No more positive points from ground combat - implications?

[StellarRat]

You guys do all realize that there is no way to win the game without doing lots of ground combat, right?

[Sirinan]

You guys do all realize that there is no way to win the game without doing lots of ground combat, right?

Irrelevant. You don't remove all other reasons for doing combat just because it's necessary in order to win. That's the perfect way to make combat an unenjoyable grind.

That's the problem here. Apparently the devs have decided that the best way to make airstrikes more palatable is to make combat less palatable. As I said in my previous post, that's exactly the wrong way to approach the issue. As a developer, you should never nerf a central part of the game in order to make a peripheral part more useful. Balance issues for a peripheral feature should always be addressed through the peripheral feature itself.

[StellarRat]

Apparently the devs have decided that the best way to make airstrikes more palatable is to make combat less palatable.

Totally untrue, IMO. They gave us the airstrike option to reduce the amount of ground combat if the PLAYER didn't want to do that much ground combat. Anyone is free to recover every single UFO if they so desire. There is nothing stopping them from doing that. You still get more money and items from ground combat vs. airstrike. Personally, 100+ ground combats was a bit much, so now I have an alternative and I use it all the time. Ground combat is still the central part of the game as you can't possibly win without doing a lot of it. In fact, you can't even win in ATA combat without the improvements you gain from ground combat recovered technology. Edited December 18, 2013 by StellarRat

[crashed97tsi]

Anyone is free to recover every single UFO if they so desire.

But that is simply not true. If you take a negative relations hit for each one you do, then doing every mission will eventually crash your economy.

I am going to put a disclaimer on this until Aaron comes back and explains if I am misunderstanding the entire mechanic as he said a few posts above, but that is how it appears to work to me right now and my economic situation seems to support that. the $50k you get for taking out a light scout is worth nothing when you factor in losing 75K in funding. Especially when you can get $20k of it for free and not take any relations hit. (I know these are pretty arbitrary numbers, just trying to explain my viewpoint. )

If I am misunderstanding the game (which is entirely possible, I barely had the game a week), then please explain how and I will go back and reevaluate my strategy.

[StellarRat]

You shouldn't be losing relation points by doing ground combat. The relation points are only awarded for shooting down a UFO as far as I know. After that, it's your call if you want to airstrike for quick cash or recover for more cash, alien materials and technology. The only time ground combat will definitely affect (+/-) your nation relations is base assaults and terror clean ups. You pretty much have to clean up terror sites immediately or you will take a big relations hit (same with destroying alien bases long term.) If it's not working like that right now than Aaron still needs to make some changes because as far as I know that is his intention.

[Mooton]

The only time ground combat will definitely affect (+/-) your nation relations is base assaults and terror clean ups.

The negatives still count towards your relations. Similarly if you add positive points back into it by editing missionscore_gc.xml you can once again gain relations from ground combat.

Also since assaulting a landed UFO is just straight up negatives it is bad to do that. Instead you send craft to shoot it down then assault the crash site. Back in X-Com assaulting a landed UFO was the ideal method of assaulting.

[harrythevet]

Let me get this right; the nation requests XCOM assistance and gives you negative points for turning up? Lame. Devs, PLEASE go back to the old ways.

[Aaron]

I have said landed UFOs are broken at the moment - they will provide you a funding bonus equal to what you get from shooting down a UFO once we get around to fixing them.

So, here's how it should work now: When you shoot down a UFO you get funding boost with the nearest nation, for most normal UFOs this is 40 "points". For reference 1 point is worth roughly $1000 (it varies per nation).

By default you do not get any funding penalty from doing a mission, I've no idea where this idea came from, but it is flatly wrong.

There are only two things that can cause you to get negative funding points from a mission, and that is civilians/friendly AI soldiers dying, or aliens escaping. In both cases each instance of these happening will give you -2 relation points. The penalty for civilian deaths doubles if the Xenonauts themselves kill them.

I think the most any UFO map has is a total of 6 friendly AI units, more often 4, and many have none at all. Terror sites are obviously a different matter. That means the total you could lose is probably an average of around 8 points IF the aliens kill every civilian on the map - which is a pretty far cry from the 40 points you gained for shooting down the UFO. Even if you took the map with 6 AI units and killed them all yourself, the maximum penalty would be 24 points, so you still came out on top even though you just showed up and murdered everyone! I might actually increase that penalty.

Aliens escaping is pretty rare, and only happens if you capture the UFO while there are still aliens outside.

Edited December 18, 2013 by Aaron

[llunak]

I don't think anybody has said that doing ground missions causes penalties on its own. The point is that doing ground missions results in negatives as a side effect, and sometimes these negatives can be so large that one will in fact airstrike the site not in order to save time, but in order to gain a better result. Which is IMO just plain wrong for the game.

Consider these two possibilities:

1) UFO is shot down and airstrike is done. There's relation boost for it, there's money for it. No negatives (except for not getting as much money as possible, but I'll get to that).

2) UFO is shot down and a ground mission is done. In the ideal case, the advantage is that new technology is gained (which is not that often), soldiers will be improved as a result and more money will be made by selling stuff, but there are so many things that can reduce this:

- soldiers die - there go the stat improvements

- equipment that need to be manufactured gets destroyed - have few soldiers with laser weapons die in an explosion and the money loss is bigger than the gains

- alien equipment to be sold may be destroyed during the mission, reducing the money gain, e.g. once aliens start to use grenades too, it's either giving aliens an advantage, or destroying their equipment

- there's a chance of getting relation penalty for civilians dying, which sometimes cannot really be helped

- did I forget anything important?

Now, seeing these two options, why should players be tempted to do more ground missions than strictly necessary, if doing that is risky and can potentially result in a much worse outcome than blowing up the site from a safe distance? Yes, ok, players can do ground missions all the way if they want, but why should they, if a much better strategy seems to be aiming for air dominance and doing only the few ground missions that are really necessary? Given that ground combat should be the core of the game, and players should be afraid of the aliens, this both discourages doing what the game should be about and reduces game immersion.

In short, it seems that in the current game the air option is way too overpowered and doesn't just serve the original purpose of skipping unimportant ground missions. IMO ground missions should significantly contribute to funding, and the gains from a ground missions should be still significant compared to just shooting something down and airstriking it, even if the ground missions is not performed perfectly. After all, if the crashsite is not important enough for a ground mission, then presumably the player is not really interested in the gains from it or finds them not to be worth the effort, so why should the gains for it to be big? And, thinking of it, since this is meant for skipping unimportant ground missions, it shouldn't be possible to just airstrike first let's say 5 UFOs of each type, otherwise this is again just cheap gains that feel like working around the game. It should be ok to airstrike the 12th light scout, but it should not be ok to airstrike the 2nd landingship.

Edited December 18, 2013 by llunak

[Solver]

Even though ground missions do not give negative points, I'm convinced the current way is wrong and is one of the few mistakes made in recent development. Relations should primarily be determined by ground missions and ground events. Shooting down UFOs should give you a relations boost, but a minor one. The main boosts should be from ground missions, especially from terror sites / alien bases, while the worst penalties should come from the presence of alien bases and ignored/failed terror sites.

Unharmed UFOs should be dangerous in that they slightly reduce your relations, but mostly in that they speed up alien progress as the aliens build and supply bases, and otherwise get points. But the focus of the game should remain on the ground missions, not suddenly shift to interceptions.

[Solver]

Even though ground missions do not give negative points, I'm convinced the current way is wrong and is one of the few mistakes made in recent development. Relations should primarily be determined by ground missions and ground events. Shooting down UFOs should give you a relations boost, but a minor one. The main boosts should be from ground missions, especially from terror sites / alien bases, while the worst penalties should come from the presence of alien bases and ignored/failed terror sites.

Unharmed UFOs should be dangerous in that they slightly reduce your relations, but mostly in that they speed up alien progress as the aliens build and supply bases, and otherwise get points. But the focus of the game should remain on the ground missions, not suddenly shift to interceptions.

[Aaron]

The guy who posted before me literally said exactly that.

You don't even mention both Alenium and Alien Alloys in your post as advantages of doing ground combat, which either means you've just forgotten them, or they are so abundant you don't consider them a limiting factor. If that's the case that is an issue that needs to be addressed, as those two resources are meant to be a big driving factor in the need to do ground combat missions. Ideally they would provide us with a perfectly linear way of controlling up the pressure the player is under to go on missions.

Do people find this to be the case? Do you ever feel strapped for the two alien resources? Do you just not need them for anything?

[winterwolves]

I think the problem with alenium and alloys is perception. I don't really know what they are used in myself. I have not directly seen the amounts required when you make things.

I have not gotten past wolf armour and laser weapons though, so I guess other stuff starts to cost alenium and alloys?

I am usually too worried about where the cash will come from for manufacture, compared with any other resource.

[Solver]

Oh yeah. Good catch. I do basically forget about those because they're not a limiting factor in my experience. That first Scout mission to get my first Alenium is really important because I want it researched ASAP. But other than that, I seem to consume those resources at a much slower pace than I gain them.

The primary pressure to do crash site missions comes, in my experience, from trying to level soldiers up. Experienced soldiers are much better than rookies, and soldiers only get better through missions. But of course they are also the primary risk in missions, as any soldier can get killed due to you miscalculating or simply getting unlucky.

The game essentially has several kinds of resources. Money, country relations, soldiers, tech. It's good for certain actions to be resource-asymmetric, that is, provide a possible payoff in one resource while risking another.

[Aaron]

@Solver, if ground missions grant you the majority of the national relations bonus, how do we make sure players don't end up grinding repetitive missions just in order to grind national representation? The way the game is structured means there are always vastly more UFOs than you should ever do ground combat missions - should we slash the number of UFOs to only 1-2 in wave every 2 weeks?

The fact that you had basically forgotten Alenium and Alloys exist suggest to me the problem lies there, not somewhere else.

[Solver]

Aaron, I would still suggest those are distinct problems. Alloys/Alenium are forgettable beyond the initial research, that's one problem. The amount of UFOs, missions and their corresponding monetary/relations rewards are another problem. I'd suggest a few points.

To generally improve the pacing, add occasional UFOs outside of waves. I currently always know that a UFO means more will immediately follow because there's a wave, and that there's a longer downtime after it. Occasional single UFOs (implemented as 1-UFO waves I guess) would be good to throw the balance off a bit.

There are, as you say, more UFOs than you should do missions. That should be achieved primarily through the inability to shoot down most UFOs. You shouldn't be able to shoot down a whole wave, but you should be able to do missions for most UFOs that you shoot down. Getting missions and not doing them feels contrary to the spirit of the game.

Grinding national relations should not be feasible because of the risks involved. Getting those relation points from yet another Scout should not be worth the risk of losing a good soldier. The missions should become worth it by a combination of rewards. Soldier stat increases, money, relations, alien resources. Those should together - but not individually - outweigh the risks such as losing soldiers or getting them wounded so they have to skip a few missions.

Plus, national relations should be (or already are?) capped at some maximum, so doing them repeatedly doesn't gain you anything when a nation already has great relations. And finally, the main boosts should come from missions that can not be grinded because they appear more randomly. That is, terror and alien base missions. Those should be much more significant than crash sites for relations, my gut feeling would be to say about 5 times more important.

To further complicate matters, overall tech progression can add to the feeling of grinding if it's not well balanced. A few builds ago (20.2 maybe), I felt like I was grinding because I was in fact doing too well. I was doing well, shooting down UFOs and doing missions, but only small alien bases were showing up. Which prevented me from capturing an alien leader to progress in the story.

Here are some relations that might feel good to me, again, gut feeling:

Baseline -> relations boost for clearing a crash site is X.

Shooting down a UFO is about 0.25X.

Not shooting down a UFO is about -0.2X.

Completing a terror mission / alien base is about 5X.

Failing/ignoring a terror site is damaging by about 5X.

The difference between best possible relations (they love you and give you lots of money) and the worst possible relations (they give up on you completely) are about 11X.

Would actually be interesting to run some numerical simulation if there's data on relation points and UFO waves.

[Mooton]

Do people find this to be the case? Do you ever feel strapped for the two alien resources? Do you just not need them for anything?

Alloys are easy enough to come by that the only time I've ever run out was in rushed production of laser weapons. Alenium was stretched when building corsairs. And then I realized that corsairs are outdated pretty much right as you can finish manufacturing 2 assuming you rushed the research on normal difficulty. And it would've been better to have just been building foxtrots the whole time.

[Ol' Stinky]

I don't think anybody has said that doing ground missions causes penalties on its own. The point is that doing ground missions results in negatives as a side effect, and sometimes these negatives can be so large that one will in fact airstrike the site not in order to save time, but in order to gain a better result. Which is IMO just plain wrong for the game.

Consider these two possibilities:

1) UFO is shot down and airstrike is done. There's relation boost for it, there's money for it. No negatives (except for not getting as much money as possible, but I'll get to that).

2) UFO is shot down and a ground mission is done. In the ideal case, the advantage is that new technology is gained (which is not that often), soldiers will be improved as a result and more money will be made by selling stuff, but there are so many things that can reduce this:

- soldiers die - there go the stat improvements

- equipment that need to be manufactured gets destroyed - have few soldiers with laser weapons die in an explosion and the money loss is bigger than the gains

- alien equipment to be sold may be destroyed during the mission, reducing the money gain, e.g. once aliens start to use grenades too, it's either giving aliens an advantage, or destroying their equipment

- there's a chance of getting relation penalty for civilians dying, which sometimes cannot really be helped

- did I forget anything important?

Now, seeing these two options, why should players be tempted to do more ground missions than strictly necessary, if doing that is risky and can potentially result in a much worse outcome than blowing up the site from a safe distance? Yes, ok, players can do ground missions all the way if they want, but why should they, if a much better strategy seems to be aiming for air dominance and doing only the few ground missions that are really necessary? Given that ground combat should be the core of the game, and players should be afraid of the aliens, this both discourages doing what the game should be about and reduces game immersion.

In short, it seems that in the current game the air option is way too overpowered and doesn't just serve the original purpose of skipping unimportant ground missions. IMO ground missions should significantly contribute to funding, and the gains from a ground missions should be still significant compared to just shooting something down and airstriking it, even if the ground missions is not performed perfectly. After all, if the crashsite is not important enough for a ground mission, then presumably the player is not really interested in the gains from it or finds them not to be worth the effort, so why should the gains for it to be big? And, thinking of it, since this is meant for skipping unimportant ground missions, it shouldn't be possible to just airstrike first let's say 5 UFOs of each type, otherwise this is again just cheap gains that feel like working around the game. It should be ok to airstrike the 12th light scout, but it should not be ok to airstrike the 2nd landingship.

The points penalties amount to a pretty small amount of money, though. In my latest landing ship mission I got $164,000. If I'd managed to save the two civs, I'd have earnt $2,000 more. If I'd used an airstrike, I'd only have $70,000 to show for it, less than half of what I actually earnt. And that's not including the alenium and alien alloys.

Having said that, I agree that some of those penalties for ground combat you listed are too steep. If just one of those sebilian soldiers armed with a plasma caster had managed to close the distance during my last mission, it would have been disastrous, regardless of whether that was the only incident. However, I think that's more of a problem with the penalty for losing soldiers than the airstrike system. Rookies don't improve (at least, not yet, I don't know if a new training system or whatever's a WIP) but I'm guessing the average player is meant to lose some men each mission. Also, weapons seem to have their costs/manufacturing times balanced around lasting forever, but aliens have overdamage weapons - my eyes water when I see that a laser sniper costs $80k. But these problems are about ground combat, and getting rid of the airstrike system won't help any.

Alloys are easy enough to come by that the only time I've ever run out was in rushed production of laser weapons. Alenium was stretched when building corsairs. And then I realized that corsairs are outdated pretty much right as you can finish manufacturing 2 assuming you rushed the research on normal difficulty. And it would've been better to have just been building foxtrots the whole time.

Yeah, I think I have over 400 alloys in storage. I don't think I've ever had my mouse cursor hover over the "airstrike" button and then stop and think, "Wait! What if I need some more alloys?"

Edited December 18, 2013 by Ol' Stinky

[Solver]

The points penalties amount to a pretty small amount of money, though. In my latest landing ship mission I got $164,000. If I'd managed to save the two civs, I'd have earnt $2,000 more.

I think the relations points right after a mission should only affect the money slightly, which is okay, though the relations points should have a very big effect on end-of-month funding. Though upping the rewards for saved civilians a bit would seem appropriate.

[Ol' Stinky]

In the original XCOM I'd execute every civ I saw if there were Chryssalids around. My laser factories would be printing money anyway. So I'm not bothered about the cost of losing civs in Xeno since I'm used to being evil by now, and civs are largely beyond my control anyway - I just wanted to put the monetary loss in perspective. It's tiny.

[RyanZA]

The fact that you had basically forgotten Alenium and Alloys exist suggest to me the problem lies there, not somewhere else.

Definitely the big issue. I think a big part of the problem is that the UI doesn't make it clear what does or doesn't use alenium and alloys. The only time I realized I even needed them was when I tried to build in a different base from my main one that didn't have any. The cost to transport them across was also far higher than the difficulty in just getting them directly, so I just built stuff only in my primary base. I'm not convinced the transfer costs actually add any decent gameplay benefits either...

Either way, using alenium and alloys as a method to get players to do or not do missions is not working at present because it's not pressing or visible on the player. Might be a UI issue though.

[vaultdweller]

In terms of getting optimal results, I think that it's still best to do every possible ground mission, rather do the minimum for ground combat and airstrike the rest. I disagree with some of the assessments of risk and reward in crash site missions. Yes, you can potentially lose more than you gain, but that is not the norm (unless you're chronically skipping ground combat to the extent that your soldiers have crap skills and equipment). The norm is that the resources you obtain, and the experience your soldiers get, far outstrips the possible negative outcomes from ground missions.

As for the supply of alien alloys and alenium: I have not found alloys to be a major limiting factor. There's usually more than enough to keep your manufacturing going. Alenium definitely can be limiting, since you need fairly large quantities of it to produce some of the late-game tech. I was hesitant to airstrike larger UFO's, because I didn't want that precious alenium go to waste.

Edit: As for the game not conveying what does and doesn't require alenium... I think it's perfectly clear on the manufacturing screen what the requirements are. However, I'll agree that it doesn't do a great job of letting you know if you have an abundance or a shortage. It would make sense to show the available supply on this screen, instead of making the player switch to the storage screen to see what they have.

Edited December 18, 2013 by vaultdweller

[StellarRat]

I'm all for showing the player the benefits of Alenium and alloy recoveries, but the rest the of suggested changes here I totally disagree with. I don't want to be forced to run dozens and dozens of recovery missions to maintain my nation relations (something Solvers proposed changes will do.) I feel the balance between air, ground, the number of UFOs, and finance is just about perfect right now. Any significant changes are going to throw every off again. There is plenty of additional reward in running recovery missions vs. airstrike already both in money and materials. Yes, it's possible you could come out behind if you really foul up a ground mission, but for the most part if you're competent you come out ahead nearly all the time vs. an airstrike. That's always a risk when you put your soldiers in harms way.

Since the aliens don't actually put troops on the ground except to run terror missions and build bases it seems silly to me to make ground combat anymore important than it already is. It would be much more important if the aliens were actually invading with an army, but since most of the damage they are doing is from their UFOs air combat should be the predominate determiner of nation relations, less UFOs = less damage to each nation. I also don't believe that it hurts the enjoyment of the game by anyone. It adds another element that the OG didn't really have and that makes the game more interesting i.e. better. You actual have to have an air strategy. Don't get me wrong, I like doing ground missions, but I also like the air strategy too. In my mind you still get plenty of ground combat and like I continue to say, you simply can't win without doing a lot of it even in the current build. Please don't change the balance we have now.

Edited December 18, 2013 by StellarRat

[Solver]

I do in fact agree that we should not play hundreds of missions. I do not want that. I do not even want a hundred. But I'd like to point out that with my estimate numbers from a few posts up, a 6 UFO wave where you shoot down 1 and do its mission, and let 5 go, would increase your relations slightly. As long as you either shoot down 3 out of 6 UFOs without doing any missions, or do at least one crash site, your relations would go up.

Then again, I do not think the current balance is fine at all. I want nation relations to matter, among other things, and I want ground performance to be more important than air. You should have to have an air strategy, absolutely, but you shouldn't feel compelled to airstrike most crash sites because they only give you a small benefit. The air game is absolutely better than in X-Com. So is the whole funding scheme in fact, but it should not be possible to keep all nations happy just by having many interceptors.

[ventuswings]

The fact that you had basically forgotten Alenium and Alloys exist suggest to me the problem lies there, not somewhere else.

In truth, the very fact the player forgot about the Alenium and Alloys is not very promising. Ignoring the whole discussion about the national relationship points, I would recommend having early UFO - scout and light scout, possibly Corvette - give significantly less resources while later UFO - large and massive - give slightly more resources so player are encouraged to participate in bigger UFO more, rather than relying on easier, smaller UFO for Xenonaut training + resource collection.

In order words, skew the distribution of resources toward late-game UFO so that people have reason to prefer bigger UFO mission over small ones. If this skewing cause problems manufacturing-wise, skew the resource cost toward late-game tools too. The number of missions player would have to take would be constant (<50), but percentage of the pre-Landing Ship missions the player will likely do will decrease.

Edited December 18, 2013 by ventuswings