yawa

That looks fairly similar to mine, might be the same thing. I think I found the right crash dump, looks like xenonauts dumps direct to "My Documents". Looks like a use-after-free (eax and eip are both 0x29). Can't see a way to attach a non-image file - if anyone can do anything useful with it, please PM me.

I wanted to equip with sidewinders (although you can use avalanches against anything that can't evade, if you position carefully) - it didn't seem to let me. Swear I'd been able to in previous builds. I'm now waiting for 12.11 to install. Thanks for digging around in the files - sounds like everything fits with what I'm experiencing, so that's fine. I don't want to change config yet, hopefully my reports / whining is useful feedback for the yet-to-come tuning stage. I like hard games, and I like breaking stuff, so I want to ensure Veteran and Insane are playable, beatable, and not exploitable via design choices (not considering bug exploits here). Currently Veteran feels beatable (maybe!) but very hard, and the invasion ramps quicker than (for me) feels good gameplay wise. Terror missions feel like an "aliens well-established, mid-to-late game" element for me, and I'm consistently getting them before I research any armour or weapon tech upgrades. Perhaps an hour into the game, no more than two. Will keep trying new tactics and see how I go.

I had two interceptions quite close together. I lost the first battle, went to geoscape, then shortly after my 2nd squadron intercepted a different group of UFOs. I could now hear the air combat music playing twice, slightly out of sync. After beating the 2nd set of UFOs, the air combat ended... to be replaced by a mix of the geoscape and the earlier air combat, with the victorious UFOs from the 1st fight slowly exiting the airspace. When this air combat ended, I got a CTD, which wasn't caught by my JIT debugger. I don't have a save sadly, I'll start saving more before interceptions.

> 4 sidewinders will kill a scout - 2 F-17s or a MiG. Getting in close with a scout without upgraded weaponry is > not reccomended! As noted - not on Veteran it won't. 2 anything vs a scout is okay, it sticks on one of mine and I can get a lock with avalanches or finish with cannon. Good to hear they did actually get harder. Personally I haven't been able to change the missiles on Migs, while I could before. I'll... try clicking harder. > I see light scouts the first 10 game days, then start seeing normal scouts after that. The key to managing it is to > realise there's a lot more of them than there is of you. There's no point trying to do everything at once, so just > learn to let go, let the UFOs do their thing and focus on one base at a time, one area at a time. You can't do > everything at once, so don't bother. The backers aren't going to abandon you in your first month! Previously trying to do everything worked really well. You could earn more money this way from selling after missions, and get more funding because you were doing better at stopping them. There was no downside (which didn't feel right, but that's just how it played in earlier builds). I could get 5 bases built before terror missions started. There were always more of them than me, that's fine. But now, *if* you have two bases from the start, there are a *lot* more than you. Oddly, having experimented, with one base they don't seem to ramp up anywhere near as fast. Perhaps you get more invasion progression if you see a UFO but don't thwart it? So you're not penalised as much for not having a base in a region, as having one and not stopping them? This still leaves the problem that I'm getting terror missions *before the end of June*, and I only have one base. Chinooks simply don't reach that far. On prior builds the game would end very soon after failing one or two terrors, so I've been restarting. Has this been changed? > Now, as to dodging. You know you can pause the air combat by pressing the spacebar, right? While paused, > you can still issue commands, so it's easy to co-ordinate multiple dodges using the pause function, as well as > manage missiles to maximise damage. Personally, I'm starting to use a lot more MiGs now, as even though MiGs > can't dodge they can take some damage and they have enough missiles to crack a fightercraft open. This might > change when I start rolling out alienium missiles - the F-17 might be able to handle scouts and fightercraft > without MiG support - I shall see. Well, yes and no. Yup, happy with pausing. But they fire faster than the dodge recharges, and once you're very close, your pilots are very very bad at shooting anything (constantly circling). 6 missiles aren't enough to take out three fighters, so you have to use cannon, so you have to be close... It's very tough to engage three fighters with cannon without taking damage. I can generally kill three fighters with three F17s. But I will sometimes lose a plane. With two bases, the rate of incoming UFOs was so high I was losing all money (you can't currently gain *any* money back from shooting down fighters...). If Migs are tough enough that might work. 12 missiles would destroy 3 fighters easily enough. Will give it a go. > The key to air combat if you're outnumbered or outgunned is to work out which of your fighters the alien ships > will lock onto. This has been up to now the aircraft which you selected last in any squadron. If you can work that > out, then you can lead the alien craft off with the "locked-on" fighter as a distraction while the others fighters > come in and start shooting. This really doesn't work for me, once there are equal numbers of combatants. You can actually see which plane they're targetting, that's fine. Also, for me it's always the first plane I select to launch that's targetted by the first UFO. But, with a squadron of three UFOs, they split attacks. I've never seen all 3 enemies target the same one of my planes - it would be much kinder (and boring) if they did that . This is was gets me - 1-on-1 I can't avoid all damage, and sometimes lose planes. Combined with the rate of incoming UFOs I'm finding it impossible. I'll experiment with using Migs earlier (previously I saved them for corvettes only). Another tactic might be to ignore almost all of them. Down an early light scout for the pistol research, and ignore everything until light scouts to get the power source. Wouldn't be very satisfying Oh, and I'm also having fun times with escorting chinooks, as that drops your squadron down to 2 But you can be a lot more tactical about when you launch the raid, so I don't mind that.

I had no trouble in Kickstarter build - happily got to Aug/Sept before terror missions and never lost a plane. It felt too easy until corvettes and 2+1 fighters turned up. I know there is much balancing to come - this is just for discussion not bitching Oh, Veteran difficulty. However, with 12.1... scouts instakill F17s if they get in range. Before, you could take a hit or two, and they had the slow firing weapon so you could dodge (or am I remembering this wrong?). I now have to take 2 of mine for one of theirs, so I can get behind. I still did this before when possible, it was much safer. On its own, this would be fine - I have no problem with UFOs being better than my feeble starting craft. But now it seems UFOs spawn in clusters more than before - I've seen 6 targets on geoscape simultaneously by June 18th! I don't think I could field 12 F17s by then! I build two bases from the start, get hangars as fast as possible in the 2nd so I'm stopping a fair few of the early UFOs (which I believe slows invasion progress). But it's just not possible to shoot down this many. I'm getting Terror missions by late June, I simply can't stop that many UFOs at once. I'm going to experiment with a single base and 8 hangars, but I suspect I'll lose out, not stopping enough activity in other zones due to losing coverage. Alien fighters seem weaker than scouts now, bit strange. They have the slow weapon so you can dodge, and get behind 1-on-1. But they come in packs of three much sooner (it seems?), I can only field 3 craft at once, and coordinating 3 dodges is hard. UFOs are, reasonably enough, better than my 1970s crates, so I die here also. Am I using weak air combat tactics? Missing something else that's causing huge spawning?

I would absolutely love this too. They're already using Lua, so that's a good start. For truly moddable AI there'd need to be an API for external Lua scripts to get/set AI info/actions. If Goldhawk has recently brought on a new AI coder, this might be the perfect time to change the internals to support that! (or, it might simply be too much work at this stage, fairly close to release) I think moddable AI at this level would add a lot of longevity to the game. It already looks great and allows a high level of themeing style modding, as well as balance tweaks. But if the AI could be extended over time by fans to support different styles, different tactics for each alien race for example; that would let the real core of the game get better over time. If a friendly dev is listening - what are the odds of this happening?

Playing in Ironman mode, I stopped after a Terror Mission had spawned but before starting it. Upon reloading, I have a chinook and 2 escort fighters at the location of the TM. I can't make them start the mission and it doesn't seem possible to select the aircraft - which would allow me to fly away slightly and back, to start the mission. It seems my only option is to wait till the TM fails. I've also seen this problem in a less important (but still annoying) situation - when I have sent a squadron out to the wrong UFO. Typically this is when multiple UFOs spawn simultaneously, and I respond to the first popup, not knowing that I really want to intercept the 2nd UFO. You can't immediately redirect the squadron, as you always select the base it launched from. Here of course they fly far enough away that they become selectable. Perhaps if multiple objects were under the click location, it could give you a choice of selection. (I also think it's possible here that my squadron teleported to the Terror Mission, as I don't remember stopping play with them at the site, just enroute. I'll try and confirm this and file as a separate bug if so)

If manufacturing makes a very very small positive profit, that may make people feel they constantly have to be cranking out items and selling them, and the tedium may reduce enjoyment in the game. I'd rather see it make no profit or make a decent amount. Making a fair return I agree has some serious balance issues... but in Xenonauts, doesn't everything you manufacture use a limited resource? It might be possible to balance around that fact, if everything used some of your limited alenium or alloys (eg the worth to you in terms of powered armour may be greater than the money gained from selling the components). If I recall, in Xcom you could create alloys, and laser items didn't need any elerium, so it was a pure time -> money conversion. Personally I disliked being able to sell things for a profit in Xcom, purely because of the annoyance of setting up the engineers, bases, and selling off your crap every few weeks. Oh, and on base defense missions all your lockers would be full of laser pistols But if you used this tactic you could beat Superhuman without ever losing a funding nation. Incidentally, the current game balance (kickstarter build) isn't awful. On Veteran I can get 4 bases by August with good coverage, but it's quite tight. I think I'm making more money from selling mission loot than the funding nations give me. There doesn't seem to be much use for the alloys and alenium you currently get though, so I am free to sell them. Oh, as it stands currently you can of course sack all your idle scientists and engineers on the last day of each month. Just hire them back if you need them in the next month. Costs you nothing *and* lets you pay their wages with the nation money. Maybe the hire vs maintain costs need to be tweaked slightly. Certainly I'd like to be able to pay my guys from the money I'm about to be paid, rather than having to maintain a reserve equal to the wages.

It might have been this vulnerability, as I see you have the Timthumb plugin: http://markmaunder.com/2011/08/02/technical-details-and-scripts-of-the-wordpress-timthumb-php-hack/ That page is a very good writeup, and explains the possibility that they may have installed a backdoor - even if you have fixed how they got in the first time, they may have installed another way. It seems to be pretty common with Wordpress hacks to use a php based backdoor. DrAtomic's advice to run a virus scanner on the server is a good idea in my opinion. Sadly detection of php malware generally isn't as good as for exe stuff. DrAtomic's advice sounds very good to me so I'm going to leave him to it, but I do have one question: you say you updated Wordpress, did you update all the plugins, too? I saw a very large number of exploited Wordpress sites at work today (AV industry), via some gallery plugin that lives in a directory named fgallery. Good luck! This kind of hack is normally automated, so once you do clear out the traces they're not likely to come back.

I can verify this also happens to me.

This has been reported a few times - the common factor seems to be if you have saved then loaded into ground combat. I don't know if it triggers on every save/load. Unless you're sure you haven't ever saved in ground combat, there's probably nothing more to do on this one - enough people have reported it that I'm sure it's being looked at.

Cool, thanks for the retest. For me shooting the power source didn't crash. I tried it a few times, I was sad. Then I left the game and it crashed, and I was happy! Sort of...

Shame there's no save - it could be as simple as another typo in a different file (or maybe you missed a line when search-replacing in solder_spectre.xml?). If it's the same problem, finding out which alien and weapon would help. I did this by reloading, killing the alien that could cause freeze, and walking a guy over to check what it was. Maybe next time Oh, was the alien invisible?

Great, glad it helped someone else, too I've added to the workarounds thread.

Frozen game on reaction fire: Issue: Reaction fire from invisible aliens causes game to hang. Workaround: Edit xenonauts\assets\units\alien\caesan\noncombatant\weapon.AlienPlasmaPistol\soldier_spectre.xml In that file, replace every occurence of caesan/weapon with caesan/noncombatant/weapon This fixes both the reaction fire hang and alien invisibility (so far, for me ).