The biggest problem is the difficulty,... I'm a veteran of all the X-COM games,
Ufo:AI is a bit different, so some of the old tactics need adjustments.
it's too difficult. You need to give the player the chance to discover these tactics, not punish them for not knowing them the first time they play. Imagine what it is like for someone who's never played a TBS game before... Either that, or the reaction fire really screwed me big-time (see below). But I don't think so; I wasn't particularly effective on my turn (I couldn't hit bugger all anyway, apart from about 3 yards).
As long as you concentrated your fire and had the numerical advantage (and took cover)
In Ufo:AI the aliens can move a lot, so your cover needs to be out of their reach.
Let them come to you, don't charge them.
And have groups of 2-3 soldiers to shoot at one alien.
As I say I tried that, but it didn't help. It may be due to a different issue though (see reaction fire below)
Aliens were not able to wipe out several agents with a single burst at the start.
Remember Alien grenades ?
With a kevlar-vest, soldiers can survive 1-2 hits from a distance.
I don't remember any insta-death weapons in the first missions in any of the X-com series; admittedly I haven't played EU or TFTD for years. But I was playing Apocalypse the other day, and I don't think it was that different from the earlier games in terms of general game design. When the more powerful weapons did turn up, you generally would have had the chance to research various technologies that would help you counter these more powerful weapons (psionic attacks, improved armour, shileds) as well as build up your agents attributes. With armour, agents can generally withstand at least one hit from a powerful explosive and several hits from beam weapons.
Either way, 1-2 hits is far too few hits for a kill IMO, especially in the first mission. It's not a good idea to build in insta-death in games anyway, because it doesn't give the player any chance of recovering from an error. We play games for fun; it's not supposed to be some kind of test! All it makes the player do is reload their last save game, which is an unneccesary annoyance and inconvenience. The only game insta-death works in IMO is nethack - and that's because there's no reloading
BTW, that also means that I don't think it should be too easy to kill an alien with a single agent in a single round either. Well not unless every round hits
On easy level, it should not really be a problem to win the first mission without a single casualty,
I already did that on normal - but I know that level quite well now...
My point exactly; you shouldn't need to know the game inside out to do decently on easy level!
If you think of the X-com games, the initial missions were a sort of "training ground" that acquainted you with the basic mechanics of the game,
Ok, maybe there should be 2-3 of those "first" intro-levels.
Currently, the quota is set to 0, which means the first mission can be skipped.
In fact if you think about it, they worked something like this in X-com (and this is good game design):
- The aliens got progressively harder as the game developed. This meant introducing aliens with psionic capabilities, for example. The initial aliens were generally very weak, and it was just important to concentrate your fire. But whilst the earlier aliens were generally weak attribute-wise, some would excel in one specific area. This meant that different tactics were required to defeat different aliens - a means of introducing players to the various strategies that can be used to combat different threats. New aliens were introduced slowyl to give you a chance to get used to them.
-The alien technology also got progressively stronger as the game went on. The initial aliens tended to have pretty feeble weapons (no insta-death!). New weapons were intrdocued slowly, and you were generally given the chance to have researched previous technology that could protect you from later threats by the time they turned up. For example, in Apocalypse (which, as I played i yesterday, I remember better than the others), the initial alien ray guns are no better than the human weapons. More powerful, yes, but they are also exceedingly innacurate. Alien weaponry doesn't really start to get interesting until several weeks into the game (devastator cannon).
In fact there are similiarities between the initial aliens and weapons in this respect; some aliens have many more hps than a human, but to compensate they are slow or innacurate; some weapons are more devastating if they hit, but to compensate they are less accurate. I got the impression that the aliens in AI were superior in both attributes and weapons to an insane degree - wiping out 3 agents in one burst, for example.
Not one of my agents managed to fire a single shot on the aliens' turn.
Reaction fire must be enabled each turn.
I'd suggest having it they other way round then, because I expect my units to fire if an alien turns up. The only time I can think of when I would want an agent to hold his fire is if civilians are in the way. So the default should really be to fire back. It's what you'd want most of the time; you shouldn't need to activate it each turn. Note that all other games of this type (e.g. JA, as well as X-COM) work like this - by default, if you have TUs left, your agents fire back.
It's therfore in no way intuitive that you need to do this - and it might explain why my entire team got wasted by a couple of aliens.
There is also no indication of what the difference between primary and secondary fire modes are
The effect is shown below the weapon.
But not on the 3D combat view, where it should be
i.e. you need to have it display the weapon-specific info, not primary/secondary mode. Unless you already know all the weapons (in which case you don't need the info displayed on the weapons screen OR on the combat screen), it's in no way immediately apparent. If you displayed the different weapons capabilities there, it'd be much easier to get to know the capabilities of the weapons as well. I can't be expected to remember the attributes of X different weapon types, or to continually refer to the UFO-pedia whilst I'm trying to play the first mission. So instead of saying primary mode, it should say "aimed shot". "full dose" or whatever it REALLY is.
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Anyway, it's quite possible, that it's not as impossibly hard as I first thought, but the reaction fire is really screwed if you need to remember to enable it (and need to know you have to enable it on top of this, when no other game in the genre that I know of works this way round).
You really would be well advised to stick to conventions in that sense. If someone makes a RTS game, where you can't group units, select them and centre on them with alt/ctrl and number keys, people will be flummoxed. That's the de facto standard
It's the same with the middle mouse button to scroll, right mouse to fire/turn. Don't reinvent the wheel! If you keep to conventions, new players will find it so much easier to get into the game.
