Difficulty level suggestions

[StellarRat]

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

Feel better now?

[svidangel]

People are already artificially making the geoscape harder at the moment, though. I think that was a point earlier or maybe in another post. I get confused easily.

Anyway, just by playstyle some people are getting Massive ships as early as January, probably because they didn't intercept enough UFOs or left alien bases going too long. If you adjusted the ticker so that even by intercepting most of the UFOs you get massive ships in January, you'd have increased the difficulty, your need to both expand and keep costs down, research techs in an order that works well for you, balance manufacturing, etc. It would still be very similar to the game as people are playing it now, without blowing everyone away.

Just increasing the number of aliens doesn't really "change the game" much, especially if you decrease the money you get from them. You'll just be playing on easy/normal with more aliens to fight. At that point you could pretty much just program your base to build X structure when you hit Y money, preferably by Z date.. and it would be the same for every difficulty level.

Also that doesn't even touch air combat, which would end up the exact same at all difficulty levels.

Don't get me wrong, I want at least more aliens in ground combat at harder difficulty levels! I'd just like for the feel of the game to change a bit.

Concrete example... on easy you could build up your first base, get a bunch of foxtrots, and then eventually expand to a second base in October or November without the invasion spinning out of control.

On hard, if you DIDN'T expand to a second base by the second month, and maybe a third by the third month, you would get quickly overwhelmed. Stretching your resources to the limit should be as much a part of harder difficulties as shooting more things in ground combat.

[StellarRat]

Fair enough, but why don't we wait and see what it's like to fight say 50% more aliens per mission on Veteran? You might think it's plenty tough then without any further changes. Personally, I think an AI improvement is going to make things much tougher on the ground.

[svidangel]

Yeah, I'm fine with numbers mattering on the ground, I just don't want the ground combat to be the only thing that directly changes! Good starting point though since that is where most of the game is spent.

[StellarRat]

Yeah, I'm fine with numbers mattering on the ground, I just don't want the ground combat to be the only thing that directly changes!

So, even if adding aliens made the game sufficiently challenging for your play level you'd still want other stuff to change?

[svidangel]

"features like the two described above that could give a significantly different gameplay experience between difficulty levels."

The extra cash on startup on the harder difficulty levels would open up extra options. It would be nice if the harder difficulties had a whole different feel to them, with other changes like this to the global part of the game, even if the ground combat could be made challenging by adding more aliens.

EDIT: Actually I'd prefer some changes to both vs just ramping up the alien count until the missions were enough of a meat grinder to slow you down heh.

[Gauddlike]

I am not sure I want the experience to be significantly different.

If I am playing a game because of the experience but it just isn't quite challenging enough for me then I don't want the next difficulty step up to feel like a different game.

I want that same feel and same experience but with a challenge more suited to my skill level.

If a big part of the game on normal is balancing your funding to get your base built and afford what you need to survive the alien attack then that should be the same on hard and superman.

[svidangel]

If a big part of the game on normal is balancing your funding to get your base built and afford what you need to survive the alien attack then that should be the same on hard and superman.

Not sure I follow this part. So since a big part of the game is ground combat, we shouldn't touch ground combat either so that is the same on hard and superman?

[Gauddlike]

I never claimed that the geoscape shouldn't be touched, I just suggested that any changes made should maintain the atmosphere of the game.

Adding extra enemies, tweaking damage so on wouldn't change the feel of ground combat (or the geoscpae for that matter), it would just make it harder to win.

Throwing a ton of cash at the player does change the feel for me.

I mentioned a single part of the geoscape that I felt was important to the atmosphere and feel, not freezing the entire system.

To make a more realistic comparison you could have picked one part of ground combat, for example:

A big part of the game is using your AP wisely, maybe AP costs should be balanced so you always have to use your AP wisely on all difficulty levels.

That comes close to reflecting my comment but with a ground combat example I think.

[svidangel]

So what part of the geoscape do you think could be changed in a similar way?

[Gauddlike]

I think the easiest change and the one that feels closest to the same sort of adjustment is to increase the starting ticker value a little.

I would also consider reducing the amount the player could slow the ticker down as well.

Not directly increasing the ticker speed, just forcing the player to do better in order to maintain the same pace as lower difficulties.

For example (made up numbers and not completely researched items that affect the ticker):

On easy you could reduce the ticker progression by 100 per week if you manage to take down 75% of the enemy craft.

On hard you would need to take down 85% of the enemy plus generate a bit of research to get the same reduction.

On superhuman you would need to have your research pretty much up to date and be stopping 95% of the enemy to maintain that 100 reduction.

In general the player needs to run faster to stay in the same spot.

That would need testing though as it could rapidly get out of control.

Just an idea off the top of my head, not put much thought into it.

[svidangel]

Ok, I like that. I think that we are ending up in the same "gameplay place" ideally. Normal geoscape seemed a bit easy for me in 18.3 once I got the hang of it, so I was imagining the "running faster" already happening and so increasing the invasion ticker would help compensate for the player improvement over beating it on normal. But either way works for me.

-From what I saw in 18.3 running faster resulted in me slowing the invasion ticker by about a month by January, so whether making it tick faster so that Massive ships show up in Jan., or reducing the impact of what the player does so that on a harder difficulty so that massive ships show up by Jan. doesn't matter to me.

[Gauddlike]

The only reason I suggested the reduced impact over the faster ticker is that for some reason I feel that it has less impact on balance than faster ticker speeds.

I know it has basically the same effect and there may in fact be no difference at all, it is just a feeling.

Everything will happen (ticker wise) in exactly the same way, you will still need your research by the same point, you will still need to boost your manufacturing at the same stages to keep up with demand and so on.

You will just need to work harder (or smarter) to keep the aliens in check while you do it.

Throw in the increased impact from enemy numbers in ground combat which could mean increased losses and resupply costs (especially on iron man) and the game should become trickier and less forgiving.

Then on superhuman you start the ticker at a slightly higher stage as well.

You now have to play catch up with reduced impact and stronger/more numerous ground forces.

[svidangel]

I'm actually not as much of a fan of starting the player farther behind as I am making the advancement curve they have to keep steeper. Punishing the player right from the start before they've had a chance to even make any good or bad decisions... meh.

Course I don't actually understand out said ticker works. Could be that making the ticker go faster is more of a V^2 increase than a V increase, in which case I don't want to make it THAT bad.

[Dranak]

I'm actually not as much of a fan of starting the player farther behind as I am making the advancement curve they have to keep steeper. Punishing the player right from the start before they've had a chance to even make any good or bad decisions... meh.

Course I don't actually understand out said ticker works. Could be that making the ticker go faster is more of a V^2 increase than a V increase, in which case I don't want to make it THAT bad.

Or how about moving the ticker at normal speed, but starting it slightly ahead? So on the highest difficulty you start out facing scouts instead of light scouts (basically skipping the first several weeks of game time), starting you at a slight disadvantage.

[Black Cat]

While a lot of people will probably think the easy changes would make the easy mode to easy lol. Lets face it easy is for either learning or very casual consumption. Most of us on this forum would never play on easy anyways so don't think of them in how they would affect you, but think of them as ways to get more people to pay for our more difficult modes.

Alien Bases

Easy: Show up on Geoscape as soon as they are built.

Normal: Show up on Geoscape if they are flown over.

Hard: Show up on Geoscape only if patrolled over

Ticker

Easy: Slow it down

Normal: As is

Hard: AS is, but.. Instead of light scouts first, Light and normal scouts for the same amount of time it would take to do both.

Corvettes and Landing ships get grouped also

Economy

Easy: Cheaper Everything, Easy is learning mode for any game and things are a bit to expensive even on easy for learning.

Normal: As is

Hard: AS is (but see Alien Ships)

Aircraft

Easy: Condors can carry missles and torps, or longer Gun ranges

Normal: As is

Hard: Foxtrots limited to two missles and two torps

Alien Craft

Easy: Large Ships don't spawn with escorts

Normal: As is

Hard: If damage to alien ship doubles that needed to down it then the craft is vaporized with no ground misson generated

Base Buildings:

Easy: Living Quarters Hold 60, Research and Manufacting can support 25 techs/scientists each.

Normal: As is

Hard: Radar short range radius is reduced, long range stays where it is

More to come...

Edited June 25, 2013 by Black Cat

[RawCode]

IMHO!

First of all, this game not competitive, its sandbox and all settings shoud base off this fact.

There is no reason to hide actual effects from player, entire configuration shoud be opened, with predefined patterns like EASY and HARD.

Affected options shoud be:

1) "Hidden movement" ON\OFF (if turned OFF hidden movement screen wont appear and player will be allowed to see what happening, as long as area not under FOW)

2) "Supressed indication" ON\OFF (if turned OFF game wont display any supression indication on alliens)

3) "Open map" ON\OFF (if turned ON entire map will be grayout at start, soo player will know location of every object, includin UFO, but not locations of alliens)

4) "Aliens HP" 50% > 200% with 25% steps

5) "Aliens damage" 50 % > 200% with 25% steps

5) "Aliens amount ground" same as above (amount of allien units in ground missions)

6) "Aliens amount air" (amount of UFO flying around)

7) "Income amount" (amount of money from start and from each county)

8) "Loot amount" (amount of money from ground missions)

9) "Units death" ON\OFF (if set OFF, xenonauts survive any damage and returned to base with 0 HP, loosing entire mission still cause complete death)

10) "Iron man" ON\OFF

11) Invasion rule:

A) Scale by time (more powerfull UFO start to appear over time)

B) Scale by player actions (more powerfull UFO start to appear after player did 10 ground missions) (or any other amount) (this will remove difficulty spikes from game)

C) Scaled by research (total sandbox option, harder ufo start to appear if player finish special research)

If player select any difficulty, it set all params in predefined way, but, still allow to change individual values.

Such system implemented in "Gnomoria" and allow just infinite gameplay options, also it allow to disable specific enemy types.

[Queamin]

I agree with this quote by Black Cat as I have just started Xenonauts I am finding ground combat OK but air combat progression very hard.

by Black Cat

While a lot of people will probably think the easy changes would make the easy mode to easy lol. Lets face it easy is for either learning or very casual consumption. Most of us on this forum would never play on easy anyways so don't think of them in how they would affect you, but think of them as ways to get more people to pay for our more difficult modes.

I know we in beta but if you never played x-com or Xenonauts, they do need some leeway or you could find people could quit and stop playing, air combat on easy could delay when 3 fighters and mediums ufo's show up some what or give more money then people learning the game will not have a so hard learning curve and hit a brick wall.

Edited June 29, 2013 by Queamin
deleted some text when I changed my post before posting

[StellarRat]

I'm still in favor of just increasing the number of aliens to fight. Like I said, shooting more bad guys is more fun than have to re-think your economics or some other arcane angle. It's also very easy to control one variable changes for balancing purposes.

[Person012345]

My personal feeling about this that you probably should only change ONE variable to make the game more difficult.

I take the opposite view. I think most variable should change. The overall experience should be easy on easy (well, this is xenonaughts so maybe not "easy" per se), normal on normal and hard on hard. Being not as good at a certain aspect of the game doesn't mean that that one single thing should therefore make your experience no different than on hard mode. If you're a whizz at ground combat, but air combat stumps you, if air combat is the place you fail every time and doesn't scale with difficulty, then playing easy will be the same as playing hard. To my mind that doesn't make sense. All "parts" of the game should have at least one component that scales with difficulty so that all parts do.

I also think escalation speed is an obvious candidate for difficulty scaling. Things that happen on the geoscape have a knock on effect on the entire rest of the game, so if we want to just modify a few things to change difficulty, it should start there (since reducing difficulty of the geoscape aspects makes the entire game easier).

Edited July 10, 2013 by Person012345

[Person012345]

IMHO!

First of all, this game not competitive, its sandbox and all settings shoud base off this fact.

There is no reason to hide actual effects from player, entire configuration shoud be opened, with predefined patterns like EASY and HARD.

Affected options shoud be:

1) "Hidden movement" ON\OFF (if turned OFF hidden movement screen wont appear and player will be allowed to see what happening, as long as area not under FOW)

2) "Supressed indication" ON\OFF (if turned OFF game wont display any supression indication on alliens)

3) "Open map" ON\OFF (if turned ON entire map will be grayout at start, soo player will know location of every object, includin UFO, but not locations of alliens)

4) "Aliens HP" 50% > 200% with 25% steps

5) "Aliens damage" 50 % > 200% with 25% steps

5) "Aliens amount ground" same as above (amount of allien units in ground missions)

6) "Aliens amount air" (amount of UFO flying around)

7) "Income amount" (amount of money from start and from each county)

8) "Loot amount" (amount of money from ground missions)

9) "Units death" ON\OFF (if set OFF, xenonauts survive any damage and returned to base with 0 HP, loosing entire mission still cause complete death)

10) "Iron man" ON\OFF

11) Invasion rule:

A) Scale by time (more powerfull UFO start to appear over time)

B) Scale by player actions (more powerfull UFO start to appear after player did 10 ground missions) (or any other amount) (this will remove difficulty spikes from game)

C) Scaled by research (total sandbox option, harder ufo start to appear if player finish special research)

If player select any difficulty, it set all params in predefined way, but, still allow to change individual values.

Such system implemented in "Gnomoria" and allow just infinite gameplay options, also it allow to disable specific enemy types.

I would however prefer a system like this, where every option is customizable to the user.

[StellarRat]

I take the opposite view. I think most variable should change.

That's fine, but that would require rebalancing the whole game. When do you want it to be done? Besides, you can be all the whiz there is at ground combat, but I guarantee that having more aliens to fight will make the game harder.

[Person012345]

That's fine, but that would require rebalancing the whole game. When do you want it to be done? Besides, you can be all the whiz there is at ground combat, but I guarantee that having more aliens to fight will make the game harder.

I should rephrase my comment to "as many variables as feasible should change". Yes it will require effort, but making a game people want to play is worth it. The changes your espousing are extremely narrow viewed - they only cater to your one view and don't take into account that other people may enjoy the game for different reasons and find different aspects hard. For your comment, it doesn't matter how many aliens are on board a ship if you're having difficulty shooting them down in the first place. If you fail before you even get beyond light ships with few crew due to being bad at economic management then having 50,000 aliens on board a battleship would not make the game harder or more enjoyable. Yes, the game should punish you for being bad at it, but the point of easy is that it's more forgiving and, well, easy. If it's exactly the same for you as on hard because you never even get to face "more aliens" due to the rest of the game being identical to hardmode whilst you're a newbie, then more aliens doesn't matter.

That is, ignoring the fact that simply adding more aliens in a brute force attempt to make the game harder is rather... inelegant at the least, and I seriously doubt would make the game as fun as you seem to think it would. I certainly don't necessarily agree (in all circumstances) with the mantra "more aliens = more fun".

Edit: If you're saying balance the geoscape specifically around easy, then add "more aliens" to harder mode, then I don't think that would make for a very enjoyable game for most people. The economics would be too easy for someone who wanted a challenge and if they're very good they'll just end up stomping the aliens anyway due to having all the money and all the equipment, no matter how many aliens you throw at them (not to mention the fact that it would seem unrealistic and immersion-breaking to balance all alien weapons around easy mode then just send more).

I honestly think you're severely underestimating the disparity in skill between a good player and a baddie.

Edited July 10, 2013 by Person012345

[StellarRat]

I should rephrase my comment to "as many variables as feasible should change". Yes it will require effort, but making a game people want to play is worth it. The changes your espousing are extremely narrow viewed - they only cater to your one view and don't take into account that other people may enjoy the game for different reasons and find different aspects hard. For your comment, it doesn't matter how many aliens are on board a ship if you're having difficulty shooting them down in the first place. If you fail before you even get beyond light ships with few crew due to being bad at economic management then having 50,000 aliens on board a battleship would not make the game harder or more enjoyable. Yes, the game should punish you for being bad at it, but the point of easy is that it's more forgiving and, well, easy. If it's exactly the same for you as on hard because you never even get to face "more aliens" due to the rest of the game being identical to hardmode whilst you're a newbie, then more aliens doesn't matter.

That is, ignoring the fact that simply adding more aliens in a brute force attempt to make the game harder is rather... inelegant at the least, and I seriously doubt would make the game as fun as you seem to think it would. I certainly don't necessarily agree (in all circumstances) with the mantra "more aliens = more fun".

Edit: If you're saying balance the geoscape specifically around easy, then add "more aliens" to harder mode, then I don't think that would make for a very enjoyable game for most people. The economics would be too easy for someone who wanted a challenge and if they're very good they'll just end up stomping the aliens anyway due to having all the money and all the equipment, no matter how many aliens you throw at them (not to mention the fact that it would seem unrealistic and immersion-breaking to balance all alien weapons around easy mode then just send more).

I honestly think you're severely underestimating the disparity in skill between a good player and a baddie.

I understand what you want, but Goldhawk has stated that more aliens will be the first thing they try. I guess we'll see how that goes. As far as the other stuff goes, of course it's possible, but considering how much time has already been spent trying to balance "NORMAL" and it's still not done I just don't see changing a lot of variables on each level. I will say that Goldhawk (and I) seem to think that ground combat is focus of Xenonauts. That is obvious by the changes and choices they have made, so logically, increasing the difficulty there is the first place I imagine they will go. One thing I don't want is uber-aliens that hit 100% of the time or have a million hit points. XCOM 2012 went that route and most people think it sucks. Having more aliens seems much better and more fun to me than that solution.

[Person012345]

I understand what you want, but Goldhawk has stated that more aliens will be the first thing they try. I guess we'll see how that goes. As far as the other stuff goes, of course it's possible, but considering how much time has already been spent trying to balance "NORMAL" and it's still not done I just don't see changing a lot of variables on each level. I will say that Goldhawk (and I) seem to think that ground combat is focus of Xenonauts. That is obvious by the changes and choices they have made, so logically, increasing the difficulty there is the first place I imagine they will go. One thing I don't want is uber-aliens that hit 100% of the time or have a million hit points. XCOM 2012 went that route and most people think it sucks. Having more aliens seems much better and more fun to me than that solution.

As far as alien abilities go, I'd be in favour of keeping them at the same level for normal and hard then reduce it slightly for easy mode. I don't support making aliens godmode. However, if indeed the only difference they make between easy medium and hard is alien numbers then I will probably not end up playing the game very much and will most likely regret my purchase. Unless they pull some amazing balancing act with the economy that I very much doubt is possible. Yes ground combat is the main part of the game, but it's not the only part of the game and has to work with all the other parts of the game. If all the other components are balanced around a single difficulty, that's about half the game that will be either too easy or too hard for most people. People will either be failing the game due to not being able/willing to game the economics thus pulling focus away from ground combat, or they'll have so much money that ground combat will become trivial. Moar aliens won't solve that and even if it does it'll make the rest of the game a mere sideshow. If you want to make everything except ground combat utterly trivial then why even include it. You might as well just make the entire game a "skirmish" mode.

These are just my thoughts and obviously we won't know exactly how it balances until they implement it fully. But from what I can think right now, simply adding more aliens to harder difficulties and changing nothing else is a lazy way of doing it and won't make for a very fulfilling game.