TheTuninator

I won't miss Blaster Launchers as long as there is a dumb-fire human rocket which can knock holes in UFO hulls, as that's all I really use them for. As far as human psionics, I honestly think that they are the worst-designed part of X-COM. My experience with the game is admittedly limited, but I have noted a significant drop in my enjoyment of the game following large-scale implementation of human psionics. As a player new to X-COM, perhaps I can provide a perspective different from those of the series vets. At first, it was great fun to MC alien after alien and make them kill each other or toss all their weapons away; there's no denying that. However, after a couple of missions, it started to feel more like a pointless grind than anything else. I'd go into a mission, two rookies and a tank would march out of the Skyranger to spot aliens, and as soon as I found the first it'd be time to spam MC abilities from the safety of the Skyranger until the cows came home. Thanks to psionics, all of the tension of the game had been removed. I no longer had to worry about whether or not my elite troops might not come home from a mission, because they'd be tucked snugly away in the Skyranger while disposable Rookie Redshirt scouted around for the aliens, and who cares if he doesn't come back alive? Missions went from a harrowing experience where every wrong door selection or poorly chosen corner turn might cost me Colonel Rambo McBadass, beloved five-month veteran, to an absolute cakewalk, and all of the tension and pseudo-horror which X-COM fosters so well vanished completely. I won't miss psionics one bit, personally, but that's just my take on things. The only way I think they could possibly be balanced in order to avoid destroying game atmosphere would be to implement both a requirement for direct LoS from the Xenonaut to the target as well as a hard-capped range limit. Your troops should always be in danger in Xenonauts, and X-COM-style psionics run completely contrary to that principle.

Yeah, I don't have a problem with it if the aliens inside can redeploy to match the breach; that's what I'm referring to when I say it will need to be "carefully balanced".

The difference is that the Blaster Launcher is high-level, end-game tech, and as such its ability to knock open a UFO is somewhat justified. That's a whole world of difference from getting the ability to breach UFOs from close to the start of the game.

Grenades are a basic piece of gear, but you can't throw them into a UFO without having line of sight; it's what balances them. Being able to open a UFO door from a corner without walking through is already a massive advantage for boarding; everything else will need to be carefully balanced to ensure it doesn't tip the scales too far in the Xenonauts' favor.

Right, but the problem is that it's such a great tool that it would be quite possible to make boarding a UFO too easy. Boarding UFOs should be a punishing and harrowing experience which demands extreme caution.

The game looks like a lot of fun! I am firmly convinced now that soldier body counts will be significantly lower, but that doesn't mean it will be a bad game, just different.

O_O I hope those guys don't have a terror unit that's anything like the Chryssalid, then...ow.

IIRC someone mentioned in another thread that High Explosives are planned; they simply haven't been implemented yet.

It's a spaceship; they are guaranteed to have sensors which alert them to a breach in the hull. That would be, y'know, kind of a big deal in space. In any case, there needs to be some drawback to breaching at an early level, or it will severely impact the tension of the game.

Isn't that what tutorials are for, though? If you don't know what stuff means, you play the tutorial.

Yeah, I find the idea intriguing but I think it's something that will have to be very carefully examined to ensure that it doesn't combine with equipment like the riot shield too well, and in doing so remove some of the fear of boarding a UFO. I trust Chris and the team, though, so I look forward to seeing how it plays out in-game.

If you have any name suggestions, PM them to me and I'll implement them! Haven't had much time to work this week, but I hope to update it over the weekend.

Great to hear! I do miss my HE. On the subject of welding charges; I'm actually a bit ambivalent toward that, as it's one more tool to make breaching a UFO (arguably one of the most harrowing parts of X-COM tactical combat) even easier. On top of things like riot shields and stun grenades, this could potentially snowball together to make early-game breaching operations a bit too easy. If the alien AI is smart enough to have the aliens react to breaching attempts and redeploy accordingly, that's fine, but otherwise I think hull-breaching tech might be better kept at the higher tiers; breaching a UFO should be terrifying and punishingly difficult.

Action points do feel a bit tight at the moment, but Chris has indicated that they won't really receive much balancing attention until beta phase, so that will improve. It's also quite possible to edit the shot AP values yourself in the game files; I've done it myself to allow for moving and still being able to auto-fire (though I've lowered the accuracy accordingly). I agree on shot accuracy; shots feel much "tighter" overall, and seem to land within a square or two of the target even when they miss. I liked the fact that you could sometimes miss pretty wide in X-COM, so I as well hope that this changes.

I'll repost what I said in another thread; these are my thoughts on the matter. I wouldn't really miss psi powers, to be honest. I'm hardly an X-COM veteran, so my word on this doesn't count for much, but I found having to grind up psionic skill every mission rather tedious. It was fun once you were able to MC aliens and run them over the map, but I realized that the end result of doing so was that none of my core troopers were ever exposed to enemy fire; they could just park in the Skyranger and shoot out mind-blasts to their heart's content without every coming under fire. Where's the fun in that? I wouldn't necessarily mind psionic powers if they required direct LoS for the psion and had limited range, as you would then be required to put your soldiers in harm's way in return for the massive benefit of MCing enemies, but the X-COM psionics were just way too powerful. The fun in X-COM is heading out to a mission not knowing if your elite soldiers are coming back, and you always know the psi-troopers are coming back. Bear in mind that this game is set in 1979, toward the end of the Cold War. Also, while it is a spiritual successor to X-COM, it does not share the same setting.

I wouldn't really miss psi powers, to be honest. I'm hardly an X-COM veteran, so my word on this doesn't count for much, but I found having to grind psychic powers rather tedious. It was fun once you were able to MC aliens and run them over the map, but I realized that the end result of doing so was that none of my core troopers were ever exposed to enemy fire; they could just park in the Skyranger and shoot out mind-blasts to their heart's content without every coming under fire. Where's the fun in that? I wouldn't necessarily mind psionic powers if they required direct LoS and had limited range, but the X-COM psionics were just way too powerful.

Because it was OP as all hell in X-COM (let's be honest) and Chris has stated that he wants the player to feel genuinely threatened by the aliens every step of the way, something which obscenely powerful psionics would preclude. There's a thread in GD if you want to offer your thoughts, Chris seems still potentially open to suggestions.

You can't use MiG-32s in a furball with multiple UFOs at the moment; they'll just kill you in the head-on charge, as avalanches can't fire until you're in range of their guns. The default loadout of 2x F-17s and 1x MiG-32 works decently well, but you're going to need F-17s one way or the other. Corvettes leave a crash zone too, at least they have for me. Their tileset isn't implemented yet, though, so it's still the "evil shed".

Just a thought, but you might want to wait until Chris feels that the farmyard tileset is polished enough to implement into the game before criticizing it, as it's no doubt got quite a few missing features, or it'd be in the game already.

Agreed. With the addition of stun grenades and riot shields, the game will have to be balanced very carefully to ensure that breaching is still the terrifying, precision-demanding exercise it is in X-COM. Realistically, I think the ability to open doors without passing through them is already advantage enough; if you could throw grenades around a corner while keeping your men safe, clearing a UFO or a building would be insanely easy.

Eh, I like requiring LoS to throw in a grenade. Door entry shouldn't be too safe, or it removes the suspense.

Thanks for fixing the soldier healing bug!

The fact that it doesn't have the same feeling of accomplishment is the reason it's not as good. As Beagle and I have repeatedly stated, Chris has made it clear that these medals are not something you strive to get, but rather something awarded after the fact to remind you of something awesome that happened within the internal narrative of the game. If you insist on treating them as an achievement to be obtained, that's fine, but please don't then insist that your personal preference reflect upon game design when the professed design runs completely counter to what you want. The bottom line is that these medals are not achievements, yet you insist on treating them like achievements.

I'd rather not see these implemented, personally; while they're a novel idea, Goldhawk is an indie team and simply doesn't have the resources to stretch themselves out with feature creep such as this. I'm also leery at the idea of soldiers randomly becoming indisposed; it feels like a little too much harsh randomness even for a game as harsh as Xenonauts.

Right; but, again, the game (X-COM) isn't designed with the idea that players will reload if a mission kicks their ass. It gives players the option, but it's designed so that you're able to pick up the pieces and continue even after a full squad wipe. And again, I have to disagree. I've already had a "sole survivor" situation in my (current and first) playthrough of X-COM. Is it going to be rare? Yes. Is it going to be obtainable? Yes. Some medals should be rarer than others; there's a reason that recipients of the Medal of Honor or the Victoria Cross receive a certain degree of awe. I apologize for misunderstanding, then; it seemed that you were promoting the fatal wound medal as an alternative to the sole survivor medal. Your argument that this medal is badly designed relies upon the idea that you, as a save-scummer, would feel obligated to save-scum in order to achieve it. A majority of posters in this thread have indicated that they do not agree with this position, and I am inclined to come down on their side as well. The argument for this medal is that medals (as per Chris's statements) are supposed to recognize particularly significant or heroic feats by your soldiers, and there's few things more heroic and awesome than one soldier finishing up an entire mission on his own. Again, I would invite you to advance a medal proposal that cannot be obtained via enough save-scumming; I think you'll find that such a medal doesn't exist. Where, then, do we draw the line between medals that people will feel a compelling need to save-scum in order to obtain, and medals that require too much save-scumming for it to be practical? The simple answer is that you can't, as it's inherently a subjective principle; what may be an intolerable amount of save-scumming for me may be a light to moderate amount for another player. As such, save-scumming must be removed from consideration entirely; it cannot be evaluated from an objective perspective due to its highly personal nature.