Geoscape Balance Discussion v19 Experimental Build 6

[Aaron]

This new build doesn't contain a great deal for the Geoscape, mainly the air superiority flights have been given a cool down so they no longer repeatedly lock the players fighters in an inescapable loop, multi-UFO combat/auto-resolve should no longer crash and the auto-resolve function has had some minor tweaks to balance heavy missiles.

Probably the most useful thing you guys could give feedback one is how you are managing with the Geoscape economy and how well research and manufacturing tasks are filling your time and making you make difficult decisions.

[Ishantil]

One of the things that I noticed is that there is often a glut of new things to research and subsequently build once a new "era" hits, such as the transition between Light Scouts and Scouts, or when the medium UFOs start showing up. This is usually when you have to prioritize research, because having enough scientists on standby for the glut of new research isn't cost effective long term.

Perhaps a random chance of a few different types of things showing up in each era that trigger research would make things more interesting and variable. The game bogs down a bit when I've researched all of the tech, and produced the new items, and I'm fighting UFO after UFO of the exact same two kinds of guys.

This time around, the pacing seems better, as I am encountering Scouts earlier than corvettes. I'm not sure if that's simply coincidence, though.

[kabill]

I'd agree entirely with what Ishantil has written there. I got unlucky, I guess, in that I didn't encounter anything other than Small Scouts for the first two months of the game. This made a lot of the early game quite dull, but also meant I did no research in month 2 at all. Indeed, at the moment it seems quite easy to have a bit of bad luck (no larger UFO, or a bad air battle) and have your research set back quite seriously. Getting some Scouts around the end of month 1 might help?

[GizmoGomez]

Scouts should come earlier than corvettes anyway. Also, I think that they made scouts start to show up during the light scout era, so you should have a little more help there.

[xcomnaut]

I got my 1st scout 20th October. Until then only light scouts showed up, about 15 of them.

[Max_Caine]

I thought I'd give vehicles a try as I haven't used them in quite a while, and it's very tempting with the starting cash to buy things like a garage. My first thought on rolling out a Hunter for the first time since v18 was "wow, 300HPs???". 1 battle later, I now think that 300HPs is the vehicle equivalent of starting HP for a squaddie. It's much easier now for an alien to hit a vehicle and they'll get 2 out of 3 shots in with a burst shot. Vehicles can't hide very well or take cover at all, so they are that much more exposed than squaddies, so 300HP is not excessive for the amount of fire they take.

The 60AP for a vehicle isn't enough. My starting squaddies either hover around 60AP or have more and they very quickly build up a bank of APs far in excess of what a vehicle can manage. Whle squaddies are intended to be the stars of the show, to relegate a vehicle to bit-player makes me question whether the investment in time and money was worth it and whether I should just simply scrap the garage to save on cash I could spend elsewhere.

[lemm]

I got my 1st scout 20th October. Until then only light scouts showed up, about 15 of them.

Yeah, that's about how my game on normal played out, though I think the first scout might have arrived a bit earlier. I don't think that we need so many light scouts.

[Ol' Stinky]

Another vote for fewer light scouts.

Given that it's (probably) unrealisitic to get another UFO that can bridge the gap, maybe we could have a "lightest scout" that has the current loadout of a handful of non-coms, and then lightscouts that have a mix of guards and non-coms. A player who doesn't look behind the curtain wouldn't be able to tell the difference: both types of lightscout would share the same xenopedia entry etc. It'd look like the first few light scouts had fewer enemies is all.

This way you can tune the early game experience to be, well, less boring. The trouble with scouts any earlier is that you risk giving away alienium much too quickly.

Edited August 4, 2013 by Ol' Stinky

[kabill]

The trouble with scouts any earlier is that you risk giving away alienium much too quickly.

This is true, but I think that this raises an entirely different issue with regards to the Geoscape part of the game - research.

At the moment, research is highly limited by the stages of the invasion rather than the resources you allocate to research. The 'choice' you have in researching things makes little difference - between say weapons and armour it might make the difference of getting one a few days earlier than the other, which is maybe a mission or so's difference. It very easy to research all the first stage tech without trying, and 15 scientists seems like its enough to keep pace through the first 3-4 months of the game so long as you don't have bad luck with the UFOs you encounter (and don't screw up the air game). Indeed, the main 'choice' in the research game is actually at the manufacturing stages, because manufacturing times are often longer and money often tight so you can't build everything you want to.

Relatedly, air power seems to have more impact on your research development than scientists. If you don't develop air power quickly, you fall behind on tech because shooting down UFOs to get better tech becomes more difficult. Labs therefore function almost like a safety net, so if you fall behind you can catch up more quickly. But you're better off avoiding the problem in the first place by building hangars and planes. I find it telling, in this regard, that I research alenium explosives before anything else when I can because the cost of not doing so is amplified (all other techs put you back having that thing for a few days; not having alenium explosives can put your research back weeks by making it harder to shoot down UFOs).

Personally, then, I'd much prefer the research game to work much more like the OG, with access to a lot of the tech basically from the beginning of the game but with longer research times such that what you spend your time doing is more meaningful and forces a choice. For example, you might prioritise explosives research for better air combat at the cost of not having done weapons/armour research. You also get the option then to spam labs/scientists if you want to try and get all the tech quickly (which will have the disadvantage of having less resources for manufacturing/buying planes/building bases). In other words, rather than railroading the player's tech development rigidly to avoid them 'out-pacing', you give the player the chance to develop their own research strategies.

If this was the case, getting alenium early wouldn't be a problem, since there'd be a cost of developing it by knocking back other bits of research.

[Ol' Stinky]

Yeah, I'd definately prefer a tech tree as opposed to a tech, um, line. In all fairness, that's my memory of the original too - I beelined for laser weapons and tried to get the laser cannon factories online to trivialise money asap. But there'd need to be more techs before they did that, since the current bunch would make for a rather bare tree, meaning that each one would take yonks to complete. I imagine that'd mean more passive bonuses to flesh things out. Aircraft filler tech would give +fuel, +speed, +hp to aircraft; base filler tech would grant lower maint. costs, quicker construction, faster transportation.

So getting more scientists would allow a player to scoop up the bonuses quicker, but at the cost of a less developed airforce/base/ground force than a player running a skeleton crew in the lab.

Currently for research, I don't even hire any scientists for a while. I was unlucky in my current playthrough to only get Sebillians (so no Alien Biology -> Stun Weapons) for yonks. I was still able to get: Alien Invasion, H.S.Interceptors, A.P.Pistol, Imp. Arm., Seb. Analysis, Alien Interog., (start on hunter until I get a caesan, no other research possible), Alien Bio., Stun Weapons and then start on Cae. Analysis (which finished in early Oct.). That's with 10 scientists.

[xcomnaut]

Scout leads to laser weapons thats why it is "on hold" for such a long time. First time I played Xenonauts, those first two months using ballistic weapons, I thought I'm playing Jagged Aliance

Edited August 4, 2013 by xcomnaut

[Ol' Stinky]

Ground combat-wise, laser weapons seem like a bit of a waste against scouts and corvettes to me, both pre-and-post accuracy buff. If someone really wants to outfit all their squad in top of the line laser weapons and jackal armour, they're paying out the nose for it and are going to suffer back in the geoscape; it's the same reason why I think rocket launchers and now the frag grenade family are balanced, despite the fact that going by stats alone they're crazy powerful.

I've no idea how powerful laser gatlings on aircraft would be earlier on. If that was a concern, I guess they could require another tech to unlock, possibly requiring a doohickey from a corvette or something.

[xcomnaut]

At the end of october I have fully operational base, 2 condors, 4 foxtrot and full squad equiped with laser and jackal. I have 500.000$ also.

[thothkins]

Research: No tension created in the game through worrying about which branch in the tech tree to take. As above, going with Aircraft, should leave issues in weapons/ medkits/ base facilities. There should be parallel branches working throughout.

So far, everything can be researched with minimal investment and without the need to build a second lab until later in the game. With an invasion fleet appearing overhead and Xenonauts dusting off it's responses, there should be something of a research glut at the start.

Manufacturing: With free upgrades, ammo, weapons, missiles (containing alien resources) and now magic planes manufacturing is pretty much busted. In the early part of the game, the only thing I want to build is a foxtrot. I have to wait until the hanger is built before I can do this. So, the technicians sit there. I don't have any requirement to build another workshop until 3 to 4 months into the game.

As with research, I would have thought that there would be a manufacturing glut at the start of the game, as the funding nations realise they should have been pumping more cash into Xenonauts since the 1950s. Perhaps they do realise, which is why everything is now free.

Part of the issue is that ballistic weapons are viable for quite some time, with a big helping hand from alenium and plasma grenades/ Rockets. As they are all free, I've no need to improve my weaponry, and they keep me fairly safe from having to bother with any of the early armour.

[Ol' Stinky]

At the end of october I have fully operational base, 2 condors, 4 foxtrot and full squad equiped with laser and jackal. I have 500.000$ also.

Well, my point was that even if laser weapons could be beelined at the game's start, they'd be largely wasted in Oct., at least at the moment.

With the amount of caesan and sebillian non-combatants I kill, I'm worried that my Xenonauts are going to be accused of war crimes.

[Lorebot]

As with the previous versions I've come to the conclusion that we get too much free stuff and it's seriously hampering the balancing process for the game.

Free aircraft ammo, free rockets and grenades, and free advanced weapon ammunition...it's just too much free stuff.

I understand making the basic human equipment free. The basic ballistic weapons, medkits, shields, grenades and rockets are all fine as free. They're the starter stuff and it's reasonable that your organization would be supplied with all the already available equipment it requires.

The disconnect comes when you start researching advanced materials and equipment. Automatically turning all your grenades, rockets, missiles, and torpedoes into an advance Alenium variant and then letting us have an infinite supply isn't just unbalanced, it's impossible. All of these things require Alenium and in most cases I haven't even recovered any from an alien ship by the time I have access to all this stuff. Even explaining it as small quantities of spent Alenium doesn't really satisfy the situation because you have access to an unlimited supply of ammunition that's built using a material that's in extremely limited supply. We should be made to build these things through manufacturing, even if they don't cost us Alenium to build we should have to pay for them with manufacturing time and funding. If they did cost Alenium to build, and I believe they should, we should have the option of collecting the alien plasma weapon magazines and breaking them down to Alenium using manufacturing to help us get the supply we need to build the weapons.

The advanced medkits, stun batons, and stun grenades/rockets are other examples of items that are instantly free and in unlimited supply as soon as you research them. They should also be things we need to manufacture before being able to use them in the field. I don't believe the medkits and stun batons should be consumed on use, just refill them back at base between missions, but the quantity and speed at which they're available to us is just not balanced or realistic.

The same goes for advanced weapon ammunition, though I have a bit different reason for this. Magazines for all the advanced weapons (Laser, Plasma, and MAG weapons) are instantly free and infinite upon completion of research and that's just silly. Let alone the fact that your researchers go out of their way to develop propietary magazines for these Alenium fueled weapons at all being ridiculous. There's no reason at all that they wouldn't design these weapons to use the already perfectly functional and readily available alien magazines for the alien plasma weapons. They don't need to be consumed on depletion, just recharge them back at base between missions so you end up with a pool of magazines to use. The pool will grow over time, but in the early game they'll be very limited, and if we need to start breaking them down for the Alenium to build missiles, torpedoes, rockets and grenades it'll be another facet of the economy we'll need to balance as players so we have enough materials to build our munitions and still have enough magazines to keep our weapons running.

It would greatly help to balance the use of these items both in the geoscape and ground combat if it actually cost us something to use them instead of just trying to balance their effectiveness around how much you can carry into combat. I wouldn't suggest the supply be difficult to maintain, but it should be something we need to worry about and currently it isn't. I don't care how many grenades I have to use to get through a mission, they're free. Same goes for the rocket launcher and for air combat. I don't mind using Alenium Torpedoes on small ships because they're free. I'm not paying anything for the increase in effectiveness and this is inherently unbalanced and makes achieving any real balance in the game extremely difficult.

I'd propose that breaking down an alien magazine would give one Alenium. One Alenium could be used to build 10 Alenium grenades, 5 Alenium rockets, 5 Aleinum missiles, or 2 Alenium Torpedoes. I'd say 1 man hour to break down a single alien magazine would be good and 5 man hours to build a single lot of Alenium munitions would also be good. So in 6 hours you could break down a single alien magazine and build 10 alenium grenades from it with a single engineer, 3 hours with 2 engineers, etc.... This would allow us to keep a small number of engineers devoted to munitions manufacturing nearly all the time without greatly impacting the speed at which other things are built, but would give us the option to build large quantities quickly using many more engineers when we need to or have nothing else to assign our engineers to do.

[EchoFourDelta]

@Lorebot

Part of the balancing problems that Stinky mentioned would only me complicated by *magnitudes* by working in actually producing individual alenium/etc. munitions. This game's air combat is also a good deal more ineffective than the original; it doesn't quite work the same with a direct translation like you've mentioned. The original game's interceptors carried a good deal more ammunition, combat moved slower, and you were more often than not dealing with single craft; here, you're encountering multiple craft in multiple locations on a fairly regular bases, and more often than not, you're lucky to splash a single light fighter with an aircraft's payload; the modus operandi is to load up another fighter and send it out, or get the interceptor back and refitted and go again, spending even more missiles. You burn through munitions in this game due to the sheer inefficacy of fighters, and how the missile engagement works. The "build all the missiles" like before would complicate things to such a massive degree it doesn't even feel like it'd be worth it. Maybe scale the maintenance costs of fighters up as the weapons tech level increases, or something.

Having to produce each piece of ordnance on its own would add additional craziness to a funding issue that's already crazy.

Edited August 4, 2013 by EchoFourDelta

[Lorebot]

I wouldn't add much, if any, monetary cost to upgrading munitions from standard to Alenium. Maybe $100 per lot of 5 missiles or 2 Torps. The real cost would be the Alenium needed to build them, the manufacturing and funding required should be minimal. Just enough to keep things interesting without bogging the system down with severe micromanagement.

A single Alenium clip would get you 5 missiles or 2 torps, that's more than enough to take out a single small craft. Considering how many clips you can potentially bring home from a ground mission that's pretty much a non-issue. I don't want it to be difficult or complicated, I want it to be interesting and fun. Currently the geoscape is neither interesting nor fun, it's boring and simplistic.

Even with the balance differences between EU1994 and Xenonauts there's no reason to make the upgraded ammunition free. I don't want it to be overbearing, but I don't want to be able to ignore it either. A small cost that if not balance properly leaves you at a disadvantage is what I'm looking for. After a while it'll be a 'set it and forget it' issue, but at the beginning of the game managing it properly should be necessary.

Also, I'm not sure what you're doing in the air combat, but even with Condors using basic missiles I can handle light scouts without an issue. I need to bring some torpedoes to deal with anything larger, but the fighter escorts aren't a big problem for me either. My biggest problem currently is that I can't bring enough ammo to the fight to take out medium ships, but I solve that issue by modding the Foxtrot to have 2 normal hardpoints along with 2 heavy hardpoints. It allows the Foxtrot to bring just enough extra firepower to bring down a medium ship without having to go reload as long as you have Condors to deal with a fighter escort, along with giving it some extra punch to deal with a fighter that gets away from the Condors without spending torpedoes on it.

Honestly I don't find it much different than EU1994's air combat. I still need more than 1 interceptor to deal with a small craft and I still need heavy weapons to deal with mediums or larger. The combat is more complicated, but the end result is about the same, just a lot faster. In the original you'd have to wait 3 days to get munitions delivered if you ran out...and that's if you had the money to buy them. I'm only suggesting that you actually have to pay attention to how much you're using and that you be required to set aside some of the resources you bring back from ground missions to help keep your air combat effective.

[EchoFourDelta]

@Lorebot

"My biggest problem currently is that I can't bring enough ammo to the fight to take out medium ships, but I solve that issue by modding the Foxtrot to have 2 normal hardpoints along with 2 heavy hardpoints."

I suggested this to someone the other day; this is seriously something that needs to happen to the missile trucks.

[thothkins]

I agree that Manufacturing seems awkward, if not broken. It's not only that there is infinite amounts of free things. It's not only that this applies to items containing alien technology. It's not only that entire buildings appear as if by magic. It's a combination of those and that it's handled inconsistently.

You have to buy craft autocannon upgrades, but alenium missiles are free being one example.

Possible Solutions:-

1) Dig out the EU1994 manual and use their price list as a guide to everything. Tweak as required. No more freebies.

2) Make everything free, following costed initial workshop projects. The reasoning being that the Xeno-workshops craft prototypes for the rest of the funding nations to then build on a mass scale.

3) Get rid of the economy entirely and have an abstract resource points system based on funding nation resources form crashed UFOs in each territory.

The infinite freebies certainly shapes what I'm having to research and what I build. Knowing I'm about to get alenium and plasma grenades, why would I invest in laser weapons?

[svidangel]

Some of that could be dealt with in combat by dropping the damage on ballistics or raising the damage on lasers. Not that that would be any simpler since you would have to do it all the way up and down the tech tree, but it is a non-economic influence at least.

Also, air combat finance decoupling ;p

[xcomnaut]

The infinite freebies certainly shapes what I'm having to research and what I build. Knowing I'm about to get alenium and plasma grenades, why would I invest in laser weapons?

Is there any reason why not to invest in laser weapons, even if it gives a small advantage in damage?

In EU1994 many things were "free" also, alien grenades, plasma weapons/clips, stun weapons/clips, big launcher/clips. Late game manufacturing were armors/planes/ammo for planes and then money making.

In EU1994 UFO's didnt fly every 3 days in such huge numbers. Imagine if you need to produce everything, including ammo. That will take ages, so production times will need to be reduced. If production times will be reduced then you can build certain things too fast. Then, to manufacture everything on yourself, need money and resources because crafting out of thin air would count as freeby too.

Ammo and missiles are free but you need weapons/planes to use them. The only thing that I'd make craftabe is grenades, to make them more valuable in combat situation.

[Max_Caine]

I know this has been suggested already, but another method to make it clear that equipment like Alenium grenades and missiles are expensive without having to go through the buisness of making them is to put an upkeep cost on the balance sheet. The game takes stock of everything squaddies have during ground combat cleanup (or we wouldn't have issues where weapons aren't auto reloaded), so it should be able to take a snapshot of items prior to a mission, items post-mission, add up all the grenades, etc. and make a charge against the alien gear that's auto-sold. If you come out in the red, then that can be deducted against your standing funds.

[kabill]

In EU1994 UFO's didnt fly every 3 days in such huge numbers. Imagine if you need to produce everything, including ammo. That will take ages, so production times will need to be reduced. If production times will be reduced then you can build certain things too fast. Then, to manufacture everything on yourself, need money and resources because crafting out of thin air would count as freeby too.

You don't have to increase production times; this could simply be used to encourage workshop building.

As it is at the moment my engineers are sat idling almost all of the time. All they have done in my present game is build planes, and a workshop full of engineers can make a Foxtrot in ~2.5 days. Now, it's looking like better weapons and armour might be more useful earlier in 19.6 (the terror missions are hard), but that's still going to leave a lot of idle time. Giving engineers something to do, and making early workshop building a viable and useful strategy, doesn't seem to be a bad thing in my opinion. (This said, I can't decide whether making ammunition wouldn't get frustrating with all the fiddling. Would have to play with it).

As for resources, the amount of funding you get could be easily tweaked. I think, coming off my post re: research, overall I'd like to see a bit more of a sandboxy economy which leaves room for various choices and therefore where investing in research/manufacturing was meaningful. Sadly, at the moment, the Geoscape game of Xenonauts feels quite rigid a la XCOM 2012 (and as much as I enjoyed that game, the strategy layer was not it's strength!) only rather than building satellites you have to build hangers and planes!

[Max_Caine]

kabill, I believe the legacy data back when grenades had to be manufactured is still there. It should be a case of switching it on.