Dagar

It definitely is useful if the soldiers are getting good at everything as they did in Xenonauts and if it warns you of overloading the replacement soldier due to lower strength. But I think it is bad because it is not intuitive. If you have played any game of that kind you expect the soldiers to have custom loadouts, mostly because it has always been that way and because similar games of the last years have much more focus on the individual characters than on the squad. If you want to go that route, I think a good idea would be to make that system as clear as it gets. That might involve showing the loadout on the dropship assignment screen or having according role symbols fixed to the slots, though that does not really play well with how at least Xeno 1 had roles more as a suggestion than an actual rigid system. In fact, maybe the best thing would be to unify the soldier loadout and dropship spot assignment screens with some overview of at least the most relevant inventory items of each unit, such as armour and main weapon. It always bugs me to have to go to the hangar to select the order of units in the dropship, and also it is quite tedious to scroll through all soldiers to determine which pieces of equipment I have on the team and which I forgot. If you were to press that dropship slot centered loadout system onto Xeno 1, I would dislike that very much, even though it would be practical.

Nope, no insult intended. Just said mistake.

I really like that choice (as I do with meaningful choices in general). I'd love it even more if I could also choose to do the mission for experience only, giving the loot to the country instead for a higher relationship bonus (since you made their lives easier by annihilating the resistance), and I would like it even more if, from the loot that dropped, you could decide which to leave there and which to take. But I understanmd that would, again, undermine the system you are trying to establish here. Of course, the proposed system is only really attractive if relations are meaningful beyond the Xeno 1 way of getting more funds. I hope for some good implementation of the Cold War as a scale the aliens try to tip and you have to keep in balance.

Personally, I think Xeno 2 will be a mild upgrade to Xeno 1. All I really hope for at this point is that the mod tools are really good and easy, and that the vanilla game is engaging enough so that it attracts enough people so that there is a decent mod base fairly quickly. As a computer scientist, the thought of how to make my software highly adaptable for people without programming skills is pretty unnerving. Just think of having to code the editor for TES 3: Morrowind ...

That's a rough cut in the red line. How about something along the lines of "Even though that info came late for us, it gives us enough data to be very sure about the tactics the ETs are employing:" "And finally, let's go over the emergency protocol for an attack on one of our bases:" while the remainder will seek shelter elsewhere. We can re-hire them later.

Just a small remark: in that block of text I am missing the link to what happened at the nuclear silo. It rather sounds like "this is what will happen" instead of "we observed this behaviour, it may be what the aliens will do to us". Maybe @PALU can change that a bit if others feel the same way.

@Charon See edit above for an additional paragraph. As for what to do, maybe it is time to leave X-Division in the state it is in. I honestly have many hopes for Xenonauts 2 with high moddability. Otherwise I'd love to look into what is possible with the source code, but I even lack the time to continue my LP right now, so...

What strikes me as pretty arbitrary here is that from what I understood aliens raiding your base get their numbers reduced proportional to the damage the UFO sustained prior to the raid (hence why missile batteries are useful), while all other alien missions only suffer from the "crashed" decrease if you manage to shoot it down. More elegant imo would be a system where aliens encountered ALWAYS scaled with damage the UFO has taken, because it would make it good to damage UFOs that you do not shoot down for easier missions, be that ground missions, terror sites, base attacks, or Alien Outposts. At the same time it would give players some incentive to let a UFO do its mission for a higher chance of capturing a missing specimen. The description "loring" over the bug is not really good imo, because for a terror mission the aliens would do the same, i.e. dropping troops in landing pods (the UFO is not present after all...) As for game mechanisms and balancing, I can't really tell anything for the late game. Androns reviving over and over sound bad to me; maybe a restriction on how often they can do that either overall per mission or per unit would be good, especially since you often times want to preserve corpses for research and looting. For any other encounter I think that maybe we as the players should rather adapt to the mission and take weapons which have the necessary ammo capacity (i.e. machine guns and miniguns may not be the best option as damage dealers here because of high ammo usage), i.e. whose magazines are pretty well stocked and have a small footprint in the inventory. I am thinking of Shotguns, rifles and snipers, specifically.

I wanted to keep out of that until you said Phase 1 and 2: There are plenty of LPs out there (Charon's, Svinedrengens, mine...) that show successful air combat. If you are having problems even if Phase 1, you should revise your tactics.

Legally blind just means Charon won't lend any support concerning issues with that version of X-Div, afaik.

Really, is it that hard to distinguish the two visually (it does not even strike me as something useful for Xenonauts, because both are the same mechanically)? I mean, you could go sepia vs. gray, or hatch or overlay tiles out of vision cones with a dark blue, or even literally outline the vision area of all your troops.

Nice! Yeah okay, I concur, it definitely should be doable if you know what you do. I basically tech whatever I feel like, and especially do not know what leads where. That said, on NG, I get by pretty fine I'd say, so I'd at least contest the "you're doing it wrong" part, not in the strict sense of the words, but in the implied "If you are not following this path you are doing it wrong" sense. Links to the Let's Play series: Charon's NG+2 Svinedrengen's NG+2 My own NG, no first Terror mission as carrier got downed Coffee Potato's NG, to show you that you can play this game even if you screw up royally.

I don't think Reuban's requirements can be met even at the lowest difficulty. I'd say the minimum requirements should be Jackal armour, some Laser weaponry or Division if you can't access Laser until then, and some experienced troops who can carry loads of important stuff like rockets, ammo and grenades. Alenium grenades and rockets are also good to have. That said, in my current campaign I managed to down the first Terror carrier, but I have beaten this mission on easy and normal each once before, if only barely in the very first campaign.

You also seem to misread something here. I did not call reddit as such a dumpster fire, but the post flood that occured since Snapshot have made that announcement. Kain somehow linked my statement about what is happening on reddit to his own post instead of the OPs post and implied that there is no shitstorm because he does not see it. And no worries, I stop if I have the feeling that the argument becomes completely unconstructive.

Maybe you should read before you post? You called my comment childish, which I fail to see in the sense of the word. I tried to suggest that you research the meaning of that word or educate me in how it was childish. Oh, and I also do not see why you took my initial comment as an answer to your prior comment specifically as opposed to the general situation and took personal offense with it. The OP clearly is right up your alley, too, and even linked to the reddit, so there is that connection to the dumpster fire going on at reddit.

Umm... have you seen what goes on in the PP reddit? If all these cries for legal actions, claims of misusing backers as interest free loans etc. is no hate campaign, I don't know what is. I see nothing childish about my comment. Do you have contact with children?

Yeah, good, that totally convinced me. Good job!

As for me, take your time to make a good game. Some comments though: I am nervous about the UFO acceleration system and eager to read reports about how it plays. In theory, it seems to me like a not too fun system, because catching a UFO in Xeno1 (at least at the beginning) was no trivial task to begin with, and having your Interceptors turn around because of lack of fuel is not fun. Maybe you could alleviate that a bit by e.g. dashing the UFO in one direction only and only for a brief period of time, after which it has to go really slow? Or it gets damaged due to high wear and atmospheric drag it is not built for, so it may even crash? As for the teleporting: If you introduce such a system, please weave it into every system of the game. Teleportation has a huge impact on how the game should work compared to Xeno1, e.g. deploying soldiers, agents, retrieving personnel from anywhere, transport of men and material between bases, including airplanes and vehicles, ... Additionally, please make it interesting decision-wise. As I have stated multiple times, strategic and tactical games live from the range of decisions the player can make and their impact on the game world. Does teleportation cost anything? Can you maybe only teleport soldiers to the battlefield in a staggered manner, meaning that for the first couple of rounds you need to secure the perimeter with few soldiers? Can the aliens take some measures to prevent you from teleporting or delay it? Why does each side not teleport in reinforcements all the time? Why can I not just teleport soldiers around on the battlefield at will? Or equipment like hot grenades or C4? Why can the other human factions not teleport and we can? All that needs to be balanced, explained and explored carefully to make it a good system. I hope you are not opening Pandora's Box with this decision. I am eager to hear and see more of the game!

All that hate against Epic seems pretty petty to me. I'd prefer Epic Store over Steam actually, as all those "features" Steam supposedly has don't concern me anyway (maybe generation facebook needs to share to the world how many hours they put into a grindy shooter or how they tossed the most epic item of the game into lava for an achievement, I don't), and Epic actually gives more of the money to the developers, which is what counts in my book. I still prefer gog for lack of DRM, but I definitely won't get worked up about whether I need to download another piece of free software to play a game, I've done that many times since buying games over the internet became a thing. By the way, Chris never said he would not take a deal akin to the one Snap Shot took, he just stated that he does not deem it very likely that Goldhawk get such an offer in the first place. Oh, and yeah, Snap Shot behaved pretty shitty concerning promising Steam and gog keys and now making the game exclusive to Epic, but to me that does not justify the kind of shit storm they receive. But you be the loud minority all you want, after all it is free exposure for Snap Shot who you intend to hurt with that campaign. I'd love to see that kind of money and exposure for Xeno2, actually.

...and now compare all that (which imo was not all that rude, mostly a) roguish and b) very clear to what he thinks about the situation) to what you did, and then ask yourself again why Chris (I'm not linking him on purpose here, let them work on Xeno2) took steps against you and not Charon. If you can't find anything wrong with your behaviour, think again harder. That said, I'd still love to see breach points on UFOs in X-Division. But if it's not happening, that's also okay. X-Div has enough content already and Xeno2 is not that far (and with better mod support, it seems - Yay!) @Borak: Later in the game, equipment becomes much more impactful than stats, meaning that even rookie soldiers can do good work on the battlefield. The rationale for "bad" veterans in the beginning is that it reflects a new, powerful enemy and new rules of engagement to be learned for the soldiers.

I just felt the need to give my 0.02$ to the situation here, and there are three things I want to adress: - Charon definitely is not easy to communicate with online (I could use more unpleasant words, but I won't). Regulars here know this; PALU for example powered through this with his lore writing and is the workhorse for the Xenopedia now, even though Charon treated him the same way as he did with Dr. Ethan a couple of days ago. Charon is definitely not the type of guy to say "Oh, you want to do something on the code, well welcome to the team, here is your badge." Charon is the kind of skeptic who wants to see that you are doing it for the sake of doing it, that you are not stealing his time and that you can learn what you need to without him holding your hand. If he sees that you persist, and that what you do is good, he may ask you if you want to integrate it into the mod. - That's how mod teams tend to work in general. You'll get one good dedicated person to work with forn a couple of dozen who just "had an idea" and are gone after a week. In the worst case, the latter can ruin your code base, in the best they have stolen your time better spent with the few people who stay. - Dr. Ethan did not react kindly to Charons provocations, to say the least, so to me it seems reasonable of Charon not to react at all. I may have done the same in his stead. So yeah, Charon does not do the best job to make it attractive and easy to contribute to X-Div, but he is the one heading the project afaik, so you either do your own thing or you integrate.

Yeah, it's a known bug. The only way to preserve your savegame is to blow up the walls, lure the aliens to them and let them die as intended.

X1 already has this (well, at least I am sure for X-Division, but Vanilla is the code base for X-Div after all, so...) The problem with this is, and it is also in Xeno/X-Div until you get the facility that lets you know what aliens are aboard a UFO, that there is no tactical decision unless you KNOW which aliens you are going to encounter. You will always pick a mix balanced around the statistical likelihood of a certain resistance type being encountered by your troops. Turn-based tactical games are all about the decisions you make and their impact on the game world (at least for me), but if you do not have sufficient information, you cannot make meaningful decisions. This would be totally different if you knew the amount and types of enemies you encountered (even if there was some uncertainty as to the resistances they have), or if there was a decision to be made for either stronger weapons of the same type or a more diverse arsenal, but that, at least in X1 Vanilla, was never the case. So yeah, cool concept, but only meaningful if the game is adapted accordingly.

What is this sorcery?!

Agree. The thing is that Goldhawk are in a bit of a bind here since X1 already had air combat. If they now switch to autoresolve only, in my perception this would get them a bad reception with the players already familiar with the franchise, which, let's be honest, will be the biggest part of the customer base.