Balancing Campaign Difficulty without Magic Interceptors

Background and Issues

It seems fairly clear that the campaign currently is too difficult. While ground combat may be significantly easier than in The Original Game (TOG), mostly due to a very incomplete AI program, the air combat and overall difficulty are clearly much harder. Current efforts to fix this problem by introducing new, gamey, and unrealistic measures carry with them a large amount of antipathy from the community and only serve to alienate the core fans of TOG, which if I'm not mistaken are a large target demographic for this game. This increase in difficulty is due to two factors: increased air minigame difficulty, and increased economic constraints.

Let's start with the first one. In TOG the minigame was very simple, and losing an aircraft a fairly rare occurrence. It was easy to disengage - hell, it was actually possible to do so, which isn't true with Xenonauts. Additionally, only the player could choose to engage - the AI could not. Again, in Xenonauts this is not the case. Now, the aliens also have that choice. Many times players are faced with an impossible situation, where they easily can lose 3 aircraft in one encounter: send out a sortie to take down 1 craft, on the way back get intercepted by 3 fighters/etc. You're toast because:

1. You have no ammo left,
   
2. You have minimal fuel, and
   
3. You cannot disengage - even if you manage to escape the combat zone, the fight restarts immediately as the aliens reengage your sortie as soon as the last round ends.
   

But even in less lopsided engagements, ones where the player chooses to start, losing a single aircraft is quite easy to do now. It isn't just a matter of clicking "disengage" when your 1 craft becomes too red, but a matter of handling a highly maneuverable 6-craft tactical situation where your own craft are perpetually less maneuverable and weaker targets than the opposition.

The Air Combat Fixes

So, what to do? First off, the new minigame is a welcomed addition, and the ability for aliens to engage your own craft is as well. This adds a lot of additional challenges and decision making to the game that were not present in TOG. Kudos to the devs. There are tweaks and features that can be added to make the game less difficult, without breaking realism or changing much. First, to avoid "hopeless encounters" as mentioned above, altering the fuel management system is necessary. Currently, outside of combat all craft apparently fly at a high efficiency/low speed. I'm not sure how realistic this "cruising" is in terms of physics, but let's accept it as a gameplay compromise. Now, the problem is that although Xenonaut craft can evade and outpace alien craft in combat, they cannot do so in the geoscape. There is a simple solution: allow them to increase geoscape speeds at an increase of fuel use. This basically takes the same fuel management of the combat screen and scales it up to the next level of geoscape air tactics. There is some realism to this, as jet fighters usually have (for a given loadout) a "most efficient airspeed/altitude", which is usually lower than their 100% speed and favored A-A fighting altitude (at least for the Condor/F16). Additionally, increase fuel efficiency for fewer armaments. This also is true in reality - the fewer armaments a plane has, the less drag, and the more efficiently it can fly. This way, returning aircraft from a fight can get home faster and could outrun intercepting flights that are going to "catch them with their pants down". Furthermore, you can add a geoscape option to 'drop stores', which releases armaments to gain that increase in efficiency. All of this is extremely realistic, being that these are typical real-world solutions and concerns for air combat craft. They also add a lot of extra decision making and tactics to the geoscape screen.

Finally for the minigame, rebalancing the various planes' abilities (including lock-on times/distances, missile ranges, roll amounts, and speeds) will help a lot in making the always-inferior Xeno craft a bit easier to keep in one piece.

It's the Economy...

On to the economy. It's true that a lot of things cost less in Xeno than in TOG. In TOG, just renting a basic fighter was $600K/mo. Yikes, and we complain about Foxtrots. Bases cost $500K-1M to establish, and all around maintenance costs were much higher as well. So, how is it that Xeno is so much harder? There are a few factors:

1. It is much easier to lose funding nations, especially early in the game when you lack the ground forces and large-capacity ships for them,
   
2. Alien craft recovery values are roughly 10-20% of TOG's - yeah, TOG gave you 5-10x as much for each downed craft,
   
3. There is no (sustainable) profitable manufacturing, and
   
4. Country funding is much lower (by a factor of 2-3).
   

By far, (2) and (3) are the most crucial. Instead of focusing on interceptor costs, just simply restoring balance to income/expenses would be more than sufficient. Now, the devs have stated that profitable manufacturing is out. I think this is reasonable but overdone - inifinitely profitable manufacturing is balance-killing, and there's no way around that. If it scales infinitely largely at any reasonable rate, it will make money a non-factor within a few months. That said, limited profits are not unreasonable, and they can be limited simply by linking the products to limited resources (be they alloys, alenium, reactors, or whatever). That said, this is (in V18) and should be a minor component of one's total income, in order to avoid breaking the game. That leaves rebalancing mission income and funding income (and reducing the ease of losing funding nations).

That's mostly it. Some final suggestions are:

• Return hyperwave decoders to allow players to increase their knowledge of flights/bases.
  
• Reduce the costs of transport aircraft as they're horribly out of line with other expenses, yet are totally necessary for base assaults.
  
• Allow your aircraft to perform off-base landings at non-Xeno "virtual bases". There are like a million airfields on the planet, I'm sure they can find somewhere to land within 25km of wherever they are. This makes the planes invisible to the AI, though the flight remains on your geoscape in yellow (and will be refueled at least as well). It's like "patrol", but is not limited by fuel state (as that will be increasing). This is only possible in friendly territory over land, of course.