Chris

Prime - again, that sounds like it's something wrong with your local copy rather than the game itself. I've not seen any other reports of frequent random CTDs.

The point is that you're not meant to use torpedoes on everything. You shouldn't be using them on the fighters. Because the fighters take two missiles to bring down, a long re-arm time (unrealistic or otherwise) would prevent players from using torpedoes against fighters. The advantage of the Condor is meant to be that it has a cannon, which will make short work of the fighters. Therefore it doesn't need to use missiles against them. Thus a Foxtrot and two Condors should have 2 x Torpedoes, 4 x Light Missiles and a load of cannon rounds left to deal with the main ship once the escorts have been shot down. Three Foxtrots would only have 2 x Torpedoes left after shooting down both escorts. Would that not work? I've not played the mid-game air combat for a while so I'm not completely up-to-date on what's happening there. In any case, you're not meant to be able to use the same planes to shoot down all the UFOs in a wave, so we'll have to nerf the re-arm times so players actually have to make decisions about where to send their planes rather than just using the same squadron to get them all.

Thus far we're quite happy with the effects of the 50% variance we've added. I think increasing it any more puts us in the realms of where luck may become a bigger factor than the equipment you have, but I think most people agree that we've seen a big improvement from the 20% it was previously. It could be made more complex and and realistic but I don't really think it's necessary, and represents further investment of implementation and balancing time I think would be better spent elsewhere.

Hmmm. The main issue in what I've watched is you've engaging with Foxtrots, killing the escorts, backing off and re-arming and then almost immediately sending the same planes out to shoot down the main craft (I think there was also a bug where one of the fighters magically came back to life, wasn't there?) Anyway, you're not meant to be able to do that. What would happen to your playstyle if the re-arm time on aircraft was set to 6 hours or something?

Yeah, you're right. That's causing crashes again. We'll get that fixed for the next update.

Kimchi - it sounds like an installation error. You should Revalidate your files in Steam (right click on the game).

Polygon have a very interesting article on the story behind it: http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/19/4614410/xcom-the-bureau-development-2006-2013

Bear in mind that 9 is the upper limit, and even if you wind up with 9 in a single Light Scout, they don't land - which means up to half of them will have been killed on impact. Statistically you'd be unlucky to get more than 4 on any mission.

Thanks for the thoughts. Are you playing V18 Stable or the Experimental? If you're playing V18 and love it I suspect V19.7 Experimental will blow your mind (and fix a few of the things you've mentioned there).

Old thread - but this forum is much easier to use. We've got a sticky on the Steam forums about Experimental Builds and the RSS feed in the launcher contains all the posts about the new Experimental versions too, so it's not that hidden really!

The weighted average idea is fine, but doesn't necessarily seem an upgrade to me (just equally valid but not what we're using). It makes "special" events rarer, but then I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. Pure random provides more variation and therefore more interesting events.

Hum, good point. Stick them in here if there are any particularly bothering you I guess. We're hoping for the V19.8 Experimental this Friday, and if that's working well we'll use that as V19 Stable.

Cody - the damage variance actually represents the difference between getting shot in the foot and shot in the face. In reality that probably represents more than a + / - 50% increase in damage.

Bad luck sometimes just kills someone. It won't be the most important factor in whether you win or a lose a mission, but sometimes someone is just in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets a critical plasma bolt in the face. That's how life works, and it adds to the tension of the game. If you want your soldiers to be 100% safe, leave them at base.

I'm not sure having the additional "pelletcount" as well as "shotcount" makes things more intuitive necessarily, but what you've suggested could work. Probably a better idea is having a singleshotcount and a burstshotcount tag. Either way, it could be done. It's not that high on our list of priorities at the moment though if I'm honest.

It's "probably one shot" rather than "maybe one shot". Just because your dude has advanced armour doesn't mean you should know he's got an Extra LifeTM in his backpack. Particularly given the alternative against advanced aliens weapons (not having armour) would be certain death.

The wiki is probably going to be removed if I'm honest. It never really took off and getting it filled up is going to be a looot of effort I'd rather spend on writing a manual or something.

I think the new build actually fixes this. There's no reference to the Green Berets in that as far as I can see.

Yeah, but surely single and burst shot will fire different amounts of projectiles?

Voeter - hmm, interesting. Yes, it's quite possible we'll buff the autopsy research either just to make it have a shorter research time or to increase the damage bonus to 20% or so. You should note that laser weapons cost money and have to be issued to each soldier individually, though, whereas the autopsy bonus is global. In regards to the general discussion, the way the tech tree works is generally that there is a "gateway" tech for each tier - usually a power source of some kind. Once you've researched that, the choice then comes from whether you'd like the new armour or new weapons or new interceptors etc first. The "choice" can't really come that much from the research tree because it's used in-game to control the player's progression. Research times will probably be shorter in the easier difficulty settings.

Have you used the Toggle Roof UI button to hide the upper parts of the buildings?

a333 - hmmm, moving that logic to the ammunition would mean we'd need to set separate shot / ammo consumption values for burst and single fire in the ammo, as well as setting accuracy and TU consumption for the weapon for single and burst fire separately. I think it might make the XML a bit convoluted, no?

There have been historic issues with the accuracy % on the cursor not actually reflecting the hit %, or at least that the subsequent behaviour of "hits" or "misses" meant that the % was inaccurate. The debug program I've previously linked allows this to be tested to some degree, but it is certainly possible there's some misbehaviour there.

Yup, the info needed is in the thread a333 linked!

No problem. Thanks for deleting the Steam thread.