Chris

Nah there's 6 interceptors. I just couldn't remember off the top of my head when I was typing and couldn't be bothered to count them. There's no armed transports - given the way the UFOs escalate, if your transport gets jumped by a UFO then it is toast anyway. There are five vehicles in the game, and an undetermined number of walkers which may range from 0 to 3 depending on how well they work in the game. The later ones will be more like mini-tanks than scout cars....but future tanks, of course... TF2 hats, none planned. I don't think we're big enough for Valve to care about doing a hats promotion for us. Everything else, Jean-Luc has answered.

Nice work. I'm sure there's plenty of people who would happy to see this turn into a complete mod!

Yes, it's actually our test light when we were testing the night mission stuff. I think its gone the way of the Evil Alien Barn now though sadly.

Ah yes...you were using the wrong save button, I see. Major tile update in the next build (in a few hours) so I'd hold off for that if I were you

I thought it looked pretty good from the videos I'd seen, except for the mystifying lack of FoW. I certainly thought it looked pretty.

It's coming out next month, isn't it?

We're not, sadly. It's a bit far for me to travel. Thanks for posting it up tho.

Actually, you do have to use them. I've told the coder to add a second selection circle above the head of the unit on mouseover. It'll make selection of units much easier.

Hmm. It should save. What spectre?

You can abort mission using the Esc menu - or you can when we fix the bug that has it disabled.

Actually no, we do have a tile artist in the UK too. My bad.

Yeah I've pretty much decided what I'm going to do - it's the soldier pool system as described in my last post. I think it adds more flexibility with the hiring and also prevents exploitation, which the two main objectives.

I'm the only team member based in the UK, I think. It wouldn't exactly be a massive event

It depends on how the AI integration goes.

The waypoint mechanics aren't something that can be modded in, I'm afraid. It would require adding new code. I don't know how much work it'd be, but it's something we might consider adding for modders after release if the game sells well. People will invariably want to mod the blaster bombs back in, which I can understand...

TheTurninator - he is gone. You just only have 11 more soldiers to choose from for the rest of the month. Shouldn't be an issue unless you're really keen on firing your soldiers.

It is theoretically possible to add destroyed buildings on the crashed UFO tiles though.

Yeah, we've gone for a flat Geoscape. It has some advantages and some disadvantages, but it's too late to change it now I'm afraid. This is a very faithful re-imagining of the old games. Bascially everything about them has been analysed with a fine-tooth comb to make it easier to use and more fun, and better balanced, but the core mechanics are very similar. That's what it'll be when its done, anyway. It's still a work in progress.

Sorry, I'm not entirely clear on what you're asking Bibdibop - I'll try and answer it though. The idea is that you'll get the same soldiers whether you let them cycle through naturally or artificially cause it with hiring / firing. Hiring LOADS of soldiers at the start of the game will let youi get your hands on the top soldiers immediately, but that just means you'll only have terrible soldiers left for however many months it takes you to cycle through all the soldiers you fired at the start of the game. This means it probably won't be worth the investment of money required to do it. If you let the game cycle through the soldiers normally - as you lose soldiers in battle or as the pool naturally refreshes at the start of each month - you'll be able to pick up those same top soldiers each month anyway, but you won't have to pay the hire cost of all the mediocre soldiers before them in the list (as you do if you want to make them appear early). Of course, you could still do the hire / fire thing by launching missions, marching all but one of your soldiers of the Chinook and then aborting the mission (dead soldiers wouldn't go back into the pool), but that would have consequences for your mission score and therefore funding. And if people really want to game the system that hard, there's not too much I can do about it. It'll just be harder than in the original game.

Hmmm. Seems a lot of people are against penalising the player for excessive hiring. That's understandable I guess. The simple adaption to the system would be this: You have a pool of 12 people, which is cleared and updated every month. If you fire a soldier, he goes back into the pool and displaces a soldier already in the pool. That displaced soldier is remembered, and put in a hidden 'pool' of soldiers which is of unlimited size. When soldiers are refreshed from the main pool (whether due to natural cycling over time or through hiring soldiers in the existing pool) they are drawn from the hidden pool first and only randomly generated once the hidden pool is empty. That way you can recruit 50 soldiers at the start of the game and cherry pick the best ones if you want, but not only would it be expensive but you'd only be getting the soldiers you didn't initially want appearing for the next four months or so. That would effectively halt the cherry picking that the powergamers used to do, but it won't affect people playing the game normally. Regarding a cost for firing soldiers - not keen on that. You pay an upfront cost to hire them already, which is the penalty incurred if you immediately fire them afterwards. Re: Gazz's suggestion about having troops getting better through time. I'm not convinced by this philosophy, and I never was. I think by the end of the game you won't have a squad of 16 super-elite troops anyway, I think you'll have about 6-7 super-elite guys and then another 7-8 reasonably experienced guys. Yeah, you might lose a couple of super-elite troops on a mission and have to hire rookies in their stead, but they're not expected to replace the super-elite troops anyway. The replacement for your super-elite guys would come from the reasonably experienced guys completing a few more missions, and the rookies would become reasonably experienced themselves with a few missions under their belts. It's more of a sliding scale of ability in your team than an abrupt cliff - and if it's not, you're either incredibly good (or bad) or save scumming.

Deleted pages in the wiki are because I was burning out spambots.

Ugh. I've actually got to write this system up today so it can be implemented this month. So, thoughts welcome. You've got about 48 hours until the design is finalised and goes into our milestones. Thread here: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php?925-New-Soldier-Recruitment-model&p=10658#post10658

It has been raised numerous times in the forums that the current hiring system is inadequate. It's basically the same as the one from X-Com, which has a number of issues with it. The first issue was that it encouraged hiring / firing soldiers until you had a squad of randomly-generated supermen, which isn't very interesting and distorts the game mechanics too much. The second issue is that you might be looking for a soldier with a high stat for some reason - maybe you want a high-strength soldier to deal with lugging a rocket launcher around or something. The current system is blind luck when it comes to whether you'll get what you need or not. Instead, I'd like to implement a new system as part of the new GUI that will allow the player to manually select soldiers from a pool of twelve soldiers. This pool is always 12 soldiers; every time you hire a soldier another is added to the pool. Possibly firing a soldier would put him back in the pool (displacing the most recent recruit), to stop exploitation. The members of the pool will be refreshed at the rate of, say, one new soldier per week. There will also be a modifier in place to punish people for losing too many soldiers per month. If more than four additional soldiers are recruited into the pool in a calendar month, the sixth will have a penalty of -1 to all his attributes. The seventh will have -2 to all his attributes, up to -4 for the tenth soldier and beyond. What do you guys think about that?

A hammer would work pretty well though - I think they're pretty brittle. But yes, I'm not a fan of the welding kit idea either.

The soldiers are the hardest part to mod. Adding new dropships or new maps is extremely easy once you know how - there's a big guide to mapping on the wiki (xenowiki.goldhawkinteractive.com).