Charon

Indeed. Thats not indended, but indeed.

@PALU For the next version i fixed some shield trickeries with harridans. Firstly, harridans are not supposed to have shields. The Terror warrior and elite had some early shields and this lead to some funny implications. Like shooting a cannon with a 0.01 reaction modifier with a 1.0 reaction modifier. I made the following corrections, and you can see it fit to change the lore if you want to, as mentioned units gained a bit of resilience in the process: (1) I removed the shield from the Terror warrior and elite and appended the 62.5% of the shield hp. For the terror warrior this means from 400 to 500 hp, and for the terror elite it means a change of 500 to 688 hp. This removes the buggy behaviour of cannon wielders firing with the reaction modifier of a rifle. (2) I set the reaction modifier of the Blood Cannon from 0.01 to 0.1. This is a sensible value, since it wont trigger on most units, but on ones which carry heavy equipment as well ( miniguns, cannons, etc ... ). (3) Fixed the wrong reflex value of the terror warrior from 210 to 120. This is the said video which the incident occurred in:

Since when is even the slightest value in X-Division an oversight ? You dont get anything from bombing a mothership because ... you cant bomb it. Even when grounded a mothership will still have enough defenses up to repell any kind of air attack to "finish it off", but against nuclear warfare. Which isnt really allowed since you cant simply nuke some place in another peoples country. Every mothership has a Praetor onboard, if he didnt die on impact. Even the lowest Praetor has around 50 000 ships at his command. Do you really think he will just say "Welp, crashed, cant help it. Now i gotta detonate my ship ... ... ... not." What actually happens is either that the crew can repair the mothership and/or he simply calls in a supply run with 2 dozens UFOs which (A) give him a lift into space and (B) can repair the mothership to flightable conditions again. Having the 0$ airstrike options is simply a "Lets ignore this, ok ?" from the command room perspective. :P As if the leader of 50 000 UFOs would self detonate his ship just because he crashlanded :DD.

Okay. I kindly disagree.

@Dagar As far as i read your response you missed the whole point of the things i wrote. Eg. the topic mentioned is not mechanics vs graphics. Its gameplay vs cinematik. The difference between them is as big as a tactical in comparison to strategic. Most people use them in an interchangeable manner, but they have 2 completely different meanings.

From discord. "Removing elements can be as impactful as adding them" - Does adding a guiding system add to the experience, or does it take away from the accomplishment of the player to make their own system ? "The books he ( Hidetaka Miyazaki, creator of dark souls ) read at the time, many in English, were sometimes beyond his reading capabilities, with parts of text he could not understand fully. Using his imagination to fill in the blanks by using the accompanying illustrations, Miyazaki used this as inspiration for some of his later ideas on game design. All games have 2 extremes. The Gameplay side, and the Cinematic side. The Gameplay side, roughly speaking, is about what kind of pysical and mental skill a player has to either posess, or aquire during the gameplay to successfully progress in the game. The Cinematik side, also called Presentation of the game, is what kind of content the player is experiencing without having to be restrained by any skill requirement. It is what i call the "Movie" side. You dont need to have any skill to sit down and watch a movie. And ofcourse there are infinite variations inbetween. Lets talk about what that means. Having a gameplay heavy game means turning away players who do not possess the skills to play the game. This limits how far you can budget the game and how big your audience can even be ( restricted by skill level ). Let me reiterate that those 2 points are quite important, as both have to do with money. So you can say that the gameplay element adds an environment to learn deep skills, but on the expense of a smaller audience, since not everybody is at the level of which some people can even start to aquire the skills necessary to progress in the game. It is more akin to teaching material than a mobvie. Having a cinemtic, or "Movie", heavy game side means that you have to lower the game-play required skill level in order that more people can enjoy the cinematic. A game like "Firewatch" would be poorly designed if it would require too much skill in order for the player to progress. It is a playable visual movie for you to experience, with some button clicks involved. No skill necessary. The advantages of this is very good content brought across to the player, at the expense of giving the player less environment to aquire skills and to improve on themself. Watching the "Titanic" is nice, and you can extract a lot of information from it, but it hardly changes how you approach games and the world. For the last 20 years and with the fall of the mighty movie industry, due to being easily able to spread cinematic content over the internet and the and blue-ray fail, games have moved heavily towards the cinematic side of gameing. Mainly because focusing on the cinematic side lets you expand your audience almost indefinitely, you just have to lower the skill requirement. A bigger audience means more money. More money is good when you loose a lot of money somewhere else. Games have become the new Hollywood. And so this notion towards "streamlined features" and more cinematic content has become the agreed norm in the game industry which we move towards to. Even more, customers are getting accustomed to the low skill requirements and are getting angry when a game actually demands skills from them. After all, a movie doesnt demand skills from you either, no ? But what are we getting here at exactly ? "Quest markers are the laziest game mechanic i can think of. The usual solution that developers concots in response is "Well, just turn them off". ... Well now im just completely lost, because the game isnt designed with this in mind. Basically, no amount of turning off quest markers or mini maps will bring back the sublime in-world maps of the original Thief games." Simply put: You cant develope a game in 2 opposite directions. Cinematic games gets its enjoyment from making cinematic content as easily available as possible on the expense of skill requirements. Gameplay rich games gets its satisfactions from aquiring and mastering skills at the expense of players who are not capable enough to get into the journey. A quick but important side note i try to outline here: Skill requirement games won´t ever see such a popularity for the same reason any kind of teaching material in the world won´t see any storm of people anytime soon. First of all, the people are limited to those who actually want to learn the skill. Than its further limited by who even has the requirements to profit from the learning material. And the death sentence for teaching material is ... once people learned what they wanted to learn they move on. This keeps the kind of people in need for the same kind of teaching materials always limited. Cinematic material on the other hand reaches infinitely more people than skill based games. More people means more money. Did i mention that money is important ? Anyway, this brings us to X2 and guiding systems. Does making a guiding system help the player, or does it take away the opportunity of making their own system, and the satisfaction which comes along with it. Only one things for sure, you cant have both, because one lives on the expense of the other. And the other big thing apart from not being able to develope a game in 2 directions is that ... you cant make 2 games. You can only give 1 goal your full support. Do you give him a visual help and call it a day ? Or do you expect the player to be able to count numbers + turns + shooting options, and give him support based on the required skill ? The point im trying to point out is that one of the decision curbs the other. You cant have a visual system AND give the player support in case they make their own system. There is only so much money available to make a game. On the other hand it doesnt make sense to implement a visual system if you spend money on supporting the playercalculating numbers + turns + shooting. Aaaaaaaaaanyway, im outta here. Cheers.

Necrophilia means loving corpses. Im not sure what that would mean in the context provided.

Ill take that than. A postboned game will eventually become good, but a rushed game will forever be bad.

@PALU I will have to postbone the release for 24 hours.

Ill pass them along to you this evening. So you will propably be able to work on them tomorrow.

Very good entry. I like it. If you want the technical details, the archelon flies with 3000 kmh, making its max speed 4500 kmh. To accelerate from 0 to 4500 you need 4.5 seconds. Since aircraft usually dont fly on 0 kmh you can say that the average time it needs to reach the speed you can practically work with is indeed 3 seconds, give or take. I have also redesigned the ancient weapons, but am struggling with the latest 2 weapons to give them a unique design. Do you want to get the preliminary results and write some entries for them ?

That sounds like a better explanation, go with it. Foxtrot has an acceleration of 200, merlin, the Phase 4 2 heavy slot bomber, has 250. They have better turn rates, and faster speed than the archelon, in case of the merlin. The Firebird has 1000 acceleration. This means the archelon can accelerate and decelerate with the same agility as a Firebird, ontop of that the max speed of the archelon is lower, which means it can go reach highest/lowest speed faster than a firebird. The main problem with bombers making a bombing run is partly the turn rate means you need to have a good plan, but the main disadvantages of bombers is their low adjustment to speed. This is such a big problem that better players even snake their planes in order to cover less ground ( and thus are slower at a certain range ). The archelon is a heavy craft, and the heaviness makes it hard to turn, but its turbines make it possible to speed to a certain point, decelerate to turn in 3 seconds, and acelerate to max speed in 3 seconds again. At least thats the intended design.

Maybe the problem lies in the fact that you use only drakes ( a Phase 3 aircraft on top of that ) ? What if you aggro with 1 adopted alien interceptor, while the 2 drakes escape unscathed. The adopted alien interceptor should be agile enough without having to have a narrow time window to escape ? Aircombat skill can net you better results, but in reality you just need to make a good plan for your encounter. The file says the dreadnaught missile is single targeting, so it should work. If you are now saying that you need to stay in range of dreadnaught for 20 seconds than thats because you are using mines. Mines are good, but there are definite counters to it. Like the dreadnaught. Time to deliver max payload: AV.STEALTHMINES: 19 seconds AV.SINGULARMISSILE: 10 seconds AV.WARPMISSILE: 6 seconds ( 12 ?) AV.SINGULARITYTORP: 4 seconds You can see the higher the tech goes, the faster you can deliver your payload, usually, and thuse spend less time in the danger zone. Mines are just mines, they need time to deliver their payload. As the dreadnaught is basically the last piece of tech you need to bring down ( since you technically dont need the mothership, thats just an extra ) and the fact that you are mostly using Phase 3 tech there are 2 points: (1) 2 lost drakes for for 1 dreadnaught doesnt sound like a bad deal. You are in Phase 4, your production is supposed to be able to substitute anything. (2)You dont have much Phase 4 tech. No heavy interceptor, no interceptor, no nightowl, no archelon. Fighting Phase 4 enemies with Phase 3 equipment is supposed to be difficult. What should players look forward to if better aircraft, you know, wouldnt be better. The nightowl can evade, the heavy interceptor has 1 normal and 1 heavy slot, and the archelon is just armageddon ( still propably needs a buff. ) And the dreadnaught is supposed to be one of the last things you need to get. EDIT: Fazit: Im not unhappy about the technical limitations of the fight, although if i would be able to change it, i would. The lore department is there to make the player feel good about what happens, so if the head chief of said department wants to write some lore about how terrifying beyond *shrug* range the dreadnaught is, it would be welcome. I have buffed the archelon acceleration from 500 to 1000 for the next version, still with a very low turn rate of 25. This is supposed to make the player decelerate when he wants to turn. @PALUmaybe you can make a lore point about the high tech rotateable (a lot of mini thrusters as described in Researches.DirectionalThrusterArray ) super fueled "turbines" of the archelon ? This is for you guys:

That would be my prefered solution, but that is how Xenonauts was coded. Alas its not possible.

@PALU Personally im always amazed when the development of X-Division changes the rules again, even with the limited possibilties available. You think you can safely leave the battlefield BAM ! think again. I also noticed that with drones, where you sometimes have to time your exit just right, so the disengaged anti-missile system are not your downfall. But the dreadnaught is ofcourse a completely different story, with its high effective range nothing is safe anymore, and adds a new skill to your arsenal:"Time your exit right." I am not up to date, but the missiles have a poor turn rate. Wouldnt you be able to basically evade with this manouver ? Afterburners on for maxgeschwindigkeit. Apart from that it is a fitting fight for the lore description which comes along with it. Dont you think it fits extraordinarily well ?

X-Division fixes this for terror maps by placing 95% of civilian and local spawn points inside of houses, while placing 100% of the invading forces outside of buildings. This gives them very good defense for the first turns in form of sight block and basic cover. Local Forces can use the buildings to strategically shot from and hide again in a corner. Guaranteed they wont make it alone, but aliens will have to use resource points like moving and shooting over cover in order to engage them.

The capability of a SAM site doesnt only depend on its immediate environment, there is something called logistics and supply routes too. After all you dont put a SAM into the wilderness and it will function unconditionally forever. People are operating a SAM site, they need food and water. And machines need regular maintenance. Spare parts need to be delivered. Technical Operators might want to check on the equipment. All of these means there needs to be supply routes for them, usually in the forms of roads, or rails, to deliver personel and equipment to and from the site. Roads dont build themself. Factories dont build themself. Resource Extraction sites dont build themself. Hit any of these and you are also weakening the defense capability of any SAM site. What is a defense system good with the missiles stuck on a destroyed road ? The "defense value" for a country is just a symbolical representation of those statistical occurences, no ? The visual representation doesnt need to go over that. Thats the way to go. The visual representations are the very last thing to implement anyway. First you wanna feel out the mechanic. If the mechanic gets scrapped there is no use to think about it further. My point was simply about the basic fact that if a mechanic gets represented by a visual indication its pretty nice for the player. Even if it is just a red cross on the right bottom end of the UFO flying around. The human eyesight is next to nothing apart from the eyes of the few predatory birds around the world.

Even if not a minigif, alternatively you could just add a little red cross on the right bottom of the UFO to tell the player that the UFO is engaged by the country its flying over. Again a visual scaling of how much it is engaged by would be nice. If you implement mechanics its always nice to give the player a visual representation of what is actually going. Visual design is not about realism, just about a symbolic representation of what ( in the best case ) really is going on.

I think a mini-GIF with mini-missiles and mini-aircraft would make the geoscape feel a lot more involved than it was in X1. The mini-gif is as long active as the UFO is above the country. It would be important that the mini-GIF is 1. not an eye-catcher, just a small visual representation of what is going on and 2. that it visually scales with the actual defense of the country.

Wouldnt a rudimentary stream of missiles from the territory towards the UFO be an unobstructing way of telling the player there is something like a fight going on ? The higher the defense of a country the more missiles can be shot. You can also add something like aircraft to this minigif if you want.

+1

Very informative article. Thank you for the read. While i do enjoy the better posts in this thread they dont have anything to do with what this thread is about. That is about the falls and benefits of Save Scumming and Ironmann in Xenonauts/Xcom genre. And because of this i have to ask both of you to leave the thread. You can open up your own thread and continue your discussion there, and/or request for your posts to be transfered there. Good luck.

Every conversation is a confrontation. This is why i think you are living in wonderland. A conversation where there is nothing at stake is just small talk. If you truelly want to get a talk you necessarily have to have an oppinion, and in the best case you also need to be able to negotiate it. If you are just here for small talk, go somewhere else. Like i said, this guide doesnt adhere to everybody. But it is also not meant for everybody. It is meant for the people who think they can profit from it. There is no language which is "inclusive" for everybody. A title with a hundred footnotes which say what it doesnt mean is just ridicoulus. People who understand will understand. And people who dont, won´t. The difference between them is education, knowledge and a proper attitude towards life and the shortcomings of any tool . Thats just word hairsplitting. You cannot invent words or a language which is inclusive for everyone. You are chasing a dream. The proper way is to know the limitations of language, and the use of it. Men talk differently among each other than women do. The proper way to behave is to know when to use which language. Normal people know that every word has its limitations, and that every tool has limitations. They dont try to invent a perfect language, but are simply humble. Thats what i said. What makes you think repeating what you said makes me accept it the second time ? But i already stated that the majority of things you say is wrong: If you want to fight the definition of a word you are in the wrong thread. Im not claiming that bad RNG games dont exist, nor am i disputing that bad Ironmann games exist. But again you are in the wrong thread for it. The example with the dices is just a bad game. Im sorry that you are playing bad games. And i also sorry that the gaming world has become less about gaming, and more about entertainment for you. But again, you are in the wrong thread for this discussion. This guide is concretely about Xenonauts and about Ironmann only in this context. This is why its on the Xenonauts and Xenonauts reddit forum.

The issue here is that people can interpret it as such, unless my senses about how people read English with a western traditional value is completely off. Which i dont think it is. So regardless of whether what you said is intended as such or entirely different has no effect on the fact that an wide array of people will read it as such, thuse my answer addresses the issues which come up while somebody might read your text. Which again, is in my oppinion the majority of people. There is only so much bullshit i can take. Its not about discussion, its about A. your text is based upon a context which gaming is simply not. The unsaid word is more powerful than the said one. And so addressing the wonderland which your narrative is based upon is more important than what you actually had to say. And B. You misinterpret my words and state things which are simply, plainly wrong, and therfore make black into white, and white into black. Here is your example: Like i already said, simply because i make 1 guide on how to properly play the game doesnt mean i invalidate all other ways. Which i stated. Which you didnt read. Here it is again: See ? This is so untrue that i even wonder how you can say that without getting purple red in your face. Thats like saying poker is purely a game based on consistency, and has nothing to do with skill. Poker is a game based on consistent display of skill. Again, the unsaid word is stronger than the said one. Your narrative suggests anybody has an objective of hiding balance issues under the rug. That is mostly not the case, no game is balance issue free, and the goal of development is to make the game as interesting and engaging as possible, not as balance issue free as possible. Balance is important as well, but its not the primary goal. With this you end up with games which are not balance issue free, but nobody "hid" anything anywhere. It just so happened that the game came out this way, and i wouldnt contest any developer to have any agenda of hiding anything anywhere under what-not. The issue is mostly about time and money. Ofcourse there is, if you have a concrete goal in mind. The goal of the guide is to enrich your experience, make you learn high quality skills fast, and to not waste your time learning skills. If you have such concrete goals there is definitely a finite approach towards that, and this guide suggests ONE of it. It is there to help and guide people. Your statement of "everyone has a different approach" is true, but that doesnt help the people who concretely want advice on how to utilise their time on the game. In the same way that if somebody wants to learn how to cook the answer of "Everybody does it differently" is technically true, but doesnt help the trainee a single bit. I just think that the majority of your statements are too wrong to be discussed ( Ironmann doesnt make the game harder ) and your view too different to have a common ground. This place is for people who want to concretely discuss how to enrich their gameplay experience, and how to utilise Ironmann ( where can you reload, where not ). You are simply in the wrong thread. Shoooo. Open your own thread for your oppinion . I requested to lock the topic because this forum is a place for robust debate. Not drama. And there havent been any answers for a long time, and the rest of it is just somebody who disagrees with the proposed fundaments so hard ( Ironmann makes the game harder, and there are skills you can learn to deal with it ) that no debate is possible. You are like somebody who doesnt eat fish and goes into a fish restaurant . Cheers

You are misinformed. Save scumming is defined as the technique to evade RNG results and get the RNG results you desire by reloading. Havent seen this anywhere. I think you are oblivious to the fact the we are only talking about Xenonauts, and XCOM games in general. Not any other genre. Also a game is not a movie, the satisfaction of overcoming new challenges is what makes the game so noteworthy. That implies that nobody is able to learn anything in a game. Im happy to announce that humanity is still able to increase their skills and broaden their horizon by playing video games. This is impossible, because you dont have all the information. XCOM is not a puzzle genre. Sentences like these make me wonder if you even played one game in the XCOM genre. Ironmann has its own appeall in single player. You see the game in a completely new way, learn new techniques to deal with uncertainties and learn how to calculate and deal with risks and failures. Thats the same thrill and satisfaction you get out of playing poker. Congrats. Guys ... is this craziness ? You dont lose the game because you lose one soldier to a reaper. Again, a game is not a movie. Aquiring the skills necessary to beat a game is the satisfaction. Mastering a game and all its RNG odds is where the enjoyment comes from. Something which might not be for you. FFS. The game is just in early access. You cant say anything about the balance. And even apart from that, bad map rolls are what makes an RNG map creation appealing. The randonmess, the unpredictability. In professional AOE2 games player can call a reroll in the first 2 minutes if they feel like the RNG rolled too bad in their favour, with a limited reroll count for both players. Random maps are not a bad thing, but it obviously has its limitations. Additional tools are implemented to control the worse side of it. Play Chess if you dont like RNG. There 100% of your actions are skill based. Welcome to XCOM, baby. Why do all these people like to gamble so much ? Its outcome is little determined by strategy or tactic . Anyway, a lot of readers didnt seem to get what this guide was about, so let me quote from the guide itself. Its about enriching your gameplay experience as well as learn high quality skills in your life. People also seem to overlook this paragraph: Everything which has been stated wrongly by @Edmon Save Scumming has been termed like this for a long time. It hints at the depriving aspects of said techniques, but is used carefully for each appropriate situation. The proper way to behave in this world is to learn features of a tool and the time to use it, instead of making the world infant-proof. The quality of a knife lies in the fact that it has a sharp edge, and not in the fact that every knife in the world is made so dull that nobody can hurt themself with it. Ironman makes the game harder. Ironman gives you a new experience. People are actually able to learn something in their life. Random map creation is a good thing. Too high difficulties is part of the creation process. It can be mitigated by various other tools. Spoonfeeding everybody their own difficulty and Safe Zones are a bad thing. You gotta learn your limitations to see real improvement in your life. Not every game has to be a game for everybody. Some can be niche games. In fact making games for every taste in the world enriches the experience and diversity more than only standart cost for everybody. The guide was about the XCOM genre, and Xenonauts especial. Its not about RPGs. This is why its on the Xenonauts reddit page. Just because somebody makes 1 guide to a proper gameplay experience doesnt mean he becomes a predator to all other ways of playing the game . Apart from that its a lot of simply wrong facts, out-of-context statements and a lot of emotion hype. Cheers @Max_Caine please lock the thread.