Chris

At present UFOs are assigned to funding regions totally at random. So a base in just North America isn't currently optimal - it's only one funding block out of 8-9 of them...albeit not one you want to lose.

Clear the UFO of aliens and leave a unit inside it for 5 turns. You should win the mission automatically.

I think your views are coloured, to an extent, by rose-tinted glasses. Once you've played the original game a few times you'll find it has extremely poor balance. You can rush Plasma Cannons for your interceptors and Heavy Plasmas for your soldiers almost immediately, making 90% of the research tree irrelevant...and the national funding is largely irrelevant because you can just manufacture and sell gear from special bases set up to do that. Fundamentally I wouldn't say either were good things. They're exploits or bad design choices more than alternative playstyles, although they allow them, because they are by far and away the best way to play the game. Your point about air combat has been noted, but I'm not sure I see a viable way of changing the game without reverting to X-Com's original system where the invasion involved about 20 UFOs and perhaps three interceptors throughout the entire game. I don't think that's inherently better either. But I'll think about the issue, anyway. It's something that does get raised a lot and the opinions of new posters are always particularly valuable. EDIT - actually, we'll just reduce the number of UFOs in the next build. You still need the same amount of radar coverage, but you don't need as many planes and hangars that way.

This isn't a high priority feature, but I don't see any particular reason why we shouldn't implement it. There's not really any gameplay reason why the player should be obliged to click the airstrike every time (though I don't see any reason to remove the airstrike button on the pop-up either).

Hmm. It shouldn't really be necessary to spam explosives, but Aaron is making new maps for them at the moment and we'll try and rebalance them at the same time. It may be that there's too many aliens with Aggressive settings in the missions.

It's unlocked with the Alien Alloys research.

Even the in-game lore says that the Plasma Cannon can be fired four times without needing to be reloaded, so that's a pretty poor argument for us putting in a feature that (for reasons explained elsewhere) I don't see much reason to implement. Rather, your argument says that you think the TU cost for firing the weapon should be increased so it can only be fired once per turn. Quite possibly, but once again the unlimited ammo of the aliens is of no real relevance to the discussion. Solver is actually correct about the doors in the OG too - to right-click was only added in TFTD, although it's such a natural feature it's difficult to imagine a game without it once you've experienced it. Reaction fire for opening doors probably is a good thing to add. I didn't realise it did not currently trigger it. Your thoughts on the other stuff I've read but are primarily something for Aaron to look at (I've pointed him at it). However, it's quite amusing that you complain about the ramp-up in weapons and armour being too high and therefore upgrades are too important, but also that the key to the game is air superiority. Surely reducing the necessity for battlefield upgrades is just going to make air superiority relatively even more important?

Lightzy - no, sadly there isn't. They're not treated as cover so much as very thin walls that don't block LOS, so it's not really possible. Cover in the game is basically waist high stuff you can crouch behind and fire over, either filling a full tile or one edge of a tile. Trees sit on diagonals and fill 1/9th of a tile, so they're a bit awkward and are a bit of a special case with regards to the cover system (they don't fit well on a grid of square tiles).

C4 was moved to a gas grenade type explosion recently so you couldn't kill units with the blast from underneath or beyond thick walls. Seems it has had some unintended effects. crashed97tsi - the relations boost for ground missions was moved to the initial shooting down of the UFO in the first place. Under the old system, the economics still wouldn't have added up, but you'd have had to grind every single crash site to find that out. So your thoughts on the economic issues may well be completely valid, but I don't think you've identified the root of the problem correctly. If the economics are unsustainable, we just need to provide more of a boost for shooting down UFOs. Glad you like the game!

Yeah, it's likely old maps. Delete the maps folder and update again and the problem will disappear.

OK. I think I know the cause of this actually.

Only the Stables are available on Mac / Linux, so at the moment the latest version you can play is V19 Stable. You'll need to get it from Desura or the Humble Store as they're not on Steam yet - given you have a medal you should have access to one or the other?

Steam screenshot function should work - just press F12!

Yeah, had a chat to Aaron and we didn't realise the accuracy multiplier was not set to 1. We're reducing it down now and hopefully it'll add some differentiation between different zoom levels again.

I must admit I'm not entirely sure those accuracy buffs were intentional. I suspect the coder might have committed the global accuracy boost code with random values in it just before we released the build, and it sneaked into the public build without us noticing. Still, it's good to know that more accuracy is generally better - but I suspect we'd prefer a value closer to a 1.5 multiplier than the current 2 / 2.5 multipliers. We'll have a look though. EDIT - they're just at the top of weapons_gc.xml if you want to tweak them yourselves and experiment, btw. They're intended as a quick way for us to test how different gameplay feels with all the weapons in different "bands" of accuracy.

Pretty sure this is fixed in the Experimental version, so it'll be fixed when the next Stable build comes out in a week or so!

True, but then I don't really see what value has been gained from giving them limited ammo? I understand that people don't like the idea of a system where the aliens don't fight fair...it just kinda feels "wrong" when you find out about it. However, I think people are over-estimating the difference giving the aliens limited ammo would make to the game. I honestly think the difference would be negligible. In any case, it is useful for us to have the discussion and we do appreciate the feedback the community gives us on our product (even if we occasionally appear to disregard it entirely and do what we want instead). It's better than having mindless fanbois and it's certainly better than having no fans at all!

We've had a number of people email us about this problem, but I don't know what to suggest. You've restarted Steam and tried right-click >> validate files too? If you find a solution please let me know.

Out of interest, is that a new save or an old one? Saves from prior to Experimental 8 are likely to have problems in them if loaded in this version.

It's an oft-requested feature, but not one that's an easy thing to implement unfortunately. The OG has equipment assigned to dropships instead of soldiers, which is why they don't have permanent loadouts and you have that 80 item limit for your whole team. When we designed Xenonauts we decided it'd be much smarter to have the equipment assigned to individual soldiers instead. And it is - but it means we don't assign inventory items to dropships like the original game does. Long story short, it is something we'd possibly consider doing but it would be quite a lot more work than you're expecting. Plus also involving new UI elements, which is it bit tricky to do now the "final" UI is in place.

I'm also accepting feedback on whether the build feels more responsive now we've sped up some of the animations, notifications and cameras.

We've tried to make things a bit snappier and more responsive in general. Speeding up the crouch and shoot animations so they're no longer in sloooow moooootion should help, and having the camera dwell on units after they perform an action for less long will hopefully make the alien turn shorter and also make the game feel a bit less ponderous. If there are few bugs in this version, V20 Stable will hopefully be arriving next week before we officially shut up shop for Christmas. I'd like to get the new loading screen in the game for then, but the rest will be last-minute balance changes. Air combat got some fairly significant changes last build but hopefully will be improved in this build. Let us know your thoughts in the appropriate balance threads: Geoscape Balance: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8346-Geoscape-Balance-Discussion-V20-Experimental-8 Ground Combat Balance: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8345-Ground-Combat-Balance-Discussion-V20-Experimental-8

A case in point - people want an advanced AI, but they also don't want it to spam grenades in every situation where a grenade would be better than shooting at a unit with conventional means (basically anything below 10 tiles in range). And so on. A game that was tuned to be wholly realistic rather than catering to gameplay enjoyment wouldn't be a very fun one, so the aliens playing by different rules is not inherently a bad thing.

Generally it's because people expect games like ours or the new Fallouts etc to have not only just the features that have become standard in the interim (nicer graphics, UIs that are not horrendous, gameplay that is not broken or so easily exploitable, etc) but then also to have all the features from old games too. People want games to "move on" ("else why wouldn't I just play the old game?" they ask) but when a conflict arises between the old and the new, suddenly they hark back to how great the old times were. And then it falls to the developer to weigh up both options and choose what they think is best - knowing full well that whatever they choose will be wrong. In this case, you need to weigh up the benefits and the cost. Aliens having limited ammo complicates the AI and has historically caused a number of bugs. It also opens up potential exploits and other unintended behaviours. As an example, you can imagine the capturing / killing an alien would be trivially easy if you had combat shields and stayed in cover just inside the alien firing range and waited for them to run out of ammo. I don't want to reward that sort of play style. If that sounds far fetched, then why is it important that we give aliens the ability to run out of ammo? The aliens carry enough ammo that it won't matter whether they can run out of ammo or not except in fringe cases that 99% of players will not see, so spending developer time on it would be a waste. For just normal in-fight reloading, remember units have no obvious reload animation, so you're more likely to end up in a situation where a reloading alien looks as if it just hasn't performed any actions instead of gunning down your exposed soldier - which is going to look more like the AI glitching or being stupid than being intelligent. Maybe you can add a sound or something, but even then the average player is still going to be confused irrespective of how clever the game is actually being. Hence, when Half Life is mentioned above, you're thinking about the Marines in it reloading...the human enemies that use the same weapons as Freeman uses, weapons that you already understand and expect to need reloading. But do you see the Vortigaunts reloading? The player's not familiar with the alien weapons in our game so they don't have to follow the same rules as the human weapons. Thus the idea of spending a fair bit of time on implementing and debugging a feature that has few benefits and a number of potential negatives doesn't strike me as a hugely important task.

Heh. Turns out you can just go into psionicpowers_gc.xml and turn the message duration setting down to 1 sec instead of 3 sec. I'll do that in the next version...and maybe I'll nerf it a bit too.