gozer

terror missions should feel like TERROR missions. And also, they should make a bit of sense in the context of the game "lore" *** long incoherent rant warning *** so part one ... the reason: aliens landing to set off a bomb (aka mission with timer) ... nope, no way. With bunch of bomber UFOs appearing all over the globe every few days and every decently sized UFO being able to sink warships, they don't need to bother with landings to do damage, certainly not when they start using UFOs of cruiser size or larger. so, option B. Aliens landing to set up some sort of device (let's say psi emitter with large radius effect). Large and relatively complicated device that needs some time and quite bit of work to be set up, start working and needs to be running for a while to show effect. The time needed can be explained by the fact that it can't be simply mounted on the outside of UFO (won't survive atmospheric entry etc), so the ship needs to land and aliens need to move it outside of UFO and assemble/activate it. Or maybe later have some sort of specialized UFO with the device mounted directly in the UFO, but it still needs some perparation time to get operational (can't work from inside of the UFO through the hull directly and so the aliens need a while to pull down the canvas roof of their cruiser convertible ). The device should be located right in front of the UFO (on the upper floor in case of specialized UFO) and should be reasonably durable not to be destroyed by a few random hits. On the other hand it should be destructible if enough force/explosives is used (so you can't/shouldn't use it as cover) and you should really really try NOT to destroy it because bad things would happen, well, you'd basically do the 'terror' part of the terror mission for the aliens, the part you are trying to prevent when doing terror mission (except the effect when blowing it up would be very localized while the properly running device would affect much larger area, maybe even entire city, that's why the aliens are bothering landing and assembling it instead of just dumping it on the ground and blowing it up themselves). Engineers can disable the device later after you secure the area (bonus reward for the mission? money/tech/resources/funding?). As for the device, instead of timer after which some bomb or one-time-effect device goes off and mission fails (many players really hate that, me included) let's make it some real terror device. Something designed not to do direct damage (because that really can be done a lot faster and easier from air or orbit) but instead something that is designed to scare people, crush their morale, make them panic and soil their pants in general. Some PSI emitter that in terms of gameplay affects/lowers skills of Xenonauts and the effect gets stronger the longer the mission lasts. It should affect all skills except strength and hp, with primary effect being bravery/morale penalty (certainly lower maximum bravery, maybe even lower rate of regaining it after panicking, but instead of the usual panick/berserk/run reaction the result of low morale should mostly be similar to suppression), also it should have pretty noticeable effect on reflex skill (harder to concentrate/react). Smaller effect on TU's and accuracy. At the beginning of mission the device should start at "low" strength and after certain ammount of turns the effect should get stronger, up to a certain maximum (some reasonable percentage penalty, this would probably take a bit of testing to find propper balance, something that can't be easily ignored but isn't completely crippling). Or maybe remove the maximum limitation and just tweak the effect increases to allow it to go into extreme effect strength if player really drags his feet and mission takes really excessively long time to finish. (higher bravery increase in mission results after such mission?) ------------------------ part two ... terror (or lack of it) ok, let's face it, civilians are completely expendable, disposable and useless. The game regularly displays messages (on strategic map) that somewhere outside of my radar coverage UFO has shot down airliner with 100+ passengers, or sunk a ship, strafed a train or abducted a few hundred, total losses around the world are climbing into thousands or tens of thousands ... why exactly should anyone pretend to care about those 5-10 civilians in a mission? Especially when they spend most of their time blocking doorways or getting into my line of fire. Sorry, but the current terror missions aren't any different from any other mission, except there are a few more civies on map (and the already mentioned "UFO not included"). Come on, that isn't terror mission, that is just aliens bullying a few random civilians, obviously the slowest and dumbest ones (that explains their AI) who weren't smart enough to run away fast enough. And the idea of aliens bothering to land huge friggin ship with 20+ terror troops just to curbstomp those 10 civilians on the map is really pretty ridiculous. So, terror mission revamp (maybe not all terror missions, but at least one version of it). A little bigger map, most likely city map, with UFO (and the PSI device next to it) somewhere on the map. Lots of civilians (30+? 50? more?). OK, this would affect the "enemy movement" part of turn quite a bit in the beginning of mission, but it should be bearable and it should get better quite fast. So ... civilians. They wouldn't need exactly good AI (and they are pretty dumb even in normal missions), after all they are panicking civilians currently being very busy pissing their pants because aliens have landed and are killing them and assembling some sort of terror device that is messing with their brains. So, aliens have lots of targets to fire at. Lots of weapon blasts, lots of screaming, lots of civilians dying all around the map (it would also cut down the enemy turn length). Ideally the civilians should try to move towards the Xenonauts dropship landing point (maybe make some sort of evacuation area behind the dropship at the edge of map civilians are trying to reach), after all military helicopter that is obviously not alien has landed some distance away and soldiers are shooting at aliens so trying to head in that direction doesn't should like the worst idea, getting the soldiers between themselves and the aliens sounds even better. Random movement, with a lots of panicking and back and forth running, etc, etc. That would mean that Xenonauts are fanning out from their dropship trying to locate UFO, lots of civilians are converging on the dropship trying to get to 'safety' and aliens spread all over the map are shooting at everything that moves, lots of weapons fire everywhere, Xenonauts trying to clear the crowd with stun grenades or stun batons, often having to risk shooting at aliens with mob civilians randomly getting in their way (machinegun reaction fire through the crowd?), Reaper or two thrown in the mix, zombies shambling through the crowd and clawing at the civilians, armed civilians/military/police panicking and shooting at pretty much everything that moves (aliens/civilians/xenonauts). General chaos in first few turns that would start to drop down noticeably fast with all the casualties (even with 50 civilians at the start there wouldn't be that many of them still standing at lets say round 5), creating something that would really feel like ... you know, a real terror mission. But with all the bodies scattered around the map would at least look a lot like terror mission site. For those civilians lucky enough to survive the terror mission (still alive on map, or evacuated from the extraction point near dropship, or stunned on the ground so aliens lose interest) there would be some small reward in mission results, but the logic here would be that you aren't fighting to save those few people in the immediate vicinity of UFO, you are trying to stop aliens from activating terror device that would affect thousands more in much wider radius. Trying to save civilians on the map is barely a secondary concern, they are more of a distraction (or obstacle even), certainly not mission objective. And this would introduce some "new" challenges ... having to spend TUs to deal with civilians (stun them, or having to move to avoid shooting through them), it would make area effect weapons like rocket launchers a lot less usefull if you want to avoid huge casualties (or maybe screw that, nothing says 'crowd control' like incendiary rocket), machineguns and shotguns would have similar problem. Ammo would be more of a concern, especially with heavier Reaper infestation so you'd have to be more carefull with loadouts and pack more spare ammo, no more "I'll get through the mission with two clips". Stun grenades and stun batons would be extremely usefull. There would be incentive to not cause civilian casualties yourself, not just because the reward at the end of mission (who cares?) but because civilians would serve as usefull "human shield" and also as distraction, something for aliens to focus on and shoot at instead of your soldiers. On the other hand you couldn't ignore civilians completely because panicking police officer McUseless could randomly decide to blast his shotgun at one of your soldiers because that guy in Buzzard armor suit (or Predator armor) clutching laser sniper rifle doesn't exactly look like typical human soldier ... so better zap him sith stun baton just to be sure. Precision weapons like sniper rifles would be usefull to be able to pick your targets and also there would be pretty big advantages to using higher ground (firing from 2nd floor or using Buzzard suit to get sniper on the roof) as it woud allow you to fire over the heads of the crowd below. And instead of the boring and hated "mission fails after 10 turns" limit there woud be pretty good incentive to push forward and keep pressure on the aliens, because fighting them would be easier while there are still civilians around distracting them and while the terror device is still at low power setting and not draining/lowering your skills severely. The longer the mission lasts the more difficult it gets ... less civilians to distract aliens, higher skill penalties from the terror device. OK, I'll stop there because the post is getting hideously long, but I guess you get the idea where I'm going with this. But I'll repeat it again (sort of TL:DR version): terror mission should really feel like TERROR mission

how about "checklist" somewhere in options where player can configure at what events he wants the game to do automatic save? End of day, ufo shot down, transpert leaving base, mission start, every Xth turn in combat, ...

cool, thanks for info

awesome, any hints about how soon is soon? another question, will 0.34 saves be compatible with new version? I wanted to give Xenonauts another go and I'm wondering if I should wait for 0.35

I hope not

exactly, UFO:ET Gold is just a cut down version of B-Man's mod ... avoid this version like plague. Anyone who wants to really enjoy the game should get non-Gold version of UFO:ET and use either full version of B-Man's mod or Grayfiend's Unimod (not sure what the current state of bman's mod is, but Grayfiend is still working on Unimod and just reseased new version in Jan 2012)

Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos the game was absolutely awesome, especially with the various community mods installed (there were quite a few) ... and was one of few space sims to actualy use newtonian physics with stuff like movement inertia etc (instead of behaving in airplanes-in-space kind of way most space sims use). highly recommended to any space sim fan

what did the trick for me was editing the toolinfo.sqlite file and set the updates as installed so Desura doesn't try to install them. I have these installed already (it is mostly stuff like directx, .net framework etc), but in case there is something I don't have the file even contains links for download of the updates from desura website, so I can download and install these manualy in case anyone runs into similar problem, just edit the file using SQLite database browser or similar application and set the values to 3 (Desura client later changes the value to 1, but if you set it to 1 right away the client just crashes)

thank you, it is nice to have option to install the game without Desura client

it would be nice to have option of automatic resolution of ground combat ... at least for small UFOs (and maybe medium later, based on some technology or something like that). but certainly not for large UFOs or terror sites (or whatever their equivalent is in Xenonauts)

well, more aliens and more alien attacks would also need some tweaking of the prices of stuff found in missions. I remember that playing on lower difficulties in UFO:EU and TFTD was actually much more difficult money-wise ... kind of unintended consequence of higher difficulties was you didn't have problems with resources When playing on high difficulties combat was harder but on the other hand I never had to manufacture grenades of ammo for alien weapons (I got everything I needed from missions) and I had tons of elerium/zrbite to manufacture whatever I wanted and to fuel the advanced aircrafts. I also had tons of money from selling alien weapons and corpses ... so even though combat was harder and I had more casualties there was no problem with hiring (and then paying their salaries every month) lots of soldiers to compensate for the losses. On lower difficulty settings elerium/zrbite was quite a problem (less UFOs to get it from, and if I didn't catch them on ground the elerium/zrbite usualy got blown up when I shot UFO down) so manufacturing stuff and fueling Avengers etc. was quite a problem. Also with less income from selling alien weapons and stuff I had to rely much more on income from monthly funding ... and even if the game was going really good that really wasn't some huge pile of money - with couple bases to pay maintenance for and lots of soldiers/scientists/technicians on payrol monthly payments were barely able to cover month-to-month expenses

yeah, you're probably right. creating different sets of AI patterns for different difficulty levels would probably be a lot of work maybe just use different numbers of aliens in ground missions instead

It'd be great if on top of the easy/medium/hard difficulty settings there was also option of custom difficulty, where player could choose all the different settings influenced by difficulty (enemy AI difficulty, ufo spawn rate, how often aliens try to attack player bases, numbers of ...)

awesome, exactly what I wanted to hear

instalation ends with this message. seems to be Desura client problem ... game file download seems to finish OK, then another window opens labeled "Downloading dependencies" (about 98MB download), download finishes and then the error message appears. and since Desura seems to lack any instalation logs or debugging tools there isn't much I can do to locate what causes the problem