No more positive points from ground combat - implications?

[vaultdweller]

Let's suppose I accept the hypothetical that ground combat can be completely ignored. If you love ground combat... why should you care if it can be ignored? Are you compelled to skip it? If you love ground combat, can you not simply say, "I'm not going to ignore this, I'm going to play it." If you want to do every combat mission because you feel that's the most fun part of the game, are you unable to do so?

[Chris]

It was already said and confirmed that you can beat the game doing about 10 ground missions while i can't find any proof that you can beat original X-COM with just one ground combat as you say. Probably you will need the same ammount of missions just to get needed tech, but you will run out of money before you can get to Mars. So i don't know who "exaggerating wildly" here.

You're the one exaggerating wildly. One battleship UFO mission gets you everything you need to get to Cydonia in the original game. I've spent the last four years doing a remake of X-Com, it's generally safe to assume I know what I'm talking about.

So yeah, the original game requires 1 mission to complete and a skilled player could do Xenonauts in 7 missions, and you're complaining that Xenonauts takes too few missions to complete compared to the original...

You are trying to shift focus from tactical turn based combat to that real time air combat mini game, make it less important. Yes, you do. Stop deny that. Ground combat was everything for XCOM: your reputation, money, materials and tech came from that. And now? Just some extra money, materials and tech. Looks like about 1/3 of that "everything" moved to air combat. But for me XCOM is like 90% tactic battles + 10% management. And i'm perfectly fine with that.

So you just making a cake for propeller-heads and telling "screw you, guys" to those who prefer ground combat? I don't want that "more challenging air combat", never asked that and can't understand why game have to change for that. "A blend of turn-based ground combat and strategic command" that's my thing, that what i ask and that's why i supported Xenonauts in a first place. And now you telling me that i'm asking too much, everything changed and etc.?

Yeah, the description says "a blend of turn-based ground combat and strategic command". It doesn't say "only turn-based ground combat". You apparently want a game that's just ground combat, but then you may as well play Rebelstar where there is no Geoscape at all. A lot of X-Com players like the Geoscape part of the game, and it wouldn't be X-Com without the Geoscape...and I'd disagree that the Geoscape was only 10% of the game, too.

As vaultdweller says, why don't you just play every ground combat mission? The game doesn't stop you from doing that, it just means that it's not compulsory to do it. You can skip literally every air combat mission if you want to using the autoresolve.

It just sounds like you're raging because we're letting other people play the game in the way they want, even though you're still perfectly able to play the game you want to.

[StellarRat]

Newfr - You might be happier playing Jagged Alliance 2. It's nothing but squad level ground combat. Very well done and detailed, if a bit dated.

[Dranak]

Here's a link about the one UFO XCOM challenge. http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=User_talk:Arrow_Quivershaft#1_Mission_X-COM

As much as I dislike anything that takes emphasis off the ground combat and puts it on air play, I'm not sure what a better solution would be. If we put much more rewards on ground combat, we'd be back to airstrikes being comparatively useless.

Edit: in full fairness, you could probably complete this game in two ground missions (landing ship, battleship) with a comparable level of difficulty.

Edited January 15, 2014 by Dranak

[StellarRat]

If the emphasis were tilted more toward ground combat I sure would want less missions than the maximum. I'd like to be able to finish the game in 10 - 20 sessions not a year.

[Ol' Stinky]

I think it's inevitable that more emphasis will be placed on ground missions. We've had the devs say that secondary resources aren't being appreciated and they don't like that (as is right and proper). Once alloys and alenium feel more important throughout the game, people will hopefully be thinking, "I have enough/will get enough alloys from this landing ship, I don't need anything from that light scout: I can airstrike it safely". Right now, I can safely bomb all light scouts and regular scouts after the first: there's nothing early game that requires alloys or alenium, and even for lasers I get all the alloys needed from a shooting down fighters.

I'm imagining something along the lines of jackal costing only alloys to make, and lasers earlier (or an "upgraded ballistics" tier) but costing more alloys and less cash, along with tougher than guard level aliens for corvettes. You'll want to do enough ground combat on light scout and scout missions to upgrade your troops in time for corvettes, but it'll cost alloys instead of/much more than money, so that base expansion isn't horribly slow. Airstriking all the scouts would make corvette ground combat extremely tough, along the lines of an unexpectedly early Muton mission in the OG. You wouldn't want to fight Mutons with the starting weapons.

[kraex]

You can literally completely ignore the air combat due to the autoresolve system for that, but you're still forced to play the ground combat missions...so you're either confused or exaggerating wildly.

No offense Chris, but this reply leads me to believe you've missed the point entirely. You're talking about the air combat mini game, and people here are talking about "The resources and research required to stay competitive in the air in order to have any kind of economy that will sustain you past the third month" No one (well, most people) aren't saying much about clicking waypoints and manually firing missiles. We're talking about the fact that you have to devote all of your resources, base expansion, and research on building up at least one secondary base and 5-7 interceptors in each location, just in order to scrape by.

(Also, why so desperate to maximise funding on the Geoscape if it's just a little minigame?)

I assume this you either trying to be cheeky or just trolling.

The original game can be completed with one crash site mission. Please stop telling us be more like the original game, but then telling us we've made the ground combat irrelevant by only forcing a skilled player to do seven missions. Shouldn't we reduce that down to one mission so we're keeping the spirit of X-Com, then?

You're right that this is a bad argument. Doing that in the original game was entirely based on manufacturing for cash. You've removed that element entirely, so it's not a valid tactic.

Legit, you're also saying we shouldn't nerf the importance of the air combat because it wasn't important enough in the original game, but then you're also saying we should make the ground combat so important people should have to do almost every mission (giving 4x the resources means the only optimal way to play the game is to play EVERY crash site, not airstrike it). But then what do you do about the increased number of UFOs in the waves we use to make the air combat more interesting? More UFOs = more crash sites = even more grind, and X-Com vets would think it was a bug if shooting down a UFO didn't generate a crash site.

Was it really not clear from his post? He answered your question, I think you're just either too angry to see it, or not reading very carefully. The method he describes is an overall large net gain in funding over current balance if you actually do the ground missions. The result of this, at least without some balance tuning, would be a significant easing of the economy if you continued to effectively shoot down UFOs, AND performed well on ground operations. He's asking for a balance. His system would (if tuned properly) enable you to choose to airstrike if you wished, but continue to reward you if you did not. If you chose to grind every UFO crash site, you would likely have more money than you needed.

So, as is frequently the case, people seem to want to have their cake and eat it. You can't just pull out individual system changes and then say "this is bad, change it back" and want to keep the other upgrades that caused us to make that change in the first place. More challenging air combat = more UFOs = more crash sites, so we need a way to deal with them.

But you can put in a system change and say "this is good, we need it" without addressing all of the concerns that haven't gone away after its been in place for two months? Yes, it's your game, you could. But you're really not being rational in this thread. You haven't done anything to explain why this is a good change. I think legit nailed it when he called it a lazy approach to economy balance.

It doesn't even make ground combat less important, as you still get increased money from doing a crash site, it's just in the form of loot rather than country relations.

It makes ground combat less important by comparison when it becomes 100% mandatory to maintain an air fleet capable of shooting down as close to 100% as possible any UFOs. There's a no-risk button to deal with ground forces that does not require any kind of ground force. Do you even need to own a soldier to air-strike? Meanwhile in order to use auto-resolve to successfully manage the skies, you need a full fleet of upgraded and researched aircraft. It shouldn't be that hard to see.

Easy fix to this problem: Allow a single base condor the ability to "airstrike" any UFO grouping. That would be the equivalent of the airstrike system. I'm guessing you're not going to entertain that suggestion.

[StellarRat]

Meanwhile in order to use auto-resolve to successfully manage the skies, you need a full fleet of upgraded and researched aircraft.

...that you can't get without doing GROUND COMBAT...

You either are failing to understand that the strategic side of Xenonauts is much "bigger" than XCom (or you just don't like it.) I don't see what's wrong with that.

Xenonauts is supposed to be a global UFO defense game not a recover some UFO stuff and destroy their HQ game. If it didn't have large air component how would you go about defending against UFOs?

Also, did you know that the original XCom was supposed to an air combat simulator in it? They originally were going to have the player fly the interceptors and attack UFOs in real time. They scrapped that because it was too cheesy and because they didn't have time. So, it wasn't a bad idea at least according to the original designers.

Edited January 16, 2014 by StellarRat

[Ol' Stinky]

It makes ground combat less important by comparison when it becomes 100% mandatory to maintain an air fleet capable of shooting down as close to 100% as possible any UFOs. There's a no-risk button to deal with ground forces that does not require any kind of ground force. Do you even need to own a soldier to air-strike? Meanwhile in order to use auto-resolve to successfully manage the skies, you need a full fleet of upgraded and researched aircraft. It shouldn't be that hard to see.

Easy fix to this problem: Allow a single base condor the ability to "airstrike" any UFO grouping. That would be the equivalent of the airstrike system. I'm guessing you're not going to entertain that suggestion.

Nerfing airstrikes isn't really a fix to the problem, which is that there's not enough incentive to do a ground mission. The real way to deal with this is to make secondary resources - which you get none of by airstriking - valuable throughout the game. People are never going to agree on the sweet spot for the cash rewards; back when there was no airstriking option I'd do every damn mission I could fly out to, because I'm only going to "have more money than...needed" when I have full coverage of the earth.

Edited January 16, 2014 by Ol' Stinky

[kraex]

...that you can't get without doing GROUND COMBAT...

This is only true of the research, which I will acknowledge. You need to do a bit of ground combat to get explosives. It has to be a certain ship type.

Even then, the point remains, you're doing ground combat to support your airforce, not the other way around. This is "the wrong" focus. I know you don't agree. It's not that I don't get it, it's that I think it's flipped on its head. Geoscape and shootdowns should support ground combat and improving soldiers and weapons tech. Not the other way around.

[kraex]

The real way to deal with this is to make secondary resources - which you get none of by airstriking - valuable throughout the game.

I mostly agree with your comments. But this only addresses airstrike, and not the overall focus on air play.

[vaultdweller]

I think you're over-emphasizing the extent to which resource allocation dictates the focus of gameplay. It's certainly true that expanding air coverage and maintaining air superiority takes up the lion's share of your budget. However, it takes up a tiny fraction of your play time. Unless you've chosen to avoid ground combat (which is sub-optimal but possible), you're going to spend almost the entirety of your game time on the battlescape.

[Ol' Stinky]

I mostly agree with your comments. But this only addresses airstrike, and not the overall focus on air play.

I won't deny that there's a huge focus on air control. I don't think that's the fault of airstrikes, though, I think that's a symptom of other problems. For example, research. Air combat upgrades tend to be just that, upgrades. Look at the first couple of months: what techs will you get done ASAP, every game? I'm going to say high speed interceptors, alenium, and alenium-based weapons. HSI is vital for foxtrots, alenium-based weapons help air combat at least as much as ground combat. All other research topics are arguably sidegrades, fluff, or researched solely because they're a prerequisite to something important later on. I can do corvettes in basic armour and ballistics, so what's the rush to upgrade my squads' equipment? A 100hp medkit's great, but I don't really need it, since most soldiers tend to be wiped out well before a medkit's used up. The corsair's the first air related research that doesn't make me go "hell yeah!", I'd say, unless I'm forgetting one.

[ventuswings]

I won't deny that there's a huge focus on air control. I don't think that's the fault of airstrikes' date=' though, I think that's a symptom of other problems. For example, research. Air combat upgrades tend to be just that, upgrades. Look at the first couple of months: what techs will you get done ASAP, every game? I'm going to say high speed interceptors, alenium, and alenium-based weapons. HSI is vital for foxtrots, alenium-based weapons help air combat at least as much as ground combat. All other research topics are arguably sidegrades, fluff, or researched solely because they're a prerequisite to something important later on. I can do corvettes in basic armour and ballistics, so what's the rush to upgrade my squads' equipment? A 100hp medkit's great, but I don't really need it, since most soldiers tend to be wiped out well before a medkit's used up. The corsair's the first air related research that doesn't make me go "hell yeah!", I'd say, unless I'm forgetting one.[/quote']

This best reflects my opinion on the subject. While I like changes airstrike brought forth, removing the necessity to do all the missions, currently I feel there is only one right way.

I know StellarRat brought up the post about great game Civilization also only having one best option - Expansion - but in Civilization, expansion is the point of the game. More specifically, there are multitudes of ways for the civilization to expand. Macromanagement, regarding where to place cities and which techs to research, and micromanagement of workers etc. are both significant and unique choices. Would there have the series continued with such longevity had there been one single path far more viable over the others? It's not restricted to Civilization either. Just think about how long game like Starcraft would have lasted had there been only one superior build - when 1/1/1 build ruled the Startcraft 2 scene, lack of variety had significantly harmed the game's enjoyment before the balance patch reintroduced other options.

I am of the camp that more overall Geoscape option be viable. Giving extremely poor example, Chris brought up the 'do only one battle' variant for the original X-COM. Contrarily, I do not believe it is possible to do any successful variants with Xenonauts that is not 'prioritize air tech research and cover all the land', such as one base Hawaii/Antartica challenge.

The easiest and most obvious target for my campaign is the heavy necessity to get the air combat research first, but whatever method that accomplishes better variety is fine in my book. Perhaps buff aircraft laser weaponry to avoid alenium explosives bee-line. Maybe increase damage of normal missile slightly so player could manage geoscape for awhile without need for higher damage output. Hell, ignore the whiners and make ground combat harder so that better gear is as much as requirement to succeed against advanced aliens! Whatever that works.

Edited January 16, 2014 by ventuswings

[StellarRat]

I know StellarRat brought up the post about great game Civilization also only having one best option - Expansion - but in Civilization, expansion is the point of the game.

I said the best strategy at the beginning was to expand. That's important because after you've got 4 - 8 cities you can pursue many strategies to victory. There are five distinct ways to win CIV, cultural, tech, conquest, diplomatic, or best Civ when time expires.

I could easily see implementing at least four victory paths in Xenonauts. That would probably radically alter the game play and open up the possibilities for various strategies besides completing the final mission.

1. Total Air Superiority - After shooting down a certain number of alien ships they pack their bags and go home. (Air Combat path)

2. Time Limit - After the aliens spend five years (or whatever) of trying to conquer Earth the aliens give up and go home. (Combined path)

3. Final Mission (The Ultimate Solution path)

4. Hostage exchange - You've captured enough leaders and officers (50?) that aliens negotiate to leave if you return their prisoners. (Ground Combat Path)

Edited January 16, 2014 by StellarRat

[ventuswings]

@StellarRat

Sorry, I do not like multiple victory options idea. Don't know what others think about it, but it feels like unnecessary baggage and some options like Total Air Superiority and Time Limit does not make much sense considering the lore. Ground Combat path also overlaps with the ultimate solutions path - besides, when did the Praetors ever care about their subjugated allies? They completely conflict with the hopeless war atmosphere Xcom series actively pursued.

More importantly allowing these options would further devalue the ground combat technologies. You may point out Ground Combat Path, but even for that you need to avoid losing certain number of nations and intercept decent number of UFO; multiple victory conditions do not affect the fact that early focus on expansion and air combat technologies are the way to go. It's needless feature creep that sacrifices much for no tangible benefit.

Note that when I criticized Civilization analogy,

there are multitudes of ways for the civilization to expand. Macromanagement, regarding where to place cities and which techs to research, and micromanagement of workers etc. are both significant and unique choices.

I mean that while there are overall goal you need to build toward - larger and better civilization, and in case of Xenonauts the ultimate solution - no beginning play on Civilization is identical. The extreme example to illustrate the point: for every game, for you to win you need to settle in place, research agriculture first always, settle your second city 3 tiles west of your capital always, beeline oracle always etc...

Putting this paragraph in spoiler to maintain flow of the argument. As a fan of Civilization series, I found your simplistic argument way too demeaning. Even ignoring all the variances due to different map, neighbours and tile management, outright expansion is NOT the right strategy all the time. Civilization IV tries to balance expansion and economy with the concept of maintenance, notwithstanding maintaining military is equally as important. In Civilization V, developers introduced global happiness mechanic to keep play style involving smaller nation just as effective as those of enormous empires. That mechanic was poorly thought out and failed spectacularly for awhile but you have to appreciate the developers for the effort.

Variability on the early game is what is important, not the end game. And my point was that this could be accomplished by altering the value - not research man hour - of certain technologies as my thoughtless suggestions on the last paragraph of previous post indicates. Of course, I'm not demanding much freedom from Xenonauts considering the gene. However I am hoping that research options will be balanced so that player will at least have a choice to experiment without punitive failure.

I am NOT arguing about the no positive points from ground combat here.

Edited January 16, 2014 by ventuswings
inclusion of all my other thoughts [final edit]

[Newfr]

Newfr - You might be happier playing Jagged Alliance 2. It's nothing but squad level ground combat. Very well done and detailed, if a bit dated.

Yeap, that and Silent Storm are my favourites so far. Maybe Age of Wonders too. Playing The Banner Saga now (great art and sound track i must say!). Another project with turn-based combat i backed on KS. And it out already unlike *cough*Xenonauts*cough*.

You either are failing to understand that the strategic side of Xenonauts is much "bigger" than XCom

For real? Because of what? Because balance is all about "throw more shit at you" (8 aliens in a ship described as a "mere probe" in Xenopedia)? Because air combat mini game a bit more complex than in original game (but you could lost aircraft in OG permanently)? Oh, sorry i fail to see greatness of this features under dumb passive AI and few metric tons of bugs...

And you see, i remember clear enough Chris said that they will release game around 2K's X-COM (not to mention that KS campaign said "Estimated delivery: Oct 2012"). Ok, 2K's X-COM already got an addon and Xenonauts are still in development. Is it 4 or 5 years already? And i don't see an end to that. And completely reworking some aspects of the game just add to that. Actually that reminds me about Duke Nukem Forever. A LOT. So i really don't get all this "changing game principles on a fly" thing. Hope this game will be a better game than Duke at the end.

You can skip literally every air combat mission if you want to using the autoresolve.

Don't even tell me about autoresolve. It's a pure joke right now. And before you nerfed MiG it was even more so (single MiG could shoot down every UFO up to medium UFO one on one with 4 Avalanches). While autoresolve had 0% chance to win with such layout (it changed to 50% later i believe). So yeah, autoresolve is complete fine and reliable thing...if you want to lose.

It just sounds like you're raging because we're letting other people play the game in the way they want, even though you're still perfectly able to play the game you want to.

Look what kraex said. He did a better job describing some moments than i. Edited January 16, 2014 by Newfr

[legit1337]

@chris

Glad to see even devs can mix it up in the forums . For the record, I wasn't attempting to troll or to flame, so I'm going to answer your post point by point as best as I can. Although kraex has summed up my arguement nicely.

Newfr, see how far you get in the game if you "COMPLETELY IGNORE" the ground combat. You can literally completely ignore the air combat due to the autoresolve system for that, but you're still forced to play the ground combat missions...so you're either confused or exaggerating wildly.

You can completely ignore the air combat minigame. You cannot completely ignore geoscape management and the fact that you have to focus the majority of your resources and income on aircraft.

Legit1337, you can still do the ground combat missions to maximise your loot and be better off than if you'd just airstruck the crash site. (Also, why so desperate to maximise funding on the Geoscape if it's just a little minigame?)

It doesn't give enough currently. Why risk my men on the battlescape to get 40,000 and a couple alloys, when I can just nuke it and get 20,000 and still get the same nation rating? Aside from getting research, ground combat has become a large risk for very little reward. The fact that you have had to remove overdamage entirely just to balance the costs/benefit ratio of even ENGAGING in ground combat is indicative of the problem.

Ground combat has become entirely optional apart from a handful of missions that you need to do to unlock the final mission. The thread where the guy did an entire airstrike playthrough and how successful it was illustrates the issue nicely. Could he beat the game with that strategy? No. Did he make it months before finally succumbing? Yes. I can guarantee if he ignored building planes and expanding instead of ignoring ground combat he wouldn't have made it to november.

Weren't airstrikes implemented so that you didn't have to do EVERY... SINGLE... MISSION... to maintain NATION RATING? Moving part of the relations boost to the shootdown was the right call, but removing it from ground combat entirely was a bad design decision IMO.

The original game can be completed with one crash site mission. Please stop telling us be more like the original game, but then telling us we've made the ground combat irrelevant by only forcing a skilled player to do seven missions. Shouldn't we reduce that down to one mission so we're keeping the spirit of X-Com, then?

Ignoring the sarcasm. I'm not telling you to be a clone of the original x-com. The original certainly had its flaws. But it also did a lot of things right, and altering what made the original so great is not a good idea imo. If it isn't broke, don't fix it.

Legit, you're also saying we shouldn't nerf the importance of the air combat because it wasn't important enough in the original game, but then you're also saying we should make the ground combat so important people should have to do almost every mission (giving 4x the resources means the only optimal way to play the game is to play EVERY crash site, not airstrike it). But then what do you do about the increased number of UFOs in the waves we use to make the air combat more interesting? More UFOs = more crash sites = even more grind, and X-Com vets would think it was a bug if shooting down a UFO didn't generate a crash site.

I'm glad air combat is more important in this game then the original. What I am not so happy about is the fact that it had to come at the cost of the importance of ground combat. Buffing the rewards of ground combat will not make you HAVE to do every ground combat unless you balance the game that way. It WILL however, make it so that the people who choose to risk their men and resources get better rewards, and maybe make the game a bit easier for themselves (if they succeed).

Ideally the game should be balanced so that the further you progress, the rewards you get from the smaller craft start to make it not so necessary to do the missions because you can sustain yourself from the rewards of doing the larger craft. So you can airstrike them with confidence, knowing that they didn't have anything you really needed anyway, except for maybe a relations boost if you need it before the end of the month. (If relations boost is given back to ground combat).

So, as is frequently the case, people seem to want to have their cake and eat it. You can't just pull out individual system changes and then say "this is bad, change it back" and want to keep the other upgrades that caused us to make that change in the first place. More challenging air combat = more UFOs = more crash sites, so we need a way to deal with them.

... and airstriking is a good idea. It is just totally imbalanced in its implementation (imo) and skews the focus of the game to the geoscape right now. The fact that the ONLY place you can get relations boost is from air combat doesn't help things on that front.

It doesn't even make ground combat less important, as you still get increased money from doing a crash site, it's just in the form of loot rather than country relations.

If you don't see how turning a system that rewarded loot + country relations, to rewarding just loot (and even then you can get about half the cash from just pressing a button) isn't a HUGE nerf in importance then trying to reason with you is a lost cause.

Assuming that "100%" is the amount of relation boost you get from shooting down an aircraft in the current version...

Imo this is how airstriking should be balanced:

-Shooting down a UFO should give 50% relations boost (down from what it gives now).

-You can either airstrike the site for a small amount of cash OR

-Do a recovery mission where you can get 3-4x the amount of resources AND MONEY you would get by airstriking AND

-Depending on how well you do the mission, a extra -75 to +75% nation boost. Resulting in a NET of -25% relations if you totally screw up and get lots of civilians killed or wipe your team, or 125% if you pull off a flawless operation with no casualties.

^Please tell me why this is a bad idea.^

The numbers may need tweaking but I think that's a good way to do it.

I've played the game your way, and despite my original reservations I think I've given it a fair chance. I don't like it. Sorry but I just don't like how emphasis seems to be... well everywhere EXCEPT ground combat.

What happens if you screw up base management/air combat?

You lose planes for 72 hours and miss the rest of the current attack wave. Funding plummets because of not enough coverage. You lose...

What happens if you screw up ground combat?

Nothing except losing the experience you have accumulated on your men... you get all of your gear back and replacing soldiers is cheap (free now I think).

What happens if you do really well on base management/air combat?

You shoot down alien ships generating crash sites and thus funding. You get tons of cash + nation rating which is the only real way to win the game.

What happens if you do really well in ground combat?

A little extra cash (lets be honest here, not much more then you would get by airstriking), some items that you rarely use except for 1 or 2 big projects, and a pat on the back.

See my point now?

Edited January 16, 2014 by legit1337

[Ashery]

Don't even tell me about autoresolve. It's a pure joke right now. And before you nerfed MiG it was even more so (single MiG could shoot down every UFO up to medium UFO one on one with 4 Avalanches). While autoresolve had 0% chance to win with such layout (it changed to 50% later i believe). So yeah, autoresolve is complete fine and reliable thing...if you want to lose.

Autoresolved 90%+ of my air combat (Couple practice runs and a couple encounters with only Foxes) and I'm doing perfectly well on Veteran.

It doesn't give enough currently. Why risk my men on the battlescape to get 40,000 and a couple alloys, when I can just nuke it and get 20,000 and still get the same nation rating? Aside from getting research, ground combat has become a large risk for very little reward. The fact that you have had to remove overdamage entirely just to balance the costs/benefit ratio of even ENGAGING in ground combat is indicative of the problem.

Experience, for one, and that can't be bought. A sniper with maxed TUs and high accuracy is a fucking beast. Other classes benefit as well, but tend to have higher casualty rates, heh.

Smaller UFOs should have next to no risk once everyone's armored. You'll lose a shield user on occasion and might have an unlucky reaction shot insta-kill someone while scouting outside, but that's why scouting is a rookie's job.

If overdamage was reintroduced, I could see the argument for bumping up ground combat rewards, but that'd also likely require a rebalance of the manufacturing side, not so much the raw costs (Those can be balanced via increased value in alien tech), but in production times.

Assuming that "100%" is the amount of relation boost you get from shooting down an aircraft in the current version...

Imo this is how airstriking should be balanced:

-Shooting down a UFO should give 50% relations boost (down from what it gives now).

-You can either airstrike the site for a small amount of cash OR

-Do a recovery mission where you can get 3-4x the amount of resources AND MONEY you would get by airstriking AND

-Depending on how well you do the mission, a extra -75 to +75% nation boost. Resulting in a NET of -25% relations if you totally screw up and get lots of civilians killed or wipe your team, or 125% if you pull off a flawless operation with no casualties.

My understanding of the airstrike's purpose is to remove the tedium of the mid/late game grind. Making such a significant chunk of your income depend on ground combat will encourage a player to grind through combat that he'd find tedious. That's not to say airstrikes should be exactly on par with ground combat, but the current game's setup is closer to what I'd consider the ideal than your initial numbers.

Note, however, that I'm assuming overdamage isn't in effect.

One big thing about tying relations to civilians in the current build is that their AI is currently a work in progress. Would be frustrating as hell if I took a massive relations penalty due to civilians deciding to take cover in the middle of an ongoing firefight. Worse yet, deciding to end their turn directly in my line of fire and forcing me to either a) kill the civie myself or b) risk losing a soldier.

Now, once the AI is working well, I could go for making ground combat influence your relations, but I'd still argue that airstrikes should provide the same amount as a "neutral" ground encounter. The player already loses a fair amount of "resources" when airstriking: Experience, alloys/alerium, and 2-2.5x the income.

What happens if you screw up base management/air combat?

You lose planes for 72 hours and miss the rest of the current attack wave. Funding plummets because of not enough coverage. You lose...

What happens if you screw up ground combat?

Nothing except losing the experience you have accumulated on your men... you get all of your gear back and replacing soldiers is cheap (free now I think).

These are fair points, and why my first game fell into a fail cascade, but I'm not sure how they can be addressed without completely rebuilding the game from the ground up.

Aircraft losses have to be meaningful, otherwise you'll just throw wave after wave at a 20% autoresolve, but it's hard to say how.

Perhaps speed up recovery but attach a cost to recovery? It'd prevent the wave after the one you lost a bunch of crafts on from being a guaranteed failure, but you'd still be dealing with a fail cascade if you fall behind.

What happens if you do really well on base management/air combat?

You shoot down alien ships generating crash sites and thus funding. You get tons of cash + nation rating which is the only real way to win the game.

What happens if you do really well in ground combat?

A little extra cash (lets be honest here, not much more then you would get by airstriking), some items that you rarely use except for 1 or 2 big projects, and a pat on the back.

See my point now?

The air game's the war and the ground combat's the battles; the war's what ultimately matters in the end.

[Ol' Stinky]

Imo this is how airstriking should be balanced:

-Shooting down a UFO should give 50% relations boost (down from what it gives now).

-You can either airstrike the site for a small amount of cash OR

-Do a recovery mission where you can get 3-4x the amount of resources AND MONEY you would get by airstriking AND

-Depending on how well you do the mission, a extra -75 to +75% nation boost. Resulting in a NET of -25% relations if you totally screw up and get lots of civilians killed or wipe your team, or 125% if you pull off a flawless operation with no casualties.

^Please tell me why this is a bad idea.^

The numbers may need tweaking but I think that's a good way to do it.

I'd say it's a bad idea because it's overkill. The money balance of v20's fine, where you can get ~x2 cash for scout combats, but more than that for bigger, more interesting ships. All that really needs to be done is to give aliens another plasma cell or increase the value of ship components or whatnot to make up for the fewer numbers.

The relations boost should continue to be significant so that a couple of unfortunate missions don't cause a snowball effect where you're better off restarting/reloading than seeing the game through. The comeback factor's what makes the OG a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it achieved this by having a broken economy, which isn't an option for Xenonauts.

I don't want to be massively penalised for civilians dying while I can't do much to stop it. I didn't like it in the OG until I realized the negative score from civ loss wasn't a big problem, at which point I was perfectly happy to butcher innocent people. (I'm a bit of a jerk.) Changing this for Xenonauts will be frustrating and make ground combat feel less rewarding, since I am being punished for something I can't control.

Perhaps speed up recovery but attach a cost to recovery? It'd prevent the wave after the one you lost a bunch of crafts on from being a guaranteed failure, but you'd still be dealing with a fail cascade if you fall behind.

How about a manufacturing project that costs alien alloys, where you can speed up the recovery/repair rate.

Edited January 16, 2014 by Ol' Stinky

[Ashery]

How about a manufacturing project that costs alien alloys' date=' where you can speed up the recovery/repair rate.[/quote']

Possible, but alloys are a dime a dozen, so you'll be able to spam repairs without much consequence. Only if overdamage is put back in will alloys be anywhere close to scarce. At least, that's my observation as of early February (Alerium's another matter entirely).

Another possibility is to delay the recovery bill until the end of the month, so that every loss adds a temporary ~25k$ to maintenance. You'd still have the issue of a fail cascade starting because you can't expand your air force due to limited funds, but perhaps ufos could generate more landed missions and success there can bump up your nation rating as much as downing a ufo. That'd give some wiggle room for players who find themselves behind the air game. As it stands, landed ufos are pretty much impossible to deal with due to the length of time they're on the ground. Ended up losing half of my crack squad (Including an irreplaceable 88TU sniper) due to a ufo lifting off and downing my transport right as I was about to land.

[Newfr]

Autoresolved 90%+ of my air combat (Couple practice runs and a couple encounters with only Foxes) and I'm doing perfectly well on Veteran.

And what it has to do with autoresolve being a joke? Just one question: what is the outcome of this dogfight with autoresolve? And back in 19 build it was a clear win for MiGs with all UFOs shot down. Ofc sending 3 Condors after Light Scout, autoresolving that and saying "See? See? This works!" suits "doing perfectly well on Veteran" better.

Why i would use MiGs only? Yeap, that's not practical and so on, but that's only proves that building as much bases with as much aircrafts as possible is the only viable strategy atm (not like it became suddenly like that, but more and more so with every build). Good luck trying to turtle on one base and invest heavily in ground combat techs.

The air game's the war and the ground combat's the battles; the war's what ultimately matters in the end.

Neither air nor ground is war according to lore. It's just aliens toying with you. And you have a zero chance to win anyway.

[legit1337]

Again you guys are assuming that in my system the game would be balanced around income from EVERY ground combat. Balance it around a little higher then the airstriking income (so you do have to do SOME ground missions to be viable) but have all the rest of the money be icing on the cake so to speak. Whats wrong with floating the player an extra 200,000 a month from a few well executed ground missions?

It allows the player to be a little looser with his/her money and allows mistakes to be made without meaning an instant loss on the geoscape.

Edited January 16, 2014 by legit1337

[Ashery]

And what it has to do with autoresolve being a joke? Just one question: what is the outcome of this dogfight with autoresolve? And back in 19 build it was a clear win for MiGs with all UFOs shot down. Ofc sending 3 Condors after Light Scout, autoresolving that and saying "See? See? This works!" suits "doing perfectly well on Veteran" better.

Why i would use MiGs only?

Uh...I can autoresolve a single Condor vs Scout @ 100% (Plasma cannon + alerium missiles). And you weren't just saying it's a joke:

Don't even tell me about autoresolve. It's a pure joke right now. And before you nerfed MiG it was even more so (single MiG could shoot down every UFO up to medium UFO one on one with 4 Avalanches). While autoresolve had 0% chance to win with such layout (it changed to 50% later i believe). So yeah, autoresolve is complete fine and reliable thing...if you want to lose.

I'm not losing.

Yeap, that's not practical and so on, but that's only proves that building as much bases with as much aircrafts as possible is the only viable strategy atm (not like it became suddenly like that, but more and more so with every build). Good luck trying to turtle on one base and invest heavily in ground combat techs.

That's like playing Civ, never settling a second city, and wondering why you never win. The original may have been designed (Or been broken enough, depending on your view) to permit a single base, but it's not viable here. Even if the game's changed such that there are more landed missions and you're able to use those to generate enough nation rating to offset air loses, you'll still need multiple bases due to the speed of the Charlie.

Neither air nor ground is war according to lore. It's just aliens toying with you. And you have a zero chance to win anyway.

I was simply stressing that the ongoing activity is what matters to the humans. A set of ground combat encounters is pretty meaningless in their view of the grand scheme of things.

Edit:

Whats wrong with floating the player an extra 200,000 a month from a few well executed ground missions?

Bumping up to just 3-3.5x the cash reward would be substantially more than 200k a month. A single medium craft would be nearly 80k. Making ground combat that much more rewarding doesn't quite force the player to do all combat, but they become a lot more tempted to grind out every downed ufo.

If overdamage is reintroduced, I could see the cash rewards being bumped up a bit, but not until then.

Edited January 16, 2014 by Ashery

[legit1337]

Experience, for one, and that can't be bought. A sniper with maxed TUs and high accuracy is a fucking beast. Other classes benefit as well, but tend to have higher casualty rates, heh.

Smaller UFOs should have next to no risk once everyone's armored. You'll lose a shield user on occasion and might have an unlucky reaction shot insta-kill someone while scouting outside, but that's why scouting is a rookie's job.

If overdamage was reintroduced, I could see the argument for bumping up ground combat rewards, but that'd also likely require a rebalance of the manufacturing side, not so much the raw costs (Those can be balanced via increased value in alien tech), but in production times.

Then you and I have a very different idea of risk assessment. I'm not going to put my veterans into combat for 20k, and 2 alloys.

Even a 5% chance of having them die is too much for the possible rewards. I might want to do it for training a team of rookies... but the devs said they didn't want the game to devolve into farming like the supply ships raids in OG.

Edited January 16, 2014 by legit1337