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Geoscape Balance Discussion v19 Experimental Build 2


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Here's a thread to discuss the first pass of the Geoscape and Air Combat balancing, which is available for play-testing in the latest build (2) on the experimental branch on Steam.

The changes are far too numerous to list, I have reset pretty much every important variable in the Geoscape and Air Combat according to a systematic approach to try and give the pace and experience we want to achieve. It should work end to end, but it will probably seem a little bit flat right now - most things escalate in a fairly linear fashion, and there is no mixing of UFO types (each one just appears sequentially). Those things will be improved drastically later, but for now it is important we pin down the very basics of the progression.

Just some general info: the invasion now takes around 6 months from the weakest to the most dangerous aliens appearing. Waves of UFOs are less frequent but hang around for much longer. Countries now take significantly more "damage" to their relations from UFOs missions that occur in their territory; likewise the bonus for shooting down UFOs is greater. For simplicities sake all countries are currently "worth" the same in funding terms - this will change later.

Thoughts and impressions gratefully received.

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Here's one thing that bothers me slightly.

There seems to be one definite best location for your starting base - that'd be in Northeast Africa, specifically somewhere around Cairo seems to be the best spot. Consider a Cairo base - you have near-complete coverage of North Africa and Western Europe regions, you have 100% coverage of the Mideast region, over 50% of South Africa, a significant chunk of Soviet Union, and you even get some coverage of Indochina, enough to shoot down some UFOs there. There is no other spot with as much potential coverage over the nations. In Central America, you can get 100% coverage of 1 region and partial coverage of 2 regions. You can get near-100% coverage of Indochina by putting the base somewhere in Xinjiang, and also catch a large part of the Soviet Union there, but lose all of Africa and Europe, plus half of mid-east.

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"Hey Atlas? Come over here for a minute would you?"

My main base isn't far from Solvers.

Solutions:-

- Adjust funding depending on where you put your base. Alters cold war standings, but hey, it can be argued that different nations have their own priorities.

- Have different requirements for each funding region covered. Central America knows it's not covered, so is a little more ofrgiving than Egypt which delivers your milk in the morning and demands everything is caught.

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We can, though, edit the borders of the regions or even add new ones. Say, moving the North/South Africa border further South, and extending the Middle East region eastwards while decreasing Indochina would decrease the amount of region coverage you can get with a base in Cairo.

EDIT: I suppose some of that might be fixable as different nations become worth different amounts of money. Say, if you get decent coverage of North America, you can't really cover anything else at the same time, just parts of Central America. But if NA were worth more money, that might be a reasonable option.

This may not be straightforward to solve. The original X-COM had the same problem, where the optimal base location was somewhere in Western or Southern Europe (I usually used Northern Italy) because it'd provide coverage over the greatest number of founder nations.

Edited by Solver
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I'd suggest maybe balancing funding from regions by making the total funding values of regions you can protect roughly equal? Say you can cover most of Russia/Indochina, most of NA/Central America/part of SA, and Middle East/Europe/Africa if you're maximizing the area you cover with a base, so make each of those blocs roughly equal in funding provided?

Also, holy crap is the air combat a ton harder now. I'm not really a fan of it atm, especially having three separate packs of fighters roaming over Africa at once. Turns out a light scout beats a Condor now 1 on 1 with starter weapons.

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Then make Condors cheaper!

;)

I heard 50K somewhere, I like that. Make us able to swarm the enemy with our Condors.

"Our Condors will blot out the sun! (Much like other vultures do, actually.)"

(I agree, though, one "stock" (for the Xenonauts) aircraft taking out a UFO? Ridiculous. It should take two "stock" aircraft at the least.)

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I'd suggest maybe balancing funding from regions by making the total funding values of regions you can protect roughly equal?

Although I've given a few options above, I'm hoping that the stats screen, or Xeno-equivalent, will show you the starting funds byy region. That should make it very clear on your priorities, without having to know a thing about 1970s superpowers.

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A condor should easily defeat a light scout and a light fighter,

otherwise you need two bases full of hangars right next to each other and multiple sorties of fighters just to take out one alien fighter squad etc.

either rebalance or remove rolling from aliens. with each update you need to think at least marginally of overall balance

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A condor should easily defeat a light scout and a light fighter,

otherwise you need two bases full of hangars right next to each other and multiple sorties of fighters just to take out one alien fighter squad etc.

either rebalance or remove rolling from aliens. with each update you need to think at least marginally of overall balance

Ah, well, I guess noone can make everyone happy. My opinion is that condor should not easily defeat light scout and light fighter. The assumption that you need bases full of crafts is not so valid IMHO. You have to pick your targets. Some UFOs will escape, whether you like it or not. The game should be interesting and challenging, forcing you to make some strategical decisions. Do you expect to be able to bring down every UFO that gets in radar range?

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I agree with that Thunder, but I'm not talking about any ufo. Talking about squads of fighters. There is no way to bring them down unless you have very advanced tech, and even then you will take damage which will leave your squadron out of action until repaired (because the aliens now roll effectively + lower missile ranges).

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Also, you do kinda want the first combats to be easy for newer players easing into the game. I always imagined the light scout combats were easy because some people were doing them for the firs time. Ever.

This is why there is an "easy" difficulty. I expect "normal" difficulty to be challenging.

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The light scouts arn't even built for combat. They ought to be chumps. Even unmodified fighters (unlike the Condor) are supposed to take them out.

This was the case in X-Com too, the smaller UFOs presented minimal threat to your starting fighters.

Suggestion, make evading something alien Fighters can do but not the Scouts. This presents a sharp divide between combat craft and utility craft.

If you want to have a challenging fight in the first month, there could be rare multi-ship groups. The aliens banding together in attempt to stop the bleed.

Ah, well, I guess noone can make everyone happy. My opinion is that condor should not easily defeat light scout and light fighter. The assumption that you need bases full of crafts is not so valid IMHO. You have to pick your targets. Some UFOs will escape, whether you like it or not.

The logic of the game compels you to shoot down every UFO you see. That's how you earn money, that's how you earn tech, that's how you level up your soldiers, that's how you earn nation rep. If shooting down every UFO requires you to spam hangars then players will do it. It only takes a couple of downed UFOs to payoff the construction cost.

Also, 'Rampaging UFOs' makes for a much less controlled game experience. It's far more likely than players game experiences will range from utterly facerolling the aliens (doing very well in interceptions, ahead of the curve on money and tech) to extraordinarily difficult or failed games(doing poorly in interceptions, behind the curve and getting worse). Assuming that the player will shoot down _most_ UFOs means there's a far more consistent progression in squad power, relations, and funding: the result is a more consistent challenge level.

Edited by ChaseBears
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I'm a proud hangar spammer

Air combat is the most important part of the game right now

Also, losing air combat is the only way to critically lose the game

Also, losing just *1* air combat engagement is how you lose the game (in the beginning it is too costly and makes you miss too many ufos' and later on your planes are very expensive and take a long time to build, so in either case if you lose planes you lose the game).

Balancing it the other way around, so that losing a few planes and missing a few ufos still lets you win, means that people who do not use planes will find the game extremely easy.

personally though I play ironman and the only real loss is air combat loss

This is why I originally suggested that planes escape rather than get destroyed.

So that air combat remains very important but not the central focus of game balance

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So reduce costs and production times.

Step them all down by one stage so starting aircraft are provided free and the rest go down one tier from where they are currently set.

Losing a bunch of aircraft early on wouldn't be such a problem and the cost of later craft can be reduced without having to worry about balancing their cost with the pre-existing aircraft.

Balance the air combat so it is as much fun as it can be with the right amount of challenge and then work out costs and so on from there.

Once you know how often an average player is going to have to buy new aircraft you can decide how much of a financial impact that should have.

It doesn't work so well if you try to balance the air combat by using the price and manufacturing times of the aircraft as a reason for difficulty changes.

The game lore is a bunch of fluff text that can justify pretty much any decision that is made about the supply or manufacture of aircraft.

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I'm of the opinion that light scouts should be able to be taken out fairly easily by a single Condor. I understand many of us want this game to be difficult, but it shouldn't be easy for a new player to run into a pretty much auto-lose situation of losing their two starter aircraft to the first enemies they encounter. Remove their ability to roll, and if you want to encourage the player to start using multiple aircraft to engage a single UFO, give a light scout enough HP to take two sidewinders and a couple cannon shots so the first Condor will take some damage but be killable by four sidewinders (and later by a single Condor with alenium missiles).

So I've made it to late December on my game, currently sitting on two bases because even though I'm losing about one plane every other month I can't afford much else. I'm still using primarily ballistic weapons and only two total sets of armor made, trying to squeeze out a few plasma weapons now (had to skip lasers entirely due to lack of funds). I'm sitting on six hangars on one base and five at the other, going pretty much pure Foxtrot. Getting a plane damaged now is way too crippling with the high number of UFOs spawning and the Foxtrot's standoff range pretty much obsoletes both the Condor and Corsair. I was disappointed to see that the Corsair is still just a faster/more HP version of the Condor.

Dog-fighting is completely pointless at this point. It's far more effective to just use the Foxtrot's standoff range to safely engage UFOs than to get close and risk damage and the ensuing inability to engage other targets. The only obvious way to change that I can see is to take the Foxtrot down to only carrying a single torpedo, rendering it unable to kill fighters to force players to use brawling aircraft to engage them, and then majorly buffing short range aircraft and/or massively reducing repair times so you don't need 5+ of them per base. Or simply change to a more linear progression of aircraft upgrades instead of trying to force a range/dogfight split between them.

Edited by Dranak
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The light scouts arn't even built for combat. They ought to be chumps. Even unmodified fighters (unlike the Condor) are supposed to take them out.

Unmodified Squadrons, yes, sometimes, but not without heavy damage and loosing one aircraft or 2. At least, according to the background story. Xenonauts were the only ones that brought a UFO down on the first day of the alien assault over the Baltic area.

This was the case in X-Com too, the smaller UFOs presented minimal threat to your starting fighters.

They would escape some times and the only reason they were a minimal threat was because your weapons outranged theirs. If you had fired the missiles without dowing the UFO, though, you were in for some damage. Besides, everyone agreed at the time that the air fights were very simple and wished for a real time air combat. I cannot believe that there is so much whining about the air fights being more difficult already. Just because the previous tactics(brute force) do not work anymore, I would expect you people to try some new tactics before starting complaining about it. Some of us have and like the new system, although there is no arguing that it needs some balancing.

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I'm of the opinion that light scouts should be able to be taken out fairly easily by a single Condor. I understand many of us want this game to be difficult, but it shouldn't be easy for a new player to run into a pretty much auto-lose situation of losing their two starter aircraft to the first enemies they encounter. Remove their ability to roll, and if you want to encourage the player to start using multiple aircraft to engage a single UFO, give a light scout enough HP to take two sidewinders and a couple cannon shots so the first Condor will take some damage but be killable by four sidewinders (and later by a single Condor with alenium missiles).

As I have pointed out, new players should start playing on "Easy". This is what it is there for. Using new players as an excuse for easiest anything on Normal is a moot point, IMHO.

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the concept of giving any planes for free is absurd. i'd never build a foxbat ever again, i'd just spam condors at everything.

Why shouldn't that be a valid tactic?

If you didn't want to pay the extra for a better interceptor then you should be able to throw a lot of weaker aircraft at the enemy.

At least in the beginning losing an aircraft would be very easy to recover from.

Of course you would soon encounter aircraft that were just too tough for your condors to handle and you would likely lose a lot of them.

If the condors have a delivery delay then you would struggle to use them as disposable assets in a meaningful way as each time you threw them at an enemy you would have to wait for the replacement to arrive.

You would also need to replace any advanced cannon they were equipped with which would take more time and some cash.

If you chose not to use the advanced cannon either then you would lose the condor with little chance of taking down the enemy which is a poor tactic and therefore deserves to lose.

Your alternative is to invest in a better/tougher aircraft and stand a higher chance of surviving the combat and of downing the better UFOs.

That in turn gets you better cash rewards which you use to fund your better interceptors.

Being unable to think of how a feature could be made to work does not equate to absurd.

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From what I remember from OG is that sooner or later you were forced into having you own squad of planes, because larger alien crafts were traveling at higher speed/altitude. So in order to catch up with them and get then down you had to have a better craft.

So having inexpensive crafts might give you an edge at the beginning but soon you will be forced to have your own made crafts as well, where later in the game they will be the only planes your gonna have.

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