Charon

do it. Indeed. A base which gets supplied grows faster. Approximately by 33%. But i dont think you will find what you are looking for in there. There is a special something which will spawn based on time and chance. The longer you wait the higher the chance.

@PALU For the next version: decreased TU% for Praetorian in all Phases to the level of the Warrior, while keeping the higher damage. This means Praetorian can attack up to 50% faster, but given they also have 25% less TU than Warriors it is not a significant change. Decreased TU% for Rogues, Stalker and Ravagers. Increased the range of the Shock Gun from 2 to 3, due to the game not counting from the border to border of the hitbox. Check the weapon.AlienMatergyMinigun entry, i think there is a word missing here

I have actually kinda slipped into retirement some while ago/am in the process of. So with this i am in no obligation to answer any questions which may arise, and dont threaten the peace of the thread. Especially not questions which have been answered before and/or which information is easily available by reading the first post. So except for moderation purposes the mod creator Charon is gone, but the player Charon is still here. Apart from that i take interest in any interesting issues. If you cant find an answer to your question yourself maybe the community can help you. Taking the right time to quit is a skill worth writing books about. Last one puts out the light please. The thing with @PALUis an intern development discussion for everybody to read and participate in, as is the 1.00.10 version.

True, but all operators are UFO specific. You won´t encounter a landingship operator on a corvette mission. You won´t encounter assault operators in a terrorised city. In all instances you can clearly predict which operators you will encounter, except for a few exceptions, where additional operators have spawned to give additional opportunities to capture them ( bonus spawns ).

I dont think thats intentional. Definitely not on the X-Division side. Rather looks to be a byproduct of the additional tu cost multiplied by x3. If we could have no movement penalty for vehicles due to environment obstacles i would do it.

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.