Chris

The way the inventory system works means unfortunately it's not particularly easy to add a new container for the dropship itself, and even if we did it would lead to some odd behaviours that we'd also need to deal with (as the dropship doesn't always appear at the same time that soldiers are used)...and also need some more interface elements. So I'm not keen to add it, tbh. The idea of the arranging soldiers in the Chinook before battle is quite an interesting one that I'll bear in mind though. I don't know how much work it is to implement the "swap" location code you'd need to make it work in an enclosed space, but perhaps I'll enquire with the coders. The dropship-equip screen is a bit clumsy at the moment. @Caaygun - does it disappear, or does it just return the dropped equipment to base?

(Bear in mind that this thread was started a year ago, when the game had a very limited variation of maps in it compared to what it has today.)

No, because the modifier is applied to get the Initiative score. So if you're able to throw a grenade, you've already got more Initiative than the target (else they already would have fired at you until they no longer do). Once you've thrown it, Initiative is calculated again to see if you've still got the initiative. The grenade is no longer in your hand at that point, though...or never was, if you've used the quickslot. So it'd just use the equipped weapon's score, or 1x modifier if you're unarmed after having thrown it from your hand slot.

That check is broken, unfortunately. I'll put a fix for it on the to-do list actually. The MG will have a 0.5 reaction modifier in the next build as discussed in my earlier post.

@Frank_walls - yup, I'd actually post that in the AI suggestions thread. The defensive aliens should occasionally check outside the door to see if your soldiers are there, and if they're bunched up then the AI should already be capable of throwing grenades at them.

@legit - I typed out a long reply but really it's not worth the argument. ARMA is a fundamentally different type of game to ours and if you don't understand that then there's no point discussing this any further. Also, adding more complexity whilst maintaining perfect balance often requires sacrifices elsewhere...like the more complex air combat requiring recoverable interceptors, or reduced ammo counts allowing an ammo system that the player can't just ignore, which cause reduced realism. But you apparently want complexity, balance and realism at the same time and I don't consider that achievable. I think at this point the most sensible thing for you to do is to make your own "realistic balance mod". If it turns out to be amazing, more power to you and I honestly think a lot of people will want to play it. But I think it's more likely that you'll come away with a greater understanding of why we do things the way we do in the official game. The arguments now are just degenerating into you telling me why my changes are wrong, me explaining why practical experience suggests the changes have to be that way, and then you just telling me I'm wrong again. There's no point, because "acceptable realism" is completely subjective so neither of us can prove the other wrong. Finally, if you let the aliens use grenades freely, they always and only use grenades. It's been tried and everyone hated it because it removed any semblance of tactics from the game. You're welcome to read the announcement thread on it to see just how much fun everyone had in that build (I'm explaining this one because I don't think the XML files have an option to reactivate grenade spam).

Have you got "Disable Stat Tracking" ticked? Stat tracking can cause crashes on launch sometimes.

Yup, the level / sub-map editor has all the tools to generate levels in the way that the original X-Com does it, we just use a more handcrafted method because we think it gives better results.

"More complex" and "arcadey" are terms that are elastic enough to be meaningless. You can argue that the game is made more arcadey by allowing the player to throw grenades without any fear of retribution, making attacking entrenched aliens utterly trivial. Or you can argue it's more arcadey if you don't have that ability. Both have an element of truth to them, which ultimately is why the concepts of realism etc are so meaningless when developing a game. (I also question whether you really would enjoy aliens throwing grenades at you without you having any chance to deal with them. I think you'd find it much more unfair in practice than you believe.)

It's a bug that'll be fixed in the next build.

Nah, your resolution suggests you're right and you do have a 5:4 monitor. I'm also surprised to see that 7% of Steam users have a 5:4 monitor, as I don't think I've seen one. Our game is unfortunately very bad at supporting non-standard resolutions because of the awful engine we have, which makes UI design incredibly hard (I've also made a couple of questionable design decisions on the matter in the past, unfortunately). It might be that the game just won't work properly for you. Windowed mode is your best bet, but then you might find the game text too small to be playable. If that's the case, I guess we'll have to see if we can get you a refund somehow.

Yeah, looking at the files they get +21 morale every time they panic. That should probably be applied at the end of the turn, rather than immediately though. EDIT - Plus they regen +10 morale a turn naturally, so any soldier that panics appears to have +31 morale more than they did when they panicked. I'm going to cut the +21 gain down to +5, which means a soldier will always have +15 morale more then when they panicked. If they were at 0 morale, this means they only have a 45% chance of panicking again the next turn.

A 5:4 monitor? I don't think I've even seen one of them before. Are you saying the game window is going off the left of the screen? Can you try playing in a smaller windowed mode at all (preferably a widescreen resolution)?

Valkyria Chronicles was awesome. I ordered the 400-page (!) full-colour art book for it today. I don't understand how they can sell it for £20 and still make a profit...

There's about 70 or 80 maps in the game now, and there's a system in place that should stop you getting exactly the same map in another mission in the same game until you've played all the other possible missions of that UFO type. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than it was a year ago. Random maps aren't really possible for reasons I'm not going to go into in detail about; they've probably already been mentioned in this thread somewhere but if not you can always search the forums for them as I've explained them quite a few times over the years.

Actually, now I think about it, the reason why we don't do it is if you fall to 0 morale then you're automatically up to 20 or whatever before the next morale check. So you can never have really low morale....although you do still take morale damage as normal down to that minimum level. However, the game could theoretically be balanced around that, if the chance to panic was set to 90% at 20 morale...or whatever the numbers actually are.

Yeah, there's a problem with the berzerk power we're working on fixing for the next build.

Thanks for working out what the problem was. I'm discussing this with GJ now.

It is indeed an issue, but it's not really one we can easily fix (due to complex reasons I won't explain here).

No, but it's a valid tactic imo. It's certainly not worth removing the aggressive aliens in order to "fix" it.

I guess we can move morale-recovery to the end of the turn, maybe? I'll take an in-detail look at the morale system in the polishing phase.

Yeah, I've added medium alloy cost to aircraft and vehicles - I didn't realise before that they didn't have one. I've also reduced the relative $ and alloy cost increase of building precision rifle and machinegun derivatives. They were waaay to expensive before. StellarRat - if there's a shortage of alloys with the adjusted values, we can tweak the values again. I just don't want to change too many things at once.

Maybe. We'd have to look into how the Iron Man system works at the moment to judge the best method of avoiding corruption / game loss etc, this may be the best way to do it but I don't really know at the moment.

Dunno about V5, it should be working in V6. Any successful base mission, provided you don't blow the command room up, should let you get the base upgrade.

Ah. You're right - there's no research project for the Alien Assault Plasma, just an item. You need that to get MAG weapons. Thanks for the heads-up.