Chris

We have merged the Russian soldiers into "Soviet" soldiers for historical accuracy. It appears that there is a bug and the new Soviet nationality is not appearing as intended, though when working correctly they are the most common of all the nationalities. Jemar, I'm actually quite unhappy with the way you've treated Goldhawk here. This is a bug and all you have to do to report it is file a bug report. Why not ask us if it's intentional before accusing us of racism, and posting about it in the Steam forums?

Is EMP not working? It should do. Shock grenades should either apply stun damage to stunnable aliens or damage to robotic ones.

No, they shouldn't give 50% cover. That's probably a mis-set sprite or an error in the code somewhere. I'd report it as a bug. Open doors should provide 10% cover at most.

Combat Shields may need a buff then. Maybe we'll try setting them so they cover all three tiles in front of the soldier (if they don't already?) and weigh a bit less. The fact they fill one hand already makes them a weapon you wouldn't issue to every soldier, so possibly the existing weight is a bit too high as it shouldn't prevent a soldier from wearing armour too.

Yeah, science projects have a fixed number of man hours till completion and each scientist beyond the first works with a cumulative -1% efficiency penalty.

The idea is that the rocket launcher remains useful through the game, with the Plasma Rockets being the human equivalent of the plasma cannon (and the plasma infantry weapon being the replacement for the machinegun).

Nice job with these, perhaps we'll use them as inspiration for our own ones when we get around to doing the final versions. Also, it's a bit strange to see our game has made it all the way out to Camp Bastion. Keep up the good work!

Are combat shields much use? Also changes to the smoke means that they properly block LOS now, rather than just somewhat reducing accuracy.

Also, I've not played much of V19.7 myself but GJ has fixed some of the incorrect inputs into the AI - how exactly has their behavior changed, out of interest? It'd be nice to get an idea of the state of the AI at this point.

Yeah shotguns fire individual pellets that can hit adjacent tiles sometimes. It's more of a blunderbuss effect than a traditional shotgun (though the same enemy can still be hit multiple times due to the multiple bullets), but it's more fun than the previous single slug. And yes, the penetration of the shotgun has accordingly been reduced. It does a lot of damage but has very little armour penetration.

The aliens are still "cheating" with their TU, btw. Now the alien wallhack has been fixed, GJ is working on it...but it's not been corrected yet.

I'm not too bothered whether it's realistic that the C4 would explode or not, tbh - but the C4 was never intended to explode as the soldier died, even if he dropped it in the process of dying. It was C4 that was "active" and placed on the ground that this was meant to affect. The current behavior isn't really intended, but might be also caused by plasma cannons (with their blast radius) activating C4 on nearby corpses maybe?

The AI may be functioning better in this build as it was previously being fed incorrect data. The other stuff is intended to be more tense and random, but we may have overcooked it - so do let us know if it gets too much later on. But your descriptions of those two missions suggest the early game is operating much as intended now!

Also, yeah - the new shotguns are good fun too. We're expecting to be arriving at the final V19 Stable fairly quickly now that GJ and Giovanni are both back at work fixing the bugs in their relevant areas. V20 Experimentals are going to be where the new UI arrives. We've finished the basics of all of the new UI screens and we're at the stage of polishing the formatting on them now.

The big changes in my mind are to armour degradation and random damage - the wider range of possible damage done by each weapon means that it'll be more X-Com like, with some shots doing a LOT of damage and some doing much less. It means you should feel a bit less safe at any given time...but you might have some lucky escapes too. The armour degradation means that armour can be fairly likely to save your men's lives, but will rapidly lose its effectiveness after taking a few hits. This means the Predator will be very powerful initially but even weak aliens will bring one down if they hit it enough.

Were the exploding soldiers carrying C4? C4 is meant to explode from damage if it is on the ground, not while in a soldier's pack.

We probably should cap them, yeah.

Thanks the the writeup, it's nice to know that you're mostly happy with the balance and that there feels like a progression in the game. Our next update is going to put some cats amongst the pigeons balance-wise, but hopefully for much the better. Should be out later today if all goes well with bugfixes.

Yeah, you're not the first person to request it!

It's not possible to change the colours, I'm afraid. There's a lot of sprites and art so it's too big a job to do. If we'd been more sensible at the start then maybe we could have used a more flexible system, but we can't. The blue was chosen because it's easy for the player to see, as GizmoGomez points out, as very few natural things are that colour.

The (later) aliens still have Mind Control and other psionic powers, but the humans don't get psionic powers because we feel it's a bit imbalanced.

The science could be outsourced there, but I'm not sure the writing could be. I think the writing is actually more important than the science and I think it's important to maintain stylistic consistency, so if we did get the community involved with writing the research projects then I'd still have to spend a long time editing them for writing style. Plus I just want to get the Xenopedia finished for V19 Stable and leave it at that so the translators can get to work properly on the game prior to release. Hopefully someone will produce a "scientifically accurate" mod for the game that caters for people who would rather have in-depth, scientifically plausible explanations for the technology - I don't think we should put it in the mass-market vanilla game though.

Yup, better signposting of the objectives is a perfectly valid point and we may well add it in before release to make the victory conditions clearer. It's not a bug, though. Also, the number of aliens in the command room may well be unbalanced given how tough they are but again this is a balance issue rather than a bug and it'll almost certainly be tweaked before release.

Have any of you been transferring stuff between bases when the save happened? We are aware of this bug but it's tough to pin down and likely has multiple causes...it's one we'd love to fix though, we appreciate how frustrating it must be.

Insta-win is not a bug; it's basically a super-interceptor with weapons powerful enough to annihilate anything you use it against but it has a resource cost per use. You'll also get a nice picture of the Fury flying away from an enormous fireball in the final version so you get some kind of reward for using it. However it shouldn't be able to autoresolve like a normal aircraft so that is indeed a bug for Giovanni to take a look at. So 3) and 4) are bugs.