Geoscape Balance Discussion v19 Experimental Build 2

[svidangel]

I guess I was wondering if the intention was to go back to a player influenced progression, or just work on nailing down the "perfect" alien invasion progression. IE where is this going? What would be useful as feedback?

X classes of new ships showing up on the 1st of the month seems harsh, maybe if you waited till the 11th to 15th for the changeover that would give players time to use their funding from the end of the month effectively before getting slammed. (But seems like a fairly useless idea if we are going back to a progress based invasion at some later point)

Corsairs seem a bit expensive given your income when they are first available and take forever to repair?

Hiring scientists before December is probably a waste of money since you can't find tech fast enough for them to always have something to do?

[Aaron]

Variable progression is something that will go back in, I'm just unsure what should control it right now - previously, the extra progression was caused passively by UFOs while they were on the map. While I'm not ruling out still using that it does have the disadvantage that it is a negative feedback loop - the player does worse in the game, therefore intercepts less UFOs, therefore the ticker advances more and brings more/better UFOs while the player falls further behind etc... Maybe that is actually desirable, in that it puts a player that has fallen too far behind "out of their misery" faster, but I need more convincing.

Another alternative that currently seems attractive to me is to make shooting down UFOs and engaging in ground combat missions advance the ticker - this is a positive feedback system, so a more active player escalates the invasion faster until they are almost overwhelmed, at which point it starts to level off (as a result of the players rate of missions going down due to casualties/repairs) - a less active player will find the invasion advancing at a more sedate pace, but will be starved of the resources they need to fight it if they take it too easy. I find the elegance of this particularly appealing as a control engineer

[svidangel]

The original option did at least "end" the game, so to speak.

That alternative might make for some interesting balancing with the air combat, as certain technologies change the playing field far more noticeably there than on the ground, but it seems like it would end up training people to run a certain number of missions each month and no more, in order to find a sweet spot. I do like that there would be some way for the player to influence the invasion though.

Random ideas.

Maybe the, ah, "intensity" of the invasion (number of missions the aliens run) could be decoupled from the actual tech/ship size advancement. Only one of the two would actually be directly related to the player's efficiency, or maybe both but in differing ways.

Or perhaps only certain types of missions affect the invasion ticker, like alien bases and terror sites. If a player manages to snag all the terror sites, they are doing fine, accelerate, but if they can't... shrug.

[svidangel]

Spose another dirty way to do it would be to sum the total cash spent plus currently owned and determine the invasion schedule from that. It would still be heavily monthly based, but the players should have "enough" resources, if not necessarily enough time, to deal with the upgraded invasion. Would end up slowing down the invasion quite a bit early on if you lose a funding country. Once you are on a roll, a country would just be a drop in the barrel.

Edited July 2, 2013 by svidangel

[Xenomorph]

Using researched technology to speed up the ticker. We might argue that it may be used an exploit to build extra bases during the easy invasion phase, but it would take forever, at 30-35k a pop on scouts. As for powerleveling soldiers, if someone would be able to do A LOT more easy missions to do so, both options could remain opened, research or stall.

Or

Score. Sum the total score from crashes, terror sites and alien bases, and go from there. That would be the solution for a linear progression?

And you could toss in more locally shot down small UFO, or crashable random small during after waves cooldown. That could encourage having more then one transport and more then one squad, or basically have some properly trained reserves (much needed towards mid-late game, when rookies are useless) while balancing the funds needed to have them equipped.

[ThunderGr]

I think the ticker should be independent from player progression. The aliens should labor to advance their agenda all over the globe. Everything depends on what is the actual goal the aliens are trying to achieve. If they are trying to conquer the planet, their goals should progress more rapidly in areas that the player does not operate(and this is why AI generated missions outside of radar range are important, so that the play can operate on the ground in non-covered areas and slow down the pace of the invasion at these parts of the globe) and their pace would suffer greatly in areas that they are being held back by the player. So, the player's performance should be important and, definitely slow down the aliens and not advancing their progression. I am strongly against the, so named, "positive feedback system" as it is unrealistic and frustrating. I propose a system that aliens have priorities and they change it according to how good the player is at stopping them. For example, the aliens could attempt "conquest missions" trying to subdue territories. If that fails, because of the player, they should switch to trying to find out and eliminate the player's bases. If that fails, they would start infiltration missions, trying to convince countries to withdraw from the project and strike a pact, while keep trying to neutralize the player's efforts. Aliens constructing bases which they use for ground and air attacks also would make sense and bases should be able to generate alien ground missions without the need of UFO activity. I strongly dislike the current fund-related penalties for an active alien base in a territory. I would prefer it the way it was in the OG. The opinion I present here is just an outline. The details are not so hard to deduce, though.

[Solarius Scorch]

Another alternative that currently seems attractive to me is to make shooting down UFOs and engaging in ground combat missions advance the ticker - (...) a less active player will find the invasion advancing at a more sedate pace, but will be starved of the resources they need to fight it if they take it too easy.

Umm... Sorry, but what? Are you telling me that doing my best will actually make things harder for me, not easier? Sorry, but I cannot accept this; this might solve some gameplay problems easily, but it'd be an awful case of schizophrenic design. I can accept a lot in the name of gameplay, simplification or fun, but this is going too far - no matter how elegant it would be (and yes, well, it would).

That alternative might make for some interesting balancing with the air combat, as certain technologies change the playing field far more noticeably there than on the ground, but it seems like it would end up training people to run a certain number of missions each month and no more, in order to find a sweet spot. I do like that there would be some way for the player to influence the invasion though.

I thought the idea was to allow the player to influence invasion by preventing the aliens from completing their missions, since each mission advances the ticker. Which, truth be told, is a wonderful, if simplistic idea.

(The following paragraph may contain actual game content presented as my own ideas. If it's the case, it's only because I honestly don't know how the game works yet; in such cases, sorry for kicking down an open door.)

A way to make it a little more complex, without putting much additional development work in the game, is connecting the ticker advancement to the alien bases only. Bases represent alien activity and their various efforts to take over the planet. A base can only be built if:

1) several reconnaissance missions are completed for a chosen location,

2) a base construction mission is complete,

3) the aliens perform a certain number of abductions and research operations to give the base a purpose.

Preventing these missions would hinder the aliens.

As for new ships, they wouldn't be governed by the above-described ticker, but by time passed; after all these UFOs are already built, they just need some adjustment. The ticker can give a bonus here (research conducted in bases on Earth means faster adjustments on UFOs).

Finally, after some time (a year?) relations with funding countries become progressively more difficult, since our organisation is starting to be seen as ineffectual. This penalty grows slightly with every month. While it's possible to mitigate it by being very effective, it will become progressively harder. Also, events like "warship strafed" etc. will increase this penalty or even unlock it earlier. Alternatively, they can be divided into morale-related (abductions, terror missions etc.) that add to this penalty and military-related (attacks on military installations) that advance the general ticker (because the global military power decreases, therefore allowing the aliens to work more openly and therefore faster).

Maybe the, ah, "intensity" of the invasion (number of missions the aliens run) could be decoupled from the actual tech/ship size advancement. Only one of the two would actually be directly related to the player's efficiency, or maybe both but in differing ways.

Tying alien progress to the player's progress was how it worked in UFO: Extraterrestrials. While not inherently terrible, this is a very crude system, which leads to a lot of metagaming (like postponing research on plasma weaponry until nothing else remains, because plasma weapons for us will unlock ion weapons for the aliens and we don't want that).

Or perhaps only certain types of missions affect the invasion ticker, like alien bases and terror sites. If a player manages to snag all the terror sites, they are doing fine, accelerate, but if they can't... shrug.

Yes, something like this (well, I was getting to the same idea just before).

EDIT: I also agree wholeheartedly with ThunderGr (who posted at the same minute as I, so I missed his/her post at first) that it'd be nice if aliens somehow reacted to Xenonauts' actions. Alien retaliation missions and all that.

Edited July 2, 2013 by Solarius Scorch

[Queamin]

Last thing we want is like xcom2012 where the aliens react to what you do in research as it makes it linear (4 things made xcom2012 suck for me was no base attacks and only one base option game play seamed to be on rails and very linear and lack of maps), at least in xcom93 the aliens seamed to do their own thing like making bases and taking over country's and looking for your base if you shot down to many UFO's.

I hope that the aliens do their own thing to win the invasion and not tied so much to what we do unless we piss them off like shooting down a lot of UFO's and attacking their bases.

[Max_Smirnov]

Another alternative that currently seems attractive to me is to make shooting down UFOs and engaging in ground combat missions advance the ticker - this is a positive feedback system, so a more active player escalates the invasion faster until they are almost overwhelmed, at which point it starts to level off (as a result of the players rate of missions going down due to casualties/repairs) - a less active player will find the invasion advancing at a more sedate pace, but will be starved of the resources they need to fight it if they take it too easy. I find the elegance of this particularly appealing as a control engineer

Please. With all due respect, Sir, this is a retarded idea, plain and simple. I know it is popular in the industry, preoccupied with casual players, but please, let's reconsider the objectives of the game, okay?

Is the objective of the game:

a) destroying the aliens

b) being nice to the aliens

If the answer is a), the only conceivable (and thankfully unreachable) 'sweetspot' is intercepting and shooting down every UFO immediately after it appears and taking every alien alive for extra points, while not allowing a single human life to be lost. Yet it seems that for some reason, this kind simple elegance is not enough.

I can't understand that. First you show the less experienced players their place, by making the air combat extremely hard, then you're trying to keep them in the game by rewarding the lack of skill? An experienced player, on the other hand, will try to find what makes the aliens more active, and what doesn't, so his or her objective will be to cheat the system, not to defeat the alien invasion.

Also, there is already one positive feedback that 'rewards' ineptness - the more territories you lose, the easier it gets to defend the remaining ones. I think this is already more than enough. Shooting down UFO's keeps your funding levels high and allows to expand to thwart new waves of aliens. And provide money to cover for mistakes. Not shooting them down and losing fights leads to lower funding. I don't think any extra mechanics, timers, tickers etc. are really needed. Because feedback loops quickly run out of conrol, and produce crazy results, simple.

[Xenomorph]

THIS got me thinking about how Corsairs could be made useful in the game. Rough ideas, but they might carry some meaning.

Alien fighters will always dodge the heavier, slower torpedoes carried by Mig/Marauder. To counter that, the player has to use fighters.

Now corsairs have a role, that will last till the fury jumps into service.

Of course, decrease the repair times and cost for them things a lot. They will ALWAYS take damage in combat, on a 3 v 3 fight, be it 3 fighters, or 2 fighters and whetever else, and will make sense to research armor,speed and maneuverability upgrades for them once Interceptors come into play. There is room for something extra, without any major adjustments in research times

Of course, Corsairs must have the means to defeat heavy fighters and interceptors in one fight, with proper weapons, and proper maneuvering, of course. No head-on fire missile-dodge-fire missile ratata boom strategy, the cannon should have enough ammo and a bit more to spare. We don't send people to war with 5 bullets on their hand anymore.

This will sort of push towards the need of having dedicated fighter bases, which i think makes sense, once the economy has some more balance. I did have 3 fighter bases on vanilla 19v2, but at some sacrifice, and it was effective keeping the skies clean.

Wattayu think?

[Xenomorph]

Please. With all due respect, Sir, this is a retarded idea, plain and simple. I know it is popular in the industry, preoccupied with casual players, but please, let's reconsider the objectives of the game, okay?

Is the objective of the game:

a) destroying the aliens

b) being nice to the aliens

If the answer is a), the only conceivable (and thankfully unreachable) 'sweetspot' is intercepting and shooting down every UFO immediately after it appears and taking every alien alive for extra points, while not allowing a single human life to be lost. Yet it seems that for some reason, this kind simple elegance is not enough.

I can't understand that. First you show the less experienced players their place, by making the air combat extremely hard, then you're trying to keep them in the game by rewarding the lack of skill? An experienced player, on the other hand, will try to find what makes the aliens more active, and what doesn't, so his or her objective will be to cheat the system, not to defeat the alien invasion.

Also, there is already one positive feedback that 'rewards' ineptness - the more territories you lose, the easier it gets to defend the remaining ones. I think this is already more than enough. Shooting down UFO's keeps your funding levels high and allows to expand to thwart new waves of aliens. And provide money to cover for mistakes. Not shooting them down and losing fights leads to lower funding. I don't think any extra mechanics, timers, tickers etc. are really needed. Because feedback loops quickly run out of conrol, and produce crazy results, simple.

Hes got a good point.

[svidangel]

THIS got me thinking about how Corsairs could be made useful in the game. Rough ideas, but they might carry some meaning.

Alien fighters will always dodge the heavier, slower torpedoes carried by Mig/Marauder. To counter that, the player has to use fighters.

Now corsairs have a role, that will last till the fury jumps into service.

Of course, decrease the repair times and cost for them things a lot. They will ALWAYS take damage in combat, on a 3 v 3 fight, be it 3 fighters, or 2 fighters and whetever else, and will make sense to research armor,speed and maneuverability upgrades for them once Interceptors come into play. There is room for something extra, without any major adjustments in research times

Of course, Corsairs must have the means to defeat heavy fighters and interceptors in one fight, with proper weapons, and proper maneuvering, of course. No head-on fire missile-dodge-fire missile ratata boom strategy, the cannon should have enough ammo and a bit more to spare. We don't send people to war with 5 bullets on their hand anymore.

This will sort of push towards the need of having dedicated fighter bases, which i think makes sense, once the economy has some more balance. I did have 3 fighter bases on vanilla 19v2, but at some sacrifice, and it was effective keeping the skies clean.

Wattayu think?

The always takes damage sounds pretty terrible, since that will leave them out of combat for a week or so at current repair times, leaving them only able to sortie at most once per wave, maybe less.

[smoitessier]

my 2 cents

The aliens have their invasion time tables, lot's of red tape etc..

How about the score of the earthlings and the aliens are compared to each other, every set time period. If the alien score is too poor, i.e. the orbital commander isn't meeting his quota set by the emperor, then he increases momentarily the pressure, then in the next set time period he compares notes again with how they are doing and may decide or not to try and squash us again?

By 'momentarily' increasing the pressure; either..

a) The ticker goes up a notch, but plateaux for a little while before continuing it's ever upwards crushing progression. But it has a cap so if the player is doing very well he would not be overly penalized.

b) Or the alien numbers are greater on missions, both ground battles and Geoscape. Perhaps the odd rank increase mingled in their troops?

By the score I mean add up all the successful AI missions across the globe represented by falling nation scores, and vice versa add up the xenos nations rep gains. If orbital commander is down by set % @ set date he gets mad and reacts, or madder if he is doing very poor, because he can't do anything about it

[Xenomorph]

The always takes damage sounds pretty terrible, since that will leave them out of combat for a week or so at current repair times, leaving them only able to sortie at most once per wave, maybe less.

It does sound terrible, but if repair times are cut off to something reasonable (lets pretend all that needs repairing is prefab armor plates, quick work) it will bring the meaning of dogfighting into the game, and make Corsairs with missiles and cannons something worth even thinking about, not just Mig and torpedoes.

This is just a rough idea, but i think it could work with some brainstorming. And don't forget your fighters will only take damage IF 3 vs 3, solo UFO you can use a decoy and other kicking it from behind.

I can see some good, fun and not too hard options here, really. Like if you go on a 3 vs 3 with a medium escorted by 2 fighters, you'd have to lure the fighters away from the slower medium to get a breather. 2 corsairs pulling the fighters, the free corsair being chased by the medium kills a fighter, then the now other free Corsair, still with weapons, will kill the second fighter. It sound about right with what really happens Then they fly off so the Mig can finish the job.

The point is not to make it very complicated and hard, simply make it less of a no brainer. Right now, air combat is being tweaked by weapon damage and whatnot, but it's still very basic, potentially boring. If wave compositions are mixed and matched a bit more (not just 3 fighters, 2 fighters and a bomber or 3 fighters), we would have to think about how to do it and what to use to do it.

Mind, when you get Marauders and Furys, the aliens don't stand a chance anymore, it becomes way too easy. The fury is meant to be the ultimate air superiority machine, and there couldn't be a better reward for persisting. The marauder, with fusion torpedoes, kills everything it shoots at while taking a nap.

With this set up, the Corsair would not be obsolete right from the drawing board, lasting until a single unkillable fury replaces 3 of them.

[Atomic Moose]

maybe a more "forced" tiering of the game, for plane/ground combat vs air losses in terms of balance : Losses need to be acceptable, at almost any stage of the game (minor caveats?) but especially the start of the game. It really depends what the the devs want the final playthrough of this game to look like. I understand not wanting to give us too much money too easily, but I think overall the income of the xenonauts needs to be bolstered (particularly through sales of UFO hulks, as it doesnt seem like they manage to strip much material off those humongous UFO's to do much with.) this can also be done via getting money from allied countries collecting the fighter debris or rewarding 2/3 points per enemy fighter shot down, the same value as an alien ground target, both are equally noteworthy to the involved nations, or split that bonus between an equivalent one time fee and a 1 point relations boost, as the ally salvages what remains, the point of this is to make it "acceptable" to lose a fighter at least every few dogfights, without setting you back. for players on easy this could be reduced risk reduced reward, and the opposite for higher difficulties

Edited July 2, 2013 by Atomic Moose

[Xenomorph]

Selling UFO for cash is something done in UFO:AI, and is a good solution. Better then think they are just...disposed of.

[Mytheos]

Variable progression is something that will go back in, I'm just unsure what should control it right now - previously, the extra progression was caused passively by UFOs while they were on the map. While I'm not ruling out still using that it does have the disadvantage that it is a negative feedback loop - the player does worse in the game, therefore intercepts less UFOs, therefore the ticker advances more and brings more/better UFOs while the player falls further behind etc... Maybe that is actually desirable, in that it puts a player that has fallen too far behind "out of their misery" faster, but I need more convincing.

Another alternative that currently seems attractive to me is to make shooting down UFOs and engaging in ground combat missions advance the ticker - this is a positive feedback system, so a more active player escalates the invasion faster until they are almost overwhelmed, at which point it starts to level off (as a result of the players rate of missions going down due to casualties/repairs) - a less active player will find the invasion advancing at a more sedate pace, but will be starved of the resources they need to fight it if they take it too easy. I find the elegance of this particularly appealing as a control engineer

Not a fan of this thought.

I believe strongly the Alien Invasion should be on their own terms, they are invading us, and are playing the Take Over the Planet Game.

We are playing the Dont Let Them game.

They shouldnt even care about us until we prove ourselves bothersome, and they decide to search out our bases and destroy us.

But they should have their invasion already planned out.

Phase 1 - Scout, Goals = Find Cities, Study Military, Abduct.

Phase 2 - Launch Fighters to remove Detected Military Presence, and to protect mission vessels.

Phase 3 - Create Alien Base - Escalate Invasion by use of [Medium Class Ships] to remove Continued Military Presence.

Phase 4 - Continue to Create and Support Alien Bases, *Begin Infiltration* Find and Destroy Resistance Bases.

Phase 5 - Continue all Goals, Escalate Invasion. by use of [Large Class Ships] and Destroy Resistance Bases.

Final Phase - Continue all Goals. Escalate Invasion by use of [battleship Class Ships] Eliminate All Resistance Presence!

Not sure what the end game thought is here, but in XCOM we were fighting a Hive Mind AI Trying to Take over the Planet, and it should feel that way.

If it ends up feeling like we're playing a game with an AI that Responds to how bad we suck or how good we are and adjusts the difficulty to "just right" for us I think that is going to be bad...and isnt this what difficulty levels are for anyways?

[svidangel]

Oh, and regarding air missions and repetitiveness and the autocomplete, a nice standard feature might be that any combat you have already done before (exact same combat) and resolved, you can have an option to "choose same result."

So for Foxtrot with avalanch on single fighter, I wipe that out easily, then afterwards when I run into that combat I have the additional option to autoresolve, maybe with the resolution listed in tooltip form (Foxtrot health 100% Fighter health 0%).

Now later on if I have Foxtrot and two Condors all with standard weapons vs a single fighter I would have to do it again. Or if I changed weapons.

If I did Foxtrot and two Condor's vs 3 fighters, and resolved it with Condor 1 80% Condor 2 100% Foxtrot 100%, I could choose that same resolution the next time, or try for a better one.

Mainly it would serve to eliminate some of the repetitiveness of the minigame, which becomes a bit tiring if I have a single foxtrot or two making bombing runs on larger ships. Just reaching the edge of the screen without afterburner (which I don't want to use since refueling takes forever) can take almost a minute of staring and doing nothing. Each time.

[Solarius Scorch]

Well, I'm not THAT bored of air combat. However, I wouldn't mind having the option to do so.

Still, the possible combinations are many, since it's not just the number and type of your and enemy crafts (which already is a very large number of combinations), but also that your planes may have different weapon configurations. I think a file containing all this would be too unwieldy for the engine.

[DNK]

RE: PROGRESSION

My ideals for balancing. When a player succeeds:

1. All of the following will have hard limits on how fast and slow they can progress. These will be increased by difficulty level. Basically, a very good player on Easy should find the game quite easy regardless of how well they do in missions due to slow progression and positive impacts, whereas at Very Hard, they would just be able to keep up with the progression limit.
   
2. Increasing Fighter Escorts (Positive Feedback)- When the aliens aren't being shot down much, there won't be many fighters or heavy fighters. When their landing ships, scouts, etc, start getting destroyed regularly, then they need the escorts. This isn't impacted by player performance on ground missions, but just in the air war. This is an auto-balancing sort of feature.
   
3. Reduced Flights (Negative) - Consider that the aliens have limited resources. The more ships they have to send for escorts, the fewer missions they can fly. This both rewards the player, as he sees lower alien activity, and makes the progression slower, as he has fewer resources and less money from missions.
   
4. Increased Fighter-Only Flights (Positive) - This will increase player costs and reduce mission rewards. It's also realistic - if the aliens cease being able to land anything, they need to switch to an air superiority war and put the invasion on hold. However, allowing fighters to roam the skies unmolested should have a fairly low impact on governments' funding - it just slows down the invasion as the aliens are unable to fly normal missions while they focus on the air war. This is sort of like an overall ticker slowdown with an added flavor of almost pure air fighting (at its extreme).
   
5. Ship Difficulty (Neutral-Negative) - Adding higher tier ships should happen more or less on schedule. This effectively gives players a fairly reliable progression (increasing with difficulty level), with only a reduction in advancement if the player is successful (but not the opposite). This is a way of rewarding players for success, while not punishing them too harshly for failure.
   
6. Increased Base Defense (Positive) - When larger alien ships are shot down (base supply, cruisers, etc), it forces the aliens to do base attacks. They prioritize for: bases which house the aircraft that take down their own craft, the least defended bases, the most developed bases, and for bases with radar (as they're spottable from the emissions, whereas non-radar bases would be very hard to find). Basically, if a base doesn't have radar, it should have a very low chance of being attacked, unless it regularly does counter-air operations, for which the aliens would trace the planes back to their base easily from space. Even a highly developed "silent" base would very rarely be attacked.
   A suggested formula (per month): [attack weight] = [# successful anti-air missions from here versus large targets]x50 + [tiles in use in base]x3 - [air defense buildings]x35 + [if has radar installations/does an air mission]x100
   Something like that. The overall likelihood would depend on month (with them not being possible in early months, like the first 6 on easy, first 5 on normal, first 4 on hard), number of bases, number of anti-air missions v large targets overall, and overall progression of the invasion.
   
7. Fewer Terror Missions (Negative) - This is based more on ground mission success. The deadlier the player's ground forces, the less aliens are going to want to go on these more abstract sorts of missions, and the more they will focus on military and general invasion goals. This rewards good players, while at least giving bad players a chance to make up their low scores.
   
8. Harder Ground Forces (Positive) - Obviously, if the player is doing well then higher armor/weaponry/races should be seen as a response.
   

All of these should adjust readily over a few weeks. For example, air superiority missions and fighter escorts should shift their mix based on a rolling average "air score" from the player that takes into account just the last 30 days. Same for ground forces - if the player keeps losing troops, the aliens don't need to just send in the best of the best.

Also, there needs to be variety all the same, so even if the air missions are set to "full air superiority", there would still be some non-fighter-only missions, for example.

Another idea is to adjust purely on a per-region basis for most of this, with overall progression depending on overall global response. This per-region thing might not come into effect until the 3rd month (on normal, 2nd on hard, 1st on very hard), though, to give players a chance to get established with their first base and build a second before undefended regions started to get very advanced. Then, moving into a new area would be a much larger challenge after a while, as the invasion would be more advanced there (and the aliens might have been shifting resources away from well-defended regions to these ones). This advancement could be countered and brought down to that of the previously defended regions, though, by player successes, but it would be a lot harder than just maintaining in the already-defended areas.

Edited July 3, 2013 by DNK

[Max_Caine]

Regarding increased fighter only flights: That used to happen, right up until around... v14? I forget. The abundance of fightercraft-only flights raised a howl you could hear around the world. If you want to see what happens, turn the "once only wave' flag in AM_Airsuperiority to "false".

Regarding reduced flights: That was tried out fairly recently, actually. v16? v17? It's in the forums, somewhere. People complained of a lack of resources.

I'm not saying these aren't things that should be tried again, these are things that could be tried again, but with lessons learned from the first application.

EDIT: Here we go, I knew the evidence was lurking on the forums somewhere! Here's a typical thread when the fightercraft were free to roam the skies and the battle for earth was fought as much in the air as on the ground. It's not the only thread (dear god, there were plenty of these), but it's one of the best.

Edited July 3, 2013 by Max_Caine

[Dranak]

That must have been absolutely ridiculous then given that I'm already seeing better than 2:1 ratio of fighters to mission ships.

[DNK]

Well, like I said, placing limits on this stuff is necessary, and including variety is necessary. There should never be 100% fighters-only missions, but they should become far more common as the player shoots down a higher percentage of flights in an area. Basic progression would be: unescorted ships -> increasing escort chance -> increasing number of escorts (1->2) -> increasing number of fighter missions. Finding the right balance to ensure continued ground missions/resources is important, of course.

This should be a goal, actually: the player should be trying to keep the aliens off the ground altogether, and so long as they're just doing air-superiority stuff, the player is succeeding in thwarting the invasion. This should result in greatly increased funding and high ratings. It should also significantly reduce the rate of progression of the overall invasion (making that lack of resources less important).

Additionally, pop-ups could come up, or in-game medals/awards given to the player's command unit when a certain number of days elapses without aliens touching down in a given region. We have unit medals/awards, why not have some for bases for how 'XCOM's performance in its home region is? This is a good way to give feedback to the player for what he's doing right (or wrong), as many newer players might be confused (as well as more experienced ones).

[DNK]

To expound more on "player feedback through the UI":

At the end of the month, the funding screen should include lists of positive and negative events, as well as a procedurally-created briefing screen for each region. This would have a basic letter, with sections for different types of activity (each would have more than several varieties, as well as certain parts that would be based on statistics). For example:

USSR (extremely happy)

Comrades, we are most happy with your abilities this month! You have met and exceeded our expectations in defending the Motherland from these interplanetary exploiters and enslavers. First, we are happy that in this entire month not a single alien vessel landed on Soviet soil unmolested. This is the most important thing for us. Second, although no purposeful landings were accomplished, you were not fully successful in containing all crash landings. Some aliens managed to escape your forces after you captured the downed vessels. We see that here, your commitment to protecting our citizens is less than your zeal for capturing advanced alien craft, and this makes us disappointed. You allowed [%] aliens to escape capture or death, and we would like to see this number improve over the coming month. Third, your air campaign was highly successful, yet a few craft were not shot down. We noted [#] sorties that entered and left Soviet space without a proper response. This is less important to us, but still we would value more persistence in your efforts.

Signed,

President [Russian name]

Factors:

Importance - very high, Rating - excellent: 30 days without peaceful landing of alien craft

Importance - high, Rating - average: only 75% of aliens killed or captured in ground missions

Importance - medium, Rating - good: 80% of alien air missions were contested by Xenonauts

Importance - low, Rating - very high: 80% of engaged aircraft were shot down completely

And another:

Australia (poor)

Hello, mates. Let's cut to the point, we're mighty disappointed in your performance this month. Too many allies, too much death for us. Let's start off with the terrorization of Sydney. You didn't even bother showing up! Just let the fine citizens of Australia go to the grayskins, you said! We can't tolerate that, and for that reason alone we're severely cutting our funding for this month. Might be we'll start our own force. Second, you generally failed to keep the aliens from landing on Australian soil, with them landing [#] times and taking a good deal of our citizens off with them. Regular abductions, infiltrations, and destruction are not what we're paying you for. Third, your air defense left a few things to be desired. You failed to intercept an entire 50% of air missions, which is quite poor. In addition, you only shot down 70% of the vessels you did intercept, which is a bit below average. Finally, we are glad to see that when you did bother to show up to defend our soil, you captured or killed 95% of the aliens you found.

Factors:

Importance - Extreme, Rating - Terrible: Failed to show for a terror mission (Sydney, 7/2/1980)

Importance - Very High, Rating - bad: Failed to respond to 70% of landings

Importance - High, Rating - Very Good: captured or killed 95% of aliens in ground missions

Importance - medium, rating - bad: failed to respond to 50% of flights

Importance - low, rating - okay: only shot down 75% of intercepted craft

[GizmoGomez]

I like that idea, although it would be difficult to have a prewritten letter for each situation that could come up. Perhaps prewritten snippets of letters would be stitched together, with specific numbers and figures being added in the correct places?