Ishantil

I'm in a base now, if I ever get out of the entry room, I'll post a pic. You know, I never noticed the colored thingies up above the doors in an alien base until now. Does that mean a red one is locked? Or are those flavor only?

It's the big thing in the middle of the room. It set of walls around it. Usually it's the room diagonally from where you start. I assume that you put your soldiers back in the glowing squares in the initial entry room, and you escape them abort mission.

I was in a huge city map with lots of building and alleys everywhere. It was tough and interesting. And Caesian soldiers with Plasma Cannons are no joke.

I like that!

Well, if you are tossing around particles, you might as well use positrons, and convert the enemy into the energy that destroys them.

Too bad it doesn't actually have the properties of Elerium.

I'd say she got to see both ends of this particular pendulum.

Yeah, that's no bueno. I haven't seen Androns at all in my game. At all. Not a single one. And I'm researching Alien Electronics now and I think I'm in November. @StellarRat: I would say that burst fire on the alien plasma cannon it is probably too good.

The plasma cannon should basically be the alien version of a missile launcher. It should take careful aiming and fire carefully placed shots. You don't spray and pray with a cannon. Thus, it should only have single modes: snap, normal, aimed. And they should be fairly TU expensive.

Realistically, every Alien (dead or alive) or piece of technology would be saved. I assume they money given for those is a reward for their capture?

Yeah, I'm sure that's true of both of us. Definitely.

Basically like a machine gun? Makes you reevaluate your life choices?

Doh! The few that I experienced before the hotfix were all Sebs, too.

I'm talking about having two aliens right there as the Chinook lands (Hot LZ). Shooting the one I saw triggered action fire, all hits on the same guy. It was impressive.

It would actually make a lot of sense to use the same ammunition for human plasma weapons, so you could take ammunition from your enemies in the field. It's why we use compatible ammunition across various weapons in the NATO arsenals, so you can share ammunition in a pinch.

So I find myself with a lot more money lying around than I did previously when most of my funding was based off of killing UFOs. The new funding levels have changed a few things in my play style: 1. I have enough money for more than one base. In fact, I'm building a third base, now, which is something I've never done. 2. I tend to concentrate on the overall picture of the invasion more, and on killing every damn UFO I can less. This makes the game a lot less tedious, when I feel I can just shoot down the UFOs (and not engage them in ground combat) 3. Having some cash lying around lets me build armor and weapons as long as I'm careful I'm almost thinking the monthly funding per nation might need to be tweaked down 10-20%. What do you guys think? Also, having more nations but the same money numbers would make things more interesting. Placing your first base in Europe or the Med is a complete no brainer, and I'd like to see this diluted some by there being more regions in the Americas and Asia.

I agree that the plasma cannon shouldn't have a burst fire mode. I'm not sure the plasma shotgun should be doing quite as much armor mitigation as it does. If I see a guy with a plasma cannon or plasma shotgun, I start to rapidly re-evaluate my position. So that's actually a very good thing. I had an awesome time last night with a Corvette. All of the aliens were out of the UFO hiding among the structures. They surprised me a few times. It was really fun.

Game balance is basically the rationale. Our attempts here have been to construct some sort of plausible reason why the aircraft have so few weapons. Basically, the intent of the UFO waves is for you to not have enough resources to deal with all of them, or it to be a very near thing. I'm certainly not advocating two missiles per plane, though. I would like to see the light missiles have dual mounts, and every aircraft should have a cannon. The idea of a missile truck was used for a while (the F-4 Phantom didn't have a cannon) but later discarded. They realized there's a lot of good reasons to have a cannon. Such as when you need strafe something. Or you need to firing warning shots. Or when you are out of missiles. Or when you want to shoot down a UFO.

I was hoping to stay on a particular topic about a specific thing, rather than cluttering up your balance thread. But that would reduce the clutter in the Beta Discussion forum, so I'll try that from now on, Aaron.

GizmoGomez: I captured text files of all the ones that we wrote. I was already thinking of starting a Xenopedia mod. I wanted to wait until the Xenopedia was stable, though, so I didn't have to change it every twelve seconds.

I don't think it's properly taking the "don't spawn in this" points into account.

She was Major rocking the Jackal armor. I haven't gotten to Wolf armor yet.

What I can't figure out is how I was being shot from beyond visual range. I don't think there were any aliens within visual range using the squad sight trick... I shoved an Alenium rocket into his face, which worked admirably. I'm loving having a rocket launcher with me. It's great for eliminating cover. These days, I have all my other guys carry and extra rocket and drop them at his feet when they exit the helo.

Sometimes I'm willing to to chalk it up to "That's X-COM, baby!" but...I dunno, there's seems to be a weird consistency from me missing reaction fire shots. And this is an entire group of Captains and Majors. I mean, these guys roll hardcore. I don't carry flashbangs. They don't do squat.

Don't worry, I'll save the ARDA stuffs.