, the choice is yours. If you choose AI general to do so, you select the general with the corresponding skills, and choose a strategy, let's say you got 3 strategies, one that is aggressive, like mass assault, one that is defensive, like waiting on aliens to come to your troops, and one that is something in the middle, where your troops carefully navigate around seeking the aliens out while using cover at each opportunity. Obviously there is no limit to the imagination around strategies to use, and those too can be researched and changed around as needed. Good example of such mechanism can be explored in a game called Endless Space 2, check it out.

[cman1983]

11 hours ago, Komandos said:

For the development of the strategic level of the game, it would not be bad to have several detachments of soldiers for various tactical tasks. (At the moment, the game has one universal squad for all cases).

These several detachments should not only be hired and armed, but also trained. The player must invest part of the forces, funds, resources in the preparation and training of these units.

Before the squad begins to perform its tactical tasks, the player must make a number of important choices that will determine the capabilities of these units. And the outcome of the battle will depend on the correctness of these elections.

I agree that it should be possible to create a permanent garrison at each base.

The problem is that with the help of recruits, a player in X2 can cope with any opponent. Training of soldiers and detachments before the battle is not mandatory.

At the moment, in the game, we have one universal squad that is able to perform absolutely all tasks and control all locations of the globe.

This ability: to keep up everywhere, and cope with any difficulties - must be taken away.

I will be happy if the player needs 3 squads in the game to get to all the locations and complete all the tasks. Three squads is not so much.

I don't think several detachments would be answer I think maybe different types of xenonauts companies and not just us on the ground maybe a good or bad company against us or against aliens or both 

[cwamartin]

On 7/26/2023 at 12:39 PM, doubleskulls said:

Having scientists / engineers being the civilians running amok and getting killed (and needing to rehire if they die) would be nice flavour. 

Do bases actually take damage from the attack? That also could make it more interesting - destroy a lab with HE and you have to repair it. So deciding whether to use laser weapons and carry a higher repair bill for every missed shot would add to the decision making. 

Hmmmm. I think they need to update the civilian Ai before doing that, otherwise the scientists and engineers will be suicidally running toward the aliens...