Steelpoint

An alternative explanation would be its akin to slotting attachments on a gun.

Could the installation guide be streamlined? I only just realised that I had accidently missed out on an entire update due to the poor layout of the install guide. I installed the mod, then applied the 1.00.01 update, but I did not realise that under that is a newer "unofficial" update that takes it to 1.00.10. I only noticed this because I am watching a LP and I saw this person has a updated xenopedia that actually has full text descriptions of the projects whereas my version of the game has none.

I had this issue as well, game would reach 24% on load before freezing. I was able to eventually resolve the issue by going into my save files and deleting all my old saves from the original, non-experimental, version (I think 8.3 or something). Doing this instantly fixed the issue and let me load in a new game.

There was never a good reason to have multiple dropships in X1, outfitting one squad with the latest tech is hard enough, outfitting two squads is near impossible without major sacrifices, and even then your splitting up experience. The viability of multi dropships in X1 mods is irrelevant. I personally would rather the best mechanic for the game be picked, if that be the classic base system or the X2 base system. The thing with multi bases, is most of them just become mini-bases akin to X2. Becoming figthter and radar bases, maybe with one or two dedicated bases for other reasons, but that's a stretch.

I've also personally found if iffy when we have a military team where the entire frontline troops rank from Captain to Major or beyond, I never knew we were making entire fire teams out of Officers only. I appreciated the original XCOM's rank system where the highest ranks are limited to the amount of troops you have and you can't have too many officers. You can have plenty of Squaddies and Sergeants but only a limited amount of Captains and only one Commander. Even if its more so superficial. I know this is more fluff and aesthetics. Perhaps if there was a system where you can designate a certain amount of sufficiently higher troops into 'officer' roles that grant them a minor bravery/morale boost and confer that to other soldiers on a mission, but that's getting a bit extensive for a simple system.

I'm not as iffy with Aliens having better protection than Humans in the late game, since the main counter at that point is that you will have between 10-12 soldiers and maybe a Tank. Throughout my entire Insane Ironman play though, any time a soldier wearing Pred/Sent armour was hit by a Battle Rifle, they died. The only utility therein when they are dead is that the armour protection might be enough to possible save them after the battle is over. However I don't want my soldiers to become invincible, since that would remove any tension. However being able to at least tank a single shot or two should be a given for the most expensive, and powerful, armour in the game.

From what I've seen, most Aliens will end up using 'Alien Battle Rifles' by the late game. Which is when your using Predator and Sentinel Armour. The Battle Rifle essentially nullifys most of your Armours protection (correction, It has about 30 armour mitigation), meaning by the end game the utility of using Pred/Sent armour is for the weapon benefits (Flying/360 degree vision/walking around with a machinegun). It is annoying that your armour is hyped up as being super awesome, but is almost completely useless against late game alien weapons. --- In fact, I did the math a while ago. If you go to the bottom of this wiki page you'll see how effective Predator armour is against alien weapons: http://xenonauts.wikia.com/wiki/Predator Its good against early game weapons, against late game weapons its a coin toss.

Sometimes I think friendly fire accidents come down to poor communication on certain objects blocking your shot. An example is your tank/soldier is behind a crate that has another small crate in front of it. So even though the first crate will be shot over, the second crate may well have a 45% of blocking the shot. There are also some circumstances where a wall unintentionally blocks a shot at close range with no warning it would do that. The biggest offender is the Charlie Dropship. In my earlier post about my Hyperion Tank killing a good portion my squad, I had positioned my tank near a wall. The tank was 1/3 behind the wall, the far right side of the tank was behind the wall, yet when I fired, expecting the shot to fire from the middle of the tank, it instead hit the wall to its right.

Medium to Large UFOs, and Alien Bases, should be designed around allowing the player the ability to more effectively move their troops into the UFO without heavily exposing them to enemy fire. The usage of opening and closing the door is the symptom of the somewhat poor UFO design, well by not poor from the aliens perspective that is. Preforming this 'dooring' tactic is not only extremely viable but is outright demanded in order to not take unneeded casualties. Allow me to elaborate, I'll be using the Corvette design here, but also referring to other designs and alien bases. This is the corvette design I am talking about (took me forever to find a image online):Image ---- That image above shows heavily encourages the player to hang back and use the 'dooring' tactic. Moving you soldiers inside the corridor leaves them horribly exposed, with not enough TU's to move anywhere useful, and the Aliens can move into the area and take free pot shots at the exposed soldiers. Alien Bases are often worse, the control rooms offer no real initial cover for the humans, feature a very long corridor down to the control room usually guarded by several aliens who keep opening the door and shooting. The game can often come down to pure luck on moving soldiers up and hoping the aliens are not all stacked up on the other side, pop out, and kill half your team during their turn. When your playing on Ironman that becomes even more annoying to deal with. ---- The design of the UFO needs to allow the attacking soldiers some breathing space to move into cover, not be immediently exposed to heavy alien fire but also force the humans to enter the UFO instead of hanging back shooting from a distance. I recall assaulting a Large Alien Bases control room. As soon as I opened it I was greeted to about eight defending aliens. I simply could not move any of my soldiers into the room as they would be horribly flanked on all sides. I had to use the 'dooring' tactic in order to clear the room.

Mind Control does become obnoxious to deal with in the late game, bravery seems to offer little resistance and your only defence is to drop then requip your weapons every turn, which gets annoying to do.

I think that UFO starts to appear mid way through January.

Corvette's, Landing Ships and Carrier's can build bases. While Alien Bases can hold alien leaders, a certain UFO type will also hold alien leaders. The first UFO to carry one is:

Imagine this scenario. Ironman Insane, your inside a Large Alien Base. Your squad consists of eight soldiers, three Predators, five Sentinals, cross of MAG/Plasma weapons. You have to capture a Praetor. Your just outside the control room, the control room door is a long hallway with no cover. Inside the control room is about six to seven Elite Ceasans with Battle Rifles (Tend to one shot my soldiers), three Elite Wraiths, all of which are carrying a Plasma Cannon, and a Praetor. The question is, if you could not close the entry door, and your soldier opening the door would draw reaction fire, how do you breach and clear that room? Don't forget the constant barragment of Mind Control attempts and Dread. In my opinion, I think this feature would just be making the game even more unneededly hard.

Try Insane Ironman. Breaching UFOs is a big task to preform, I still have nightmares trying to breach Corvette's, the layout that has a three way section with doors on each side is the hardest UFO to breach in the game for me, I would rather breach a Battleship than that Corvette. Aside from using Shields, which I've never used, the only other alternative to breaching a UFO involves sending my men into the UFO, out of cover, to die. Opening and closing the door may well be cheesy, but there is no better alternative for me. Funny thing is, my breaching strategy for clearing Carriers is to keep moving soldiers back and fourth on the teleporters to the third level, shoot out the doors and kill the aliens as they step into my line of fire.

I just finished my Insane Ironman game, well by finished I mean I lost at the last mission. Mainly in the fact that my Tank decided to hit the wall next to it and wipe out 1/3rd of my squad. Then the infinite battle rifles that negate armour but that's beside the point. Explosive weapons, and Support Tanks, are great. But are very situational and great care needs to be used when using them. In my experience the vast majority of friendly fire issues I've had come from explosive weapons and tanks.

The history is still there, here's a link: http://xenonauts.wikia.com/wiki/Alien_Stats?oldid=4202 These are back from December 2012.

Well that forced me to update the stats page. Take a gander.

I can tell you for a fact that the armour values on the wiki are wrong, those are left over from well over a year ago. That's back when Psions were the 2nd best psionic user in the game.

In my Ironman Insane game, I had a Captain, who was wearing a Sentinel Armour, be ambushed by a Alpha Reaper on a Arctic map. He was turned into a zombie, subsequently shot by a Percision MAG and killed by a burst fire from a Plasma Rifle. Skipping to the end of the mission. No one else was killed in the mission, I discover the very same Captain had somehow survived being turned into a Reaper and was now in my Medical Bay. Apparently, my Chief Medical Officer failed to inform me they had a cure for being turned into a Reaper.

It would be great to at least have some questions answered and some additional closure if you win. Hell, it could be dynamic where there is a separate entry if your squad evacs the ship, kills the target but does not escape, or fail utterly.

*Spoiler* It would have been nice to at least explain why a Singularity Torpedo would be unable to destroy the dreadnought, and I do personally think the ending is pretty lackluster. I was secretly hoping for something more akin to the original XCOM, heck even the Playstation version had a end game cutscene.

I think I'll consider the dynamic mod once I've finished my current playthrough. The main reason this is a problem though is simple if you look at the inspiration. In XCOM, Battleships would preform base attacks, and Terror Ships would preform Terror Missions. Both of these ships were very difficult to shoot down until near the late game. However in Xenonauts your fighting ships that scale with your power. Once you encounter Battleships in Xenonauts, you should be using Marauders which are the perfect counter to them.

I've currently logged about 100 hours on the full release of Xenonauts. More during the alpha/beta. I'm currently finished the game twice on Insane and am currently half way through a Ironman Insane run through. Xenonauts is a great game in my opinion, however it is not without its share of faults. However I want to bring up what I believe to be one of the bigger faults, or annoyances, of the game. The inability for aliens to do anything. I have never had one of my bases attacked by the Aliens, Terror missions are also a rare sight, I've only had one or two terror missions occur. In my current Ironman play through I have yet to see a Terror mission. Alien Bases are also uncommon, I've always had at least two Alien Bases in any playthrough be constructed by the aliens, both around the same month and both early in the game. The reason for this is two fold. Ability for the player to maintain air superiority, effectivly shooting down any UFOs preforming these missions. Being able to easily guess what UFOs are preforming certain missions (In my experience, UFOs with escorts are the one's doing assaults/terror missions). The reason base assault missions always fail for me is because the UFO has to expose itself to my bases radar, and interceptors, to do the attack. Terror Missions and Base Construction can be done because they do it away from my bases. Until I get Marauders that is. The only way I will ever encounter a base assault is if I intentionally let a UFO preforming that mission do it. So essentially, the only ground missions I am doing are assaulting crashed UFOs. In XCOM, Terror Attacks were a constant threat until the late game. This problem has most likely already been noted, I just wished to share it, as its unfortunate a good chunk of the games ground content is extremely rare to encounter. Of course it can be a conundrum since if these events occur to often it can get annoying. ------ I did have a weird solution of the Aliens occasionally using "stealth UFOs" instead of the normal UFO if the player was being very consistent in stopping a certain mission from occurring. A stealth UFO would be a variant of the mother UFO (So Stealth Landing Ship) that carries less soldiers, has no weapons, loses in combat instantly, but cannot be detected by normal rader, only rader used by interceptors. ------ Thanks for reading.

Pretty much, while it is possible to do, the amount of work required would be so great you may well just make a new game from scratch.

Something I noted about soldier recovery. One round I had a soldier die from a plasma blast at close range, long story short the area the soldier died suffered a direct hit from a rocket launcher, destroying the soldiers corpse. After the battle was over, I discovered to my surprise my soldier had survived the battle! Amusing considering the last time I saw her she was just a pile of blood. Nonetheless, I like the alternative Alien Base detection, I always felt Alien bases never would last long. However it is still very easy for someone to glance at a continent's funding to see which one is losing funding.