Separate Game Difficulty into Geoscape and Battlescape

[KiethSomataw99]

I wonder if the game difficulty can be separated into Geoscape Difficulty and Battlescape difficulty. Geoscape difficulty affects events and income while in Geoscape. Battlescape difficulty affects the stats of enemies.

Geoscape Difficulty:
1. Beginner
2. Experienced
3. Veteran
4. Genius
5. Superhuman
Battlescape Difficulty:
1. Rookie
2. Sergeant
3. Captain
4. Commander
5. Xenobane

[Solarius Scorch]

Or a 'Custom' difficulty, like in some modern games. A menu where you could set parameters such as enemy numbers, enemy strength, defeat conditions and so on.

[ohartenstein23]

My first thought for custom difficulty menu would read like a Dark Souls guide: "Get gud, scrub"

But maybe an in-game guide for creating mod rulesets? Like a way to view the number of aliens in a deployment, their weapons, etc., make edits, then spit out a ruleset file so the user has their own custom difficulty "mod".

[Varana]

I like this idea.

Actual easy levels are hard to play, because of less loot income. You sit in your base and watch the aliens stealing your supporters, while your economy is still weak.
With this simple change, easy levels could become easy (more income, less agression).

[Forez]

Here is another proposal: what if game would look at our income / available funds and give accordingly to that

At the later stages of games money is not a problem while at beginning it is. So why not maybe not boost at the beginning but limit near the end? Simply make less income from looting later on and maybe make new donations from nations in smaller amounts

[The Reaver of Darkness]

So why not maybe not boost at the beginning but limit near the end? Simply make less income from looting later on and maybe make new donations from nations in smaller amounts

I have generally held the view that games should give the player larger ways to spend money to control their excess as well as larger ways to make money to ensure they can support themselves. With a scaling to income dependent on how desperate you are, and a scaling to expenses depending on how rich you are, the player gets padding to ensure that varying playstyles all feel there's room to play.

Most game designers will fail at this and a player's income will either depend largely on their general playstyle or will be fairly static, as opposed to changing to meet their demands. Likewise, the player's expenses will generally feel like it's outside their control, with most games abandoning any routine expenses or making them so low that the player effectively spends their money on the spot with no obligation to hold on to any of it.

In my mod, I address not only how I always get way too much extra money when playing X-Com, but I maintain the ability to play on the deep poverty end while ensuring no matter how fat your income stream gets, you can find a way to spend your money. I do this by offering the player a variety of options of which some are more expensive than others. In particular, starter equipment is ensured to be strong enough to finish the game (though not ideal), laser and other mid-game technologies are a bit more expensive and a fallback position to ensure your technology is useful to you even when you lack funds, and late-game technology like plasma can be expensive while some even later technologies (fusion and others) can be very expensive but extremely effective. I make the Avenger cost over $12 million (more expensive than you might think after you've been playing a game in which everything else is also expensive, and income is reduced in some areas), but the Firestorm and Lightning are closer to $3 million so you can meet your minimums more cheaply, or gain high-end performance by spending more. Also, handheld plasma guns are cheap (since you're getting it from the aliens) which ensures the poorest of players can benefit from plasma technology, while plasma craft weapons and their ammo is much more expensive, so with money you can use plasma to blow everything out of the sky and lessen your workload. It also has the natural effect in which the poorer player who goes on more ground missions gets more money, while the richer player who just shoots everything out of the sky is spending money faster, helping to balance different playstyles within one game.



My purpose for posting here is to indicate that the problem can be solved best by making the game have room for varying playstyles, but that if you haven't designed it to handle this variation, then trying to balance income by difficulty is a futile effort. There will always be some players who feel it's too easy and some who feel it's too hard, with not enough feeling it's in the middle.

[Forez]

[...]
In my mod
[...]
I make the Avenger cost over $12 million (more expensive than you might think after you've been playing a game in which everything else is also expensive, and income is reduced in some areas), but the Firestorm and Lightning are closer to $3 million so you can meet your minimums more cheaply, or gain high-end performance by spending more. Also, handheld plasma guns are cheap (since you're getting it from the aliens) which ensures the poorest of players can benefit from plasma technology, while plasma craft weapons and their ammo is much more expensive, so with money you can use plasma to blow everything out of the sky and lessen your workload. It also has the natural effect in which the poorer player who goes on more ground missions gets more money, while the richer player who just shoots everything out of the sky is spending money faster, helping to balance different playstyles within one game
[...]

I think that is a very neat solution

This is how it should be done!


I just hate in a games, be it RPG or a turn-based strategy, when near the end you just do not have means to spend all your money. And you do not do side quests or do not bather anymore with micromanagement or skip levels, because you can always buy stuff or ignore all kind of penalties. At the beginning you have to really think and be careful - but later on you just do not bother anymore; and thus get bored

I remember that in one of the Might And Magic games [not the Heroes series] to progress the main plot you had to acquire a couple of some kind of items plus a large amount of money- to be able to buy a castle. And if I am remembering correctly, overall there were more of those items than you really needed for that task. So the game made you do some of the side quests [of your choosing] plus demanded points [money] from whatever sources. While in Elders Scrolls III [Morrowind] there was also an option for buying a castle with a huge sum of money- that very soon became pennies to me; and on top of that [if I remember correctly] the castle itself served no vital purpose

[...]
In my mod
[...]
I make the Avenger cost over $12 million (more expensive than you might think after you've been playing a game in which everything else is also expensive, and income is reduced in some areas), but the Firestorm and Lightning are closer to $3 million so you can meet your minimums more cheaply, or gain high-end performance by spending more. Also, handheld plasma guns are cheap (since you're getting it from the aliens) which ensures the poorest of players can benefit from plasma technology, while plasma craft weapons and their ammo is much more expensive, so with money you can use plasma to blow everything out of the sky and lessen your workload. It also has the natural effect in which the poorer player who goes on more ground missions gets more money, while the richer player who just shoots everything out of the sky is spending money faster, helping to balance different playstyles within one game
[...]

I think that is a very neat solution

This is how it should be done


I just hate in a games, be it RPG or a turn-based strategy, when near the end you just do not have means to spend all your money. And you do not do side quests or do not bather anymore with micromanagement or skip levels, because you can always buy stuff or ignore all kind of penalties. At the beginning you have to really think and be careful - but later on you just do not bother anymore; and thus get bored

I remember that in one of the Might And Magic games [not the Heroes series] to progress the main plot you had to acquire a couple of some kind of items plus a large amount of money- to be able to buy a castle. And if I am remembering correctly, overall there were more of those items than you really needed for that task. So the game made you do some of the side quests [of your choosing] plus demanded points [money] from whatever sources. While in Elders Scrolls III [Morrowind] there was also an option for buying a castle- with a sum of money that very soon became pennies to me; and on top of that [if I remember correctly] the castle itself served no vital purpose


And it is somewhat similar for me in the final stages of X-COM when I have the means to go to Cydonia and I am just prolonging the gameplay with maxed out soldiers and equipment [because it's the revenge time] but without the need to really do so. So I wish that the final mission would require something like 25 000 000 $ "ticket" to Mars [for example in form of very special navigation system to the ship or whatever]. This way I would have to play [toy] with Aliens [while still having to defend against attacks on bases, one way or another]

[The Reaver of Darkness]

And it is somewhat similar for me in the final stages of X-COM when I have the means to go to Cydonia and I am just prolonging the gameplay with maxed out soldiers and equipment [because it's the revenge time] but without the need to really do so. So I wish that the final mission would require something like 25 000 000 $ "ticket" to Mars [for example in form of very special navigation system to the ship or whatever]. This way I would have to play [toy] with Aliens [while still having to defend against attacks on bases, one way or another]

I agree very much. I always like to be able to keep playing after the end game and so many games make it just end, they don't write in any content past the "win" scenario. In some games--like X-Com UFO Defense--you can win way too quickly.

In my mod, the path to winning is a longer and more involved process. Researching the spaceships and alien leaders requires you to first gather stuff from some of the larger UFOs or alien bases. But then I've also got some later game stuff that can serve two purposes: either giving you something to do when you don't feel like going to Cydonia, or keeping the gameplay from getting stale if you wind up taking a long time to complete the main objectives.

I think it would be really cool if you'd go to Mars and establish a base on a separate geoscape, then you could fly spacecraft between Earth and Mars. You'd use Earth to build up resources and send supplies to Mars to keep your bases going. You'd mop up the alien bases on Earth but meanwhile your bases on Mars would be under constant assault, and you'd have to take on missions to strike at key targets to weaken the aliens. They would be stronger on their home turf, and you'd be weaker there. If they crush your Mars bases, it wouldn't be game over. You could regroup and make another push later if you still have enough supporting nations. Perhaps you could capture alien supply depots which could give you very large amounts of supplies, extremely useful for making sustainable bases on Mars. But then those supply depots would be major targets to the aliens and they would try to re-capture the depot. If you want to prevent them from having it, you could destroy it instead.

Of course that gets into even more strategy, giving the aliens finite resources and having them able to capture things from you when they win missions against you. Their technology is generally superior to ours, but there's probably a few good ideas we had that they missed. Maybe they will come to like some of our technology and use it against us, and you can prevent that by not allowing such tech to get into their hands.

[SteamXCOM]

The original game is designed to last a certain specific length and that is it.  If you got tonnes of money "geoscape is broken" because you manufactured too many medkits, maybe its time to visit Mars.

If we want to capture more the difficulty and challenge of those beginning days of uncertainty, then extending the research times in which conventional weapons are used by delaying lasers for example.  however at some point that has to be transitioned as the lasers are researched and built, then plasma then big bucks earned and on to MARs game over.

I think the game boils down to these stages:

1. Beginning period (struggle to survive with bullets and heavy hand cannons)
2. Equilibrium (got lasers and plasma, not so many soldiers are dying now, however an alien retaliation mission may screw things up)
3. Overwhelming Force to crush all (everyone has flight suits  and the Avenger unloads more than enough soldiers to flood the maps, you have more gold than Fort Knox ever did and can build a fully equipped base wherever wanted.
4. The final battle map (designed around the Avenger crew capacity plus the players's fully researhed tech, the game difficulty plays big role here)

 I gather the tone of the conversiation is about the transition from Equilibrium to Overwhelming Force  since stage 3 is boring prolonged if stretched out too far.  The problem with huge resource stage  there are few things to sufficiently challenge the player at this point with out being viewed as frustrating; and the player certainly would not stand to be kicked back to stage 1 or 2 if, for example, aliens suddenly launched a string of successful retaliation missions (though one or two  successful ones might stir things up, a modders challenge).

Nothing worthwhile to spend the money on?  Get your ascii to Mars.

[Forez]

[...]
The problem with huge resource stage  there are few things to sufficiently challenge the player at this point with out being viewed as frustrating; and the player certainly would not stand to be kicked back to stage 1 or 2 if, for example, aliens suddenly launched a string of successful retaliation missions
[...]

How about if the game took notice of player being able or nearing to be  to go do Cydonia and the Aliens would make a desperate but successful strike?


If the game would require to interrogate one more Commander then the Aliens could plant a bomb inside him- and during interrogation a whole base would be destroyed. Or Commander would self destruct while still in Alien base or in flight to X-COM base. Then the player would have to research some type of screening / neutralizing process to prevent it from happening again. But the first one would be inevitable


Or they could infiltrate the defenses with a human [hybrid] agent who would make a suicide attack, blowing up something like 25% of random facilities; in all of bases or in all but one. [After which a story would tell the player that a screening process would has been developed to prevent it from reoccurring]


Or they could spread a virus during such mission and X-COM operatives would start to die off one by one, until a cure would be researched



Overall: something to kick the player in the leg when the crossing line is in the eyesight

[The Reaver of Darkness]

If the desperate attack leaves the aliens weaker, then a barely surviving player may find the game is not unbeatable at this point. That can be a good way to have the aliens notice your progress.

In the vanilla game, the aliens will send a battleship to attack your base after a year spent in-game, and they will also send one when you complete the research topic "The Martian Solution".

[SteamXCOM]

Forez==>Overall: something to kick the player in the leg when the crossing line is in the eyesight

ReaverIn the vanilla game, the aliens will send a battleship to attack your base after a year spent in-game, and they will also send one when you complete the research topic "The Martian Solution".

 I can totally see how once one understands how alienMissions.rul and missionScripts.rul work another class of alien ship might be added to assist in the leg kicking while the finish line is in site:

--DREADNAUGHT shows up rarely but essentially it is packed with twice the aliens making it much harder to defeat than a battleship,  in fact defeat in that battle for the the player  is almost guaranteed, causing a base loss. However the  DREADNAUGHT is so rare it  while it causes concern perhaps forestalling victory, it does not negate it. 

Sort of like prior to Battle of the Bulge when the Allied thought crossing into Germany and their defeat was an inevitability, the surprise offensive through the Ardennes stirred things up.

Where in

[The Reaver of Darkness]

Yes, you can have any mission trigger at a given point in geoscape time or from any research project. There is lots of flexibility there. You can also add new UFOs with their own attributes, sprites, and maps.

[Forez]

[...]

--DREADNAUGHT shows up rarely but essentially it is packed with twice the aliens making it much harder to defeat than a battleship,  in fact defeat in that battle for the the player  is almost guaranteed, causing a base loss. However the  DREADNAUGHT is so rare it  while it causes concern perhaps forestalling victory, it does not negate it.

Sort of like prior to Battle of the Bulge when the Allied thought crossing into Germany and their defeat was an inevitability, the surprise offensive through the Ardennes stirred things up.

But if you defeat a Dreadnought attack then you will be left with enormous amounts of stuff to sell? So instead of being kicked in the leg and slowing down, you would be kicked in the butt and starting to move even faster?

What would really hurt and / or slow down: mandatory [inevitable] destruction of facilities; especially of hangars

[SteamXCOM]

But if you defeat a Dreadnought attack then you will be left with enormous amounts of stuff to sell? So instead of being kicked in the leg and slowing down, you would be kicked in the butt and starting to move even faster?

The idea is to make it undefeatable, but so rare that it will not seriously impact the course of the game.

In alienMissions.rul there is
 - type: STR_ALIEN_RETALIATION
    points: 0
    objective: 4
    spawnUfo: STR_BATTLESHIP

Which I gather spawns a battleship to attack your discovered base.
   
UFO spawned is the BATTLESHIP which selects a battleship or one from a list of different interior styles if using a mod such as DARKENED UFO's.
   
 However all battleship maps alienDeplyments.rul have a certain number of aliens aboard and hitpoints, that is I do not know how one UFO type style  can be modded to have more aliens or hitpoints  than another style  of the same type without defining another ship type entirely.
 
 We do not want  all ALIEN RETALIATION missions spawning DREADNOUGHTs except rarely.
   
 At this time I do not know if the yet to be designed DREADNOUGHT can fit into that with exception of a certain tech that is researched, which within what we know about the game now, is completely moddable.  However because it IS a certain tech, it takes away a certain randomness of the encounter.

   We only want the DREADNOUGHT to appear extremely infrequently, against bases only; as I do not think they are looted if a base retaliation fails.

What would rally hurt and / or sow down: mandatory [inevitable] destruction of facilities; especially of hangars

Since this IS a suggestion thread about what does not exist but what we would like to have, some event to cause facility destruction in some way would definitely  present a challenge.