Sathra

I use 'vault' teams. Shield + carbine/shotgun pairs. Takes a while to be really effective (STR requirements) but when they get experienced its damned effective. The number of times I've been able to charge an alien with the shield guy (absorbing any reaction fire) then crouch and move the assault up to burst fire or throw a grenade for a quick kill is steadily increasing. I also find it fun.

I've tried addressing some of your concerns in my mod Goetikmagus. You get more money from missions (due to alien weapons being worth a bit more + more aliens), bases are cheaper, and you can build 1 item for a reasonable profit, but it uses up valuable and limited resources. Alien power unit (3 different kinds) + alenium, or alenium + alloys. Making them from the alien power units provides more of a profit, and you just get TONS of alenium.

My first thought was that they were licking it. Maybe Reaper chitin tastes like apples?

So tempted to change the title to make the pictures seem irrelevant or punny.

Classic Thothkins.

How much work would it be to add armour mitigation and degradation to air combat? I've been thinking of changing the health and armour of UFO's to make a 2-torp MiG effective. However, if there was armour mitigation and degradation I could instead drop health a bit, but increase armour so that only same-era (Avalanche for Corvettes, Alenium for Landing ships and Cruisers) Torpedoes could do good damage to a 'Capital" ship. High level would do severe damage, while lower level could only do some damage. But they would also degrade armour enough that after a couple of Torps, same-era missiles could now get through the armour, with cannons after missiles or at the same time as missiles. So you'd use Marauders or MiG's to 'crack' the armour, then hammer it with missiles and/or guns to finish it off.

Oh of course. I love the images you've made and would like to use them as much as possible!

Sounds good. I'm not too concerned about realism as much as gameplay, but having the AK image look different could remove some confusion.

I noticed since Australia gets ignored by aliens, except for a terror mission. Since it never got flyovers it had a base change of 0, which didn't get modified after the terror mission. I only checked after you mentioned something was off .

You're meant to get the datacore from them, and as a result get the research pop-up after you kill one. Should be relatively simple to add an alloys gain after that works I guess.

I think they bleed, but I've never left them alive long enough to check. You can't use alien weapons (you can in ground combat, but some stuff still needs to be added) so they are sold automatically. You make your own versions of their weapons.

Yep. Faster and cheaper.

Hmm, I think the mod may make the game too easy. I've only seen 1 Landing Ship at this point in the game, and I now have to build a new base before I can make any more Corsairs. Also a medal I haven't seen before, after I took out the base the Landing Ship dropped (about 3 weeks after the base was created, took me a while to notice). Most kills of any trooper, and he's one of the original 10. I've only lost a couple people so far.

When the Xenopedia reports for them show up properly it gets explained. Simple answer? They're flying bombs.

I may have said that about Jackal. It does well against grenades and stray friendly fire, but alien weapons simply do too much damage for Jackal to deal with. It can saves lives, but they've got a big chance to be injured for a couple weeks. I use it, just not on everyone. It also reduces sight range badly, which with the low TU troops you start with can also result in deaths. Aliens have better stats on the higher difficulties, and their weapons do less damage on Easy.

Yeah. Most players don't use shotguns anyways. They've got a very specific role. Extreme close range combat. So they only really come into their own inside UFO's at the moment. The AK currently has a similar role, but it can also work alright as a more general purpose weapon. I think it fills a similar place to your version of the shotgun at the moment, but with the addition that at point-blank range it can cause some major damage with its 4 shot burst fire. Though to be technical, I mostly added it so players could have some experience with the Carbine class of weapon, as the shotgun is ballistic only. I've used both in the same mission, and they work pretty well together. AK helps to pin the alien down, and can also come up and finish off a badly wounded alien after a shotgun blast.

New UI ETA? Soon. That's all we know. Getting close though.

You can still use it as cover, just don't rely on it not to die. Now smoke grenades in the new version, those are good. I had to reduce their effectiveness soo much just to get aliens to sometimes try to fire at units inside the cloud. And they'll still decide not to most of the time.

Ah, now I understand the question. Okay, some parts of this may be wrong, but this is my understanding. When a shot hits, it does a random amount of damage (something like the base damage +/- 10) When it hits the target, it checks if the damage is greater than armour, if not, nothing happens. But if a shot does damage, it also degrades armour. So if you've got armour the enemy has no chance of penetrating, you are completely safe. If they can penetrate with a high roll, those high shots can make it easier for later shots to get through. So the Hunter's armour really good against plasma pistol fire, but its not perfect. If you can get unlucky some shots will get through, which will let other shots get through. So in the case of the video, some of the shots rolled high enough to get over the armour, which let the rest of the bursts tear through it (alien weapons do a huge amount of damage).

The ships being 'Destroyed' are probably all Fighters or Heavy Fighters, which don't create crash-sites. The game does slow down around about Landing Ship era. It picks up again about Cruisers I think.

Gameconfig.xml, third heading down. No idea about the ranks stuff.

I will look at suppression though, when its working properly. I just don't want to mess with it too much at the moment. It's alright, I'd just rather keep this thread about the actual mod. And in the sometimes vain hope of balance feedback . I've been where you are, its exciting working out how stuff works and the possibilities that open. I may have been too sharp, but listening to heavy metal. And I'll stand by that excuse!

I've been seeing a bunch of this in V19. In boxes, on top of barrel stacks...

Not the place for this. Anyways, suppression is buggy and suppressed alien get far too many TU's. And at close range they will use it to burst fire and kill the shotgunner. So I went with damage and armour penetration.

My standard second base. Mixed intercept/manufacture. I started this one about 2 weeks into the game, finished it halfway through October. It can build and equip a Corsair (2 alenium missiles + Gatling Laser) in about 2.5 days. Not including the Power Core, since I make those well in advance, usually with a Conversion tech for speed. You can build them like this in vanilla, but you can't get the same number of troops (it currently has 20 with space for 11 more).