Belmakor

Oh and I can confirm that in V10 the alenium missiles are not consumed. Doh!

I have seen this happen! In my last mission an civilian went and stood in front of an alien. He remained there for 3 turns, he was not shot at by the enemy and indeed the enemy shot out at angles from behind him! I ended up firing a rocket at both after the alien one shotted one of my men with the plasma rifle.

Oh yeh, my bad! My brain didn't register his solution, only the part about manual control which I am heartily against as you can see.

Might I suggest you change the ammo count for sidewinders to 2 and drop their damage to 60. Also, drop the target lock time for the sidewinder to 3 secs (this last part is vital). This solves all your problems (I have been testing it out tonight and it seems to be pretty balanced). I used this in conjuction with a slightly weaker autocannon but with a faster fire rate. (not sure if this is essential - see what you think) For example, 1 mig is now the hard counter for a single fighter with a balanced load out of 4 sidewinders and 2 alenium missiles. You will have a real battle on your hands 1v1 with an F17 but you should manage it with proper control. The 5 second cool down on the sidewinder between shots still mean you can't insta kill the enemy even with a 2 sidewinder, 1 alenium loadout but still gives you a single sidewinder for more tactics other than just turn and gun. 2v1 F17s will mop up a single fighter ufo or scout and still have a couple missiles left incase they get intercepted on the way home or while guarding a dropship (meaning its not an auto loss of two units if this happens as current). They should even manage to fend off 3 fighters using their missiles to kill 2 and a gun fight to kill the 3rd. You can now win in a battle of 3v3 fighters (but you will really have a proper fight on your hands with just sidewinders and need alenium missiles to win comfortably). You will be able to take out 2 fighters guarding the corvette but not manage to drop it using 2 MiGs and 1 F17s without the use of avalance or alenium torpedoes making load out choice critical for this particular intercept.

I was thinking about the taser that fires a wire but any of those futuristic or close combat tasers would be equally valid. But in keeping with Chris' vision, could replace the stun baton with an adjacent tile re-searchable taser that has a higher chance to stun fleshy targets, while the blunt force baton could still be useful against armoured targets.

Is the scatter laser a replacement for the cannon or can it be mounted on one of the MiGs hard-points?

This is very true. There is no combination that will allow you to take out 3 fighters easily with only 4-8 missiles. Its pretty essential one of them is an F17 with the cannon but even then... I suppose you could hold your missiles until you are literally on top and then fire point blank - you risk losing one aircraft then though.

Chris, Been playing around with v10 tonight and very happy with the stability so far. Only one crash to note and it was because I was trying out something unusual. I have some suggested balance changes to make it possible for people to play the game until around September without having to resort to cheats. Most of these revolve around maintenance and wages, as well as construction costs and times for certain ammos. 1. Set wages to: soldier = 15k, tech = 18k, scientist = 22k. (down from 20,25,25k) 2. Set command center upkeep to 50k (down from 100k) 3. Set hangar upkeep = 8k (down from 10k - as your going to need a lot of these initially) This should now put the cost of running two bases in the $1.5m bracket instead of nearer $2m meaning you can run about $1m profit for the first 3-4 months (before negative relations start to take their toll) and allows you to manufacture missiles and replace the occasional aircraft. 4. Set Alenium Missile to 3k (down from 5k as you are going to start chewing through these as fast as sidewinders and you don't want every engagement to cost in excess of 30k!) 5. Set Alenium production between 10-15 (25 is far too high given the much higher tick rate set currently and the almost reliance on these once you are up against groups of 3). Why? There are several scenarios that absolutely require the use of alenium missiles now that fighters can dodge the first missile. 3 F-17s armed with 1xside, 1xalenium vs 3 fighters. Side winders are used to cause enemy to dodge and the alenium missile causes about 70% damage - still require a fair skirmish to kill all. 2 MiGs + 1 F17 armed with 3xsides, 7 aleniums vs 2 fighters and 1 corvette. 2 sidewinders to force the reaction from the fighters, 1 alenium and 1 sidey to kill one and then 1 alenium and some cannon to kill the other. 5 aleniums left - might just be lucky and take out the corvette (but probably not). Still this is gonna happen quite a lot come mid August, but your not going to be managing anything close to this if its taking you more than a day to produce each alenium missile! Sure you can get in close and dirty before firing missiles to make more count but your going to take alot of damage and probably lose one aircraft to that corvette cannon.

In theory this should work and be encouraged. However in practice it is not very reliable. 1. Sure you can launch a squadron at almost the same time but then you have to manually select them and waypoint so as to keep abreast of the transport as it moves. A little fiddly. 2. The UFOs can come out from space almost anywhere, and can quite easily jump down and reach their maximum speed quickly. Its certainly possible you won't manage to intercept them manually. Sure they come in waves, but how do you know its actually a lull between waves. What if its just your radars haven't picked up the enemy yet? 3. There is no current benefit of moving more than one good in the same C-17. In fact the current set up actually encourages you to send out one item at a time so that if the C-17 does get shot down you don't lose much cash. i.e. it should probably be a set cost for the C-17 and it should have an item/space limit.

In that case I would call for squadrons to support the C-17. It would have to be an option on the transfer screen though which might be complicated. Would it be better if C-17s couldn't be destroyed? It pretty much means you can transfer mid/late game what with all those aggressive fighters appearing from space and actively hunting you down.

Well in that case I rest my case. As long as getting up close is not the only method I am quite happy.

Ooh, I managed to get through a terror site without game freeze. Nice work team!

Can you clarify that by transport you mean C-17? I had no idea they could be destroyed!

Matthew, I just experienced this bug again in V10 but from another angle. This time it was just a normal kill shot from the light drone onto a crouched soldier with the RPG/no armour. During the AI turn the drone fired but I only saw the plasma spout from the drone before it heading back to the hidden movement screen. I did hear the sound of a man dieing. Then on returning the battlefield I find my soldier is dead. =( I have also experienced this on normal firing. Generally the shot lands on target but you just do not see it and when the bug happens it is also tied in with enemy reaction fire...

Oh man I forgot to raise this bug earlier in the week. Yeh they are not actually dead. It should take a sidewinder and alenium missile to kill a fighter or 2 sidewinders and 20-30 cannon rounds. Often they will appear invisibly after the first hit.

Will the taser be something that ends up in the game? I was thinking about options for non-lethal take-downs and considering the stun baton can only reach one space would it not be logical that the xenonauts would research something akin to the taser for taking specimens alive?

Hello there and welcome to the boards. This has been mentioned before and I think (?) it wasn't going to be a priority if it does get included.

No the alien was facing towards both soldiers. One was on the south side of the building, stationary and couched. The other was standing on the north side of the building and moving - triggering the reaction. The enemy shot straight at the closes soldier on the South Side. It wasn't a fluke hit either as the same thing happened on another occasion with a guy in the doorway getting hit while his colleague moved about 7 paces away in open terrain.

I think a repro step would be. Fire at the enemy until they reaction shot you back - I don't think you will see your bullet fly from the gun before it animates the return fire. There is also a case of it happening during normal firing too though - you just need to play several missions on one play through.

Try updating your Desura copy to v9.5.1. lol

Just thought that there is no real reason to only allow two aircraft and the dropship as only the interceptors appear in the air combat anyway. In fact, it actually means that you can't always defend your drop-ship adequately against a heavy fighter flanked by two fighters as you simply can't carry enough missiles! Hopefully this is something you will consider Chris?

And in action...

Ooh, that ignited my imagination. If you were going for the UI changing over time you could probably get away with 3 different ones.. I'm thinking the second advancement the clip board would be replaced with a iPad type device, and the 3rd one would be akin to something out of Minority Report (i.e. I kind of holographic translucent screen). Your scientist could go from wearing that lab coat to wearing a chemical/radiation hazard suit (without the helmet) * hes dealing with alenium now for heaven's sake, and then in the late game he should have some sort of optical device fitted over one eye and be wearing a shiny reflective suit (that looks abit like aluminium rubber) powered by an obvious alenium reactor (iron man style).

I'd still love to have some indication of where exactly this engagement is taking place. Its really difficult to work out what squadron is fighting when you have two identical squadrons up in the air at once. Also it would be nice to know what region gets the relations bonus as a result. There might be times when youd rather shoot it down in Russia than in Europe if you get what I mean?

I sent a chinook out unintentionally empty to a terror site. When the aircraft reached there ground combat was not initiated. The aircraft just hung there above the site and were not able to RTB until the terror site had disappeared. I don't know if the fact I had saved the game mid-flight had something to do with it though? Slightly different scenario to the one above but might add additional insight.