Leaderboard

I rather like Charon's thoughts above on how the experience of the pilots themselves is not as important as the air wing as a whole. You could work this as readiness value for each airbase as a whole. When plane is shot down your value goes down as they will be replaced with a less experienced pilot, whereas successful missions increase it as your pilots and ground crew become better. At certain readiness thresholds you could have skill tree abilities for both the ground crew and the pilots that you could pick such as quicker refueling or slightly longer range for cannon weapons. Also higher readiness could translate directly into higher accuracy and evasion as well. You could even transfer readiness between bases to bolster a bad base or one that recently took a lot of casualty's. A ten percent transfer could be explained as you just sent them a couple good pilots and a few experienced technicians. Also as an aside it would be cool if there were other aircraft in the combat zone. It would spice it up a bit if there were civilian craft that you could try to bait the et's away from, or military craft from the local government that could try and assist you.

I completely agree. But given that the Xenonauts are supposed to be drafted from the elite military units of the participating nations, they should already be very well trained in both the skills and the mental state required - even if they're still rookies in terms of facing non-terrestrial beings. That said, I had a mission today where the soldier with the HEVY launcher managed to, twice in a row, actually fire in the opposite direction of the target and hit the wall behind them, injuring both themselves and the soldier next to them. Which seems ludicrous. Even someone with little to no experience with a gun/grenade launcher isn't going to fire it backwards.

I've had general concerns about this as it's definitely happened to me before as well. Things like the soldier using the HEVY Launcher shooting something immediately in front of them, going almost 45 degrees either left or right, or even shooting half as far or twice as far as the target. While I certainly understand the fairly low chance to hit that sometimes comes up, these are supposed to be soldiers pulled from the elite of the elite of the world's military, come to fight against an alien menace. And even though the HEVY launcher is a newly researched item, it's not really that different from many grenade launchers used throughout the world's military. So while there only may be a small chance of hitting the target, it would make much more sense to me if a miss resulted in going a few squares left, right, over, or under. The lower the hit possibility, the more likely to be further away from the aiming point. So some sort of grid or circular template with possible hit chances around the target would make a lot more sense than the current behaviour. Similarly for throwing a grenade. These aren't civilians who have been conscripted into the fight, and throwing a grenade directly into the tree right in front of them seems extraordinarily unlikely for any highly trained solder. They may not hit the exact square they're aiming for, but they're not going to miss 45 degrees to the right and half the distance they were aiming. Even people who aren't great at throwing objects like balls usually can manage to get it in the general direction they're aiming. Anyway, that's just my thinking on this, but it would probably entail a significant redesign of the way things work. I totally agree though that the shooting at your feet that happens quite a bit in the game seems pretty ridiculous given who our soldiers are supposed to be.