Kimberly

I'm not really sure what your suggestion is. Grenades show precisely what their blast radius is if they land on target, and how much chance they have to land there--you can't know where else they might stray if they miss; that's sort of the point. Surely it is clear when they miss, because of the explosion.

Congratulations on reaching 300%, guys. Unfortunately, I had to cancel my pledge yesterday for financial reasons... Still, I hope to buy the game when it's out. You've done an amazing job.

I engaged a corvette escorted by two fighters over North America with an F-17 and a MiG-32. The MiG fired all four torpedoes at the corvette once they locked on, and the F-17 launched two Sidewinders at one of the fighters. The first Sidewinder missed, the second one hit, and all four torpedoes struck the corvette, sending it crashing to the ground. I set both craft to retreat and engage their afterburner, the F-17 fired a few shots at the fighter but only left it with critical damage before hightailing it out of there. Both craft escaped successfully, and a crash site appeared on the Geoscape. There were no UFOs detected, though the two fighters had survived the battle. When I sent an unescorted Chinook towards the crash site, the crash site icon began moving towards it and destroyed the Chinook! The message identified the interceptor as a corvette. I reloaded the game and sent the Chinook again, this time escorted by an F-17. The crash site remained in place, the Chinook arrived, and I was able to enter ground combat as normal. So yeah... apparently, leaving some but not all of the UFOs in a battle alive creates a bizarre half-living crash site.

Everyone knows Mossad is secretly controlled by the President of the United States. (Who is, naturally, a secret alien himself, bringing us full circle.)

You can easily tell a corvette by its very slow speed; a leisurely 850 km/h.

Well, it's been called a demo officially, hasn't it? And it certainly feels like one! An alpha usually has way more bugs and instability; this game looks nearly complete and quite polished. (The fact that they're going to polish it so much more is wonderful.)

I think a superhuman tool like that might make it a bit too easy, and would clutter the battles. You can already see whether someone is in your line of fire, and if your soldier happens to be a completely awful shot, well, that's collateral damage for you. I prefer forcing players to use their own judgment over giving them a tool which makes it for them.

For games and films that allow you to get your name in the credits or on a website if you pledge enough, I always justify it like this: if I run for office one day (I'm ineligible for the presidency, but I'll settle for senator), then it won't be long before someone realizes I sponsored those things they loved so much way back when. It's like a time-traveling political campaign!

Well, I hate my legal name--it can't be pronounced in English and has religious connotations. (More so than regular old Biblical names.) There's some gender issues involved that some people know about but others don't, so there's two names involved there. And even with my preferred first name, Kim(berly), it varies whether I use "Quinn" as my middle or my last name--and it's not my legal middle or last name. So uh, maybe not all of them are normal, but it's nothing sordid. I'm working on a legal name change to simplify the issue somewhat.

Even though I didn't pledge enough to have my name in the game, I'm glad you're taking such a sober approach to names. As someone who regularly uses no less than three different names (none of which are my legal name), I don't appreciate being asked for ID.

I actually like the large amount of fighters. Too many crash sites gets a tad old, as well, and keeping fighters away makes you feel like you're really battling for air superiority. The only issue is that they come in large waves, meaning you need to split up your fighters every which way---it'd be better if they formed squadrons of two or three fighters more often. (And a single fighter can be defeated easily anyway.)

Well, money still needs to be balanced, anyway. I think it will already become easier once the "local forces survived" counter works, because reputation will go up a lot quicker. Also, may I ask what inspired your forum name?

I don't like barbecue anymore, after listening to a Christian vegan for too long. It was always fire and brimstone with her.

Well, that's good enough for me.

You can actually perform an autopsy on alien corpses, through the research menu. But once you've researched that, any other bodies are simply marked as "destroyed"---I took that to mean they were destroyed as part of clean-up, not during the fight.