NuclearStudent

Hello! I used to be here a while ago. To be honest, I never played X-Division because I had an illegal copy of Xenonauts, but I was involved in X-Division a bit. What's going on?

"Madcap Mech MK1" We had certain problems in the lab when thinking of ways to reduce casualties. Armored scout cars have their applications, but are so often stuck by impassable terrain and made useless during close quarters situations. Personal body armor is limited by the weight a soldier can carry while still being able to fight. Shooting the enemy before they have a chance to shoot you is the best way, but your soldiers have already assured us that they are doing that the best they can. We believe this is an important problem-dead soldiers cannot recover artifacts for study. My team proposed and masterminded alternations and improvements to our prototypical power armored suits, hoping to create something larger, more powerful, and better protected than any infantry soldier we have to date. Without the limitations that tracked or wheeled vehicles have, an upscaled mechanical armor suit could breach with force, provide cover for other troops, and carry weaponry too large and cumbersome for any soldier. The engineers misread our designs, as usual, and decided to build the prototype twice the size we had planned for. They complained something about "problems of scale" and difficulties in miniaturization, but I suspect they are simply covering up for their egregious mistakes. Regardless, the MK1 Madcap Mech is a powerful large infantry vehicle capable of delivering mobile firepower anywhere on the field, even if it can not longer fit in any reasonably sized UFO or building.

What weapon branch lines don't have xenopedia entries? Sorry for intruding. Would rather not poke through the files myself-feeling burned out.

I have some free time, and I'm looking to practice my technical writing skills. If there are any Lore entries that need completing, I would be happy to make a couple. I'd just need to know generally how the thing behaves in game, and any specific or general tone/method you need.

At the end of the day, air combat was and is the worst part about XCOM. The air game is likely the least liked aspect of any XCOM game, Xenonauts, NUXcom, or other wise.

I'd love to see the alien strategic AI have some kind of "personality." For example, it could be an aggressive one with mission selection tendencies randomly selected, but biased towards more brazen events. In Xenonauts, there is no overarching plan to alien missions. Whatever RNG rolls is whatever RNG rolls. I've always been weirded out by how distracted and unfocussed the aliens could be. I'd like it if there were some sort of strategic AI that does internal research and resource gathering, a la XCOM: Long War. Low alien resources would weigh resource gathering missions higher than aggressive ones, or something.

That's weird. It's not a mod feature. And, your soldiers aren't overburdened either, or else you would have half of your time units on the first turn as well. The closest thing I can think of is that suppression is glitching out and is causing all of your soldiers to take the suppressed debuff for some reason. Can you check and see if your soldiers can be suppressed at all?

That is a good idea. I will write that.

That's coded into the game under "Probabilistic Search." If the aliens have a good reason to believe you are hiding somewhere, they will blindly fire into that space. If you go into the gamefiles and increase that value artificially, you get amusing results. Aliens would blindly fire at almost any empty space.

More seriously, the game is less random than you think. Aliens have surprisingly rigid patterns of behavior. Chokepoints are very linear. There are real (and annoyingly repetitive) patterns to everything in this game. It's an absolutely fact of life that your point men, who turn around corners and open doors, are going to die. So, make your worst troops point men. It's an absolute fact of life that you have to pass certain doors in certain ways and incur a similar risk every time. So, you can plan around that. There's an arbitrary forced attrition by RNG, that's true, but there's tactical planning and methods you can develop to deal with it.

That's X-Com, baby.

There are no line of sight rules. The AI will fire or use grenades on positions where it believes your troops are. If it knows it saw you peer out from behind a fence, it will bomb behind the fence.

I haven't finished a playthrough (the campaign is about as long as a Xenonaut campaign, but with far more enemies&technologies), but there's some interesting ideas to lift. 1. Fighting enemy humans. For example, gunning down hordes of squiashy human-alien hybrids. You can also run into an evil XCom that works with the aliens. It's interesting fighting human tanks, grenades, and power armor. 2. "Bases" that are actually landed UFOs. This is an abuse of the game mechanics, so alien outposts can be set inside UFO recovery maps. It's a brilliant idea that will definitely work in Xenonauts. 3. You start with a Heavy Machine Gun unlocked, that is too heavy for any soldier to possibly carry. That's an interesting way to gate weaponry-being able to use the gun depends on keeping soldiers alive long enough to become strong, and not on your tech level. 4. You can use workshops to convert corpses into interesting items. In particular, you can use the armor of elite level enemies. That could work in Xenonauts.

I understand a little now. What the Xenonauts spends most of their time fighting is the alien airforce and the escorts of scientific specialists. I'm still noodling around in my head for an explanation of the weapons and modifications the alien spec ops are supposed to have. But this makes sense to me.