How does radar work?

[Solver]

I'm running into some unclear things with the radar. How does it work exactly? It has short and long range. Around your base, you see a circle and then a second circle with a dashed line. Are these circles, respectively, the "short" and "long" range? Or is the first circle the "long" range with the second one being tracking range? If so, where exactly is "short" range?

Depending on the answers to this, something may be fishy with the numbers for radar in the game.

[Sathra]

Short range has a better chance to detect, but is very, well, short-ranged (not sure how short). Long covers most of the area inside the solid circle.

Nothing can be detected between the solid and dotted circles, but a UFO that flies out of the solid circle can still be seen till it leaves the dotted circle.

[Solver]

Okay, then the dashed circle is tracking range and the solid one is long range, while short range is not shown.

In that case, I am not convinced that building additional radars is worth it in a base. I can't really find the amount of time that a UFO spends on a mission, but some quick observation reveals that UFOs routinely stay in radar range for 3-4 hours at least before heading back into space.

If the probability of detection at long range is 1% per minute, it means that the chance of detecting the UFO within 1 hour is 45%. Within 2 hours it is 70%, and in 3 hours that rises to 83%. An extra radar would mean that it's 70% within 1 hour and 91% within 2 hours. I would tend to think that, given your ability to only run so many missions, the numbers as they begin are already good enough, and that improving the detection chance further is not especially worth it.

[Hadrian]

Radars increase your detection chance by 10 % per minute short, 1% long per minute to a max of 40% detection short and by 4% long. Many times UFOs simply wont BE detected, so increasing your odds of detection its critical imo. Initially you may only detect one or two UFO's per wave, but with more radar you may detect more per wave.

Edited June 9, 2013 by Hadrian

[Hadrian]

Double post, sry.

[Solver]

I don't see the "many times". Does anyone know the typical duration of a UFO mission? Like I said, you'll detect UFOs 83% of the time with 1 radar if they spend 3 hours within your range. I can assume that I am not detecting all UFOs in a wave, but I even doubt the usefulness of that as it would possibly lead to more missions than I can handle with my forces anyway.

[Hadrian]

You dont have to do every mission though. Just shooting them down is enough to stop them advancing the invasion ticker score. More shootdowns means slower invasion ticker growth.

[Solver]

Fair point, I suppose it slows down the rate of the invasion and that makes things easier. Well, in a way - you still need the invasion to reach full force to complete the game.

[Steelpoint]

The rate of which the invasion progresses can be down to luck as well, considering that most UFO's will appear at a random point on Earth, with one or two exceptions.

Correct me if I am wrong but you don't need to have the invasion hit its full force before you can win, well more so full force would be the thousands of UFO descending on Earth at the same time. But your objective is to somehow repel the invasion before it hits that critical mass where the UFO's arriving on Earth are simply too much for you to handle.

I remember Chris stating that he wants to eventually force the players hand, and to prevent the player for trying to outlast the invasion or hold out for as long as possible before the "final" mission since the time between attacks would get smaller and smaller until it is a constant attack all the time.

[Solver]

I don't know how much forcing the player's hand is needed. In the original, you could last for more than a year if you wanted to, I'd rather lose the game due to losing nation support than just an endless barrage of UFOs that clearly feels designed to make me lose.

Anyhow, how do you win without the invasion at full force? You'll need to capture a Praetor to complete the game, and those guys only show up in the very late stages. I get the impression it's very near to full force by the time Praetors make an entry.

[Hadrian]

I had a praetor as a base commander in one game that made it to January. But I absolutely agree with you on forcing the players hand. I want to drag the game out as long as possible to get the max "fun" out of the playthrough. As you said I would much rather lose to lack of nation funding than from endless waves I cant compete with.

[Solver]

I completed my first game last night, it was in February, and I also had a Praetor command a base in January. And the impression I got was that it's approximately the time limit. It felt like March might be the last survivable month, that beyond it would be just endless waves of battleships attacking everything that are no longer possible to deal with.

[flashman]

I completed my first game last night, it was in February, and I also had a Praetor command a base in January. And the impression I got was that it's approximately the time limit. It felt like March might be the last survivable month, that beyond it would be just endless waves of battleships attacking everything that are no longer possible to deal with.

Was that March of the first year? Coz that feels like a really short game to me

[Solver]

Well, the game starts in September, so that would be 6 months. Which is less than the original game could go on for.

[flashman]

Yeah any game that lasts less than a year is too short for me.

[Solver]

The current game is in no way suited for playing a year. You will run out of things to research in 5-6 months tops. And starting in January, it seems to be just Elite aliens with highest tier UFOs everywhere.

For it to be playable for a year would be a huge rebalance. The pace of everything would need to be slowed down, and also the frequency of UFOs in that case (doing a hundred crash sites in one game is a no-no).

[blubberdiblub]

Well, one could at least have the invasion ticker tick slower (with a lower multiplier) in easy difficulty or something like that.

[StellarRat]

In the OG it was possible to achieve air superiority and hold out for a very long time.

[lightgemini]

If I remember correctly Chris stated 2 things:

-Game should last around a year

-Multiple radars may be changed to increase range not detection chances.

The first is not there, but guess it will be adressed when the balance work finishes battle and goes to geoscape.

The second feels much better, although building "radar bases" in the OG was fun for me.

[svidangel]

Mmm, just hit January and don't even have mag tech, but haven't seen anything larger than a large UFO either. Guess I should start seeing new stuff soon.

[Hadrian]

Mmm, just hit January and don't even have mag tech, but haven't seen anything larger than a large UFO either. Guess I should start seeing new stuff soon.

For me it normally starts around the 10th of January or so. Thats when the "Massive" size stuff starts popping in with interceptors whizzing around. I had at one point 6 intercept targets on radar nearly every day.

[TrashMan]

Here oysu go OP:

A radar system has a transmitter that emits radio waves called radar signals in predetermined directions. When these come into contact with an object they are usually reflected or scattered in many directions. Radar signals are reflected especially well by materials of considerable electrical conductivity—especially by most metals, by seawater and by wet lands. Some of these make the use of radar altimeters possible. The radar signals that are reflected back towards the transmitter are the desirable ones that make radar work. If the object is moving either toward or away from the transmitter, there is a slight equivalent change in the frequency of the radio waves, caused by the Doppler effect.

Radar receivers are usually, but not always, in the same location as the transmitter. Although the reflected radar signals captured by the receiving antenna are usually very weak, they can be strengthened by electronic amplifiers. More sophisticated methods of signal processing are also used in order to recover useful radar signals.

[Xenomorph]

I have a feeling i may be missing some stuff here... I played earlier versions on and off, and only recently got the Steam version, so i'm not very experienced with it yet, but i can't stop having a feeling, by going through this post, that there's also a "scripted" feeling on Xenonauts.

It has been stated that things get rough in January (haven't got there yet), and its quite impossible to keep things up after 6 months. Does it basically mean forced game over, win it or lose it? As fact, there is only so much income we can get through the period, most of it through funding, and selling some extra loot; i do find this adequate, in some way, but it brings up severe limitations - base building, manufacturing stuff and how long it takes with only one base available, without going bankrupt. I just managed to save enough to build a second base with a radar on it, so i can also keep an eye on eastern Russia and rest of Asia. North and Central America are already gone, South to follow soon, and there was nothing i could have done about it. Maybe there's a way to keep everyone happy? I can't figure out how to fund covering the Old and New world with radars and fighters, and i have been killing plenty of UFO in my coverage area, haven't been throwing money away on stuff i don't need, only have 3 Foxtrot and 3 Condor, so far haven't lost any aircraft, but i'm still strapped for cash. Thinking about how things developed and how i could manage to get a second base on America early enough to keep it from baling out, i just conclude i probably couldn't.

From the above, i could assume this might be a feature, much like "pick a side and stick with it"; saving half of the world is better then losing it all, guessing lore dictates everything will get back to normal once the aliens get their rears kicked out, if it wasn't for that so important cash flow, it wouldn't really matter.

But it really doesn't play well as for playing the game on my own terms, drag it as much as i want to (i always loved to make them suffer a bit ), achieve air superiority and have the satisfaction of having a very organized, strong well funded military organization, with a good compliment of awesome arse-kickin soldiers, even if its for the bling, but they do keep the planet safe, and that's the main reason why the organization exists.

I don't go back to XC-UD anymore, but i do go back to Apocalypse regularly, and no matter what how many says it sucks, it doesn't, and there's some good lessons to learn from it - rough start, but keep it up and money wont be a problem anymore - if not for manufacturing/selling/killing UFO, i can raid other organizations that allied with the aliens, get some good loot and bring them some pain, till money is not an issue anymore. Point is, there is no war without money, and its a little sad that so many games, as tendency, tend to use it as a degree of difficulty; EU is a good example of it, pretty much like "here's a hundred bucks, now go save the world, you can figure it out". It works, but it does get tiresome when we constantly have to figure out how to ride bicycles with no wheels, and for the most part, we can only get squares.

I would hope for 2 gameplay modes, regular, as it is, and marathon. With marathon having the option to get additional funding from manufacturing/selling, of getting turncoat countries back, by achieving air superiority, wiping out all alien bases on the territory, and help forming a new government, even if it meant "distributing" some of the riches amassed by the organization to get them back on track, much like an investment. And delivering the final blow on the alien invasion as and when we see fit, because after so much work researching all that tech and manufacturing all those bad-arse guns, might as well have some fun with them, right

Another thing is soldier character, i think its missing some. I cant seem to get a connection with any of them because they can do something special, be it by being able to shoot a fly from 5 miles away, running the whole map in one turn, you know what i mean. If any John a, Peter b or Charlie c get killed, its not a catastrophe, there will be no special memorial for being some special, just another soldier forgot to duck a big ball of barbecuing plasma. I think this would be a really good addition to the game, having those special soldiers that get special perks that can do special things, just because they are special, like us regular humans, were all different and some of us can do things no regular dude can. I would mention Jagged Alliance 2, i cant think of a better example of a game with character personality/traits, we all loved some and hated others. Sure its a special setting, but it would be a great setting if one of our totally generic and random soldiers was found to be a sniping crackshot, other being able to see in the dark better the cats, other have that outstanding amount of stamina and TU, other was a baseball player and can throw 2 grenades at the same time. You know what i mean maybe most of us like to stick to the same team over and over, some like to bring a couple rookies along to give them some training, just in case, but as for having the alien exterminator dream team, this is how it should go

Things like these would really make Xenonauts stand out from the other stuff out there. One must have, replayability, not just because its fun, but also because there will always be something different.

Being developed by an Indie team does have its disadvantages but many many benefits, has lots of strong points, and will be any modder's dream. If not THE perfect, surely A perfect candidate for UD spiritual successor, after so many fails. Sure there's UFO:AI, looks pretty solid as of lately, good competition and a game these dudes should keep an eye on.

Edited June 10, 2013 by Xenomorph

[svidangel]

Most of the way through January now, still no massive ships.

Now that my second manufacturing base with 75 engineers has come online I'm starting to be able to pump out enough aircraft and weapons to keep shooting everything down. There was a rough spot at the end of december/beginning of January, but I seem to be past that now. I suspect I could have done better if I had produced more Foxtrots rather than using my precious manufacturing man-hours on xenonaut weaponry.

Jan 21, 2707 casualties, as a reference.

[svidangel]

Just entered February, probably a bit behind on the invasion tickers since there are still no Massive ships. Also I don't think I've encountered a Praetor yet, whatever that is. It definitely isn't so scripted that you absolutely get overwhelmed within the first few months.

Here's an example from my game in Feb where things are still fairly well under control.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pbklut04qcdw0a1/2013-06-10_23.25.49.sav

I do miss differentiating the soldiers with a skill tree. One of the things I really liked about the Firaxis XCOM