Monifix

Haha, yeah better be careful or the internet forum police will come after you ;-) Consider me consoled. And yeah, you bring up a good point. This IS an indie game after all and perhaps I am expecting too much. On the other hand, I think a lot of it could have been addressed without adding costs to the development such as the decision to make UFOs appear in waves. Adding hills and more randomness to the maps and simulated UFO damage would probably come with a significant price tag though.

Thanks, I will give your maps a try ;-) I don't think that I'm really straying too much off topic if that is what you meant though. The general issue for the points I bring up is lack of randomness, which ties in to the waves of UFOs vs. having them appear sporadically. Predictablilty detracts from the enjoyment of this type of game in my opinion, and compared to the original games I think there is significantly more of it in Xenonauts.

Well I don't know if you can call it nostalgia when I've been playing the original games regularly ever since they came out and only just finished a Terror From The Deep playthrough very recently. I respect that you don't think it's that bad, but for me personally the issues I bring up are major negatives as far as enjoyment of the game goes. I also mainly use autoresolve now, simply because the air combat mini-game became such a chore and after I've gotten good at it, the outcome is also very predictable (I hate the little exploits you can use to swing the battle in your favor.) At least the autoresolve is pretty random sometimes and can screw you over even though it sometimes gives you an unexpectedly positive result as well. I understand that the maps were not completely random in the original games, I don't think we have the technology to make reasonable looking maps that are completely randomly generated for every single tile, but they were FAR more random than the ones in Xenonauts. Xenonauts doesn't even have hills in the landscape, or simulated damage to UFOs for that matter.

I think you guys are so proud of your little air combat mini-game that you are putting waaaaay too much emphasis on the challenge of shooting down UFOs, and completely ignoring that your approach leaves the geoscape a barren uninteresting wasteland for most of the game. Why did you decide that air combat should be such an important part of the game? It's as if your design philosophy doesn't understand what made the original games great. One word: Tension. You would feel tense never knowing when the next UFO would appear and if you'd be able to take it down due to the more random air combat. You'd feel tense in ground combat never knowing what the mission site would look like or where the next alien is lurking about. In Xenonauts you sit around looking at your clock while waiting for the next predictable wave of UFOs to appear. In ground combat you know the map patterns after a while, you know that only about half of the aliens will engage you outside the UFO while the rest hunker down inside, you even know that Aliens can't spawn on the second floor of buildings, so you never have to check or be wary of sniper fire from the windows. I think this is the games biggest downfall.

Well, you can play self-imposed iron man of course, that's what I've been doing. Keep 2 saves for the geoscape and alternate between them. 1 save for just before you land for a mission (I've had most crashes during the loading of ground missions) and one extra save for every time you leave the game. That way you'd have to be very unfortunate for both to corrupt, and you can always pick up after a crash. It just takes the self control not to reload when something bad happens, which isn't really a problem if you loathe yourself for doing that or think that it ruins the fun.

It was the same in the original game. So many times I'd spot an alien in hidden movement which would park itself just outside of vision. I'd take 1 step forward with my soldier in my turn, spot it and think "Got you! Time to crouch for that extra aim and to make myself a smaller target if it shoots back" *Click* - Instant reaction fire to the face and a soldier dying in agony.

You know, every time you post I get an urge for pancakes, and now I want them with raspberry jam! Alas, I have no pancakes... T.T

I admit I might be a little masochistic in this regard, haha. If I misclick I don't rage, I just call the soldier an idiot and think that he deserves to die. ;-)

Even so, losing a team doesn't equate to losing the game necessarily. One of my most memorable playthroughs of the original x-com had me losing 2 teams of 14 soldiers, and even a dropship to the 2nd and 3rd missions. As the last survivor got gunned down with a shot to the back while he scrambled to try to get inside the second time I wiped (the first time I managed to get my last guy back into the dropship) I was sure that I was completely screwed. I still managed to beat the game but it was not easy for sure. I lost a ton of soldiers because i fell so far behind, and I even had to sell an interceptor to get a new dropship, but I have such fond memories from that, and ultimately the feeling of success was so satisfying. THAT is Ironman ;-)

I don't think I've ever had a mis-click "ruin my game," might have lost me a soldier a few times though. But you get used to losing people when you play ironman.

Well, with the way i play personally, always stretching my resources to the limit, always on the edge of bankruptcy, I never quite have enough armor to go around for everyone, so I actually prefer that the armor gets removed from soldiers who are not fit for active duty.

Why not have them ricochet/deflect based on the angle of entry and the strength of the material or realistically fragment into smaller pellets as well? Surely this can't be hard to code ;-D Neat idéa though.

I personallly like that the Aliens can get a lot of reaction fire in certain situations, It's one of the few things that make them challenging. How boring it would be if Goldenhawk nerfed everything people complain about on these forums. It's supposed to be a hard challenging game people. I wish it was harder than it is now really.

Cutscenes cost a lot of money, I don't think an indie company can just get cutscenes made like the big boys.

Hmm, how does someone with 2 injured arms use the medkit to heal himself? EDIT: Or someone who got shot in the back.... hmmmmmmm