Chris

Yeah, the rank thing does annoy quite a few people but we're primarily using rank as an easy way of sorting soldiers by combat experience. It's not realistic but we feel it makes the game more accessible. And, hey, as the OP discovered - you can always mod it out if you'd prefer it to work another way

ninjaed13 - would you mind doing a screenshot to show us exactly what you mean?

Thanks. Got a busy day today but I'll try to check out the site later. If it makes translation significantly easier then it'll be very helpful indeed!

Hmm - how does it work? It looks like a project management system rather than actually providing the translators to translate the game?

I'm afraid we don't support resolutions other than the standard 16:10, 16:9 or 4:3 ones. I suggest you play in a window - choose a (preferably 16:9) resolution size with a vertical height less than your monitor height or it will try to open full-screen.

Can you try revalidating your game files in Steam, then starting a new game? I suspect there's something wrong with your installation.

There's already Soviet weapon images in the game, and we'll have a Soviet weapon mod available when the game launches. But I think having the same weapons changing skin in the same game would just be confusing for players. Also, I'm not sure the community would be able to generate the required skins to the quality that the professional artist who did the weapons would be able to, unfortunately - and he's too busy to do another 30 or so human weapons.

In the original X-Com, players usually put the hangars and the lift in one section of the base, joined to the rest of the base by a "bridge" consisting of a single tile structure. That made a chokepoint that all the aliens had to move through and made base defence missions extremely easy. Allowing players to think about how to lay out their bases invariably means there is one "correct", exploitative way to do things and I don't really think that's actually much of a choice. We can probably make the CC placeable manually though.

Are those burning remnants of a crashed alien vessel?

Thanks for your thoughts. I can kinda see where you're coming from, but I think the changes in 1) and 3) are for the better overall. A lot of people were complaining about the full-screen hidden movement screen while it still existed - I think old-school X-Com players liked it, but anyone who had not played the original a lot just found it a bit weird and found the transitions between full-screen image and no image to be jarring. I think our new screen is a good mix of the two. You may have a valid point with point 2), though. I can see how the mystery of the research tree may be being eroded by being told in advance what a research project will do - and the mystery of the research tree is a powerful force in an X-Com game. What does everyone else think about it? Do other people feel that too much mystery and tension is being sacrificed there?

We've passed your save files to the tester so if he can reproduce the bug hopefully it'll be fixed in the next version which is due at the end of next week. However the save games from V19 Stable are very unlikely to work in the next version of the game, so unfortunately it won't help your current situation much. You'll either need to load an earlier save or start a new game, I'm afraid.

Don't beat yourself up too much if you can't complete the game, the balancing isn't finished yet and the game is pretty tough at the moment

Good luck with it all Gizmo. It's been a pleasure having you on the forums.

It's not vanity that the portraits are not being redone, it's because realistic portraits wouldn't fit the rest of the art style of the game and, ultimately, I'm happy with the current art style that the portraits are a part of. Quite a few people don't like the existing portraits, but it's a subjective matter of taste and ultimately you can't make everyone happy all the time. There's a mod that adds about 30 new starting interceptors to the game too but that doesn't mean I feel we should add more starting interceptors to the game, much as the effort that went in impresses me. We may try a different style of portraits in future games but it's something that needs to be considered as part of a wider art style rather than just as an individual part.

I think with regards to Kerbal Space Programme, Aaron's enthusiasm is at similar levels.

Doesn't sound like it's working as intended at all. In V19 aliens can't see vehicles so won't shoot at them, but they should attack your soldiers and be reasonably aggressive on missions.

The mission starts over again? It shouldn't be doing that at all. I think we need to test the final mission a bit more intensively when we're back in the office...

It's a sprite issue largely because they aren't allowed to pick up any non-alien weapons, nor are they able to switch to a pistol because only the very basic aliens have pistol sprites. They therefore have to stick with their starting weapons (not all of which can be reloaded, such as the drone weapons etc, so looting nearby alien weapons won't fix all eventualities). This then means they'll be defenceless if they run out of ammo. Fundamentally I don't want "wait until the aliens run out of ammo" to be a valid strategy in the game, so I imagine we'll be sticking with the aliens having unlimited ammo. It's a bit of a hack, but I think it's for the best.

Thanks guys.

OK, thanks. We'll give this some more of a test.

Regarding tension in real-time games, it is certainly possible but it's a different type of tension. Some of the tensest games I've played are Company of Heroes in multiplayer, which usually uses a victory point system where holding two of three victory points causes the other person to lose points until they reach 0 and the game is lost. It's the tension of time (can I get my Tiger to the VP to reclaim is before time runs out?) rather than tension of action selection (do I shoot at the Sectoid or retreat my soldier back round the corner?) but it is also rather effective if done well.

Don't the players take their turns in real-time?

Yes, the aliens can be set to have infinite ammo but a reload TU cost. However, we can't set them to have limited ammo because they'll exhaust their weapons in a prolonged battle and will then be defenceless. We can't let them freely scavenge weapons from the battlefield like the player can, because the aliens don't have weapon sprites for most weapons and therefore if they pick up an unfamiliar gun they'll default to appearing unarmed but will still be able to spray bullets from their chest. All the aliens planned to use grenades do have grenade sprites though.

Thanks for your thoughts and I'm glad you enjoyed the game. Construction / research times and the power of sniper rifles are both things that are still undergoing quite a bit of balancing, as they're actually quite hard to get right. Hopefully we'll find a good balance by the time of final release. UFOs on air superiority missions do actually attempt to shoot down your dropships and fighter squadrons, but they are relatively uncommon spawns. I'm sure long time forum members will regale you with stories of the good old days when they were much more common, but in the end we had to dial them back because they ended up being REALLY annoying. It's much more of an occasional thing these days.

Sent you a PM.