Suggested fix to supply raid, troop column, HQ 0% infiltration abuse

[Doc Savage NDMF]

We're looking at three things on this:

1) Reducing max allowed squad size to 8
2) Requiring a minimum infiltration % to start the mission in concealment
3) Requiring a minimum infiltration % or else the enemies start in yellow alert (able to shoot on activation)

Definitely not interested in #1. There's enough small squad Long Wait, Avoid and Run missions in the game already.

#2 should be a thing for many missions, not just this one. 0% infiltration is basically yah, we just showed up to shoot stuff, now where is it..? You should never start concealed at 0% as you haven't infiltrated anything more than your undergarments let alone a mission site. I like the previously suggested idea of "staged infiltration", where not 100% means some of your squad isn't hidden. Make the math easy; 50% would mean half your squad is concealed and half isn't. You have to give things time or you just don't get everything set up properly and you aren't fully prepared.

#3 is a no brainer when you just show up without concealment. You get spotted, you get shot at. You make noise, more enemies show up and shoot at you. That part of the game works as it is. If you don't take tthe time to prep, you aren't going to get the benefit of concealment.

The issue IMO is arbitrary "let's make this harder just because reasons" vs functional "risk vs reward plausible game mechanic". Just cutting the team size doesn't fix anything, it just makes the pool of players that can do the missions smaller and increases the number of "regular" players complaining they can't do the mission, can't get supplies, snowball into countless discussions etc etc etc.

The whole infiltration mechanic works really well. Just need to remove the ability to "not infiltrate" working out to starting concealed. It should not have ever been that way to begin with. No infiltration should equate to you're not sneaking in to anywhere. Put a premium on 100% equating to a full concealed squad, make the time and intel pay off. Make the role play of getting the information, planning the routes and strategies and getting your people in where they can do some damage worthwhile.

Cheers..!

[LeaderEnemyBoss]

One related issue that should probably be investigated are the black market values of goods in general. Even when supply raids are nerfed, hq assaults will continue to provide huge amounts of bodies. Say you have 50 trooper bodies lying around. The amount of supplies you get per body can vary between (i think) 5 and 12 (!) when you are lucky (high positve buypricevariance value and the interestpricemultiplier of 2). This means depending on your luck (and how well you understand manipulating the odds for interest rolls on the blackmarket) you may get between 250 and 600 supplies for your corpse pile. The variance is huge! Ironically my newest mod (shameless plug: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =873562794) made this whole issue more apparent to me (as before I often was to lazy to manually remove items from my hqinventory).

I strongly suggest to lower InterestPriceMultiplier in XComGameData to maybe 1.5 or something - at least for higher difficulties.

[Jadiel]

If you want some more feedback on this, for one thing it would to good to know what exactly the goal is. Is the goal to make 0% infiltration outright impossible? Twice as hard as currently? Do you want only say 5% of players to be able to do them well? What is the goal?

Without knowing the goal, I can give some limited guesswork which is that none of them alone will be enough of a deterrent.

1) will not change anything alone, because honestly I think people like joinrbs can do the work of 10 with 8. In my own practice, I find I usually have a couple "carry" guys who aren't doing much but soaking up exp anyways, so 8 instead of 10 alone doesn't provide a deterrent. It also makes it easier to find enough cover for everyone

2) doesn't really change much, the strategy is still find a corner and wait until someone runs into you. Since the mobs are not on yellow alert, the first pack then runs into you essentially behaves as if they had run into you while concealed

3) alone, doesn't change much because your first concealment ambush should be super effective, this essentially just makes it so you get maybe shot at once or twice extra in the entire mission (on that first ambush)

I would honestly guess just try all 3 simultaneously. I think it is OK at this point to punish a little bit too hard for 0% (I just don't ever want to go back to farming these things at this point) since you guys are also making more middle man stuff (smash and grab).

I'm not even sure all 3 is enough honestly because people will still bring a shinobi who does start in concealment and you can create all sorts of shenanigans with that cherrypicking good ambush points.

I don't think you're looking at it right. (I think) the problem is not that it's too easy, it's that the choice architecture is out-of-whack. Choosing how many soldiers to bring should be a difficult decision, similar to when you're doing an HQ assault. Is that 10th guy really worth an extra 6 days infiltration time? Should I only take 8 and then my squad will be back in time for the invasion I think the aliens are planning? It's an interesting decision, and one that is easy to get wrong.

With (less than 3 day) Supply Raids though, the decision isn't very interesting. You take 10 men, or you ignore it. The challenge is first to come up with a solution which fixes the decision making, and makes 5, 6, 7 or 8 (or even 9 or 10?) man squads the right answer some of the time, depending on the circumstances (ideally with 6-7 men being the right answer most of the time), and then worry about calibrating difficulty afterwards.

I agree with you that implementing all 3 is probably the best approach if that's what's on the table. If it were me, I'd add an effect which attracts the aliens to your deployment zone (you know, one of the fail effects from lampposts) if infiltration is really low (i.e. less than 10%).

[trihero]

(I think) the problem is not that it's too easy,

I mean there's a lot of ways to look at the problem, it's kind of like is it half empty is it half full? Is it that it's too easy, or too rewarding? Which is why I asked in the very beginning of my post: what is the goal of the changes? If the goal is clear, then the solutions can be evaluated in light of the goal.

But you do have a great point, it is something indeed I've realized that the whole 0% thing really bypasses the "fatigue" system entirely but I didn't address just by looking at those 3 solutions that were presented.

I think perhaps the minimum infiltration suggested by the devs is trying to introduce some "fatigue" but any of those alone again are pretty inconsequential, I would still just launch at 0% and not look back.

[nightwyrm]

I have been wondering about something. It seems what really trivializes these 0% Supply Raid/Troop Columns missions is your ability to just camp in a corner of the map in high cover and wait for pods to arrive. What if you just can't do that? What if you can't take 20 turns scouting around the map with your stealth shinobi? How easy would the Legend tester find the missions if they actually have to move into the Fog of War and try to engage things on the alien's ground?

I don't know how best to accomplish this but here's a thought:

What if for Enemy Material missions, you flip the LW2 mission scripts around. In most missions, you're the side running and conceding the battlefield. In these missions, it's the Advent retreating and conceding battlefield. The in-game justification isn't too hard. The Advent forces has been ambushed and is disadvantaged. They're pulling out, limiting their loses and regrouping. The more Advent you're able to kill before they retreat, the more bodies/supplies/alloy/whatever you're able to get. You have a timer, but you win after the timer and your reward is pegged to how many you kill. You can choose to be safe and camp and get fewer rewards or you can go aggro and try to kill lots of stuff for lots of reward. You could peg the timer to your infiltration (more infiltration = more turns) and that provides a natural balancing mechanism. Low infiltration gives you bigger/more pods but you also have less time to kill. Or maybe the number of enemies don't get higher and you just get a lower timer at low infiltration since the less soldier time spent is already a benefit. Someone smarter than me is gonna have to work that out.

There are other ways to accomplish these gameplay objectives, but the idea is that you want to reward non-camping.

[seananigans]

I have been wondering about something. It seems what really trivializes these 0% Supply Raid/Troop Columns missions is your ability to just camp in a corner of the map in high cover and wait for pods to arrive. What if you just can't do that? What if you can't take 20 turns scouting around the map with your stealth shinobi? How easy would the Legend tester find the missions if they actually have to move into the Fog of War and try to engage things on the alien's ground?

I don't know how best to accomplish this but here's a thought:

What if for Enemy Material missions, you flip the LW2 mission scripts around. In most missions, you're the side running and conceding the battlefield. In these missions, it's the Advent retreating and conceding battlefield. The in-game justification isn't too hard. The Advent forces has been ambushed and is disadvantaged. They're pulling out, limiting their loses and regrouping. The more Advent you're able to kill before they retreat, the more bodies/supplies/alloy/whatever you're able to get. You have a timer, but you win after the timer and your reward is pegged to how many you kill. You can choose to be safe and camp and get fewer rewards or you can go aggro and try to kill lots of stuff for lots of reward. You could peg the timer to your infiltration (more infiltration = more turns) and that provides a natural balancing mechanism. Low infiltration gives you bigger/more pods but you also have less time to kill.

That's an interesting suggestion, and works both thematically and balance...-ly for troop columns and supply raids. I'm not entirely sure there's any possible mechanic they can use for enemy evacuation, though, other than maybe silently killing off un-discovered aliens (leaving no corpse or clue they were even there). I'd be curious to hear from people more experienced with X2's code and moddability.

[DerAva]

One other idea would be caps/limits:
Let's say the Black Market only has a certain budget they can spend each month on buying corpses. Once they spent all their money they won't be buying anything from you until their reserves refresh in the next month (similar to traders in Rimworld who only have a certain amount of silver to buy your crap).

In a similar vein you could also cap the XP a single soldier can get from these missions.

This way you can limit the rewards for these missions (XP and supplies) while not touching the actual mission itself, giving the player the option to either infiltrate them for an easier mission, or do them with 0% for higher risk, and the bigger reward being that the soldiers aren't unavailable for this long.

[saroscycler]

Make rewards scale with infiltration percentage? Massive reinforcements at lower infiltration?

[Gri23]

If infiltration less than 100% - advent reinforcements every second turn
If infiltration less than 50% - advent reinforcements every turn

Reduce rewards is not effective. Because loot, exp for kills...
Reduce squad size too. XCOM can kill everything in 6 mans anyway)

[seananigans]

I really hope squad size reduction isn't truly on the table. A major part of my enjoyment from LW mods is the squad size increases allowing for large fights.

[JackDT]

I don't think even putting in place all of Johnnylump's suggestions will curb the problem unless other changes are made. You can still win, Joinrbs just did it with 7 soldiers and no concealment. So it's still the case that once you can beat one 0% Supply Mission the campaign breaks -- your troops aren't tied up in Infiltrating so you can do it over and over, you completely stop the Avatar Countdown (witness the Legend streamers who have like 3 pips and are at endgame items), and you don't even really need to do many other mission types because you get so many resources of so many different types from Supply Raids. So it still breaks the game it just makes reaching that threshold a little tougher.

Joinrbs current houserule is simply that he can't do missions unless they are >50% infiltrated which seems to made them showup in about the right proportion in the campaign, and requires you tying up your troops.

The general idea of inverting the rewards is interesting. Because right now 0% also gives you the most corpses, which are quite valuable. But if that was flipped so instead at 0% infiltration you get 0% rewards (or maybe 10%, and you still get soldier XP of course). At >100% you get 100%. Then there's a nice middle ground where you can hit like 60 or 70 percent and decide whether it's worth it, whether it's worth dropping a squad size down to knock the rewards up to 60, etc.

I don't know if Intel gives you a linear increase in detection, but it should probably have diminishing returns because this would make it even more important to find Supply Runs early. Although I think *generally* the rewards should be nerfed.

All that said, it doesn't really fix the tactical abuse you can do where you setup in a edge, rocket nearby cover or whatever, and deny the AI a safe route to get to you so it breaks.

Big picture, Supply Raids need to be one mission type that isn't dramatically more important or rewarding than everything else in the game.

[josna238]

Am I the only one that think that going on a mission with 33+ enemies and 8+ turns to evac is a VERY RISKY decission?

[Kharneth]

I don't understand this topic... The only reason for the problem iff that supply raids it almost imposible to detect with a reasonable infiltration time, the "abuse" like the title said is only because the game force you to do it.
Make the column ambush, supply raid show In a racional time and people start to infiltrate it or make another source of supplies, corpses

[justdont]

The general idea of inverting the rewards is interesting.

Seconding that. The investment should be proportional to rewards, "inverted" infiltration works well for open fight / grab all corpses missions such as supply raids. Run it at 0%, and you'll get extremely low amount of enemies and barely any supplies at all (and very low XP). Run it at 100% - and you'll get a proper mission (probably not like current 0% raid, but maybe a tad easier and lower on rewards), wait all the way to 200% - and you'll get lots of enemies and lots of loot.
You can give it a lore reason of "striking at the right time" - too early and ADVENT just retreats destroying supplies, but if you wait for a perfect moment, you'll get all the loot (but also all the guards).

However, it will certainly require some additional explanations as to how such missions are different and why they're "backwards". Otherwise quite a lot of players will be annoyed that somehow more infiltration gives them more enemies.

Same could be applied to the troop column, probably with additional caveat that you're not getting -1 advent strength if you're not infiltrated enough and killed only a few stragglers, missing the main force.

Make the column ambush, supply raid show In a racional time and people start to infiltrate it or make another source of supplies, corpses

At the moment there's no reason to do so. You will need to spend lots of your soldiers' time BUT you'll get less rewards for your trouble. Longer times will simply mean that I'm still doing them at 0%, but if for some reason I don't have enough strong soldiers for a raid, I can send a much weaker team, infiltrate, and still get some loot. Or just wait until my main force return from whatever other mission they're doing.

[Jacke]

I'm of the school of game design where I try to apply the similar real-world situations to a game and adapt from them. So I think about how a real insurgency would play out.

1. Deploying and infiltrating before the mission should take a minimum time. Even for a hot LZ drop from the Skyranger, they're going to be the flight time. If infiltrating on foot from a distant LZ, it should take longer, a minimum of a day just to get the right time of day to assault.

2. Longer infiltration times should allow the XCOM squad to pick a better approach and time for the final assault on the objective. This can mean changing the number of enemy already around the objective and how fast they can get reinforcements.

3. Longer infiltration should mean the enemy isn't clumped around the objective and XCOM hasn't deployed right next to half the enemy on the map.

4. Longer infiltration should mean a fixed Evac Zone can be closer to the objective.

5. All missions should have a chance of being discovered with enough time before expiry to allow a good sized XCOM squad to infiltrate to 100% or better.

All this means even a "0%" infiltration should take a minimum amount of time before deploying on the map. And XCOM won't just face more enemy. Half or more of them could be right beyond their field of view when deployed and the rest tight around the objective.

But the player should not be forced to use 0% supply raids and troop columns because that's all that can be done with short expiry times.

[SouthpawHare]

So, here's a thought. Instead of adjusting the missions that are imbalancing the game due to dropping so many corpses... What if corpses themselves had diminishing returns? What if the amount you could sell corpses for kept dropping with each one, until they were all but worthless after an extent?

After all, from a realistic simulation POV, you have to wonder who keeps buying them at substantial cost by the dozens. It's the same situation as in many RPGs in which you head to town and off-load all your vendor trash to the vendor for money - you have to ask, how are they going to benefit from them?

[fowlJ]

So, here's a thought. Instead of adjusting the missions that are imbalancing the game due to dropping so many corpses... What if corpses themselves had diminishing returns? What if the amount you could sell corpses for kept dropping with each one, until they were all but worthless after an extent?

After all, from a realistic simulation POV, you have to wonder who keeps buying them at substantial cost by the dozens. It's the same situation as in many RPGs in which you head to town and off-load all your vendor trash to the vendor for money - you have to ask, how are they going to benefit from them?

That would be interesting, but supply raids would still be the most valuable normal mission in the game, even if not by as much, and would still net you a bunch of experience, alloys, and elerium. A pretty complicated change to the black market system that only makes it a little bit more difficult to break the game's economy over your knee probably isn't worth it.