(Mod Concept) Dynamic UFO Spawns

[Solver]

I will report on this further, but yes, it seems that one UFO that completes its ground attack mission successfully (doesn't get shot down during the wave) can cause ~200k damage early in the game, and can put your relations with the region on the verge of going critical.

[kabill]

Update: I've uploaded v0.3 of this mod.

Change log:

- Changes to Terror and Base Attack missions retained from v0.2

- Slight adjustment to the vanilla wave system so that UFOs can spawn up to 6 hours (rather than 30 minutes) after the wave triggers. I've not tested this, but in theory this should retain the wave-intensity of the vanilla system, while also making the waves a little less easy to analyse because you don't necessarily know what missions might spawn later in the wave.

- The maximum number of UFOs spawning in the end game has been increased by roughly 1/3. This will impact all through the game with a slight increase in UFOs, but mostly won't matter 'til the end. This is largely to offset the fact that, late game, the difficulty of UFOs can only decrease as a result of randomisation, since in vanilla late game just spams carriers and battleships at you.

- Funding impact of UFOs reduced by roughly 25-35%. This has the largest effect on Research, Air Superiority and Ground Attack missions, and is intended as a way of balancing the apparently quite silly amount of damage that can be done very quickly. As part of this, I've put in a difference between land and sea based events, such that sea events cause less damage than ground events.

- UFOs more likely to land. I like landed UFOs, and it will nerf their ability to do funding damage a bit as well, since while their landed they don't do anything.

- Increased crew diversity: I've had a second pass over the crew lists to mix them up a bit more. As a result, Harridans and Wraiths will appear slightly sooner than usual.

[Solver]

Hmm, you feel that research and air superiority also needed the decrease? They can do some damage to funding, but they have also felt fair to me.

[kabill]

I decided to nerf all of the funding damage events rather than just the GA ones as I wanted to maintain the difference between the different events.

In vanilla, the damage done by each is:

- Research: -25

- Air Superiority: -30

- Ground Attack: -40

- Bombing Mission: -80

I wanted to maintain that hierarchy, but it would be impossible to do while nerfing GA damage only.

Happy to play around with it some more. This was more or less a first draft and its possible vanilla will change before final final release anyway. But I thought this was a better solution overall, since it maintains the distinction between the mission types while (hopefully) stopping the player from getting blitzed early on.

Edit: Ugh, dammit, I just realised I set the base cost to £750,000 rather than £500,000.

Edited June 7, 2014 by kabill

[Solver]

I just realized that with these numbers, the whole system is sufficiently transparent, since you also know how often waves spawn. Have you considered running some simulations to evaluate the effects of this mod on funding, without needing to do more lengthy playtesting? My current impression is that funding in vanilla was fairly balanced, apart from the current GA missions.

[kabill]

It's not a bad idea, actually. I'll do a couple of vanilla tests and then a couple of modded ones and see how they compare.

[kabill]

I've sussed out the issue you were having, Solver.

When they added Ground Attack back in, they also added variables into the gameconfig file to control the occurrence of the ground attack events. Since the old file didn't have this, I presume it was defaulting to like a 100% chance or something. I only noticed because of doing the test: the events were fairly infrequent in vanilla and then I started the mod test and suddenly South America got blitzed by 8 or 9 events.

Given that, it looks like the GA events are going to be less impactful than thought. So I'm going to replace the current v0.3 of the mod and use the vanilla funding level damage values for the time being and see how that goes.

EDIT: New v0.3 is up.

Edited June 7, 2014 by kabill

[Solver]

Ah! That explains a lot. My own experience was the same, a UFO on a GA mission would result in 8-9 events within a few in-game hours, which is totally devastating.

What variable do I need to edit where to balance that? Or if I download v0.3, does it already have sane occurrences of these events?

[kabill]

I've just updated the mod which should be fine as is.

[Solver]

34th playthrough of the last few days, coming up

[kabill]

Good luck!

[Solver]

So does this use the vanilla numbers for GA missions? It still does not feel quite balanced, though it is better.

[kabill]

Pretty much. I've kept the vanilla funding damage numbers and the ground attacks happen with the same likelihood as vanilla. Ground Attack UFOs can land, though, which should if anything reduce the amount of damage they do. But, counterwise, they turn up sooner so damage will be slightly higher over in the early game I imagine.

It's also worth bearing in mind that in vanilla air superiority missions are currently turned off, so there's only research missions doing funding damage prior to mid-October (unless ground attack missions got moved forwards).

in my own game, funding damage hasn't outstripped the "do nothing" scenario I was testing before, which considering I've had a pretty poor first month (second mission was a nighttime landed scout; this did not end well! Also trying out a hard-mode air combat mod) seems fair. But I got a $200,000 difference between the highest and lowest amount of damage done in the first month during my tests, so it's pretty variable and I might be on the low end of the scale this game.

[TacticalDragon]

Well Kabill this is my review after 3 of my people test a quick run of with this mod on Vanilla and XNT:ITD:

Note 1: Maybe lot of the issues and details has been reviewed here for other players.

Note 2: This test was make in a long run play of 8 hours until Tier 3 as soon as the player can play, dosent mean that the results be accurated for detailed players, but gives a general view of the behavior

- The UFO diversity draw by the system is HUGE and awesome diverse for the game, I think that this system is a must go for the official version.

- At early game the players suffer of huge economy impact, we experiment a reduction around -200 to -350 in vanilla version. In the modded game this is reduced to -100 to -180 because we introduce a new aircraft for dogfight, the Apolo MXR2 light combat scout and the fact that the player can build new interception bases quicker.

- At mid game almost Tier 2- the player can deal with good amount of UFOs and the economy begin to rise, I believe that this is the equilibrium of the mod. You can deal with almost every UFO taken by the system unless you have a random catch of Landing ships or Figthers, in that case you lose some income. In vanilla seems to be very balanced! and a perfect moment for the Dynamic UFO spawn. The modded XNT:ITD the things change a bit, player can growth economy by manufacturing but the alien base and terror missions is increased a LOT, because in the mod the frecuency is increased in the V4.2, for XNT:ITD there is a moment of random encounters because you can have bad luck and aliens overrun your bases and earth economy to hell, or you can deal with UFOs and get new economy. This thing ins XNT:ITD's Philosophy is GREAT because we want to push the player to despair.

- At Tier 3- and late game the dynamic change a lot. The system draw can let you in Vanilla deal with waves easy, because system can waste some choose slots in smaller UFOs or Fighters that give the player more experience and resources. In vanilla seems to be easy, increasing the frecuency of the big ships is necessary or the amount of choose slots for UFOs. In modded game the thing change again, one single Battle ship can destroy you to game over the Elite soldiers are a real threat and again we have the same behavior of "Coin head or Tails" or you face with it or you are killed by it.

In general the mod is awesome and bring a new diversity to the game!

You have my congratulations for this plausible effort and intuitive use of the system.

Thank you so much!

[kabill]

Thanks for the comments!

First, glad you like it.

Second, early funding: yeah, I think this mod might be a little more harsh in terms of funding damage. That said, in my own game I was playing it didn't feel that much different from vanilla, and that was with a stupid-hard air combat mod I'm testing as well which was causing me to miss waves.

It'll be interesting to see if there's any emergency balancing in vanilla for this, but I'm inclined maybe to soften funding damage a little by increasing starting relations but reducing the funding modifiers. That way, negative events will have less impact, which might make the early game more bearable without losing any of the existing balance between UFO mission types. It might also help a little further into the game as well, since there's more chance in this mod of getting stomped on by something too hard to fight at the time. Shall see, though.

Third, UFO variation: Yeah, I agree that mid-game is kind of the high-point for the mod since it's where the full range of UFOs are in play but also where there's a meaningful difference between them in terms of their role. In contrast, in the late game the UFO spawns can only be easier, which is a bit of a problem. I've added into v0.3 more UFOs late-game, though, so hopefully that will help a bit.

---

Some other thoughts from playing last night:

- Early tech access is quite interesting. I bagged a Corvette around the beginning of October, so I've currently got a massive array of techs to be working through. I think this is good, personally, since there's more room for opportunity costs.

- I have mixed feelings about the higher rate of UFO landings. On the one hand, I've enjoyed there being more landed UFOs in terms of GC (tried a landed Scout at night for my second mission; one soldier made it back to the dropship to abort!) and the difficulty is such that there's, for me anyway, a nice risk/reward thing going on there. It also encourages more night missions, since you can't as easily wait for day to come around for a landed UFO. All that said, I'm wondering whether the landing rate isn't slightly too high: I'm ending up with a lot of aborted interceptions due to UFOs landing. So I might scale it back a little bit.

[Solver]

So, my own impressions with v0.3.

It is quite good. The funding is a bit harsh, but manageable. Maybe softening it by some 10% would be good, but it's mostly fine.

I love the crazy UFO mix that shows up a bit later. I am now seeing, at the same time, Corvettes and Landing Ships, with the occasional smaller UFO, as well as both Fighters and Heavy Fighters. This is really great!

UFO landing chance should definitely be decreased. I also get lots of aborted intercepts, but it also makes the UFOs easy to shoot down. After the UFO has been landed for a couple of hours, send out interceptors to hover above it, and shoot it down as soon as it takes off. Or do a (night) assault on the landed UFO if you prefer, but really, the very common landings don't have the desired effect.

[kabill]

Glad the mix of UFOs is good.

I'll reduce the UFO landing chance in the next version. If you want to do that in the mean time, it's just the landing chance variable in the ground attack, scout and research missions (if you don't know that already).

I'll have a look at funding. I might just adjust the relations/funding per relation point a little bit. Or, alternatively, drop all the funding events a little bit in the damage they do.

[Solver]

The intensity having been good and all, December is when it really went downhill, and quite sharply for me. I was really doing well, but in December the UFO waves became so powerful that I could not cope. Perhaps I had fallen behind a bit on air weapons, but still, I lost Soviet Union that started the month with good relations and 560k funding, and North America that I had near-full coverage over, due to a couple UFOs doing huge damage. I did not play perfectly, but it went bad much more rapidly than it should have.

[kabill]

What was the problem? Was it the number of UFOs, the types of UFOs, or simply high relations damage? (Or a combination).

Will be useful to know for further balancing.

[Solver]

I think it was a fairly sharp jump in UFO numbers, coupled with the high relations damage from certain UFO types. In November I was shooting down almost all UFOs within my radar range, and suddenly in December there were many I had to leave alone. And if they happened to be Ground Attack, ouch. Further adding to the difficulty was the fact that Medium-sized UFOs nearly stopped coming without escorts. With almost each UFO having an escort of 2 Fighters or Heavy Fighters, I would of course no longer be able to drop such a UFO with 1 Foxtrot + 1 Condor. I could have probably coped by prioritizing extra air force at the end of November, but that did not happen.

Then of course there's the somewhat unrelated issue that, if you take a dramatic funding loss in one month, it's essentially impossible to come back. You lack the money to pay for anything but maintenance and that makes things very difficult. Never mind that if you end up in the negatives, it's impossible to work your way back.

[kabill]

Fair enough. I think I'd argue that your air power could have been greater; by the same point in the game I tend to have three rather than two planes in each base (although I don't know how plausible that was given the funding situation earlier). This said, it wouldn't surprise me if you were at the point where additional UFOs were starting to come from the extra I've added top end, so that might need some balancing (I think I can keep the total number but reduce the rate at which they appear so it will start to have impact later).

One thing I'd forgotten, though, which I will reduce is the escorts. I'd actually increased the chance of there being escort missions when using the 'long wave' system to try and make UFOs a bit tougher to take down overall. It's redundant now the vanilla waves are being used, but it hadn't occurred to me when I did the last build.

The last point - about not being able to come back - I don't think there's anything I can do about. Short of - as I say - softening relations impact.

I might put together another version and see how that goes. Should only take 10 minutes or so.

[Solver]

I did have 3 and 4 planes at my 2 bases. What I'm saying is that I needed a full squadron every time. For instance, with a lone Corvette, I can send a Foxtrot + Condor, while a Corsair goes somewhere else. Not so with escorts. I could have had even more air power, had I delayed some other stuff (I equipped a second assault team), but overall, I feel the situation was not balanced.

You may want to try fast-forwarding a couple of games to December just to see what UFOs appear during the month and in what combinations.

That aside, I am really enjoying what the mod brings to the table. Great work!

[kabill]

Update: New version is out.

Change Log:

- Funding adjusted to reduce the impact of funding events. Overall, nations have ~20% higher starting relations, but the funding they give per point is reduced accordingly so that funding overall is the same. Hopefully this should take the edge off of sharp changes in funding.

- Reduced escort chance on regular UFO missions and slightly reduced on special missions (e.g. terror missions)

- Reduced the landing chance of UFOs.

- Adjusted terror mission failure chance (I'd failed to do that in v0.3, apparently).

@Solver: Sorry, I misunderstood. It sounded like from your post that you only had two planes stationed. I think expecting anything more than 3-4 per base is too much, so if you had that amount it's the mod that's at fault.

In terms of UFO types, I have done the test you suggest. I've not done it with the increased UFO numbers, but I have an idea of the distribution of UFOs. Landing Ships seem to dominate between December and January, although in my last test I got loads more landing ship in December than I did January which was split, of all things, between Landing Ships and Corvettes.

This said, the way the UFOs spawn can be a bit clumpy. It often seems to generate multiple UFOs of the same mission type, therefore if you pull a difficult draw you often get multiple copies of the same UFO (escorts seem to tie into this as well, like it makes an escort roll for the mission, rather than per UFO). I first noticed this in a very early version, but when I redid the mod for distribution, I tried making sure that there was a variety of different UFOs set to trigger at the same time, but they'd still tend to clump due to the same mission type coming up. In other words, if you got a couple of bad draws in a row it might have been a bit overwhelming because of that.

[Solver]

Nice!

Yeah, in terms of doing better, I could have upgraded my planes earlier. I still had a couple of Condors which I could have replaced by Corsairs, but I instead went for a Shrike earlier. It's good that the extra unpredictability allows me to make these different decisions, but the balance just isn't there yet - ultimately, funding is most dependent on the air game, so falling behind there is very punishing even if doing very well on the ground. Of course, this is very much a work in progress, so exactly this sort of balance issue is to be expected.

Curious to see how the funding chance works out. I guess it will make it more difficult to suddenly lose a nation with good relations, which would be a good thing.

[kabill]

That's the idea, yes. It will also nerf the bonus you get from shooting down aircraft, but I actually think that's a good thing too since it will reduce funding bloat once you get to the point of having good control over the skies. So, basically, funding should be less spiky, which will be an advantage at the beginning of the game (when there's a lot of funding hits you can't do anything about) and a disadvantage later (when you're shooting down lots of UFOs).

I don't know how much of a difference it will make in practice, mind. I've deliberately been conservative with the change, but I can push it a bit more if necessary (and if it looks like its working as an effective solution).