exponential difficulty

[yrizoud]

continuously increasing alien activity once you have played for a certain time

I thought about this specific point. If UFOs become extremely numerous in the end-game :
+ It makes good use of the Geoscape interface, with many dots buzzing around,
- But the notifications become very annoying (you probably have full coverage of main lands, with decoders which have 100% success rate)
+ The player gets progressive feedback that he's outnumbered, as he sees his interceptors spend less and less time idling, and soldiers always on duty
+ Once the players resources are fully mobilized, there's a real incentive of choosing specific missions : Protect important countries from being lost, ignore antarctica settlement(s), keep an eye for specific alien you need to capture. It's much more active than systematically answering every call.
- Much before getting overwhelmed in the game (limited by ship refilling), it's the player who will feel he's playing non-critical battles non-stop : A game month would take forever, because the player needs to play out 1 battle by game day, which all take at least 15 real-time minutes. An autofight system would solve this : manage the easy battles, play out tactically the critical ones.

[TheUnruly]

However, using the Plasma Beam Mod or something similar makes the choice much less obvious, sionce you're constantly out of Elerium to power the plasma cannons (except the late game, but even then it's still a factor in your economy).

I think it would be much better if the aliens actually used these bombs. Compared to the original game, aliens are very reluctant to fire Blaster Launchers.

Can you please summarize the changes, for example in a simple comparison table? I'm a lazy person.

Being new in these parts I didn't know of that mod.  Mine does something similar but also tweaks the damage and ranges of all weapons in an attempt to make them all useful.
 I slightly increase the range and damage of the laser cannon, for example, it's still worthless on a standard interceptor but on somthing a little more durable it might be worth using on anything up to medium ufos.  As it was the laser weapon wasn't enough of an upgrade over the cannon to be worth bothering with at all; the only advantage it had was infinite ammo and there cannon ammo cost was never really a worry. I don't know if my changes make it viable but as it was I don't know anyone that used it.
The blaster weapon can carry four shots so that there is a replacement fo the plasmas damage capability but you won't bring down the largest ship with just one of your own without risking losing it (it's not even a close fight you are heavily outclassed).   I think that file also includes a shortening of the avalanches range, I play about with it a lot at the minute.

Your right about the blaster bombs the aliens do seem to use them less.  In fact their behaviour if they are holding one seems weird. Just had a base commander stroll into the lift, I boxed it in a corner with rookies and it did nothing at all fot the rest of the mission, which is a shame.  I recall them shooting their own team as often as mine in the original game so maybe it's to stop the AI looking like idiots?

[Jstank]

Did anyone think about adjusting the points necessary to get Excellent rating at the end of the month for later months so that you don't get so many points for simply shooting down ships. I think thats the way you keep the game going forever. There comes a point where you can shoot down every ship including terror ships and you will rack up so many points by the end of the month you barely have to undock your sky ranger. Possible fixes. Adjust points down for attacking small UFO's after month X. Then at month Y you start to get no points for attacking med ufos, then at month Z you only get points for attacking large UFO's. This way you have to recover or assault bases and get to cydonia quick before your points run out.

Then combine that with some of these other suggestions like plasma cannon takes delirium and adding badder UFO's and you have yourself a tricky end game.

I don't think there was such a ship (except for T'leth, haha), but I can't see any problems with making such a shipo and adding it to the game. However, what exactly would it do? What missions would this super-sized ship be in? Would it share missions with the Battleship? (In the latter case, some coding is required, since the Battleship is hard-coded to be used in base assaults and country takeovers.)

And on that note off the cuff.... The bigger UFO's could be for terror missions as you won't be able to shoot them down late game. They will land and you ll actually have to do terror missions... better yet just increase the health of terror UFO's after month___....Just a thought.

[Solarius Scorch]

And on that note off the cuff.... The bigger UFO's could be for terror missions as you won't be able to shoot them down late game. They will land and you ll actually have to do terror missions... better yet just increase the health of terror UFO's after month___....Just a thought.

Sadly, that's hardcoded too.