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Massive air combat difficulty spike


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What worries me is that bases aren't that big, but if we need more planes then hangers will tie up even a larger % of that base.

Perhaps we should go back to the original, larger base size? If it becomes a problem, that is. I could easily see it becoming one, though.

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Perhaps we should go back to the original, larger base size? If it becomes a problem, that is. I could easily see it becoming one, though.

If we can have more bases cheaply then, I wouldn't mind, we need to wait until it is balanced.

Just at moment air combat seams a bit of a mess with the changes and funding and that air combat almost over shadows everything else (skipping items to get planes out)but once it is balanced I hope it is right.

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I think that's a false dilemma - just because air combat is not important in the overall scheme of the game doesn't mean it has to also be simplistic and uninteresting. If you can succeed at the air combat by just building loads of Foxtrots and ignoring both Condors and Corsairs then that is clearly broken. Condors and Corsairs should be used to to take out light scouts and also to protect the heavy hitting Foxtrots from fighters.

Keep in mind the economy for the Geoscape is still basically the first pass I made - enough people have said they are short on resources that I will be increasing player income in some way on the next pass, especially if I am also adding more money pits in the form of maintenance.

I understand that the economy isnt balanced, and the corsairs being useless is an obvious balance issue.

Again I said I had faith it'll get worked out in the end.

I imagine the thought is 6 hangers per base, 3 Foxtrots and 3 Condors/Corsairs.

Condor/Corsairs used to destroy fighters and Foxtrots for bombers and larger ships.

We need to be able to properly split off or engage the fighters escorting a larger ship tho...which means we'll either have to be able to safely kill the fighters and retreat (Safely read as not be destroyed) and the Foxtrot can at least do some damage, or outright destroy larger ships.

However if the single Foxtrot kills a bomber, fine, but a Corvette? So this means an additional 1-2 Foxtrots would be needed to finish off the corvette...and this is where I see a problem.

How many more Foxtrots would it take? 1 extra with plasma? 2 with Alenium? Or maybe 2 more condors/corsairs? 1 to kite the larger UFO and 1 to circle behind and empty it's guns?

So you'll be using 4-5 planes to take out a single UFO grouping, which reads as throw the entire base at 1 UFO, as the only thing you have left is enough to take out a single fighter or possibly a grouping I havent ever seen such as a Bomber with single escort.

You "can" refuel and "try" to get a 2nd UFO off the map tho, but it will be tight.

So it seems like 6 hangers, 2 Foxtrots and 4 Condor/Corsair = [1 Fighter Wing OR 2 Bomber Wings OR 1 Corvette Wing] and maybe a single fighter or bomber perhaps?

Seems like you would have to spread out the UFOs more, which is no bad thing, and/or Consider adding hardpoints back to the Foxtrots.

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I'll be honest. I find having to throw multiple sorties at aliens to be very vexing. Generally if I cannot take them out in a single pass I let them go. Granted the furthest I have gotten to so far has been the beginning of January I believe. But I tend to think if we need 5 planes to down a ufo then we should be able to launch 5 plane sorties.

It just seems to really go against my tactical thinking of sending a sortie at a target I know they cannot take down.

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Put me down for someone who's confused by devs saying:

1. Air combat is too hard and important

2. Air combat needs to be harder and more involved

We get magic interceptors to nerf air combat, then we get told we need more interceptors to manage a more buffed air combat...

I'd interpret that as meaning: they want the air combat to be interesting and challenging, but they don't want losing a single air battle (or even a single plane) to be game ending. Under the old system, air combat was difficult not necessarily because of the actual battles (once you know what you're doing!), but because the consequences for failing were quite dramatic.

In other words, I think they want it to be like ground battles - these are (in principle) difficult and challenging (if they weren't, there'd be no game!). But losing a single soldier, or even half your squad, or even the entire mission, doesn't have irreversible consequences for the game - you can easily re-recruit, while the resources lost to a failed ground mission aren't (or, shouldn't be - I'm not sure this is entirely true at the moment) essential to your game (not for an individual ground mission, anyway).

That would be my interpretation, anyway.

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Remember the whole point of the waves system is you are not supposed to be able, or at least it will be very difficult, to fully defend the airspace during each wave - regardless of how much sense it makes, the premise of these games is that XCOM/Xenonauts are very resource constrained, and always on the back foot; if we allowed players to shoot down every UFO they would essentially be halting the alien invasion, which would somewhat undermine that premise.

I am thinking of some ways to make that process of picking which targets to intercept a little more interesting, but absolutely no promises on that because getting changes to the Geoscape portion of the game at this stage is an absolute nightmare - one very small change to UFO mission types in a previous experimental build caused all those UFO crashes which have now plagued us for a couple of weeks.

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Remember the whole point of the waves system is you are not supposed to be able, or at least it will be very difficult, to fully defend the airspace during each wave - regardless of how much sense it makes, the premise of these games is that XCOM/Xenonauts are very resource constrained, and always on the back foot; if we allowed players to shoot down every UFO they would essentially be halting the alien invasion, which would somewhat undermine that premise.

I am thinking of some ways to make that process of picking which targets to intercept a little more interesting, but absolutely no promises on that because getting changes to the Geoscape portion of the game at this stage is an absolute nightmare - one very small change to UFO mission types in a previous experimental build caused all those UFO crashes which have now plagued us for a couple of weeks.

I have been watching the Altitudes and speeds of Medium Ships, trying to predetermine if the ship is a Bomber or Corvette, I feel like the answer is probably there, just havent fully watched and studied it yet.

Is there a way to determine this though? (I have noticed at times the stats of the Bombers and Corvettes can be identical)

If not, that would be something to look at...as playing the shell game to see if you get lucky is something that is going to ruin people's game due to guessing poorly over time.

Granted you can always send in a scout ship...but I think expecting that isnt the best idea as it requires more ships and places further constraint on how you manage your Air Force and How much/what you need.

Maybe once everything gets balanced more, it'll be fine to use scout ships to find out...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Okay, so if this were turn based instead of real time, I would love it to death. But it's not. And that's why I'm actually starting to dislike it. I can't control three things at once in air combat in real time very well. I find the interface to be somewhat cumbersome, given the amount of precision that is required.

I have never once shot down anything larger than a standard class Scout. The Heavy Fighters are even harder to kill than the standard Scouts.

I don't even know what a Corsair is, but from what I've read in this thread, I never got a standard class Scout until after I saw the first medium annihilate all that opposed it. My reaction was, "okay, so that was stupid."

But right now, I'm so frustrated with the air combat, I'm tempted to just edit the files so I always win to effectively take it out of the game. Not being able to down a medium craft is preventing me from playing the rest of the game. I can't keep up enough funds to actually do anything.

I've gotten a few hints from this particular topic, though, so I'm going to try a few things and see how it goes.

EDIT: Well, that didn't work. I guess I'll wait for the next build to see if the balance changes. It was fun until the mediums showed up. I'm done with 19.5.

Edited by Ishantil
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Ishantil, you can improve you chances by splitting up your air force, thus forcing the aliens to do the same; this allows you sometimes to down two fighters and damage the medium. If you have not managed to get a Condor behind the medium, then you have to scoot out and come back to finish it off.

As I posted elsewhere, a change I don't like in 19.5 is that even a light alien scout now cannot be downed by two missiles, which means that one now cannot send out a single plane to intercept a very small target. And the auto-combat for air is totally useless, as your air force will be totally crippled after one or two battles against even the weakest aliens.

Bottom line: save before every air battle and be ready to reload often, and use divide and conquer tactics.

BTW, in the recent video by Stellwarrior77, I saw that his Foxtrots had 4 missiles, which is a HUGE advantage, so I wonder how in the World he managed to get 4 missiles on his 2-missile Foxtrots...

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I'll be honest. I find having to throw multiple sorties at aliens to be very vexing. Generally if I cannot take them out in a single pass I let them go. Granted the furthest I have gotten to so far has been the beginning of January I believe. But I tend to think if we need 5 planes to down a ufo then we should be able to launch 5 plane sorties.

It just seems to really go against my tactical thinking of sending a sortie at a target I know they cannot take down.

I agree entirely. The original X-COM very rarely required you to sortie, return and rearm, and sortie again, at least on the difficulty I played at, and air battles were a very short affair. You often didn't even need more than one fighter; I still meet people who never realized that you could engage with more than one interceptor at once!

I'm of the mind that nothing but the very largest UFOs should require multiple sorties to take down. Air combat exists to provide some tension and realism in the lead in to the game's meat and bones, the ground battles. Air combat should be challenging and fun, but not overly long or very arduous. A 3-plane sortie, competently handled and appropriately equipped, should be able to splash most UFOs in one engagement.

Chris himself has said that air combat should be a relatively minor part of the game, and if I need to burn the majority of my money on a large wing of interceptors and string out anything less than battleship-class UFOs over multiple engagements the air combat is eating up too much of my attention.

At the end of the day I'd prefer that the dev team err on the side of making air combat too easy rather than too hard. Save the real brutal difficulty for the ground battles. Decoupling air combat difficulty from the overall difficulty setting, if feasible, would be a very wise move. Even something as rudimentary as making an "air combat difficulty" setting that simply tweaks UFO HP values and nothing else would get the job done.

Edited by TheTuninator
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