I think 5-10 turns is a good mission time to have, at 10 turns you will already start feeling it will become more like a slog, but 5 can be very quick…if you have set out your moves pretty much from the get-go like can happen if you are rushing lairs.
unlike VOLAND I do feel skill spam has to be somehow curbed, note that there are many ways to do this that don’t even require cooldowns or turn limits, I just think that these are the easiest to implement. (for example to limit skill spam you you could have teams that mentally exert itself a lot…lose significantly more stamina on the strategy layer…this is just one example)
personally I feel the fun of a longer mission should be from back and forths between the AI combatants and the player. how to achieve this…well there are a significant amount of options, but I don’t know what option would be best. but I would avoid:
-slowing the player, you can add mission length by making players slow, causing a higher movement tax…moving on its own though isn’t that interesting.
-making enemies tankier, bullet sponges come with the drawback that positioning becomes much less important then simple damage output…on the other hand very high lethality only makes weapons valuable as long as they hit certain tresholds and forces the player to kill quick or he loses men so that isn’t the best option either.
-map blinding the player, when a player is blind he will play more cautiously…as he is afraid of losing troops or getting crippled from the fog of war, this creates tension. however, as this game has an overwatch system it would also promote using this constantly…at the moment the game actually does the opposite is most cases (the majority of pandorans, save perception head tritons have less perception/stealth then the player…allowing the player to make a plan and get its troops into position before the fight actually starts) nor does it have pod activation where an enemy gets free movement…
from the above I actually feel that the game is already at or very close to where it has to be, players can get into the action fairly quick. they are not afraid of moving about because they can’t see anything or would be instantly killed by a single misplaced trooper. now all these things can be pulled completely out of proportion with certain skills and abilities…but the assumption was that those problems where worked out.
my main problem happens when the fight is on, very often I’m pretty much forced to disable or kill enemies outright because you cannot allow a back and forth to happen. not just because that 40 dmg grenade launcher can bug out and delimb my troops with an 80 dmg blast, but because the enemy happily waddles into the middle of the open and uses it…and it won’t ever miss. the enemy is not afraid of getting shot and will barge through overwatches to land melee, explosive and psychic attacks…I only occasionally get back-and forth gameplay with faction troops, tritons (not kamikazi iconoclast) and MG crabs (if they don’t also have a launcher).
extended fights are hard to generate, because as soon as you have the power to plow down all the grenade launching crabs before they can get a grenade off into your team, you also have the power to do the same to the MG ones…unless they happen to be well covered and reasonably far away. so I feel one of the ways longer mission times could be generated is by introducing more gun toting enemies that have high self preservation. (in effect the only one that comes close to this at the moment is the triton)
to make the issue even worse, extended fights would automatically link into the overall difficulty of a fight, what a hard extended fight is for a player with a lower skill rating could be much easier and faster for a player with a higher skill rating, and the speeds would vary from position to position in the game ( player A might be awesome in the startup but poor by endgame, while player B is better at endgame tactics), or sheer luck (position of bases, timing of evacuated/lost missions/lost troops/available recruits) on top of the selected difficulty. I think this is the problem that the DDA is intended to resolve, but I think the current DDA cannot define the problem clearly enough to work with my vision of an extended fight.
now my post is starting to degrade into ramblings, so I’m going to end the comment here.