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Author Topic: [CRAFT] Air Combat Rebalanced  (Read 22899 times)

Offline Istrebitel

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[CRAFT] Air Combat Rebalanced
« on: July 05, 2014, 05:07:10 pm »
This mod changes the air combat balance, aiming to make UFOs more challenging, provide incentive to use different weapons together on one craft, make more craft weapons useful etc.

Mod page: https://www.openxcom.com/mod/air-combat-rebalanced

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After getting back into X-Com again with the long-awaited release of the OpenXCom version 1.0, I quickly remembered how simple is the air combat in that game. The tactical combat is awesome, deep, and challenging, where aliens remain quite terrifying for a long time, but in the air, X-Com dominates from the first day, and just keeps dominating until the end. Seeing as at that time, there were no mods available that tacke this problem, with most modders focused on the tactical aspect of the game, I've decided to do it myself.

I've tried to focus on making different weapons vialbe on the same craft - so that a loadout like Laser+Plasma, for example, is preferable both to 2xLaser and 2xPlasma. I've also tried to make it so that the player spends more time in range of a UFO taking damage, while at the same time not forcing the player to always engage with multiple craft. I hope I managed to achieve that, and at least in my experience, shooting the UFOs is much more fun now, but we will see what the players who use the mod think.

In order to strike the optimal balance, I've relied on both calculations and actual playtesting. In process of developing this mod, I've made some simple programs, spreadsheets and even a crude emulator for the dogfight process in order to test the modded stats over millions of engagements, or just calculate exact probabilities of each outcome (like, for example, to know what damage total, on average, would 10 shots of Plasma Beam do against a Terror Ship, with exact probability of each outcome, or summarised probabilities, like, the chance to crash it, or the chance take it down to less than 100HP). If anyone is interested, I could release those too.

Well, guess that's it. Now I should await what you guys think of it.

PS: As a side note, how do I contact the admins of openxcom.com? The "images" section for mm mod has bugged out and I can neither sort nor delete images I've uploaded for the mod. I need help with that.
« Last Edit: July 09, 2014, 02:03:32 pm by Istrebitel »

Offline Deskulpa

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Re: Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #1 on: July 06, 2014, 02:35:43 am »
Nice, will download and play.

Offline Warboy1982

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Re: Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #2 on: July 07, 2014, 12:42:37 am »
message Jo5hua, or contact him on the IRC channel, he hangs out there with us :)

Offline Aldorn

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Re: Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #3 on: July 07, 2014, 01:38:24 am »
I was intended to make some changes in order to rebalance Air combat, I will have a look at your mod  :)

Congratulations for quality of description on Mod Site !

Offline ibanix

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Re: Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #4 on: July 07, 2014, 01:56:16 am »
Takes a different approach than the changes I made in Modest Rebalance.

I think my only concern is the huge increase in damage (280) to the Avalanche. I suspect this makes medium sized UFOs a whole lot easier.

Offline Istrebitel

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Re: Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #5 on: July 08, 2014, 12:24:45 am »
2 iblanix
Well, medium sized UFOs were actually not a concern when balancing things out because... do you see them often? I mean, what's the last time you saw one? Honestly, I hardly ever saw them in my whole life... I've played countless of campaigns, I've played when I was ten years old, I've played it on PS One, DOS and Windows, I've played it with XComUtils and UFOExtender, I've played it over and over... and I'm playing it now when I'm 28 and... well, maybe I had 3 or 4 I can remember? They're really really rare... and thing is - they have pitiful range and not that much health, so they never were a challenge to begin with. They're outranged by even Stingrays in vanilla! And btw, new Avalanche is both less damage total per one sortie (a little bit), and is less reliable, than old one... so the damage change can't really make anything easier.
« Last Edit: July 08, 2014, 12:32:24 am by Istrebitel »

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #6 on: July 08, 2014, 12:25:22 am »
I'm seeing them all the time. Almost as much as Large Scouts.

Offline animal310

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Re: Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #7 on: July 08, 2014, 12:45:00 pm »
This is a fantastic mod. Thanks Istrebitel. The only area of the game I think is really lacking now is base defence, not the battlescape part but the pre attack bit.

Offline Istrebitel

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Re: Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #8 on: July 09, 2014, 02:00:28 pm »
Welp... just noticed I've posted in the wrong forum. Could this topic be moved to "Complete mods" please?

Offline Istrebitel

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Re: Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #9 on: July 09, 2014, 07:00:38 pm »
I'm seeing them all the time. Almost as much as Large Scouts.
Lucky you. I'd love to see more mediums, I like that design with the door on the second floor etc. But not getting them! Alien Abduction and Harvest missions (the only ones where they show up) seem to be really rare - most UFOs I see are on Terror or Retaliation missions, with occasional Infiltration and Research (and Base, of course).

Offline lordkrike

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Re: [CRAFT] Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #10 on: July 10, 2014, 07:32:32 pm »
Hi Istrebitel,

I have something for you.

I saw your mod and decided to take my own crack at rebalancing air combat.  After messing around with it for a while I gave up on it, but along the way I wrote an air combat simulator in Python for funsies.

It allows you to simulate thousands of air combats between craft of your choice in a couple seconds, so you can get an idea of how likely you are to take down a certain type of UFO with any particular craft with any particular weapons.

Hopefully it will be of some use to you.  I plan on messing around with it for another few days, and if there is anything you'd like to see me add to it, or you have any questions on how to use it, let me know.

Edit: what kind of forum doesn't automatically markup url links? :-P

Offline Falko

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Re: [CRAFT] Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #11 on: July 10, 2014, 08:14:19 pm »
interesting i did not know that difficulty has an influence to air combat

does it really make a big diffence to an easy estimation like (craft-hullstrength/(ufo damage/ufo reloadrate))-(ufo-hullstrength/((my damage-weapon1/my reloadrate-weapon1)+(my damage-weapon2/my reloadrate-weapon2))) ?

i have a bunch of things i would make differently
Spoiler:
- loading data from rulfile -> modded ufo/craft can fight each other
- allowing multiple craft to atttack (needs a parameter like "duration between starts")
- getting rid of numpy.random using the default random.random function
- web :)

Offline lordkrike

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Re: [CRAFT] Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #12 on: July 10, 2014, 08:40:10 pm »
interesting i did not know that difficulty has an influence to air combat

It's not that crazy for regular weapons, but if, for example, you do what I did and mod the UFOs to fire for less damage more often, the -10 cooldown from superhuman difficulty makes it impossible to attack some UFOs.

does it really make a big diffence to an easy estimation like (craft-hullstrength/(ufo damage/ufo reloadrate))-(ufo-hullstrength/((my damage-weapon1/my reloadrate-weapon1)+(my damage-weapon2/my reloadrate-weapon2))) ?

Honestly, no idea.

i have a bunch of things i would make differently
Spoiler:
- loading data from rulfile -> modded ufo/craft can fight each other
- allowing multiple craft to atttack (needs a parameter like "duration between starts")
- getting rid of numpy.random using the default random.random function
- web :)

Thanks!  I'm not really a programmer - my background is in numerical computation and applied mathematics.  This is mostly just me messing around.

I'll look into loading from rule files.  At the moment it wasn't worth my time, but I can figure it out, since it's something that probably should be in there.

Multiple combats should be extremely easy.

I just used numpy out of habit, I guess I can switch it out no problem.

Honestly, I don't know absolutely jack about web development.  You're more than welcome to put a wrapper on it and put it on a website.  Just give me some credit.  :-)

Offline Dioxine

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Re: [CRAFT] Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #13 on: July 12, 2014, 05:14:08 pm »
The best air combat rebalancing mod I've seen. Great work. I've learned a lot from your readme alone :)

Offline animal310

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Re: [CRAFT] Air Combat Rebalanced
« Reply #14 on: July 12, 2014, 05:51:14 pm »
I can only manufacture one tuned missile at a time despite having lots of the base missile in stock.