Geoscape Balance Discussion V19 Stable

[Elydo]

I think you're right, it was in but they took it out because it wasn't working properly, and they decided it was no longer necessary. It might solve this issue though.

Or I maintain that giving Foxtrots gunpods would allow them to have a higher damage output for higher risk.

Should there be a method of getting a ufo to switch it's attention between fighters? Currently it's a bit of a lottery, you just kite with whatever it locks onto and you have the others to do damage.

[Ishantil]

Well, I would rant about the whole forced torpedo plane idea, but meh.

I think the easiest way to make you want to replace the F-17s is that they can't catch the UFOs larger than a medium. Meaning you need something that goes faster, thus, Corsairs.

Again, though, if the Marauder (I always want to follow that up with Bomber, too much 40K) is just around the corner, there's no reason to spend money on them.

Again, this should not be the case. I think that means they should be both better and cheaper.

When I saw the price tag at 30 Alenium and $300K, I immediately rethought building them. I think you should have to rebuild a Condor, and have it cost $100 and 10 Alenium. This way, your Condors aren't useless (you build a Corsair out of it) and you can justify not having to pay as much.

[StellarRat]

The Foxtrots would be a lot more interesting if they had some ability the Condors didn't have besides carrying torpedoes. I don't know what that would be though...maybe if they could outrun enemy plasma shots by going to afterburner, that might be cool.

[Dranak]

I do think that some of these discussion are focusing a bit much on a single engagement, and missing a bit of the larger picture. Yes, Condors are more versatile, but they have a much lower operational tempo (fewer missions per wave) which actually means that while they can do *slightly* more damage per fight, they generally have less damage output over the course of an entire wave (assuming more than one UFO is present). With Foxtrots I got minimum of three sorties per wave, and normally got four. With Condors, I normally get one or two. If I'm killing an escorted UFO in a single engagement, I'm almost always using guns to kill the escorts which means my Condors are taking damage, which in turn means that fight is their only one for a wave. So for most of my Condors, I'm getting one good fight per wave, whereas with a Foxtrot I can generally get four. Even the ones that don't take damage are burning so much fuel (from an already smaller tank) that it is uncommon to get a third engagement from them.

Foxtrots both play and are optimally used completely different than Condors, and are frankly made worse by combining them with Condors. To borrow a bit from EVE Online, Condors are your brawlers, they travel a lot slower and have to get in close, where Foxtrots are more like a fast kiting ship that excels at getting in and out of fights; and having a fleet composed of both brawlers and kiters generally results in a less effective (and certainly less efficient) squadron overall. Combining them with Condors in mixed squadrons completely negates the strategic value that Foxtrots have in their high speed and operational tempo. Against unescorted UFOs, an squadron of Foxes is far faster and safer than using Condors and they can run more fights per wave.

Foxtrots also benefit from never needing investment in them to upgrade weapons. Over the full life of a plane, I'll spend more total manufacturing costs for a Condor than a Foxtrot due to cannon upgrades.

Currently, we're at a point where both Condors and Foxes are viable. Both can be used effectively, which makes me reluctant to support any major changes as you can get by with two Condors and then any number of additional Condors or Foxes beyond that and probably be completely fine so long as you adjust your tactics to reflect the makeup of your air forces. I have a hard time seeing the game being better for instituting a clear, dark line between escort killers and everything else killers (which would make building 2 Condors per base and everything else Foxtrots clearly optimal).

I do think that if a nerf to the long term value of Condors is needed/desired, a good way to do it would be via increasing the speed of UFOs on the Geoscape so Condors have a harder time catching them. I also like the suggestion of adding an option for upgrading Condors to Corsairs, but I have no idea how hard that would be to implement or how to make it intuitive to newer players.

Edited September 12, 2013 by Dranak

[Elydo]

Increasing the speed of unescorted medium ufos such that Condors couldn't catch them would certainly provide a niche for Foxtrots to fill without decreasing the combat effectiveness of Condors, which I'd be against. They seem well balanced against their intended targets at the moment. It also fits with the stated requirement of Foxtrots over Condors in the research. But it does require that 'right way of playing' you were against previously.

I think it would counter a lot of the confusion and discontent over what the point of Foxtrots is at the moment though. Any such change will need extensive playtesting though.

I find the opposite of you in sorties per wave however. Admittedly I never sortie Foxtrots on their own due to my underwhelmed attitude towards Avalanche damage, I'll need to try that. But I can get three or four victories against small ufos and lone fighters from a single (3) Condor flight during a wave assuming good cannon control, whereas Foxtrots get one shot then have to RTB and I rarely see them ready to go again in time enough unless it's a landing craft buzzing around causing trouble.

[StellarRat]

Increasing the speed of unescorted medium ufos such that Condors couldn't catch them would certainly provide a niche for Foxtrots to fill without decreasing the combat effectiveness of Condors, which I'd be against.

That's not a bad idea.

[Dranak]

Foxtrots are much, much better when operating separately from Condors as they lose their speed advantage (and much of their fuel capacity advantage) when forced to slow down for Condors. A huge key with Foxtrots is to never have them stick around on the battlefield. They're at their best when just bursting things down and then returning to base to reload. If I was flying a squadron of Foxtrots, I'd consider it a problem if they were in a fight for longer than 10 seconds (unpaused time of course) as that doesn't play to their strengths.

Increasing the speed of just unescorted UFOs would seem a bit silly to me. Why would adding fighters (which are themselves very fast) massively slow down the larger ships? That just doesn't seem to make logical sense to me. It also would create another "This is the correct way to play" situation, which I am obviously against.

Edit: Wait, I think I was looking at something slightly differently than you. I will grant that you can run comparable numbers of engagements versus light scouts/scouts with Condors by engaging more than once before returning to base, but you can't do that against anything larger because you won't have enough ammo to actually kill anything.

Edited September 12, 2013 by Dranak

[GizmoGomez]

How about the corsairs come in right as the UFOs, escorted and not, speed up enough to not be catchable by Condors? Then you kinda have to upgrade to Corsairs.

Also, agreed, Corsairs should be the "next condor" by making them cheap, easy to make, and thus able to be spammed a little. We don't upgrade to them because they're not good enough to justify the price. Therefore, drop the price.

Have marauders be the ultimate, but expensive, craft, but make corsairs fairly cheap, like condors.

That way you'd be stupid not to upgrade to corsairs, because they're so similarly priced to condors. Also, they would be needed to catch up with the faster craft with the foxtrots. Also, I don't know what their fuel is like currently, but it should at least be that of the foxtrot, probably slightly more. Otherwise they're still limiting the foxtrot. The next plane unlocked (marauder) makes the foxtrot obsolete, so we need the corsair to not hinder/limit the foxtrot concerning speed, fuel, etc.

[TrashMan]

I'd rather have the Corsairs be highly effective, stable fighting platforms, with marauders being a huge cash investment for those who have money ot burn.

[Ishantil]

How about the corsairs come in right as the UFOs, escorted and not, speed up enough to not be catchable by Condors? Then you kinda have to upgrade to Corsairs.

Also, agreed, Corsairs should be the "next condor" by making them cheap, easy to make, and thus able to be spammed a little. We don't upgrade to them because they're not good enough to justify the price. Therefore, drop the price.

Have marauders be the ultimate, but expensive, craft, but make corsairs fairly cheap, like condors.

That way you'd be stupid not to upgrade to corsairs, because they're so similarly priced to condors. Also, they would be needed to catch up with the faster craft with the foxtrots. Also, I don't know what their fuel is like currently, but it should at least be that of the foxtrot, probably slightly more. Otherwise they're still limiting the foxtrot. The next plane unlocked (marauder) makes the foxtrot obsolete, so we need the corsair to not hinder/limit the foxtrot concerning speed, fuel, etc.

This is basically what I was getting at. Encourage the player to upgrade to the new awesome thing simply by making it awesome and affordable. The player should feel like the Condors aren't enough (hey, I can't catch these new UFOs) and see them getting value for their investment (oooh, more HP, faster, same range as a Foxtrot, wow, yeah, that is worth it!).

I still like the idea of rebuilding a Condor. You also don't need to ditch them (so you think hey, this is awesome, I'm overhauling my existing airframes) and you don't need a free hanger to leapfrog them, which massively increases the costs. It's about as realistic as making the changes they talk about for the Foxtrot (rebuilding half the airframe). In this case, they re-use a lot of the existing parts and surfaces so they don't have to make them from scratch. Enhance them with new techniques, whatever.

[Elydo]

Rather than rebuilding a Condor it would be more akin to cannibalising it, heh. Breaking it down for the parts that can be used to save money. Bit of a stretch justification at that, but probably swallowable.

Only speeding up the larger ufos is a bit counterintuitive, but you can find justification for it. One workable angle would be fuel consumption, alien fighters can't maintain high velocity for long periods due to a lack of fuel, whereas larger ufos have the fuel reserves to sustain higher cruising speeds.

The other, more realistic reason (for a given value of handwavery) is that for spacecraft, larger engines and more fuel equals longer acceleration means higher top speed.. The only rationale for space fighters is having a powerplant that can accelerate a small mass faster than a larger mass (As opposed to accelerating at the same rate. Delta V could be a decent argument for space fighters). This would not be as true in a gravity well, but these craft use anti-gravity. It would also not be true due to atmospheric friction, but we can bullshit something for that as well if need be. Some form of cavitation effect that works in atmosphere perhaps. The real issue is the Aluminium Christmas Trees; something being realistic but not what people think is realistic so it causes their suspension of disbelief to break.

Another issue would be if (assuming we go with this paradigm) it needs to be worked into the Xenopedia.

I still think there should be a Xenopedia entry for the alien fighters, it's too strange not to have one. Or has one been added now?

Edit: I'm making the argument about space fighters very poorly in an attempt at brevity, heh. Going into it at length would be derailing though, I fear.

Edited September 12, 2013 by Elydo

[Max_Caine]

There are xenopedia entries for all the non-crash UFOs. For whatever reason, they don't show up. I have logged this as a bug, but that was a while ago.

[Aaron]

Those entries will show up, we just need to add a code hook to do so - should be done shortly.

About the Corsair, I do agree we probably need to sweeten in a bit - I think tweaking the speeds of UFOs is probably an interesting way to do it, so I will see if that's feasible.

[Ishantil]

Are you posting these hotfixes to the stable branch or the experimental?

[Ol' Stinky]

When we press 'q'/click "launch interceptors", does anyone else think it'd be more handy if the game brought up the list of aircraft first, and then told us to select location afterwards? (It's the other way around right now.) That way, it's a handy shortcut to check on refuelling/time until repair for various aircraft as well as manual interception.

[GizmoGomez]

When we press 'q'/click "launch interceptors"' date=' does anyone else think it'd be more handy if the game brought up the list of aircraft first, and then told us to select location afterwards? (It's the other way around right now.) That way, it's a handy shortcut to check on refuelling/time until repair for various aircraft as well as manual interception.[/quote']

Yeah, I'd like that; however, currently it shows an ETA next to each of the planes, so that'd have to change if we didn't define where the plane would be flying first.

[Ol' Stinky]

Yeah, I'd like that; however, currently it shows an ETA next to each of the planes, so that'd have to change if we didn't define where the plane would be flying first.

Oh, right. I've never found the ETA to be useful, so I guess I overlooked it. If I'm alone in that, then maybe another shortcut like 'w' for plane list -> select location.

[Elydo]

Or you could just have the ETA read --:-- with no destination set.

[Ripley]

Since the thread is about general Geoscape balance as oposed to only planes I was wondering about a few things that have been nagging at me:

If you want to setup a "research only" base and a "manufacturing only" base, transfering anything, even a single alien allow between bases costs 1,000$ minimum per item even though it says it costs just 25$ per alien alloy. This obviously makes it impossible to have a dedicated manufacturing base as getting all the materials your teams colect ends up being very costly.

Is this a bug or has item transfering between bases not been fine-tuned yet?

On another topic I havent been able to dicern wether having more scientists in an "EXCELLENT" research is wasting personel that coud be used to advance another research in parallel or if it actually makes things go faster. The mayor threads about this matter that Ive been able to find seem quite old and dont specifically mention this.

Finally I was wondering wether the build and research times are meant to be as slow as they are. Im on December on the Steam version (Veteran) with about 30 or 35 scientists and just finished my first twon plasma weapons while having two foxtrots and a fleet of 3.4 condors per base equipped with gatling lasers. I have been shooting down every single detected UFO except maybe 4 and doing every mission with a base in the Americas by the second month. Only in this month have I had my first terror mission and have yet to suffer a base attack mission. And of course I have been doing every single crash site I could reach in time.

If my air superiority efforts have been too good (only now have heavy fighters and bombers shown up, still on landing ships) I am grateful since my gorund and air forces are woefully unprepared due to how long it takes to research and manufacture anything (managed to get 5 people from each squad in wolf armor, but only 3 lazer rifles have ever been produced.). Im wondering if this is intended.

[Solver]

A few tidbits from the current version.

- While manufacturing times are a lot better than they used to be, they feel a bit on the high side for weapons and a bit on the low side for aircraft. Now my engineers can churn out a Corsair about as quickly as 4 rifles.

- There's still something wrong with the investment of setting up a new base. One problem seems to be that radars take 20 days to complete, meaning that a new base needs 20 days to be operational if I intend to use it for air combat. Given that bases already start with nothing useful, this feels too drastic. Maybe a reduction to 12-15 days for radars is in order?

- I really like how various UFO types are mixed now and no longer a flat boring progression.

- In the grand scheme of things, it still doesn't feel like capturing additional aliens has any benefits. Capturing one of each type is nice for the damage bonus, but there isn't a point to capturing the 2nd or 3rd Caesan really.

[Solver]

A few tidbits from the current version.

- While manufacturing times are a lot better than they used to be, they feel a bit on the high side for weapons and a bit on the low side for aircraft. Now my engineers can churn out a Corsair about as quickly as 4 rifles.

- There's still something wrong with the investment of setting up a new base. One problem seems to be that radars take 20 days to complete, meaning that a new base needs 20 days to be operational if I intend to use it for air combat. Given that bases already start with nothing useful, this feels too drastic. Maybe a reduction to 12-15 days for radars is in order?

- I really like how various UFO types are mixed now and no longer a flat boring progression.

- In the grand scheme of things, it still doesn't feel like capturing additional aliens has any benefits. Capturing one of each type is nice for the damage bonus, but there isn't a point to capturing the 2nd or 3rd Caesan really.

[Elydo]

It makes it a little odd that you still get more points for capturing an alien rather than killing him, given that they're simply executed at mission end anyway. Perhaps a little Fridge Horror at exactly 'how' they're terminated such that it's worth more to the funding nation...

[Solver]

Point is, captured aliens should actually feel like a reward. This is an area where I've always felt the original game didn't do justice. Same here, you're capturing aliens, feels like it should be a boost to technology, morale, country relations, something, while in reality it's not worth the risk if you've already captured one alien of that race.

[Elydo]

Well the OG had ranged AoE stun options and a variety of aliens 'ranks' to capture, each of which came with rewards. You needed to capture technicians (engineers?) to get the specs for new ufos, for example.

[StellarRat]

Yeah, I think all the weapon and armor manufacture times need to be less. In the OG cranking out infantry equipment didn't take very long.