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Alien activity too intense?

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paziek:
Hello,

So I've come back to UFO:AI recently and now it has noticeably more content, so its playable for longer. But I find its very exhausting to progress any longer. When I started with just one base it was still cool - didn't see much, didn't act too much. But now that I have more than half of the land covered suddenly I'm doing around 2 missions per day, most of with I already remember where will be aliens and what to do to kill them easily. Its getting repetitive slow grind just to get some new research or maybe new alien on the scene. Its been over 100 missions and I didn't finish all laser weapons yet, made just one alien body dissection and I'm yet to catch a living one.
Maybe beside difficulty setting, there should be "alien activity" setting, that would give us opportunity to choose how often (more or less) we want to go into action.

What do you think?

Siim:
I guess you are playing the 2.3 version. 2.4 dev version maps have a lot more different alien starting locations so you can't always win the maps with the same strategy. Also, if you get tired of doing missions, just use mission autoresolving.

paziek:

--- Quote from: Siim on July 03, 2011, 08:24:57 pm ---I guess you are playing the 2.3 version. 2.4 dev version maps have a lot more different alien starting locations so you can't always win the maps with the same strategy. Also, if you get tired of doing missions, just use mission autoresolving.

--- End quote ---
I would use auto-resolving if I had more soldiers, with I don't. I'm on latest 2.4, maybe some maps have more than 1 starting positions, alas there are also those that I don't even need to wonder where aliens are, since they are always in the same place. But... thats not the point. Even if each and every mission would have random starting positions, then it still would tire me too much. Right now I have 5 UFOs hovering over my radar range, not including 2 others that I intercepted - thats really putting me off this game.

MCR:
paziek, I agree with you.

The whole game balance has to be revised, one important point is the one you mentioned:

TOO MANY UFOS ARE SPAWNED

TallTroll:
>> The whole game balance has to be revised

I don't think anyone would disagree with that, but there's little point trying to balance a game which still has major gameplay elements missing. Introducing psionics will no doubt radically change the balance, as will a true visibility system, and any changes to the PHALANX equipment lists, and so on.

If the introduction of some element totally breaks the game, and makes it unplayable, then that would need attention, presumably, but other than that, trying to balance an unfinished game is a diversion of effort from actually implenting new content.

>> TOO MANY UFOS ARE SPAWNED

Then again, you can equally argue that the UFO appearances are what fund PHALANX expansion (in my current game, expenses outstrip funding by a considerable margin, so I depend on alien tech sales not just for keeping what I have going, but for any future expansion. I still need at least 2 more bases).

I know what you mean though, it can be frustrating watching the research figures creeping up so slowly because of the frequency of missions and the need to handle them manually. I think it's likely that research will be one of the areas that gets a lot of attention during balancing though, because it is so critical to the development of the gameplay.

The rate of UFO appearance is also clearly a critcal part, but if it was turned down too low it could also be a problem, due to loss of funds from tech sales, less experienced soldiers and less loot generally. Until the game is more complete, it is impossible to say what the "right" level of UFO activity might be, and personally, I'd rather the dev effort went on adding shiny new toy than crippling my economy  ;D

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