Ishantil

Sorry, the Internet doesn't transmit the inflection of my typing. I knew you weren't trying to be offensive. As for the manual, yeah, a good play by play with pictures and such, plus a key mapping would be great.

Ah, okay, so you haven't gotten to medium UFOs and heavy fighters yet. I actually rather enjoyed the air combat until that time. I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about it.

Don't tell that to Sathra, he just blows up everything. Until it's all on fire!

Hey, just because I can't down a medium UFO doesn't make me a caveman!

ThatSwoleGuy, have you played 19.5? Have you gotten to the medium UFOs yet? Because I'm not talking about downing Light Scouts. Also, for the record, I know you are not trying to get a rise out of me. I appreciate you joining the discussion. I want to welcome as many different viewpoints as possible. By all means, please state your opinion! ----- The point of this game is shoot down UFOs and clean them out so you can loot them. That's a primary game mechanic. It cannot be avoided, nor should it be. There are three ways to make money in the game: doing missions (which means selling off existing weaponry), selling items for profit (only items looted from UFOs actually make you money, as far as I know) and council funding. All of these are directly linked to shooting down UFOs, of course. In order to get new fighter aircraft, I need to down a medium (as far as I can tell). I have probably engaged mediums ten different times. I'm getting better at it, but after losing ten times in a row with total annihilation, I realized that I was so over matched, I didn't see a way to win. I know other people are winning at the air combat against medium UFOs, but I have yet to decrypt whatever magic they are using. Nevertheless, as it stands, the air combat preventing me from playing the rest of the game. ------- I suggested decoupling the air combat difficulty in another post. That way people who like it as is can play it as is, and those of us who are having trouble with it can play it on an easier difficulty.

That's how I normally would play. But the timetable in Xenonaughts is pretty tight. After I started consistently losing all three craft nearly every battle, I started saving before every air combat encounter. Which defeats the whole point of even offering the "3 day magic planes". I just reload the game. If the game isn't fun, that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? I'm not having much fun with air combat any more. But I think I've probably pounded that subject at length. What I'd rather see is more suggestions on better balance.

Full Disclosure: I'm using the extended map packs. Ol'Stinky mentioned that he thought that the cause of the FPS drops may be related to that.

I think I'm actually able to get around this by clicking on the "none" button twice after switching weapons. I'm not sure why clicking once doesn't seem to work.

Oooooh, when I mentioned the FPS problems at night, I forgot to mention that my game is also using the map packs!

This is an excellent point, GizmoGomez, if a mod could please move this to the beta forum, that would be awesome.

My system isn't exactly a slouch and my video card is pretty good. Is the lighting algorithm using any kind of video card support, or is it straight floating point? Yeah, those are the ones. They were weirdly all in the same room, trying to shoot through the walls. They were actually killing each other because of it. Damn odd.

I like the interceptors coupled with clicking on the base in the geoscape, because it logically links the aircraft with the base. I don't like how many steps it takes to find out basic information (is my plane ready yet?).

Overview: So after running through a bunch of air combats with the game I started wondering about approach the developers are taking for the air combat. I like a lot of the ideas in the game and I think that the overall implementation is pretty great. It's definitely more challenging, deeper, and fun for a lot of people. After reading a lot of forum posts, there seems to be three camps: 1. The people who are actually good at the air combat and like it to be difficult 2. The people who develop tactics to that work around the difficulty (three Foxtrots, hit and fade, rinse, repeat) 3. The people who are like me, who haven't quite figured it out (and may not!) Past Approach: To take a quick look at the "roots" of Xenonauts, the X-COM approach was a simpler air combat format. The aircraft were destructible. They either had to be rebuilt or you had to order a new one. With each era of the game, assuming you were keeping up with research, you had very reasonable chance at bringing down a UFO in a single or perhaps two engagements. With this system, the player got to decide whether it was worth the sacrifice of an aircraft to bring down a target. Repair times were long. Current Approach: With Xenonauts, the focus seems to be on multiple engagements per UFO. Even the people who say they love the combat and are good at it say so. "Don't be afraid to re-engage in four hours!" Yes, I know that approach works, but that's means several times the number of air engagements per UFO. Is that the intent of the system? I'm not sure. General Comments: I find the air battles in the beginning of the game to be exciting and fun. By the time the second or third month rolls around, the difficulty spikes way higher and it becomes very frustrating for me. Having to do that all the time makes it tedious. At that point, I just want it to be over so I can get to the parts of the game I do like. And there's plenty I like about this game. It seems obvious that at least one of the reasons they introduced the "free" fighters was that air combat was so devastating. Losing three fighter craft would basically ruin the game, it's pretty tough to recover $350,000 on top of the inability to actually shoot down UFOs, which is one of the primary ways you make money. Suggestion: Down here at the bottom, if you made it this far past my wall of text, I do have a suggestion that would hopefully help each of the three groups of players have fun with the game. Assuming there will be no changes to the gameplay elements, my best suggestion is as follows: Decouple the air combat difficulty. Have one for the overall game, and one for air combat. That way, each player can fine-tune their experience. ----- Thanks for reading. And thanks to Goldhawk for all their effort. There's a lot of good here, and I hope that the game is successful beyond all imagining.

Personally, I think I should be the one to determine what to do with my own craft, just like I can with my soldiers. The original X-COM simply had two slots (one on the Lightning), the player took a look at what was available and made a choice. While I know this not X-COM, I don't agree that the forced conformity is better. It's against the spirit of the original intent which was the freedom to solve problems how you wanted to. That's one of the things that made X-COM so good. And I think taking that away is a real shame. What would be better is if you could actually choose your loadout yourself. With drop tanks or more weapons, no gun in exchange for a better combat computer (better guided missiles or longer range). If you want an agile interceptor, use a Condor. If you prefer a faster longer ranged plane, you sacrifice maneuverability with the Foxtrot. Start us with one of each, and make us build the other two like you currently do with the Foxtrot. ---- To get back to the topic of this conversation, I think that adding two light missile slots to both aircraft would improve things.

So a .00 buckshot round is effective all the way up to 50 yards or so. A standard 12 guage 2.75" shell as has nine .30 caliber balls, going about 1200 ft/second. That's a lot of lead going pretty fast. Hits hard, punches big holes. Simply put, they are really good close in. You'd want to use something like an autoloading 12 gauge, like the Benelli M4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benelli_M4). The collapsible stock allows for tight corners. That aside, in my opinion, the accuracy needs to be improved over all ranges, and then buffed at short range, debuffed at long range.

Both of my terror missions have been nighttime. It makes it challenging, but the FPS hit is what needs to be fixed. I take it that graphics engines optimizations are on the list?

Wow, I sure wish I had four weapons! I have a button for them and everything! The F4 key seems like it should be rather useful.

I haven't figured out the missile button works. Clicking on it simply seems to disable the weapon, which is useful, but how do you fire them manually? I was going to test the hotkey next time.

The terror mission was nearly unplayable. Thankfully there was only one alien left. Notably, when you reload games, destroyed terrain has a tendency to come back. Which means my guys spawned inside destroyed terrain. Sub-optimal. Another note, alien bases are not possible with starting gear. I don't even know what those guys were, but they must have 200HP and damage reduction. They've got plasma rifles, so they generally one-shot my guys. I was just seeing what an alien base was like, I was pretty sure it would be impossible to pull off with ballistic weapons.

I'm having really bad framerate issues on the Terror mission I'm on right now. It drops from 60 to 1 fps when I'm moving the soldiers. I suspect it has to do with the lighting. I have multiple fires in in the level, so there's a lot of light sources. Anyone else seen that?

Well played, sir.

One of the devs recently posted their intent to make it so there is a cooldown timer on firing missile (so that it would be the same as the roll cooldown). I assume that this will simply mean it will take two to three times the number of engagements? It would force you two use two planes to score one hit. Questions: 1. Do enemy craft have any kind of ammunition limits, or are they infinite? 2. Is the maximum number of planes in a squadron three? Seems like if you have inferior weapons, the normal tactic would be to increase the number of aircraft. 3. One of the things I realized recently is that you can fire missiles manually with the number keys, something I didn't realize until very recently. I have not yet tried using it yet, but I assume this is key?

I think that the air combat system needs another look. The ground combat, barring some more balance tweaks, is shaping up nicely.

Yes, I mean the actual base location, clicking on that should bring up the interceptors for the associated base. It seems far more logical to me, since the geoscape is primarily used to interact with the existing UFOs. That icon taking me to the base location isn't very useful. I've already got lots of ways to get to the bases, but no real way to directly get to the aircraft status. I think that a "status board" might actually be worth having in the UI, but that's probably a fairly extensive change. An interceptor status button or something at the top would be great, too.