Oathbreaker

1. No linear weapon and gear upgrades. I like seeing my team's faces and heads, it makes them somehow seem a bit more human, although ofc no-one in their right mind would go into a set combat situation without a helmet (some high-speed raiding excepted, I know). Put a big heavy power suit on that's simply better in all respects as a clear across-the-board upgrade, and I just don't like the look of the game. With the only brake on that being cost of Elerium. Perhaps have the upgrades be useful but in a slightly different way so the previous stuff still has its uses? 2. Don't one-shot said dudes in said expensive power suits with blatantly overpowered weapons. Blaster bombs, sigh. Apparently I should have known about that. I'm cool with getting ambushed and losing if I don't play well. But the lower difficulty settings are fairly boring since there's very few aliens on each map, and you spend the time just walking interminably. Losing a few to a runaway Reaper or some Chryssalid - no problem, my own dang fault. I didn't put smoke down before exiting Skyranger - my own fault. Blaster bombs from nowhere - wtf, dude? Not fun. If I care more about the loss of a piece of armour than I care about the loss of the dude inside it, then something's wrong somewhere. I want an emotional connection. Not to a piece of metal. 3. Not too many dudes/chicas. I'm not much of a fan of controlling robotic tanks, so generally go with full human complements. Then again, controlling 14-20 people is just too much. XCOMEU the reboot did this mostly right, perhaps a tad under-numbered. 4. I don't mind being up against Psi enemies. I do mind if this just takes over the game, to the point that it completely changes how you play, because it makes it just so easy to just MC your way to victory without worrying about ...the actual combat. It's no longer a tactical sim, it's a game of who can MC first. Silly. 5. I really like weapons technology that I can kind of recognize. Rifles, shotguns, pistols, SMGs, machine guns etc. I can deal with Laser weapons being a straight upgrade if they're just scarce enough that it doesn't turn into the new regular weapon. I don't want massive huge upgrades to big huge plasma weapons and then just a power fantasy game from there. Then again, many people just want to be a space marine badass superguy unbeatable invincible superhero, so maybe I'm the minority. Edit: oh, and for gods' sake, make the "stop and pause before jumping over a wall" turn into the same exact thing without the "stop and pause" part in the animation sequence. Not that that is terribly game-breaking. Category filed: Slight Visual Annoyance. Other than that, thanks for continuing to try to pull this thing off, I expect to see a final-ish product mostly bug free and playing smoothly somewhere around Xmas 2013. Nothing wrong in that, cheers to all. /rant off

Amen. Played my first mission on my new Windows 8 laptop last night and had a hard time moving soldiers, as the "move perspective up/down levels" tool in the UI didn't seem to work. Example: Select soldier. UI height tool at level 1, but all levels of buildings is displayed. Appear able to select and move to a square that's hidden behind a building visually from the player's perspective, but is in view of the soldier. Move soldier - game cuts down to correct level, then cuts back up to max levels displayed. Everything else seems surprisingly smooth, though. I'm glad I'm not on a Mac anymore. Here's to hoping the game will be relatively bug free and feature complete in 2013.

Seems to me you're going way overboard on the feature creep here. Easy on the high-concept design and the rest of the game will carry itself, going overboard on this will just bog down development. More power to the bug fixes and smoothening out everything else to a fine polish. Down with feature creep! Up with polish! Rah! Rah! Rah!

10.6.8 Walking through buildings (Quonset huts). Apparently dead alien (couldn't shoot him, could stand on him) shown standing up. Walking through visually solid walls. Invisible civilian, too. Biggest thing right now is the game feels very clicky. You have to click. A lot. To get past most any popup window notifications. The game world also feels very un-atmospheric at the moment. It's sterile and very very basic in that you hardly ever see anything past the first vertical level, since you have to be down at that level to select or move anything, you can't display the second level just for looks like I usually do in these types of games to get a better feel for how the game field actually is intended to look. Q: When was the last time you saw the second level art for the Chinook? Is there really much of a point to having all these gorgeous art assets if we're just going to almost never see them? /2c

17.1 is up on Desura. Downloading.

Cheers. The v16.x was so nuts I uninstalled it and decided to wait on the next patch. Here's to hoping for a Mac version soon enough.

16.1 had some major issues, I guess we'll have to wait a few days to get caught up to v17 like the big boys. Major v16 problems: Desert maps with no buildings or scenery. Can't move some units out of the Chinook. Other units can't fire. Game hangs.

Some weird stuff. Plane at the top of the right side in aerial combat mode is labeled as "2", but in the battlespace it's labeled as "1". UFO shot down over water "has escaped to space." "Items have arrived at Base X" should probably sometimes read "Personnel have arrived at Base X".

1. CTD trying to load previous version saved game. No surprise there and should generally be expected moving from version to version, I guess. 2. Invisible civilians/friendly soldiers walking around with shadows showing. Friendly soldiers' weapons seem to blink in and out of existence. 3. Units walking straight through walls of Quonset huts on desert maps. 4. I finally figured out that Ctrl-click changes the shot from snap/normal/aimed - but is there an easy way to switch to burst from single shot? 5. Game is very 'clicky' - Esc still doesn't close out of many pop-up windows. Selecting a fighter jet in the right-side pane during aerial combat doesn't mean it's selected in the battlespace, you still have to click the little fighter icon there. Research popup window you have to get the mouse cursor all the way down in the bottom to click a button. Esc key won't get you past that window. User-friendly it's not. 6. Early game aliens seem VERY underpowered, or maybe that's an AI thing. I have yet to take damage other than from friendly fire, and my tactics consist of running at max speed to bum rush everything. 7. The game doesn't seem to handle elevation changes very intuitively. Can't make a soldier jump out through a second story opening. Can't select a ground-level soldier if I have the map elevation set to display level 2. Which means 90% of the time you will have the map set at level 1, which in turn means damn near ALL buildings and the Chinook will always and damn near forever be cut off at the middle. Which is somewhat silly in that you make all this nice art and never display it - to me it just looks silly. But then again, the hardcore tactical customer won't care. The vast majority of your player base probably won't care. I just personally always liked to play TBS games from a higher elevation so you can kind of see what the map was intended to look like with everything displayed. I'll get off my soapbox now. 8. If I have 4 (or is it 5?) action points left, shouldn't I be able to change the facing of a dude? Is this by design that you can't, or bug or? 9. Too tired to think. Good night. At least you guys don't have people shooting through walls and through friendly soldiers and wonky LOS issues like the newly released XCOMEU AAA title does. Yuck. But it looks nice, and the glam cam works well, imho. 10. Still haven't figured out how to put a unit on Overwatch. Or maybe I'm stupid. Or tired. Or both. Ehhhhhhh. Weeee I'm so sleep dep'd.

v16 out for download if you have this thread subscribed to.

I think you're taking this a bit too far. The OP was just a simple question about one simple graphical icon detail. That's it. I couldn't care much less about the actual game effect with mechanics and whatnot, to my eyes the underlying math/psychology/battle system is just fine. It was just a thread about the icon, no more. I'm not trying for a huge overhaul of the game. If you think a bit of constructive criticism of one single little icon floating over a character's head on the screen is "wanting... something completely different" then I really don't know what to tell you, other than that you in this post appear incapable of rational discussion regarding something that doesn't immediately appeal to you. Or perhaps this is just a case of normal reasonable people not being able to have a reasonable discussion over the internet, as seems to so often happen over this medium. I'm moderately certain that if we had this discussion face to face it'd last about 2-3 minutes and finish with a mutual "Ah well, no big deal" from each of us. Well, at least from me. Again, and with renewed emphasis - TO EACH THEIR OWN. I'm not trying to force or QQ to change - as you so fanatically put it - "completely different" design. Now, if you continue to say anyone who disagrees with you about some minor little icon or detail should go find another game, you appear as tolerant as the extreme liberals that call themselves "tolerant" and yet can only handle talking to anyone that shares their every opinion.

In the Ukraine they're trying to pass a Church-backed law that would make it illegal to offend people by talking about gay stuff. Generally speaking I'm okay with countries setting whatever standard they want for what's acceptable speech or not, but ...that's a bit rough. Here's to hoping there's a soon-to-be-uncovered Ukrainian National Church Gay Sex Scandal. He he.

I'm guessing the Mac version will be stuck in v14 for a bit longer?

You made me google Introversion, and found out they're the guys behind the selling $1000 slots for Alpha access to some upcoming indie Prison sim. Good on them. I'm all for you guys squeezing maximum money out of people for access to stuff you're actively working on. As long as you don't promise X by date Y and keep plugging away, I see no problem.

Can't Goldhawk buy the maps for $0.01 or somesuch?