Gauddlike

I would quite like to see doors, for the UFOs at least, that once opened cannot be closed until they close themselves automatically. Not the end of your turn but the start of your next one. Like the TU damage taken from suppression it should last all the way through a full turn so opening the door has some risk attached. If you open it you know it will stay open over the alien turn giving them the chance to shoot at you. Even if aliens open it I would have it close at the start of the players turn. They are used as defensive structures so give the advantage to the defending side. Xenoanut base doors can close at the start of the alien turn, alien doors close at the start of the xenonaut turn. Normal house doors can be opened or closed at will, they are just normal doors after all. The down side is that it still doesn't address the problem of using a stationary scout to spot for squad sight. Maybe when a unit takes fire it should do an immediate initiative check on enemy units it can see, regardless of who is firing? If your scout has lower initiative than the enemy that has just been affected by a shot (even suppression damage, not just hp damage) then that scout is going to get a face full of plasma just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It might resolve the passivity without breaking the mutual surprise rule Chris likes. Opening the door would work as now but if anyone takes a shot at the aliens inside they check initiative on everyone they can see and then shoot the poor scout if he is lower. Coupled with automatic doors that might work nicely. You could still get around it by hitting every enemy inside with enough suppression to prevent the reaction shot but toning down flashbangs should also make that trickier.

What kind of research would be useful to defend against psionics? Remember that visible items have been ruled out. If that is the case then research would likely just boil down to an increased chance of failure for psi powers. Might as well skip the research and just reduce psi strength of higher rank aliens by 10% or so if that is what is needed in order for it to be balanced. To take into account something like that then psi powers have to be balanced after the research which means making them inherently imbalanced before the research. The research is just a compulsory click required in order to face the balanced version of the power.

With access to the source code, a good coder, and a few months of hard work I reckon most of those could be added as mods. The only one that wouldn't technically require coding would be the military base terror missions tileset I would guess. I say technically because it would likely still need some coding done to allow the game to generate missions specific to that new tileset. The masks currently only have two different colour options for terror missions which are used for eastern and western town tilesets. That may be hard coded.

Even more odd in a world where you can only have strawberry or chocolate ice cream if you have already bought vanilla

I think the Xenopedia suggestion was more along the lines of a mod than an official addition. I don't really think it fits though, I would prefer it to be an outside source. If nothing else the size of the addition could be huge. The unofficial wiki could be the best bet as MrPyro says. It has already been started by a forum member but is very outdated now. http://xenonauts.wikia.com/wiki/Xenonauts_Wiki

Oh no, a theme was reused in this thread. That burns me up inside

Yeah all his fault. We didn't start the fire. [video=youtube;eFTLKWw542g]

Plus a lot of the artwork could be reused I would think. All those 3D models should come in handy for something.

That's my plan, no rush for it. When it's finished I will have a better idea of how much I am willing to pay as well.

The old garage screen UI had a section in the lua script to display and select possible secondary weapons but that was removed when the new UI was created. I still have a copy of the old script file with the code intact but I haven't tried adding it back in yet. On the ground I think you always had to use a keyboard shortcut to select secondary weapons, I remember doing that with my original test mod back in May 2012 and secondary weapons were already not being supported by GH at that point. I wonder if there would be a way to sneak them into the quick grenade slot?

I have played a few of them that do that. It never really struck me as odd that it happened with Xenonauts On the up side if there isn't much available content then losing your saves shouldn't be a big deal!

I enjoyed the first game and was really looking forward to the second one. When the price drops to a level I consider reasonable I will pick it up. I find the current price point to be incredibly unreasonable

I enjoy Xenonauts but if the choice was to have more content added to it or for a new game to be started I would much prefer seeing the new game. I'm not saying they shouldn't continue patching bugs or even add in anything that they have almost complete but going down the path of expansions for Xenonauts feels like a waste when half the time the game engine barely works with the core elements

I like the idea of increasing armour and stopping chance to make them useful as mobile cover. Especially with the change to the accuracy calculation so soldiers should be able to fire around it more easily. It already provides a sight range bonus usable with squad sight so makes sense to stack a couple of squaddies behind it to advance in relative safety. I would also like to see them have a little more ammunition so they don't become so much less useful on the longer missions. Especially if their main protection is armour which will likely degrade over the course of the fight. Being much less tough as well as out of offensive options feels like a waste.

Even the aliens are turning to the light of the buddhist civilian thread then. I knew it was only a matter of time until they took up the torch.

Would it be a sun tan? Think that's what I would be working on after all this time. Looking forward to the announcement.

In this thread I would like people to say how they are finding the current vehicle balance (V22.7 HF2) and how it can be improved. If they are not using vehicles then I would also like to see what they feel could be done to make them a more viable option. Please don't list problems without possible solutions. Also remember we all play differently so someone else may pose a problem you disagree with or a solution you do not like. Feel free to discuss this but remember to post your alternative options for balance.

Maybe I am in the minority but I don't believe the vehicles should out perform the two soldiers they replace in every single way. Of course a single vehicle cannot be in two places at once to perform flanking manoeuvres on its own and will not be able to face in two different directions to cover the same view angle as two soldiers. If those are some of the criteria the vehicle will have to meet or exceed in order to be useful then no wonder balancing them is difficult. For me the vehicles currently out perform a single soldier which is fair due to their restrictions so I would suggest they should only displace that one soldier on the dropship. That addresses the concerns that they are not as good as two soldiers but still means you have to decide which to take rather than making them a compulsory upgrade to the squad, which would be the case if they were an addition rather than a substitution. The middle ground between replacing two soldiers and not replacing any. What I am looking for is not just a list of problems people find with vehicles but also suggestions on how they could be addressed. Maybe this should move to a specific vehicle balance thread though as it seems to be quite a big topic all on its own. http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/9969-Vehicles-balance-and-usability-%28V22-7-HF2%29?p=110098#post110098 New thread on vehicle balance and usability, please add your thoughts there for now so this thread isn't swamped by the discussion, we can always feed back to here when we come up with great ideas.

The boardingspace variable in vehicles.xml determines how many soldiers a vehicle displaces on the dropship as far as I remember. Could just change that to zero and see how it goes? Should just be an xml tweak if that's the case. Of course you may have to make other adjustments to make sure that the vehicle and soldiers will all physically fit in the dropship. At least that will probably not be an issue for the Valkyrie or Chinook. My personal preference would be to have that flag on the dropship instead. A large Chinook with plenty of cargo space but limited passenger seating would allow you to take a vehicle without losing any soldiers while a Shrike might require a couple of soldiers be left behind in order to fit that vehicle in the passenger compartment. *edit* At a glance it looks like you could have plenty of soldiers plus tank on each dropship, just going by the amount of deployment spaces. Chinook - 9 plus tank. Shrike - 15 plus tank. Valkyrie - 24 plus tank, although 16 is still the maximum the UI can support.

Thinking about it vehicle recovery is probably more work than it first appeared to me. There doesn't seem to be a repair/rearm system for vehicles as there was with aircraft so that cannot simply be reworked and there is no hospital/healing system to be reworked for them either.

Is that a day mission or night? Does it make a difference?

So what changes to vehicles would make people consider using them in the field? Would they be better off as scouts with longer visual range and fast movement? Maybe made into stronger tanks with much better armour? How about extending the aircraft recovery rules to ground vehicles so they can be repaired if lost in battle? Would people like them to be a stronger offensive platform with more powerful weapons? How about further increasing ammunition so they just keep on giving? Would secondary weapons like smoke launchers make them a better support platform? How about if they shared the Sebillians immunity to smoke (built in sensors)? Would just removing the research requirement make them an option or is it purely their performance on the ground that makes them less worthwhile than taking soldiers? Would removing the soldier cost for taking them along help with that, at least in the chinook as it has plenty of extra space?

Personally I wouldn't mind if this was a single toggle button, like the crouch button, rather than multiple buttons. By default the soldier is in the rotation of whatever method you use to cycle troops, when you press it to toggle modes then that soldier can only be selected by clicking the (possibly greyed out) button along the top or pressing its hotkey number directly. The buttons in the mockup earlier were way too small for my liking. I would either move the last part of the UI across or change the function of an existing button. Trying to cram more functions into the current amount of space looks forced and would really make it difficult to use for me. If it was reduced to a single toggle button then halving the size of the end turn button and using the bottom half as the toggle could work. I keep clicking the soldiers portrait to try and get into the inventory so I would consider replacing the inventory button on the UI with the toggle and using the soldier portrait for inventory for personal use, no idea if that would be acceptable to others though

So a high accuracy melee weapon, say 150%, would almost certainly be used if they were in melee range I would guess. Wonder how that would affect the AI. Would the AI try to get into melee range if that was its most accurate shot or would it be happy trying to pepper the enemy from range and only use the melee weapon if it accidentally ended up in melee range? I am guessing you would need the primary weapon to still be the ranged weapon. If nothing else they would look like they were all armed with the melee weapon but still fire bursts of plasma. Unless you chose to make a different version of the primary melee weapon to team up with each secondary ranged weapon to reflect the sprite of the ranged weapon... Should work. Be interested to see how this works out.

I haven't tried yet but I have been planning to add a stun baton type weapon to the belt item slot for aliens instead of the grenade to see if they will use it. I don't really know enough about how the belt items are used to know if it will work. I feel that it won't but there might be ways to work around it. Maybe a grenade with 1 range and no area damage might be an alternative if it cannot recognise non-grenade items. Melee items have a range of 1000 so that might also work to disallow ranged attacks with a belt item to simulate a claw attack?