Skyfire

Skylances are the lowest damage weapon, so no surprise you're not winning if that's all you're using (they're not necessarily bad weapons, but they're a debuff, not DPS). The loadout you want for dealing with scouts early is 2xmissile+gun. Manual flying an Angel with day-1 gear can 1v1 a scout using that loadout: I dodged a couple of shots using evasive roll, but other than that I basically just charged straight in from the front and kept shooting till it died. With a squadron of 2 Angels it should be close to impossible to lose against a scout as long as you don't replace the guns. Example: I used 'manual combat' there but literally didn't touch the controls: just press play and let the AI go. The basic loadout your planes have one day one will stat-check scouts quite comfortably.

I don't think it's as powerful as it seems at first. Check the tool-tip for gas damage: 'units with enclosed helmets are usually immune'. It's fine for knocking out random basic enemies, but isn't going to work on a lot of more important targets (which we can expect to be required for plot advancement) as they'll have masks that protect them. Also going to scale badly in general: putting 10-15 stun damage on a target and then chipping it down to lower than that is fine with ballistic weapons on targets with 40-60 health. Getting it reliably low without killing the target is going to be way harder with plasma weapons and enemies with triple-digit health scores. (And that'll go double on difficulties where you can't see enemy health bars...) Stun guns and batons let you stack stun points on a target quickly and reliably, without waiting for it to spend multiple turns breathing smoke.

What I know with certainty is that it was very unstable, I restarted my PC and ran Xenonauts without the background load, and since then it has been stable. I strongly suspect that A) it was hitting the page-file at first and now isn't, and B) that that's what made the difference, but those are educated guesses rather than hard proof.

If it's crashing very often in a lot of different circumstances, then it might be related to the computer running low on resources (probably memory?). I had a similar experience when I first started playing: very frequent crashes, basically at random. (Geoscape, mission load, during a mission, end-of-opening-cutscene...) I'd been running it with other programs open in the background, though (key offender being a browser with a bunch of tabs open), and once I started running X2 without the extra load it's been perfectly stable. Not sure if @SoulFilcher is having the same issue, but it sounds similar - including the 'some of them also crashed Steam' bit. @Chris would debug branch logs from a (suspected) system-overload crash be useful to you? Pretty sure I'll be able to make it happen again fairly easily, so I can upload some when I get home tonight if it'll help.

The tooltip for Armour Destruction is broken - appears to be due to incorrect/imbalanced braces in the template. See screenshot attached.

When in ground combat, the soldier weight bar in the inventory gives different values depending on which soldier I was previously viewing. Replication steps: Selecting Renata Popova and opening her inventory shows her at max capacity. Going forward one soldier and then back to her now shows as slightly below max capacity. Going back one soldier and then forward to her shows her significantly below. This is replicable (for me) with the attached save, and happens with Renata Popova and Lu Tailin but not the other soldiers. user_day_19_crash_site_manual_save-8.json Previous actions: Several soldiers have dropped excess grenades to get down to carrying capacity (anyone who did this will have the spare grenades currently sitting at their feet). Renata has moved from her orignal position to the door (she did this before dropping grenades), no one else has.

Also, trying to do it anyway is the kind of thing that gets your game flagged as ransomware by antivirus software.

Yeah, that's one of two reasons that I dropped that theory. The enemies are robots who don't take stun damage anyway, and it'd be in the summary (and isn't). Don't underestimate the local forces in this game - there are plenty of stories about the Xenonauts coming round a corner to see a farmer standing over a literal pile of corpses. Dudes are hardcore. (IIRC it's a quirk of the turn system - local forces reset their TUs just before the alien turn, so their reaction-fire is always at max efficiency even when they acted last round. Most noticeable with the shotguns that farmers carry, but a policeman could still definitely pick up a kill or two)

9x Andron Guard + 2x Light Drone corpse/wrecks recovered, so looks like all 11 enemies were dead. Are enemies killed by environment effects or local forces counted towards the 'Aliens Killed' counter? Possibly the last enemy was taken down by fire or a policeman/farmer/soldier. Seems a bit unlikely that that would kill an Andron, but drones are fragile enough that it seems plausible. If this was organic enemies I'd be wondering if one went unconscious because of smoke, but that's not going to be the case here.

I did that based on info from the loadout screens, air-combat results were only used to double-check, so just as viable on high difficulties. Only other piece of info that's not on the weapon description is the basic mechanics for how armour works in this game (which, admittedly, the game could also be better at explaining...). Again, 100% agree that the game should be better at teaching this stuff. I'm posting for two reasons: to note that the info is actually available in game, just requires some analysis, and to try to cover the gap so people can try out air-combat properly in the mean-time. (E.g. if you're ignoring guns because that made sense in X1, the balance is going to feel much worse than it actually is. I suspect @Solver had the capacity to kill that destroyer in both runs he mentioned if he'd closed in and finished it with guns - it would be quite useful for the devs to get feedback on whether he still feels the balance is totally off after trying that.) In regards to the lack of damage displayed on higher difficulties: to be honest, if you're learning basic mechanics like this on higher difficulty levels, you signed up for an ass-kicking. I'd consider that to be working as intended.

100% agree that the air combat needs to be better tutorialised, but it can be reverse-engineered from what the game does tell you. Reading off the actual weapon stats, there seems to be a fairly clear niche for each of the three weapons, and none of them can really be replaced. For anyone who needs it, here's what appears to be the intended role breakdown: Cannons are your raw damage tool - total damage-per-weapon-slot on a cannon is much higher than on missiles/torps. Downsides are... pretty much everything else. They wast a lot of damage against even light armour, take a long time to actually output all of their theoretical damage, limited range/arc means you have to close in and take return fire. Missiles are for air-superiority. They don't have the ammo-capacity to take down anything particularly hefty, but they give good burst-damage at range with chunky enough damage instances to defeat light armour. Best used when you're less worried about 'do I have the damage to kill this' than 'can I kill this before it kills me'. Torpedos are now specialized anti-armour tools. You should probably never run an all-torpedo loadout (massive change from X1 here...) - instead, you want to hit the UFO with just the right number of torps to break through its armour, then finish it with missiles/guns. One important note - if you are using torps, they need to be the first attack that lands. If anything else is hitting first, either it's wasting potential damage on the armour, or the UFO doesn't have enough armour to justify torps in the first place. This means don't fire torps and missiles in a massed volley - they'll hit in the wrong order due to different speeds. (Full disclosure: I'm basing this off watching streams till the early-access release tomorrow - I'm not part of the test group - but I'm pretty confident that the above is correct regardless)

Setting the timer for longer than one turn can help, as can throwing it from as far away as possible. Stand back in the corridor leading to the room, and throw stun grenades into it (as far to the side as you can get them). The gas spreads out far enough that you can pretty much fill the whole room, so it's entirely possible to knock out aliens without ever walking into line-of-sight.

I think the biggest problem with a dropship escort is that the stock game is designed such that you either don't need it or can't afford it. Strategy on the Geoscape largely centers around establishing and expanding air-superiority - and if you have air-superiority, then sending an undefended transport out isn't really a problem. On the other hand, any time the aliens are winning the air war you probably A) can't afford to divert resources from other more critical tasks and/or B) don't have many ground missions to send the dropship to anyway. I could potentially see a drone escort being useful in a mod which heavily rebalanced the air war so that there would always be more UFOs roaming around than you can possibly shoot down, and the player needs to focus on surgical strikes against carefully chosen targets. (Although in that scenario, you'd probably want to significantly redesign the dropships anyway. The stock ones don't make much sense for a surgical strike through hostile airspace.)

Electroshock grenades deal regular damage to Androns, so they won't work, and my one attempt with batons ended in the andron still standing after I'd used about half my squad's TUs on beating it. (More importantly, the game files don't include any 'stunned andron' resources - or anything to do with one if you did stun it - which strongly suggests that it's impossible.)