[No more positive points from ground combat - implications?]

Taking out a landed UFO or thwarting a terror attack or destroying an alien base will grant you a national relations bonus - we just haven't had the system to do this implemented yet.

[Geoscape Balance Discussion V20 Experimental 7]

It's a shame we had to pull build 6 for the moment as I think the changes in it would have addressed some of the issues people mention. Corsairs, for example, become a bit more interesting as your first dogfighter which is actually capable of catching UFOs, and has enough fuel to chase them down. Foxtrots now deal more raw damage than Condors, with the equivalent weapons level. Superbob's strategy of massive expansion would probably have run into money trouble because of increased base and interceptor maintenance costs early on.

Hopefully we will have it back up soon.

[V20 Experimental Build 5 Available!]

@Elsayal, that should now be fixed - please try it again and repost in that bug thread if it isn't.

[Geoscape Balance Discussion V20 Experimental 7]

I think armour just muddies the issue - I'm not convinced there's anything you could achieve in this case using armour that you could not just tweaking damage/hit points numbers. Also the armour code is apparently a bit dodgy.

[Geoscape Balance Discussion V20 Experimental 7]

It's been dealt with. No more on that please.

[Geoscape Balance Discussion V20 Experimental 7]

I have considered the approach of giving each main UFO type a long range missile that it can fire from out of range of Xenonaut weapons, which would do enough damage to destroy Condors but not Corsairs - but how do you cope with Condors being able to evade? You could make the missile fast or manoeuvrable enough to prevent evading, but that begs the question of why other alien weapons don't behave that way, and seems just as "gamey" as manipulating the speeds to me.

[Ground Combat Balance Discussion V20 Experimental 7]

We will have to resume the discussion of this once we put the build back up with the necessary fixes - for now the old balance thread is available in the forum below so just continue posting feedback there.

[Geoscape Balance Discussion V20 Experimental 7]

Trashman, chill out - you are in no position to demand anyone does anything on this forum. Believe it or not we do not painstakingly go through the Xenopedia and adjust all the text every time we try some balance changes.

And yeah, to be clear - you can still lose relations points for letting civilians/friendly soldiers die in a ground combat mission.

The change to Condor speed was purposefully a bit harsh. There's a bit of a problem with them in that the intended upgrade path for them, the Corsair, uses exactly the same weapons and therefore has to rely on things like speed, hitpoints and range to differentiate it. Previously there was simply not enough difference to mean that building Corsairs was worthwhile, so I could either make the upgrade to Corsairs cheaper (which would be weird as they are already pretty cheap compared to buying guns or armour) or exaggerate the difference in capabilities (which I am trying). I think it also makes a little more sense that the very first human craft is just outclassed by UFOs in terms of speed. This is not by any means set in stone though, I really want to get more feedback once we've fixed up the ground combat and got that build back up.

@superbob, can you describe the specific tactics you are using to dominate like that? Are you acting powerful UFOs multiple times with squadrons of less advanced aircraft? I am thinking about possibly making UFOs repair a certain percentage of the damage they take in combat. Also keep in mind with Furies that their ammo will eventually be extremely limited - right now there's a bug that lets them re-arm automatically, but once that is fixed you will need to build their ammo using singularity cores from Battleships.

[Geoscape Balance Discussion V20 Experimental 7]

Some pretty significant balance changes in this build, so I am refreshing this thread to discuss them.

I have implemented a rebalancing of the air combat mini-game and the costs of base structures. Both of these will probably seem quite harsh - Condors have taking a beating in performance and should no longer be viable in the long term and base maintenance costs have increased, so money will be tighter - adjustment to previous strategies will likely be required!

Here are the changes:

- General update to air combat balance - too many changes to list individually, but generally:

-- Ranges of starting aircraft reduced, so the Condor now has quite short legs!

-- Speeds of aircraft and UFOs adjusted to encourage progression, Condors will have trouble catching UFOs reliably

-- Damage of Xenonaut weapons adjusted: 2 heavy missiles now always do slightly more damage than the equivalent 2 light missiles + gun

-- UFO health adjusted in line with the damage changes so that earlier weapons have an increasingly tougher time against later UFOs

-- Turn rates of various craft adjusted to encourage more manoeuvring around larger UFOs in air combat

-- Radar ranges of Xenonaut aircraft adjusted so they now progress from small to larger on later long range craft

-- Maintenance costs of all aircraft set to a flat rate of $100000 per month for fighters, $50000 for dropships - no increase for later craft

-- Auto-resolve rebalanced to take into account all of the above

-- Build cost of Mig31 increased to 200000, as the above changes gave it a bit of a buff

-- Reduced Refuelling time of aircraft by about a third

-- Increased re-armament time from 30 to 60 minutes

- Also rebalanced the maintenance costs of base buildings from around 10% of the cost of the building to 25%

- Introduced a build time for new bases, and significantly increased the maintenance cost of command centre

Thoughts away!

[Ground Combat Balance Discussion V20 Experimental 7]

Some pretty significant balance changes in this build, so I am refreshing this thread to discuss them.

The main change for the ground combat portion of the game is the AI has been updated so that alien use grenades, and understand when and how to use them most effectively; there have also been a variety of additional under the hood AI changes that hopefully improve their behaviour in general too.

Additionally Xenonaut grenades now have a larger blast radius, and should be more reliable when throwing them in interior spaces (particularly UFOs). Stun grenades also got a bit of a buff again, while we search for their magical sweet spot.

Feedback appreciated!

[V20 Experimental Build 6 Available!]

EDIT - best not to download this yet. There's a game-breaking bug in it at present which we will fix tomorrow with a Hotfix.

Firstly, if you do not know how to access the experimental branch on Steam, please read the instructions (and warnings!) in this thread. All saved games from earlier versions (including experimental versions) are incompatible, attempting to load them will cause problems.

This build contains a pretty substantial number of changes and fixes and additions. The main change for the ground combat portion of the game is the AI has been updated so that alien use grenades, and understand when and how to use them most effectively; there have also been a variety of additional under the hood AI changes that hopefully improve their behaviour in general too.

For the Geoscape, I have implemented a rebalancing of the air combat mini-game and the costs of base structures. Both of these will probably seem quite harsh - Condors have taking a beating in performance and should no longer be viable in the long term and base maintenance costs have increased, so money will be tighter - adjustment to previous strategies will likely be required!

I will post new balance threads in the beta forum to discuss both these changes in more detail.

Fixes

- Fixed game hanging on certain alien base attack missions

- Aliens (or Xenonauts) are no longer able to shoot through floors or ceilings

- A large number tweaks, fixes and improvements to the Geoscape UI and related windows

- Throwing grenades will no longer be blocked if there is an obstacle above the line of sight to a target

- Increased Xenopedia font size

- You should no longer be able to throw grenades into a building by throwing them at the upper floors

- Fixed Battle Rifle displaying Plasma Pistol Xenopedia article

- Fixed crouching bonus back to 80% (it was reset to 60% accidentally)

- Tweaks to the blocking tile layout of Scouts and Landing Ships to fix issues with jagged edges, incorrectly sorted hull etc...

- Fixed barn roof displaying incorrectly when viewed from the side

- Deleted some duplicate unused tree sprites

- Updated target point tile to be a little easier to read in the editor

- Fixed minor visual issue with garage door open state

- Fixed Chinook exit for vehicles being blocked on a particular desert map

- Fixed an instance where you could instantly lose by placing your base on a city near another city

- Fixed issue where throwable items rendered on all levels

Additions

- Added explanatory tooltips to tutorialise various screens to the player on Easy and Normal difficulty (can be disabled at game creation)

- Introduction of additional AI behaviours for aliens

-- Aliens should now throw grenades

-- A large number of tweakable values for aliens have been introduced in aiprops.xml

- New animated sprite for the Singularity Core

- Added new dropship images behind Xenonaut soldiers on the soldier equip screen

- Finally snapped and fixed the awful transit van drop shadows

- Added Xenopedia image for Alien Armour Plating and Singularity core

Balance

- General update to air combat balance - too many changes to list individually, but generally:

-- Ranges of starting aircraft reduced, so the Condor now has quite short legs!

-- Speeds of aircraft and UFOs adjusted to encourage progression, Condors will have trouble catching UFOs reliably

-- Damage of Xenonaut weapons adjusted: 2 heavy missiles now always do slightly more damage than the equivalent 2 light missiles + gun

-- UFO health adjusted in line with the damage changes so that earlier weapons have an increasingly tougher time against later UFOs

-- Turn rates of various craft adjusted to encourage more manoeuvring around larger UFOs in air combat

-- Radar ranges of Xenonaut aircraft adjusted so they now progress from small to larger on later long range craft

-- Maintenance costs of all aircraft set to a flat rate of $100000 per month for fighters, $50000 for dropships - no increase for later craft

-- Auto-resolve rebalanced to take into account all of the above

-- Build cost of Mig31 increased to 200000, as the above changes gave it a bit of a buff

-- Reduced Refuelling time of aircraft by about a third

-- Increased re-armament time from 30 to 60 minutes

- Also rebalanced the maintenance costs of base buildings from around 10% of the cost of the building to 25%

- Introduced a build time for new bases, and significantly increased the maintenance cost of command centre

- Updated mission scores so that ground combat missions no longer provide national relations boosts (the relations boost now comes from shooting down UFOs)

- Xenonaut grenades increased in blast radius from 2-3

- The shaded tiles for grenade blast radius now indicate tiles that receive at least 50% of the grenade damage, up from 25%

- Base defense turrets now do far more damage than previously, but have a lower chance to hit

- Stun grenades now do a small amount of stun on impact

- Stun gas now deals twice as much stun damage (also investigating a bug where this may not be getting applied properly)

- Made many alien props slightly tougher, as in many instances a stray shot could have destroyed them outright

- Alein grenades do incendiary rather than kinetic damage (making them better at destroying props)

- Difficulty setting changes: UFOs now have 75% HP on Easy, and alien invasion speed is now at 75% / 100% / 120% / 150% for the 4 levels

- Tweaked AP cost of alien grenades

- Normalised speed of various projectiles

Please post your comments on the build here. If you encounter any bugs please post them in the experimental build sub-forum of the bugs forum. I will post new threads in the beta forum shortly for in-depth discussion of the current Geoscape and Ground Combat balance, but feel free to post brief opinions here too.

[[v20 b5] Black, un-walkable voids [UFO Crash Ground Combat]]

Thanks for the save - the map you are playing on there doesn't exist in the current build of Xenonauts (which is why parts are missing). Can you confirm to me the version number that is displayed at the top right of your launcher (in case it hasn't updated properly) and also take a screen shot of the files in the Xenonauts/assets/maps/industrial directory so I can see if there are any there that shouldn't be?

[[20.5- Ground combat] Aliens shoot through the UFO floor]

Thanks guys; we now have a fix for this, will probably push a new build including that tomorrow.

[[v20.5] Neverending ground combat]

If you could get a saved game we could probably figure out what the problem was immediately. Do you remember if you were on a particular map or tileset? Which UFO were you assaulting? Was it crashed or landed?

Keep in mind you can also end the ground combat phase by clearing the UFO of aliens then keeping soldiers inside it for a few turns (not an excuse, just a work around until we fix it).

[[20e5- New Game] Immediate game over]

Yeah, you shouldn't be able to click on a city and place your base there. You actually cannot do so with cities already, but you can trick the game into letting you by clicking on two cities close to each other so you get the "choose one or the other" popup menu - then this bypasses the normal safeguard against this.

[[V20.5 - Ground Combat] Hunter Car dropship exit blocked by terrain features]

You can reposition the Hunter from the dropship screen, unless you mean you've tried that and you cant get it to go at the front?

The bug was just a poorly placed tile - fixed for next version.

[V20.5 carrier pathfinding bug (my units can walk through walls)]

Good catch. This is not intended behaviour, and indeed it works regardless of armour types. This bug may well be the cause of a variety of strange behaviours, and now we can reproduce it we can probably squash it easily.

[[20e5- Ground Combat] Open doors not displayed as open]

Thanks, fixed for next version.

[Error maps]

I am having trouble downloading that saved game as I don't read French well enough to understand the download site - could you possibly re-upload it somewhere else like Mega? Also, yeah, we really do need to know the version of the game you are using (it is displayed on the top right of the launcher)/

[[v20 b5] Black, un-walkable voids [UFO Crash Ground Combat]]

Hi - I tried to load your saved game in the Steam version but it just crashes, which suggests to me something you have is missing for me. Have you ever previously installed any map packs? It could also be old versions of official maps causing these problems.

You said you re-installed already - but to be sure could you delete Xenonauts, go to the Steam/SteamApps/Common folder and make sure the Xenonauts folder is gone (and if it isn't delete it), then install again. I know this is a pain, but as I can't reproduce it here there's not much else I can do otherwise.

Also out of curiosity, what are your system specs?

[V20E5 feedback]

Thanks for the feedback! Air combat is due for another balance pass, with a view to encouraging the construction of the later game interceptors.

[[20e5] Ground Combat - Clipping graphical error ?]

This is known, thanks for the report though.

[[20e5] Base: Soldier Equipment - Next button disabled on empty slot]

Thanks, this is noted.

[[v20e5 - Ground Combat] Game freezes after deployment phase in large base assault]

Thanks, getting it fixed right now.

[[v20e5] Naming issues with classes]

This is probably expected right now - the class naming area is still a work in progress and we had to pull some changes from it just before release to prevent a crash.