Chris

Nope, planes actually RTB when they reach the minimum fuel level needed to reach their base. They can't take off below 50% fuel though.

Irongamer - it does sound useful to me!

Interesting points, thanks. There's quite a few minor niggles there that I wasn't aware of or had just become blind to over time. Unfortunately we won't be looking at those until beta as there's still game-critical work to be done first and a new UI should fix a number of these issues up. Maybe have another play in beta and give us your thoughts? This is the sort of thing that'd be really valuable then.

Glad you like it. I think the main issue right now is the lack of AI, which we're working on pretty urgently.

I like Alenium, and I'm almost certainly not going to change it. Unfortunately I can't really change the name of things in the game because they sound funny in another language, too. There's a lot of languages, and a lot of rude words...

We're looking to put in some very basic (but functional AI) as soon as humanely possible so the game starts being fun to play - ie, the aliens move and shoot at you. After that we'll start work on the proper AI model.

I don't get the logic that having to manufacture the F-17 (and associated weapons) is necessary if the MiG is researchable. One is already in use, the other is "researched" because it is obtained in order to fill a gap in current Xenonaut interception doctrine. It doesn't exactly stretch logic to assume that modifed F-17s can be bought in from suppliers because there is a pre-existing relationship there, given the fact the player starts with two of them already.... I also don't see any real value in adding geopolitical complexity to the funding arrangements at the start of the game either. I imagine we'll probably implement this idea as described in my earlier posts, it has grown on me quite significantly.

Nice, I'll have to give this a try sometime...although "Special Forces" is not an actual regiment. Nor was I aware the Russians ever fought in Vietnam? Also at some point we'll have to work out the character limit for the first and last names, because some of the eastern european ones can be very long and they go off the edge of the screen.

"Research" in this case would be obtaining them from the Soviets and modifying it to suit the Xenonaut aims. In fact, it's probably best if I make it a manufacturable item, that'll take about 5 days to build using the 10 starting engineers and cost the same as purchasing one does now. This will introduce the player to both the Research and Manufacturing parts of the game, and give them a cool new toy that they built themselves within the first month of starting the game (plus encourage people to be careful with it!) I'm thinking the initial research would be something like Orbital Scan, which would basically be a research project to do an orbital scan (or perhaps sift through the data gathered by satellites as the alien fleet arrived) to work out the composition of the alien fleet. The idea is that this gives some taster info about the aliens and the situation. In short, the situation is bad. There's literally thousands of UFOs out there, but they must still be converting them to atmospheric flight. Therefore it's more than likely that there will be much bigger and faster craft appearing than these Light Scouts, which are pretty easy opponents. Therefore it'd be a good idea to get our hands on a faster and more heavily-armed interceptor. This unlocks the "High Speed Interceptor" research. The problem with the hangar is a little more complex. Hangars take time to build, and you'll want players to have the hangar ready to start work on the MiG immediately. Remember, you'll start needing it about the start of week four, so you'll want to build it after 16 days. Even if we reduce hangar construction time to something like 4 days and put a strong hint that the player will want an empty hangar slot in the Orbital Scan research, there's still a potential time lag there. I think it'd be more sensible to start with four hangars and only two F-17s and the Chinook. If people buy an extra F-17 then fair enough, but they'll only ever do that on their first playthrough.

How would you detect over such long ranges? I don't quite understand the utility of having vastly increased range. I'm not necessarily averse to bumping it up (we started with realistic aircraft ranges and then threw them out the window and doubled or tripled them) but I don't want you to be able to protect the entire world with a single base really....

It's a nice idea, but I think we'd struggle to have actual speech in the game. There's already faint stuff in the background of the air combat, and I think that's best to stick with - you intetionally can't hear what they're saying. Having dialogue that doesn't repeat even if you play for a long time needs a LOT of sound effects to do, and that gets expensive. But yeah, we have tried to get a bit of this vibe through the current air combat sounds because I do like the basic idea.

We're aware of this. We're working on the wall opacity and we've got 3D cursors that light up at the top of the square when you mouseover an alien or friendly unit in the dev build now. That should make the selection headaches a bit easier!

One of the biggest problems with the game at the moment is the air combat - while it is a good addition to the game, it's not particularly intuitive. While we've got a new GUI on the way that will involve tooltips and should make things clearer, there's a more fundamental issue than that. The difference between the F-17 and the MiG aircraft is important, but not immediately obvious. Sure, you can check the Xenopedia, but realistically almost nobody is going to do that. So there needs to be a better way to explain it. This fits into a wider issue about the pacing of the early game. We've just finished the art for a new UFO type, the Light Scout. The intention is this will be a small 2-alien UFO that is slower than the F-17 and relatively easy meat for interception. This will appear for the first few weeks of the war, and then the Heavy Scout, Corvette and the Fighters will all start appearing at around the end of the third week. As the MiG is basically designed to do two things, either picking off lone Heavy Scouts using Sidewinders or picking off Corvettes using Avalanches, this means it is basically pointless for the first three weeks. In fact, it's actually counterproductive - if you hit the early ships with an Avalanche missile it'd just destroy them outright rather than make them crash. Therefore, making the MiG a research project that is available from the start of the game seems the most sensible suggestion. It achieves several things: 1) The air combat starts off more simple, with only one interceptor to get the hang of (and only two weapons). 2) The player has to look at a research report when they get the MiG-31. This will explain the role of the aircraft, making it more likely to be used correctly. 3) It's a research project that can be available from the start of the game. This lets people use the research screen without having to capture alien technology. The more I think about this idea, the better it sounds. Anyone got any thoughts?

We will balance this better shortly. Perhaps we'll stop undamaged UFOs just running away from combat altogether - I guess they've already done plenty of running on the Geoscape. That means it'll be easier to shoot them down with cannons.

We've had the same two key coders for well over a year now, one doing the Geoscape and one doing the Ground Combat. We're only potentially changing AI coder.

The AI is causing some major, major issues right now. These are due to personnel rather than code-related issues. At the moment the aliens (including the Sebillians) now make reaction fire rather than doing absolutely nothing, but they currently don't move and shoot during their own turn. I'm currently deciding whether it'll be better to throw out all the work so far and replace the current coder who is both a specialist AI coder and has worked on several commercial video games over the past decade, or stick with the current guy and carry on what he's done so far (his issue is not being unable to code AI, but he's struggling with the C++ knowledge required to fully integrate it into our codebase). The more experienced coder is having a look at the codebase this weekend and we'll discuss what's currently in place, and then I'll make my decision. It's been a bit of a pain in the ass but you sometimes encounter issues like this when you're working with contractors. Anyway, it's my #1 priority to get sorted out at the moment so I apologise for the delay but I'm doing everything I can to resolve it.

Check you out

I'm not really sure this would add much to the game in terms of enjoyment, and it's a bit late to be implementing this sort of feature in any case I'm afraid.

Yup the answers given above are correct. We've mostly implemented the new ground combat GUI now though so the camera level issue will be resolved in the next build. Oh, and with regards to 3) we'll add a throttle control for each of the aircraft so you have finer control over speed.

It's far too late in development to change the time period.

Hmmm. It's possible. Something to think on. I don't even know if we'll actually have the AI controlled bases yet though, although we'll probably trial them,

Yup I'm the lead developer. The bugs you've mentioned are known and hopefully will be fixed shortly!

Yeah, no need to hold of pre-ordering until the funding thermometer is active. We are working on it, but we'll get the pre-order money either way. You can always donate a few extra dollars on Kickstarter afterwards when the thermometer goes active if you so desire. Also, the terrain editor is a pain in the ass to learn but it's very powerful once you have. And we're just adding an Undo button to it so it's a bit less frustrating to use. Realistically at this point we won't be making many more changes to the tile mechanics so if you want to start mapping, please do. We've not finished generating the tilesets but it'll just be a case of adding more tiles in the future rather than replacing the old ones.

You can't move in teams, but you can press the soldier hokeys (1-9) and move each new soldier while the other one is still in motion, which speeds things up quite a lot.

Yeah, there's definitely potential there. The key, as you point out, is getting media exposure on the big sites for any fundraising drive. The majority of money raised in our case would be from people pledging to buy pre-orders of the game, so we'd have to produce something that would incentivise people to pre-order at that point. I'm hoping doing a few videos and the Funding Thermometer ideas will be enough to get the news coverage we need. Once I've found a way round the problem that we're not US based.