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Unfortunately Hotfix V3.1 did not address all of the critical issues in the game, so we're releasing another small hotfix to improve the player experience. Changelog: Fixed a second crash that would occur at the end of the first turn when you were fighting Sebillians due to some missing shield animations. We've done this by temporarily removing the shield-using Sebillians (they'll be back in V4). Fixed the floors of the alien base appearing bright pink / purple due to a missing texture shader. Possibly fixed the issue where some of the civilians were upside down. Incidentally, if you see objects in the ground combat colored bright pink / purple please screenshot them and post them up on the forums - this is our error color that indicates that there is a missing texture or missing shader on that object. It's usually very simple to fix these problems if we know where they are! This is probably going to be the last fix for the V3 builds, so now we've addressed what we think are the critical bugs we think it would be useful to start getting some feedback from you on where you think the game is and why. Please could you give the current game a rating out of 10 and a quick comment on the following areas: Stability - what bugs are most spoiling your enjoyment? Quality - what things could we do to improve your enjoyment of the game? List up to three, but please keep this short! For example: Stability: 5/10, I get a crash at least every hour on the ground combat (usually related to shooting) and I can't play the Alien Base missions because they always crash. Quality: 3/10, I would like to see the research art and text included, better alien AI in the ground combat and I feel the air combat is not very interesting.

I've taken a look at the Xenopedia entries available, and I think the least bad place to provide base assault casualty info is in the two Early Assault Operator Interrogation entries (so, two instances of the same info), according to the logic that these enemies are responsible for that kind of operations. After all, the info is not critical, so it's not a big problem if it takes some time to get it. Something along these lines: "We did extract some information that's potentially useful out if the interrogation of this enemy operator: In order to assault the target base as quickly as (in)humanly possible to deny us the chance to deploy our troops closer to the breach points and to set up booby traps for them in our base, the assault troops are stationed in drop pods along the hull of the UFO well before reaching our base. This means that damage sustained by the ship is also likely to result in casualties among the crew, as opposed to the standard situation when crew is killed on a crash only, while well protected inside it until that happens. Our estimates indicate up to half of the crew may be eliminated if a base assault UFO is shot down, compared to about 10% killed in a regular crash. Similarly, engaging a landing base assault UFO without succeeding in bringing it down ought to result in a casualty proportion that increases more or less linearly with the damage up to about 50%, and we think we reap about the same benefit regardless of whether the damage is caused by engagement by our airborne forces or by base defense batteries. Interestingly enough, the aliens aren't nearly as worried about regular ground forces as of the X-Divison ones, so terror missions are performed in the normal, more leisurely fashion, which means only an outright crash is likely to kill any troops. I guess we can take some meagre pride in being considered a harder nut to crack."

Androns aren't EXACTLY reviving, but it has a similar effect in the end. You may or may not have encountered force fields yet. They act like shields with the extremely important difference that there's no way around them (no vulnerable backside, area effect do not bypassing them, nor do melee attacks [I think, I'm not sure I've tried]), so you have to deal damage to them until they're destroyed to get at the unit underneath, and it takes quite a lot to do that as they're generally stronger than current level shields (and you'd have to spend quite some time if you're using antimatter weapons, since they're dealing out comparatively little damage, and the ability to bypass armor that isn't present anyway doesn't provide any benefit). Once the force field is down you have to start to wear down the Andron itself (which isn't exactly weak either). Here antimatter works well (although the buggers still have a lot of HPs). Also note that you can't damage the Andron itself until the shield is completely gone, so an explosive of any kind will at best blow away the (remainder of the) force field, but won't hurt the unit underneath even if the shield had only a single HP remaining (A minigun can wear through both a force field and the unit underneath because each bullet is a separate attack [with the occasional odd situation where a unit reaction fires while being pelted with minigun bullets and then dies, potentially resulting in both units dying, but that's a side track]). There's also a mechanism with multiple "skins", with each skin having different protective properties, and each skin has to be destroyed separately (again, overshooting explosive damage is lost, with the next "skin" being in pristine condition). Thirdly, there's a protective "spore" mechanism that causes select units to form into a "spore/pupa" on the cusp of destruction, to eventually emerge as a new unit. When all mechanisms are present in the same unit the maximum times you may have to destroy an incarnation of it is 5 (I believe it's possible to extend this cycle further, for extra pain, but 5 is the maximum number in the current version of the mod). If I understand it correctly, robosadists have to have a stake through their hearts to stop them from rising again. The maximum number of incarnations you have to take down in that case is 4 (assuming you "place the stake" in a timely manner). I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised if you had to deal 10000 HP of effective damage to get rid of a top tier robosadist. Concerning the comment about using weapons with large mags to work around enemy unit counts, the last Energy line of weapons has an incredibly poor mag size (and I'm still not sure they're actually better than the second last one. Rather different, yes, but better?), with the mags being filled with lead, judging by their weight. Lore: I'll try to find somewhere to explain away why downed assaults suffer heavier casualties than other downed craft. As dead units tend to litter the interior of downed craft, it ought to be possible to count the ones not killed by your team the next time such a mission is performed (assuming you're sufficiently interested).