Chris

Nice art there. But that's more of a Fallout-style industrial and post-apocalyptic look though, don't you think?

If that's a Caesan Guard / Noncom, you've extremely unlucky not to kill him in one with a shotgun blast from an adjacent square. They're already weaker than humans so I won't be nerfing their HP any further I'm afraid. Will bear in mind your comments on reaction fire accuracy.

They are experimental after all...have you actually played the build? That's not particularly useful feedback as is. Also, a US Marine who has a desk job would be able to take just as many bullets as one assigned to combat duties (and probably wouldn't be a significantly worse shot either, having still gone through training). Non-com doesn't mean "civilian", it means not assigned to combat duties. Why should the aliens be different?

TrashMan - True, I suppose. That is a viable alternative research model. We didn't go down that route though, and it's a bit late to change everything now The degradation number you're after is in config.xml, as Gauddlike mentions above.

The balance patch is available now and can be downloaded here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8660-V20-Experimental-Balance-Patch-1-Available%21 I've sorta lost track of what this thread is talking about now, but I don't really want to show armour on the damage numbers as I think damage alone is fine. And you're lucky to even have that! In my day, we didn't have damage numbers at all... *grumble grumble, shakes fist*

@Tobbzn - that'll be a missing sub-map, which probably means you're missing some files (unless other people experience it too, which means I've forgotten to upload a map). Try going into Steam and Properties >> Local Files >> Validate files, then install the balance patch again. That should re-download any maps you're missing. @All - yes, adding more variation back into the accuracy zoom levels may be worthwhile. Part of the reason fire costs were slightly increased was because they are so much more effective now, but it does render the entire system a bit meaningless if the lowest accuracy shots are always the most useful. I kinda just wanted to stop players being able to compensate for bad soldier accuracy by spending more TU...otherwise it's just that more accurate soldiers have higher effective TU. But perhaps that's not a bad thing in itself?

No worries, the resolution fix alone makes their project worthwhile. Good luck with it.

Whenever I play the OG, I find the aliens extremely accurate with their reaction fire. I think they take aimed shots with their reaction fire so their effective accuracy % is 70-80% or more, which is in-line with what (I think) they have here. The accuracy levels in this patch are intentionally very high. Quite possibly they're too high...but it could also be you're not used to it. Solver, the fact you're having to play slow and methodical to avoid getting murdered by the aliens isn't necessarily a bad thing - really, that's how the game should be played. It's just there's consequences to not doing it now. This is conjecture, of course. More than happy to listen to what people are saying about it and possibly we will tone down accuracy. For what it's worth, my own experience was more like Shrelock's - I got murdered in the early part of the mission, and had to rethink my tactics because I was going to lose if I didn't treat the enemy with more respect. Even lone Seb non-coms felt scary and dangerous when I saw one. But I think I could minimise casualties if I played more carefully.

Research that gives no in-game benefit and just serves as lore does not take scientist time to research, and if your interceptors are shot down they are put out of action for a number of weeks instead of being permanently destroyed. The latter has come about being we improved the balance and added complexity to the air combat, just as infinite ammo is part of a larger upgrade of the ground combat to make it more balanced and complex. To be honest, I would suggest you just go here. We're making a game that is more complex and balanced than X-Com overall, but you seem to want every tiny facet of the game to be the same or more complex and things just don't work that way. You will at least still be happy with the original though.

It'd be interesting if people would post which they would prefer to be displayed, if there was only room for one - the updated stat, or the increase (so "ACC +1" or "ACC 67").

Just updated the archive file so the debug panel on the Geoscape is disabled!

Hmmm, I don't think I've ever changed a feature in the game simply because people on the forum (or elsewhere) don't like it. You need a persuasive argument to get me to change a feature, as there will always be people in favour of / against any idea. It's not a simple task to allow the player to enable / disable various options as you ask. If we include those options in the game when it is released, we'll need to make sure the player has an enjoyable and balanced game if they select those options. If it's a checkbox in the game, we're implicitly endorsing the player playing the game with those modes active...and I don't think it's possible to make the game as enjoyable with them enabled. So it's really not simple at all. However, all of those things can be modded into the game by anyone with a text editor, destructible interceptors being as simple as a true / false switch. They'll have to figure out the balancing themselves, though. Most people seem to think it's only a small change, as you do, so I'm sure you guys can handle the balancing too However, purchasing ammunition is unnecessary micromanagement in my view. Not only does it require an entirely new "Buy" UI screen for the game, it doesn't bring anything useful to the game. Clips are so cheap compared to fighter jets that every player would just start the game by buying 200 rifle clips (with minimal effect on their finances) and then never have to worry about it for the rest of the game. The point isn't that it's an impossible amount of work for the player, it's just that it is essentially pointless work. EDIT - and for the flares, we've made them unlimited because they cost more AP to throw. AP is the main resource in combat so it's not really making the game easier to give the player as many as they want but make them spend a bunch of AP every time they want to use them, it's just making the game less arbitrary.

Uh, I'll leave this for Giovanni then

PLEASE DO NOT REPORT BUGS IF YOU ARE USING THIS BALANCE PATCH, IT WILL JUST CONFUSE US! The .exe is not updated so there's no new version number involved. Please keep discussion limited to this thread. This is an experimental balance patch for V20 Stable Hotfix 1. It requires slightly more effort than normal to set up, mostly because we're testing Hotfix 1 on the Experimental branch before rolling it out to the Stable branch. The purpose of this balance patch is to change the feel of the ground combat. It is experimental and not every change in this patch will make it into the official builds...perhaps none of them will. The idea is to get feedback on what works and what doesn't. The intention of this patch is to get the game feeling more like the original game, chiefly by making the combat a bit faster-paced and making the aliens less tough but more deadly. It mostly affects the Light Scout missions, and I suggest you play a couple of those and perhaps one Scout mission (Caesans work better than Sebillians) before you come back to this thread and read the final changelog and post your thoughts. You'll be able to give better feedback if you go in "blind", I think! Download instructions: 1) Get the file here: http://www.xenonauts.com/devfiles/balancepatchV1.zip 2) Navigate to your game directory 3) Unzip the file into /assets/ and overwrite everything 4) Play the game! Changelog: Seriously, give the Light Scout missions a play before you click the button and reveal it!

Your soldiers can only increase either +1 or +2 in any stat per mission, so the difference is only ever going to be marginal tbh. In terms of layout, there has to be space for three medals at the end of the row so if you add five characters to every stat level up, you start to overlap them on the fifth attribute and the sixth attribute goes slightly off the end of the blue tile. It really does affect readability too.

The increase isn't actually useful gameplay information though. If you had the choice of knowing one of your soldiers out of twelve got +2 accuracy, or his new accuracy score was 70 accuracy, which would you want to know? Do you know the stats of all of your soldiers in advance so that knowing the +2 is useful information? Without context it is meaningless; a soldier with +2 accuracy could be an awful shot or a brilliant one but you have no way of knowing. Fundamentally, what matters is that your soldier has 70 accuracy rather than how they got there. What makes you think the new value is a meaningless stat?

Regarding the increase number as well as the new value, STAT +X (XX) was the format in the initial draft of the screen but it adds a lot more clutter and makes it much less readable...particularly if the soldier skills up three or more attributes in the same mission. In the end we decided to remove it because of that, afraid you'll have trust us on this one.

My Experimental Balance patch is not included in this release; it'll be released separately shortly. This is essentially V20 balance with the AI fixes that were preventing it operating correctly, plus the all the stability fixes Aaron has listed above.

You're right, we probably don't need to display HP for the dead soldiers. There's no space to write out all the stat names in full, though, and nor do I want to increase the size of the bars (without going into details, it affects almost everything else on the screen if you do that).

My view was that there should be weapon variation, but it should be provided inside the tiers (ie. shotguns vs rifles etc) rather than between the tiers. I think that gives better gameplay than having differentiation between the tiers....although it may make upgrades less exciting. That said, if you're making the tiers different rather than improvements, you're also invalidating the research entirely. If lasers are different from ballistics instead of better, then you could just get really good with ballistic tactics and use them right the way through the game. You need to push the player to upgrade or the structure of the game doesn't really work. It's not super-hard to add new ammo to the game, but the problem actually comes with displaying it in the soldier equip screen in the armoury, as there's only space for one clip beside each weapon. Trashman - armour degrades by 20% of the damage it prevents, whereas mitigation just reduces the target's armour value by the mitigation of the weapon. So it causes more damage but less armour degradation than unmitigated shots.

There's two major UI screens still to be updated from V20, the month-end funding screen and the mission-end debrief screen. I've concepted up the mission-end screen and it can be viewed below. Comments are welcome, but please read the post before commenting: This screen combines both the debrief screen and the soldier progression screen without actually reducing the information displayed. The removed lines from the debrief screens were either duplicates (you don't need a "civilians killed" AND a "civilians survived" line) or pointless information we originally put in just to fill space. The numbers on this concept are largely random, so please don't tell us that they don't add up etc. Same with formatting (and the screen frame graphics), if things aren't centred etc then save those comments for if it's actually misaligned / wrong in-game. This is a "worst case" screen, displaying pretty much every soldier status at once. This makes it very busy in terms of colour, but in most cases it won't be as bright. You can view the image here: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/combat_debrief.jpg

Rutger - there's a few issues with that idea, the first being that Kickstarter backers are a minority of our pre-orderers. We don't have the contact details for those that buy the game through Steam / Desura / Humble Store etc, and so any Kickstarter poll would only involve the Kickstarter backers. If we did it on the forums, it'd only include those who check them regularly...and you can see the regular players of the game are in favour of the change, and wouldn't include the silent majority. (Also, the silent majority regarding political issues like equality in the game is different from the silent majority with gameplay issues). Secondly, it's not a change we're going to roll back as we made a decision on it a long time ago and playetesting has just solidified our view that the ammo change was an improvement. You can't expect us to update and improve the original game but then question our judgement when we make a change you don't like on paper; if you're not a regular playtester of the game and don't experience the results of the changes firsthand you've just got to trust us to make a game where the final sum of the parts is an improvement over the original. Almost all of the regular forum users here are extremely experienced X-Com players, and have also played a lot of Xenonauts. If you're an experienced X-Com player but haven't played much Xenonauts, it's sometimes worth taking the views of people who have played a lot of both on board. After all, most of them are saying they had the same views as you before they actually tried the changes for an extended period of time and felt they were an improvement.

And for the infinite ammo, I can understand why people may not like the idea and there were a lot of complaints on the forums when we first suggested it...but the vast majority of players said it was an improvement once they'd actually tried it.

I'm actually going to close this thread at this point because it is well over a year old and the new UI has been implemented now (subject to final tweaks, perhaps). If you want to discuss the new UI then it's best to create a new thread about it in the General or Beta boards, as all discussions should be based on what is in the game rather than what I posted up as concepts a year before the screens were implemented.

What economic complexity is there to a game where you can entirely fund yourself by manufacturing laser weapons for profit from the outset? That's what you have to do in every single game to have the best chance of winning, so there's no variation or tactics at all. Presumably you find it a "joke" to have a game where financial reward is based on your actual performance in the game, then? Because that's what you're complaining about.