arisian

You need to shoot at an alien, and I believe you need to have a (non-zero) chance of hitting them. It doesn't matter whether you hit them or not; even if your hit chance is only 5% and you miss, it still counts towards giving you +1 ACC at the end of the mission.

At the moment, when a character gets MC'd, they immediately get a full turn's worth of time units, which they then immediately use (as in, during the Alien turn, before you get a chance to do anything). Whether they had any TUs left at the end of *your* turn doesn't matter. It's not reaction fire, it's "standard" fire. And you're absolutely right, it's essentially a guaranteed death for one (or more, depending on positioning/loadout) of your other soldiers.

So, I'm not sure how psi is "supposed" to be working at the moment, but it still seems...problematic. I can understand it from a tone perspective, but as a gameplay mechanic in a tactical battle game, it's still pretty broken. I've just downed my first battleship, and there's (supposedly) a praetor on board. Having people get hit with dread at the beginning of the first turn (i.e. before either side has taken any actions) was a surprise, but I could work around having fewer time units. What's a problem is that on the aliens' very first turn (i.e. as soon as I hit the "end turn" button), I seem to invariable wind up with one of my guys either getting MC'd or berzerking; either way, somebody winds up dead. This is true in spite of the fact that everyone's got "99+" listed for morale, and I can't imagine the Praetor is *that* close to the drop zone. I was so surprised at this "drop-zone MC" that I re-loaded the combat-start savegame and re-ran the first turn a couple of times to see if it had just been amazingly bad luck, but it seems to happen pretty frequently. Is this really working as intended? Because at the moment, it sure doesn't seem like there's any meaningful tactics I could use to handle this (outside of exploits like holstering weapons at the end of every turn, or save-scumming for good "vs. psi" rolls). Are there tips for dealing with this for the *actual* state of psi in the game (as opposed to "tactics vs. proposed replacement psi-systems," which some of the stuff in this thread seems to be).

I'm running Gentoo (64 bit) linux; I'm up for some basic testing. A non-RPM version is going to be required for gentoo (there are ways to install RPMs, but my experience is that it's rarely as simple or straightforward as it should be). My preference, frankly, is for a tarball that just contains the game directory, with all necessary files in it. If the game wants to create a .xenonauts directory in my homedir for config files, it should do that when the game is run (e.g. if it should look for config files, and if it can't find them, create defaults).

I've now encountered several places where I can "see" an alien who was enclosed behind walls, once in a building and twice in crashed "heavy scout" ufos. In all instances, it seemed to be caused by an alien who was in a corner tile; I think there might be an issue with the corners. In at least one instance, I was able to shoot and kill an alien from outside the ufo, with the shot passing through the wall corner. Note that this did not cause a crash, or any other detectable issues. It would appear there is a literal corner-case in the line-of-sight code

Had a soldier with an MG trying to fire through a window at an alien (soldier was standing, not crouched). Instead, the soldier appeared to hit the wall containing the window. This did three things. First, the wall tile was destroyed. Second, the soldier died. Third, the game crashed to desktop (no error message or crash handler). I guess the first one might be okay (even if it was a bit unexpected), but the second and third are both clearly bugs. Oh, and the XML fix was in place, so it's not related to that. This took place on a crashed "heavy scout" industrial map, in "play" mode.