Chris

Yeah, I'm potentially interested in this - it's not something I'm planning on doing before Early Access though. Fair enough, I guess an upgraded stun melee weapon could be cool. I'll make a note of it, but there's quite a few different moving parts required to add a new weapon to the game so I'm not going to give it serious consideration until after the Early Access launch.

Yes, the item destruction should also be fixed. And yeah, you're still going to be able to abuse Cleaner Cells if you want. I'm still thinking about how to fix that, it's not something we'll be fixing overnight.

Yeah, you're free to sell the data as soon as you get back. I can see how it's unclear though, and I'll think about how we can indicate that to the player. The static maps do get a bit tedious after a while, but the goal is to have three different potential maps for each of the static Cleaner missions so it's less repetitive than it would be if there were just one.

Thanks. I'll get this fixed.

Thanks. Yeah, this bug is already fixed in the newest experimental builds, which will be released onto the main branch in a week or two!

Thanks. Yeah, I can reproduce this. So are you telling me that you've already completed the Cleaner Headquarters mission? Because if so then the Cleaner Cells should have been cleared from the map, and maybe that's what's causing the crash. Do you have the save from before the mission? I can't really check anything on strategy because the game crashes as soon as it loads.

So smoke deals a small amount of stun damage if you start the turn in it, or move through it - I think it's like 2 per tile. But it deals a LOT more if you end your turn in it, something like 20. I think the AI units getting stunned is usually because they stay in the smoke rather than because they try to leave it. It'd be easy to change or zero out those values, but I think fundamentally the issue is just that at present the AI isn't really aware of smoke so happily just stands there until it passes out from smoke inhalation.

Thanks guys. I'm going to put out a quick hotfix for this issue.

Yeah, I saw your message and fixed it, don't worry. Thanks

Thanks. Actually, in this case your description is enough and I've been able to fix the bug based on that!

Yeah, that's fair. I'll give that a try in the upcoming hotfix.

I've had this thread bookmarked to read as part of my next balance pass, and as it looks like you're still about on the forums I just thought I'd briefly necro the thread and thank you for the detailed feedback. I was internally debating whether to bother adding support for rotating soldiers in the dropship, but I wasn't sure if anyone would use it before reading your post.

Yeah. The pacing question is difficult, really. You're right that you're not meant to go for the Cleaner Cells immediately, unless it's part of some crazy elite strat. But if the player does a bad job on the Cleaner Intel Hub mission, they might come out with only 20% progress - which means it'll be a long time before those Cells appear. And there's nothing they can do to speed it up, because the data required to do that is in the missions they've not yet revealed. Whereas other players might manage to reveal the Cells almost immediately if they do well at the Intel Hub mission. I guess it's self-solving to some extent - only the good players capable of dealing with the mission would get it early. But it doesn't fully solve it. Might still be an improvement though.

This is the third hotfix for V27, and hopefully the last. It breaks saved games so if you want to continue playing V27.2, please switch the the Experimental Legacy branch. Changelog: Cleaner Cell missions are now unlocked at 50% progress on the Cleaner network, not immediately. The number of desks in the Cleaner Intel Hub mission has now been reduced to 20, meaning it's no longer possible to unlock the Cleaner Cells before you've encountered your first UFO. Quantum Decoder is now called the Quantum Array, and is a global upgrade for the standard radar rather than being a seperate building. HEVY and MARS smoke launchers no longer cause damage or armour destruction. Did a readability pass on the first few Xenopedia research projects. Fixed a crash when firing the MARS smoke launcher. Fixed the Dragonfly dropship engineering project actually giving you the Valkyrie. Fixed the Cleaner Cell missions still not registering that you'd captured the VIP in some cases. Fixed not being able to change the equipment of Unassigned soldiers. Fixed air superiority missions not actually attacking Xenonaut aircraft. Fixed the tutorial being impossible to complete on Commander difficulty.

Yeah, it's possible the Cleaner Cells need more balancing. Note that each Cell has a unique bonus; only one of the cells has armoured enemies. In previous versions of the game the Psyon was extremely aggressive due to a bug so it went down pretty quickly most times I played it. That might mean I've set the reinforcements to turn up a turn or two early. And maybe the 15 armour could be nerfed down to 12, or maybe there's just too many enemies. There's plenty of balancing levers to pull but I guess I just need a bit more community feedback on it. EDIT - also, what difficulty are you playing on?

The autopsies were previously shown after the mission, but now just appear in the Xenopedia without popping up. The player was getting spammed with 3-4 popups after some missions, which was just too much. I might just make them research projects instead. The research report explicitly tells you how the ability works, though. I'm not sure it feels very X-Com to immediately tell the player exactly what the aliens are doing to them as soon as they are encountered (you yourself immediately figured out that it happens whenever you miss a shot).

I've tried to reproduce it and I wasn't able to. If it happens again, please post the most recent save (the game autosaves at start / end of turn) and the logs so we can see what's happening. Otherwise we can't fix the bug.

Yeah, that's the Psyon ability. I think perhaps this is the downside of hiding the autopsy reports away in the Xenopedia, as they tell you what the ability does. It doesn't trigger if the Psyon is suppressed or not looking at you, or it takes damage from the attack.

If that's a bug you've encountered, please provide save games and logs for the crash (details in thread below). I'll try and find some time to test it today based purely on your text description, but I've got a lot to do and there's no guarantee I'll be able to reproduce it anyway.

Thanks. Yeah, I can reproduce this. We'll get it fixed.

Thanks. 1) Hmm, I'll have a think. You just sit in the corner and kill all the enemies with overwatch? 2) I'll have a look at this in Early Access. Rifles are the most versatile weapons, so they make the AI less abusable at the moment. 3) Fair enough, but it makes the research tree more interesting overall. I don't want to go into too much detail, but if you make them proper projects then the player has to research them because they're needed for pretty much everything. It's better to have actual choices imo. 4) That's the point though. You don't need to use both. You can go straight for lasers, or just use Accelerated weapons until you get Gauss weapons a few months in. 5) Yes, there'll be more maps coming in Early Access. 6) Alternative UFO layouts are also planned, yeah. 7) Yeah, this is probably a good point. I'll take a look. 8) Androns aren't in the game any more, are they?

Yes, it's more complex than that. If it was that easy it'd already be fixed

Thanks. Yeah, you're right. We'll have a look and get that fixed. But if you're getting to turn 20 and getting zerged by Cleaners, you should have left earlier - so maybe we need to spawn more reinforcements to make sure you do. You shouldn't be able to stand and fight them for very long.

Thanks. Yes, I can reproduce this. This is probably a side effect of a bugfix we made to the Sentry Guns in the last hotfix, hopefully it'll be easy to correct.

Thanks. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Fixing this would take a surprising amount of effort so it's quite low down on our fix list (we didn't think many people would build two bases at the same time).