Suggestion for promoting liberation of regions

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raydeft
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue Jan 19, 2016 1:30 pm

Suggestion for promoting liberation of regions

Post by raydeft »

I've been giving some thought to what would be a "good" reward for libereating regions. I feel that there is a limited incentive for risking troops on the network tower / hq assault if you do not really need the supplies. I've also seen a number of people describe their wins and mention that they have only liberate one or two regions.

What do you think about having the removal of dark events as an incentive:
1) Either dark events are tied to specific regions, so liberating a region might result in multiple dark events being removed;
2) or there is a reward of one(two?) dark event removed for every hq assault completed.

On its own its not a major change to balance / difficulty, but it certainly would be worthwhile if you liberate a number of regions.

Thematically I see this as the improvement related to the dark event being "manufactured" at the HQ facility.
SouthpawHare
Posts: 73
Joined: Sun Feb 19, 2017 6:34 am

Re: Suggestion for promoting liberation of regions

Post by SouthpawHare »

Hm, I really like this! It makes sense both mechanically and thematically, I think.
LordYanaek
Posts: 940
Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2017 1:34 pm

Re: Suggestion for promoting liberation of regions

Post by LordYanaek »

I think it's an interesting idea but you shouldn't be able to remove more than 1 Dark Event per HQ, no matter how many are tied to the region.

If too many DE are removed Pavonis will need to find another way to balance the late game. Below Legend (i don't have experience above Commander with LW2) there is a point where you're so powerful compared to ADVENT that you can basically no longer loose to the tactical game, only ignoring Avatar for too long can cause you to loose and every tactical mission becomes a walk in the park or close to. Removing a few DE would make the late game slightly easier, removing a lot of those would make it way easier.

If the late game is balanced to be hard without DE, it will become very hard with them so unless it's the intended design that you must liberate regions regularly to avoid a downward spiral of enemy strength, removing DE should be unusual.

Another idea i had to promote liberation, and one i'll test in my next campaign (it looks like 1.3 won't come before i start a new campaign) is to increase the base infiltration time for Golden Path missions by a large factor so you basically have to liberate (or at least start the chain) in order to infiltrate those missions in a reasonable amount of time. Of course this will only work if you can't stealth those missions with a pair of Shinobis.
chrisb
Pavonis Dev
Posts: 364
Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2017 8:43 pm

Re: Suggestion for promoting liberation of regions

Post by chrisb »

I've never really thought of liberating many regions as something you 'should' do in a campaign. I think it should be harder than it currently is to discourage liberating half the map. It may not be apparent at first, but it's quite possible to break the strategy layer through liberations.

The only place I see liberating regions being something you 'should' do are progression of the story, and only then is the 1st one a requirement the others are merely there to lower infil time on the golden path.

I also agree with Yanaek that being able to remove DEs in some reliable way is a bad idea. The ayys only have 3 sources of difficulty. Alert, Force and DEs. Alert is already controllable and removable, sometimes too much so. Force is a constant increase but more subtle and inline with most of your advancement. DEs are the only thing you can't control well or predict occuring. This is what makes the tac layer interesting across new campaigns. And really it's only the mid-game that is most affected. They are few in the early game, and by late game you have near all of them. Late game is already hard to balance because of how varied the mid-game can be. So something that makes the late-game easier would simply require the mid-game to be much harder, or Force would have to be scaled up, leading to a nightmare of an end-game if you don't get rid of DEs.

You'd also have to account for the RNG nature of being able to counter them. I've had campaigns where I had countered 4 DEs before end of May, and others where I didn't even see a DE mission until June. Having a reliable way of removing them, along with missions to counter them makes the difficulty too RNG to balance.

Of course if I was tuning, I would make them all permanent, take away the ability to counter them and force Vigilance to spawn in March :P
Jadiel
Posts: 214
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 9:28 am

Re: Suggestion for promoting liberation of regions

Post by Jadiel »

Liberating regions is already massively rewarding, especially during the early/midgame. You remove 5 points of alert from the map and possibly increase vigilance also (depends on how much vigilance was in that region), which is a huge setback to the Avatar project for the aliens. You get a huge bonus to supply drops (if you go supply) and the possibility of more engineers/scientists (if you go recruit). HQs give a crazy amount of resources also.

I don't think there's really any reason to incentivise liberation any more than at the moment...
darkerevent
Posts: 103
Joined: Sat Mar 04, 2017 12:12 pm

Re: Suggestion for promoting liberation of regions

Post by darkerevent »

I'm pretty fine with "Liberate two or three regions, then build up your economy, make more contacts, and win the game" being the general flow of the campaign. As cool as the liberation mission chains are, any that get completed beyond the first are essentially sidequests, and I like that it feels that way. I like that I can choose to pursue more liberations if good opportunities present themselves or if I feel I need the rewards, without feeling forced into doing it massively across the world.
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