Chris

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

If a Reaper hatches from a zombie during the alien turn, it has full HP and TU. If the zombie is killed during the human turn and a Reaper appears, it should have full HP but no TU.

Yes, we do need to fix the issue that a player who expands air coverage quickly enough can avoid terror missions and bases spawning at all.

Fair enough, if you've played V21 a bit then you're entitled to your opinions

No, Reapers are meant to spawn at full health after you kill the zombie. It's not realistic, but it makes you think more carefully about when you kill the zombies. The 0 TU thing is to stop it being totally overpowered.

You need to opt into the Experimental branch on Steam to receive the Experimental updates. Instructions on how to do it are here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5958-Xenonauts-Experimental-Builds-Instructions

Yeah, it says that crouching gives you 80% of the chance to be hit that a standing soldier has. Regarding the accuracy calculations, try playing the gc_editor.exe version of the game while running the debugger: www.xenonauts.com/devfiles/xeno_debugger.exe That will post debug information on the numbers the accuracy formula is using for each shot. Might shed some light on what's actually happening.

TrashMan, if you post it here as well as in the AI fix thread GJ has going, that'll maximise the chances of it getting our attention

Went, have you actually played the new balance or are you just telling us it's pointless without having tried it?

If my posts yesterday were ill-tempered and offended some people, I apologise. It's just a combination of the fact that I'd just typed out a long polite post that disappeared when I clicked the quote button, and people love to create strawmen and exaggerate when they're telling us we've made bad decisions and being told you're wrong in a factually inaccurate way grinds after a while. @Newfr - have you played V21 Experimental 1, or better still played V20 Experimental Balance Patch 2 on Veteran? The AI isn't dumb any more, and they'll probably wreck you unless you play very carefully. Also, it's not fair to say our choice of mechanics were bad because the game right now is not completely balanced or has bugs in it, that just means that the game is not completely finished. If you think we're not going to be able to finish the game properly, fine, but that's a different argument entirely. @legit / kraex - the main problem with the system that you're suggesting is you're making the ground combat missions much more useful than the air combat missions, where as now they're somewhat better but not massively better. There's never actually been a relations penalty or anything for not doing combat missions in the game, but even when we told people that some would still do all the missions even if they weren't enjoying them - because doing all the missions was by far the optimal way to play the game, as you got much more in the way of rewards for doing it. It was a chore, but it gave them by far the best chance of winning the game. So if we're agreeing that having the UFO waves rather than the system in the OG is better (and for the purposes of this discussion, let's say that we are), then we either need to reduce the number of crash sites in some manner or make it so that not doing every ground combat mission is a valid choice in terms of game progression. Under what you're proposing, it is not. TL;DR - relying purely on tedium to discourage people from doing crash sites is not a good idea. People will just say "this game is boring" and stop playing. Regarding the point due to lack of consequences for failing ground combat missions, I do sort of see your point. It's true that losing a crash site mission doesn't give you much of a penalty...but losing a terror site gives you major penalties, and losing an alien base mission means the base is not destroyed. So you can't really ignore all the crash sites entirely, as you do need the soldier experience and in-game resources to be able to tackle the other types of mission. It's not just research. EDIT - There is currently a situation where players can get so dominant in the air that they don't get alien bases or terror sites, and we're going to fix that so they'll still get some even if they shoot down every UFO (the bases are needed for the tech tree, so this isn't just to make the game harder).

OK. We'll bear it in mind then. It's quite possible that the size of the map increases the number of calculations a unit has to perform each turn too, so more units and bigger maps increases the time exponentially. The HM "freeze" sounds like quite a serious problem though. Are there specific situations (with regards to alien types and mission type) in which it happens, or does it happen mostly at random?

You're the one exaggerating wildly. One battleship UFO mission gets you everything you need to get to Cydonia in the original game. I've spent the last four years doing a remake of X-Com, it's generally safe to assume I know what I'm talking about. So yeah, the original game requires 1 mission to complete and a skilled player could do Xenonauts in 7 missions, and you're complaining that Xenonauts takes too few missions to complete compared to the original... Yeah, the description says "a blend of turn-based ground combat and strategic command". It doesn't say "only turn-based ground combat". You apparently want a game that's just ground combat, but then you may as well play Rebelstar where there is no Geoscape at all. A lot of X-Com players like the Geoscape part of the game, and it wouldn't be X-Com without the Geoscape...and I'd disagree that the Geoscape was only 10% of the game, too. As vaultdweller says, why don't you just play every ground combat mission? The game doesn't stop you from doing that, it just means that it's not compulsory to do it. You can skip literally every air combat mission if you want to using the autoresolve. It just sounds like you're raging because we're letting other people play the game in the way they want, even though you're still perfectly able to play the game you want to.

This update is basically just a balance patch for Experimental 1, as a larger update with new systems and bugfixes is due to follow next week. I thought it'd be useful to make a few select balance changes and get feedback on them in isolation. THERE IS NO CHANGE IN VERSION NUMBER IN THE LAUNCHER! The .exes should remain the same and I can't see the changes causing any new bugs, but you can report them in this thread if you find them. Balance Changes: - Smoke grenades no longer block line of sight. Instead, smoke reduces shot accuracy by 20% for each tile of smoke the projectile passes through. - Alien accuracy global modifier reduced by 10% - Alien invasion speed set to 1.2x for Insane, 1x for Veteran, 0.8x for Normal and 0.6x for Easy. Previously the scale was one level higher, so Normal was set to 1x. - Soldier strength carry formula changed to 6kg + (0.3*Strength), giving 50 strength soldiers similar carry capacity but making stronger / weaker soldiers more extreme. - Combat shields now have 100% chance of blocking shots from the front, but still 60% from the sides. HP increased from 60 to 80, and 120 to 160 for Assault Shields. - Alien grenade damage nerfed a bit - Burst fire on alien Plasma Rifles nerfed to 40 accuracy, down from 55 - Fixed some incorrect clip sizes in soldier inventories To comment on the updated balance, please use the threads below: Ground Combat: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8791-Ground-Combat-Balance-Discussion-V21-Experimental-Balance-Patch%21?p=98015 Geoscape: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8790-Geoscape-Balance-Discussion-V21-Experimental-Balance-Patch%21?p=98014

No, it was an oversight on my part that I only noticed about an hour ago. It'll be fixed in the next version.

These are the changes in the balance patch: - Smoke grenades no longer block line of sight. Instead, smoke reduces shot accuracy by 20% for each tile of smoke the projectile passes through. - Alien accuracy global modifier reduced by 10% - Soldier strength carry formula changed to 6kg + (0.3*Strength), giving 50 strength soldiers similar carry capacity but making stronger / weaker soldiers more extreme. - Combat shields now have 100% chance of blocking shots from the front, but still 60% from the sides. HP increased from 60 to 80, and 120 to 160 for Assault Shields. - Alien grenade damage nerfed a bit - Burst fire on alien Plasma Rifles nerfed to 40 accuracy, down from 55 The smoke change is a deceptively large change, so it'll be interesting to see what effect it has. The aliens have been made a bit less accurate too, so see how this plays. Remember, if you've played X-Com before then you should be playing on Veteran rather than Normal.

The only change to the Geoscape balance is that the invasion speed for Veteran has been changed to the former Normal speed. This change is echoing the changes for the ground combat, as Veteran is meant to be the normal difficulty setting for people who have played quite a bit of X-Com. I will also be checking the feedback given in the previous balance thread before the next build, so you don't need to cross post.

Yeah, the Initiative system is coming back in a future update.

That was the big change, yeah, and it probably did have knock-on effects. You didn't like the Initiative reaction system, Max?

If you're shooting at something that isn't the alien you want to hit, your chance of hitting him is reduced by 75%. So even if you had 100% accuracy to the tile behind him, you'd only have a 25% chance of hitting the alien and a 75% chance of hitting the tile (if that makes sense). The accuracy formula was changed specifically to prevent that issue. Is it still happening?

Very little has changed in balance terms since V20 balance patch 2, combat shield nerf aside. The accuracy levels are identical. (Just pointing it out because it's occasionally problematic for developers how opinions can change due to perceived differences as much as real ones.)

The forum ate my reply and I'm not going to write another long one (it's also put me in a bad mood). There's a lot of melodrama about this change. Newfr, see how far you get in the game if you "COMPLETELY IGNORE" the ground combat. You can literally completely ignore the air combat due to the autoresolve system for that, but you're still forced to play the ground combat missions...so you're either confused or exaggerating wildly. Legit1337, you can still do the ground combat missions to maximise your loot and be better off than if you'd just airstruck the crash site. (Also, why so desperate to maximise funding on the Geoscape if it's just a little minigame?) The original game can be completed with one crash site mission. Please stop telling us be more like the original game, but then telling us we've made the ground combat irrelevant by only forcing a skilled player to do seven missions. Shouldn't we reduce that down to one mission so we're keeping the spirit of X-Com, then? Legit, you're also saying we shouldn't nerf the importance of the air combat because it wasn't important enough in the original game, but then you're also saying we should make the ground combat so important people should have to do almost every mission (giving 4x the resources means the only optimal way to play the game is to play EVERY crash site, not airstrike it). But then what do you do about the increased number of UFOs in the waves we use to make the air combat more interesting? More UFOs = more crash sites = even more grind, and X-Com vets would think it was a bug if shooting down a UFO didn't generate a crash site. So, as is frequently the case, people seem to want to have their cake and eat it. You can't just pull out individual system changes and then say "this is bad, change it back" and want to keep the other upgrades that caused us to make that change in the first place. More challenging air combat = more UFOs = more crash sites, so we need a way to deal with them. It doesn't even make ground combat less important, as you still get increased money from doing a crash site, it's just in the form of loot rather than country relations.

Thanks for the post with the screenshots. Now you point it out, the pathfinding does behave rather strangely (I hadn't really noticed it before). I'll point the relevant coders to this thread.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm a bit pressed for time and you've written such a long post I can't really hope to reply to them all, but I have read them

Can everyone post how long the average alien turn takes on a Light Scout mission in V20 Stable HF, or V21 Experimental 1 please? It works fairly fast on my PC, certainly no 5 minute alien turns for me. My work processor is an i5-2500, so it's about five years old now...but I guess it's hardly slow either. Sukio - are you playing on V20 or V21? If you're getting that in V21 then it's even more concerning, because the number of aliens has been reduced by about 30% and you're correct in surmising that the number of units on a map increases turn time.

New Reapers should spawn with 0 TUs if they are spawned by killing the zombie. If that's not happening, it's a bug. I did update the TU and health to broadly take into account the new balance changes, but I've not playtested any missions with Reapers yet so I can't comment on their specific balance right now.