Chris

Hmmm - I see what you mean, jkamcmillen, but I think the likelihood of it being exploited is too high.

Any icon would be tied to the little stat bars and portraits you have above the UI for each soldier, and would probably only appear on mouseover to avoid clutter.

Yeah, the UFO crashing thing is either you're using too much firepower, shooting them down over the sea, or shooting down craft that don't create crash sites. We're going to improve the invasion AI so it's less weighted towards non-crashable craft in the future. I understand it can be frustrating to fight endless numbers of fighters. For the accuracy cone - I dunno, there is some joy in accidentally shooting your own soldiers so I think we won't reduce the accuracy cone too much (though there is one) but we may tighten it a bit in beta if it is getting ridiculous. It's one of the fine balancing things we'll look at when we have done the core features.

Yeah, the +damage bonus from the autopsies is meant to represent the "weak spot" stuff in a more streamlined way.

Well if you want to randomise a particular tile, you just do two versions of the same submap, one with it and one without and then add it to the level. The game will randomly choose one. Yes, we could add more props to the maps to make it more realistic, but that's more tileset polish rather than anything else - we need to finish all the tilesets first in their basic form before we go back and start revising them. The Farm tileset in particular needs more props in it right now, as it doesn't have any.

Yeah, what was said in this thread and in the other thread is true. Kimberly is right about the corpses, and the same logic follows for stunned aliens - they are executed when there's no associated research project available. As I've not put the interrogations in the game yet, any stunned alien is immediately executed whenever captured at present. But they won't be in the final game unless the associated research projects are already finished.

Yeah, it's too late to change it now, for better or worse.

Leonatus - the reason they were put in is because people asked me why I was treating female soldiers differently to black / ethnic soldiers, which are deliberately represented in the game because I want it to feel like a proper multi-national organisation and I want everyone to be able to identify with their soldiers. Having thought it through, I thought the argument was valid (moving them out of "optional" category) so we added in women. It's been a bit of work, but nothing too major. It also means that we won't take a load of flak from reviewers for not having female soldiers in the future, as it could have counted against us given X-Com had it.

We're fixing the reaction fire now. The problem is that they remember their LOS from their turn - so if they were facing one direction and turned around, if you enter the area they used to be looking at they'll still be able to "see" you and it causes reaction fire.

Yup, basically the answers have been given above. Most of what you're looking for hasn't yet been implemented properly, or if it has it will be better signposted in the final version!

Yup, this is covered by a FAQ on the Kickstarter page - but you won't get the key until the KS closes as you can cancel your pledge up til that point. Turning buildings before they are placed will be in the new UI we'll be implementing soon!

From that it looks like you've only pledged once, and the fee is charged to us rather than you guys, so I wouldn't worry about it!

I'm only 25 - Wing Commander came out when I was 4. That's one of the interesting things about X-Com - even in such a young industry as games development, plenty of people have still heard of it and love it.

What the blazes are you all on about?

Yeah, the command centre is a 4-tile building, with the inner command centre and a defensive ring (which will have sandbags etc) around it. Your troops will start in this ring and can be deployed as you wish before the battle starts. So the idea is that the command centre can be defensible even if the aliens spawn next to it has it has a built-in buffer zone around it.

Hicks - the $100 name option will remain open until the game is released, most likely.

The workshop project upgrade method is a possibility actually. It might actually be possible with only changing a couple of text lines - I'll ask the programmer.

Hmm. The precision laser shouldn't have burst fire - does it?

Yeh, Bob instead of Robert is fine - anything that could concieably be a real name. We would object to BigBoy74 or Ben Dover etc though.

Hmm, the traditional joke made amongst my friends is that my two main "abilities" are actually personality defects. I'm sufficiently delusional about my own abilities to assume I'll be able to pull something off if I try hard enough (how hard can it be?), and then I'm too stubborn to give up once I realise I am in fact in waaay over my head. But the handy thing is that if you plug away at something for long enough, it'll usually work out in the end. I am quite good at organising stuff, although I'm not especially good with people or anything. I'm reasonably bright, but nothing special. It's just a case of knowing what you want to achieve and then keep at it until you get to it, no matter how hard it is. The business knowledge accumulated at my day job did help, but it wasn't the be all and end all. Generally you've gotta enjoy what you do to do well in it - I wasn't very good at my previous job because I simply didn't care enough. I don't do art or programming for the reasons you said. I don't think I have the natural talent to do it. So I set my mind to raising enough money to hire people who were naturally talented at those jobs to do them instead. Seemed a more efficient way to do it.

Isn't the entire forum essentially a big question answering session?

Thanks guys.

Incidentally, can someone cross-post it to the gaming section? It won't let me make another post because my current one has not been sufficiently well recieved or something. Also, it'd probably look more like transparent marketing if I did it...

The first answer is only accurate after I replied to all those spam emails anyway... Jean-Luc - yes, true. I just posted that title to try to get people interested. Although I'd only been out of university 6 months when I started the project so I wasn't exactly Warren Buffet!

I suspect it was Matthew asking the first question. He's been forwarding me spam emails all day...