Geoscape Balance - V21 Experimental 6

[Chris]

I've reworked this quite heavily for V21 Experimental 6, particularly the air combat. The autoresolve formula should be better now as it more accurately models the potential damage of weapons for human aircraft, and the HP of the UFOs. Let me know how it works in practice.

I've also responded to feedback on the early game being a bit dull at times - Light Scout after Light Scout appearing for the first couple of weeks. Now you get a full range of UFOs appearing at the start of the game, up to Corvette class. This makes things more interesting, and makes the invasion seem a bit more threatening. The appearance of the later ships has not been sped up though, it's just the early craft have been brought forwards.

It should mix things up a bit, given you can't initially shoot down the Corvettes and the alien Fighters appear on air superiority missions right from the start too - which means sending out lone Foxtrots or unescorted dropships in the middle of a wave can be risky. I think it makes things better but let us know your own thoughts.

CHANGELOG:

- The early strategic game has been made more exciting; Fighters, Light Scouts, Scouts and Corvettes all appear right from the very start

- Light Scouts are now "Small" UFOs instead of "Very Small", making Fighters easier to distinguish

- Air combat Autoresolve stats have been heavily reworked

- Alien Leaders / Officers have been moved one UFO earlier in the progression to make the research tree less compressed in the late game (this means Caesan psions now appear in Light Scouts).

- Vehicle weapons are now free and unlimited upgrades when researched

- Aircraft no longer retreat veeeeeerry sloooowwwly

[Skitso]

Wasn't the light scout just recently marked as "very small" so it would be easier to distinguish from scouts that even have the same icon?

More variation to the first month is a welcomed addition and having leaders/officers earlier is a good change, but psions in light scouts? Isn't that a bit too quick? What about the sense of progression?

Edited April 29, 2014 by Skitso

[kabill]

Haven't played it yet, but I like the sound of these changes. Shaking up the early game is a really good thing, I think, and should help with the rather samey early game. It might also make things a bit more tough-feeling with UFOs that can't easily be downed.

Regarding psions, I actually don't think its a problem them appearing early on. From both a game-balance and flavour point of view, Caesans have a lot less going on for them compared with Sebillians and Androns so giving them something from the get-go seems like a really good idea. In terms of progression, they only have the "Fear" power, which actually isn't very good when compared with later psionic powers and therefore there should still be a sense of progression, I think.

(Also, 'Fear' will make soldiers more likely to panic, which means they're more likely to gain bravery, which means - assuming it gets fixed - that soldiers should be slightly better at resisting psionics in the mid-late game.)

A thought: Building Foxtrots from the off was already a good plan so you have them in time for Scouts. With Scouts and Corvettes appearing right from day one, the imperative to build Foxtrots is increased. Therefore the early tech choice (Hunter vs. Foxtrot) is even less of a choice now. Indeed, I can't ever imagine researching the Hunter first. This isn't necessarily a problem, but I'm wondering whether there's anything that can be done to make the choice more important.

[Max_Caine]

Yeow. Just re-started the game and YE-OW. Corvettes are intense when you start getting them from day 1! It also really screws up the progression - I skipped Jackal and went straight for Wolf, just because I could! Could I suggest that the first two waves you get scouts and light scouts (up to game day 14), then phase out the light scouts and introduce corvettes from wave 3 (game day 21+)?

[legit1337]

- Alien Leaders / Officers have been moved one UFO earlier in the progression to make the research tree less compressed in the late game (this means Caesan psions now appear in Light Scouts).

Not sure I like this change. But will playtest and give feedback.

Yeow. Just re-started the game and YE-OW. Corvettes are intense when you start getting them from day 1! It also really screws up the progression - I skipped Jackal and went straight for Wolf, just because I could! Could I suggest that the first two waves you get scouts and light scouts (up to game day 14), then phase out the light scouts and introduce corvettes from wave 3 (game day 21+)?

Agreed. Corvettes from day 1 also mean terror sites from day 1, and at day 1 you are NOT equipped to handle that at all.

I would like to see the first month be scouts and light scouts only, and then after the first month (4 waves) you can let rip with the corvettes.

Edited April 30, 2014 by legit1337

[legit1337]

Double post.

[Chris]

Nah, you shouldn't get terror sites on day 1. They still appear at the same time they always do.

Skitso - it's more important to be able to recognise fighters than light scouts because fighters are actively aggressive and will shoot down your craft if you give them the chance.

[Max_Caine]

You know, I re-read the OP properly this time, and caught "you can't shoot down corvettes" thing. You totally can. Well... I totally can. Here's how you do it. Take two condors. Work out which Condor the Corvette will chase after. Kite the crap outta that corvette. The other Condor will do 48% damage with missiles and cannon. Dis-engage. You'll have enough time to re-arm then go out again, and this time you can either autoresolve or do AC. Bingo bongo you have a downed corvette. If you want to prevent kiting you need a 360 degree turret on the Corvette. Like so:

[video=youtube;6X2hugmFd1E]

Now, that's using a way old mod of mine that totally need updating (so I guess that's tomorrow's project), but if you want players shaking their fists and saying "I gotta get me some Foxtrots", then the Corvette's gonna have to be up-gunned.

Tbh, the loadouts in most UFOs could stand to be significantly altered to improve their challenge in AC. I'm going to post up some examples to show what could be done to improve the challenge without making AC harder than it is.

Edited April 30, 2014 by Max_Caine

[legit1337]

Nah, you shouldn't get terror sites on day 1. They still appear at the same time they always do.

Why not? Don't corvettes spawn terror sites if they fly around for too long? Forgive my ignorance if that is not the case but that has always been my observation.

Even if it does not, I still think corvettes from day 1 seems a little over the top. You cannot down a corvette with 2 condors without landing to re-arm. Also, the lore explicitly states that the beginning of the invasion should purely be small craft. Obviously "small" is a matter of interpretation, but I took it to mean "scout" type craft like the light scout and scout because the aliens are scouting our defenses and probing for weaknesses.

By all means, move the corvette appearance times up to start at like wave 4-5 or something, and make scouts appear at day 1. I have no problem with either of those. But corvettes appearing before we even have foxtrots strikes me as too difficult, and puts too much emphasis on getting at least 2 foxtrots out ASAP. That makes the research choice between foxtrots and hunter cars not really a choice at all.

Also, how are the larger ship progressions going to happen now that the corvettes come out sooner? Are we going to have like 4 months of lightscout+scout+corvettes before the larger ships or are we moving the appearance of the larger vessels sooner too?

Edited April 30, 2014 by legit1337

[Skitso]

Skitso - it's more important to be able to recognise fighters than light scouts because fighters are actively aggressive and will shoot down your craft if you give them the chance.

But fighters already have a unique geoscape icon so you can easily tell the difference. As it is now, I find it a bit annoying to not be able to distinguish light scout and scout from each other.

Could you atleast change the light scout icon to be same as fighters have? Then you would know:

• very small icon and "very small" indentifier -> fighter

• very small icon and "small" indentifier -> light scout

• small icon and "small" identifier -> scout

Regarding corvettes, I agree that they need to come a bit later (week 5-6, maybe?).

If it's left like this, it screws the progression, confuses new players and also lessens the sense of wonder when you see one for the first time after getting used to just scouts. I also didn't have a single light scout or scout in my first wave and only one that I couldn't catch in the second.

Also, it makes the early-mid game more stale as it would take forever (like what, 3 months of no UFO progression) to see new UFO types. (landingship) Just adding scouts and fighters to arrive at the beginning and making corvettes come a bit earlier than before should be enough to spice up first couple of months...

@Legit1337: Alien bases are tied to a certain ticker level so there won't be one too early.

Edited April 30, 2014 by Skitso

[Chris]

@Legit - We can control the types of UFOs that appear on specific mission types and when they appear. The day 1 Corvettes are on ground attack missions, but Terror missions don't spawn until ticker 200.

@Skitso - no, there's an icon for Very Small UFOs and one for Small UFOs, tied into their identifier. So the Light Scout is going to look like either the Fighter or the Scout whatever you choose.

[Caaygun]

Corvette:

-Officer is too powerful for unarmored team, his grenade, Tus and HP are just no match. Maybe it is intended to let aliens wreak some havoc with the corvette until Xeno can handle them. I got so mauled last night by a surprise seb officer. There was also a dead reaper lying around [brr... shivers].

-Technology becomes available too early, it lets you skip certain levels. If this will remain, technology prerequisites will need some workup like:

Scimitar -> should require Hunter

Wolf -> should require jackal

corsair -> should require foxtrot

-It seems we can still shoot them down with condors, but handling them on GC will be tougher. Maybe it might thus incentivize airstriking?

-Month 1 making them only go for Research mission, and removing officer could balance this somewhat. But even with their offbalance, they might stay for some added difficulty. New players are up for some real surprise I'd say.

General:

-Early fighters are great. They even occasionally shoot airliners and cause massive casualties.

-LoS rework causes issues, aliens are now shooting and perhaps also seeing units bahind complete walls inside closed rooms if they are standing adjacent. Also through many parts of Ufos, it became unpredictable.

-I love that caesan psion in the light scout. The caesans needed their niche.

All in all, I'd say the first few Ufos the player meets definitely should be light scouts only (like week 1). Week 2 adds fighter and scout, week 3 adds corvette. So it's still fast, but meeting corvette before LS is thus removed.

[Skitso]

@Skitso - no, there's an icon for Very Small UFOs and one for Small UFOs, tied into their identifier. So the Light Scout is going to look like either the Fighter or the Scout whatever you choose.

hm, bummer...

[Skitso]

Are people getting any scouts in early game? I've played the fist month 5 times and it seems every time I only get few fighters and light scouts, tons of corvettes and almost no scouts.

The early ufo spawning really needs some balancing I think.

[kabill]

On Corvettes: I think I agree with the comments above that maybe they should be pushed back a little (either to the latter half of month 1 or beginning of month 2). Doing a little playing around last night, I found quite a lot of Corvettes flying around. This was fine - as Max indicated above they can be shot down even with just two Condors if you attack in two waves - but I can imagine it being a bit much for new players as the tricks you need to beat them aren't immediately obvious. And new players loosing both their planes on their first air combat might be a bit rubbish and put them off playing further.

EDIT: @Skitso: I *think* I saw some scouts flying around last night. But the other types did seem a bit more common. Can't say for certain, though, either way.

[silenced]

Corvette:

-Officer is too powerful for unarmored team, his grenade, Tus and HP are just no match. Maybe it is intended to let aliens wreak some havoc with the corvette until Xeno can handle them. I got so mauled last night by a surprise seb officer. There was also a dead reaper lying around [brr... shivers].

My standard team consists out of at least 4 heavy weapon guys. These shred anything to pieces that's not called Andron in the early game. Also, lots of flashbangs are a helper.

[legit1337]

Let's not freak out people...

I just played a new game tonight and basically confirmed my hypothesis.

Day 1 corvette spawns do not work at all for three main reasons.

1. Too difficult. Scouts and light scouts you can handle, but corvettes are impossible to defeat unless you have luck (having to catch them with condors) AND know the trick to do it. Even if you do shoot them down, the recovery mission is exceedingly difficult. Ballistic weapons, and no armor vs a larger number of aliens armed with plasma rifles and an officer is too hard a fight for the first month IMO.

2. It screws with the tech progression. It puts too much pressure on getting foxtrots out early, which makes the early tech path too linear (out of necessity). It also introduces technologies faster then the player should be getting them. I researched jackal armor, only not to build any suits as I got the research for wolf armor soon afterward. It also introduces androns far earlier then they should appear, and dilutes the chances of getting both seb and caesan missions for the "alien biology" research topic.

3. It stagnates the early game. There is no UFO progression for at least 3 months. It is just L. Scouts+Scouts+Corvettes until landing ships, which is pretty boring IMO and may lure new players into a false sense of security, which is exactly what you were trying to eliminate when you moved corvettes to show up earlier.

Personally, I do not mind scouts on day 1, or even fighters on day 1. But I would like to see corvettes pushed back to the beginning of month 2 at the EARLIEST. IMO I think a better decision would be to have them show up halfway through month 2.

Making corvette's appear earlier was a good idea, but I think it was taken too much to the extreme.

Edited April 30, 2014 by legit1337

[Amaror]

I really don't get the change of corvettes day 1. The progression balance was completely fine. The game had a clear challenge and technology progression and this change just completely fucks this up.

Why this change? It doesn't improve anything, it just makes things worse and the games supposed to come out in 1 month.

If you only have a month left to squash bugs and balance things out, then don't break your current balance, it doesn't make sense.

Now you can get pummeled by ufos day 1, without a chance to learn the game mechanics properly. Additionaly the early technology tree is completely screwed up, too.

This game had such a good progression balance, why do you screw it up?

Edit:

You also have to keep in mind. These are mostly veterans that you get the feedback from. Most of us played the game for months, maybe years before now. If we say that the beginning is a bit slow for us, it doesn't mean that the beginning is too slow. It just means that we know it so well allready. If you balance your game towards veterans, then you will not be able to engange any new players and i don't think i have to explain why that is a bad thing.

Edited April 30, 2014 by Amaror

[kabill]

Edit:

You also have to keep in mind. These are mostly veterans that you get the feedback from. Most of us played the game for months, maybe years before now. If we say that the beginning is a bit slow for us, it doesn't mean that the beginning is too slow. It just means that we know it so well allready. If you balance your game towards veterans, then you will not be able to engange any new players and i don't think i have to explain why that is a bad thing.

In fairness, there were some posts a few weeks back that Skitso (and others?) wrote giving some feedback from new players and this highlighted an issue with missions during the first month or two as well. So I'm not sure it's limited entirely to 'veteran' players. This said, I do agree that the Corvettes are probably a bit much, certainly for a beginner.

(It's also worth noting that just because this change has been made for an experimental build doesn't mean it's definately going in the final build. The point of the experimental builds is to test stuff out, and it makes good sense to try out radical changes rather than small ones so you can really see their impact. I imagine this change will be scaled back a bit in the future, but better to have tested the most extreme version of it I think to see how far it can go.)

[Amaror]

In fairness, there were some posts a few weeks back that Skitso (and others?) wrote giving some feedback from new players and this highlighted an issue with missions during the first month or two as well. So I'm not sure it's limited entirely to 'veteran' players. This said, I do agree that the Corvettes are probably a bit much, certainly for a beginner.

(It's also worth noting that just because this change has been made for an experimental build doesn't mean it's definately going in the final build. The point of the experimental builds is to test stuff out, and it makes good sense to try out radical changes rather than small ones so you can really see their impact. I imagine this change will be scaled back a bit in the future, but better to have tested the most extreme version of it I think to see how far it can go.)

At least in my experience the only real problem was a gab between scouts and corvettes. Meaning Corvettes showed up too late and you will had one or two weeks of no research to be done and just repeatedly shooting down scouts.

Pulling Corvettes to Day 1 is pretty obviously a bad idea.

[ventuswings]

End of the first month seemed to be perfect time for Corvette to start appearing, at least in my opinion.

[StellarRat]

You shouldn't have to deal with Androns right away either.

[Max_Caine]

Once upon a time, scouts on scout missions would cause the ticker to increment for every game minute they were on the field, so an incentive to shoot down scouts was to help slow down the speed of the invasion. I've been experimenting with this and was wondering what people might think of bringing this back. Perhaps a scout might increase the ticker by 0.0005 ticks per minute which works out as 0.03 ticks per hour or 0.72 ticks per day, so even if you miss out on early scouts the invasion doesn't boost that hard (seeing as the big boys don't start appearing before the ticker gets to 200-300) and scouts almost dry up later on.

Edited April 30, 2014 by Max_Caine

[kabill]

Once upon a time, scouts on scout missions would cause the ticker to increment for every game minute they were on the field, so an incentive to shoot down scouts was to help slow down the speed of the invasion. I've been experimenting with this and was wondering what people might think of bringing this back. Perhaps a scout might increase the ticker by 0.0005 ticks per minute which works out as 0.03 ticks per hour or 0.72 ticks per day, so even if you miss out on early scouts the invasion doesn't boost that hard (seeing as the big boys don't start appearing before the ticker gets to 200-300) and scouts almost dry up later on.

I'm not sure it would actually make all that much difference in any case, but adding that in would make air coverage even more important than it is at the moment (the worse you do at the air game, the faster the aliens advance, making the ground game harder relative to your tech level). I'm not sure what you gain in exchange for that cost.

[Max_Caine]

I honestly can't see how air coverage can get any more important than it is. It's one of the things which every newbie to the game who comes onto this forum mentions. Sometimes gently "gosh, I need lots of aircrafts", sometimes shoutily "WTF AIRCRAFTS", but the air war is the number 1 priority on the to-do list. See, the thing is that UFOs now land a lot more than they used to, but there isn't a great deal of incentive to go out and deal with landed scouts, not when there's bloody great corvettes hanging around like a white transit van emblazoned with the sign "free puppies" outside a busy schoolyard. If scouts had more importance attached to them, such as "I really should sort them out because they're advancing the alien masterplan", but not so much that it's scarily dangerous to ignore them, perhaps players would go after landed scouts more often, rather than wait for them to take off and hit them right in the tailpipe.