First of all, this is more of a brainstorming session than me proposing specific resolutions here; I just feel that air combat can become much more interesting somehow. I do not know which approach would be best, but I guess they're at least worthy of discussion.
Adding depth to interception stage would also require "quick battle" button, which is much more lame than vanilla approach.
Maybe so. Sounds convincing to me.
I don't see anything bad about vanilla dogfights. It's as much detailed, as it needed to be for this game. Pilots are fighting themselves, command center doesn't take control over the aircraft. They just telling exactly what is implemented. Engage/disangage.
Okay, they're not exactly "bad", but they feel really lacking in depth when compared to the ground combat. I haven't felt this way before
UNIMOD for
UFO: Extraterrestrials, and to lesser degree after
Xenonauts (which was indeed too hardcore and frustrating in this regard, just like you explained below), but now this feels really shallow and disappointing to me.
It's not just about control of the battle, but the general "flatness". All fighter planes can have two weapons - no more, no less. All fighters use exactly the same weapons, regardless their engineering principles. And so on.
I'm insisting, that most people won't appreciate altering fight mode, because it will make game even more longer/dull/monotonous. Hell, some of people are quitting xcom because they don't have good amount of elerium left after ufo crash (almost 0), and just got tired after 10 pointless missions and just loosing people. "Deep" air battle will annoy after these 10 battles.
I realize it's a bit of an asshole-y answer, but such people should perhaps find a different game. I'm not talking about air combat here, but getting tired from ground missions means one should take a break from
X-Com.
As for the air combat, I remember extremely heated wars on the
Xenonauts forum between people who enjoyed it and people who didn't want to see them at all. For
X-Com it's not so bad, because dogfights are more symbolic than actually significant to the game; there's no tactics, either your craft is better than the UFO or it isn't. I realize changing this is going to antagonize some people, who would prefer to stick to ground combat, but I don't think we're completely forbidden from at least thinking about it, especially if we pay attention to the fact that some players wouldn't want extended air combat.
BUT: The tactical battlescape doesn't lend itself well to the high-speed dogfights that the interception represents, I'm afraid. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I really don't see how this could be implemented as a full tactical air combat system.
Perhaps you are right. I was never particularly attached to the "duplicate the Battlescape" idea, it just seemed easiest to do.
what I would still like to see is a battlescape-based damage allocation system. instead of actually fighting the dogfight in the battlescape, the battlescape would be used to simulate the impacts of the various weapons on the combatants. for each shot that connects in the dogfight "mini-game", a corresponding shot hits the craft in a "virtual battlescape".
why? because in this way, internal damage can result from the shots, and it would actually matter which weapon you use!
the game would check against various scenarios that can lead to a crash, for example (numbers open for discussion):
- more than 50% of Power Sources destroyed
- more than 50% of Navigation units destroyed
- more than 50% of Hull destroyed
- more than 50% of Navigators killed or unconscious
while Avalanche missiles or even Fusion Balls will blow away large portions of the hull and for example two lucky hits could "surgically" destroy two Power Sources on a Battle Ship, the large explosions are also more likely to kill crew members, destroy salvageable material and possibly cause the Power Source on a smaller UFO to explode, destroying much of the loot.
Cannons and Laser Cannons, on the other hand, would eat away the hull - much more likely to preserve the loot. or a lucky double hit with a Cannon (first hit punctures the hull, second hit kills the Navigator) could give you an almost-intact UFO.
oh, and the damaged UFO would of course need to be preserved in memory, because that same damage needs to be transferred to the crash site UFO. plus perhaps some impact damage in case of a full crash.
Hmm... If I'm not mistaken, it looks a lot like the combat system from
Master of Orion II - well more detailed, because we have more ship systems, but also limited to several ships at most. Yeah, it could work.
Or we can make a real-time arena, like in one of those old shooting games
Or in
X-Com: Apocalypse, if you think about it.
