Xadism

Hey all - I played this game a lot in Beta in summer 2013. I really loved it, and the developers have done a great job. But a couple frustrations led to me getting bored with it after 1.5 plays -- I'm curious how it's changed since July 2013. Here's what bugged me in 2013 - can anyone tell me if these things have changed in ways that might make a re-play more rewarding? Strategic play - and particularly air combat - was very linear. There was only one strategic research path towards keeping up with the increasing toughness of UFOs. Once medium ships appeared, you never saw any more smalls. Once larges appeared, you never saw mediums again. Which meant if you hadn't anticipated exactly the correct tech choices, you were behind, with no hope of recovery. There was no "explore and try things to find what works", except for reloading much earlier and trying a different research sequence. Squad weapon tech progression wasn't very diverse. The step from ballistic to laser weapons was identical to the step from laser to plasma weapons: more damage, more weight, less ammo capacity. And at each tech level, the same mix of weapons was available: pistol, rifle, sniper, shotgun. This made tactical planning less interesting - when new tech was available, you upgraded and lived with the lower ammo caps, but you didn't need to adjust tactics at all for the new technology. (This as compared to the original X-Com, where laser weapons had higher accuracy and no ammo consumption, but plasma had higher damage, making the strategic choice between the two interesting right up to the end of the game. Xenonauts doesn't need to exactly clone the OG of course, but the branching of tech capabilities meant there were multiple approaches to making an effective squad, each of which required different tactics.). Air combat losses were nearly unrecoverable. Planes were fairly easy to lose, but so expensive compared to income that even a single loss was usually financially catastrophic to your strategic arc. This meant the game involved a lot of save and reload, re-trying each air combat until you found a way to win. IIRC the devs were trying various approaches to rebalance this right around the time I stopped playing. So - do y'all think I'd find the game more replayable now? There was a lot I loved about Xenonauts, so I'm curious to re-try if some of those concerns have been better balanced. (It's *way* better than the 2012 XCom: Enemy Unknown, which I felt was fun once -- but not as fun as Xenonauts! -- and was so tightly scripted that it had almost zero replayability.)

"Just". I've only been able to afford two foxtrots at all, so one at each base (North America and Europe). Next game I'll ignore vehicles entirely; by not building that one experimental scout (i hated it and stopped using it) i might be able to afford a third Foxtrot by mid-November. Though then with the new FTs only mounting two torps, but still having to build a hangar for each, I'll be worse off than I was. Sigh.

Totally. In fact base defense missions absolutely *must* include a couple dozen unarmored, untrained, 30-TU scientists and engineers in labcoats with ballistic pistols. :-) And when they die, you have to hire new ones.

Hmmm.... okay, so it was probably low on fuel because I'd transferred it to another base right after manufacture. Thanks! Devs: a message explaining this would be nice; it's confusing UX to click on something and have nothing happen for no apparent reason.

Don't know if I'm doing something wrong, or if this is a bug. I just build my second foxtrot, and I have alenium explosives. But I can't put alenium weapons on this foxtrot. The other has them, but this new one is armed with sidewinders and avalanches, and clicking on the weapon or its label does nothing. I can switch weapons around on all my other aircraft just fine. Version: v18 stable. (EDIT: Specify version)

In v18 stable I periodically get blank Xenopedia pages coming up when I complete research projects. I don't mean "the picture goes here" placeholder, I mean a completely blank 'pedia frame with no text, no image, no nothing, just the close box. I can try to screenshot it the next time it comes up, if you like.

Yeah, the air difficulty spike is pretty absurd. I'm in late October, build v18 stable, normal difficulty. All last month was light scouts and scouts, which a single condor takes out without difficulty, so I focussed on improving equipment for the ground troops. The game text says Avalanches are so powerful they'll destroy almost anything slow enough to hit. Small scout: 1 condor, no upgrades, no problem. Scout: 1 condor, little problem. 2 condors, no problem. 3 Fighter squadron: 2 condors, win with a little damage. 2 condors + foxtrot, still no upgrades: no problem. Missiles take out one fighter, cannons finish off the other two. Next thing I see: corvette. By now I have gatling lasers. Wipes out my squadron every time. I savescummed 8 times trying to figure out the tactics to beat it. Eventually I manage to hit it with almost everything by getting it to chase the foxtrot and circling the condors around behind. ... which still didn't work. The damn thing soaked up 2 avalanches, 6 sidewinders, ~50 cannon rounds and a FULL LOAD of 250 gatling laser rounds without going down. WTF? My experience went from "avalanches? who needs them - these ships are weak!" to "Is it even possible to kill this thing?" I didn't get alenium explosives, sure, but I *did* build aircraft weapons (gatling lasers) before any weapons for my troops. On Normal difficulty, that shouldn't be a fatal mistake. What's the point of the gatling laser if the only ships it can take out are ones you can take out just fine with a normal cannon?

Can't open the installer .dmg file. I have downloaded it twice, once with torrent and once direct from the link provided by my preorder. The torrent successfully verified when I used "force verify" in Vuse. Whenever I click to open one of the .dmg files to open it, it says "verifying" for a couple of minutes with a progress bar, then pops us a window with "unable to open dmg, checksum invalid". Version: v18 stable OS: Mac OS X 10.7.5 Mac: 17" Macbook Pro (2.5Ghz i7 model) Memory: 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3