Chris

The discussion behind the implementation of airstrikes has already been had at length. If you have less UFOs spawning then you only need a couple of interceptors throughout the entire game and I don't want Xenonauts to be a game where only two dozen UFOs appear throughout the entire thing. That wouldn't be much of an invasion. But then something needs to be done about all these extra crash sites. Missions are less tense if they become a repetitive grind, no matter how dangerous they may be. I'm not sure there are actually many people arguing with the fundamental idea of airstrikes, and I think they're a good addition to the game. I therefore think some of the responses do seem a little dramatic. The balance isn't final and will be updated so the player isn't penalised for doing ground missions or other common-sense "good" things to do, but it just takes a little time for the changes to work through the system.

We just call it radar so everyone knows what it does, even though it doesn't make much sense when you think about it too hard.

Thanks guys, we appreciate it.

TL;DR the whole thread. The idea is interesting but the tech tree isn't really balanced around the self-destructing equipment model. Also if we did that, there'd be no penalty for just killing all the aliens with explosives instead of using normal weapons (explosives destroy the equipment so you can't sell it). There's nothing wrong with the idea, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the existing system either. So in situations like that I'm content enough to do what takes less development time and is consistent with the original game.

Radar range increases when you build new radars, the detection chance is the same in the entire area covered and is pretty decent.

Also the two "local forces" UFO missions can't be airstriked, and only appear on Easy / Normal difficulty now. I don't see a problem to not getting a long term funding boost for completing them.

The increase in interceptor maintenance is a separate change so it's best not to involve that in the discussion. The purpose of this change was to stop the game penalising players for using airstrikes, because it doesn't build their long term funding. Now the player gets the long term funding from shooting down the UFO and the air strike / ground combat mission just effects short-term funding. You still get rewards from the missions, mostly from recovered technology that can be researched, soldier experience and money from selling the equipment recovered. The updated mission end screen won't have scoring on it, it'll just be informative - it's not really for the game to tell you whether a mission was "good" or "bad". You can figure that out yourself. Nor does it makes sense your score would affect your monthly funding - why would a mission where you lost half your squad give you more funding increase than one where you lost nobody? The nation wouldn't care (and so forth).

Yes, they will - assuming you've not deleted them from your hard drive in the past 24 hours.

There's a pretty major bug in V20 Experimental 6 where aliens have unlimited grenades, are able to throw them through walls, and use them at every available opportunity. We've spent the day trying to fix it, but we've not had any success so far so we've just rolled back to V20 Experimental 5 so people can play that over the weekend if they want. V20 Experimental 6 will hopefully return on Monday, but we're currently unsure. It's actually quite a complex issue and the grenade spam was a symptom rather than the actual disease. In short, there's an issue in the accuracy code where the AI is not being fed the correct "to hit" information for its shots. This is why they would always use grenades, as it thinks it is unable to hit the enemy with normal weapons - but it also means that if we remove their grenades, they won't attack the player at all. Therefore we can't hotfix it like we planned yesterday. We don't know when this bug will be fixed, nor if it will reveal further bugs when it is fixed - so we'll just carry on working on it and let you guys know when Experimental 6 is ready to be released again.

Scuttler went because the design is too spindly to work properly at the game scale - it's only a tile wide and not very tall, so you couldn't really see any detail. I experimented with turning it into a two tile robo death spider but it doesn't do anything that the Medium Drone didn't already do. The Juggernaut went because the thought of doing multi-tile enemies vertically as well as horizontally gave the programmers headaches just thinking about it. Also, the terror sites in the game were meant to be more like conventional warfare when the design was concepted - but we've increasingly realised that that just doesn't feel very X-Com (the current terror sites suffer a little from this at the moment). So there wasn't really much need for them and we cut them out.

Yeah, the Chimera, Cerberus and Manticore just became the Light, Medium and Heavy Drones. The enemies that were cut were the Scuttlers and the Juggernaut, which was a three storey tall Godzilla-style Andron vehicle that would only appear on Terror missions. Looked like this (at in-game size): http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/juggernaut2.png EDIT - and this was the Scuttler: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/scuttler.jpg

Was it destroyed when it ran out of fuel, or did it just go into negative fuel?

Yeah. This isn't a bug, it's because combat missions no longer give rewards to country relations based on your score. The mission rating will be removed in the updated screen.

Yeah, I've added a warning to the first post now. Best not to download it if you haven't already. We'll fix the issue or roll back the AI changes tomorrow.

Wonderful. We'll look into hotfixing the grenade spam tomorrow then.

An update on our milestones - we've decided that it is not feasible to try to get the game finished for the end of the December because of the way the holidays have fallen within the team (largely due to the cost of flights meaning our holidays don't line up properly). We will therefore be producing a V20 Stable in the near future so those on the regular branch have some upgrades to play with over their holidays: the changes to the UI, AI and game balance have all been pretty significant since V19. The fixes to the alien base hang and the aliens shooting through UFO floors mean V20 is (fingers crossed) now getting fairly stable, but we'll endeavour to fix up any remaining crash bugs or irritating bugs in the next couple of weeks and get V20 Stable out. I will specifically be looking at some of the resolution issues with the new UI to try and resolve them. As such, I wouldn't expect any major additions in the builds running up to V20 Stable in terms of programming - the biggest new feature that might get added is the game's updated loading screen. We'll post the remaining changes to be made before we can consider the game a release candidate along with the V20 Stable release.

It will be gone in the next release, it's already been fixed.

It's a relic of when the two were coded separately. It's not exactly intended but I don't consider it much of a problem.

I think 4 is the only one that is possible at this stage, unfortunately. 1) is intentional to keep the player guessing, even if it is unrealistic. We're not going to mess with the inventory code at this late stage of development so 2) is out, and while 3) is quite an interesting idea I'm not sure it's suited to Xenonauts. It's more the sort of thing you see in a Jagged Alliance game along with much more in-depth weapon customisation options - Xenonauts takes combat at a slightly higher level and abstracts the weapons a little more. So I like the idea but don't really think it fits with what we're trying to achieve. Glad you like the game!

Elysal - which specific bug do you mean? This build should allow you to change role and create new roles for your soldiers without any issues. Skitso - no, there isn't. Good point. All - we're planning to put out a new build tomorrow, which includes the long-awaited "shooting through the floor" fix, among others.

Easy mistake to make - they used to be listed as KIA, but we fixed it recently. It's a bit weird when a soldier "survives" being Reaper-ified though. We need to fix that.

I was under the impression they are not listed as KIA.

No, not at the moment. It's quite fiddly to do and we're considering whether there's any ways we can easily add it. It is a feature that gets requested a lot though so it's on our radar.

Yeah, soldiers can survive "death". It's a low chance and it's further reduced the further the soldier's HP was reduced below 0 (at -10 HP it falls to 0% survival change). It's been in the game for a while but I think we only recently added the "soldier recovered" notification to the screen. They were previously listed as KIA but then just reappeared in your troop rosters at 1% health. In my mind listing them as casualties is fine too, Gorlom, because a casualty doesn't necessarily imply death.

You are resurrecting an old thread. All the base simplification that is going to be done (the radar range changes) has already been done and there will be no further changes to the existing systems, except for balance changes where necessary. So you can sleep easy!