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Indestructible interceptors?


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I definitely don't want to see the game get too easy -- and in my opinion, this would make it just so. You could almost casually toss out planes and suffer in the short term, but never in the long term - as you would constantly always be able to 'come back' from plane losses.

Currently, there is TOO much reliance on air combat, however. You lose two or three early, you're hard pressed to get back to any fighting position what-so-ever.

By contrast, making the planes cheaper does exactly the same thing as well - it makes planes expendable, and they should not be. They are meant to be very expensive pieces of machinery and not fielded casually.

My idea would be something in the middle -- why not make a mission out of it?

Scenario: A condor gets shot down by a Scout and two heavy fighter escorts. The condor is NOT destroyed instantly, but crashes into the ground. Similar to downing a UFO ship, there is now a "Downed Fighter" mission.

You can choose to send in help or not. If you DO choose to send in help, you'll be pitted against the enemies from the craft that shot down that UFO to begin with. Sort of like a UFO clean-up crew, to ensure there aren't any survivors. Objective? Like any other mission: secure the crash sight or eliminate all enemies.

Here's the benefit of rescuing the downed aircraft: you tow it back to base and it's torn up. Less cost than completely making a new one, but still a repair cost and repair time.

It tackles a few big points: adds another mission type ( which is nice ), makes planes ABLE to be salvaged without out-right making them indestructible, adds another layer of tactics and importance to decision making in the geoscape, makes it so that the air combat isn't a make-or-break it scenario, and doesn't alleviate the difficulty of losing planes substantially, but makes the game more forgiving in the short term.

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I searched around but don't see anything. Is Chris still thinking or are we stuck with this bullshit idea of magical aircraft?

We are stuck, as you can see from his latest response in the build3 release post. We will be able to mod it out, though. He says it will be just an on-off switch in the xml.

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I searched around but don't see anything. Is Chris still thinking or are we stuck with this bullshit idea of magical aircraft?

7/12/2013

Chris (Talking about Immortal Interceptors)

"In any case, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I can understand people's viewpoints on the matter and I have read and noted them, but I still don't agree with them. There's probably not much point me debating it further at this stage as it's unlikely to change my mind nor the minds of those who I'm debating it with, so I'll bow out again at this point. "

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Thank you.

What happens if your aircraft gets forced down from the UFO's non-lethal weapons over a body of water?

The wings of the planes have inflatable air bags in the shape of a giant rubber ducky on each wing.

The pilots are given oars and simply row their planes back to shore so that recovery efforts can begin

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Crosspost from the other thread discussing it. I'll give a quick summary of my thoughts here.

The pros are:

  • Mistakes in the air combat are less likely to ruin your game than mistakes in the ground combat or strategic level of the game, fitting the two main parts of the original X-Com formula.
  • Aircraft can be "big ticket" items that are significantly more expensive and time consuming to build than weapons and armour (realistic), without also completely financially ruining the game if one is lost.
  • It's much easier to balance, and makes progression smoother and will let us produce a more tightly balanced and exciting Geoscape invasion.
  • If players lose aircraft due to an auto-resolve in a battle they think they should have won, it'll be hugely frustrating. It'll be very difficult to produce an auto-resolve system that can accurately account for all of the situations and also match player's expectations of the results of a combat. Therefore I only really think auto-resolve will work if we have invulnerable interceptors.

The cons are:

  • It can be immersion breaking for some players (partially negated by referring to it as a "crash land", with the Xenonauts recovering the crashed chassis and fixing it up over a prolonged period).
  • Some people see it as dumbing down the game (partially negated by the fact that a significant "repair" time penalty for shot down interceptors means losing planes will still hurt).

As I say, you can read the full thread for the earlier discussion but that's a summary. To be honest, I'm pretty sure there'd only be about 10% of the current fuss about the system had we referred to it as "Xenonauts recover crashed interceptors and repair them over a couple of weeks" rather than "invulnerable interceptors" but internally we've been referring to it as indestructible interceptors and that's what Aaron put in his patch notes.

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I think the damage below 1% - i.e. the week or whatever that is spent bringing the craft up from 0% health to 1% health (at which point it repairs at the normal rate) will be referred to as "recovery".

It makes sense - it represents the remains of the plane being shipped back to the base and fixed up. Seems fair, given that UFOs are able to survive a crash-landing in relatively good shape.

Either that, or "super magic healing phase".

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I think the damage below 1% - i.e. the week or whatever that is spent bringing the craft up from 0% health to 1% health (at which point it repairs at the normal rate) will be referred to as "recovery".

It makes sense - it represents the remains of the plane being shipped back to the base and fixed up. Seems fair, given that UFOs are able to survive a crash-landing in relatively good shape.

Either that, or "super magic healing phase".

*laugh* I can assume the last part is sarcasm.

But the...

-It makes sense - it represents the remains of the plane being shipped back to the base and fixed up. Seems fair, given that UFOs are able to survive a crash-landing in relatively good shape.

A UFO uses alloys and materials beyond the technology level of human starting Air Craft (Condors and Foxtrots) and Air Plane recovery and repair would cost more than building a new one. Just based on what we have seen in real life.

So that doesnt make sense?

However if the whole post was sarcasm, nevermind 8-)

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this sstorm on forum about nothing:

Case A:

"hardcore" player losing aircraft in combat =

save scumming (yes yes, dont tell me that you start again)

Case B

player losing aircraft in combat =

continue game (just continue game, try to rebuild or whatever)

in result:

normal player will hit brickwall later (or very soon if 3 figher making circle just above base and terror missions popup like shrooms after rain) and get nice portion of frustation, rageout and possible abandon "stupid game".

"hardcore" player uneffected, cos he savescum anyway

in case of harcore player who start over - still no change, starting from begining still possible.

conclusion:

fanboys dont want game to evolve and want to harm "generic audience" who not going to waste time on wikipedia or forum.

As for game, something like this will cover every possible gameplay desision:

All aircraft in xenonaut possesion are special, made from (upgraded with) lowgrade (advanced) allien alloys, strong enough to (partially) survive (ever) fullspeed ground collusion and keep operator alive in process.

Crashed aircraft recovered by xenonaut agents and delivered to base in 72 hours, after that craft repaired in X hours.

Advanced aircraft much more harder to recover due size\weight\unstable reactor\whatever, process will take noless then 144 hours, but restoration process a lot faster.

Something like this will explain everything to player in nice and logical way.

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@RawCode

I think most Hardcore players that you refer to might Save/Load and practice until they develop a better understanding of how it works.

In fact I believe that is a very common practice for most players playing any game.

But the Hardcores should be stated as - Spent time learning enough about Air Combat to take only Rare/No losses.

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I think the damage below 1% - i.e. the week or whatever that is spent bringing the craft up from 0% health to 1% health (at which point it repairs at the normal rate) will be referred to as "recovery".

It makes sense - it represents the remains of the plane being shipped back to the base and fixed up. Seems fair, given that UFOs are able to survive a crash-landing in relatively good shape.

Either that, or "super magic healing phase".

How about: The aliens feel so bad about having shot down your plane that they offer to fabricate you a new one using their special alieny tech, but it takes 72hrs to complete. Kinda like star trek replicators.

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Indestructible-interceptors

It sounds to me like those options are quick fixes to be honest.

In my opinion just let the player sell items for good money, both manufactured sales and mission reward should be decent/good on the idea that the air battles and ground missions are the deciding factor in success/failure.

In this kind of situation money wouldnt be much of a problem. We should be able to throw plane/units at the enemy with little success mid game onwards (until completed research for advanced units). Let ammo be bought along with everything else, but also give the player the ability to, through good planning, set up a network of bases for their use. Through perseverance and a well thought out base structure, reward the player.

The challenge should be the air/land battles, it shouldn't be whether you can afford to buy some new troops/planes that you need replacing. It should be the cost of loosing your ranked up units or bases that hurts (including pilot/driver rank and skills if implemented if not its still a money loss).

As for the early planes and vehicles, im with the idea that you can purchase them at a reduced cost but due to Xeno enhancements still takes time to customise therefore justify a slight modification/manufacture time within which you could miss UFO's.

The pricein theory should be roughly enough to replace them easily, but if your not great at space combat could be costly to your ongoing war and many losses will slowly grind you to a halt.

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I honestly don't see what would be so hard to balance about planes on different difficulties anyway. I think the devs are looking at it the wrong way. Right now they're looking at changing the price of the planes and are afraid it will result in planes cheaper than rifles for balance. I think we should be looking at the other aspect of air combat in order to balance it.

Planes on easy shouldn't be cheap, but they should be balanced so that loosing a certain number (say 4 or 5 high tech ones, idk that would be for the balancers) should have an actual detrimental effect on your game. The crucial part of balance should be in how easily they die. Make it so that they can take a hell of a beating and have better speed than aliens of the same tier, plus make it clear using tips that damaged planes should be evac'd. Make it so that even fairly new players are not likely to take the kind of losses that would ruin their game. They would have to be doing it seriously wrong and unintuitively to actually have air combat screw up their game.

To medium. Increase the cost of fighters so that losing fewer would be significant and make them tough but not too tough - a player who knows what he's doing even if not amazing should be able to take few enough losses that it won't ruin the game. You might note that this has the same essential effect as indestructible fighters - Players won't be taking the losses required to mess things up, except that in this case it's actually based on player input, requires no handwaving and doesn't dumb down the game too much, if you do it very wrong you will still suffer. Essentially replacing indestructible fighters with simply hard-to-kill fighters.

Now on to hard mode - price-wise I think it should have similar balance to normal mode, but this time, planes are actually more difficult to keep alive. It would require a good player with some skills to be able to avoid the game-ending losses, hence it being hard.

Finally to very hard. Very tight losses and much easier to kill aircraft. This surely solves the issue of pricing since the price balance remains fairly high. There could potentially be 2 issues I can see depending on the balance:

1. Air combat is "too easy" if we shift ground combat balance to slightly harder for a given difficulty (because ground combat is the main focus of the game), but that being said I can't see how it would be easier than not being able to lose your planes at all.

2. For the purists, it might not make sense that the human airplanes tank "so many" shots from a highly advanced UFO. I would contend that it makes a lot more sense than downed interceptors magically being repaired by the power of friendship. Plus being able to tank large amounts of shots would only apply at certain difficulties (easy, even for normal I only envision giving a player 1, 2 or maybe 3 extra shots taken in order to hit the evac button in time) and it's in the name of balance.

Of course, I'm not an expert on exactly how easy this would be to balance, but I imagine it can be done and it seems that the devs haven't focused on that aspect in their rebuttals, but rather the aspect of trying to balance the cost. On the easiest difficulty this should have a similar effect to indestructibles, but without the actual indestructibility. On harder it should make air combat more than a trivial minigame with no impact on the main game.

Edited by Person012345
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Well, people, all of us that protest for the issue are just hardcore loudmouths that are too short-minded to see the brilliance behind the development decision. Chris spoke and his arguments must have convinced us all. So, since there is no point arguing about it nomore, since he specifically stated that was the last he posts about that, why don't we just focus on something else? Besides, it will not be the first nor the last game to fail to stand up to the challenge of being a worthy X-COM remake. It will certainly be the first and the last I paid for in advance, though. ;)

Life goes on. Have fun! The game might not end up being as good as X-COM, but it will be a good and fun game, if they manage to make it bug-free! :)

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This isn't a problem in itself, except that aircraft are the most expensive and time-consuming things to build aside from bases. So if you have a player that is really good at the air combat or knows the auto-resolve combinations, they will be able to play through the game without losing any planes.

Reduce cost and time needed for getting planes up and running. Make it clear in the game context that the actual airframes are being manufactured elsewhere, paid for by supporting governments, and the time and money directly spent by The Xenonauts organization represents initial operational setup costs and final tuning of the systems.

Invincible planes is such a bad, lazy solution guys, I honestly can't see how it ever made it out of a brainstorming session.

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To be honest, I'm pretty sure there'd only be about 10% of the current fuss about the system had we referred to it as "Xenonauts recover crashed interceptors and repair them over a couple of weeks" rather than "invulnerable interceptors" but internally we've been referring to it as indestructible interceptors and that's what Aaron put in his patch notes.

No the idea itself is bad, not the way it was presented. Sorry.

Edited by shabowie
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Well, people, all of us that protest for the issue are just hardcore loudmouths that are too short-minded to see the brilliance behind the development decision. Chris spoke and his arguments must have convinced us all. So, since there is no point arguing about it nomore, since he specifically stated that was the last he posts about that, why don't we just focus on something else? Besides, it will not be the first nor the last game to fail to stand up to the challenge of being a worthy X-COM remake. It will certainly be the first and the last I paid for in advance, though. ;)

Life goes on. Have fun! The game might not end up being as good as X-COM, but it will be a good and fun game, if they manage to make it bug-free! :)

Although it doesn't bode well for future design decisions it could still be salvaged by a dedicated modder in the future.

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