mrsisk

I loved blaster bombs. And feared them. They were overpowered but if you think about it, they were kind of balanced after both sides had them. I don't anticipate any of us talking the devs into rethinking their removal, but here are my thoughts on ways they could have been included w/out making them annoyingly overpowerful: 1) My favorite part about them was that they were guided. But they seemed to be 100% accurate. Their power could be mitigaed by making the # of waypoints decrease their accuracy. The more complicated the flight path, the more likely they are to go off course. 2) Destruction of parts of the UFO is already programmed to decrease your yield of special materials. The urge to lob endless blaster bombs into an enemy UFO would be tempered by this. It could be made more paifully obvious that your playing style is costing you a lot of cool stuff if after a mission there was an "Alien Alloys Destroyed" menul item. 3) There power of each bomb could simply be decreased. Their blast radius was, frankly, crazy big. First time I used one I lost at least 2 soldiers and they weren't anywhere near the center of the blast...or so I thought. 4) Or their damage could be selectable by the player, delivering higher yield payloads with more AP spent. 5) Similar to #1: make them less accurate from distance. Distance assumes that a spotter has located an alien and radios back to the blaster wielder. Well, in the time it takes that message to be called in, the blaster programmed, fired and the bomb to reach its target, the alien is likely to have moved. So the farther the way you are, the less accurate it would be. Lack of accuracy in such a messy weapon is a BAD thing. That's just off the top of my head. Like I said, I'm not expecting things to change. I'm actually not even advocating it. Just brainstorming for the fun of it.

I've never actually made it through the game enough to get lasers (new version of the game comes out and I start all over again). Not that I've needed them. Right now in early game the weapons you have are fine. Rockets are powerful, but messy and can make you lose resources if you fire them into a UFO (or accidentally kill civis if you use them in the open). Machine guns are powerful...they rock, but are likely to kill civis and your own troops if used at too great a range. But they can also be used to balst through walls w/out making as big a mess as rockets (no poisonous gas clouds and no burny hurting fire left in their wake). Precision rifles are powerful and really don't have a lot of a down side. They're slow for close range use, but they almost always drop your target in one shot. Accurate at ranges even farther out than your enemies. They won't blast through walls, but you don't really need that if you've got others around to do it for you. All the weapons above are heavy and can slow you down until your troops are trained up and beefy strong. Personally, I try to bring one rocket launcher, one or two precision rifles and one or two machine guns on every mission (depends on my soldiers). I also outfit my tanks with machine guns rather than rockets. Their movement rate makes them easier to use for taking out physical obstacles (I let my soldiers do the killing so they will level up while my tanks act as advanced scouts and do some wall busting). I also try to bring two shotgun/grenade soldiers along for UFO penetration (grenades outside at distance, shotguns up close). The rest of my squad take assault rifles or whatever they can comfortably carry given AP and STR.

Ah...doesn't do me a whole lot of good, I'm playing on a laptop with no mouse

I've not had that problem at all. I've got a base in NA and don't remember any "destroyed" UFOs except for fighters. I only send 1 F17 when the target is a fighter or light scout. Often only send 1 against scouts as well. As long as I'm careful about rolling my planes before they get shot, I've not had a problem with either getting them too damaged or totally destroying the enemy. **shrug**

I tried it once back in like v8 or something and I didn't get a CTD...but the grenade just kind of disappeared. No boom, no nothing. But that was a while ago.

That's kind of what I assumed, and why I never reported it....So there's no way to dodge torps with a MIG.

...how do you even place a hangar horizontally? I never realized you could do that.

Someone mentioned dodging alien attacks....I haven't tried it for a while with a MIG, but for several versions the Roll button didn't work for the MIG. I never got around to reporting/asking about it before. So, was there a fix or am I just not doing something correctly?

Can you blow the wall up from behind him to gain a clear shot? Sometimes you have to take the hard route to victory

And learning to use the afterburners (switching them on or off as needed) and doing rolls can help. That actually makes the F17s better in some cases than the MIG...they can sometimes get close enough for their guns to work but too close for the UFO to shoot you...or so it seems.

When you no longer have unlimited funds ("M" for $ millions) I doubt this will be an issue...ooo! missile turrets! Haven't seen those before.

In v9.1 I also reported that happening when redirecting a Chinook to a second crash site. Had wounded soldiers onboard after a mission, redirected to a 2nd site on the way back to base, entered combat with full health. Might be related.

v9.1 was kind of doing the same thing (haven't downloaded 9.2 yet). Save in combat and when you reload it took you to the Chinook hovering over the crash site. However, you were able to click on the Chinook and redirect it to the crash site...sometimes clicking the Chinook was tricky, though, as it often would open the crash site instead. Are you sure you can't select the Chinook?

...but not always! I had read about this bug and was using my tank as a scout, not worrying about how close I got. On the alien's turn it did take a pot shot at my tank. Never shot a second time, but it definitely did shoot once. Odd, innit?

Cool. **thumbs up!**

When you hire a bunch of new recruits, they all come with the Assault rifle, medkit in their backpack, ammo clips on the belt...etc. I always put medkits on the belt, remove the extra ammo clips, add a couple grenades. Hiring 16 soldiers requires something close to 100 keystrokes to do all that. It would be nice to have a New Recruit Template system where you can set the default soldier equipment...It would be even nicer still if you could set If-Then conditions based on a soldier's stats (high AP/STR soldiers get equipped with MG or rocket launchers, high Accuracy soldiers get precision rifles, high morale get shotgun and grenades, etc.)!

Not technically a bug I suppose, but kind of...might should have put this in game suggestions... I somehow equipped a soldier with a machinegun whose AP and Strength were so low that he ended up with only 30 AP...but the machinegun requires 32 AP to be fired. Result: even standing still the soldier could not fire the weapon! Seems to me in the Soldier tab of Base Management you should not be able to equip weapons that you can't fire, or at least get a warning of some kind that this is the case........OR, the AP cost of firing a weapon should be lower if you fire before moving. Anyway, it was annoying! I almost renamed the soldier Decoy Dave, or Don Gimmea MG. **DERP!**

I've been keeping my settings at non-iron man, normal difficulty.

I don't think you can reserve AP with Hunters...I don't think they have a reaction AI. I haven't tried it with machinegunners, though. HOWEVER, I did have a soldier equipped with a machinegun whose STRENGTH was so low that he didn't have the AP to even fire the gun! I mean without moving. He had 30 AP, the machinegun required 32 AP to fire. I can see that kind of issue interfering with reserving AP.

Saving a game while in combat now loads as if you've saved the game just before entering ground combat screen, no matter how far you were into combat when you saved. Also, you have to click on your Chinook icon in the Geoscape and redirect it to the crash site it's hovering over to re-initiate the combat....and finding the magic sweet spot to click the Chinook icon instead of the Crash Site icon is tricky and frustrating!

What I'd like to see is the ability to give an inventory item to another character. Right now you've got have Soldier1 drop the item, step away, Soldier2 step into that square, pick up item. Total pain.

Yeah, I played quite a bit recently and the research tree just plain stopped after plasma pistols/rifles and Alien Invasion. Not sure if that's the save/load game wipes out research bug, or if it's the issue you mention, NoIdidnt.

I had a ground combat mission where at least 2 of my soldiers got wounded. On the way back to base after completing that mission, I rerouted the Chinook to a second crash site. Entered the mission and all my soldiers were at 100% health.

Yeah, you can do it now...well, you can equip 2 and, as stated, double your ammo load. But so far I have yet to have to reload any weapon in a ground combat. I don't even carry spare clips. But maybe that's 'cause I'm playing on easy difficulty settings so I don't have to worry about things during alpha testing. Pistol/grenade, though, is a good combo 'cause you don't lose AP equipping the grenade.

Aside from stun gas, frankly, I don't see the point of adding vehicle turret types. Since vehicles don't gain experience, everything they kill is a missed opportunity to level your soldiers. So the only thing I ever really use them for is scouting and obstacle clearing. (Late game in the original version I also used them as Get Out Of Jail Free cards for when my entire squad of soldiers had be killed, controlled or paniced!). I've even moved away from rocket launchers for obstacle clearing, as the machine gun punches holes in just about everything I've found, and they have less chance of depriving my soldiers of a kill by accidentally offing hidden aliens.