Gazz

I want to see Evil Alien Barn shaped cookies.

The background story does not specifically demand ammunition to require alienium. The actual kind and amount of resources required for manufacturing each item are balancing issues so that they require alienium can not be an argument. It would be the result of a balancing decision, not a cause.

The entire Alenium angle is only derailing the topic. My point is that the player has no realistic choice of whether to produce the ammunition or not. The soldiers must have their rifle ammo. Actions that the game dictates the player to do are a chore and offer no interesting gameplay. These filler actions should be trimmed back so the player can make interesting decisions instead. Balancing the heavy equipment and ordnance should be plenty to do without having to worry about screwing up the timing on something as basic as rifle bullets.

Oh, that't easy then. Pistol and rifle ammunition does not require Alenium. See? All better. I'm talking about a gameplay issue here, not about some minor detail of the background story that can simply be changed to fit the gameplay needs.

One of the truly silly restrictions of X-Com has always been how few buildings you could physically fit into a single base. I usually ended up with one base mostly for storage alone. Stupid. What buildings you have in a base should depend on what you want to build and if you can afford it. Unless you're building your sekrit base in the middle of a city, space itself would not be an issue. What could be an issue is the map size the tactical engine can handle. If you simply allow more tiles and the game crashes when trying to load the map on a base attack, that's a no go. In that case, the base could simply have *drum roll* a basement! No hangars / garages can be built in the basement level because the vehicles need to have access to the surface. Everything else is not handicapped by a flight of stairs or a lift. The tactical engine already does multi-level stuff so if ground and basement level each get 2 map levels, that's plenty for the map designer to play with. 2 levels are less at-a-glance in the base building window because you couldn't see the entire base at once... unless the base area is rectantular instead of square and you see both levels at once. Obvious is good.

That's where I got the idea. My own initial reaction was pretty much the same but... it's not such a bad idea if done right! =P To me, the balance is maintained by having to set up the equipment the soldiers go into battle with. How many magazines they are taking, how the carried weight affects their mobility, what other useful things they don't have the inventory space for. Can you imagine a Seal team commander canceling the mission because there aren't enough rifle bullets for his small handful of soldiers? Extending this system to all ordnance (XCOM:EU) goes too far, IMO. Rockets / grenades are larger scale. One (or more) inventory slots is used up with every attack. Their usage is far more limited. It makes sense for the commander to have an eye on the heavy stuff but supply with simple bullets (be they alien or terran) should not be too complicated to delegate to a clerk. It makes for far better gameplay if you assign believable weight and volume to the magazines so that a machine gunner cannot carry unlimited ammo. 1000 rounds of 7,62 would be 24 kg. Just the bullets alone! No belt links or boxes. I can guarantee that you'll develop a personal hatred for every single 100 round belt you have to carry on a march. =P

Xenonauts already reduces some of the micro through the auto-selling of excess alien items. I would suggest to make the clips / magazines of all firearms available in unlimited quantity. The only things the player would manufacture would be the "heavy" ordnance like launcher rockets, grenades, and interceptor missiles. Things that come as single items. Constantly monitoring the number of pistol and rifle clips is just no fun. That also prevents the sadface when an entire clip is "used up" even though only a single round had been fired in the mission. Tracking the actual number of bullets is a silly level of detail that doesn't fit with the rest of Xenonauts.

Possible solution: A hotkey to press or a qualifier key to hold down (while you mouseclick your move / fire orders). Then TU reservation is temporarily disabled until you switch to another soldier.

On the old forum there's been a huge thread on all kinds of ways to do a training system with and without pre-existing or achieveable perks / stats. Chris said it's not happening. That was that.

Oh, I'm not saying you are wrong. Just that you're not necessarily right. =P For a code monkey (like me, I admit it!) the damage value of a gun is not interesting. It's just a value in a table. Literally. Not doing anything. The graphics? Irrelevant pixels that have no effect on the game. 97 bit colour depth triple buffered epsilon shading on the weapon graphics? Do not care. But the actual function used to simulate a partial but not infinitely cascading destruction of a building due to a rocket hit? I'd care about that. That is code. Alas, it'll be untouchable in Xenonauts. Xeno can still be a good game. It just can't be modder heaven like UFO:ET, where you can rewrite the whole damn game in the script files. For instance, in my version of it, energy shields are not destroyed when they reach zero points. They have 2 turns of downtime, then they start recharging as normal. Doesn't change anything they do in combat but it eliminates the micromanagement in re-equipping a soldier for all the burnt-out shields.

It's pointless to counter (modding) exploits in a game that allows modding with no more than a text editor. Set the damage of all alien weapons to zero. Duh. Any ape can do that. With a single player game (no permanent connection to a governing server that could monitor things) it would be ridiculous to even try. On the contrary, it can only be beneficial to allow as much modding access as is possible... with reasonable effort. Not only is it a huge help in the balancing / polishing stage of the game, it also opens the doors for all the crazy ideas modders can come up with. Neither I nor Chris can even begin to speculate what they'll do.

What do you mean? Stats like weapon damage are all saved in tables. There is no code involved. It's actually very easy to add content. (weapons, aircraft, research stuff, whathaveyou) Copy/paste another line to the table and change what you want. All content can be added or changed. Content. Game functions can neither be added nor changed. Therefore coding skills are meaningless in Xenonauts unless you go all out hardcore, decompile the executable, and build your own from scratch. That can get you into all kinds of copyright trouble so it's hardly ever done with a "live" franchise. I'm not saying Xeno can't be modded. The OP just shouldn't waste time looking for a coder when there can not be anything to code. =P

You got a point there. There may not be a penalty for not attacking a crash site but there will be penalties for not attacking infiltration, terror, and whatnot sites... If the aliens zerg you with ground missions then you won't have a chance to get to all of them in time! Dropships and interceptors, have flight time, need to refuel, and their ammo is limited. But... what would you do about that? Destroying the UFOs on the ground with cruise missiles? That is the reasoning behind the "no crash site penalties" thing. There would have to be a cost attached to that. After all, you are not risking your troops and you can field a smaller air force / army, saving lots of cash. If you still want to get a "neutral" result from these bad missions, you have to pay for that. So... you would click the UFO landing site, select "Cruise Missile Attack", costing x $. If the country's owners are not hostile to you, they launch missiles from a nearby city. You get a minor negative relation hit because you're a lazy bum. Much preferrable to the large relation hit for a successful alien attack... This feature would be limited to 1-2 times per day. That way you still have to do your job but if all hell breaks loose, you have a way of asking for backup. The world would feel a little more real because it's not just you alone against the aliens. There's a whole world around you and they don't like the aliens any better...

The only accessible "code" in Xenonauts is the graphical presentation of the UI. (the LUA scripts) You can change the size or texture of a button but you cannot change what it does. That amounts to reskinning the UI. Yes. You just can't do that in Xenonauts. Changing the damage of a weapon is typically filed under "modding content" or "balancing". A code change would be adding a new function to the game, like creating a homing property to certain bullets so you can shoot around corners.

FYI: there is no coding in Xenonauts modding. All you can do is modify and add content.

My guess is that it can stagger menacingly.

No. You could create mini-trees for various weapons and research your way down a different path, creating further "modifications" of the base weapon. You could even use this to "update" old weapons, extending their shelf life and creating more tactical diversity. For instance, once you have researched Alienium you get another research option for extended power (magazine) laser weapons. Alien armour research could lead to better AP rounds for the basic machine gun... Adding stuff is easy in Xeno. Changing any game functions via mods is practically impossible.

Weeeell, the point of the paint job is not to hide a tank at a 100m range. At 2-3 km, camouflage can be quite effective if the tank isn't moving. At the engagement ranges in Xenonauts it's really just for looks. =P

Wouldn't that add some seriously annoying micromanagement, having to re-paint the vehicle for every mission?

Advanced intercom = letter chute?

Intercom? What if they have to use the bathroom?

Nukes are pointlessly complicated if you already own the space near a planet. Drop a rock on your target. Big rock. Same basic effect as a nuke, minus the radioactive fallout. Much harder to intercept, too. You don't just have to damage the complicated trigger mechanism of a nuke. No, you have to physically divert maybe a thousand tonnes or solid rock. If you manage to break it up, you create the mother of all shotgun shells.

Graphically, UFO-ET is officially pwned. That thing actually looks crashed, not fresh off the assembly line like in so many X-Com clones. =)

And a Xenonauts comic. =P

Hey, it sold! ...and the plot / setting was even more unremarkable than the 20-times warmed-over one from UFO 1. =P (Yes, I said that Avatar has a plot. I'm easily amused.)