Dagar

I essentially only use the normal level 1 speed and the level 4 for when my planes disengaged and just fly towards the edge. The lowest I would go would be maybe 1/3 normal (level 1) speed. But I thought about it a bit more and hope for more people to state whether they think this is a good idea. I mean, there is balancing to consider here. Would it be fun to play if my planes essentially dodge every incoming bullet possible? Would it widen the success gap between experienced and novice players (or those who don't really care for the air game but for some reason did not disable it)? Even though this may sound counter intuitive, I think what a good player can do with such a slow-mo feature is far more when compared how much it could help the newer players. But, on the other hand, it will definitely help them to some extent to play it more slowly. Maybe what would be more helpful and not potentially distort the balancing that much would be an auto-pause feature a player could enable. The three scenarios where it could trigger I can think of as useful would be: The moment when a plane enters the weapon cone of an enemy ship. Useful because if I micro-manage one plane I might not look after the others too closely. Whenever a roll is finished and you can do the next one. Useful because for now we need to eyeball that pause manually and hope that we get it right. When I disabled a slow weapon (like a torpedo) that would not hit on the maximum allowed distance anyway and intend to use it at very short range. If you again micromanage another plane as bait you might miss the window you have to actually enable that weapon.

I think that would be cool, because on the most extreme of micromanagement levels you essentially just do pause - unpause as quickly as you can and re-adjust in the pause. So a slower speed would help make this less of a reaction time game.

Okay, an idea for the 100 Pound level (though you might put this one further up (cheaper) to get more of them): What if in the soldier management or loadout screen you had a personal note/memorial wall in the background (I would not put it in an actual separate memorial screen because this will only rarely be looked at), and there were random notes appearing (e.g. "Happy times in the stalls to the person who kept stealing my joghurts - hope you enjoy the laxatives!"). Backers at a certain level can create such a message to be seen in the game. If that is not feasible from a design standpoint, it could alternatively be part of a loading screen showing some base interior or a scrolling info text line (dunno what this is called in english) somewhere. That would be kind of like the random audio messages from Firaxis XCOM, and the backers could contribute.

Really off-topic now, but hey To be honest I don't know the specifics of the laser that is in use (yet), but I think that it is not some ultra-rare expensive powerful laser just for that case. I am not in astrophysics (or physics for that matter), but wikipedia says that that kind of measurement can be used for distances up to 5000km from earth to satellite (though these satellites do have special reflectors which we do not need). The atmosphere is not that strong in dispersing light, especially not of that strongly bundled kind. You can see its dispersing effect if you compare the apparent size of the sun to its apparent size during a total solar eclipse - and that light is not bundled in any way. And thanks, I could not be happier

Both I am going to work at the DLR (german center for avionics and astronautics). They have a laser here at an observatory in germany that can measure exact distances to objects in low earth orbit (200 - 2000km up).

In my opinion that is just nonsense. The combat distances you have in Xenonauts are so small that bullet drop does not affect you in any meaningful way. With the rifles of the last decade, you need to aim higher from around 300m onward. Additionally, a focused beam of light should have the same energy delivered over these distances. A laser system I am going to start working on soon has a beam that has a 0.5m diameter 850km away. If you extrapolate that on comabt distances, the effect is barely measurable. That said I am all for different mechanical effects of the different weaponry. But if you want to start reasoning with real world physics, it should be done right. I have also thought about smoke dispersing laser beams, but I think its effect on the beam's power is pretty small in the scenarios of Xenonauts. What would be cool though if you (or the aliens) had a specialized kind of "glitter grenade" with small reflective parts slowly sinking to the ground that really would reflect the beam (or parts of it) somewhere else, rendering it rather ineffective. You could also upgrade your smoke grenades to do both, maybe.

I referred to X-Division, if you should have to make any changes to it. Sorry for not making that clear.

Would be nice if you had an alternative hoster for the new version as well (apart from steam). I presume the goldhawk file section is still offline.

Thanks, that's all the confirmation I need. New game it is, which is also nice as I can adapt some of the thing I learned until now.

@Charon Installed it and it runs. How confident are you in your statement that I need to start a new campaign? I loaded mine for test reasons and everything works, plus I now can equip my airplanes with weapons...

Thanks, I will try and report back eventually. Thankfully I am not yet 50 hours into the game...

screenshot of folder

1. Since I do not have the steam version, and the forum file section is down, I downloaded it from here. 2. Mod loader with left side 3. GOG version, but without the GOG client.

Bug Report: Sorry if I was meant to PM this to someone on the team, it was not stated clearly in the initial post. I attached a .rar file containing a screenshot of all the mods and a geoscape save game with the issue. The problem is that I built my first aircraft cannon (Fighter Beam), and it also is displayed in storage, but I cannot equip it on any aircraft (tested with fully healthy ones - F-17 and Aserius). I also tried shipping it to another base, but the problem remained. OS is Windows 7 64bit. Edit: attaching files does not seem to work, so here is a link: https://ufile.io/a6reu

Depends heavily on what the mission and map framework is made for. An "interactible" object such as a button also has a 'script' (a definition of its behaviour) that says what happens with it under certain circumstances. In that sense, an NPC is just like a button. It all depends on what behaviour the mission sub/object is meant to portray.

Second this. A really good idea, but maybe it should be restricted in tiles you may side/backstep, or soldiers will tend to move sideways for proverbial miles, which is not really realistic. Maybe sidestepping should give the enemy a bonus to reaction fire, as your soldier clearly moves slower and more upright than s/he could when moving forward.

More than this I'd love to see an abundance of missions of which you cannot do all (e.g. due to lack of ready soldiers or too much risk), as in Long War 2. Each should have a reward for you if you succeed and a reward for the aliens if you fail or do not attempt the mission. Of course, the risks and rewards should be relatively clear for the most part.

Incorrect, you can totally do that. In fact, my first use of C4 was exactly this - I did not realize it could be thrown and that a time of 1 would mean detonation at the end of the turn - rip my first specialist.

Well, let's take a step back here. We know the game is set in the Cold War era, meaning that the SU/USSR and the USA are the main opposing human forces. I think Chris wrote at one point that it is not public knowledge that there are Aliens. There are rumours about abductions and UFO sightings, but most people, including leaders of nations, do not believe in that, at least initially. The Aliens are here to overthrow humanity as a whole for some reason, but they are not powerful enough to do so in open warfare (a plot that is highly unlikely, but that's what it is). Instead, they try to weaken humanity with covert operations to a point where they can take over. Xenonauts are the only organization consistently knowing about the Alien threat and trying to prevent them from reaching their goal. From this knowledge, there are some things that immediately come to (my) mind. How would the Aliens weaken us? Well, obviously, the Cold War going hot would be very efficient. Other than that, by sabotaging military equipment, replacing high ranking officers and enforcing demilitarization politics, all within the realm of covert ops. As such, it should be one of the strategic goals of the Xenonauts to prevent the Cold War from escalating, and thus keeping a balance of force and a pacifistic mind set in the major populace and politicians. With this in mind, each region could have a (public) alignment value showing where on the US-USSR spectrum their sympathy lies, and a (maybe unknown or possibly obtainable via intel missions) military readiness value condensing all the factors mentioned. Xenonauts would have to balance the first value globally, while keeping the second value as high as possible in each region or risk an alien coup there. Alien regions could provide them with additional infiltrator manpower and resources for their effort.

At first in X1 I also thought this would be a good idea, but it is hard to justify going out with your troops if you could just be turtling around the transport. Some possibilities: time limit on missions like XCOM 2. Will change the feel of the game and will upset many players. corpses and equipment get destroyed when shot at by these large calibres. Perhaps additional environmental damage resulting in less funding bonus from the respective nation. transport might take damage and need repairs back in base. transport evacuates after the first (or first two) turns, meaning it is of temporary use. If you can redeploy the transport, the aliens could have landed AA guns that pose a risk at bringing the transport at a new location unless the surrounding area is already cleared. But then, why would you even bother doing that?

Sorry, this does not make sense to me. So you say they do neither have the industry nor the numbers to repair, restock and refuel some place that is more suited than earth to do the latter two things (you know, the materials are out there in a more convenient place than scattered in tiny fractions on a bulky planet with a thick atmosphere hard to get out of again), yet they have the numbers and industry to attack and enslave humanity (or so they think), and then make us produce their highly advanced stuff? Sorry, but I have yet to see an industrialist train dolphins or monkeys to produce anything cheaper than human labourers could and of worth to sell. Additionally, we do not need animals for cheap labour anymore, why would the more advanced aliens? I'd reckon if they managed to get here from light years away, they'd have the technology to do that themselves (at least some useful subset of nano machines, universal 3d printing, artificial intelligence, cloning, gene modification). It is hard to actually conceive any logical reason for aliens to come here and wage war with us (too high costs in time, resources and risk for something they could get much cheaper), meaning that any aliens that would do would be illogical in our understanding, and thus no reason behind it we could think of would be, well, reasonable. They would need to be some religious fanatics that would want to be the only intelligent living thing in the universe maybe, but then they'd just burn our whole planet from orbit, not go into squad combat.

I'd rather see them really dive into the Cold War theme and the "UFO sightings" associated with the time, portraying the blocks and neutral nations as own agents reacting to the invasion in their own manner and still trying to overthrow each other. Also, you said it yourself: Aliens coming here would not need our resources. Why would they come to earth instead of Mars, Venus or any other body in our Solar System, and why would their flight end at our world? If they were just to restock their fuel and supply and then go on fleeing further, any other body would provide that without giving them a fight. If they planned on staying, why would our world be their sanctuary?

I agree on different tiers of weapons behaving differently (not the example tier scheme though - why should pulsed lasers be more effective than a continuous beam, and how is the latter in the same tier as modern weapons of the time?), weapon attachments and the friendlies in missions. The rest I see as rather unnecessary, especially considering the limited resources Goldhawk likely have. The different weapon behaviour should aim at never obsoleting any weapon type completely and just increasing damage with tiers, but rather them having some unique features and bonuses (like lasers being more accurate in general).

Night vision goggles are just low light amplifiers, usually. And they come with the drawback of what I already stated in the original post, at least at the time the game is set in. Also, if we did that, night missions would not play differently from daytime missions (at least if I interpret your post right). Instead of scrapping another system I'd rather see the mechanisms fleshed out.

In X1 we essentially had four light sources in night missions: scenery lights like lamp posts the inherent flash lights of our troops (their illuminated vision cones) flares head lights of vehicles I'd like to see this system expanded a bit, as it essentially slowed down the pace of the game in X1 compared to daytime missions (because you would throw flares around one round, then advance in the next). low-light amplifier - a piece of head/eye wear for a soldier, giving him good sight in darker areas, but none in light regions (as the light amplification tends to overcast the surroundings of bright objects) thermal imaging glasses - same slot, portrays surroundings in false colours, but some aliens (e.g. the reptilian sebillians) are invisible to the user. Might show gas and heat pipelines through walls, whatever this might be useful for (blowing stuff up, obviously...) signal pistol - a secondary weapon that can illuminate a big part of the battlefield this round and can be fired indirectly over obstacles, and a smaller one next round, and then dies. Short life and big area compared to flares, maybe even a chance to stun enemies with big, night time adjusted eyes portable floodlight - a rather heavy utility item that must be placed down by a soldier and then illuminates a bigger part of the map compared to flash lights. As it runs on batteries, only limited use time. Some Psi vision system - reveals the location of living things, but not what they are. Civilians and Aliens as well as the type of Alien cannot be seen (something like a blue blob on the battlefield) For some of these to work, the blind fire system needs to be reworked - in X1 a soldier could fire at a tile with an alien with the direct aim function, even though he could not see the alien. Either this needs to be made impossible (or one soldier with low-light amplifier essentially provides the same bonus for every comrade) or weakened in terms of accuracy. Suppressing fire could still work to a degree. Any other idea you can come up with?