Xenomorph Posted June 16, 2013 Share Posted June 16, 2013 Maybe these have been suggested or mentioned before, and they're a bit obvious, so forgive me if i'm being redundant Balance: UFO missions could be somewhat more focused around the area where the players builds the first base, and all around in a minor scale. To make this somewhat realistic, at the start of the game, a. INTEL report stating that alien activity seems to be focused on one specific part of the globe, and suggest the first base to be built there. This doesn't go well with the player building a base wherever he wants, but then, we can build a base on Australia and lose from the very beginning. Right now the only good and viable starting spot is North Africa. I think this would add some freedom and variety. As an alternative, letting the player build wherever he wants and tune the AI to have increased activity on that area. That would ensure fair game and steady income. But still, building a base an New Zealand would be "at your own risk", good luck being a fisherman UFO over sea/water: Maybe i've been unlucky, but it has been happening A LOT. I'd hate to invest hours and lose a game because of such thing, either most just fly over sea, or they run and get destroyed there (or escape, if i have to RTB, after so much cat chasing rat). No missions-game over, and chased aliens should know better if they get shot down over sea, its byebye for sure, no chance for rescue or quick fix. Not to mention it destroys marine ecosystems! Immediately having having to rush for a second base makes sense, but it might end up in a dead end, like it happened to me on this playthrough - i rushed a second base on NA, got almost no activity for 1 month (a couple UFO over sea), and still lost the territory. Sure can still shoot down UFO there, but the funding is gone, and almost all activity is over sea (thus the ranting on the previous para). As someone mentioned on some other thread, a weekly or monthly activity report would help immensely. There has to be some sort of INTEL, right? Additionally or alternatively, there could be a report stating increased UFO activity somewhere else on one or more locations, and suggesting a base. Feature/mod: Radar stations: Deploying shorter range standalone standard radar stations, instead of having to build a whole base from scratch. Mentioning requesting cooldown/limited time/availability AWAC missions from countries may be a bit too much? This wont necessarily make everything much easier (because our aircraft may not have enough range to get there), but may help determining where things are happening. We're not swimming in funds. after all, and it's quite easy to get a truck with a radar on it. Alas no additional sprites, just a dot and a circle! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderGr Posted June 16, 2013 Share Posted June 16, 2013 (edited) I do not agree with the UFO operating near your base or the suggestion for a base location. There is no reason whatsoever why the aliens should operate at a specific area of the globe. You have the option to order your interceptors to tail the UFO and start the engaging over land. A good commander should use all options and good tactics. If you give the order to intercept over sea/water, it is a tactical mistake you have to pay for. I am not so sure you have to rush for a second base right now. The UFOs are so weak in the beginning and the aliens are worst than your rookies, if you can believe that... Building standalone radar stations is rather useless if the area they cover is outside interceptor operational range... Right now, you have missions for UFOs brought down by national troops(not xenonaut troops) and I think this is a *very good* thing that has been included in the game. So, not everything is depended on your base coverage or radar range. The thing with losing a territory so early has been mentioned as a bug elsewhere. Ehm...sorry if I sound too negative. I think the game starts too easy at Normal difficulty as it is. Edited June 16, 2013 by ThunderGr Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xenomorph Posted June 16, 2013 Author Share Posted June 16, 2013 I do not agree with the UFO operating near your base or the suggestion for a base location. There is no reason whatsoever why the aliens should operate at a specific area of the globe.You have the option to order your interceptors to tail the UFO and start the engaging over land. A good commander should use all options and good tactics. If you give the order to intercept over sea/water, it is a tactical mistake you have to pay for. I am not so sure you have to rush for a second base right now. The UFOs are so weak in the beginning and the aliens are worst that your rookies, if you can believe that... Building standalone radar stations is rather useless if the area they cover is outside interceptor operational range... Right now, you have missions for UFOs brought down by national troops(not xenonaut troops) and I think this is a *very good* thing that has been included in the game. So, not everything is depended on your base coverage or radar range. The thing with loosing a territory so early has been mentioned as a bug elsewhere. Ehm...sorry if I sound too negative. I think the game starts too easy at Normal difficulty as it is. As it is right now, i find it quite unplayable, unless you're lucky enough to get the right set of events, which i haven't been. The reason for Increased alien activity over a specific region has a purpose. May be the right site for a base, resources, terror sites, or just plenty of cows to chop, they like doing that kinda stuff, and kidnapping farm folk for parts I know we can them then till over land, but when you get then running over sea ALL THE TIME, it gets frustrating. So there are no missions, there is no money, game over, hours wasted, and there are not that many available in a day. I always built my base on North Africa, and i never though the Mediterranean and that small patch of Indian ocean could have water so valuable for them aliens. Maybe they like jellyfish. Aliens are weak in the beginning, but in September, all i've been getting are Alien air superiority missions. Heavy fighters wont give you anything but headaches. If you don't get a second base quick, youll lose a lot of territory. It's a fact. Besides, you REALLY need it, if you want to build at least ONE of the good aircraft. You cant cramp enough workshops in one base, can you? I never got missions for UFO brought down by the AI. It's just fluff, as far as i can tell. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderGr Posted June 16, 2013 Share Posted June 16, 2013 Perhaps you were unlucky. I had one ufo shot down by the AI and was requested to assault it. I, also, had 1 touch down and these were in a game where I have only played 4 missions so far...My base is in Europe. Of course the geoscape (aka the strategic part of the game) is just functional. It is not even considered to be playable by the developers, as I have understood so far. So, I assume it is normal to get such frustrations at the moment. I am confident things will be different when they manage to work on it and that it will not have to include guided play. I do not like to be told by the game where to build my base or lose if I fail to comply. It was not the case with X-COM, I think it should not be the case with Xenonauts, either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThunderGr Posted June 16, 2013 Share Posted June 16, 2013 I also had one UFO shot down over water(near Scandinavia), but the game generated a ufo assault mission, nonetheless. I suppose it is a bug or something. I even got the dialog informing me that the UFO crashed in the sea. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xenomorph Posted June 16, 2013 Author Share Posted June 16, 2013 (edited) Note that those are just balance features i noticed, so far, but brought me some grief. It's my point of view balance is not just about numbers, but also events. There is a hint of "rush needed" in Xenonauts; I could compare it to Apocalypse, for example, where we start getting bigger UFO based on score, not a ticker - i do agree with both, as long as it's stated that there is no room for laziness, and we really need to get our hands dirty. Point is, if there is none or poor event balancing, in this situation, it's game over way before you can notice it; just wasting time, fighting for a lost cause, you don't get enough action and the ticker eats you alive... The first para on my post is about that. It would take off some of the rock-paper-scissors mechanic from the geoscape, let us start the game with a base NOT in North Africa but somewhere else reasonable, and still be able to do something with it. If you think of it for a moment, you can see how that could add to your individual challenge preferences? - build a base in Australia, and you'll only get a small patch of land to get your missions done. Why? Because you may be Australian, and like it rough. Right now, build a base there and its game over from second one. All games have some degree of rock-paper-scissors. I've been playing games for 30 years, i now right? Now, i may be getting old, grumpy and senile, but i do have eyes to see how many craptastic games have been released over the past few years, compared to how many awesome games. Why? Why do they make craptastic games? They might have good engines, a very polished game overall, but they're still crap. Things devs don't notice, or choose to ignore, things that have been proven to add value, just left out for whatever wrong reasons they could imagine. Should i mention EU? Tons of polish, but still crap. I played it, i know. You play it once, it's all you'll ever see. You know how it's going to be, exactly what's going to happen, and what to do. I think Xenonauts has TRIZILLIONS of more potential then EU ever had or ever will have. I do want to see it succeed where others have failed, not because i will yell at them to do what i want, but because they are opened to suggestions, and i do feel there is some stuff i can toss their way that can make something tick, because we know they're not sitting around watching soap operas (hopefully... ), they're busy thinking of ways to make it all batter and fix stuff to make everyone happy, and maybe they read this stuff and figure it may help solve some problem, even tho i doubt it And in the end, it will be the sprite-based 2d engine awesome game VS the millions-dollar budget super high tech fluff stuff fails. Edited June 16, 2013 by Xenomorph Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thothkins Posted June 16, 2013 Share Posted June 16, 2013 If you built a base in Antarctica in EU1994, then you would also suffer in funding. It was clear that failing to please your funding nations could cost you the game. Admittedly, you did have other resource streams to help offset that, which isn't the case here. The point being that if you build your first base out of the way in your first game., then hopefully you'll learn for your second. The plus side is that you'll get to all those terror sites that always appear out of the way in my games. A solution is to alter the global economy, basically funding, around where you put your first base. That was people who want Australia to be where they operate their operations from can contribute more to the total funding. Not great on the realism front, but I don;t think the alien invaders fighting against the nearly equal opportunities Xenonauts with advanced weaponry will mind too much. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
svidangel Posted June 16, 2013 Share Posted June 16, 2013 In the last two games I played I have never seen a UFO brought down by another government, but I have seen ones that crash in the water close to land show up as crash sites. Anyway, the way it is right now, you can sort of have it both ways. Play it Rogue-like and deal with the aliens showing up where they may. Don't play it rogue-like and if the aliens show up somewhere else, reload and next time maybe they will show up near you. All alien activity is random, even pathing if you save and reload while a UFO is in midair being tailed. This isn't like the Firaxis game where so many percentages and such are fixed to prevent scum saving (although that made them just as open to other kinds of exploitation). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
svidangel Posted June 16, 2013 Share Posted June 16, 2013 Seems a bit more involved, but if there is actual alien interaction and collaboration (I forget if countries leaving the XCOM project here is "alien collaboration" or just withdrawing from the project), I could see the aliens attempting to find the XCOM base right from the outset. So here is a rough example of missions: Sept 1: Light scout: mission search for xcom base Sept 3: light scout: Information gathering Atlantic ocean Sept 15: 2 Light scout and 1 scout: Search for Xcom base Oct 10: 1 Corvette: Gather information on location of XCOM base Etc. Basically at the beginning of each wave there are missions dedicated to finding YOU. You'll want to shut these down, or else they will be knocking on your door, but it also means that the biggest and newest ships will first show up in range of your main base, giving you the best chance to deal with them. Not knocking out all the other missions or decreasing the randomness of THOSE events, just adding in missions that focus on you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sathra Posted June 17, 2013 Share Posted June 17, 2013 The auto-generated crashsites only appear if you don't get a caesan/sebillian crash-site during the first two weeks or so. I had a game where all I got was sebbies and a caesan one auto-genned for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xenomorph Posted June 17, 2013 Author Share Posted June 17, 2013 The auto-generated crashsites only appear if you don't get a caesan/sebillian crash-site during the first two weeks or so. I had a game where all I got was sebbies and a caesan one auto-genned for me. It would be cool, then, if there was a weekly check to see if the player downed any UFO and did a mission, and toss one of those to help mitigate things a bit, like my awful alien heavy-fighter air superiority September, that got me into a big messy situation. Spending a whole month with $500 wasn't funny, i had nothing else to sell Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sathra Posted June 17, 2013 Share Posted June 17, 2013 The OG dealt with making sure there were UFO's to shoot down in an interesting fashion. Retaliation missions. Basically, if you shot down a UFO, it had a chance to trigger a Retaliation sequence. More you shoot down, higher the chance. Retaliation sequences are, I think, Small scout, medium, a bunch of larges, a couple mediums (harvesters and the like) then battleships. End result, more stuff you shoot down in radar range, the more stuff moves into radar range. I think it even might have been possible for the AI to end up running nothing but Retaliation sequences due to shooting down Retaliation mission UFO's. Its also the reason you get soo many damn Large Scouts. Xenonauts does something similar, but I think it spawns air superiority missions rather than UFO's you can do ground combat against. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xenomorph Posted June 17, 2013 Author Share Posted June 17, 2013 Xenonauts does something similar, but I think it spawns air superiority missions rather than UFO's you can do ground combat against. That's my point, and it looked like there were just way too many of those, i got stuck in a loop. According to you, AS missions spawn if i'm doing ok. I was actually, but then how can my standing with most, if not all, countries on my AO - if im doing ok enough to spawn SO MANY AS missions -be bad?? Anyways, maybe next time i can just sit back and let them go away. But if it happens again a week or 2 later, something is not quite right... i smell evil code!!!!! Looking forward for the next release, big hopes for stable!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sathra Posted June 17, 2013 Share Posted June 17, 2013 Nation relations are on a big scale, and with the mission score rebalance the effect of a mission isn't as noticeable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xenomorph Posted June 17, 2013 Author Share Posted June 17, 2013 Nation relations are on a big scale, and with the mission score rebalance the effect of a mission isn't as noticeable. That explains the overall bad relations, so i'd assume successful missions in my AO also count towards global standing, in a lesser scale? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kefeinzel Posted June 17, 2013 Share Posted June 17, 2013 your september scenario could be slightly mitigated with my suggestion to add small amounts of resources and money retrieved from shot down fighters. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sathra Posted June 18, 2013 Share Posted June 18, 2013 That explains the overall bad relations, so i'd assume successful missions in my AO also count towards global standing, in a lesser scale? Not quite sure on that, though I assume it should. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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