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V18.3 Geoscape Balance Discussion


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I definitely agree with keeping lower level UFOs showing up throughout the entire game, for the same reason as StellarRat said, and also because sometimes, we just need an easy mission that we can totally dominate just to bring our spirits up. ;)

One idea that I would like to see implemented:

Add an "Aggressive Attack" option to Air Combat Auto Resolve that, if the Xenonaut craft >>> the UFO, the UFO gets destroyed outright, leaving no ground mission.

(My original idea was posted in this post, and was pretty long, so I've hid it in the Spoiler-Tag below.)

The current iteration of the idea is in this new post here:

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5473-Air-Combat-Auto-Resolve-Add-an-Aggressive-Attack-option

As a part of the air combat auto resolve we could have a "Destroy" button, or an "Aggressive" button would be a nice throwback to the OG, actually. Anyway, what it would do is if the Xenonauts craft are sufficiently better than the enemy UFO(s) (ie, highest tier with best weapons vs a light scout), that craft has the ability to basically vaporize that UFO without leaving a crashsite. If the Xeno craft aren't high enough, then the autoresolve would play out normally.

Now, when using the regular auto resolve it would never totally destroy any UFOs, only when you selected "Aggressive Attack" instead of "Normal Attack".

This would allow the game to still have lower level UFOs for training newbs, for stress relief, whatever, but also not make it a requirement to actually do those missions if you don't want to. If you're a XenoGod and have no dead soldiers, training new ones isn't necessary, so doing those lower level ground missions could be very tedious and game-killing somewhat. If that's the case, they can simply destroy the lower level craft and be on their merry way.

The destroyed craft should still give some alloys, though, maybe half of what you would get from a normal ground mission of that UFO type, just to have a decent reward for taking out a UFO. Ground combat, tedious as it may be for some, would still be the way to get the most loot.

Also, when fighters get shot down, give us alloys for that please. Maybe even 1 for light, 2 for heavy, or something small like that. It gives an incentive and a reward for dealing with them.

Edited by GizmoGomez
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Yeah, I'll express my support once again for smaller UFOs in later parts of the game.

As for funding, I'd like mission bonuses to still be important. Nation funding should definitely be more important, right now it barely pays maintenance and doesn't feel like a reward that it should. But I think the importance of mission funding should still grow. At the beginning it may be a nice 10-20% bonus, but later in the game mission bonuses should account for half of your funding at least.

I also hope manufacturing costs get another look. A base with 2 full Workshops that can build a Foxtrot in a day will need a month to build a Marauder. Yes it's a super-advanced craft, but a month is ridiculous, while getting 4 Workshops to build it in a decent time is counter-productive because you don't have anything else that could benefit from such numbers of engineers.

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Aaron, that new rewards system for shooting down craft is awesome. And smaller UFOs late game makes sense, too.

The "Aggressive Attack" option might help with grinding, but wouldn't just leaving the crashsite alone accomplish the same thing? The way I imagine it, leaving the crashsite alone and it disappearing represents the local forces taking it out. Then again, does that lead to a loss of relations? If that is the case, I think the "aggressive attack" thing is a very good idea, though I have another idea, too. Perhaps, depending on the country, occasionally a country in which a crashsite occurs could request that they themselves take care of it, which might make sense game-setting wise; perhaps they want the loot for themselves, or perhaps they want to prove to their own people that they can take care of things. If the country requests to allow the local militaries to deal with them and you leave it alone, perhaps this could lead to a small increase in standing or at least no loss of standing. But this might be asking a bit too much at this stage of game development, and maybe it would make for a cool mod.

Something else I was thinking about that I think might be a good idea for balancing issues is selling of findings to specific countries in order to boost relations. Perhaps there could be a limit to this, but it would make sense to me that if you, for example, wanna butter up the Russians, you sell them the stuff you find instead of the US or something, which could lead to increased relations or even rewards of new soldiers or scientists or engineers. Perhaps that could even hurt your relations with other nations who are not friendly towards those you sell to... I dunno.

Anyway, I think doing at least the relations boost for selling stuff could add another way to help balance the game, so you don't absolutely have to always have solid coverage in areas to keep them supporting you. But perhaps, again, this could just be something for a mod or DLC.

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The Geoscape re-balance wont be ready for release for a while at least - the code to support those relations changing aspects only went in yesterday.

I will be making sure there is a supply of various tiers of UFOs throughout the game for rookie training purposes.

There is no need for a "destroy outright" option for UFOs because it doesn't cause any national relations loss if you do not tackle a crashed UFO mission. I was surprised by this too at first, but it makes sense from a gameplay point of view because it allows players to skip repetitive missions or those that are below their level. We will make it very clear to the player that there will be no loss of country relations for ignoring them, as the local forces of the country in question are assumed to have dealt with them (this also explains where those friendly AI troops get their laser rifles later in the game!).

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I just posted about his in another thread on air combat, so rather than double post I will instead simply quote myself;

The main issue as far as I can judge it, is the game advances to fast for the player to keep up. The invasion ticker jumps way to high to soon imo. For instance for the whole first month its scouts, which is fine. Second month is medium vessels. However, in the second month the AI rarely actually sends that many roaving medium vessels instead sending a lot of fighters or terror mission ships. So you dont have much chance to get money or the research done in that month, and the construction will be a least a month for new fighters (building up workshops and ships themselves), so you are in effect a full month behind the invasion.

You see this as soon as it hits November, the AI suddenly sends out large ufo's and escorts you can barely take on. IF you are lucky enough to get Corsairs extremely early, you MIGHT have a chance to get to the new year. But by then the average player is now two months behind, and completely unable to counter the huge size vessels and interceptor escorts.

Its the ticker scoring for the invasion thats out of whack. The "medium" vessel phase needs to last AT LEAST two months (oct & sep) for the player to have any hope of really keeping up with the invasion. It currently feels like the game is way way to fast in upscaling the UFO's, meaning you can either have crappy gear for your men and good air cover or good gear and crappy air cover.

And you can forget about expanding your bases, because that just makes the problem worse. Not enough income to cover base upkeep AND production, combined with the fact that more bases = more waves and you are going to go down in flames fast.

Currently the game feels like its forcing me to win the game outright in 6 months or else fail.

Thats my summation of it. Please note I have done 15+ games, and at least 10 of those to January. I am extremely well versed in the gameplay and tactics yet I cannot get beyond this phase or even be close to "on par" with whats thrown at me.

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Another Geoscape balance thing, somewhat related to UFO types. There's an issue with the tech tree right now. The tech tree should have several viable options at any point in the game, but in the early game as it stands now, you must get Alenium & Alenium Explosives researched ASAP. So you need to shoot down a Scout with minor damage done, and then research alenium explosives. There isn't really a choice so the other options in the tech tree are then not viable. This is of course mainly due to the need for alenium weaponry on your fighters, without which even Corvettes become difficult and there's no chance of taking down a landing ship.

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1-hit-killing the fighters or them 1-hit-killing your planes? You're meant to use the brawler craft (Condor, Corsair and Marauder) against them and dodge the missiles.

Another thing to look at is that the Corsair and Marauder both unlock from the same alien ship (Landing Ship) unless you get an Andron Corvette.

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1-hit-killing the fighters or them 1-hit-killing your planes? You're meant to use the brawler craft (Condor, Corsair and Marauder) against them and dodge the missiles.

Another thing to look at is that the Corsair and Marauder both unlock from the same alien ship (Landing Ship) unless you get an Andron Corvette.

Maybe move alien electronics to corvettes so they are accesible earlier and there's more of a gap between them and marauders?

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I think that in terms of feel, it should play out more or less like original x-com which nailed the ratio pretty well..

Only towards the end you really started getting a majority of large ships... throughout most of the game it is a mix.

Also, as I've written before, the air combat game should be a little more intricate somehow.

Larger ships should be made unbeatable by starting xeno aircraft (which is ok now since there is going to be a mix of all types of aliens throughout).

I suggest making a change so that starting aircraft cannot carry advanced cannons and missiles (anything more than alenium/laser gatling) because they simply don't incorporate powerplants powerful enough to use plasma cannons or for the proper containment fields needed to control radiation from the missiles.. or to start the critical reaction that arms the missiles.. something like that.

And then making the larger alien ships real deadly

Edited by Lightzy
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Losing armour/equipment from abandoned missions?

At the moment I don't think you do, at least I haven't experienced it in my playthroughs. Obviously equipment could be recovered from dead soldiers after a victorious mission, but after a terror mission you loose and the city is nuked? Even if you get back in the ship and abort you're not going to recover the items you left on the ground. I feel this would add to the realism and really make players weigh up the decision of whether to carry on with a mission that might go badly.

It could also be reserved solely for the harder difficulty levels

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I would like for the UFOs to be a bit less aggressive in chasing your planes on the Geoscape compared to now. It feels like I should have at least 6-8 planes by the second month in order to not get blown out of the sky every time I try to go for a downed UFO or Terror Mission that's a bit outside the radar range of my main base (which is most of them). Especially the smaller strike group of 3 UFOs are borderline impossible to escape and you might as well just lose your planes, rather than get stuck in an infinite "escape" loop where they catch you before you're even back on the geoscape again.

Also, as previously mentioned in this thread, the balancing on the Geoscape is completely lopsided in favor of the aliens. You go from Scouts with practically no means of fighting back to roving packs of Fighters that have significantly longer range than the radar actually indicates, in a single day (when it switches months), not to mention the almost impossible to kill medium craft.

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I know the infinite loop of doom from alien craft has been raised previously. So, it should be assessed one way or another.

One option is that there's a chance that the alien craft will be able to hunt down your damaged, fleeing ships and destroy them. Just on one battle and not on a loop?

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TBQH, aside from the point at which I got overrun slightly in December (which probably wouldn't have been a problem if I had known I could just sell all my reactor cores/alenium/alloys without any worry about running out later), most of the geoscape balance has been fine on normal, though I think what is currently "normal" should be at least Veteran on the difficulty slider.

Reducing the cost of condors to just 50k made them worlds more accessible and expendable.

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I am currently in april 1980 and every few days the planet gets spammed with all sorts of battleships and interceptors that I cant do too much about. 3 marauders can't take on a battleship plus 2 interceptors as they run out of ammo let alone the rest of the fleet that arrives.

Is there a link between how many alien bases there are vs how many ships are around?

I currently have a bug not letting me attack their bases (reported in bug thread but no reply yet) which has meant there are at least 8 alien bases on the map. I have lost funding from nearly all areas and have resorted to the infinite money glitch since it is a bug causing the loss of cash flow in the first place.

even with that I cannot physically build enough marauders to make an impact. I keep losing my landing ships!!!

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I think its a combination of a few factors. Spoilered because its a major spoiler on how the game works.

One: Period between waves gets smaller as the ticker score increases.

Two: Alien bases increase ticker score while they exist. Its a tiny amount, but its per minute and with 8 bases at least, that's some fast increases.

Three: Number of individual mission goes up with how many bases you have.

Four: After a certain point, there will always be the maximum number of missions per wave.

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Woah, didn't know about Three (which I just almost typed out). I'm questioning a couple of my game choices, although most of the alien attacks even in february consist of maybe 3-4 missions, and that's with 5 bases and 1 continent in enemy hands. Though I might have just run into a bug with a terror site. Anyone have much experience with landing the Shrike at terror missions?

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