Chris

Hmm. Not an urgent bug, but one I'd forgotten about and we'll fix it in time. I assume it's on the master bug list?

This should be fixed in the next build. Basically the issue is that the sprite is displaying correctly, but is incorrectly setup in game so the game thinks it is on the NE edge of the tile rather than the NW one. You should be able to walk into the UFO without opening the door, but there will be an invisible door directly in front of that alien.

Yeah, it's a known bug in the AI. It'll be fixed when we rip it out and our new AI coder starts work on the proper AI model.

Ah crap yes the machinegun is still displaying the Wolf. I've updated that at my end now.

Yeah we'll have to bind this to debug mode I think.

Yup that'll be the misaligned sprite. It'll be fixed in the next version.

Can't replicate this at all in the development build. I spent a good minute or two arming and disarming soldiers, then removed every item in every soldier's inventory and there were no issues. This was at the start of the game though - although AD you seem to be able to get a crash then...

Thanks for reporting it anyway

Yes, I'll get this feature added in.

No, there isn't. I'm not sure there will be tbh. It's difficult to animate. Maybe some form of visual indicator would work better?

Hmmm. Odd. Sandy, your crash happens before the mission is over and all the aliens die? At what point does the crash occur - when you click on a weapon, click end turn etc? Or have you killed what may be the last alien, and then you press end turn and the game crashes?

I'm very much open to balance suggestions such as these, mostly because right now at the dev end we're concentrating on getting the mechanics done and game balance is a bit of an afterthought right now. Having some workable stat values for the game would be useful for when we hit beta and we concentrate on the polishing a bit more. Just to inform the discussion a bit more, I think it'd be reasonable to assume that for the Caesans, you'd encounter the first three ranks of them before you got your hands on laser weapons - so non-combatants, guards and soldiers. Throwing ideas off the top of my head: A non combatant should probably go down after three/four pistol shots, a couple of shots from a rifle and a single shot from a shotgun or a precision rifle. A guard should go down after about 6 pistol shots, three rifle shots and two precision rifle / shotgun hits. Given there is 20% of the base damage variation on the weapons, there should be a possibility that a precision rifle hit or a shotgun hit would kill a guard outright if the player is very lucky with their random damage. A soldier should be a tough cookie. The pistol should be pretty ineffective, maybe 8-10 shots to kill him. The rifle would take 4-5 shots, and you'd be looking at three shotgun / precision rifle shots to kill one. Two even with good damage rolls. I think it'd be the same for a machinegun too (two hits). You can play around with values to try and get a system that would make that work. It's also worth thinking about the shotgun - it'd be good if that was a very powerful weapon close up but rapidly dropping off in power from beyond say 6 tiles range and pretty useless beyond about 10-12 tiles. I'm not sure if the current mechanics allow this as I don't remember them off the top of my head (they're on the wiki), so perhaps it'd be possible to design something with that effect? If not we can change the code a bit I guess.

Yes, the sprites are 3D models that are rendered out and post-processed to add a border so they have a slightly more cartoony / stylised appearence. The only advantage they have over 3D models is that they require less processing power, so the game will run on a more basic machine. The main problem is the engine; it's not a very good piece of kit. Perhaps it would be possible to hack in some features so it can display 3D models, but that would take time. Right now we've got everything in place to do the renders (I even bought the servers this morning) and we know the pipeline works, so it makes sense to stick with that. But even if you had asked me a couple of months back, the simple fact is that we have excellent coders, but we don't have access to them all the time. Our lead coder was the lead coder on the latest Heroes of Might and Magic game, and he's pretty damn good. But would I rather have him code a 3D engine into the existing engine, or get the game mechanics done so we can get the game finished? The latter makes more sense. We made mistakes in the beginning when I had no idea what I was doing, and unfortunately you reach the point where you just have to crack on and finish the game despite the fact it's not going to be perfect. You can always make it better if you start over, but you've gotta finish it at some point.

There is an improved version of the rocket launcher but it has slightly different utility.

I've not played it, but it is meant to be quite good.

The local soldiers won't always be professional soldiers, but we won't have civilians grabbing guns and joining the fight mid mission.

Yeah we need to do this.

Yeah you can provided you make it clear this is just an alpha and not yet finished.

Hmmm. Were you able to clear both parts of the UFO? It has two sections. One is occasionally inaccessible due to bad map design.

Hmm. They handle all our payment processing stuff at their end so I'm afraid there's not much I can do to help with that. It'll be available on other distribution systems at release.

Aelius - we'll finish the ground combat coding first, then go back to the air combat. And no, there won't be shadows on the new sprites yet. The shadows will be a seperate layer so we'll add them later.

It's about 530 meg now.

I suspect on the Geoscape the interceptors are just flying straight towards the UFOs rather than flying an intercept course which automatically leads the target by half the intervening distance (as they do in the air combat). That would probably explain why it's so difficult to catch anything. For the reaction fire, first thing we need to do is to implement reaction fire modifiers for each weapon. The reaction fire formulae currently works by it being triggered when the offending unit is first spotted. The reacting unit will try to take a shot at him, and if the shot fails then he won't be able to take another one until the offending unit has used the same number of APs. Ie. an alien appears in front of a rocket launcher soldier, who tries to take a shot at him costing 25APs. He fails. The alien then has to spend 25APs before another reaction fire check can be made against him by that soldier. I'm unsure about a modifier for not having moved in the turn (basically for having more APs than the shot will take), as I suspect this will be very hard to balance.

You'll be happy to discover there's already Czech soldiers in the game (you can look up the possible nationalities in /assets/soldiernames.xml) - and yes, we've made an effort to make the regiments historically accurate where possible. Although sadly not enough wars were really fought from 1970-1979 to provide enough historically accurate previous combat experience...

Ah, awesome. I'm really glad to see some people are picking up the balancing challenge and making some suggestions of their own. I'll give this a try when I get back to my normal PC tomorrow. A few general points: 1) In the current build there's an issue with the random element of the damage formulae which we only discovered a few days back, which should be fixed up in V9. Basically there's a 20 damage random element for each shot, which can give a bonus / penalty to the base damage of the weapon of anything from +20 to -20. This was meant to be +20% to -20% of the weapon's base damage, but it's been implemented as a raw number at the moment. At present this means that all the weapons will have wildly varying damage outputs right now - particularly the pistol. 2) The pistol is meant to have some utility - mostly it's meant to fire fast and do acceptable damage, but have low armour penetration and not be able to burst fire. Their main advantage will be to leave one hand free for other gear (grenades, combat shield, maybe motion detector if we implement that), but they shouldn't be almost useless. I take your point on reaction fire modifiers. We need to add them in actually. I'll add that to the to-do list.