Chris

They should be doing that, though. It'd be a bit pointless to have alien fighters that didn't want to fight you

Oh. It's because I forgot to give the Heavy Fighter guns, so it runs away all the time... I'll get that fixed up.

Quite a few people have mentioned that SONAR is blocking Xenonauts. If this applies to you, please can you go to this link: https://submit.symantec.com/false_positive/ Once there, please can you report to Symantec that they are blocking a legitimate program? If a few of you do it then hopefully they can update their software so it doesn't automatically consider our game a threat...

You're not the only person to report this. Can you please go here and report to SONAR that they're blocking a legitimate program? https://submit.symantec.com/false_positive/

Also bear in mind alien fighters spawn on both scout missions and on air superiority missions. They'll be passive on one and aggressive on the other.

The facings should be based on the geoscape heading already. If the fighters are facing towards you it's because they're aggressively heading for your interceptors on the Geoscape. The others should take into account the relative positions of your interceptors - like if you're catching up on the fighters from behind, they'll appear facing away from you. Is this bug report still valid?

Fair point. I'd forgotten we'd updated vehicle armour to have all 4 different resistances. I'll boost the ballistic resistance some more then.

Ah, I see what's happened. Thanks for the bug report. I'll update the workshop projects for the next build to prevent this confusion.

TL; DR (at least until tomorrow). I'd potentially be happy with suppression negating reaction fire and inflicting an accuracy penalty, then sapping AP but perhaps to a limit of say 50% of them. Negating reaction fire would mean that we could still do things like flashbangs etc without requiring full AP sapping. For machineguns, yes, we could potentially do a short (more aimed) burst and a long (more suppressing) burst to give it several fire modes.

To be honest the first alien tech interceptor would be cropping up by the end of the demo but I can't be bothered to set up the combat graphics for it yet so I've left it disabled for now. It's essentially a direct replacement for the F-17 I'd rather not have upgrades for the interceptors themselves though. I worry it might overcomplicate things.

Yeah, if there's specific issues then you can report them. Other than that we sorta have to just muddle through, because it's kinda a waste of time to fix bugs in unfinished code (or unfinished parts of the game), so expect the stability to decrease again post V9.5 as we start adding new features. Once the game is in beta most of the crashes should dry up again as we go through this bugfixing process prior to / during the beta.

I think you might just have to live with that. There's only so much detail we can go into.

Yeah. It does seem a little uncommon. Hmmm. We'll address it after the Kickstarter.

After studying Alien Plasma Technology? It doesn't look like it should from the XML files. Can anyone else duplicate this?

It's a factor of the game design. The vehicles have to be vulnerable to ballistic weapons otherwise to be able to destroy vehicles, the alien weapons would kill your infantry instantly when they hit them whatever armour they were wearing.

Hmm. Weird. Seems like the game is not reading the contents file for the Crovettes properly for some reason. I'll look into it.

I've dug this up, but I'm not sure how accurate it is these days: Action Points – The soldiers gain an extra Action Point for every five hundred APs used on the battlefield, though they can only accumulate one thousand (2 APs) per mission. Strength – This is based on what the soldier has carried during the mission, as a factor of average weight carried multiplied by the number of steps taken. Accuracy – The soldiers gain an extra accuracy point for every eight shots fired at an alien. They can only accumulate 2 Accuracy points per mission. Reflexes – The soldiers gain an extra point in Reflexes for every four times they successfully reaction fire at an enemy, though they can only accumulate 2 Reflexes points per mission. Bravery – For each two failed morale checks a soldier endures, they gain an extra Bravery point. A soldier can only accumulate four failed morale checks (2 Bravery points) per mission. Health – The soldiers gain an extra Health point for every four skill increases they receive in their other skills. The figures are cumulative, so if you five 5 shots on one mission and 3 on the next you'll get an Accuracy increase. That having been said, both the Accuracy and the Reflexes stats seem rather hard to increase. We should probably open those values out to modders.

1) This isn't finished yet. It should work better in the final. 2) Yeah, we know about this already. We've not implemented visual height levels yet. 3) We're planning a tundra tileset rather than an arctic one. Anyway, the problem with the forest is that it's very hard to do realistic organic things like trees in a tile-based structure. It'd all look far too regular to be realistic. So we're sticking mostly to habited areas, as buildings tend to work well for tilesets. 4) Yes, I'll think about this in beta.

The soldiers learn by doing. In the case of accuracy, I think it's the number of shots fired at hostile units per battle, irrespective of whether you actually hit or not. All attributes are capped at an increase of 2 each battle.

If you can make a laser weapon, you should be able to make everything. They're all unlocked at the same time. You also need to manufacture laser cells for them to use as ammo.

Getting reaction fire involved in this is not a good plan. It's too unreliable and you need to save APs for it, which you probably won't have if you've been using the MG to suppress the troops in the first place.

I don't understand why people want suppression only to affect accuracy. If you've got a guy firing a machinegun at you and you dive behind the nearest wall, you don't then just get up and stroll away while the bullets are still flying. You stay down, pinned in place. You might peek over the top and return fire, sure, but you're not going to move from that location. Logically it should affect movement more than firing accuracy. This is actually more how suppression works in Company of Heroes, now I think about it. It was fantastic there. Could it be "overpowered", and lead to units being wiped out when you moved an unsuppressed unit over and attacked the suppressed unit at close range? Yes, it could. That was the point of bringing an MG along as a support weapon. The key was not to get your units supressed. If you played the game as if the suppression mechanics were not in place then you'd obviously lose, but both players were aware of its effects then it made combat far more exciting than it was before. Just to clarify, units won't be supressed for multiple turns, but their suppression shield would take time to recharge so they'd be easier to suppress again for a couple of turns after being suppressed until it has recharged.

Yes, suppression should affect an area. Or at least, suppression from burst fire should. I'm thinking that we may redo the way "burst" fire works so it doesn't use individual bullets like the single shots do but rather has multiple shots hitting inside a fixed area, although exactly where and what they hit in the area is largely down to random chance. However, everything in the area would take the suppression damage. Machineguns would have a larger radius, and proportionately more hits to assign within that radius. That would make the machineguns very good at suppressing things and potentially devastating, but also pretty unreliable at consistently dealing damage. I think that would make auto fire a lot more awesome and fun than the current model. It'd also let us chew through ammo much more quickly, if a burst for an assault rifle was actually five bullets and a machinegun was throwing out more like fifteen in a burst. That means you might actually have to reload your guns at some point, and manage your ammo more effectively. Bravery setting the upper limit fo the suppression shield as well as the % regeneration each turn would make sense to me. I also sorta like the idea of units potentially freaking out under fire, but I am concerned it'd be adding another potentially confusing system into the mix when you already have that with morale. If there were small morale penalties for suppression, you can get the same effect without duplicating the system. I think the AP sapping idea is good, though, and I'm fairly set on that (at least until we try it in the game). I think it makes a good back-and-forth mechanic where you can choose to try and kill the enemy, or just try to keep his head down. It'll also allow us to implement things like flashbang grenades to make storming entrances a little less dangerous than it currently is.

We can have a seperate page for each tab, but we'll want a one-page primer for each section of the game (Geoscape, Air Combat and Ground Combat) before we go into full detail on each page.

Gazz makes a fair point there. I reduced all weapon accuracies and fire costs by 25% a few weeks back because people were complaining they couldn't move very far without being unable to fire, which has left them with quite low accuracy values. I like that quite a lot though, makes it feel more X-Com (although they're pretty accurate with rifles etc if you use zoom level 3 when firing)...