Dagar

Yeah, there are some bugs. You can (or maybe could) get back downed soldiers from an unsuccessful base raid, for example.

Happy New Year to you guys as well! Good that the first play tests helped you so much, there were quite a few very active testers out there!

Are you sure that's how the tree block example goes? Because, if that is true, then each piece of cover essentially provides its cover bonus twice; first on the "does the bullet fly towards the alien" calculation and second on the "is the cover hit instead" calculation. Which just seems odd.

Welcome to the community and thanks for your effort, Trench-Digger!

...and how about enlightening the future players that encounter the same problem?

The idea there is that even the best elite forces of humanity are bad against aliens, and first need to learn new tactics and skills to be able to fight against them.Also, the reloading issue should only occur with advanced or alien weaponry, in which case the rookies just do not manage to handle the freaky new gun that is completely awkward anatomically or was rush developed in a couple of weeks so ergonomics were not a big consideration. That's why the experienced troops may have to help them handle their weapon. But as missions get harder over time, the recruits will learn to adapt faster at least. As a bottom line, try to level up your replacement troops in time for them to be efficient if they have to. That said I have no clue if it would be possible to make recruits better with the given game code interfaces.

Yeah. a known error with some prop not showing. It is the case for multiples of this house.

@Blade That in my opinion heavily depends on how you want to play this game. There are a number of people who want to play without reloading after a mistake, so to them this is no viable option. My personal metagame philosophy is that what a player does should have impact. If I recklessly sacrificed my best soldier in an attempt to capture an alien in a situation that did not allow for that, I want to feel that I did something wrong. As an automatic tradeoff for that I get a really good feeling when I played a good mission that I would not get if I "savescummed" my way through. Without punishment for the bad decisions the player makes for me there is no gratification in the rewards that the game gives. If I cannot lose I cannot win. But I know that there are other types of players out there, and I have my phases where I play a game like I would watch TV (brains out, enjoy a story, easy progression). However I have other games than Xenonauts for that (*wink wink* popcorn cinema experience that is FiraXCOM 2).

Yes, the way your soldiers do. Their aim is decreased for every tile of smoke in the way, again, same as yours.

Yes they do. The info that they are not afflicted by smoke but by fire instead is wrong. Their sight works just the way your soldiers' sight works.

Yes. I am fairly sure that any specialist also counts as the base form, but they also a) give more money when sold and b) more resources when "disassembled". You'll need those light fibers for better armour soon enough. I always go for a capture when I can.

Sorry that my post came across as "git gud", that was not what I meant. Yeah, really shitty situations can happen where you are behind from the start. But when they do and when you are in a situation without a way out, my take on the game is that I made a mistake, not that the game is made badly for not letting me catch up anymore. That does not mean that I defend everything the designers did for X1, quite on the contrary. But now you lost a campaign (or two, or more) and you as a player can now either go complain about how the game plays or adapt to it. Your post does not strike me as the second kind, but to be of the first. Yeah, that downed aircraft are reconstructed automatically does not really make sense, nor is it coherent to how the tactical layer is tied to the strategic layer, but it is how it is. If aircraft were lost permanently when shot down, we all would play differently (in fact, @Svinedrengen plays with aircraft being completely destroyed when shot down, just as an aside), i.e. we would adapt to the game as it would be. To come back to your point and leave on a constructive note: the most important thing in a campaign for me is to have a solid cushion of fairly well skilled backup troops with at least half decent equipment. They don't have to have the highest ranks, but they need to be good enough to cope with "normal" missions, at least. Once you identified that soldier experience is the one thing in the game that takes the heaviest time investment and is at a high risk of being lost, you should adapt your playstyle to that. Edit: Just realized that this is not a rant about X1, but a suggestion about X2, my bad. I am not sure if I want to have that kind of system in the game though. It was in FiraXCOM 2 and it totally destroyed the game imo. In the late game, you could just buy your squad of max level soldiers at will, which made any loss of soldiers negligible and hardly noteworthy even on the highest difficulty. I think I even recall a season of Long War 2 by xwynns where he got a squad wipe on his A team and just bought all the experience he needed back. The underlying fundamental question that needs to be answered here I think is: is it okay to punish the player by making him lose (and, ideally, start again)? To me, the answer is definitely yes, if the player has the chance to avoid the cause of failure in the next attempt. Which is the case in X1 and X-Division for anything the game can throw at you.

X-Division has you covered on melee and 'knocking off their feet' weapons (and not only SMGs that have better suppression, but also a new "SHOCK" mechanism that reduces their next turn TU). The last point you bring is already in Xenonauts. It's called "Armour".

It can go south really fast, but if it does, it is not that 'you could do little about it'. Prepare better, learn the underlying systems and use that knowledge, retreat if a mission does not go well instead of getting everyone killed, and don't go on missions where you expect heavy losses. The cure is not to get squad-wiped with your best troops. Retreat! Then how about not only having a single A-team with no useful soldeirs in reserve? You can drag the corpses and/or weapons of your fallen to the landing craft and retreat with them, which saves the materiel. All that said, yeah, an easy mode where you could hire more experienced soldiers sounds nice. But you are already playing on veteran, so you can either suck it up, learn from your mistakes and do it better next time or play on lower difficulty first. Personally, I think if it were not for that hurdle of inexperienced fresh troops, players would whine about some other safety net they would want not in the game, and so on and so on...

Bullets can fly farther than the maximum weapon range; you need to maually aim in the direction of the target, and if you are lucky, the bullet(s) will hit it regardless.

I never said I'd suppress enemies I cannot see (which, of course, I do if I know they are there, but that is not the usual case). And yes, I suppress the Aliens through doors if I know/suspect they are there, but that has nothing to do with shield usage. What if, behind them in some corner, sits an alien with high reflexes that shoots over its fellows (which happens often enough)? I have no way of knowing that, but a shielder can take the blow without flat out dying, so I can find out from relative safety. A shotgunner in the same situation might just die if he is unlucky or get suppressed, which, in close range to multiple enemies, is pretty much the same. Plus, my shielder can have a shotgun in his backpack which he can get out once I know the situation is safe for that. Your shotgunner cannot get out a shield. I have never had a shield be destroyed after 1 attack, but fair enough, let's use your numbers. What is better: Your shotgunner dies in one hit or your shielder takes that one hit, possibly dying to a second one? Also, what is better: your rifleman or MG gunner gets flanked without cover and gets shot at, or he gets flanked and has a 75% chance not to get hit from each shot? The shield is a survivability item, and it works very well in this role as it is (protecting the wielder 100% from frontal shots and everyone behind that to 75%). But that does not mean you can just throw your shielders into the open for the enemies to practice their aim. And yeah, I make mistakes. Everybody does. @Svinedrengen does and @Charon does, and these two are the best players I have seen. And guess what, they are using shields to alleviate their mistakes, secure flanks and check places they have insufficient information about. I am sure both of them could manage a playthrough of the highest difficulty of X-Division without shields as a challenge, just because they are that familiar with the game and can adapt well to most situations, but unless they do that challenge, they always have shielders. In comparison, until the most recent change, no one of them used SMGs because they deemed them too bad an alternative, and I have yet to see anyone of them using melee weapons. But as far as shields go, they are an essential item, not only to X-Division, but also to the vanilla game, because they are good the way they are. If they were not, they would not be used, and if they were even better, no one would use anything else.

As I said, I am not familiar enough with Vanilla Xenonauts to really pin this down. But as a rule of thumb, half a spare team of experienced troops should be good enough to carry you through, even if Alpha team got wiped. That said, the better you fare at the tactical gameplay, i.e. the fewer troops you lose and the better you understand when to abandon a mission, the fewer stand-by soldiers you will need. So, if this is your first attempt, get a good amount of them would be my advice. Also embrace how the levelling system works. Not the ranks are really the important part, but the stat increases. The stats increase with related stuff you do on the battlefield, so, if you are inclined to do so, you can really get grinding out that system.

Definitely rotate troops. I can only speak for X-Division, but it is also true for the base game. Soldiers in the rank of around Lieutenant should be good enough for anything, but Privates are mostly useless, so train them up whenever you can. Very light and light UFOs are the best for this. Also, consider retreat if you are about to lose troops. Don't fight a losing battle.

@Charon understood. Of course changes like these need to be tested first. Also I merely wanted to know if there was anything more planned with the SHOCK mechanism. I have occupied myself with both board and video game design over the last year, and one thing that is engrained in my perception of game design is that it generally is not good to have a whole mechanism being gimmicky, i.e. being special to a very narrow set of situations. Comparing SHOCK as it is now to suppression, you may see what I mean there. SHOCK is delivered by two distinct weapon classes of around ten, while suppression can be done with almost all weapons (apart from melee I think), including grenades, rockets, exploding props and ranged weapons that are not in the special role to do so.

@CharonIs there any plan to expand the SHOCK effect to more items? Like grenades / Rockets? Could be cool on some advanced stun grenades at least.

It would be nice to have a lot of stuff, but that would not be on my priority list tbh. I think you can't do much wrong with the rule of thumb of "keep the soldiers that got hit more out of harm's way". If that occurs so much that you lose track, you should not survive the mission anyway.

Sorry Decius, but I disagree with you here. Judging from the way shields work in X1, they are pretty great. Since the pistol does the same damage as a rifle, the shield negates the disadvantage of shorter weapon range. At the same time it helps not only with reaction fire (which you should suppress away anyway, if you can), but also as mobile cover for troops that cannot take cover this turn or just for general protection against enemies that flank around your cover on their turn. Plus, the pistol also has great reaction fire capabilities, as even when their modifier is set to 1 with the shield, firing it is pretty cheap, so you can do a lot of damage on the alien turn at close range (i.e. with high accuracy). You just should treat shielded soldiers the way you treat your other troops: try to avoid taking damage with them in the first place (using suppression, smoke and flanking the enemy), and a shield will typically hold through all the mission. Make them even better than they were in X1, and I likely will field a roman legion shield wall platoon every time in X2.

I have the same reservations as @Svinedrengen about this. Maybe make the triangle yellow for shock and half yellow, half blue for both? Still, looks good, though the edges could need some alpha channel values, if they don't have it yet.

So, you want the SMG to be an alternative to the pistol. As already said, I have only limited experience with the later stages of the game, but I felt I already used the SMG well as an alternative to the pistol as it is. Where it fell flat for me was when there was no early energy-based version of it when energy by and large is preferable to kinetic due to less resistance on the alien's side. But just comparing kinetic, by taking an SMG instead of a pistol you trade in damage and mag capacity for the chance to suppress. As always, you need to build your team around that, but it is definitely not as if the SMG is inferior to the pistol. I like to run assault rifle squads, and these rifles are my main source of damage, usually. For that to work I need some shielders to protect the defenseless rifles until they get close enough to reliably hit. I can (and do in the early game) suppress with LMGs and then get close, but I could also see myself swapping one of the two LMGs I currently bring for something else, if I have the close range suppression capability of two SMGs on my shielders instead. Sure, that's not perfect for every situation, especially on open maps like desert or arctic I would still prefer LMGs, but for towns and jungles I'd switch anytime. What I mean to convey here is that since pistols are a reflex bonus close range damage centered weapon, SMGs should not become the same thing. If a pistol is the close range counter part to an assault rifle, the SMG is the same thing for LMGs, and that is a good thing that should be preserved. I could also see myself utilizing the reflex bonus of a melee weapon in the main hand with an SMG in the off hand for suppression and damage. If it now additionally gives TU drain (SHOCK or what did you call it?), all the better for me.

My experience with it is obviously limited, but I liked the Division SMG Mk1, and took it for my shielders over the ballistic or laser pistol of same level. To me it seemed like the only trade-off you have to take is that you cannot finegrain your shots that well, but for damage and suppression I deemed it pretty good. If there was a laser SMG, I'd definitely tech and take it as is.