Unlimited Ammo & Grenades for Aliens

Why do the aliens have unlimited ammo and grenades? How did this get past the game testers. I mean it's not a problem if you don't play on iron-man where you can keep loading saved games but for iron man it is game breaking. Did any of the testers even play on iron man?

Hey. The ammo is unlimited, not the grenades. AI does not have a reload mechanic.

Even Aliens will have ammo, they will have about 3 magazines and if you would wait for them to use 3 magazines before you kill them, it wold be a long time.

They are many people who plays ironman already.

Plenty of us played ironman, both before and after release. If the aliens got limited ammo, they would also probably get a couple reloads, so it would still end up with them having functionally unlimited ammo. This was discussed a couple times during the testing stage, but ultimately the devs decided it would be developing a system that would have minimal impact on gameplay.

Do aliens actually have unlimited grenades? I've never noticed this and I don't recall them having the appropriate tag in the game files (indeed, I don't even know if it would work). But is possible I just never noticed/encountered that situation.

It would have been difficult to notice, as to test that would be to deliberately try to encourage aliens to repeatedly throw grenades. As pretty much everybody who bought into Xenonauts through all the stages of the game's development were more concerned about soldiers living than dying, it would have been easily overlooked. This is a problem with a player base who gets involved in testing - the player base is more concerned with winning than loosing, prefers to look for edge cases which produce amusing situations and screams like a stuck pig when a bug prevents gameplay. Bug testing and gameplay testing in games seems to skew more to what people shout the loudest about, rather than destruct testing every possible permutation of events that could appear.

EDIT: I mean, take the situation where aliens could theoretically have unlimited ammo. Throughout the game, alien weapons are very powerful. Every shot an alien shoots is a potential dead solider so there is no incentive to try and waste an alien's magazine - it's more beneficial to kill the alien before it can hit and possibly kill a solider. So the potential for players to notice aliens have unlimited ammo very rarely comes up, as there is every incentive to shoot and kill aliens as quickly as possible, and very few incentives to hang around.

EDIT 2: Hmm... perhaps that's a strat that could make into Xeno 2? Armour and equipment which encourages aliens to run dry? Or alien tools and armour which encourages the same behavior in Xenonauts? A swarm based aliens that is partnered up with another type which takes lots of shots to sort out?

I'm in favour of limited ammo/reload mechanic for aliens, just so they're playing by the same rules.

I'm in favour of limited ammo/reload mechanic for aliens, just so they're playing by the same rules.

As i said, even they use ammo/reload, they would have 3-4 magazine like you and if you can't kill an alien before he shots you about 40 times, i think there is a problem at the gamer's side.

Even at new X-Com games i am not sure that aliens got ammo or not because the battle is not so long.. You kill aliens with 5-6 bullet max, so if they shoot you 10 times, you will already lose..

I try to say that, even they had that mechanic, you won't notice it..

Edit: At new X-Coms, even you don't have ammo lol.. so..

In the Firaxis XCOM games aliens use the same ammo system as the player, so they have unlimited ammo but need to reload eventually. It rarely comes up, because fights are generally short.

This is one of those decisions that conceptually it would make sense for them to have limited ammo, but in practice it would so rarely make a difference in actual gameplay that it wouldn't be worth the time it would take to develop and balance it.