Charon

Lets get the numbers for the Terror Crashsites. Sebillian: 40 - 56 - 61 - 69 Caesan: 53 - 69 - 77 - 94 Androns: 34 - 51 - 58 - 69 A few things to note. As stated before there seems to be a massive increase in numbers between the first and second Phase. This is propably what kills off most campaigns after Phase 1. Looks like we can make improvements on that front. Furthermore these are the 2 terrorcarrier i played: Sebillian: https://youtu.be/1eoy0ROdHl8 20 enemies killed ? I dont know how this works together with the number 40, and i dont suspect that RNG went on a rampage ? Caesan: https://youtu.be/HUXk9eMwCXA 87 enemies killed. That is in line because Xenomorphs are counted triple towards the final score. The feeling in both missions was more than adequate, in terms of difficulty as well as lenght. I ... have a suspicion. ... ... ... It could be that the reason why there were only 20 sebillians on the sebillian mission is because it was on a base attack. The damage dealt to a terror UFO while embarking on a base translates into a decreased unit count. Up to 50% less troops. So from 40 > 20. So this was the reason why there were only 20 units on that mission (and why it didnt get decreased further by the "casuality on impact" ). The 87 enemies on the Ceasan one were on a confirmed terror mission. This meant the "full" count minus impact casualities. This makes setting the proper number for terror crashsites hard, as they can equally consist of either 90% of set troops, or only 50%. It is also not communicated with the player which UFO has "less" troops, as i just found out about that bug right now. The proper solution would be for Solver to fix this, but i dont think he will get to it in the next 6 months, so we will have to make the best experience with the bug in mind. Since i think that 20 units encountered on a terror carrier should be the minimum possible, we will take Phase 1 numbers as the master numbers and climb up from there. Sebillian: 40 - 48 - 58 - 68 Caesan: 53 - 64 - 75 - 86 Androns: 35 - 42 - 49 - 56 @Svinedrengen @Dagar @PALU @PALU Since we cannot a expect a fix from Solver anytime soon, could you communicate in the Xpedia that Damage on Terror UFOs which are on a base mission drastically reduces the numbers encountered on the Crash Site ? Something like "Due to units being already stationed in embarking cargos close to the hull damage that we do to Terror UFOs on Base Attack mission will drastically reduce enemy unit count in Ground Combat, if you choose to engage such a downed party." It should be added generally visibly AFTER you have raided a Terror UFO, so in the Datacore description would be a good place, but i dislike repeated lines. I will leave the solution up to you.

I feel about that that the proper solution is proper maps, not an abstruse AI. If you want to know how all X-Division maps should look like you can take a look at mulligans mission here, and the X-Division Gold standart for maps below it. You should always go for the proper solution, if you can. Apart from that the AI doesnt have a simple slider of "go to the ship". So developing a different AI would propably take longer than anybody making all the maps necessary. If we dont have somebody to make the maps, we dont have them. All we can do is to be transparent about it.

Technically Antimatter weapons are your go to andron killers. Not only do the weapons have generally better stats, the ammo also completely ignores any kind of armour. Which also makes them great against any other alien, except shields and reapers - YES, you are supposed to get access to antimatter weapons at one point in the campaign. Whether or not you make it there is up to your skill. 1) Instead of bigger ammo clips for weapons, you have antimatter weapons and 2) decreasing the andron count is exactly what i have in mind. I plan to especially reduce multi stage enemies, so instead of 8 Terror Androns you might only see 2, but the difference of 6 androns is getting put into regular, single stage ones.

@Ruthless ReubanI rather think the problem lies in the fact that androns require too much ammunition to take down, not in the solution to create infinite supplies in your dropship. The andron andron race was origianlly written and implemented by drages, and hasnt seen any balancing. He basically wrote them blind for the .4 version. Despite that the feeling and experienced made with those units is spot on. Phoenix noted an ammo problem for the androns as well.

So far i have fixed regular terror sites, terror crashsites havent been revised yet. I will take your report into account.

From a development viewpoint there are a few things i disliked. The main critique is the time that the terror site took. It was too long. Now i dont mind the difficulty, but 4 hours plus is too long of a mission. Such things are acceptable in Phase 4, but not for a Phase 2 terror site. The lenght usually corresponds with the number of (ranged) units. I ran out of equipment, even when loading everybody full. Now that is a critical point, as it kinda shows that even if you load yourself up to the last inventory square you will end up short by a little bit. This also corresponds to the number of enemies you have to take down. Too many harridans. We had more energy resistant enemies on the field than energy weak ones. Too little sebillians for a sebillian terror site Too many terror units and weapons. They should be special Reaper count was ok Lets look at the data. Numbers are maximum units that can spawn in a terror site per phase. Sebillian: 23 - 35 - 36 - 38 Caesan: 32 - 44 - 47 - 58 Androns: 25 - 33 - 33 - 37 The first number is the master number, its where all calculations start from. Now by looking at the numbers we can already see a few things to change. Sebillian Phase 1 to 2 has almost an 50% increase in units. Androns are a bit high in count for Phase 1. The Ceasan count is ok, since a lot of numbers are in low level Xenomorphs. By taking the above critique into account i have made the following number changes: Sebillian: 23 - 28 - 32 - 36 Caesan: 32 - 40 - 48 - 58 Androns: 23 - 31 - 34 - 38 The overall changes were: Smoothing out transition between phases Big decrease in terror unit count Substituted by their main race normal soldiers Decreased secondary race count ( Harridans, Wraiths ) Androns was the only race i decided to lower the master number Removed some inconsistencies in the lore department I will revise the unit loadout for Crashsites and Base Attacks as well, and then upload a new version for everybody to enjoy as well.

I ... would have liked to see that .

@PALU Your report reads like a survivors one. ><

X-Division official statement Officially and unoffically nobody. And what @Dagar said. Yet this versions seems to pop up here and there. It contains work of @PALU and a lot of other people. That is as far as I can make an offical statement. Your initial question was about the ETA, this should answer it, the rest are the things which you have to make your own mind up upon, i think. I think it has been pretty confusing when i make official statements, and when i blabber as much nonsense as everybody else on this forum. To remedy this, and to make it clearer when official statements are made, they will be tagged with the green armour symbol at the top.

X-Division official ETA: Never. The official development has been concluded as of version 1.00.01 . But you can download the unoffical version which is unoffical: im legally blind to the fact that this version exists.

I just had an idea and nowhere to put it. When going over the notes of X1 i realised that in the face of armour degradation mitigation is mostly a gimmick, nice when you have it, but higher damage is usually preferable. So i propose a different damage type, pure damage. Each bullet would deal X additional damage which ignores armour, and doesnt get % rolled. Especially high rate of fire weapons could become really fun to play with and could balance out low damage, high rate of fire weapons usability overall. This could lead to nice combinations between damage, mitigation and pure damage, and could lead to some really nice calculations on what weapon to use.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughpffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff ... that was a rough time. I decided to say nothing on this matter to not put oil into the fire, which really didnt need it. However, now that the investigation is over i can finally present the ... Endreport on the Dr Ethan affair Lets start off with the offenses. Dr Ethan has uploaded another modders assets against the wishes of the mod author and without any and all permission to do so. He has been warned once, and then a second time by me, @Charon, and then warned once and a second time by @Chris. Yet the files continued to stay online for a rough period of 14 days which caused reasonable amount of damage. Following this matter Dr Ethan has continuesly harrassed another user on this forum. This includes 7 dedicated posts against the other user as well as including derogatory tags in the download section for other people to see. The result of this is a borderline ban, which is one step away from getting permanently banned. Now usually this would be the end of the report but there seem to be some questions which are still lingering around, so lets answer them. Why cant you work together with Dr Ethan ? Dr Ethan doesnt respect the direct wishes of another person. It is just coincidence that these wishes happen to allign with an actual ruleset on this and any other modding forum. But putting the boot into another persons face and then expecting help from them doesnt work as a universal rule in most cultures. Be nice and get a nice reply. Dr Ethan does ignore the general modding rules which are more or less the same on the internet, a minicopyright. An example of them can be found here: https://help.nexusmods.com/article/28-file-submission-guidelines Dr Ethan doesnt accept the highest authority on this forum. Be nice to Chris. If Chris says X its X and not Y. Now this is kinda a big point, but it is objectively subjective. When people read A, Dr Ethan reads B. Ill give a few examples 1. Chris says linking to another peoples assets is against the rules, which is meat with the reply of "But i just wanna link to it", for which Chris has to reply with that it doesnt matter what he wants, which gets the reply of "But he did bad stuff too". I think you can see where this is going. An argumentation on, objectively, a childrens level. 2. When i say datacores are missing, i mean that datacores are missing. Not "Im pretty sure they are there". The rest of examples is simply a "misreading" of things. If i communicate with somebody i want to get the message across. People who work with me need the right kind of attitude. "Ill do the rest when i feel like it" is not the right kind of attitude. Now each and everyone of the above is a dealbreaker, but together they form quite a clear picture. Why did you ignore Dr Ethan ? To de-escalate the situation. It didnt need more fire than it already had. What about his work epic ? I said i will only let pass work on an X-Division quality standard through but ... its honestly a joke. The mod assets dont have a single working code line. The only things in there are either X-Division layouts with no holes, or XNT layouts, with no datacores. Im not even sure if a single line of code has seen work beyond a copy and paste. Okay, this is a big. Im not joking. ( Clears throat ). Dr Ethan has made holes into the wrong art assets. The mod doesnt have any original X-Division art. I assume it was unintentional. Or maybe it was another copy and paste. I think this ties together with the hard to communicate part above, but Dr Ethan needs the competence to find the right art assets. I literally cant do that for him. The point is that he needs to see for himself that the UFOs in X-Division actually look different, and then he needs to connect the dots. So we have not a single working code line, and we dont have any art. Now i sweeped the rest of the assets and there seems to be other files which may or may not work, but for the heart of the matter there has been zero work done. Zero. Apart from that Datacores are missing which means blocked research paths and no new aircraft ( try building aircraft without datacores ). Research incompability breaks save games. The mod is more than just a blank file, it actually blocks people from progressing through the game. Guess who has to give support for that. Anything else to add ? There was this thing on another page about using X-Division assets. Im not blocking anybody from making their own mod ontop of X-Division, even if it contains X-Division assets, unless i expressly forbid it. The general rules for using X-Division assets are layed out here under "Permissions and credits": https://www.nexusmods.com/xenonauts/mods/34 At this point i would have said that Dr Ethan has wasted my time, wasted Max´s time to investigate, and wasted Chris´s time to intervene, but i think all of this has a silver lining. Through this incident there have been a number of weakpoints in the administrative routine exposed, which may lead to an improved terms of service and code of conduct as well as improved protection of modding assets and harassed users on this forum, without installing mind control machines in everybodys brain I will briefly speak about uploading assets on steam. Its a bad idea. Not only does Steam have a lot of problems with deep directories, it also has problems with images, especially with aircraft images. Fruthermore "updating" new versions is what Steam isnt great at either. You will get lucky if the "update" button even works. New versions can take up to 2 hours to actually get taken by steam, and then redirected to the user. And this is just scratching the surface. So if @Dr. Ethanactually wants to get people to get their hands on his latest version i suggest uploading it to reliable sites. Like MEGA, but any other site that can share files is an option too, maybe google drive or whatever. Just constructive criticism though. What does the future hold ? For security reasons i will not answer anything provided by Dr Ethan for the next month. Today is the 14.3.2019. Just for de-escalation reasons. With this i consider the whole matter closed. Charon

Well, if you lower the ATP at which Terror Carrier start to appear, you obviously also have to lower the ATP at which the escorts can appear. e:airplane.alien.fighter 100 100 Being extra nice since i offer my help for free and dont own anybody anything, as you stated ? Dont worry the Endreport is coming in.

@Svinedrengen 1. gameconfig.xml. Remember to check which mod may overwrite it. 2. AM_Terror.xml Ohohoho. Is this the retribution of all that shit getting thrown at me ? I appreciate it.

The reason for the "low" reflex stats are many, here are a few: To avoid having to give certain armour reflex mali. Coding wise there are many side effects for "mali" which behave differently than "boni". The baseline for the trainable reflex stats has to be 100. Additional boni and mali are not counted towards that. So different armour can give you inbetween 70 to 150 reflexes. Reflexes are a delicate part of the armour system in X-Division, and has to be balanced as such. The stats may look low, but the basic "no" armour gives you a 20 reflex bonus, because we try to reinforce the idea "Less armour means more reflexes". If you count that towards the base line you get a range of 35 to 65 reflexes on recruits. That is "above average" as far as stat ranges go. You will also find that all early researchable armours have big bonuses towards reflexes, while the later generations of armour radically differ in use and function. The first aliens reflex stats are only 10 points above your maximum recruiting range, if you play on NG+2. If you play on NG the alien stats are considerably lower than yours. Now if you take into account that you can actually train your guys, while all Phase 1 enemies stay the same i would say its something you can play with.

@Dagar what provocations ? As always, im ready to improve on myself, so i would ask for concrete examples which can be improved upon ( use the quote function ). I wholeheartedly disagree. All the people who ever had the faintest honest spark in their heart to contribute towards X-Division, on an X-Division standard, were able to.

Fixed the Landingship DSB, granting only 3 light weapon systems, when it should have given 4. @PALU Could you revise the Focus Lense a bit ? We still have a "blind firing arc" in there.

All vanilla aircraft can be made buyable in the "Buyable" category of the aircrafts.xml. Newly added non-vanilla code supported aircraft can not be made buyable. Vanilla aircraft can be made buyable in the aircrafts.xml. So if you have a vanilla aircraft with the underlying buying code which you dont use, you could take the same code line and overpaint it with your own aircraft. Beware though, limited aircraft available ;).

All "buyable" stuff is hardcoded. No other content than the Condor and Chinook can be made buyable. Cheers.

guys guys, this is amazing:

You never offered to contribute and therefore you dont have to withdraw an nonexisting offer. But if you think you made one your withdrawal is totally ok.

If you thought it was, than you were wrong. It isnt. Maybe i wasnt too precise with the statement. It should have said "Sure, i never keep people from trying to contribute". Said statement doesnt mean anybody who thinks they are "contributing" gets a free pass or access to anything. But i aknowledge quality and hard work, and take what i think contributes to X-Division and give credit where it is due, without regard to my own ego ( eg. what i personally think about the person ). I am still the gatekeeper of X-Division quality, and set the standarts of what "quality" and "contributing" means.

The point is that @Chrisgave youtubers all rights to make video content and publish them wherever they like. A third party showing up either means that Goldhawk has lost control over their assets, changed their oppinion or youtube has gone crazy. Either way, it interferes with the ability of youtubers to make money, which means less coverage, which means less advertisement, which was the point of the whole agreement in the first place. Not necessarily suggesting anybody is at fault, its most likely just youtube gone crazy. This here is just a notice so @Chris knows about it ( as he propably has a lot of other stuff to do ).

Which is why i suggest a visual eye pleasing candy. I just wouldnt want that developers to pretend that the aircombat would need any skill to begin with, or go wtih a proper solution. But we already discussed what that means. The Utopia of good, fast and cheap food. I would rather like them to focus on things which DO matter. Like integrating a detailed "what happens in air combat has an effect on ground combat" feature(s). Here is a fast eye pleasing eye candy which is over in 16 seconds, and optionally can have a detailed connection between aircraft weapons used, UFO parts hit and which information can be transmitted to the players in various stages. You can make infinite stages between this and the X1 aircombat.

I cant help to come back to make another point. Total War Rome 1 is very similar in the fact that it also employs a triumvirat. Geoscape ( turn based ) Ground Combat ( Real time, pausable ) and Sea Combat ( Ships vs Ships ). Now the last point in the series is 100% autresolve. Up until Total War: Empire, including Rome 1, every naval battle was an autoresolve only. Now there were players who wished for full scale naval battles, and after Empire came the players who said it was awful in comparasion to the land battles, and then they removed it in later installements again, giving birth to the players who lamented the lack of sea combat gameplay. So what can we learn from this ? (1) Even AAA games substitute large parts of their games with autoresolve solutions (2) That is ok as long as they focus on the quality of things people do like. Grand scale armies clashing together in a detailed Land Combat Environment. Simply put: dont forget what your game is about. (3) Implementing a third aspect to the game with the same quality is not only very resource intensive and will propably be not be on par in comparasion to the main focus of the game. This is the same aspect as when people say that food can either be 1. fast 2. good or 3 cheap. Ofcourse people want to have fast, good and cheap food, but realistically you can only maximise two aspects. This sums it together pretty nicely: I personally didnt miss the naval combat in Rome 1, and i was happy to not spend time on something which is on a lower quality as the rest of the game.