Chris

Well the later dropships carry more soldiers, so the end-game one lets you take 16 to battle. The Chinook has less to stop the early missions being so grindy. With regards to the AI, it's something we want to improve and make as deadly as possible. So the experience you're having there isn't how we'd like it to be be. The alien stat increases are something I'm going to discuss with Aaron, or at least try an alternative balance patch for. See if I can make the aliens much less tough, but possibly make them more deadly at the same time. I suspect I'll be playing a lot of the original game over the next week or two to try and work out where we're going wrong...but I'll admit the game is currently lacking some of the edge of the original game as far as the ground combat goes.

Sorry, I should probably use quotes properly. We've already fixed this in the dev version and will update to SC3 a little later. I'm just trying to work out what this CTD on the loading screen that's affecting the current build too.

OK. So maybe the crashes are not 100% of the time then. What UFO type do the crashes happen on, and what tileset type (if you know)?

We've got a fix for the first bit on the way. We're still struggling with the second. What UFO type was it, and could you tell us what tileset the crashes were happening on too?

Ah. I suspect I know what the issue is then. Does the game run fine if you go into the directory and delete it? Just delete it and load it up without going through Steam. Or it could just be something weird with Steam...

Alturys - gah, that inventory crash is a bug we can reproduce. We'll try to get that fixed ASAP then.

Sadly Aaron and I are both using Windows 7 64-bit, so it doesn't help as much as you might imagine

Thanks guys.

Still can't reproduce that crash at all and nor can Aaron. If either of you have fast connections, please could you delete the whole game from the Steam folders and redownload it? Also make sure you are starting a new game rather than loading an old one. If someone does that it will at least confirm it's definitely a bug in the code, rather than in Steam. FGART, I saw the game was working on one of your other PCs in a previous thread, right? Also, if you post up your screen resolutions where you are getting the crash, that'd help too. It's quite often resolution dependent if some people are getting it and others not.

Hopefully this candidate will fix the issues with the previous one. If it does so, then I'll roll it out to the Stable branch over the weekend.

We're just testing out the fixes for SC2 at the moment.

Thanks Solver, very generous of you.

Again, you are playing on the Experimental branch. There are big warning signs all over the posts explaining that it is probably not stable. A stable candidate build is still an experimental build, it only becomes a Stable build when we name is V20 Stable and upload it to the Stable branch on Steam. If you're desperate to play the game, you can revert to V19 Stable any time you like. In the meantime, give us time to fix the issues...it's been less than 24 hours since the build came out, a number of which we've been asleep for.

Yeah, you can win the OG by doing a single UFO mission if you're able to get lucky on the monthly funding rolls so your game lasts long enough for you to find a landed battleship. That gives you the research you need for Cydonia, and presumably also the psionic research that makes the game incredibly easy. In Xenonauts I reckon you need to do at least half a dozen missions to win the game. You're still better off doing every combat mission that becomes available, but you just don't have to do it. The airstrike option legitimises the player saying "Meh...I don't want to do another Light Scout mission, I've already done four of them today", even if the rewards are not as great as doing the full mission. The auto-resolve still needs some more work to balance properly, but the idea is that it'll be as effective as an average player is at air combat so you can skip the air combat if you want. The balance will probably improve dramatically over the next month or two simply because I'm playing and balancing the game a lot more lately and I can't be bothered with the air combat any more (whereas Aaron plays all his manually).

The Stable candidate is still an experimental build, it's just a possible Stable build. You'll often find us reaching SC3 or 4 before it becomes the final Stable build. We'll put out SC2 later today.

It's simply because the player has the choice to either do the ground mission (for higher risk / reward) or to take the easy cash from the airstrike instead. There's no situation where it would be beneficial to do neither, and there's no skill in clicking on UFOs to airstrike them, so there's no issue with having the airstrike action applied automatically when the sites are about to time out. If you don't like the idea of the player getting money from the airstrike because you consider it to be no work then that's fine, but that's a separate argument to the one being put forwards in this thread.

Yeah. The save games are broken in the current build, so this bug is a side-effect of this then (along with invisible UFOs and a bunch of other issues). Just means that fixing the save issues should fix this too...which is nice.

We do have a specific sub-forum for bug reports you should check, really. There's a problem a with the save games in the new Experimental build we released today.

This is for every ground combat mission? The save / load just plain isn't working in this build it seems. So if you create a new game you can get a crash? If so, please can you try some different resolutions out? Different aspect ratios and both small and big ones (play in a window). It might be something to do with the loading screen not displaying correctly on larger screens.

OK, so there are three major issues I can reproduce and confirm on my machine so far. The most important is that save games are misbehaving: 1) If you create / load a game, then go back to the main menu screen and create another game, the new game is screwed up. Your starting base is set up as if it was a newly-built secondary base and crash sites etc do not appear correctly on the map. 2) ALL save games loaded in the system will crash if you try to load a ground combat, and will also contain invisible UFOs and various other issues. 3) If you hire new soldiers at the start of the game, while they are en-route to the base you are unable to click the Unassigned category on the Soldier Equip screen. If you are getting crashes in games where you have not loaded the game and have just booted the game up, then those are further issues. However I imagine the save game problems explain most of the CTDs reported in this thread.

I'm not getting this at all (at least with the new hires) in Stable Candidate 1. Keyser, is this in a new game?

It's a bit difficult to answer a thread when it contains three potentially different bugs. All of you, please confirm you've done the following and are still experiencing the issues: 1) Right click > validate files on Steam. 2) Start a new game. 3) Restart Xenonauts entirely when you create a new game or load a new game. It seems no UFOs or base buildings appear if you don't do this, so I think this is causing Calmingstorm's issues at least.

We have a bug in the game where it works fine when you start / load a game for the first time, but if you return to the main menu screen and start a new game then your base will be empty (and maybe no UFOs appear). Is that likely to cause the issue you're having? If so, just restart the game each time you create a new game as a workaround until we can get the bug fixed.

Yeah. New versions almost always break existing save games, unfortunately, as there's usually changes made to the save / load code whenever a new feature goes into the game. You'll need to start a new game, not really much we can do about that I'm afraid.

Glad you like it - we spent quite a lot of time on them. The Praetor will have one, but it'll be an interrogation image rather than a standard analysis image. Out of interest, how are they different to how you imagined them to be?