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[puke]

Its a wierd balance, though.  If you get lucky and have a transport land on a harvest mission under your satellite in month one, you'll set the aliens back on their advancement.

They need to gather research from flying missions, and if you successfully interdict them all then they will not advance.  LW becomes totally one-sided and easy if you manage to take out a few of these and can reliably shoot down UFOs and win every mission.

You can slow down the alien research and/or make it easier for you to defeat them, but this just means they wont get health / weapon / skill upgrades.  They will still come in the same numbers, and more threatening aliens like cyberdiscs and sectopods still show up on schedule.

[scrdest]

Its a wierd balance, though.  If you get lucky and have a transport land on a harvest mission under your satellite in month one, you'll set the aliens back on their advancement.

They need to gather research from flying missions, and if you successfully interdict them all then they will not advance.  LW becomes totally one-sided and easy if you manage to take out a few of these and can reliably shoot down UFOs and win every mission.

You can slow down the alien research and/or make it easier for you to defeat them, but this just means they wont get health / weapon / skill upgrades.  They will still come in the same numbers, and more threatening aliens like cyberdiscs and sectopods still show up on schedule.

I found out about those, but the other problem is the spawns. It seems there is no trivial way to change those up.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Its a wierd balance, though.  If you get lucky and have a transport land on a harvest mission under your satellite in month one, you'll set the aliens back on their advancement.

If you get lucky and can capture the landed transport. Those aren't exactly designed to be winnable.

[puke]

like everything in LW, it just takes patience and a methodical approach.

And once you get some skill advancements, it gets even easier.  If you get enough satellites up to reliably spot and stop these things, it will cascade into a total steamroll.  The only down side is that the meld cans never get the big numbers in them.

[scrdest]

like everything in LW, it just takes patience and a methodical approach.

And once you get some skill advancements, it gets even easier.  If you get enough satellites up to reliably spot and stop these things, it will cascade into a total steamroll.  The only down side is that the meld cans never get the big numbers in them.

That sounds to me like pretty horrible design. It fucks over earlygame players, who as-is have to make do with a bunch of special needs, astigmatic rookies who die from being sneezed at, but makes it easier when you're deploying literal and figurative walking tanks trained in gorilla warfare.

[puke]

its a dynamic campaign, thats part of the deal. 

You cant have a perfectly balanced scripted / linear storyline, and a meaningful strategic game where victories and losses make a real difference at the campaign level.  They traded one for the other, this is what it is.

If you haven't been taking out transports with your rookies in the early months, by the time you do have walking tanks they will be well matched against the stronger aliens later.  The LW campaign is balanced for you to let a few UFOs go, or to retreat from losing battles.

If you save scumm every shot, or are careful to win every mission through laborious tactics, you will steamroll them.  The game cant prevent that /and/ have a meaningful strategic campaign at the same time.

[scrdest]

its a dynamic campaign, thats part of the deal. 

You cant have a perfectly balanced scripted / linear storyline, and a meaningful strategic game where victories and losses make a real difference at the campaign level.  They traded one for the other, this is what it is.

If you haven't been taking out transports with your rookies in the early months, by the time you do have walking tanks they will be well matched against the stronger aliens later.  The LW campaign is balanced for you to let a few UFOs go, or to retreat from losing battles.

If you save scumm every shot, or are careful to win every mission through laborious tactics, you will steamroll them.  The game cant prevent that /and/ have a meaningful strategic campaign at the same time.

Actually, there is a very simple fix. Ramp up the challenge if the player is doing exceedingly well, keep it lower baseline. Only makes sense aliens would respond to an effective interception setup with more transports in hopes one or two slips through, or use convoy tactics.

Besides, what you're saying runs entirely counter to what LW in general is going for - to keep you on the edge at all times. Early slog followed by a curbstomp is my experience with vanilla - even moreso since with vanilla country panic you're liable to lose quickly if you fail spectacularly, whereas LW gives you more panic before the country quitting and a chance to recapture countries if that happens.

In Vanilla, you can comfortably have one elite squad and fancy base defense as the rest of the project, so if you fuck up once, gg, while LW forces you to train an entire cadre of soldiers to be semi-decent.

And if you think vanilla's storyline element, token as it is, is anywhere near linear (aside from the obvious chain of missions being set) or balanced then I don't know what game you were playing, because you might go against the alien base with Colonels with plasma rifles and Titan Armor or with a kevlar-clad team with ballistics, and one of those will end up in an utter curbstomp of aliens (hint, it's not the one with ballistics) whereas other will be more or less difficult-ish.

[puke]

Actually, there is a very simple fix. Ramp up the challenge if the player is doing exceedingly well, keep it lower baseline.

Thats cool and all, but it is like the opposite of a dynamic campaign where victories matter.  Thats like... the level scaled enemies from Morrowind or something.

It's not a fix, its just a different way of playing.  The mod is designed to give you a strategic game where if you destroy enemy resources then they have less resources.  You are advocating something like The Elder Scrolls where shit gets harder as you level up.

There is nothing wrong with what you are saying, but it is a totally different way of making a game.  LW isnt (as you say) to keep you on edge at all times, it is to try to simulate an /Actual War/.  The developers have stated as much.

But you can tweak it to play how you want -- just remove alien research bonuses from successful missions and increase their standard increase over time.  Maybe give them an additional bonus for each UFO that XCOM shoots down or captures, to try to implement your level scaling idea.

I don't know what game you were playing

Thats cool.  Go ahead and insult people that you disagree with, even though they're working with you to design creative ways to fix things you don't like.  I'm trying to help you fix your problem, and you want to mouth off.  Classy.

[scrdest]

Thats cool.  Go ahead and insult people that you disagree with, even though they're working with you to design creative ways to fix things you don't like.  I'm trying to help you fix your problem, and you want to mouth off.  Classy.

Look, seriously, that's not a matter of disagreement, it's a matter of me literally having the impression that couldn't be possibly more removed from what you describe. Calling XCOM, no matter vanilla or LW, linear is like calling Minecraft linear.

Either we have a serious difference in terminology we have to work out before we can communicate on the same wavelength, or you literally played a different game than me - I'unno, pre-patch, you remember what vanilla was like differently, whatever.

Plus, I would be a dumb fucking asshole if I used something as ambiguous as an insult as that stupid piece of shit of a sentence I used in that post.

Thats cool and all, but it is like the opposite of a dynamic campaign where victories matter.  Thats like... the level scaled enemies from Morrowind or something.

It's not a fix, its just a different way of playing.  The mod is designed to give you a strategic game where if you destroy enemy resources then they have less resources.  You are advocating something like The Elder Scrolls where shit gets harder as you level up.

No, I don't. TES level scaling is based on, for lack of a better word, experience, not performance, and in a painfully stupid way in some cases - i.e. Daedric-clad Bandits in Oblivion. That is actually in a way what happens in LW if you didn't stop the ships because you didn't know you should - enemies get more HP, more Aim and whatnot, to match your own rising capabilities. It's a gameplay element to both vanilla and LW, in some shape or form (what else the Elite Mutons are if not stat-boosted basic Mutons? Floaters/EXALTS at least get some different gameplay elements to account for, with grenades and genemods, respectively) and that's not a bad thing in itself.

What I've been thinking of is the game responding to your efforts to halt their progress with increasing efforts to force it - if you were really good, you could take out those all-Uber Ethereal/Sectopod (unbuffed) ships to prevent the aliums getting their first Research Point, but realistically, even the best player would have to let go a research ship, even if it's a day before the Temple Ship assault.

That keeps things fair - you're good, you have a chance to make regular missions easy, but your neither your successes nor failures immediately snowball - respectively, because capturing ships makes capturing ships easier (as you prevent enemy level-ups, and regular missions are less likely to kill your best men) and because not capturing ships makes *everything* harder - had an issue with that Sectoid pod? NOW THEY HAVE MORE AIM, HP, AND DAMAGE!

As-is, it's a runaway positive feedback loop in either direction - quite literally, as the change in difficulty from a transport ship affects itself recursively, that's an imbalance in any possible system.

And preventing just that makes sense as a war simulation! Would you put a single scientist to work on Beam Weapons if all enemies had 1 HP? Duh, no - there would be no point, as your weapons already do the job. Why, then, would the aliens maintain the same pace on research if XCOM was getting turned into a fine red paste? And on the other hand, when your craft gets shot down and stormed by troops, you tighten up the security, and try to slip past the interceptors.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Actually, there is a very simple fix. Ramp up the challenge if the player is doing exceedingly well, keep it lower baseline.

Thats cool and all, but it is like the opposite of a dynamic campaign where victories matter.  Thats like... the level scaled enemies from Morrowind or something.

Levelled enemies have nothing to do with it. In X-Com and XCOM, you are meant to be fighting a losing battle. The aliens plainly have more military resources than you, they can afford to ramp up. The idea is referred to as The Tall Poppy syndrome. The enemy has other business to attend to besides squashing your little resistance, maybe they have a schedule or don't want to commit all of their resources at once because it would be wasteful. But if you routinely thwart their efforts to do their business, they are going to devote proper attention to rooting you out. Your victories matter - but you have to be prepared to face the consequences of poking the sleeping dragon too hard.

pre-edit: ninjas!

[i2amroy]

Well, considering that they already have a variable that is a general "how well are the players doing" that is used for meld canister amounts, you could probably do a very easy fix to make it take that number and do a little fiddling to get a proper range that was just added to a (lower than normal to avoid needing to have subtractions) base research rate. Of course things like that are notoriously hard to balance, get your number magic off a little and you can significantly impact the difficulty of the lategame, which is also very time consuming to test directly (since you need a game to get that far first).

I would like to remind people that they are working with decompiled code, hex editing, etc. for a fair bit of the stuff in this mod though, and I'd probably harken it much closer to old-fashioned ROM editing than what we often think of as modding these days. It's totally possible that they originally planned to do something like that, and then ran into code or space limitations that they just haven't figured a way around yet.

[scrdest]

Sure. But they already figured out how to manipulate alien craft spawns - that's why the transporters show up in the first place

[puke]

Well, considering that they already have a variable that is a general "how well are the players doing" that is used for meld canister amounts

That isnt what that variable is for.  That is the "how well are the aliens doing" and you can manipulate it as I described to be inverted.  Give them more points as they loose missions, instead of less.  This might have the odd effect of providing more meld, but it will also mean the aliens get stronger faster.

There is some sort of progress tracker for xcom, also -- this is what aliens use for deciding when to run retaliation strikes and such -- but I don't thing this variable is exposed.

[Flying Dice]

It's rather strange to argue that LW alien buildup is tied to your own progression. That doesn't follow at all; their tech progression is wholly independent of player progress. The only way you affect how much and how rapidly they progress is by executing missions and flights which delay them. They're scaling completely independent of you; they'll be at the same point regardless of whether you've puttered around doing autopsies and building sawn-offs, or if you've powerground your way up to pulse lasers in five months, as long as your Geoscape actions and Battlescape successes are relatively equal.

It's also rather laughable to compare it to the vanilla progression solely because you can set them back with early sequence-breaking and luck/savescumming; that's not at all how vanilla went. I can't speak for anyone else, but frankly I don't want that vanilla progression, that's a big part of why I play LW.

"Oh no, enemies become more difficult and more numerous as the game goes on!" is an attitude I have a rather hard time grasping -- the only times I've had it become literally unbeatable without cheating were Impossible and certain maps on Classic with Cinematic whatever turned off, and when that happened I did the reasonable thing and retreated. That's one of the underlying themes of LW, having to accept that you can't win every battle. In my current campaign I was in a stretch for about two months after I overreached myself and got all of my interceptors badly damaged, which forced me to only fight the missions that came to me. It fucked up my Alloy income and delayed my development, but I sucked it up and kept going. Now I'm back on track and clawing my way out of the hole I dug.

[i2amroy]

Honestly I've always thought that the idea that alien buildup should be tied at least somewhat to your own progression rather than being it's own separate thing fits the lore much better. I mean the battleships and stuff they are throwing around is enough to wipe you out, and can even be a serious threat in the later game. Lore wise this shouldn't be a "oh we both show up on fairly even terms, and then we both advance in research quickly with humans possibly pulling ahead some" type of thing, it should be an AI war-esque "don't poke the sleeping dragon too hard until you are ready to deal with it being awake" thing. Being forced to ask yourself if the attention stopping a particular alien mission would draw is worth the damage prevented by doing so would add a whole 'nother level of (realistic) tactics to the game, though it's probably not something we'd be seeing in LW. (Though maybe in the next XCOM game? ).