Chris

Sorry for not replying to this earlier, I've been ill / busy this week. Yes, I think UFOs that land should land for much longer than they do at the moment. I'm not sure about them generating events when they're on the ground though. Regarding the materials recovered from UFOs that have been shot down but don't spawn a crash site, for the purposes of this balance patch I'm just going to remove them. Initially it was added to make it worthwhile shooting down those UFOs, but that doesn't seem necessary any more and crash sites should be the only source of those resources imo. I don't want to rebalance the air combat in this changeset. I will probably have a look at it prior to release, but I don't want to change the niches of the planes either. I'm up for tweaking the relative stats and armaments of the UFOs, though. Yes, regarding the "two strikes" rule you're expected to lose some territory. The idea isn't that you can play a perfect game and protect every nation, you just need to accept you'll lose some and try not to lose many of them. The "loss" conditions are that if you lose a certain number of nations, the game ends. The number is lower on higher difficulty settings. Remember with these changes that you'll often WANT terror sites to spawn, as they'll give you relations boosts to the nations that you're losing the air war above (dropships do have global range these days). Hence why I've set the 50% autogenerated number so high. However, I can see the argument that it's a bit "gamey". Reducing the length of time before a terror UFO spawns a terror site seems an equally good solution, because it it spawns over protected territory then you have a chance to shoot it down and if it spawns over distant territory you don't - which means you'll get a chance at the ground terror site to boost relations.

Gene - yes, you're correct. Thanks.

We do have other things in the works but they're not progressing particularly quickly given how much time we have to spend on Xenonauts. We're not going to talk about them until after Xenonauts is done though (except to confirm that our next title won't be Xenonauts 2 or an expansion pack).

That's very strange. The game doesn't have any pre-requirements other than what is downloaded with Steam. Try the .exe files in the directory directly, see if they work. If not, there's really nothing more I suggest. Can you get a refund from Steam? Give it a try. If not, email me directly (see my sig) and we'll sort something out.

We're relatively close to release. We don't have a hard date yet because we're still tinkering with the balance, but most of the systems are done and we're just doing final polishing, adding some new maps and adding the final mission. I'd say we're 90-95% done I guess. Financially I think we could keep this up for at least another six months if we needed to, possibly longer. I'd like to release the game relatively soon but after having spent four or five years on it I'd rather spend the extra month or two on it to finish it properly rather than cut corners at the end. BF4 was unplayable for me on release but I started playing it again earlier this week and it's good fun now. No more random CTDs or the sound going missing etc.

Much like I did with the ground combat recently, I'm planning to put together an experimental balance patch for the Geoscape in an attempt to improve the gameplay experience. The changes may sound quite radical, but the idea is to test them to see if they make the game more fun - not all of them will make it into the final game, and perhaps none will. This thread is so people can post up unbalanced / boring bits of the Geoscape they think I should look at, or suggest alternative amendments to gameplay systems. Please don't dismiss any of the changes until you've played them. There's no reason why we shouldn't at least try things out. This work is mostly balance work, so changing the numbers in existing systems rather than creating new ones. However, there are a few systems I may give a more thorough working-over because I think they need the attention. Problems I see with the current Geoscape: 1) Air combat is too dominant. If you get enough interceptors up into the air, you can almost completely shut down the invasion. No alien bases nor terror sites appear, so you hardly need your ground troops at all. Lack of skill (or lack of equipment) in the ground combat should be just as detrimental to the game as falling behind in the air war. 2) It's hard to actually lose the game (instead, most players just abandon a game when they realise they are deep in a death spiral). It all feels a bit pedestrian, rather than tense high-stakes command work. 3) There are some locations for bases that are objectively better than others due to the coverage they generate. Potential solutions: 1) 50% of Alien Bases and Terror Sites will be generated automatically, so will always arrive even if you have complete air dominance. Perhaps one will be generated in the region with the lowest score during the month? 2) Terror Sites will appear earlier and will give a decent relations bonus if completed, but if not dealt with will cause major funding loss from that region. This funding loss should outweigh any potential gains made from interceptions that month. The funding gain may also outweigh any potential losses from the interceptions that month, too (up for debate). 3) Funding will be reworked to make the death spiral more sudden, but also easier to understand. I'd like a system where if a nation reduces your funding two months in a row, they leave the project entirely. 4) I'm also debating a funding system where your base funding from each nation increases by a global % each month, with nations giving you temporary bonuses / penalties to the funding depending on your success in the air war (nations still drop out if they give you a negative score two months in a row). Under the current system, any permanent increase in funding largely comes from shooting down more UFOs than you let through. 5) UFO missions will be randomly spawned based on landmass, rather than randomly assigned per nation. This means multiple regions would be harder to defend with a single base. The idea is to differentiate between the mission types a bit more. Crash sites should be used primarily for research and resource gathering, while terror sites should be more regular and be more about keeping the nations happy. Alien bases are a bit of both. The auto-generated missions would boost the importance of the ground combat relative to the air combat, meaning the overall game success is not based entirely on how good the Xenonaut interceptors are. I want to make the funding more "sudden" because it gives the player more hard decisions to make. I think the "two strikes" rule is easy to understand and would give people plenty to worry about, rather than the fuzziness of the previous system. It may force early expansion for extra radar coverage, but hopefully the player may also be able to support a one-base strategy if they win all the terror sites and keep on top of the interceptions around their base. Making the gains / losses from air combat missions temporary would relatively reduce the importance of the air combat, because as the gains / losses are permanent they snowball pretty heavily under the current system. A steadily rising base income would allow you to maintain higher income than at the start of the game even with less territories, as under the system above I'd expect you to lose some along the way. However, losing one in the late game would result in losing a LOT of funding (so you better win those terror sites)! Nevertheless, I'm unsure about that one. I think making too many things temporary risks railroading the experience, making each playthrough relatively similar. We don't want to go too far and lose the freeform feeling of X-Com. I'm not sure if the effect would be that extreme or not though...I guess it depends on how strong the bonuses / penalties were. Maybe just consider it as the base funding levels increasing globally by a flat % each month? That doesn't sound so unbalancing for the game. Anyway, thoughts and suggestions are welcome, but bear in mind that this is an experimental balance patch designed to test radical ideas to see if they work. If your post just says "OMG you're wrecking the game" I probably won't spend too much time reading it...if we've wrecked the game, I'm sure people will tell us that when they play the patch

Good research there, thanks. I'll look into it tomorrow.

All of the funding levels can be tweaked in gameconfig.xml already. You can have a play and see what works best.

This should already be working, but apparently it is not. It happened to me a couple of times on my playthroughs, too - ironically the higher the accuracy of your soldier, the more likely he is to hit your own soldier (rather than hitting nothing at all, that is - he's even more likely to actually hit the target).

Yeah, the continent masks are in /assets/earth/continentmasks.

Light drones have caused problems in the past. Being able to hover affects pathfinding and having a weapon that can only burst fire are two possible culprits if the issue is connected to them.

I've updated those files to *hopefully* fix that issue now. Let me know if you see it again after the next update.

Yeah, I really should fix that. Btw, any recovered weapon in your soldier inventory will not be lost...so you can arm your troops with AKs as long as you don't then unequip them afterwards.

Sounds like a problem with your download. I'd try right click > options > verify game integrity, and if that doesn't work, I'd disable the stat tracking. Let us know if either fix the issue. EDIT - occasionally anti-virus programs cause issues too, try disabling that temporarily.

Mmmm, yeah, we may disable the stat tracking mode by default. It does cause some issues.

Supression can't "miss" as far as I'm aware. It's applied to the tile you're aiming at rather than where the bullet lands, though.

That save works fine for me, looks like a problem with your download?

I'm not gonna watch 30 minutes of video footage to see the slowdown - do you have any rough timestamps for when it occurs?

(There is a potentially very interesting debate to have as to whether UFO events should cause permanent relations damage, or just a temporary drop in funding for the next month.)

Because the UFOs attack in waves, and if you have three Light Scouts spawn then you need three interceptors to catch them and shoot them down. If it's not compulsory to shoot down the second and third Light Scout, you only need the first interceptor. A lot of the complexity of the air combat evaporates with just one plane at each base. You can autoresolve the air combat too - you're not forced to fight every air combat battle, just like you're not forced to fight every ground combat mission. In fact, you're not forced to fight any air combat battles at all - you just need to send your planes to the right places. The wave system stops this being too tedious, as it's something you have to do once every few days rather than being interrupted every 12 hours by a new UFO like you were in the original game. I can see some aspects of tedium creeping in, but as you point out issuing targets to a bunch of planes is much quicker than fighting an entire ground combat mission. I can see what you're getting at with regards to the rewards for air combat being of the permanent snowballing kind, while the rewards for ground combat are not. But once terror sites are being spawned despite air superiority, it won't seem so overwhelmingly beneficial to go for air domination first. You'll need a bit of both.

Mmm, OK. I'll think about it for a while then and see if I change my mind. If you're talking specifically about relations bonuses rather than relative allocation of rewards between airstrike and doing the ground combat mission, the key point is that I don't see crash sites as a particularly important mission once you've done the first and perhaps second of each UFO type. They should be optional, depending on how the player wants to play the game. Therefore, if you need more resources then you can do a crash site and get some money and resources, and it's basically either a one-time bonus (or loss). Easy choice for the player to make, right? Do you need the money or resources / experience urgently, or are you happy with the current position? Once you add in long-term benefits for doing an essentially optional task, you're encouraging the player to do the mission in a much stronger way. Doing 10 of those extra mission at two relations points each is $200,000 a month for the rest of the game, right? It snowballs much more than one-time bonuses do, so it stops those missions being optional unless the funding bonus provided is vanishingly small.

Yeah, so basically you're arguing that people who feel obliged to play in an optimal way should be forced to grind crash site missions, because doing crash site missions should always give you a massive advantage compared to people that don't do it. You can view my argument as UFO crash sites being primarily about gathering resources, experience and research, whilst you NEED your squad for potentially disastrous missions like terror sites, alien bases and the final mission (as well as the crash sites you choose to do). I don't see why you're so keen to force players to do every gathering mission, when the emphasis should be on the big missions instead. A player doesn't want to do 8 Light Scout missions in the first month...so what? You're asking for choice on whether to do a combat mission or not once you've got enough resources, but the game already offers that. I've not balanced the Geoscape yet and it's not necessarily working like it should be. But the issues are all just number balancing and don't require ripping out game systems wholesale to accommodate them. EDIT - to answer your post above, if effectively the "three strikes" rule would be in the game already, the ground combat would be the most important part of the game again. I'd only need to change a few numbers in the code to generate that effect. I don't see the relevance of whether the player feels like they're being "rewarded" for doing the ground combat or just preventing their game from being prematurely ended?

Think of it this way - in a theoretical world where alien bases and terror sites were made severe enough to totally wreck a month if not dealt with, and if the bonuses for shooting down UFOs were less strong, are air combat missions still the be all and end all? Or does dealing with terror attacks and alien base missions the most important thing in the game? If it does (and I'm pretty sure it would), then it's just a number balance issue and the fact that you don't get relations bonuses for doing a crash site mission is largely irrelevant. In which case, you need to make an argument for a numbers rebalance rather than a fundamental system change.

That was a typo. It was meant to say "airstrike" missions. You're stretching your argument, though. You get Geoscape penalties if you don't shoot down UFOs, and you get bonuses if you shoot them down...it's not all upside. If alien bases and terror sites give a severe penalty to relations, why is completing the terror sites and alien bases with your ground combat to prevent that happening not an upside? You also get a relations bonus for completing terror sites anyway...you're not really appraising the contribution of those two mission types properly in your post.

Yes, windows are tied to hypervelocity and they're not working as intended at the moment. It's on our fix list.