Chris

I should probably do a one-page introduction that explains the structure of the game and how everything fits together.

One of the fundamental problems with the combat in X-Com and in Xenonauts is with the shooting - all it does is wound or kill units. This may sound trite, but it is an issue in that most weapons can fire in both single shot mode or burst fire mode. In the current incarnation, assuming that you have enough APs to take a burst shot, you should always do that. It provides the highest average damage per AP spent. This doesn't really give you much in the way of tactical options. It's just simple maths as to what fire mode gives the best bang for your APs. It was suggested a month or two ago that we look at the suppression system from JA1.13 for inspiration. Naturally I've been far too busy to actually do that, but the idea of suppression has grown on me enormously over the last few weeks as it provides an obvious solution to the problem above. With suppression implemented, we can have burst fire causing lots of suppression but not actually doing that much damage, while single aimed shots are much more effective at causing damage but don't cause anywhere near as much suppression. It also means we can change the battlefield roles of some weapons a bit - for example, machineguns and the Ferret .50cal. In both cases it's been difficult to balance these to be effective but not overpowered. Giving them very high suppression but perhaps no more actual damage than the sniper rifles would make them useful support weapons but not overpowered in effectiveness. Suppression would be something that is built up with each shot the affects the unit, draining the unit's APs first from his reserves (used for reaction fire) and then from the next turn. With enough units shooting at the same target, it would be entirely possible to pin them in place. Initially I was going to suggest we tied this into morale, but on reflection I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think a soldier who is pinned in position by enemy fire is directly more frightened than one that is not, rather they are keeping their heads down to avoid getting shot. Perhaps we can add a small morale penalty for getting suppressed or pinned, but I don't think the suppression score should use the morale value. Rather, I think each unit should have a Suppression score that is based on his Bravery stat, giving it a common root with Morale but a shared value. This will start at the soldier's Bravery value, which is anything from 50 upwards (as the lowest starting value for any soldier attribute is 50). Each weapon fire mode will have a "suppression damage" value, and when a soldier fires a weapon at a target (irrespective of whether they hit it) the suppression damage will be applied to the target's Suppression score. This is affected by armour as usual, so if the unit has powerful armour it will not be suppressed by firing weak weapons at it. Once Suppression reaches 0, any extra supression damage recieved is first deducted from the unit's AP reserves for the current turn (down to 0) and then from the AP in the following terms (again down to 0). Further suppression is wasted. Maybe we'll have a symbol appearing above the head of the unit to show it has been suppressed? The Suppression score should regenerate a certain amount each turn, perhaps something like 20. That means three turns without being fired at would return any unit to their full Suppression "shield". Anyone got any thoughts, suggestions or improvements?

Hardcoded, I'm afraid.

All of those are now fixed up.

It's working as intended in the sense that smoke causes stun damage and will knock your troops out over time. Possibly to an excessive degree, though. I'll nerf it a bit. The problem with the smoke at the moment is that I don't know damage it causes, so armour provides protection from it. This means that wearing Jackal armour means you survive longer in smoke, which doesn't really make sense. Needs some balancing obviously.

Is this a replicable bug or does it just affect Phillip Johnson? I think we're going to have a tricky time randomly generating soldiers until we come up with a copy of your Philip Johnson...

Yup, hopefully 1) will be replaced soon. I've just updated 2) in the dev build so it'll be fixed in the next version.

They've been renamed Level_Editor and Submap_Editor for the duration of the KS build but will reappear under their previous names post-Kickstarter. They should be in the same location as before tho.

It's also worth validating all the files on Desura again (right-click on the game) as sometimes that goes a bit wrong, which can cause unexplained crashes.

OK, so what I need is a document up to 10 pages long that explains how to play the game to a complete newbie. Labelled screenshots encouraged. Go go forum community!

I don't really think that's a particularly good system. The first bit about suppression gradually building up I agree with and it is something we'll already be using in the system I want to implement, but I don't really think what follows that would be a great system. As far as I'm concerned, being suppressed is as much a "choice" as being shot is a choice - it's not. It's something the other side does to you. Your choice comes in how you use the mechanic against the opposition,. I take your point that not all aliens would react to being suppressed in the same way as humans, but that's reflected in the fact that several alien types flat out can't be supressed.

You're aware you can right click on an arrow to add 10, and Ctrl+click to add the maximum?

I think Desura struggles with the sheer number of files that Xenonauts has. There's something like 55,000 files in my /assets/ directory with all the new ground tiles and all of the unit animation sprites. It takes a looong time to export the assets from the SVN too because of this, so I imagine that's why it takes so long to validate the game.

Yeah the end of mission score has not been balanced yet. We just stuck any old values in there. Also, the terror site is meant to be hard so don't feel bad if you can't complete it.

Glad you like it

It's something that has been brought up before. We'll consider it in beta. Of course, we may start the aliens spawning in lcoations other than just the hangars in base defence missions too so all that might be null and void.

Yeah it is hardcoded, at least for now.

I'm not sure how we'd do that really, given our orders are controlled by Desura now. It might be something for the next game. I don't want to fiddle with our infrastructure too much as it's working fairly well as is and I don't want to break anything (or add more than is necessary to my workload).

Indeed. EDIT: And no, these 16 weapons are all you get. Use them as you will, or not.

Just giving this a quick bump so everyone is aware of it. It's slipped quite a long way down the forums already

The kids these days etc.

OK, should all be authorised now and available on the standalones too. Matthew is suggesting we've not actually killed the hidden movement bug after all. If you guys could confirm either way (and if it is reduced in incidence if it has survived) then that would be great.

They haven't authorised it as they were confused that it said Kickstarter Build and had references to the demo in it. I've given them the go-ahead to do it now. Let's hope they do it soon.

Prerogative can be used as he did. In that sense it indeed just means priority. I don't think it'd take until the end of 2013 without Kickstarter, but yes, Kickstarter may well speed things up.

OK, I'll make the game a bit longer. V9.5 hasn't been authorised yet anyway so I'll stick that in there and reupload it shortly, we've fixed the Xenopedia image display bug now too.