Balancing the Osprey?

[Praevasc]

The Osprey is one of the most useful pre-invasion craft after unlocked, and can be used for secondary bases and minor missions for a long time. It is better than the standard helicopter with a much needed larger capacity at that stage of the game, and by providing a protection for the troops during the first turn.

Yet, there is something very unrealistic about it: it's a tiltrotor craft, specifically designed to have a greater range than traditional helicopters. In real life, it has about 4x the range of helicopters of the same size category. This is why it's so much more complex and expensive, because it can turn into a traditional airplane mid-flight, to achieve a much better fuel economy compared to traditional helicopters.
Yet, in the game, it has the exact same range as the standard helicopter.
However, if I edit its range to make it larger, it will be even more overpowered. One way to compensate it is to make it more expensive, both to purchase and to maintain. Any other thoughts about making both the Osprey and the helicopter viable options, with more varied advantages and disadvantages?

[Finnik]

I personally feel that it can be reduced in troop capacity together with other nerfs, if you want to increase range. It was always strange to me that crafts is filled with soldiers up to the very limit of its internal space.
Also, the balancing in-game things by looking to its IRL reference is not the good practice IMO. You need to balance it compared to other crafts, not to real osprey range. So if you think its bad to buff its range x4, just dont buff it that much.

[Juku121]

Flight ranges of most aircraft are heavily inflated for gameplay purposes, anyway. E.g. no modern fighter jet has a combat range even vaguely as good as those in-game.

My headcanon is that helicopters are also rented, and the range represents your logictics range of being able to rent enough fast-speed transportation (more helicopters, maybe short high-speed car chases in-between, etc) to go as fast as the game says you go. Osprey might be able to fly like that on its own, if you squint really, really hard.

It's probably better to imagine that there's some sort of refueling agreement with the funding nations, and there's an invisible logistics operation that makes your craft fly as fast and as far as they do. Just like there are invisible intelligence operations, logistics webs, your 'radars' are more likely focal points for entire radar networks sourced from various militaries, your labs are outsourcing less sensitive parts of the work (and certain more unique stuff, I doubt X-Com is able to build e.g. its own particle colliders), etc etc.

[Finnik]

Well, it's good to have imagination, but this is not a text game, it's a video game. So to me personally it should be "what you see is what you get". Although, it's only my personal opinion, I don't want to start a war here 

[Juku121]

The whole premise of an X-Com game needs copious amounts of imagination to work. And even if it wasn't so, you'd still need to hide the parts of the game that are definitely either not fun or excessive feature creep. Plus, a strategy game necessarily abstracts a bunch of its mechanics anyway.

Or, well, you can play with Little Birds and civilian helicopters having a (two-way) range of 300-500 km at the most optimistic best, which is Mudranger territory.

[Finnik]

you'd still need to hide the parts of the game that are definitely either not fun or excessive feature creep.

What do you mean?

[Juku121]

Not fun: aircraft maintenance details (which gizmo needed replacing, how many hours of of de-icing, hiring aircraft technicians), on-and-off-base catering and recreation (staff morale), an hour of of 'realistic' and thus largely pointless politicking in Council session every week, picking suppliers for food, 5.56 ammo and aircraft fuel, a system for hiding the logistics trail of said purchases, diplomacy for violating non-Council airspace, etc. I could invent pointless details about what a global shadow org needs to do all day.

Excessive: flight simming (think: every game has to be flight-sim-level Interceptor), regular weapon jams, scientist skill levels, soldier friendships a la JA2, a dozen ammo subvariants (e.g. for 5.56: M193, M855, M855A1, Mk 262, Mk318, M195, M856, etc etc), research failures and weapon prototypes, smell/sound detection, unlimited bases and/or base levels, etc. Lots of ideas might sound good individually, but once you overload the game with even a few, it just becomes a slog. Well, XCF kinda is a slog already.

IMO even the current Earth gun porn in XCF is already quite a bit over that line, but I'm not terribly inclined to argue about it. Solarius has fun with it, and so do many others.

[Praevasc]

Yes, I understand that for gameplay purposes we can't (and shouldn't) be focusing on complete realism. What I meant is comparative realism.

For example, if guns have different ranges altogether than in real life, it's completely acceptable. Assault rifles generally have effective ranges of 200-300 meters, and one tile in the game doesn't seem to be larger than 1 meter, but it would be silly for pistols to almost always hit up to 30 tiles and rifles to almost always hit up to 200 tiles, as maps aren't that large, and if they were, gameplay would be too slow. We understand that it's an abstraction for gameplay purposes. Yet if pistols and submachineguns had the exact same range and accuracy as sniper rifles, that would break immersion, as sniper rifles are specifically designed to have much bigger ranges, and they have disadvantages in other areas because they had do sacrifice speed, weight, etc. for that added range. This is what I mean with arguing that an aircraft which was specifically designed to have longer ranges than helicopters, should have at least somewhat longer range than helicopters.

Speaking of logistics, I understand that cars for example are not meant to be driven from the base to the mission, yet they still occupy hangar space, which is fine both because of engine limitations and balance reasons. (although it would be fine if cars took up much less hangar space, but that's a different story). And if road vehicles are meant to be leased on-site, the fact that vans are so much slower is also a bit unrealistic, because their speed would only be a factor for the last small portion of the trip, yet this is still an acceptable game-play element, as vans are comparatively slower than sport cars.

[Juku121]

Well, as I said, most Earth-tech aircraft would realistically need refueling along the way in any case. Even the Osprey. So it's still a matter of what kind of role you want to give to the aircraft.

If you think Osprey's primary advantage is range and not the absurd (for when you get access to it) crew capacity as in vanilla XCF, go for it.

Looking at my own changes, I went in a completely opposite direction and equalised speeds for the two helicopters, gave the small ones unlimited range as rentals, but retained the crew size difference. Which means Osprey is a theatre asset for hard missions and the small helicopter is an upgrade to the globally-operated cars/vans that gets +1-2 extra guys vs losing some covert mission capability. And it's the Dragonfly that's the high-speed, limited-crew alternative to Osprey. Thus, all three have their niche (capacity, speed, range).

Van speed is not about actual vehicle speed, it's about getting twice as many guys to go through security checks for "00-code" foreign operatives while flying economy class.

Edit: Having said that, I also think vans are unreasonably slow, even taking the above into account. The most visible result of this is that converting to vans makes the already slow early gameplay seem even slower.