Max_Caine

It's a good point to bring up. As ground combat is zoomed out, it's going to be difficult to tell smaller details like gas masks. The ground combat UI has a bust portrait of the solider at the bottom of the screen with the solider in their armour, and there's a facial portrait of each soldier at the top of the screen. I'd suggest that the facial portraits are updated the same as the bust portraits once modular armour is introduced.

Armour resistances Consider the alien plasma rifle. It has a base damage of 55. The proposed tactical armour reduction of 20% means it would do 44 base damage. Human HP ranges from 40-60, so the base resistance of tactical armour would mean a one-shot kill or leave the solider on very low health. At 30% (warden), that would do 39 base damage. At 55% (Wolf) it would be significantly reduced to 25. That's still life threatening, but isn't a one-shot. Because, by necessity, alien weapons start off with a damage value sufficiently high enough to kill a human while taking into account the 50% +/- random damage factor, any resistance percentage below 40% makes the armour feel as if it isn't worth it. This is less true for mag weapons than plasma, because while the mag rifle has an aggregate damage of 90, that's split up over 3 shots. A squaddie in tactical armour isn't going to survive being hit three times by a mag rifle, but is more likely to survive 1 or 2 hits. Plasma is going feel more scary and armour more worthless simply because it dumps all its damage into 1 hit. Is that a bad thing, though? The history of human armour has mostly developed around defeating and absorbing kinetic impacts. Humans have little experience with DEW and none as it's presented in X1. So humans are at a disadvantage both in experience and technology. Perhaps this could be worked into the backstory and the lore for tactical armour, and perhaps the heavy armour module or the warden upgrade be developed in response to plasma as much as mag? EDIT: Plasma rifle is actually 55, so numbers have been edited for real value.

Smoke I'm a bit conflicted about smoke. On the one hand, smoke is an invaluable resource, especially when you're starting out. Judicious application of smoke can effectively maze enemies, block off lines of attack and cover both retreats and attacks. On the other hand, smoke is spammable and very abusable because you can have lots of it. Is there some happy medium? Perhaps smoke should have three categories. Can't see through it (e.g. humans). Can see through it (e.g. Sebillians). Can see through it but applies a malus to-hit (e.g. psychic Psyons).

There's the thing: If I spend 20% of my squdddies TU to fire an aimed shot, then that's another 20% I have to stump up if my squaddie misses. The SMG offers a 4-for-1 deal, but each shot doesn't do as much damage and won't suppress like the pistol shots can. Who do you give each secondary type to? The choices! The choices! Friarbob, you seem keen so I took all those changes and put them into one zip for you: Friarbob.zip All you have to do is replace the files in the game with the files in the zip. You'll need to dive fairly deep: The files you need to change are below /steamapps/common/Xenonauts2/assets/assets/xenonauts/template/. I would strongly advise that you make backups of the files you are going to replace, also don't report any bugs with changed files - bug reports should be made on vanilla unchanged files.

If you equip a Foxhound with sidewinders, the radar cone does not work in air combat. Save of an air fight included to demonstrate. strategy-50.json EDIT: The same is true for Skylances

It's a good point, but if I do that then I pretty much close down the pistol, because the SMG then does everything you could want out of a secondary. I've been experimenting a lot with both SMG and the pistol and my personal conclsion is that the pistol can be a viable secondary but to compete with the SMG it has to be able to do things that the SMG can't do. I haven't fully locked down the pistol yet, but I do have a number of changes to it which makes it more viable. Increase damage from 12 to 20: This is the damage the pistol did in X1, similar to the rifle. This upgrades the pistol to a magnum .50 Action-Express. The kind of weapon you take around bear country. The boost in damage is necessary because the pistol is single-shot, so every shot that hits has to count. Decrease snap TU cost to 10%, and aimed to 20%: The hallmark of primary weapons is they don't have a TU cost below 22-25% for the lowest cost shot. Secondaries can back this up by being cheap to shoot so complimenting the more expensive primary. Reduce ammo count to 7: If I boost the damage up and reduce cost of shots, then exactly why am I using a primary again? By halving the ammo count per magazine, you gotta be more careful about ammo conservaion, something you don't have to be with the primaries. Reduce magazine weight to 0.5: In tandem with the reduction of shots per magazine, you need to carry more of them so reucing the weight makes the pistol a more attractive weapon.

I'd like to take a moment to talk about the weapon I use the very least, the submachinegun. The submachinegun could be a great secondary weapon to compliment pretty much any primary except perhaps the assault rifle. The problem as I see it is that there's nothing the submachinegun does that isn't done already by the primary set. The current statline has't changed pretty much since v1, and all it is at the moment is a cut-down version of an assault rifle. Some of it's biggest failures are it's expensive to use, easy to miss with and doesn't give enough bang for your buck. It's generally better to have a medkit and rely on your primary than get some use out of the secondary. I tried out a lot of different ways the submachine could compliment primary weapons and retain the feel of a submachinegun, and came up with the following: Remove all options except burst, and give the burst 4 shots: Most primary weapons have a single shot mode already, with the exception of the LMG. The submachinegun shouldn't be trying to compete with primary weapons that do a job probably better than the SMG can do. A burst fire of 4 shots slots alongside al primary weapon types, but won't directly compete with the LMG that has a higher ROF. Reduce the damage to 12: This ties directly into the first change. The original damage a submachinegun can do is 20. Improving the burst to 4 would make 20 hella OP. Reducing it to 12 wil give a maximum damage of 48. Testing you generally see damage between 20-30, depending on how many bullets hit the target. Increase accuracy to 65: After lots of tweaking, I found that the current burst accuracy of 45 is too low, but 70 or higher made the SMG too effective compared to primary weapons. An accruacy boost of 65 made the weapon more palatable and in the hands of skilled operators, deadly. Reduce burst cost to 20%: This is the biggie. The biggest change I made was to drastically reduce the cost of firing the weapon. This change is what makes the SMG favourable - it's now a cheap way to put a lot of lead downfield. In theory a solider standing still could empty the magazine and spray 20 shots everywhere. In practice, you're likely to get 2 bursts out in-between moving and using the primary. A soldier with an LMg as primary and SMG as secondary can use the LMG first then blast away with the SMG. The reduced damage makes the cheap shots less effective than it first seems. Verses Sebillians, it's takes a lot of fire from an SMG to put one down. I found that generally, using the primary first then folowing up with the SMG was the preferable option, but I could be proven wrong on this point. Reduce suppression damage to 5: It was importnat to drastically reduce the amount of suppression damage a SMG did, because it ws cheap and fired lots of shots. Dropping it from 20 to 5 seems drastic, but a burst now simulates what suppression damage it did anyway. Reduce range slightly: Primary weapons (with the exception of the shotgun) should have the lead on the SMG with regards to range. The submachinegun is supposed to compliment them after all, so I droped it from 16 to 12. This out it ahead of the shotgun, but ehind every other weapon. Reduce reload cost slightly: This altered SMG is the weapon you are most likely going to change mags for, so it made sense to reduce the cost of reloads slightly to compensate. I dropped it from 25 to 20. The sum total of all these changes makes the submachinegun a rapid, close-quarters assault weapon, lacking the punch of the shotgun or assault rifle but more than capable to tearing up targets with a hail of bullets. It's best paired with the LMG or the Sniper Rifle, but can go with any primary. Below is the modified version of the SMG, if anyone cares to give it try: ballistic_smg.json

This is a Raid with Andron/Gundrones. During the battle the game inexplicably CTD's, which is very annoying because even though I had ballistics my K/D was 3:1 and against Androns that's damn good! Output log detalling the CTD... output.log And savegames closest to the CTD groundcombat-160.json groundcombat-161.json

I would guess that GH wants to differentiate between the number of items is in stock and the amount of space those items take up. EDIT: Yeah, I'm pretty dang sure that QTY * STORAGE = amount of storage space that is taken up by that item line. There seems to be enough space to include the figure, so could that be included?

I've done quite a lot more combat since it was introduced in v9. As we're now on 9.3 would like to give some gaeplay related criticisms. 1) There needs to be some kind of visual trigger why a missile doesn't hit a target. An aircraft doing a flip, or a missile lock signal failing, or something just to show that a missile was evaded, otherwise it looks like a bug. 2) At the moment when I run out of fuel for an aircraft, it crawls towards an edge while the ufo runs rings around it. As the escape boundary is locked to the relative position of the ufo, my aircraft keeps changing direction and can never get closer to the exit. 3) I would suggest upping the top speed of falcons and phantoms - the ufos they can overtake are 5x faster in air combat than they are on the strategy screen, and it makes air combat horrible.

If you switch from one secondary type to another, the secondary you switch to does not activate. E.G. Take the sniper loadout, place the medikit into the secondary slot and the submachinegun in the backpack. If you replace the medkit with the submachinegun during combat, it does not activate. Below is a savegame starting a Raid where you can try this out. user-6.json

A few questions regarding classification and obsolescence of armour. As you noted, X1 armour was split up into light or heavy and each generation of armour made the previous generation obsolete. How would you classify armour types now in X2? Does tactical = light, wolf = medium and battlesuit = heavy, or are you hoping that each type of armour is a unique classification based upon the modules it can bring to the party? And regarding obsolescence.Is the plan for each of the three classes of armour remain relevant throughout the whole of the game or will some armours (e,g, tactical) be eventually obsolete?

So, another question regarding modules, this time within an armours' "ecosystem". Are all module combinations permissible within an armours' ecosystem or will there be either forbidden or detrimental combinations? The most obvious example of a potential forbidden/detrimental combination that leaps to mind would be combining jetpack and heavy armour. Either the suit is so heavy the jetpack can't give enough lift, or the suit is sufficiently heavy that the jetpack requires extra TUs to operate. Another possible forbidden/deterimental combination may be rebreather and visor. The nature of a rebreather mask may make a tactical visor either impossible to wear or impaired to fit around the mask.

Talking from a players perspective, I think I'd prefer having to build each item individually, but upgrade items en-masse. Even with relatively small amounts of items - say 20 for an A and B team, it would be fiddly to have to upgrade all of each item in turn and I'd never be sure that I got everything. I'd likely instead sell off all the current item and build a batch of the new stuff.

If I understand correctly, each armour type has X number of modules available to it, but not all module types are available to each armour type. Is that right? So tactical armour might have room for a jetpack, but a battlesuit wouldn't?