V19 Experimental Build 6 hotfix 1

[StellarRat]

Just to clarify, my question was about why people feel the need to launch a ground combat mission after they've shot the UFO down. I'm not advocating letting them all escape, but at the same time not every crash site needs to be attacked (there's no penalty for not attacking a crash site, but obviously you don't get the rewards for doing them).

It's just an observation really, I'm interested in the thinking behind it. Even in the original game I didn't use to do all the missions.

I try to go on as many ground combat missions as possible. Sometimes I can't, but when I can I do. The main reasons: 1. Money 2. More experience for my troops. The budget is usually so tight I can barely afford to upgrade my weapons, so I have to go on nearly every mission to keep the cash flow up. I also want really experienced troops for the "big" missions. Going on the little ones is a good way to build up troops with less risk.

[Rikenbacker]

But precision rifles still can't shoot through open spaces, water and destroyed vehicles :-(

[Ishantil]

I've seen suggestions that funding blocs should send up interceptors to shoot down ufos. This has the effect of making funding blocs competitors for alien resources, as every UFO a funding bloc shoots down is a UFO that the Xenonauts can't get any good stuff from. This would then have a knock on effect of making the air war as important as it is now but in a different way. I forsee that base building and aircraft making would be as frantic as ever, but it would be a race to get an airforce up in the sky quick enough to beat funding blocs to the punch.

What might be a solution is to make funding bloc interceptors the equivalent of cruise missiles. If a FB interceptor did damage without actually destroying the target, the pressure to perform is less than if the target was at full strength and there is no pressure to beat the FB interceptor to the target. As Xenonauts now has the auto-resolve function it might be worthwhile making FB interceptors another class of UFO, with an air interdiction mission, whose target is alien UFOs.

I more meant that country blocs would occasionally spawn a series of F-17s or something and attack UFOs. This at least gives the impression that the countries of the world are not just relying on the Xenonauts to defend them. It would actually go hand in hand with the occasional "local forces shot down a UFO" missions (which I rather like the idea of).

The crash sites would be handled (or not handled) by the Xenonauts.

Nevertheless, I like your ideas, too, Max.

[Ol' Stinky]

Well, local forces will shoot down UFOs sometimes. I think it happens if you don't have a ground combat for long enough.

[kabill]

Just to clarify, my question was about why people feel the need to launch a ground combat mission after they've shot the UFO down. I'm not advocating letting them all escape, but at the same time not every crash site needs to be attacked (there's no penalty for not attacking a crash site, but obviously you don't get the rewards for doing them).

It's just an observation really, I'm interested in the thinking behind it. Even in the original game I didn't use to do all the missions.

To me, it's not at all obvious that you shouldn't do all the ground missions. In so far as the game is primarily about shooting down UFOs and recovering them, there's no way I would guess that the game would be designed around sometimes not doing that even when you can. I would (and have) assumed that the game will punish me for not taking advantage of the opportunities I'm presented with.

It's possible you could learn that doing all the missions isn't necessary (or even close to necessary), but only once you've finishing the game (and therefore once you know how the difficulty scales and what you need to do to win). But before that point there's no way a player could know (without being told) and in so far as someone has not completed the game, why would they not take advantage of everything they can in order to secure victory?

In short, then, for me I would expect to have to do as many missions as possible as I'd assume the game would be balanced around that (in the same way that, for example, I'd expect an RPG to be balanced around me doing most if not all of the subquests). If that expectation is wrong, then I would contend that there's no reasonable way for a player not already inveterate to know this.

[Waladil]

Well' date=' local forces will shoot down UFOs sometimes. I think it happens if you don't have a ground combat for long enough.[/quote']

They do that at the very beginning, to ensure you get 1 Caesan combat and 1 Sebillian combat early. AFAIK they never do it later on.

Waladil - as a genuine question, what is it that makes you feel you should still do Scout and Light Scout missions when you basically said you aren't getting any in-game reward from doing so any more?

Do you feel that the game would penalise you for not attacking them? Does it? One of the things I find astonishing is that people will do literally every mission that they generate even though they really don't need to (or aren't supposed to need to).

I've tried to think up ways to communicate it to people but a lot of people seem to think that doing every mission is the only viable way to play.

...Are we not penalized? That's not really clear in-game. We get penalized (slightly) if we do a mission and then leave aliens alive. We get penalized (by an accelerated ticker) if we don't shoot down UFOs. So it only seemed obvious that we'd get penalized for not clearing the crash site.

Also, you do get a reward for clearing them all. You get some money immediately, some alenium/alloys, some skill bumps (which are important given that it now takes around 50 missions to fully train a soldier), and some money at end of month. All of those are slight, but they add up after 10 or 20 missions of this. But the money and resource gains are small enough that it might not be worth clearing unless you were strapped for cash. The skill bumps are pretty noteworthy, though. I always believe in having the best troops possible -- I'm a Protoss, not a Zerg -- and therefore I really want to get my troops as skilled as possible as fast as possible. Clearing easy missions is a safe way to train them, especially once you get Wolf armor (since plasma pistols will often do zero damage to a Wolf-clad soldier). That does raise the question of why I continue to clear them now that I've got a max-skill team (they all have 101 acc/tus and 99 str), but it's probably habit at this point.

If anyone else here has played Skyrim (or other games but I recall this most with Skyrim and Oblivion), you'll know that it is optimal for a player to grab everything with value on it greater than zero, up until their weight capacity. Then, it becomes optimal to drop things with the worst value:weight ratio, to get the most cash when you return to the merchants at towns. But this is REALLY BORING. When my characters get "enough" money (usually around a million gold and owning plenty of property), I stop grabbing anything except stuff with an exceptional value:weight ratio, like enchanted gear or gems. The point is that it feels like clearing weak craft is analogous to collecting iron daggers for sale: Yes, it is optimal and it does get you more cash. But it feels like a waste of time. Especially since a mission is minimum five minutes or so.

Also, on the subject of the air autocombat: I've only used it twice, and the first time my planes got shot up much worse than they would have been if I were at the helm, so I've barely used it. Some indicator of how well your planes would be likely to fare would be nice. Relative stat numbers, possibly.

For ground autocombat, I don't know if it's on the planned features list, but including it would make having weak craft around less annoying. The way I'd envision it is the game displaying point values that are based on relative strengths, but in the case of the alien strengths they are estimated and in a range at best. So your very first UFO clearance would simply have ??? as their strength -- no-one knows what to expect. Ditto your first alien base. As you clear missions of that type, the range gets more precise. Capturing aliens rather than killing them would accelerate the accumulation of knowledge. Whenever you encounter a new UFO, its assumed that the lower bound of alien strength is equal to the upper bound of the previous UFO tier, until better data is gathered. Autoresolve wouldn't be available until you had a pretty clear range (perhaps after five missions if you capture a reasonable number of aliens each mission). Just an idea I thought I'd throw out there. So it could become obvious that a human force massively overpowers an alien force and thus its safe for autoresolve to handle it.

(For the record, I'd imagine a human soldier to be worth five points base, plus a point for each ten skill points he has over fifty per category. Plus probably two or three points per weapon/armor tier he's got. Soldier in Wolf carrying a laser gun with 60 in all stats: 5 + 4 + 2 + 7 = 18 points total. Or something like that, I don't know what the best precise balance would be.)

EDIT: Just started a medium Caesan base. In the build 6 patchnotes Aaron said only small bases currently spawned, but this medium base spawned and has a distinctly different layout than the small bases I've cleared. Unless Caesan bases have a dramatically different layout than Sebillian and Andron bases. There's a Light Scout in the first room!

EDITx2: Cleared the base. Was an awesome battle, with thirty-three aliens in total. Six were Wraiths -- the first ones I've seen all game. Made sure to capture a couple for the researchers back home. The base design was really neat -- two "hangars", a few "barracks" with what appeared to be sleeping pods (possibly medical bays?). A couple rooms with strange glowing obelisks, and a command center with no less than eight defenders. And no door for open+close shenanigans, I had to take reaction fire each time I moved into LOS. Battles like THIS are what makes Xenonauts great. I didn't know what I'd find on the other side of each door (well, I had a good idea how many enemies there'd be because of the bug where they try to shoot you through indestructible walls), I had competent enemies to fight, and solid (if somewhat cheesy) tactics and teamwork carried me through. I even once had to have a soldier kill a Caesan with a scavenged alien plasma pistol! She'd dropped her gun for the TU savings on tossing grenades but I wasn't able to have her retrieve it, so... whatever you can find, right? I might start issuing sidearms from now on. Maybe when I unlock MAGs.

Edited August 7, 2013 by Waladil

[GizmoGomez]

I would rather we not have a ground combat auto-resolve. Thankfully, I doubt Chris would want to add that either (waaaay too difficult to implement for one, and not really in line with the game theme either.)

As far as Chris's question goes, I knew that leaving ground combats alone wouldn't reduce funding, but only because I read it here. If the game is to be balanced assuming you'll leave some ground combats alone, then I would recommend that as part of the Invasion (first) research the head scientist should tell you something about the ground combats not reducing funding.

[Lightzy]

If there was autoresolve in this game I would simply use it all the time until after a couple of days I'd get bored of the game and uninstall it

[Waladil]

Way I see it is there's two ways to go about this (well, two good ways. Let's not go into bad ways, shall we?)

Either make every (or nearly every) mission interesting and fun, or have a way to abbreviate boring missions. Having a lot more light scout/scout missions means a notable portion of missions are boring. So those missions need to be removed, become more brief, or become more interesting. An autoresolve function essentially removes boring missions from the queue, which functionally increases the percent of interesting missions. However, that's not the only way to resolve this. Nor is it necessarily the best way. Including mention of it shouldn't be construed as an endorsement of a GC autoresolve. A different method might be to have some maps (just a couple for each terrain type) set aside for these easy missions. Those maps would only show up after a certain ticker value, and only for scouts and light scouts. Those maps would also be very very small. Alien spawns would all be placed inside the UFO, making a mission that is overall shorter yet remains intense due to a furious battle inside the UFO. (It'd still be easy because the player ought to have reasonably good armor by that point. Wolf and above essentially shrugs off all pistol rounds and mostly negates rifle rounds, the only two weapons found on those craft.)

That's just another idea. Feel free to recommend more ideas! Personally I'd just say scrap the late-game weak training UFOs, make later missions award accordingly more skill points, and have players be able to train by incorporating noobies into existing squads. Higher skill gains later on would mean that minor losses could be absorbed and replaced reasonably quickly, but hopefully not quickly enough that players are likely to adopt cavalier attitudes towards their troops.

I was running some numbers in my head, and I feel it would be best to have the skill gain maximum either increment based on ship size (light scout: Max +1 skillpoint/level/mission, scout +2, corvette +3, etc), or have it based on the number of missions the player's played, incrementing at mission 16, 24, 32, and 40. The idea behind choosing those numbers is to regulate the number of missions "behind" a soldier is. Except soldiers who join the squad in the first ten missions or missions sixteen and seventeen, every new recruit will be over ten but under twenty missions away from catching up to the place a veteran who'd served in every mission would be. Of course, that veteran would also have gained a number of skill points in that time, so they'd only catch up at the cap. That perfect veteran would hit the cap a bit before or during mission 30, assuming he/she never missed a single skill bump. Mission 30 would be the +51 mark, where soldiers who got every bump possible could have earned 50 skill points, which at the current cap of 101 and the current minimum starting value of 52 means perfection. And after forty missions you'd be earning five skill points a mission, fully training a soldier from noobie to perfect in about ten missions -- but ten dreadnought/carrier missions, which are no joke.

tldr: I don't actually want a GC autoresolve. Make each mission interesting. Remove training missions and the system that makes them neccesary.

P.S. Is there a redesign for UFO interiors planned? After the really cool new bases I've fought in, UFOs are seeming really dull.

[Ol' Stinky]

They do that at the very beginning, to ensure you get 1 Caesan combat and 1 Sebillian combat early. AFAIK they never do it later on.

Oh, so that's why it happens in some games and not others. I figured it was if you didn't get any UFOs in your radar area for long enough, which is why I've never seen it beyond the opening stages of the game. I learnt something new today!

[Xenomorph]

It was quite the surprise missing a few builds and get back in on V19B6, lots of goodies

I think that injecting easy UFO throughout the game is a great decision, and much necessary, no need to explain why, someone else already did.

I do agree, tho, that it has the side effect of possibly bringing some boredom into the game for some players, at some point we all want to get things move forward quicker, get better guns, armor, all that stuff, and skip the small talk.

Ways to make them relevant:

- Having the option to use the loot as bonus to speed up current research or manufacture by some percentage.

- High rank soldiers would not be able to get any xp from those easier missions, BUT fielding lower ranks lead by a top rank officer would provide them with an xp boost similar to previous builds, x2, vs current x1, speeding up training.

Interrogating the first alien would unlock intel gathering from shot scouts. Any shot scout would have a % chance to provide info about a future UFO mission - those would have their mission waypoints plotted on the geoscape map, assuming that a UFO waypoints are generated when its spawned, adding dots and lines to the map looks easy on paper, and would add to tactical sense gimmick and overall fluff

Stuff like that.

Just tossing them up, these are not recommendations or anything. Already plenty of that going on =)