Chris

Is there any particular trigger for panic etc you think is overpowered, like suppression? The soldier taking damage?

But the 50 - 150% damage variance affects all weapons equally, right? Because you still have to do a fixed amount of damage to kill each alien. So shooting the same alien three times with an AR would have exactly the same chance the alien not being killed as with three pellets from a shotgun blast (assuming everything hits)...you'd just spend more TU doing so with the AR. The variance is actually most likely to cause you major problems on high-damage single shot weapons like the rocket launcher.

Re: sniper / precision rifles, yes, perhaps the aimed shot needs a slight TU cost increase too. I'm not convinced about increasing the damage on it though. It turns open maps into a turkey shoot if the sniper rifle is too powerful.

It's not going to be too far away, we're just trying to sort out the final mission.

I'm not necessarily averse to giving the alien weapons a somewhat different TU structure to human ones, as I can see that 4 reaction shots a turn can be an issue. It's just for the first build containing the updated values I wanted to have a level playing field and then work from there. That said, I'd also consider just increasing the snap shots to 26% across the board as an alternative solution. Corners are a weird one. It may be a LOS bug, I don't know...it's certainly not an intentional feature. I'll have to give it a good test in the polishing phase and see what's going on. @mr_pa - thanks for looking into the shotguns. Seems that is a bug we need to fix given I don't want to give shotguns burst fire.

V21 Stable isn't too far away. We're mostly trying to finish the final mission before doing it though. It's likely that after V21 Stable we'll completely reset the bug tracker and set up something public you can all view...then declare open season on reporting anything and everything wrong with the game. But styling the final mission is taking longer than I thought it would. Glad the blood splatters have been well recieved, it's something Aaron's been pushing for for a while now (Skitso too ). I'm considering the MG balance at the moment regarding the ammo level; I'm a big fan of the 10 round bursts but perhaps they should be able to fire three bursts - although as others following the balance thread can attest, the arguments need to be made in terms of game balance rather than simply realism. I'm probably also going to nerf MG's slightly by putting recoil back on them so only high strength soldiers can fire them as accurately as everyone can at the moment. They kill a bit too well at the moment. @Silencer - the rocket launcher issue you mentioned there is likely due to the + / - 50% damage variance rather than anything else. @qdlat - a save converter would be quite a bit of work, and might lead to false bug positives. However, you can just make a copy the game directory...Steam will only update the original one, not the copy, so that lets you freeze the version as and when you want.

To strike a slightly more conciliatory note than in my last post, Xenonauts has already done realism. If you'd been around on the forums long enough, you'd probably understand why I'm reluctant to alter my choices based on realism reasons rather than gameplay ones. A few examples: The player used to start with four planes, 50 scientists and engineers, 20 soldiers and two vehicles, plus a fully-equipped first base. It's not realistic for the player to start the game with such limited resources as they do now, and it's not realistic that they have to research the Hunter and the Foxtrot, but there was no early-game progression under the old system where you're given it all immediately. Chinooks (and interceptors) used to have realistic ranges, and speeds. That meant that you couldn't respond to to events happening outside your radar range because you craft just didn't have the fuel to get there, and even if they did they moved so slowly a terror site etc would be done by the time you arrived. The chinook is about twice the speed it should be and has enough fuel to circle the world. But people wanted the game to be like X-Com; they found the game frustrating if they couldn't do anything about events beyond their first base...and it forced them into an early-expansion playstyle. So we changed it. Weapons and equipment used to have realistic weights, and the soldiers used to have realistic carrying capacity. The result of that was the ability to carry essentially unlimited ammo and grenades into battle. There were no choices to be made - just freely loading your guys down with whatever gear you wanted. Any element of "choice" was totally removed from the game, which is not X-Com at all. That's why Xenonaut soldiers are all feeble weaklings these days. We were originally going to literally have a T-80 tank as a support vehicle in the game (the same one you see in the desert / soviet maps). It's realistic, right? Why wouldn't the Xenonauts have some proper armoured support? They've got access to jet fighters, why not tanks? The shape of the tank made it impossible to use, but I don't think I have to explain why balance reasons would have led to it being removed pretty quickly if not. Defenders of realism complained about all of those things at the time, but I'd be surprised if people would tell me I'd made the wrong decision now. Yes, Xenonauts is going to be an X-Com game with a veneer of Cold War realism over the top. I'd love it for the game to be totally realistic, but I hope the examples above give you some idea of why it's more important to prioritise gameplay. The ammo levels of the advanced weapons appear to work fine these days - i.e. you have to reload them occasionally. It's a pretty rare occurrence to have to reload an AR with a 20-round mag though. It'd be much nicer if a player had to choose between a bit more ammo or a grenade, rather than just picking the grenade every time because one clip (or two at a push) is fine. It's also important to counterbalance the power of burst fire on the AR.

I think the weight of the equipped weapon increases the melee damage of the soldier.

You can't really equate reaction fire to a realistic equivalent, because real life isn't turn-based. Suppressing an enemy with an MG and covering a large area etc is represented perfectly well by shooting with it in your turn, because in real life actions from both sides are resolved simultaneously. Reaction fire is more like those moments in a FPS shooter where you run around a corner and come face to face with an enemy, or you see an enemy at a window for a moment and have a split-second opportunity take them down before you lose line of sight on them. That's why it relies on the soldier's reflex stat, and weapons that aren't well disposed to having a quick reaction time are bad at it or disallowed from doing it at all. An LMG isn't really the sort of weapon that's particularly good at dealing with that sort of situation. Nevertheless, I am considering putting it back in, perhaps with a similar modifier to the precision rifle. As people have pointed out, the TU cost of being able to fire it with reaction fire is sufficiently large that it wouldn't be too imbalanced if we did so.

Legit, I'm sorry you feel that way. However I think it'd be a mistake to change the game design simply to appease your interest in historical realism. Especially as M-16s used 20-round mags for most of the Vietnam war and, as this game is set in 1978, it's entirely historically plausible to be using those despite your assertions to the contrary. I mean, if you won't even give us credit for the stuff that is historically accurate, what hope do I have of pleasing you? Besides, using realism as an argument is a completely false economy. If we made a realistic game, the most glaring omission would obviously be the aliens. You must be aware of the absurdity of your position? You must know and accept that we've obviously got to change the "realistic" setting in order to make a game that is playable and fun...even leaving aside the abstractions you have to make to turn a real-time event (war) into a turn-based combat game. Forgetting the aliens for a moment, if we were being realistic about the combat model, soldiers would be able to see much further than 18 tiles (roughly 29m). Most of the weapons in the game have a useful range of less than 50m, and supposedly elite soldiers miss well over half their shots at that range. Your guys don't even bother taking a look out of the Chinook window as they land, so they have no idea where the crashed UFO is at the start of the mission. You have F-16s, armed with only two missiles (instead of six), shooting down intergalactic warships. All of those are *major* abstractions. Like, really, *really* big. But you happily accept them because you accept we're making a game and they're necessary for the game to work. But you'll still get worked up about an AR only having 12 rounds in the clip instead of 20? Really? That's the line where the game about aliens invading the earth becomes unrealistic? If I'd spent the last five years prioritising realism over fun, I doubt playing Xenonauts would be anywhere near enjoyable enough to warrant registering on our forum and discussing the game balance. I think you're getting fixated on small details here.

Kate - do you have a screenshot of that weird close combat accuracy jump? It sounds like pretty major bug.

I'll decide the reaction fire choice when I decide the MGs as a whole. And no, but it's not that surprising nobody complained about the ammo supply when they could fire the weapon ten times before they had to reload it. Skitso, I think you dislike the MGs for different reasons to everyone else. I don't think giving them a 15-round belt would make anyone else in the thread happy Anyway, enough talk about the MG's for now, we're two pages in and it's literally all anyone has talked about so far. There's a lot of big changes in this update that this thread was intended to get feedback on.

@KateMicucci - if you don't believe that ammo management should be a balance consideration, I'm not sure we'll find much common ground. Making the MG incredibly inaccurate is another way to reduce its power, but that causes other issues. @StellarRat - yes, we could reduce the number of shots fired by the MG, but to me that seems counterproductive. The defining characteristic of an MG is that it fires a lot of bullets, more so than anything else. I also disagree to an extent that players will complain forever about the ammo counts. I think when we reduce the other weapons and the MG once again has the largest clip and all ballistic weapons have the same mags as their advanced counterparts, I imagine people will understand the abstraction better. A standard AR has a 30-round mag (12), which roughly equates to a man-carried LMG having a 50-round mag (20). From there it's not that much of a logic leap that the weapon that fires loads of bullets runs out of ammo more quickly. @everyone - as I've not decided what I'm doing with the MG yet (if anything) and I don't see anyone posting any new arguments that weren't posted in the last thread, let's get back on topic with the thread and discuss the (fairly major) changes that have been made rather than those that have not.

More than likely I'm going to nerf the ammo capacity of the other weapons so the MG has a larger belt by comparison. As I've been explaining for some time, we're making a game rather than a realistic depiction of military combat. Any game where soldiers by default exchange fire with single shots despite having automatic weapons is not going to have realistic ammo levels in it else you'll never need to reload your weapons. I find it strange how people pick and choose the abstractions they decide are immersion-breaking.

No, they're not a joke, I'm still considering what to do with them. But at the moment MG's are still totally OP, so I don't know why you're complaining about them tbh.

Yeah, don't bother with this any more. The Experimental build changes are incorporated into the main Steam Experimental download now.

There's been quite a few changes for the ground combat in Experimental 6. The most obvious is a reworking of the TU % and accuracy of the various weapons; this is according to the logic outlined in the Weapon Role thread (they are similar to those in the Experimental TU Balance patch released a few days ago). In general, TU costs for shots have been reduced but accuracy has also been reduced somewhat. I'd be interested in people's feelings on the changes - it's a pretty big rework overall, but I think it's made combat a bit more mobile overall. Here's the changelog: - Weapon TU costs rebalanced extensively to reflect experimental balance patch - TUs now capped at 99 instead of 79, and you can gain 2 TU per battle instead of 1 TU - Starting attributes returned to a 30-70 spread for everything, including TU. - Reduced pistol range to 10 tiles, from 16 tiles. - Heavy weapon move penalty removed - Reduced reload costs to reflect the fact that they use flat TUs rather than a TU % - C4 / Plasma Charge damage halved, as the blast radius changes had made it extremely powerful - Increased the number of defensive aliens in the larger UFOs

Glad you like the game, TacticalDragon. I think we're probably a bit too close to release to want to add a whole extra wound system into the game now, but it's a nice idea. Maybe we'd have done it if we were earlier in development. Adding customisable difficulty settings would be quite a bit of work. It's probably not too hard from the code point of view but the UI side of things would be quite a bit of work, and I think there's higher priority things we can work on. As KateMicucci points out, you can change most of those things by changing a few values in the text files too. Bulletcatcher - in most situations it is not, but when they are asking for a way to customise how the game plays I'd say it's a valid point to make.

Reaction fire works by comparing the Initiative score of units ( % of remaining TU * RFL stat * weapon modifier), and if the aliens have a higher score they can reaction fire at you until they don't. The bug is that weapons that can't reaction fire - MGs and rocket launchers - give your units a 0 Initiative because they have a 0 weapon modifier. Standard weapons are unaffected. If you don't want to be reaction fired at, then perform actions with soldiers that have a lot of TU remaining or those armed with pistols / shotguns. They double the unit's reaction score.

Well, adjacent tiles will happen if you want them to happen. You just have to play a bit differently.

Nah, a shotgunner only really requires decent TU and maybe reasonable HP / RFL (though the latter is boosted by the 2x reflex bonus). It's a low-accuracy weapon so having mediocre accuracy doesn't matter so much as with other weapons. Even a 40 accuracy soldier will have 70% to hit from a normal shot on an adjacent tile, and that means two of the three pellets hit...each doing almost as much damage as a successful AR shot. I guess it's an "advanced" weapon, but I think it's still pretty good.

Which tileset are these stairs on? Always the middle east tileset? It's likely a mis-set tile type that we've set to be passable by accident.

Hmmm. See if it happens in the next build. The dev version has changed the save version since the release so we can't load the saves any more unfortunately.

We've fixed 2) now, but unfortunately I can't load up the save game from 3). Do you know what rank the Sebillian was? Was it actually a Soldier, or just a soldier of unknown rank? It's almost certainly the assault plasma sprites being mis-set but I know know what rank it'll relate to.

I think the aliens turn around to check if there's anyone sneaking up on them at the start of the turn, so it probably just saw your guys and then shot them. The "always face the closest Xenonauts" is a hack, but it's there to make reaction fire reasonably effective.