Difficulty level suggestions

[Aaron]

Right now the difficulty level in the game only affects the health of aliens during Ground Combat missions. Eventually I think it would be good to have it affect more systems in the game, so I'm making this thread to get some feedback from you guys on what you would like to see.

Here are a few ideas, to start with:

Different bases - in this scenario a player starting the game in "Normal" mode would get a pretty well fleshed out starting base, which would prevent them from screwing themselves too badly by poor building choices early. For "Veteran" levels and above, the player would get a much more simple base, but would instead start with an equivalently larger pile of case - this would allow them to do interesting strategies like multiple bases from the outset, but at a greater risk of them screwing it all up.

Damage numbers in combat - we are shortly going to implement a system that will display the damage you do to a target in GC. This will be helpfully right now to identify cases where the combat system isn't working, but it might be something we could leave on for "Normal" and disabled for "Veteran" difficulty levels.

There of course many stats like repair and healing times for soldiers and interceptors that might be interesting to vary by difficulty to make the game more/less forgiving, but I'm really more interested in (simple, mind) features like the two described above that could give a significantly different gameplay experience between difficulty levels.

[Gauddlike]

The suppression indicator is the first thing that springs to mind.

It could be hidden at higher difficulties.

Maybe higher difficulties could give a small increase to the number of enemies present on missions?

For example (fake numbers) if a specific ship type has 4-6 enemies on normal and easy then it could have 4-7 on hard, 4-8 on insane.

It doesn't need to be a big enough change so that balance is disrupted, just an added threat.

[Cursive]

Easy - Developed base, large starting income, decreased enemy squadron sizes/health/combat accuracy. In addition, the frequency of attacks and the damage done to country relations for not responding is decreased. Ideally, the player is guided by the shape of the base and develop their bases following the ideas they learned within.

Normal - Developed base, normal (low) starting income, normal squadron sizes/health/combat accuracy. In addition, the frequency of attacks and the damage done to country relations is average. The player survives based on their actions, no more or less.

Veteran - Completely unfurnished base, save for possibly a living quarters and hanger with one Chinook. Large starting war chest, but still moderately less then on Easy. In addition, attacks are more frequent and focused, enemy squadron sizes are at full, and relations change (both decrease and repair) most rapidly. Fair, but mistakes cost more; what a player has learned in Normal and Easy should be refined, and they experiment more before... The game hides some 'tutorial' modifiers from the player.

Insane - One base, with a living quarters, and one Chinook. No starting income, relation with all countries starts incrementally worse and decreases in addition to attack/mission failure losses. Additionally, instead of stabilizing (like I assume relations do barring catastrophical failure), relations take a small hit every month. Not enough to cause damage on it's own, but something to keep the player active and from simply fortifying in. Enemy squadronsizes are 1-3 units larger then normal, their accuracy is slightly improved, (5 - 10%?) and enemies take more damage to bring down and/or are better armored. Cost of supplies goes up, after selling 2000 units of alien equipment, you only receive 75% the normal sales price. The game hides all 'tutorial' modifiers from the player.

Naturally, you'll want to adjust this yourselves, but I'm thinking little (and adjustable) things, with options to modify some traits per the players tastes. I.E. starting Insane without Ironman, removing the well-developed base in Easy, etc etc. Also, nice avatar there Aaron.

[StellarRat]

My personal feeling about this that you probably should only change ONE variable to make the game more difficult. There really isn't a need for changing more than one. My personal preference to increase difficulty is to add more aliens to every mission as the difficulty level is increased and that's it. That is the "funniest" way because everyone likes more shooting and action in ground combat (I think.) And, I don't care how good a player is, numbers do matter. More aliens will make ground combat more dangerous. If you change more than one variable then it becomes very difficult to balance things because the two variables interact with each other.

My second choice would be to speed up the pace of the alien invasion. The bigger ships and tougher aliens would begin arriving sooner, etc...

My absolute least favorite choice is economic nerfing of the Xenonauts. That includes anything like changing the starting money, facilities, price of stuff or research pace. It really isn't fun trying to scrape up money to equipment your troops and buy newer better planes. If I wanted to do that, I'd play some kind of government administration game, BORING.

Actually, the BEST system Goldenhawk could implement is just to give the player an option interface to allow them to set global factors for the game. Like a slider that multiplies the number of aliens, an economic slider that change the "reward amount" for alien property, etc... Then Goldenhawk can set some default slider positions for the difficulty levels and the player can adjust them. Some of these things should VERY EASY to implement. An alien accuracy factor and health factor modifier come to mind as super easy.

Edited June 5, 2013 by StellarRat

[catmorbid]

The base difficulty should be balanced for normal, i.e. the hardcore folk should find it relatively easy while the average gamer should find it quite challenging.

After that, you can gradually affect different areas of the game. What I don't like is the easy way, i.e. altering HP of enemies. That's a really stupid way to to make a game more difficult or easier - what it does is create an artificial barrier of difficulty outside the scope of the original game design, actually altering the intended experience and more often than not, leading to tedium.

Instead, you should alter the number and type of enemies in both ground combat and air combat. As long as the stats are the same regardless of difficulty, you can just alter how many enemies come up without breaking the core systems, and achieve variation in difficulty levels. One such variable could be the frequency of escorts for UFOs, directly affecting how difficult air combat would be.

Also, a simple but effective way is to alter the amount of starting money. That simply makes a more or less forgiving start, but does not break any underlying mechanics. E.g. the easy mode should have maybe double cash than normal, but otherwise a similar start, plus the combat changes.

A more difficult way would be to change the enemy AI to make it dumber or smarter. Never cheating of course, but dumber or smarter. Obviously that's a lot harder to pull off than simple alterations to volume of enemies

Edited June 4, 2013 by catmorbid

[lemm]

If I can sum it up in one sentence:

On the higher difficulties, make the game BIGGER, not just harder.

Many will suggest that you should start with even less and make the aliens tougher. I disagree with that suggestion. Yeah, the game might be a little bit more tricky, but it's still the same old thing.

Consider the fairy tale career in the corporate world. When you're a new employee, you have a couple of menial tasks. When you make middle management, you have a few people under your command, and so there's more to think about. When you're finally the VP in the corner office, you have the several floors of the building under your command. Your job never really became more technically demanding; it became harder because your decisions matter more and there's bigger things to worry about. Maybe not the best analogy, but the point is that the harder levels should be bigger wars, not just tougher aliens.

So...

Beginner mode and normal mode are the normal xenonauts game. Beginner is just a little easier.

At hard mode, you start out with two bases, but you have to deal with 2x the alien fleet. The second base is just a strike base; meaning research is done at the same pace as it is at the normal difficulty, but you just have to deal with more alien incursions. And of course the aliens start to tech up a bit quicker, they're a bit tougher, and a dozen other variables are bumped one notch to the right. You get 2x the budget.

At insane mode, the geoscape is radically different. You start with four bases, two with complete research facilities, two with strike only capabilities. Therefore, at the game's start, you have eight condors, two Charlies, forty men, double the research capacity (although research takes twice as long) and double the production capabilities (production is at normal game speed), and 6-8x the budget. The aliens aren't screwing around either. By the end of the second week, you see corvettes and terror attacks. By the third week, you see cruisers and your base has been attacked. There are terror sites you will just have to abandon, and you will have to try to down landing ships and corvettes by sending in multiple waves of interceptors. There are fighter squads everywhere as well; unescorted Charlies are essentially goners.

In spite of all this, the research speed doesn't change, and the aliens are not that much stronger, maybe 150% of normal at most. You are being showered with money; the challenge now is trying to stay alive while you research the new technologies. I've always wanted an XCOM game where I actually had to use 8 bases. Even at superhuman difficulty in the original games, you really didn't need more than one main base and maybe a workshop/radar post.

EDIT: Of course, you don't have to have program in new base types; just give the player a huge wad of cash with the expectation that he'll build several bases. If he's playing at insane he'll probably figure it out sooner rather than later.

Edited June 6, 2013 by lemm

[lemm]

(I had several points to make, so I figure another post was warranted)

Here is a suggestion for a mechanic that appears on Hard and Insane modes.

The aliens set up a defensive perimeter in the airspace that surrounds the a terror site. This is visualized by a red circle around a terror site, perhaps with an alien squadron marker that constantly positions itself between your dropship and the terror site (but remains bound to the circular path). To engage the terror site, you need to break through the perimeter by first sending in a fighter squad that either defeats the aliens, or makes them retreat. If you're successful, then the red circle disappears and you can send your dropship in.

On hard mode, there is only ever one perimeter, but there might be a heavy fighter or three.

On insane mode, there may be two, even three or sometimes four perimeters (concentric circles) with weaker ships in the innermost circles. This actually forces you to take out the alien craft with your guns. This point is worth emboldening, because you don't just have to be marginally more efficient at something, but you actually are forced to do it the hard way rather than the easy way.

=========================================================================

Responding to other suggestions in this thread:

I don't like it when games let you tailor the variables in game. It's great to have that capability in the XML files, but having 20 different options menus just makes the game look like an experiment rather than a game. It's something more suited for "OpenXYZ" revivals.

I disagree with the suggestion of only modifying one variable. You should modify many variables or else the difficulty increase feels "cheap."

I don't like the idea of hiding information at higher difficulties. XCOM (along with other turn based strategies) is really just a fancy board game that requires a computer to play. All important information (i.e., chance to hit, TU requirements,etc) should be clearly computed and displayed in some fashion, and making the player get a feel for damage calculations shouldn't be a source of difficulty.

=======================================================================

And, even though you didn't want this, here's a list of geoscape things you can tweak (maybe there's something here you didn't think about):

Build times are marginally longer

Research times are much longer

Healing times are marginally longer (with chance of permanent injury)

Recruits don't gain experience quite as fast

New base costs are a bit higher

Radar ranges are a bit smaller

Alien ships repair much quicker (i.e., fast enough to force a night mission).

Alien ships have fewer dead aliens on impact

Power cores are destroyed somewhat more frequently

Alien fighters are far less likely to flee

Xenonaut Base defense missions are far more frequent

Alien bases (do we even have these in Xenonauts) appear much more frequently

[Lt_Parsons]

Tweaking some variables is easy way. In my experience it makes difficulty levels disbalanced, boring and meaningless. It is like shooting yourself in the foot to make fighting look harder. Or in opposite, when game become too trivial and slow to be at all interesting or engaging.

Imo, best way will be having different AI behavior for different difficulty.

For example, on easy aliens in battle have less squad coordination, are less prone to go defensive and generally do more stupid and risky things. In geoscape they have less escorts, less likely to chase, or monitor your activity and try to discover and attack your base, something like that.

For hard - opposite of easy. More coordination, support, flanking, escorts etc.

This option mean more programming instead of just balancing. Which is also hard to do properly, but not as much as creating meaningful AI variations, i think.

For insane difficulty i support lemm idea - make stakes bigger so your game skill matters from very beginning.

Edited June 6, 2013 by Lt_Parsons

[Argroww]

I've just played a game on Easy setting, I will admit I'm not a hardcore player, but I have played most of the XCOM style games out there. If I select EASY, I want EASY, it should result in a virtual cake-walk....okay so stupid decisions by me should result in me failing, I get that, but I was attempting to be careful in my ground missions, but by the 3rd mission I'd already lost half the soldiers I'd started with and was running so low on funds that I could not effectively replace them (this is after selecting a couple of extra buildings, building a condor and a scout tank thingy).

It's been a while since I played a Easy game of XCOM, but I'm sure that the start of the game didn't result in so many deaths. The AI seems very intelligent and keeps the aliens hiding well (so I result in having a low accuracy) and when they do fire, even when my soldiers appear to be in the same "defended" position, they still get hit.

Trouble is, everyone has a different idea out of what they expect from a game like this and to start with the humans should find it hard-going and perhaps die often even on easy...in which case make it easier for the player to keep buying replacement soldiers AND make base improvements and build the things that are researched....but I suppose there lies the balance with not giving so much money that it makes it easier to build a 2nd base right from the start.

Maybe allow the Easy option to have an "unconscious" soldier instead of a dead soldier, so if you win the level you just get a load of soldiers in hospital, then the normal takes away that option and then the higher difficulties introducing more aliens and ships ETC. This option perhaps has the least code change as it's a tweak to not let the soldier die unless the missions fails?

[smoitessier]

Fighter escorts

easy = none

normal = like it s now, but the escorts depart (into space) once a terror mission starts

hard = max 2 escorts circle terror mision and need to be taken out before Charlie can come to the rescue

[svidangel]

I like how the Civ games did things as far as the basic concept of difficulty balancing.

Below Normal you give the player more advantages (and perhaps call it something other than normal) and the option of full tutorial settings, and forced warnings like "larger alien ships are arriving in orbit, I hope our aircraft are equipped to cope!" And maybe popups from the lead scientist at certain points if he thinks some technology "should" have been researched by that point (You made it to october and no wolf armor??! OHNOES)

Above Normal everything stays the same for the player, but the Enemy gets harder. I agree with a slight increase in alien health, more aliens PER crash site, and an increased pace on the ticker. One of the interesting side effects of all of this in the old XCOM is that you are actually MORE flush with cash early on. TBQH superhuman was one of the easier settings in a way because you just had so much cash and access to tech. A corresponding increase in the man-hour research cost might be warranted, will probably need a lot of playtesting.

Given the difficulty increase people are already seeing over time, I don't think air combat will need to be changed much if the invasion ticker speed is just increased. That should cause plenty of problems on its own.

The BEST and least likely way to improve the difficulty, IMO, would be improving the AI. Not likely to happen, but if there were certain flanking tactics, and increased aggressiveness from the AI under conditions where they outnumbered the Xenonauts, then the increased number of aliens at crash-sites might naturally make the AI seem better and more difficult. Being rushed by an opponent with expendable troops and more HP will definitely make things more... challenging.

[svidangel]

I do like Lemm's idea of starting with a much larger chunk of cash and a massively ramped up invasion ticker, but that should probably be like a "Challenge" setting or a mod rather than an actual difficulty level in line with the others.

[lemm]

Pre-ramble:

What grabs my attention in the OP is the request for a "significantly different gameplay experience," and not strictly "the same thing with tighter margins for error." Of course you could just tweak variables, and as I stated in my previous post, the game could just be bigger. But in addition to tighter margins and increased scale, there could be completely new features, either not present or invisible to the user at a lower difficultly level, which become apparent at the higher difficulty.

I think of the game as composed of Ground Combat, Air Combat, Geoscape, and Base Management.

For both the Ground and Air combat, I agree with the general sentiment that the AI should be tiered so that new alien tactics emerge at higher difficulties. Other than that and slightly buffing the aliens, what could you do? Any new ground mechanic for your soldiers would probably take weeks of artwork, and the air combat minigame is not supposed to be any more difficult than it is (which disappoints me a little, but so it is). Suggestions for the AI warrant their own thread, I think.

Personally, I wouldn't want Base Management to be expanded. One of the best things about Xenonauts is that you only have to manage the important stuff. This is good, because I want tactics, not tedium.

So, in terms of new features, that leaves the Geoscape. For a couple reasons, I think this is a good place to augment gameplay. First of all, Geoscape features are graphically inexpensive, mostly iconic and textual. Secondly, the Geoscape never really factored into the "tactical" element of XCOM or TFTD. You could plunk a base anywhere, enough aliens were bound to fly through your radar so that you could down ships and tech up, and terror sites and alien bases could always be reached. Essentially, the Geoscape in XCOM was just for show, and 3 months into my Xenonauts game, this is still showing to hold true.

I draw inspiration from the StarFox 2 game for SNES, a game in which the "geoscape" was just as important to master as was the battlescape.

Suggestions:

I would like there to be a more tactical element implemented at the Geoscape level at hard and insane. Here is a list of suggestions that could make the geoscape more complex.

1) Make the stakes higher (more bases, more aliens) and lower the default radar range proportionally (e.g., if 3x starting bases, 1/3rd radar area). I think I gave an impression of what this might look like in my previous post.

2) At hard, and certainly at Insane, bring back the fighter squads that ambush your troop transport. If the transport is ambushed, the troops never get killed, though. Instead, the transport is forced to land and all of the Xenonauts get out and hide in the forest or something . Just a mechanism to prevent you from reaching your destination without actually losing soldiers. If you escort your transport with fighters, it doesn't automatically show up in battle (give an option to land it before air combat, perhaps). If you go the single base route, this might result in an inability to reach all terror missions at the beginning of the game because of limited interceptor range (but see suggestion 5b).

3) Make nations more fickle. They are easier to lose, but easier to win back. Perhaps some organizations might not even support the Xenonauts program at the beginning of the game.

4) Air combat missions.

Include a few Air combat missions to break up the monotony of repetitive ground combat.

On the geoscape, I see a bunch of notifications about alien weather manipulation. What if there were air missions that required you to command your interceptor squad to shoot down some menacing sphere that is causing hurricanes, or some impromptu surface installation that is causing earthquakes? These terror devices would persist longer than terror sites, maybe for a few days or so, but you might not be able to down them with one sortie. The longer they stay up there, and the healthier they are, the more detrimental they are to your rating. Additionally, there are Alien ECM installations that jam your radar if they are close enough to one of your bases.

To differentiate these aerial combat missions from normal fighter squads, you could make it so that you also have to deal with different types of stationary turrets. Some of these turrets shoot missiles at you. Some of them have area affects that reduce the mobility of your interceptors and their munitions, or provide a shielding effect to fighters in their radius. Some of them work in tandem to make a giant plasma "wall" through which your interceptors cannot fly, lest they take damage. Perhaps the heavy interceptors could be fitted to carry an air-to-surface munition to take out surface installations, although that would require a bit of artwork.

Conversely, there could be some sort of "air defense" mission. Perhaps the alien fighter craft decide to tail a Jumbo Jet that is carrying some diplomat because they want to kidnap him. You have to get your interceptors there and save the day, or else the passenger craft disappears from radar. Although the passenger craft appears on the air combat screen, the aliens don't actually target it.

=======================

The following ideas are little more complicated, but I still think they are "simple" enough to include, or at least suggest, although I'd imagine that they've all been suggested and rejected before.

5a) Aircraft carriers and Airstrips. They allow for some combination of refueling, rearming and repairing of your interceptors. They are owned by the sponsor nations. They are only accessible on the Geoscape screen by clicking on the Geoscape icon.

Since we're keeping this simple to program, all of your interceptors still need a Xenonauts hangar, even if they happen to be stationed at an airstrip. You can't transfer an aircraft "to" a carrier or an airstrip; they are just meant to be stepping stones to increase the range of your aircraft.

If the carrier or airstrip is attacked while your interceptors are stationed there, you have to fight or flee.

As the game goes on, carriers and airstrips are slowly destroyed by the aliens. However, you build your own bases to "replace" them. (This is all assuming, of course, that you still start out with only one or two bases on Insane).

5b) As an alternative to carriers and airstrips, you have the option to summon mid-air refuelling points to increase your interceptor range. These are mainly just for the early game to increase your interceptor range. It costs a token fee, maybe $10,000 or so, and the mid-air refuel point appears accessible to you, immediately, for 24 hours. (It never gets attacked, it has infinite fuel, and you can only have one at a time).

[svidangel]

Hmm, true, I had missed the part about significantly different experience. In that case the larger amount of cash, a more advanced starting point in the invasion ticker, and perhaps a more aggressive and numerous ground AI would be great. Of course, I still think the best change would be in the ground and alien mission AI itself... but if wishes were horses we'd all be eating steak.

Another minor change that would have some interesting impact could be a new mission type for the alien. Interrogation with intent to find XCOM bases. It would be a high priority for the campaign AI, and would involve more UFOs landing with long landing durations within XCOM base radar radius. Perhaps more civilians than aliens, making the survival of civilians significant with respect to the overall score (At the moment I could shoot all the civilians myself and as long as I shoot all the aliens I would come out ahead; would want a better civilian AI though). This gives the charlie a chance to get to them and fight perhaps larger and more difficult UFOs on the ground (care would have to be taken with the tech tree) with the consequence that passing one up will make base assaults far more likely.

Unrelated note, I think it would be fair to allow an extra 2 troopers to each transport type for ground missions on Ironman. Especially with what I'm now encountering in december!

[Cpt. Spaceface]

Could you adjust the ticker speed for the difficulty level to ramp up the speed of the invasion for harder difficulties, and slow it down for easy, so you don't have to play as optimally to not be outgunned later on?

[Aaron]

Adjusting the ticker speed is something I'm not very keen on, the ticker is really more of a game pacing control - all of the rest of the game is balanced against it, and speeding it up might make the game harder it would be in a pretty uneven way.

I am somewhat into the idea of increased alien counts on higher difficulties, but higher alien counts also grant higher rewards from recovered gear... if we can implement it relatively easily it might be worth trying though. I think people might just generally want more aliens right now anyway, which will happen in the next update regardless of difficulty level changes.

[svidangel]

A large part of the faster ticker speed could be dealt with using more cash though. At the moment it seems some people are struggling around January when massive ships start showing up, or december with the larges and heavy fighters. In my game I was very aggressive about expanding, and had the same ships showing up in February as others did in January, and thats a whole MONTH of "tickering" just based on playstyle.

For example in my game, with a faster ticker from a harder difficulty, maybe I would have gotten those massive ships in January even with the number of UFOs I was able to intercept etc. On the other hand that would make unfortunate spawn positions much much more punishing.

It might take fairly large increases in other areas to create the same kind of gameplay pressure you would get from increasing the ticker speed, especially as people get more used to the game.

[StellarRat]

I am somewhat into the idea of increased alien counts on higher difficulties, but higher alien counts also grant higher rewards from recovered gear... if we can implement it relatively easily it might be worth trying though. I think people might just generally want more aliens right now anyway, which will happen in the next update regardless of difficulty level changes.

I really think this will be the cleanest and easiest way to deal with difficulty levels. You only have to worry about one variable changing (like I said in my previous post.) All the other approaches are going to be far more complicated to balance. If the AI gets a lot tougher, you simply reduce the number aliens. If players say it's too weak you increase until they start whining. Simple. It also means you only have to balance the other factors one time like accuracy, health, money, etc... Since everything else in the game is derived from the ground combat it is the ideal place to control the balance. Edited June 12, 2013 by StellarRat

[svidangel]

I dunno, I think there should be an impact on the geoscape, base building, research etc. That's a good chunk of the game, and making that part of the game easier on the harder difficulties seems slightly ridiculous, like Superhuman was far too easy in the original due to the massive amounts of cash they threw at you after got past the first month or so. On the other hand, I dislike games that just strip you of all of your cash and options right at the start as a way of modifying the difficulty, which is why I keep advocating using the ticker.

Anyway, most of these ideas haven't fit the original criteria of significantly changing the gameplay from the original post. Best response to that I think was giving you huge amounts of money to build bases with a hugely more determined alien invasion. Having to throw waves of condors at medium/large ships early on (with the cash to replace them), along with more base defenses etc wouldn't really change the elements of gameplay, but it would definitely change the tone of the entire game.

[StellarRat]

I dunno, I think there should be an impact on the geoscape, base building, research etc.

I think just that is going to be way too hard to balance. It's already going to take a quite a while to balance things just for the NORMAL setting where every variable is in play. We're not close to done with just that one setting. Once that is complete we will have a "control model", so to speak to balance the other levels from. If you start changing all sorts of variables to make the game harder or easier I can see wild swings in difficulty which will necessiate a lot of work to understand and re-balance because you've basically thrown out your "control model". Don't forget the AI is not complete yet, so even with changing only the number of aliens we already have TWO variables in play. Good practice in any type of science is to only change one thing at a time. The permutations of effects from multiple variables quickly pile up into a big mess.

I would only be in favor of changing the other things if the number of aliens caused some type of ridiculous situation to arise. Like to have an INSANE setting would require 20 aliens for Lt. Scout crew OR the AI calculations bogged down because of the large crew numbers. At that point you'd probably want to look at making the aliens tougher or better shots, etc... instead of just adding more. That's still relatively easy to work out mathematically.

Edited June 12, 2013 by StellarRat

[svidangel]

Yep, he was looking for ideas though, not just we'll cram in everything everyone recommends haha. Making the geoscape portion easier on harder difficulties just seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.

[StellarRat]

Yep, he was looking for ideas though, not just we'll cram in everything everyone recommends haha. Making the geoscape portion easier on harder difficulties just seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.

Who said that?

[Gauddlike]

I agree with Stellar to a point.

Changes should be made one at a time and their effects checked before making more.

Add a few aliens until the challenge is increased but the balance and AI don't suffer too badly.

Then think about adjusting another variable to increase the challenge further without destroying the new balance.

For example if you double the number of aliens from normal to make hard difficulty and find any more than that starts to cause problems stop adding them.

You can keep 2x aliens and add a 0.5x modifier to cash from alien equipment, in other words more enemies but normal cash.

Then if that's balanced and tough but not tough enough try knocking 1 AP off alien movement costs or something similar until you get the challenge where you want it.

Increased enemy numbers definitely feels like a starting point though.

Increasing the difficulty of the geoscape is a tough one.

The only variables I see making much difference are UFO numbers and difficulty, cash and costs, manufacturing time, research time, funding nation relations.

None of those feel like fun to adjust.

Maybe the geoscape will balance itself out if you are having to make more gear and hire more men to replace losses in the harder ground combat?

Edited June 12, 2013 by Gauddlike

[StellarRat]

Maybe the geoscape will balance itself out if you are having to make more gear and hire more men to replace losses in the harder ground combat?

That's what I'm thinking. Armor, vehicles and weapons get very expensive after level 1 and experienced troops aren't easy to replace either. Edited June 12, 2013 by StellarRat

[Gauddlike]

Bah why do people always quote my typos before I notice and fix them?