jamoecw

Description: CTD when picking up a pistol from dead body. What Happened: Shield troop was low on ammo, so I was grabbing another gun for its ammo from another shield troop that had died. Game lagged and when I clicked the close button the game crashed. The screenshot taken in bug report does not show any of the other stuff on the ground such as the shield, dead body, gas mask, etc. I was running with advanced options with extra aliens and this was towards the end of the terror mission. Specs, resolution, etc. in the bug report zip file. bug_report_2026-04-24-20h48_gc_7.20.4_unhandled_exception_1.zip

I never really did that (overloading troops to get a stash on the dropship like in the original game had by default) in X1 or this game, but I can give some pointers: The smoke is not cover, it seems like cover, but it isn't and it impairs you as much as the aliens, so using like cover is not the best idea. Use it to cover an exfill to a defensible location or to prod the enemies into moving in certain directions. Cover for you is good, cover for them is bad, so so as the aliens did and destroy cover with the explosives and then finish with normal weapons. You can also destroy cover to gain entry into buildings instead of using doors, or to gain vision on areas with less risk to your men. The MARS robots are better than new recruits, but worse than veterans, use them for dangerous things like peaking corners or vanguard scouting. Better to replace them than a soldier. Snipers have good range, so good they can hit most aliens outside their line of sight if you use spotters and good locations. Since it usually takes a few TUs to trigger overwatch someone can poke their head out so a sniper can take the shot, the alien overwatches on the person firing or using TUs, so the sniper is safe if it is outside the LOS, and the spotter is safe since it is not using the TUs or attacking. If you are going to sit in a location use good cover and shape the terrain to fit you, knock down troublesome buildings or walls, use destructible high ground well outside the range you spot and thus engage the aliens. Have fall back positions of cover and concealment. Ensure the aliens have blind corners they enter your 'area' through so you get the overwatch on them, a shotgun to the face might drop an alien at once. Aliens don't heal, but just like your troops might stop bleeding they might as well. If one is injured and you don't have to deal with it and can keep it out of the fight let it lose health before it wants to fight some more, and use that time to deal with it more effectively, set up traps (either with overwatch or C4). Shield units are great for tanking shots from one direction, so you can use them to eat the overwatch of an enemy before you bum rush them with close quarter weapons for a cheaper cost most of the time than a flashbang. Though flash bangs help eat the TUs for their turn incase things don't go right. This also means that if a shield unit in cover is the first thing an alien sees when assaulting your position and they are eager to fight, they will typically fire at the shield unit before looking around for nearby shotgun units. LMGs while not long range weapons are better to be used at ranges of moderate chances to hit, since if they land most of their shots then they will do a lot more damage than probably any other weapon you bring. They are not great at overwatch so don't get too close though. The % to hit is for the first shot and the later ones drop due to recoil which is countered by strength, but never completely (even at 100 strength) so 50% is less than 50% for later shots. They also do their damage with each shot, letting them destroy cover and hitting the enemy behind that cover. Kneeling makes you harder to hit and increases your chance to hit, this is very good for its cost. Enemies need TUs for overwatch, so if you attack from different sides and the enemy spins around to get eyes on your forces but you use little enough Tus so they don't get a shot off you can spin them around so they get a less aimed shot or no shot on your troops. Heavy armor is great at keeping your troops alive. Accuracy is great at keeping your troops alive. These are not equal but depending on how you use your troops depends on which one is more useful for which troop. Hiring troops for a given purpose is important, and then using them appropriately for the mission. As the troops level up their skills they can do great things, but that takes a while so early and mid game they should be used based on what they are good at which means that no one tactic will carry the day as you won't always have the right troops for what you want to do and so you will need to know 3 or 4 ways to deal with any situation or enemy. It also means that better armor is something that helps you snowball and also helps you have the right tool for the job at hand. This means that being ahead of the curve on armor and using your men correctly can get you to late game without any weapon upgrades (the weapon upgrades are still helpful though so don't skip them entirely). Buildings and civilians are good to save, but if you must do a mission and don't have good troops then level everything in a strategic and systematic manner. Do it to avoid checking corners, or clearing buildings, or dealing with defensible positions, as well as shaping the terrain to ensure that you have the best advantage when facing the aliens. The civilians? try to keep them alive in this situation as they are forward alien detectors that eat up alien TUs that aren't being used against your men. You can use smoke to flush an alien from a good position once they target a civilian into a bad position. If the civilian dies then that was its job, and later when you have better troops you can do better. I only have a little over 150 hours in Xenonauts 2, so I probably missed some things, but I do have 300+ hours on Xenonauts 1 and maybe 600 on the original XCom games (the first two since the second is roughly a reskin, I have played the other XCom games a fair bit as well and the UFO series, and other games like XCom), but each game is a bit different and there have been lots of patches. One of the things that Xenonaughts does well relative to the other games is destructible terrain, though the UFO outer walls in X2 is non-destructible. Most likely due to balance as all other games tend to drop this during development if they include it. It reminds me of XCom Apocalypse, and the explosives are cheaper to bring and make use of, so you can use this to your advantage earlier on when you are still adjusting to the game over the others but once you do it should change your early game tactics. Similar to night missions and the flares, the other games had it, but I am pretty sure the aliens in Xenonauts also have limited vision unlike most of the others (technically they had limited vision but aside from the UFO games they had less impairment than you, in the UFO games they just had innate access to different vision modes).

When an enemy gets suppressed or a wraith activates its cloak on your turn the % to hit chance doesn't update until you take your cursor off the enemy and then back on (it keeps the old number). I intuitively know the rate drops so I didn't even realize it was doing this until halfway through the game.

I played after a long time of not playing and things are much better than even a year ago. The cut scenes are nice, the little dialog for important story missions, and I can finally defeat the aliens (Endgame Mission). I used to grab the laser weapon for aircraft and drop everything else until plasma (I think that was the late game weapon that replaced the laser), and I still like the weapon but it doesn't seem like such a massive upgrade over everything, including missiles, so the air combat seems balanced now. As you progress in the missions it seems like they tend to concentrate around your landing craft more and more, like before, which means about mid game the missions are 2 or 3 turns of very careful commands with 10 or so turns after that of mopping up the remaining 4 or 5 aliens. This has been a common thing and most Xcom like games tend to do this in order to boost the intensity without throwing a ton of enemies at you and eating up your limited supplies. The only thing I would be careful with for this is the cyberdrones, as a bunch of automatic explosive rounds on turn 1 or two while you are getting your guys out of the craft is a bit unfair (and why in the real world they don't drop the door on an APC in front of the enemy if they can help it, but instead do it near the combat and have them transit into combat using spacing and cover). I have only encountered this once in my playthrough, and I made sure to rush the best armor for my guys so they ended up surviving and winning the mission (lost all my MARS though, but that tends to happen on most of my missions since I use them for the risky stuff). Grenades seem to follow the same aiming rules as the guns, so if someone is throwing a grenade through a window and has a poor chance due to that they might drop the nade at their feet instead of hitting any of the obstacles that make the throw hard. Trying to shoot over the shoulder of the guy in front of you that is also kneeling sometimes doesn't happen, unlike Xenonauts 1, though the UI tells you this might be the case. All of these are pretty minor quibbles, and I am very happy with the game. I am more than happy to back your next game, no matter what it is at this point.

One thing I have learned from deployments, it is better to work more and communicate less than to communicate more and work less. The higher ups are eager for communication, and if they get carried away no real work gets done and then no one is happy. Rolling the dev update back a month is good since you aren't slacking on work, and it isn't like there is no communication.

XCOM:Apoc was far more ambitious than what was released. this is the reason i think for the more varied alien structure from previous games. there was going to be a whole espionage and economics side of things that got cut. there was a lot of really cool things in the game, though parts of the game failed in execution as well. a real mixed bag.few games wanted to go the turn based strategy route, so the opportunity to try and do what they did properly was never really on the table. would have been nice to play a polished version of it. there are plenty of other games that really hit it out of the park and simply need a revamp on their engine/graphics that would be lower hanging fruit to get some interest in those old classics, but if there ever was a rush for remaking the old games i would really hope that apoc gets it day. edit: to answer the OP questions - the aliens they had were pretty good, though the dichotomy of UFO:afterlight was nice as well creating different enemies that were very different from each other requiring rather different weapons and tactics. the vehicles being very modular is a keeper, as it really is perhaps the most unique thing about the gameplay. the more complex economy and diplomacy that cut cut would be another thing to get in there. as for the real time part of it, i'd either make the combat similar to the UFO games as it lends itself to pausable realtime very nicely, or ax it completely. who works on it isn't very important, as long as it is done well.

i'm guessing the damage types will be moddable as well? i am not sure how useful it will be to the base game, but putting in kinetic and hardness damage types can give some realistic diversity to ballistic weapons. AP ammo doing more 'hardness' damage and less kinetic would help it to 'penetrate' certain armors and do less damage against less rigid armor. HP rounds would be the opposite of such relative to normal rounds. what about having damage dependent on what another damage type does to the armor, like HEAP ammo? so if a specific type of ammo does more of one type of damage then causes more damage of another type. something like 5 hardness+(dealt hardness*2 explosive)+2 kinetic against 40%hardness armor, 0% explosive armor, 0%kinetic armor would do 3 hardness damage (.6*5), 6 explosive damage (3*2*1.0), 2 kinetic damage. against 40%hardness armor, 50% explosive armor, 0%kinetic armor would do 3 hardness damage (.6*5), 3 explosive damage (3*2*.5), 2 kinetic damage. against 80%hardness armor, 0% explosive armor, 0%kinetic armor would do 1 hardness damage (.2*5), 2 explosive damage (1*2*1.0), 2 kinetic damage. it probably wouldn't help the base game too much as it would add some complexity to the game, and aside from maybe some poison darts, tazer, or particle stream weapons i don't see it as having much impact overall. it would be cool for modders though.

as for 2 they had an XCOM clone that made it so that you had to be damaged by the reaper to become infected, and then it took a little bit of time. XCOM apocalypse had the damage tied to psi i think, so that if you had high psi defense you could defend against it (which none of the lower level armor had, so it was a late game thing, and not that great either). it really all depends on how valuable your guys are. in XCOM the first 2 guys that walk off your transport were pretty much dead, so losing 1 guy to bad luck while clearing a room isn't that big of a deal, but in firaxis's XCOM you have 4-6 guys during the mission and losing 1 of them was a major setback for the rest of the game, so losing 1 of them due to bad luck is a big deal.

i think you hit the nail on the head. a kill sweep makes things easy if the strategy and lore are about killing the enemy. if things are a complex machine, then tweaking something may bring about a greater result than just trying to kill everything. once killing becomes not feasible or not desired things have to become more creative. the problem i see is that in traditional XCOM you are fending off an alien invasion, and thus trying to prevent your machine from getting tweaked rather than disrupting another's. so either the battlescape needs to become a small section of a larger battlefield in which reinforcements just keep coming (and thus killing won't work), or you need to do subterfuge (which is rather silly given how all the important bits of the enemy is out of reach in space). in apocalypse you were going to tweak the machine to undo damage the aliens did tweaking it, unless you were playing another faction, in which case you would be infiltrating and doing the initial tweaking. too bad it was cut short. though i am not sure it would still have the same feel if the main game was not going against aliens doing 'clean sweeps' for most of the game.

no. the first two of the three XCOM original games had you bring 14 soldiers, more than X1. the third is a bit more complicated as the vehicles are modular in design, so the main transport has a default of 8 passenger space with the capability to have an additional 12, though cargo space is a separate module, so you probably want to only add an additional 8, until you need to start capturing aliens and then you'll swap out passenger space for a bio containment module, reducing the extra PAX to 4 (12 total). you can repurpose the transport into a heavy weapons platform as well when you don't need it to be a transporter. the new XCOM games are different enough to not really be in the same vein as the originals, in fact the third game wasn't considered to be a true sequel by die hard fans back in the day.

the more i think about it the more it seems that killing everything would be the easiest way to complete a mission, unless there was some non-lore friendly arbitrary constraints. unless of course aliens can spawn on the map in the middle of a fight. that way you could have say a terror mission and instead of killing all the aliens and being done you would have to take a control room to get the city defenses back up to stop reinforcements, then clear out remaining forces or leave them for the local forces to deal with. you could have a rescue VIP mission in which every X number of turns more reinforcements come from off the map to stop you from getting to the VIP, so getting the VIP and getting out of there would be the only way to really win. there could be a mission in which you have to destroy a certain device, but since it is important aliens constantly reinforce the defenders and thus you have to fight your way to the device, and killing everything will just spawn more aliens. as for downed UFOs, the score at the end if you held the UFO instead of killing them penalized you for every living alien, if this wasn't a thing then it would make such just as viable. though getting rid of that score altogether would be a mistake as it rewarded you more for tougher missions, which is important.

i don't think too many people are old enough to have played xcom apocalypse back in the day, but this was the idea that they shot for. financial issues meant that everything but the xcom side had to be scrapped. the inner politics of the earth side made the xcom faction weaker than the aliens, and while the aliens had a good deal of resources, getting their forces to earth was a bit of an issue. the idea was that the aliens were inter dimensional aliens attack from a different dimension, so they had to only send a transport or two at a time, and they had to learn how to travel and operate in our dimension better in order to be a bigger threat. working with certain factions and corrupting others was how you were supposed to defeat xcom. of course xcom wasn't your only opponent as well, so you were outnumbered. in fact any faction you were going to play was going to be outnumbered, and have some sort of edge over the other factions. there is some talk that phoenix point (https://phoenixpoint.info/) is going to try and do that again (sort of) from the same creator.

jagged alliance 2 (1.13 mod) did a bit, it wasn't a big difference so you probably didn't notice a difference. xcom and most remakes have done stuff with vision cones and light. as for gamey trade offs for scopes, there has been a few squad games (JA2 included) that have it take a bit longer to take a shot, for increased accuracy or range. as for why not equip everyone with scopes, the same could be asked as to why not cover the entire game with bases on day one? cost often times is used to limit things that seem really good. personally i prefer extra costs to far outlandish downsides to equipment in order to keep balance. but of course if the downside (what ever that is, cost or otherwise) is too great then their isn't much point in even having it in the game. in the end weapons are pretty gamey in all games. JA2 which models things closer to reality than most games still has pistols being about 1/4 of their range and rifles about 1/15 of their range to prevent pistols from being completely outclassed. in reality the draw time is a big factor in their usefulness (one reason they are popular for guard duty), as well as the deficiencies of the human element. a rifle can reach well out beyond what you can see, so scopes are a no brainer for any military, but they aren't used much due to the tunnel vision they cause and their problems at close range. all of this is coupled with durability in the field and maintenance of the device. iron sights are very reliable, while a scope needs some attention to ensure it stays zeroed in. training new shooters also have issues if they learn on a scope instead of learning on irons, and then learning to use a scope. they tend to time their shots to hit their target instead of learning to keep their sights on target, which results in greater inaccuracies as they get better (glass ceiling essentially), and their inability to handle things too far away or too close with a scope, in addition to not being able to use iron sights effectively. these issues are something people not only don't realize exist, but consider to be artificial feeling when simulated, and thus disliked. think of it like fatal injuries, in real life medieval weapons cause fatal injuries far more gently than modern weapons (little concussive shock to your system). this means that if you stab a person in the heart, he will die, but not for a minute or two. if you put that into a video game people would tend to dislike such stuff very much and call it fake. balancing reality with people's expectations is an art that is delicate, too much realism and people call it fake, not enough and people call it fake.

that is pretty cool. back during X1 development i came up with an idea using local forces for air/radar cover and local ground forces to cordon off and help with the aliens on the ground. the underpinnings of this was a balance between developing for them to boost their capability to handle issues on their own, diverting resources from making your own team strong or to try and blanket the whole globe in coverage. it was amid the discussion about air cover ranges, and how realistic ranges would be much smaller than the original XCOM. i also talked about picking what sort of transport and thus what sort of deployment you wanted. using the traditional (for XCOM) VTOL method or to parachute in a little ways away and fight your way in towards the craft. the VTOL method means the aliens don't get to set up for your arrival, but it also means potentially charging into plasma getting out of the craft, and of course shorter transport ranges for your crack troops. paradrop of course means that the aliens know well ahead of time and can bring what ever big guns to bear (mortar equivalent) while you work your way to them and of course can hit you from range or set up ambushes. it also means more civilians dead and more reliance on local forces. ultimately the game turned out pretty good so i am happy that the idea wasn't picked up on (as doing it wrong could have ruined everything). i do like the idea of helping out existing forces to combat the aliens, as it just makes a lot of sense lore wise. it isn't like a single (or a couple of) AI trooper is going to help out all too much anyway (at least not consistently).

i am not sure if prone is planned to be in the game or not, but maybe the reaction could be to go prone, assuming the people see the grenade. this would mean that going prone reduces damage to you from splash damage. if the enemy can just run away from a grenade due to reaction fire then tossing a nade into an enemy hole could have them running into the middle of your men bypassing their reaction fire. if your men react then there could be a lot of friendly fire in that case. having things move for reaction can be fidly to balance and get right, especially if it is AI controlled.