Chris

There's two major UI screens still to be updated from V20, the month-end funding screen and the mission-end debrief screen. I've concepted up the mission-end screen and it can be viewed below. Comments are welcome, but please read the post before commenting: This screen combines both the debrief screen and the soldier progression screen without actually reducing the information displayed. The removed lines from the debrief screens were either duplicates (you don't need a "civilians killed" AND a "civilians survived" line) or pointless information we originally put in just to fill space. The numbers on this concept are largely random, so please don't tell us that they don't add up etc. Same with formatting (and the screen frame graphics), if things aren't centred etc then save those comments for if it's actually misaligned / wrong in-game. This is a "worst case" screen, displaying pretty much every soldier status at once. This makes it very busy in terms of colour, but in most cases it won't be as bright. You can view the image here: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/combat_debrief.jpg

Rutger - there's a few issues with that idea, the first being that Kickstarter backers are a minority of our pre-orderers. We don't have the contact details for those that buy the game through Steam / Desura / Humble Store etc, and so any Kickstarter poll would only involve the Kickstarter backers. If we did it on the forums, it'd only include those who check them regularly...and you can see the regular players of the game are in favour of the change, and wouldn't include the silent majority. (Also, the silent majority regarding political issues like equality in the game is different from the silent majority with gameplay issues). Secondly, it's not a change we're going to roll back as we made a decision on it a long time ago and playetesting has just solidified our view that the ammo change was an improvement. You can't expect us to update and improve the original game but then question our judgement when we make a change you don't like on paper; if you're not a regular playtester of the game and don't experience the results of the changes firsthand you've just got to trust us to make a game where the final sum of the parts is an improvement over the original. Almost all of the regular forum users here are extremely experienced X-Com players, and have also played a lot of Xenonauts. If you're an experienced X-Com player but haven't played much Xenonauts, it's sometimes worth taking the views of people who have played a lot of both on board. After all, most of them are saying they had the same views as you before they actually tried the changes for an extended period of time and felt they were an improvement.

And for the infinite ammo, I can understand why people may not like the idea and there were a lot of complaints on the forums when we first suggested it...but the vast majority of players said it was an improvement once they'd actually tried it.

I'm actually going to close this thread at this point because it is well over a year old and the new UI has been implemented now (subject to final tweaks, perhaps). If you want to discuss the new UI then it's best to create a new thread about it in the General or Beta boards, as all discussions should be based on what is in the game rather than what I posted up as concepts a year before the screens were implemented.

What economic complexity is there to a game where you can entirely fund yourself by manufacturing laser weapons for profit from the outset? That's what you have to do in every single game to have the best chance of winning, so there's no variation or tactics at all. Presumably you find it a "joke" to have a game where financial reward is based on your actual performance in the game, then? Because that's what you're complaining about.

I did actually finish all the light scout maps this morning and was going to release the balance patch today, but I just remembered Aaron does all the file archiving etc for builds and he's not back till Monday. It'd take me a while to generate them again, and without the game has hundreds of thousands of files in it, so I'm afraid this patch is going to be coming after the weekend!

You'll have to play it before you comment, I'm afraid. You may also have to wait until Monday, because I'm remaking the Light Scout maps at the moment because I think they're too big now I've reduced the number of aliens in them. That's quite a big job!

I've abandoned the slow projectile idea. It really annoyed me after the first few missions so they're back up to normal speed. I'm gonna put this patch out on the experimental branch today if I can, and I'll separate out the old balance and fixes from the new balance on Monday if the build is stable. I just played a light scout mission and lost 7 of my 8 soldiers to five aliens, one of the most fun missions I've played in a long time. The aliens are DEADLY, even the noncoms. I've put the cover modifier up to 75% from 50%, and I think the extra TU makes flanking much more viable than before. Half of the deaths were because I got careless and the aliens made me pay for it, which is something we've been trying to get them to do for a while...so I'm pleased with how it's working so far (but I'll listen to what you guys have to say about it before I make any final decisions).

Please use a more useful thread title in future. Yes, if you press Space on the geoscape it will still set time to the lowest setting. Press it again and it resumes at the previous speed.

Glad you like it. It's still a bit hit-and-miss at the moment but the AI isn't as stupid as it used to be.

The terror missions and alien bases haven't been mapped and tested properly yet. That's why there's so few maps and they're not so well balanced.

If you bought it on our website, you should have received a key from the Humble Store in your inbox (if not, check your spam folders etc). If you've got that, the Steam key is claimed through their interface and is relatively easy to do. It should arrive within 5 minutes, so if the email is not there then something has gone wrong.

The next update will involve the UI being darkened by 10%, so perhaps people with sensitive eyes will find it a bit less painful. My work monitor is quite dark, but playing the game on some other screens made me a bit more sympathetic than previously. I don't think there's any more scope for darkening it beyond this, though.

Yeah, the issue with this is that a pop-up notification would get INCREDIBLY annoying. But it is a valid issue. I think if it was in the same bottom screen as the UFO notifications, but with a different colour, it would probably work fine. That's the least work of all the ideas so I'd rather try that first.

Actually, quite a lot of their maps aren't closed and claustrophic. Their forest and desert ones etc are very open. Interestingly, the OG doesn't have any concept of weapon range. A weapon is accurate at any range, provided you have LOS. It's just the pistols are less accurate than rifles etc.

Amiga - it's not been uploaded yet, I'm still putting it together and balancing it. I'll post something in the Announcement forums when I actually upload it. I've sat down and played a bunch of the OG, and I've had a few more thoughts: 1) In Xenonauts, aliens all spawn facing north-east. This means there is no chance of getting any reaction fire on turn 1 unless you are approaching the aliens from that direction, and generally the dropships spawn along the bottom edges of the map and so this is a rare occurrence (whereas in the OG you're under fire from the moment you disembark). I'm surprised nobody's picked up on this before, actually, Aaron and myself included. We need to add some logic so the aliens spawn facing the dropship. 2) The shots in the OG travel INCREDIBLY slowly, whereas ours travel very quickly. I'm also going to drop the projectile speed in the game to about 35% of what it currently is to see if it helps build suspense. However, after having played a couple of missions with it on, I'm not sure it's one we'll be retaining after the first balance patch. 3) The LOS in the original game is much more constricted than in our maps. I might try reproducing one of their farm maps in our game and see how it plays. Stinky - how do you mean, chain-suppress? Just using large amounts of firepower on a target, and making it really easy to kill them the next turn? It's meant to be useful but not OP - if it's a big thing, perhaps suppression could be limited to certain weapons like the machinegun, or at least only to burst fire? Now's the best time to consider these sort of things.

My version of the game already has those fixes in it, so it's hardly a problem for me. It's more than likely you'll have the fixed V20 on the Stable branch and my patch on the Experimental branch.

In retrospect, I should have just posted these changes up after they'd been uploaded to the Experimental branch so people could test them properly, rather than theorycrafting. Even with the reduction of cover effectiveness by 50%, crouching behind a standard cover wall still gives you a cumulative 45% reduction to the accuracy of incoming shots. The change would hardly make cover meaningless, it just means a unit crouching behind a waist-high wall doesn't become invulnerable. I posted this up to get suggestions for other things for me to think about changing, really - what I've posted above is almost certainly going to be in the experimental balance patch and I'll only be collecting opinions on it once people have actually experienced the effects of the changes first-hand. If there are other systems you think could be majorly revamped to improve the gameplay, please feel free to throw them out here.

So over the holidays I've been spending a bit of time thinking about how we can improve the gameplay experience of Xenonauts without new coded features - i.e. just by improving the balance of the existing systems. This is currently only for the ground combat, and I'll think about the strategy element of it later. I'm currently working on a balance patch that I think will make the game more enjoyable to play. Some of the changes are quite radical and I thought I'd discuss them here to get suggestions and opinions (the balance patch is likely to be tested on the Experimental branch). Aaron's done a good job of balancing the game thus far, but I want to try a few ideas and see how they play. If it goes well, I'll chat to Aaron about merging our balance ideas. My objective is to make the game a bit faster-paced, and make death more sudden for both the Xenonauts and the aliens. Here's my ideas: 1) TU move cost reduced from 4 to 3, other move costs lowered proportionally - self explanatory, but a huge change as units can move 33% further each turn. I just find the standard movement range frustratingly small at the moment. 2) Cover effectiveness reduced by 50% (so it provides 20-25% protection) - I find it very difficult to root out enemies that are behind cover, and it's easy to minimise casualties by using cover effectively. I find these updated numbers make cover a noticeable advantage, but not the be all and end all of combat. 3) Greater range of soldier stats - with the exception of APs which range from 45-55, soldier stats will now range from 30-70. This will stop soldiers being so generic, and now they have very different capabilities from each other right from the start. 4) Weapon accuracy increased, but zoom level spread reduced - weapons are more accurate, but zooming in gives less benefit than before. This will make combat more deadly, as shot are now more likely to hit, but it's harder to compensate for troops with bad accuracy just by spending extra TU. 5) Aliens are less numerous and less tough - Aaron's made the missions harder by making the aliens really quite tough, and putting a lot of them in there. Light Scout missions can have 8 or 9 aliens in them in some circumstances. I want to reduce the numbers of aliens, and make them go down faster overall. 6) Aliens are significantly more dangerous - this can be done through a combination of stats (both aliens and their weapons) and the AI, but the aliens need to be much better at killing your men. I want them to lurk inside buildings more, and also to run up to your men and attack them from closer range more often. There's an AI bug GJ is currently working on that is making the aliens overly passive at the moment, hopefully that'll be fixed soon. Any thoughts / suggestions? EDIT - I'm mostly looking for thoughts for other ground combat things I should also consider changing. As this is just an experimental balance patch I fully intend to test all the things I've listed above and we'll see how they work. EDIT 2- This was released on 6th January here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8660-V20-Experimental-Balance-Patch-1-Available%21

I'll fix the wolf C4 one now. The assault shield one is being worked on in the background, as the animations are currently missing.

Yeah. You should have autosaves, so if you load the earlier autosaves you should be able to avoid the crash, and you can post up the later autosaves so we can reproduce the crash.

You can try a version of the UI that is 10% darker by unzipping this directory to the /assets/ file in the game directory: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...ui_screens.rar

You can try a version of the UI that is 10% darker by unzipping this directory to the /assets/ file in the game directory: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26290309/ui_screens.rar

Give it a try. /scripts/sequipview.txt....do a Crtl+F for "role". If you change some of the formatting with the game open, just switch UI screens and then change back to the original screen and it'll load your changes immediately.

The methods you have to change the UI layout etc are exactly the same as what the team have to do it...manual, trial and error movement or reformatting of the screen elements. There's no visual UI editor in the engine (there's not even one in Unity). Game UIs are a huge amount of effort in general. Personally, I don't like your update much Skitso. I think the original works better, and I don't think it's logical to have the armour away from the rest of the equipment? Why does it make more sense to have it next to the soldier stats rather than next to his weapons etc? And the roles are primarily about equipment loadouts, so why move them away from the soldier equipment too? Generally I think removing some of the colour from the UI screen makes it more boring, too. I think Gauddlike's reskin is better, but I think it's gone too far. Maybe some kind of halfway point between the light of the current backgrounds and what you have there would work better, but ultimately I spent quite a bit of time choosing the colours and I'm reasonably happy with what I came up with.