Skyfire

They DO imply different use-cases. The difference isn't super-important currently, because the only place it really shows up is in the accelerated-vs-gauss comparison and there's not a huge amount of differentiation in alien's defensive stats that would make it more relevant, but it still exists. Short version: penetration > destruction for kill-shots, destruction > penetration for softening up targets. There is no level of armour destruction that will ever give you a one-shot-kill. Period. If there's an alien with 40HP, 1 armour, and your gun does 40 damage, then if you have 0 destruction it's two shots to kill. 5 destruction, two shots to kill. 10 destruction, two shots to kill. A million destruction, still two shots to kill. On the other hand, 40 damage with even 1 penetration drops that down to one shot. On the flip side, if/when we get an enemy with serious armour (something like 50-100 - basically, anything that can just no-sell a rifle shot completely), that's going to boost the value of destruction a lot. Against a 100 armour target, it'd take an accelerated rifle 29 shots to even get the first point of actual HP damage - it only takes a basic laser 9 shots to do the same. (All calculations here are ignoring damage randomisation and misses, but neither of those will make a huge difference to the current issue) If they make an assault rifle into a specialist support tool, I will riot.

I'm pretty sure the suppression mechanic itself is 100% symmetrical: lose all remaining TUs on the turn a unit gets suppressed, and only regain half next time the unit regains TUs at the start of the turn. An alien being suppressed is losing at least one shot, and probably being forced onto a less accurate shot mode even if they do shoot. The shot they do get is equivalent to a middle-accuracy assault rifle shot. Try checking a random normal shot through cover with your guys a few times - it's probably around a 30% chance to hit. If they weren't suppressed, that one 30% shot would have been one 30% shot plus one 50% shot (2x 50% with a pistol), or a longer move into a flanking 70% shot, so they definitely are becoming less dangerous. The feeling of an alien advantage is basically coming from the fact that they're expected to die, so they have nothing to lose by rolling the dice. If an alien takes a 30% shot, misses, and gets killed, it's just kind of 'eh, that was the expected result anyway', but if it lands the shot then it's a significant win - it hurt or killed a soldier that is a long-term asset for the player, while even if it gets blown up immediately afterwards itself, it was only ever a short-term asset for the alien side. On the flip side, if the player takes a risky 30% shot, the situation is pretty much reversed. A hit is just 'OK, things are on track' whereas a miss could cost a soldier death (and therefore weaken your force for the rest of the mission, lose experience/stats on the strategic level, etc).

100% agreed. "Alien-Invasion-Profiteering Tycoon" might be a fun game, but it's not this game. Spamming bases full of workshops to take advantage of manufacturing for profit is one of those 'Players will optimise the fun out of the game if you let them' scenarios. I do think it might be worth adding an in-universe explanation, though: "As part of our organisation's charter, the funding nations have the sole right to purchase any artifacts, equipment or other items of value that we may wish to dispose of, whether recovered from the aliens or developed in the course of the war. The revenue clause specifically mandates that items manufactured on Earth must be sold at-cost or below - apparently some of the founders were concerned we might become... distracted... from our primary goal of fighting the aliens if there was an opportunity for us to profit in other ways."

I like math, so I did go off and do some calculations here. The first break-point where the upgrade can save you two generators in one base is at 501 total power consumption - that needs either four upgraded or six non-upgraded generators. 36 slots are available in a base. I'm going to assume minimum viable hangars in the main base is 4 (dropship + one wing of interceptors), so 8 slots spent there. 4 slots on generators, + 1 on the access lift, leaves 23 slots available to consume power. 3 radars is a no-brainer, as they're by far the most power-hungry building, giving us 180 spent. Spending the remaining 321 power over 20 rooms is... difficult. That's 16.05 power per slot - the only things higher than that (other than radars which we already maxed) are training and med centers (25 each), and defensive batteries. Labs/workshops look close at 15 power, but you need one living quarterss per two of those, so only actually come out at 10 power per slot effective use. Med centers are capped at 1 (useful) per base, training centers need living quarters for troops so only 12.5 per slot effective use, and there's no value in a base that's nothing but defensive batteries (what are you defending at that point...?). I can't get an actually useful design out of that. Closest is some kind of five quarters, five training, medical + nine batteries setup - I guess for a player who likes human-wave tactics but hates base defense missions? Otherwise reaching the power total takes either a 2x2 of labs, workshops and quarters and then 8 training and/or med centers (why? we can't fit any soldiers in this base...), or dropping the hangars entirely and building a base that's 100% dedicated to research and production (which gives you well over 100 scientists or engineers to do... something?). Saving three generators in one base is... not gonna happen. Those designs above are only barely above the power threshold for the last generator to be needed so they have a lot of spare power available. Note: I'm definitively not saying that alenium generators actually need a buff. I can't find a base design that would justify them with our current set of buildings and time available - but we're in a progression-locked early access version right now. All it would take is one or two late-game buildings that draw 50 or 100 power in one tile and they suddenly look better. If I can offer some unsolicited advice (risky business, I know...): @bonerstorm it would be a good idea to tone down the phrasing you use. I do think the core of what you're saying is usually right, but you've repeatedly said things like 'mandatory' and 'literally impossible' for things that have turned out to be 'optimal but not strictly necessary' or 'quite difficult'. That gets under people's skin, as you can see in this thread. Say the same thing with less definitive wording and you'll be able to spend more time on the actual point (where, like I said, I think you've generally been doing OK). @bifohe6676 (and anyone else watching this debate) just insert a mental 'probably' or 'I think' anywhere bonerstorm says 'definitely' or 'guaranteed'. There's usually a decent point being made underneath that, and it's not worth getting into an internet argument over that kind of wording.

Looking at my day-180 bases, alenium reactors (which I did in fact research) mean I need three reactors instead of four in my main base, and one instead of two in my two satellite bases. That's $600k build costs saved at the cost of $500k + 50 alenium on the upgrade - effectively I'm 'selling' 50 alenium for $100k. Given that minimum sales price is $4k per unit, that's a pretty bad deal - I'd get twice the return for just selling the alenium even at the minimum price, and more if I hadn't sold much before that. Saving a few slots is... not really that big a deal. I haven't even filled my primary base completely yet, although I'm very close. Satellite bases literally have half their space still open, so I can just keep throwing down hangars there. Phantoms have the range to provide support to the main base from the satellites if necessary, and worst case I have to let one or two UFOs survive for once. So overall, I'm going to have to go with @bonerstorm on this one. It's borderline - I'd only need a few more generators before the cost-benefit equation flips - but as things stand right now it would have been more efficient for me to just build extra basic generators than to upgrade. A side benefit there is that I don't need to spend workshop time on the upgrade, so the engineers can keep working on aircraft or gear instead.

No, researching or not researching the plot techs doesn't affect how quickly new UFOs turn up. There's an official answer from Chris here: Seems to be a common area of confusion - there's some discussion over in that thread about possible ways to fix that, but no real conclusions.

The big thing that jumps out at me there is the 48 aim on that soldier - that's middle-to-low for a brand-now rookie. Part of your problem is that that guy's just not a very good shot.

That's exactly how it does work already. Baseline shields have 80 hp, and will break after taking that much damage. That might be half-a-dozen small hits if the enemy keeps low-rolling damage, or it could be one crit from a plasma rifle. Upgraded shields have 160 hp, and again will take exactly that much damage in however many hits are needed to reach that total. Ignore the 'shields can only take one hit!!!' talk - a lot of players only pay attention to the enemy high-rolls on damage, so they talk as though every enemy shot is always guaranteed to do 80-100 damage. That's simply not true.

@kingsword Real-life infantry tactics in the present day are almost entirely cover-based don't-get-hit combat, and the available evidence suggests we're going to move further in that direction rather than away. In the constant weapons-vs-armour arms race, weapons are winning right now - and the proposals for improved weapons are currently more promising than the proposals for improved armour. We know what lasers and railguns look like, and there are working prototypes out there (at a bigger-than-man-portable scale, but still). Armour that's better than kevlar and ceramic inserts is still mostly at the handwave stage. The 'realistic' version of near-future infantry combat is 'if you take a solid hit it's probably gonna mess you up pretty bad, and the job of your armour is mostly to help you survive to evac rather than actually keep you in the fight'. The one case where shields do get used is the SWAT teams you mentioned, and they're used in one specific niche - short, explosive close-quarters breaches. That's more the equivalent of having your shield soldier chill in the backline till you're actually breaching the UFO, not having them take point the entire way. Even then, it basically seems to be a police thing rather than a military thing - I suspect that it's at least partly about minimising collateral damage in a civilian environment. For a military storming a hostile UFO, the breach protocol would be less 'shields first' and more 'grenades first, point man needs a real gun in case anything's still moving'. As for realism in the damage model, we have numerical HP without a red-fog mechanic, powerful and very fast on-the-field healing, and complete recovery from major wounds in a matter of weeks. We're so far into gameplay-over-realism with this stuff that nit-picking details just seems like cherry-picking - the fact that the soldiers have a boolean instant-failure-at-zero-hp is massively more unrealistic than the fact that shields do. It's actually somewhat plausible to have a shield block 100% of the damage from a shot but get mangled in the process. Finally, the devs' have been fairly clear about their reasoning for the change. At the risk of putting words in other people's mouths: the majority of players didn't like the new shields, and many didn't understand them either. It seemed clear that the new shields were overall decreasing the enjoyment of the playerbase, so they made the choice that would make the game feel better for the largest number of players.

OK, hit day 180 myself now, so some thoughts (playing on Veteran difficulty): Accelerated weapons research is in a better spot than the forum gives it credit for. I rushed one accelerated rifle for the first cleaner mission (delayed starting it slightly for the project to complete), then built two more for subsequent missions. Never felt the need to build any of the other accelerated weapons - three accelerated rifles and a bunch of ballistics carried me through to ~day 100, at which point I started upgrading to improved lasers and then gauss. Key here was hitting the 40-damage breakpoint to oneshot cleaners with an average damage roll. Panic is controllable using the old Xenonauts 1 strategy: get extra hangar/radar bases and planes to fill them ASAP, and then everything else is just about keeping pace. I researched Phantoms early-ish (did two or three other techs first, so not a hard rush), but didn't particularly push any other air techs. Skipped the upgraded dropship completely as a test, and didn't really feel the loss. Finished the current content with all regions below 30 panic and two on single digits. The triple-interceptor wing that has been discussed may have been a problem if I'd faced one before getting gauss blasters (it was fine with them), but everything else was a comfortable fight on alenium rockets and accelerated cannons. I don't understand why mission loot doesn't auto-sell the way it did in X1. Is there any situation where it ever makes sense to keep corpses etc in storage? If not, why is the player being forced to go through dozens of extra clicks every mission on a false choice? I want a 'light airframe' upgrade/module for Angels in the mid/late game. I still want one in most of my intercept squadrons as an armour-breaker (it can bring three torps vs the Phantom's two), but it drags down the speed and range of the Phantoms. I'd be happy with literally reducing it to zero armour and 1hp if I could bring it up to the speed/range of the Phantoms in exchange - all it's doing is volleying the torpedoes and GTFOing anyway.

Yeah, those are pretty much the correct numbers for a Cleaner firing an aimed shot with an assault rifle with no penalties. 65 aim on a 1.2 acc shot is 78% to hit, and a 10% aim bonus because of difficulty would put that close to 90%. This probably means that you need to position more defensively. Are you using a lot of single-tile cover pieces (or not using cover)? Cover in this game is more finicky than some games. Placing a unit next to a one-tile cover piece only actually provide cover for maybe a 90-degree cone, not the 180-degrees of something like new XCOM. On the other hand, you don't need to be next to it to benefit - a car between you and the enemy will still provide cover even if it's several tiles away. Getting 40% cover would drop that 78% accuracy on Recruit to a bit under 50%, cover+smoke drops it even further. It's basically impossible to hit anything shooting through the middle of a full smoke-grenade cloud (5 tiles of smoke is -100% - literally impossible unless you can sneak in a bonus somewhere that skips the smoke penalty). The good news is that all of that is 100% symmetrical. Once you get used to spotting free lines where you get get a shot past the enemy's cover, you also get 70-100% shots regularly - and an accelerated rifle one-shots Cleaners even more often than they do it to you. As they say, the enemy can't hit you if they're dead.

I didn't think that was even possible - did you skip a mission or something? The Mag weapons research should become available after the first mission - the 'alien research team' one that pops on around day 3. I've had it available as an option for my second research project literally every time on Milestone 1.

There's a thread in the bug forum on this. They just vanish if you bring them back, but I think you can use them in the mission.

One thing that might help would be letting wounded-and-stunned aliens bleed out on the ground. Not sure if enemies take bleeding wounds at the moment or if that's a player-only mechanic,? If enemies that mostly went down to lethal damage were (often) on a 1-3 turn timer before dying, I suspect this would feel better. Related to that, I personally have no problem with the shotgun knock-outs - losing consciousness due to severe trauma feels entirely realistic. It's the '... and doesn't require immediate medical attention to prevent death following shortly after' bit that is weird. Second thing that I'd like to see is a decay factor on stun damage. Spending three turns in a row breathing smoke and then losing consciousness - fine. Why is spending three out of ten turns with multiple breaks of clear air just as bad? Let any unit that is conscious and not taking any end-of-turn damage (not bleeding or in smoke/fire etc) clear stun damage equal to 10% of it's max HP at the end of turn. It would be a nice quality-of-life buff to defensive smoke for the player, and help get rid of those 'oh, this alien ran through smoke five turns ago, so this is randomly a capture instead of a kill' moments.

If I remember right, there is a bug if you try to skip the first upgrade. The Plasma upgrade tries to upgrade Alenium explosives, and if you still have basic explosives because you didn't do the Alenium upgrade it can't find them and it doesn't work.

If you complete the Quantum Labs upgrade project in Engineering while there is a Lab partially built in the Construction screen, the Lab gets reset to a Quantum Lab with 30 days left on the timer even if it was nearly complete. I assume this behaviour extends to other building types as well. It might make sense to add on the extra 10 days due to the longer construction time, but a complete reset feels overly punishing (and encourages micromanaging the Engineering projects so the building can finish first). Save attached. Lab is six days from completion - run time till the upgrade completes and it's suddenly 30 days. user_quantum_lab_issue-28.json

The soldiers with low reflexes are just plain slower than the ones with fast reflexes. Not when it comes to crossing ground (that's TUs), but when it comes to spotting a target and aiming/shooting. Send a guy with high reflexes through a doorway with an alien hiding behind it, and he'll get his shot off first unless his TUs are really low. Send a low reflexes soldier through the same doorway on the same number of TUs, and the alien will shoot him before he can act. The alien doesn't need to 'know' how fast the soldier is - it's just going as fast as it can, and it either wins or loses.

You might want to consider dropping the 'all techs have this set of five weapons' pattern - or at least loosening the rules about how those weapons relate to each other inside a tier. Why does a laser-shotgun have to exist? In some ways lasers and shotguns are opposites - one of the defining features of a shotgun is the way the shot pattern spreads out, while the defining feature of a laser is specifically that it doesn't spread. Sure, you can come up with an explanation (we put the beam through a splitter), but is that actually a good idea? OK, there probably does need to be a close-combat laser weapon, but that doesn't mean it needs to be "3 pellets, 28%/40% TUs, 40/74 Acc". I'd like to see each type of weapon put a different spin on at least one of the available weapons types - preferably in a way that isn't fully 'balanced' relative to the baseline for that weapon. Throwing out a couple of random ideas: give accelerated shotguns an extra pellet* and drop the aimed shot TU cost on precision lasers to 49% TUs. Now instead of the current debate we would have clear tactical identities: accelerated weapons are brutal in close-quarters, and lasers are unmatched at long-range fire. *You'd probably need to remove the damage-per-pellet increase, as the combo of that with an extra pellet would go too far.

I have a feeling that the damage upgrade might be a bit more significant than it seems. If an enemy has 50 HP, then an upgrade from 49 damage to 50 damage per shot is an effective 100% damage increase rather than 2%. That is, it takes you from 2 shots to kill to one shot to kill. I have a feeling that there's some similar breakpoints getting hit with the accelerated weapons - even if it's only a few points of damage, there are two-shots turning into one-shots or three-shots turning into two-shots. I might go through and run the numbers at some point - this is just intuition at the moment.

Which patch are you playing on? Cleaner reinforcements should have been nerfed in v1.22, specifically to help with this kind of thing. It should be 7 turns, a wave of reinforcements, and then 5 more turns (12 total) before more arrive. The idea was to make 'fight through the reinforcements' actually somewhat viable, rather than the 7-turn marker being a hard 'you have to leave now'.

Suppress it with flashbangs - preferably using the same throw-from-behind-a-wall trick you mentioned for smokes. If you've got a good enough advantage to think about a capture (i.e. you have multiple soldiers close enough to help and you're not fighting a bunch of aliens at once), then there's no reason to let them have a chance at reaction fire. An alien on 15 hp is just as free a capture for a baton as with smoke grenades - three grenades is roughly one-and-a-half soldiers worth of TUs (50% per throw). I can spend exactly the same amount of TUs on one flashbang and then move in and stun with the baton, and it's more efficient in carry-weight (three grenades weighs the same as one grenade + baton, but the baton is reusable). Not sure what the aim break-point is (if there even is one), but I'm routinely getting 100% chance to hit with a baton so misses aren't an issue. In the event that something does go wrong (low-roll on the stun damage?), then the baton option still leaves open lines of fire for a team-mate to just kill it. Hard to do that reliably if it's standing in the middle of a smoke cloud. 1 alien captured per mission isn't really an indication that smoke is overpowered. Last crash site I ran I came out with three captures, and I probably could have pushed that higher if I'd been interested in trying. Also, there will almost certainly be plot-critical captures that are just straight-up immune to smoke. It's already in the tooltip for gas damage that there will be smoke-immune enemies (anything with a closed helmet), so when the 'Capture an Alien Commander' mission objective comes up you can expect it to be batons or pistols only. Being able to get some extra basic-enemy captures isn't really a major balancing issue, as it just ends up being a little bit more money (and not even that much more, when compared to the overall expected income).

I'd honestly call smoke stunning riskier than using the baton or pistol - simply because you have to let the alien take a turn. The grenade explosion does around 5 points of stun damage - most of the stun effect is from them taking actions and/or ending turn in the smoke. That means they're getting to take a shot at you. Yes, that shot is probably through cover and smoke, and is going to have a bad hit-chance - but a lot of the time it will have a non-zero hit chance. Sooner or later one of those 5% shots is going to land anyway. On the other hand, a soldier with good TUs can move 8-10 tiles and still swing the baton twice. In close quarters - e.g. breaching a small UFO when the door still exists - you can potentially get three swings while still starting from out of line-of-sight. Bring two batons on your fastest soldiers, and you can fairly easily put 60+ points of stun damage on a single alien on your turn, which means the thing is lying on the ground unconscious before you press end-turn and is guaranteed not to do any damage. Don't get me wrong - smoke stuns are certainly useful. I use them myself, especially to grab some early captures in the first mission or two. But they're most useful early-game, when you don't have that 70-80 TU assault who can rush in and electrocute the target without giving them a chance to act. By the time you have researched the stun weapons and have engineering time available to build some, you should be able to get good enough use out of them that they're not made pointless by smoke. (Also, the real answer is 'use both'. Giving the target you want to capture a face full of smoke for a turn while you're moving the tazers close enough certainly doesn't hurt...)

Video games and pop culture massively exaggerate the spread on a shotgun: it's not actually some magical device that completely removes the need to aim. The accepted rule of thumb seems to be 1 inch of spread per yard of distance traveled (a little less than 1 degree angle on the cone). A tile looks like roughly 1.5 yards, so at that range you have maybe a 2-inch wide shot pattern. That's a long way from 'just point in the general direction'. But even so, lets run the numbers for what actually happens with that 80% hit chance above. In game, a shotgun fires three pellets, which we'll assume have independent hit chances. With 3x 80% rolls, there's a 51.2% chance of three hits, a 38.4% chance of two hits, a 9.6% chance of one hit, and a 0.8% chance of zero hits. So that's a roughly 90% chance to get most of your damage, and over a 99% chance to get some damage. That is "pretty much 100% hit chance" if hit is defined as 'get at least part of the pattern on target'.

I've seen this as well - in my experience, it's always been after using afterburner. I suspect something goes wrong when triggering special movement modes (AB/roll) with a missile that could normally fire at the same time.

This. That soldier isn't shooting a stationary cardboard cutout at point blank range, he's in hand-to-hand combat with a seven-foot tall bipedal crocodile that's trying to rip off his face. 'Run up to point blank range and shoot' isn't a reliable tactic in real life - that's literally the entire reason that bayonets exist. Secondly, if you have an 80% chance to hit with a shotgun, it's because you're using snap-shot (unless the soldier has ~30 aim) - i.e. rushing your shot as fast as possible. A 60+ aim soldier using normal shot with a shotgun does have a 100% chance to hit at point-blank range. The game's in a pretty good spot already - use the right tool with a competent operator and don't cut corners, and you're guaranteed success. Remove any of those three and you might screw it up.