Okay, thanks for your responses, I felt awful about sending that and I'd just logged back in to apologise - sorry again for being so sharp.
My passion comes from truly, truly loving this game. I love this game so much, and when it's done well it's amazing.
But.... really impressed with your responses. Leflair and Buscher, I'll answer point for point.
It's been years since I properly chopped up a quote on a forum to do this so if I get the html all over the place and it looks ridiculous, feel free to throw things at my head.
Constructive feedback is always welcome, and we do indeed not get a lot of it (just skim this thread).
The 1.04 has only been out for a month, but the feedback I've gotten has not pointed to any big balance issues (you're the first, really), this may simply be because most regular players that do play it and give feedback are pretty experienced with how to handle the tougher foes.
This is a serious problem. If you are genuinely unaware of the balance problems in this mod, it is a serious problem. It's like flying at speed into a brick wall. If nobody's saying anything to you, you are not getting the feedback you need to make this into a decent game. And what hurts is that the content added is so good, and it's just going to waste.
I think there's a lot of people who don't want to admit it's too hard. Honestly, if I didn't have the level of experience I have at this game, I probably wouldn't feel confident to say something. Some other people just like to boast, so they don't like admitting they can't do it. But I know I'm good. Sorry, that's an asshole thing to say, but I am. I've played this game for years, I only ever play on Ironman on the hardest difficulty, and what makes this game so amazing is that that actually can be done. The hardest difficulty is really, really hard.... but possible. It is fair. There is a way through. Always. And so it makes it tense, cool - but also hopeful, fun, possible.
This is the key to making an XCOM mod work - (god, I sound like such a patronising arse even saying this, I know, I'm sorry) but it is the key. There has to be a way to win. To consistently win - it can be hard, like walking a tightrope - but it can't be impossible.
Your experience may differ, for example are Chaos Space Marines *not* common as a early enemy (there's always a chance with things like Terror missions) and you may always spawn in the middle of a enemy squad (this goes for vanilla 40k too).
My experience DOES differ. I think they're more common than you think they are. And mate- just remember this. If even ONE shows up, that mission becomes UNWINNABLE IMMEDIATELY for normal guardsmen. And you can say - well, lasfire reduces armour. Sure. But the accuracy and damage being done by the entire squad being so appallingly bad, you might as well be throwing a rock at the moon.
That is the truth. It is the actual truth of playing the game. If you say "well, these people aren't having problems" those people are savescumming. HARD. OVER AND OVER.
But then you say Space Marines are not there from the start - um... dude. Play your own game. Sit down, fire up Imperial Guard, PRESS THE IRONMAN BUTTON and try to survive three months. You will fail. Straight up. This is not a winnable game. That means it isn't fun, and it isn't fair. And I don't care who your veterans are, or what they're doing. Survive without savescumming on this mod for a full year, let alone actually win? You might as well tell me you can jump to the moon. Straight up, that person is either lying, deluded, or doing something dramatically different from anything I have ever seen done in this game after decades of playing it. I would suggest that they are lying.
If you cannot kill Space Marines, think about what that actually means TO THE GAME EXPERIENCE. It means that any Space Marines necessitate an immediate retreat from an unwinnable mission. Avoiding Space Marines means avoiding EVERY terror mission, and EVERY enemy base until you have the weapons to take them. It also means immediately fleeing from EVERY crash landing or landed plane where they show up.
Is this an intentional choice? Did you decide that this would be your game?
If you did, why do you hate us so much? What have we done to hurt you? How can we earn your forgiveness?
If not, you have two choices. Delay space marines, or SERIOUSLY buff imperials. Not just "tweak the lasfire". Do something drastic to give your game the basic ability to function. That's it. Them's your choices. There are no others.
Oh and, if the only people giving you any feedback are people utterly expert at every single enemy, what's that feedback worth? Honestly? With only that feedback you cannot balance this mod. You can't do it. You just can't. It will never be playable.
And what are these magic strategies these 'veterans' have? What? How do you stop something that can shoot a rocket/lascannon shot through smoke from across the map, when none of your guns have the capacity to reach/hurt that thing? What's the strategy you use?
And I understand it's very easy to get defensive. God, I hear myself saying these things and I can only hope you're ten times the man I am because I'd full-on have a tantrum if I heard them. But it's not just me. I know XCOM. I know what's possible, I know what's not.
There's a few things from your notes that's already been worked into update 1.05 (coming soon). Other things are bigger longterm goals of the mod to tackle, with some solutions being work in progress.
A couple of changes in 1.05 that may adress some of your issues:
-Enemy Squats have less armor, and are easier to hit. They're not as common either.
They are tough little fuckers, yeah. But maybe introduce in a later tier? Squats are awesome, an awesome idea, really well done. Better than the nerf is to make them an event. Some squats just dug out of the ground or something - oh no! Then they start showing up in random things.
-There is a new strong early game Heavy Stubber for Guard, and a Heavy Lasgun with overcharged power shots (there's some other lasgun changes like this to allow for punchier shots too). The Early Game Guard Counters may need a little tutorial.
Cool! Sounds great! More stuff like this!
-Enemy sentinels do indeed, like your own sentinels, have advanced optics that allow them to see through some smoke.
But the enemy never uses smoke, so this is not an actual leveller between us. It's just a massive buff for the enemy which essentially means that smoke means nothing now. One missile, squad gone, thanks for playing. That's what you've done.
Now look, I get that smoke is this bug up everyone's ass "oh it's so unbalanced, oh it's so terrible, you just spam smoke". Those people are idiots. Smoke is extremely important for protecting fragile troops from advanced weapons. This is EXACTLY the situation you are starting ALL your players in, and if you take away smoke, you're really crippling them. Maybe a later version of the sentinel, an advanced version with night vision googles or whatever - great. Amazing. LATER. Same with the fucking mounted lascannon sniper bastards. I swear because of the hate I feel. Just think of what that does to the game experience. Think. Really think. Or better still, play. Play it on ironman, see what happens.
What happens is, area denial. That's the military term. Area denial of the entire map. Every open space, every open anything. Can't cross it through smoke, they see through smoke. Can't cross it in one go, not enough time units. And if you can't get close enough to it, you can't shoot a rocket, you can't throw a grenade, you can't lasfire the thing, and if you're a position you can snipe it you're already dead because it's sniped you first.
It cripples the entire squad's ability to move anywhere without taking savage, unstoppable casualties.
That's what it means. Is this a choice you have intentionally made? Honestly... HONESTLY... did you sit down and say "this is how this game will play." Did you? I very much doubt it. And yet it is how the game plays. So what does that mean? Who is making choices about how the game plays? Who takes that role?
I understand your nerfing the main grenade - even though it was already much more expensive in this mod. But then to make mounted lascannons with infinite range able to see through smoke? That's absurd. Genuinely. It's like a choice taken in isolation from how the game actually plays. It's like - one soldier dead every turn. And you cannot hit that thing from across the map as starting guard. This is major, major problem. A major problem with the game. Really serious. Unfair, boring, stupid.
But like your own Sentinel experience, they die to a stiff breeze.
No they don't. No they don't. The fact that you think they do says to me you are not playing your own game. You are looking at code, you are looking at stats, you are not playing the game, you are not experiencing the player experience.
To take down an enemy sentinel with lasfire means closing range enough that a large number of your men can all fire autofire, and hit it. Think about that. Actually think about what that actually means in an actual game you actually play. It means closing distance with something that can fire rockets through smoke, and one hit by one of those rockets doesn't just kill 6-7 men (the bare minimum needed to take it down with lasfire), it also panicks the entire squad because of thier deaths, and it's game over.
Is this an intentional game choice? Did you decide this? I just don't think you did. I think nobody decided this. I just don't think people are playing this mod as a game.
And I know what you're going to say. Oh what about the disposable rockets!
Firstly, you get enemy sentinels a long time before you get those researched. Secondly, it is bad, bad, bad game design to introduce an enemy where there's only one possible solution in this single thing you have to research but you don't know about in a massive range of research options. Thirdly, 45% accuracy when shot, from a guardsman who already has the firing accuracy of Michael J Fox? This is not a solution. It's not. The idea that it's a solution could only be sustained by someone who simply had not played this mod - or who played it reloading every three seconds.
Speaking of Sentinels, the player version is getting a armor buff in 1.05.
Cool!
-We're gradually shifting the tougher enemies to rarer/later appearances. The big one to stretch out the appearance of things like enemy CSM is in a later update though (some things in the work that need more time).
Mate, look - I am consistently amazed and impressed at the incredible work you do. It's awesome, just awesome. I lay these challenges at your feet because this is an absolutely epic, kick ass content mod. It's awesome, so awesome, really. Take as long as you need. But I would say this is exactly the way to go. All your new enemies are epic. You just cannot throw them at the player from round 1, and expect your game to survive as a game. But they mean that what you could have is this insanely deep playing experience, where kick-ass new stuff just keeps on opening up. That's awesome. So awesome. Do that!
I'll let Buscher answer the Guard Tactics questions. As we've lost 33% of our manpower (Xom is busy soldiering IRL), it's just the two of us plus a few helpful people lending a hand from time to time.
Dude, totally love your work. If it's ready twenty years from now, I'll download it and play it through my white beard. And thank Xom for his service.
One big balancing difficulty is that if the game is easy enough for early guard, it's very easy for Space Marines or Sisters. For this we've been working on some "difficulty options" that will allow for more ingame tweaking to your liking. Things like increased income, or getting more veteran troops. It's always going to be hard to tweak the balance so that it's both satisfying for veteran-, new players and works for all factions.
Okay - I see what you're saying, but here's my counter.
Think of it like actual 40k. If you got a well put together SM army, vs a well put together IG army, would the SM simply waltz across the guard like they're not even there? No. Not at all. IG are a really serious force, really serious.
Firstly, there's about 3 times as many of them. That's no joke. Lasfire is a problem for Space Marines when 3/4 shots are being fired for every marine you have. Also tanks and mounted weapons. Tanks would be a problem in an XCOM engine, obviously, but mounted weapons? Hmm.
Again, sorry to mention it, but I fired up the game to see again last night. 13,500 spacebucks for a heavy bolter, Godwyn pattern. 300,000 for the same bolter on a small wheeled platform. Uh..... what? What are you trying to do here? Who made that decision and why?
I feel like a lot of these decisions are being taken because people on the forum are bitching about heavy bolters or smoke making things too easy. I get they are powerful - but the answer is not to take all the power away and then say "well, you're just not a veteran." Nobody's going to be a veteran if this game is so broken. How will you get veteran players if only veteran players can have any hope of winning?
It's your mod mate, but if you don't fix the game balance, HARD, then you'll be stuck with the same tiny pool of 'veterans' who keep telling you there's no problem with your game. Which means that although they may be veterans at playing ROSIGMA, they're certainly not veterans at telling you the truth.
So what would I do? Again - look to 40k for inspiration. The most obvious think I can think of is this.
Make a massive dropship. Something enormous. 26 person space, 4-6 HWP space. Basically AVENGER sized, and that's the IG basic ship. No kidding. There's all sorts of stuff in the lore that could be repurposed for this. Space Marines have tiny little dropships with tiny squads. IG send regiments.
What needs to be understood is that the IG are not shit. Soldier for soldier, sure, yeah, but as an army they are fearsome. Why? Because there's a million of them, they have all sorts of heavy support weapons and lasfire isn't shite. If I could sum it up in a sentence, that's the sentence.
"there's a million of them, they have all sorts of heavy support weapons and lasfire isn't shite."
And if you can't put that as an experience into your mod, then don't have IG in the first place.
But then again I think this speaks to a development focus on individual units/guns and individual changes at that level to fix problems. That's what's hurting the development of this mod. Someone (you) needs to step back and say - what makes IG cool? What makes them something epic?
How can an IG army demolish a SM army? Or a Sororitas army? Because they really, really can, in the normal 40k game, if put together well and played well.
Numbers. Support weapons. Lasfire that actually works. Numbers. Numbers. And more numbers.
26 guardsmen roll out of a ship with 4 heavy bolters and 2 sentinels. Turn one motherfucker. Do you speak it?
That is what needs to be reflected in this to make IG work.
And before anyone says "oh that's so unfair, it would be too easy"... no it wouldn't. You'd take terrible casualties. But you'd be able to take them. And on top of that, I just finished a tier 1 chaos base (as SM) on this mod. 63 enemies. Stealth space marines, nurglings jumping out of dead bodies, enemy snipers, enemy chimera turrets, all sorts of mad shit. 14 highly trained Space Marines only just survived. This mod is MASSIVELY harder than Superhuman difficulty on Xcom, even with Space Marines. And I know it is, beucase I know superhuman difficulty inside out.
Is that a choice? Did you decide - I will make this mod MASSIVELY harder than Superhuman difficulty? Did you? Even with marines. Did you? Again, I'd be surprised if the answer was yes.
26 guardsmen, 4 heavy bolters and 2 sentinels would STILL be a seriously difficult task against that TIER ONE BASE (!) and if you won, you'd be flying home with a lot of dead buddies. Which is exactly how it should be.
But an Avenger-sized craft as your basic ship? That's an easy, quick fix that would resolve a lot. And fix smoke. Night-vision optics has to be third tier, or second tier if you're really, REALLY feeling sadistic. First tier? Unplayable.
I really hope this is all cool. I've tried to be as blunt as possible, because I don't know if anyone else is giving it to you straight. I only challenge people I respect.
