Chris

Waladil - as a genuine question, what is it that makes you feel you should still do Scout and Light Scout missions when you basically said you aren't getting any in-game reward from doing so any more? Do you feel that the game would penalise you for not attacking them? Does it? One of the things I find astonishing is that people will do literally every mission that they generate even though they really don't need to (or aren't supposed to need to). I've tried to think up ways to communicate it to people but a lot of people seem to think that doing every mission is the only viable way to play.

I can guarantee you I won't be making a Xenonauts air combat app next

Giovanni should be back middle of next week, hopefully. Might have to chain him to his keyboard next time we try to release a Stable build. EDIT - smoitessier, I'd wait for the next hotfix in a day or two if you're doing something arcane to get hold of it. It won't be the latest version for long.

Sorry man, hate to disappoint fan but this one's not really my fault

No, we're not ever going to have a native Linux version I'm afraid - the engine won't let us do it. Also WINE causes problems with Steam so we'll only be putting the final game up on Steam on Linux, you'll need to use Desura / Humble Bundle for it in the meantime.

Yeah, he was talking about the machinegun I'm afraid. Don't think English is his first language.

The debug output should explain shots that hit / miss, although I've not looked at it lately myself. The scattering may just still be screwed. If you run this program while using the gc_editor.exe file variant then it should give a bit of commentary on the shot accuracy roll: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26290309/Dbgview.exe

EchoFour - I hate to disappoint but there's no chaingun in the game, I think he's referring to the machinegun there. Irishguy - not officially, but if you copy the images in /earth/ from V18 and save them then you can just overwrite the ones in the newer version when they come out. That'll preserve the horrible black look forever, if you're crazy enough to want it!

I feel the fact that one of the major areas of complaint is that the shotguns / carbines are underpowered suggests we've made some progress in recent times We'll look into the bugs and see if we can get another hotfix out early next week.

There's an issue with the alien bases - they remain Small throughout the entire game at the moment, so you don't get Medium and Large bases. Praetors only appear on Large bases (currently not spawning) and Battleships, I think. They look different to all the other aliens. You'll know them when you see them. The base issue will be fixed in the next build or the one after that - it's a priority bug.

Yes, it's a known issue and we will address it. It only affects the later game, though, so it's not as high priority as some of the other issues.

It turns out the download was corrupted for both Desura and the Humble Store. We're getting it re-uploaded at the moment. Sorry about that - the file works fine at our end so I'm not sure how it got corrupted on both sites...

No, my concern was that: 1) The end effect of the system is identical to that of the existing system, so it doesn't address the gameplay complaints about the system. People will still be complaining if they don't like the idea of non-permadeath interceptors. 2) It adds an extra layer of abstraction to building planes. At the moment to get a plane you go to the manufacturing screen and build one, and if it is damaged then it is out of action for a while and is repaired up to strength. This requires no explanation for players. Under your system, you have to choose the airframe for the hangar...and then do a manufacturing process on it when it arrives for some reason, which different to the manufacturing process for everything else in the game. New players will be scratching their head at the extra step. 3) The assumption that the airframe will always survive a crash is basically the same as the assumption there will be recoverable parts of a crash-landed interceptor in my system. What happens if it crashes into the sea? I don't see the logic fundamentally being any better, really. 4) If 3) is not the case and you're given a replacement airframe every time a plane is shot down, why do you have to pay for planes at all? Why are they not available in unlimited numbers? And if the backing nations are doing all the manufacturing etc for you, why do we have to manufacture our own weapons etc? So while it is one of the more palatable of the alternative systems, I still don't think it addresses the points people don't like about the current system and also adds extra complexity to the manufacturing process in the first place. For those reasons I don't really think it's worth implementing. In any case, as I said in my previous post, we'll leave the current system in for the foreseeable future and see how it works. We may change it in the future if it is not working but as the current system is already in and working we're at least going to give that an extended test first. As the topic will be re-opened in the future and thus the debate here is a bit meaningless, this'll be my last post on the matter. Best to save further discussion until we come back to the issue.

@xcomnaut - Xcom1994 really did not have one shot kills on the majority of aliens. It would frequently take 3-4 shots to kill them.

That'd never work!

The balance of the game is still in heavy flux. As you can see, weapons are increased / decreased in power quite regularly until we find something we think works. I'd only get worried about potential imbalance when we say balancing is finished and there won't be any more of it. I've also seen quite a few complaints that we're nerfing weapons instead of improving other weapons - this strikes me as a strange complaint. The end result in both cases is that all human weapons end up equally useful, whether or not you get there by reducing the power of the most powerful weapon or increasing the power of the least powerful!

It's too late to change the UFO designs, I'm afraid. In hindsight it would have been much better to do something more geometric than we actually did. If we ever do a Xenonauts 2, the lesson will very much have been learned. The current UFO interior maps will get a bit of love though. Chairs are indeed planned.

Duke - It's something we're going to ask GJ to look at when he's back late this week or next, so hopefully at some point in the V19 builds.

That's for Aaron to do. He has more faith in the existing mechanics than I do

Yeah. The air combat isn't what I was hoping for when we first designed the game. I don't think that detailed a combat model works very well in an X-Com game. As Dranak says, it's a bad combination of being hard to learn and quite abusable once you know how. If I did the game over I'd just rip out the air combat and have the standard X-Com-style air combat...but it's too integrated into the game now (if it was removed, you'd have to cut out a lot of the UFOs and interceptors too as they just wouldn't have any differentiation). Also people hate it when you give them a feature and take it away, so I don't think removing the existing model is a viable choice any more either. Hence, you get auto-resolve which can at least take into account the different type of UFO against different type of interceptors for those that don't like playing the combat. Maybe we'll dream up something new once the new UI is done...but we'll see.

At the risk of igniting another major debate, they don't. They crash-land and the remains of the plane are recovered, shipped back to base and rebuilt. As a general note, as all the code is done for this feature, we're going to leave it in for a bit and balance the game around it for now and come back to it when everything has cooled off and we can have a more dispassionate look at the mechanic (and when people have had a chance to get used to it). We will then evaluate it to see how it has worked and if it needs to be replaced with something else. I appreciate not everyone likes the idea, but as the work has already been done on it it seems a shame to waste it without giving it a proper evaluation first.

You're right, I actually thought a Condor was a type of eagle until about a year ago. It turned out to be less awesome when I discovered it was in fact a vulture, but by then I couldn't be bothered to change it due to consistency reasons. Foxtrot is just a slightly altered version of the Foxhound, the name of the MiG that that Foxtrot is built on. The only weird thing with it is that it doesn't really fit with the rest of the aircraft names. Neither of the conventional interceptors do. Still, who needs logic?

Don't worry, we're not dismissing your opinion. I was just saying it's not worth getting worked up about the current state of the game, because right now it's probably at the lowest point in the balance / bugs cycle for V19. It will get better, don't worry. I know Aaron is playing with a significant accuracy increase for all the weapons in the next build, which will hopefully make combat a lot more deadly. We'll also be getting GJ to come back in and improve the AI more in the near future, so we're aware of these bugs. It's just that when you're working with a large team and have an end-goal in mind (i.e. V19 Stable) then the scheduling doesn't always marry up with the mini-releases we're doing along the way.

Waladil - please list the bugs that are annoying you the most in the thread where the OP specifically asks the community to report them, so we can prioritise fixing the ones that are annoying players the most. That's more helpful than going off on a massive rant about how we're not listening to the community. Also, please wind in the aggressive tone. You're playing an experimental build of the game. To access the experimental build, you have to read a long post explaining how it's almost certainly going to be full of bugs and balance issues and if you can't deal with it, you should stick with the Stable build. We've not been fixing up all the infuriating bugs because that's not how development works - you implement the features you need and then you fix the bugs. In layman's terms, doing it the other way round is like trying to paint an unfinished house...your nice new paint job gets ruined when you build the rest of the house. It's wasted effort, as later code additions will likely break things again. The Stable build will be exactly that when it arrives.

Yeah, it's set in the Sub-Map editor for that sprite. It's the Stopping Chance value.