Tamren

Cool thanks. Needs more tooltips I guess.

Well that's just it. The grid is much bigger than it needs to be. While it is nice to be able to zoom out and see the big picture, the screen could be simplified and made much more functional. I would suggest the following: - Add an autozoom button that focuses in the camera until the UFO and fighter jets fill the frame and all of the empty space is cropped out. The orientation of the UFO and fighter jets and the distance between them are the only important pieces of information on this screen. Their actual position on the "map" is relatively meaningless. - Alternately, or in combination with the above. Add a "follow" button that sticks the camera to one of the participants. This way when you zoom in the camera you don't constantly have to drag the camera back into frame with what you are trying to see. - When an interceptor attempts to flee from a fight, or just runs out of fuel and has to return to base. Add a timer that ticks down to zero to indicate how much longer it has to fly before it leaves the map. This way even if the interceptor flies off of the map boundaries or offscreen, you can still get an idea of it's position. - Add some sort of "damage ticker" to the screen. Basically it could show an icon of each UFO in a corner of the map, and have smaller icons that list how many missile and cannon hits that UFO has taken. This doesn't just show a "health bar" for the UFO, but it lets you determine how much damage a UFO can take, and how much more it can take before it crashes.

Well in retrospect it could be that my tactics have changed with the move to laser weapons. Because of the higher accuracy I end to make aimed rifle shots instead of using burst. But I could swear that the per-hit supression is lower. It's especially apparent when you land 5 shots with the scatter laser within 1-2 tiles of an enemy and nothing happens. I never had trouble suppressing with machineguns, even when the bullets just flew past them. Manually pathing was what got them stuck in the first place. But yeah, I'm understanding the air combat a bit better now. Once I figured out what everything does I can more or less get the planes to do what I want them to. Couple issues though. - It's good that there are hotkeys for all of the commands because controlling everything by mouse is super clunky. But the location of the hotkeys is not very optimal. In particular they are spaces way too far apart on the keyboard. - The "escape zone" around the border of the map needs to be moved in. Sometimes I get my planes to flee, and the UFO chases them off the bottom of the map and off the screen entirely for a good 10 seconds before they actually get away. - The camera should automatically zoom in and out, starting unzoomed and moving in closer as the aircraft close in. Currently I have to zoom in the map manually and then drag it over to the planes, and drag it again as the planes move offscreen. It's a little fiddly. - The missile sprites are hard to see, especially given the limited colour palette. Well even now that my soldiers are experienced and have about 70 TUs average things are better. But early on things feel too slow. Moving and shooting is almost impossible with most weapons so a lot of the time my soldiers can only accomplish one thing a turn. It could be because actions are a flat-rate cost instead of a percentage like the original X-Com. In that game no matter what a rookies skills he could always at least snap off a shot here and there. Anyhow they already tweaked this in v21. But aside from making actions slightly cheaper, it would also help to add some more lower cost actions to some weapons. Like a 3-round burst shot for machineguns instead only having the expensive 5-round burst.

Hi guys, so I finally got some time to check out the beta. I'm playing the current Steam version which is v20 stable I believe. Figured I would leave some first impressions. I am aware of v21x and that probably deals with some of the issues I'm about to list. Geoscape: - You should be able to change speeds on the geoscape while a notification has popped up. Sometimes I'm cruising along in max speed and something happens which pauses the game, but when I deal with the notification the game continues racing on and I don't have a chance to deal with whatever happened. Either that or simply add a "okay 5-seconds" button to ALL notifications. - Condors seem to be somewhat ineffective. If you play out a tactical battle against a small UFO with 3 condors they fire two waves of 3 missiles and the UFO will easily dodge roll away from them. This forces the condors to close to cannon range and I tend to lose 1/3 most of the time. Outside of combat their lack of range renders them obsolete too quickly. Condors should probably carry more missiles or have some way of staggering missile launches so the whole wing doesn't shoot at once. - The way I imagined it was that Foxtrots wouldn't be a straight upgrade. But I find myself using them that way because Condors can't even reach half of the UFOs that I see. - Aircraft range in general is too limited, especially compared to the radar coverage you can achieve. I think I remember in-flight refueling being a possibility? Perhaps aircraft could also land at bases in friendly countries? They would of course charge you for this, but some way of extending coverage is required. Alternately each aircraft could be given more hardpoints and make fuel drop tanks a useful tradeoff over firepower. - Foxtrots can get stuck in a circle pattern when facing a Corvette. I tried making my planes attack the corvette from behind, but what ended up happening is the corvette started a hard turn at the very edge of torpedo firing range and the foxtrots began to turn with them in an endless circle until they ran out of fuel. I'm not sure why this happened because the corvette WAS inside the firing cone, but the missiles were never launched. - Research in general seems a tad bit slow. Even with three working labs I only make a couple improvements a month and my list is a constant logjam of topics. - The lab and manufacturing screens need "assign all/remove all" buttons to make it easier to shift them around. - Your current stock of alien materials should be displayed on the manufacturing screen somewhere. - You should be able to hire more scientists than you have lab space for. This way you don't have to build the lab and have it sit idle for a while until the staff arrives. Being able to transfer scientists would also be helpful. - There should be a hide interface button for base screens to allow you to appreciate the background art. - Sometimes when I pull a soldier off a dropship I get a "this base has no soldiers" screen" until I leave that tab and come back. - The soldier equip screen could do with more buttons and less dropdown menus for stuff like class and assignment. Tactical: - Soldiers in general seem to have too few TUs. This is something addressed in v21 I think. - Rockets seem to be too weak in general, especially the pre-alenium ones. I hit a Ceasan dead in the face with one and it only wounded him. Damage to terrain is also lacking. - Grenades need to have different throwing arcs. A direct fast "pitch" with a flat arc, and a high angled "toss" for throwing over obstacles. - Flashbangs tossed into UFOs are highly unreliable and fail to suppress even if they land on top of stuff. They also don't deal nearly as much stunning damage as they should. - Tactical combat has crashed on me several times. This seems to be directly related to the scout car. Specifically when the scout car hits something directly with a single shot weapon (rocket/laser etc). - Hit indication has poor feedback. It's impossible to tell if a projectile that "hit" glanced off armour, hit the ground or just missed entirely. All you know is that it "hit" and nothing happened. - It seemed strange to me that you can't salvage or use alien grenades. Given how simple they are the ergonomics should not be an issue, unless they have some sort of alien only locking mechanism. - It would be nice if soldiers could pick up items in the tiles beside them. This would allow one soldier to drop an item and the soldier beside him pick it up, without him having to move. - Given how carry weight is at a premium and only gets more crowded as the game progresses, it would be nice if the scout car could carry some supplies into battle. Soldiers standing beside it could pick up the items as if they were "on the ground" but at a high TU cost. - Soldiers who walk into stun gas have a distressing tendency to burst into gibs. - Laser weapons don't seem to suppress enemies at all. I never had trouble doing this with bullet weapons, but lasers don't have any effect. Even firing into the ground beside friendlies doesn't phase them. - Scatter Laser ammo capacity is too low. All of the other laser weapons have around a 1/2 capacity compared to their bullet equivalents. But scatter lasers only have 3 shots versus the machineguns 10. I would suggest giving it a capacity of 30 shots, for 6 bursts. However when you reload the Scatter laser it would take two power cells instead of one. This would actually match what it shows on the paperdoll image. - Cover is a little wonky. Firing over something right beside you is simple. But even something one tile away jumps to a 50% block rate. This also makes it almost impossible to fire past crouching soldiers. Cover should scale depending on it's distance to you, and your target's distance from it's cover.

I was wondering if the big goldhawk overlay bar at the top of the forums could be removed. It forces the threads to use a sub-panel and a separate scroll bar to access them. This is very awkward.

I'm going away on a trip and I won't be back for a month! I'm gonna miss out on the discussion for sure Hope this is still around by the time I get back.