Stealth Gameplay: Tweaking the Skill / Luck Balance

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aklos
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Joined: Fri Mar 03, 2017 3:04 pm

Stealth Gameplay: Tweaking the Skill / Luck Balance

Post by aklos »

Games that focus on stealth usually center around reconnaissance and timing, but LW2 stealth missions feel like a dice roll on patrol patterns pushed forward by an uncompromising mission timer. It's possible that after a hundred hours of gameplay I'd develop an intuitive sense of the AI and find myself more reliably predicting its behavior, but I think two changes could make these missions feel a bit more skill-driven from the outset:

1) Show pod orientation on the first turn.

Right now, if you uncover an enemy pod on your first turn they have no orientation. They face random directions that have nothing to do with their intended trajectory. This lack of information is a gotcha element. It's possible to throw away one of the precious few "extra" turns you get waiting for the pod to establish orientation, and it's possible to build that throwaway turn into the mission timers, but players have no way to discover that intent (if it exists) and when it comes down to it, missing information is not good gameplay.

2) Shorter pod movements when changing trajectories.

Some enemy pods seem to patrol around the block. Others wander aimlessly through playgrounds or loiter on the objective. Whatever their pattern (or lack), the game design does not provide the means or time to find out. This means that instead of a stealth game built on puzzle-like patrol patterns, we have a stealth game built on high risk sprints through occasionally unwinnable maps. This isn't going to change, but given the constraints, I think that slowing down a pod's movement anytime they change trajectories could provide an attentive commander just enough time to react and feel like they're playing a game of managed (not blind) luck. I'd suggest that when a pod changes trajectories, it moves 1/3 to 1/2 the usual distance.

QoL Bonus: Squad memory of known alien locations.

Soldiers will attempt to path around red squares if movement allows. But the red squares can disappear if another soldier moves first and loses the line of sight. This is incredibly fiddly and unforgiving. I'd love for the game to remember where aliens are for the entirety of my turn so that the last soldier doesn't mistakenly run through the bad.
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