Max_Caine

I've always assigned an escort after the first time I got caught, but never had an encounter after that. I will keep on trying, though!.

But... it is possible to have an escort fly with a chinook already. I can click on a pair of interceptors to join my chinook as a group.

It's funny, but when Alliance was being touted about, all I read at the time was "AWESOME!!111!!!". Now they're actually going to release an xcom FPS it's all "O NOES!!!111!!". I wonder what would happen if they decided to remake TFTD and Interceptor? (esepcially if they gave Interceptor over to say, Volition.)

I'm not suggesting that a mission be a grab-bag of alien types, but I think it would be stimulating and interesting if mid-to-late game missions featured 2-3 types, and you weren't certain (say, beyond the "dominant" type) what those types would be. It would also beef up the challenge as different racial types would support each other in novel ways.

We know there are about 9-10 different alien types in the game, that each alien has their own discrete strengths and weaknesses (the Sebillian hardiness, the Andron ability to break through walls) and we know that each alien type has (depending on alien) 1-5 classes. This makes for variety within each alien type. However, will we see alien types mixing, perhaps in the mid-to-late game? I mean, this already happens in the terror mission with the terror drone, but will we see aliens mixing later on in the game?

Having spoken about the rights of homeowners in Britain, there is a rustic stereotype in Britain of a farmer, dressed in wellington boots, floppy hat and rough, countryside clothing with a double-barreled shotgun under one arm yelling out in a broad, Somerset accent "Git orf moi laaand!". The adult-themed comic Viz satirises this stereotype with the character Farmer Farmer. The double-barreled shotgun is often considered a "sign" of the countryside.

In Britain there is no automatic right for homeowners to defend their homes. There have been a number of well-publicised cases where an intruder was fought off but the homeowner was then arrested for crimes such as assault, aggravated assault and grievous bodily harm. The charges may be dropped against the homeowner or the homeowner may be acquitted of charges, but they will still be charged regardless. There is a lot of talk about passing laws similar to the Home Shield law in certain states of America, but there's nothing concrete.

Let's crunch some numbers. Using current-alpha stats (subject to change) what does TMP's $700,000 investment in manufacturing get you? Cost of a workshop is $200,000, with a $10,000 upkeep cost. Cost of living quarters is 150,000, with a $5,000 upkeep cost. Now, amazingly, that works out to 2 living quarters and 2 workshops - if one was to invest everything in plant and machinery. For the purposes of this example, let's say that there's extra money from somewhere to finance the first goods off the production line and hire labour. So, with 2 living quarters I can have 100 engineers, fully staffing 2 workshops. Engineers cost me $15,000 each per month and an inital hiring cost of the same (so I also have to find that money as well) so that's $1,500,000 labour costs, with a further $30,000 in upkeep every month, for a total of $1,530,000. If the council of nations were not giving me a paycheque every month to cover these exact same costs, to break even I have to make $1,530,000 per month. Okay, what to make? How about MiGs? Per 50 engineers I can crank out 1 a day, so if I set up parallell production lines, I can have 30 per line every 30 days. However, at 250,000 per, that's horribly expensive to start up. How about laser guns? They are one of the first thing you can manufacture after MiGs. What would be suitible? Well, I would want to maxmise my economies of scale whenever possible. Laser pistols are priced at $20,000, and 1 is made every 9 hours per 50 engineers, laser carbines and laser rifles at $50,000 every 16 hours, so laser pistols it is! If I set up 2 production lines, I can crank out 80 laser pistols per line every 30 days, for a total of 160 pistols. (The reason that I want 2 production lines are there is a cap on the number of engineers I can put on a single project - 99. So I am better off setting up two lines instead of 1 to maximise my workshops.) Let's say that the gross profit per item is very small. I make for $20,000, I sell for $21,000. My gross at the end of the month if I produce laser pistols is $160,000. That's less than a quarter of my upkeep - so there's no point in me investing in this project to begin with. Okay, how about a gross of $2,000 ($52,000) per item ? Then I double my gross for $320,000. Eh. Still no good. If I want to break even from the sale of goods and I have no other source of income than manufacturing, I am going to need to be able to sell a little higher. Break-even is at a gross profit of $9600, but the magic turnaround is at a gross profit of $10,000. With two workshops working flat out, I produce 160 pistols. at $30,000 per pistol, I make $1,600,000, for a net income of $70,000. Providing I only have two workshops doing just pistols, at a guaranteed sale of $30,000 per pistol (a 50% markup!) my ROI is 10%.. I can recoup my inital investment 10 months from start. Now, the barriers to making a profit for even two workshops are formidable. Most formidable are labour costs. Every fully-staffed workshop adds another $750,000 to the wage bill (and quite frankly, the engineers are on a crap wage). But, once you cross the magic profit line, because the engineers are total robots who only exist to serve their master and will work around the clock 24/7, even small net profits will add up quite quickly.

If you want to use realism as an argument, then you cannot separate the cost of labour from any other cost involved in manufacturing. Without labour, there is no manufacture. If you look at the earlier link I gave which strategized manufacturing in X-com:Ufo Defence, here it is again the analysis deliberately includes the cost of labour in calculating the overall net profit from the sale of manufactured goods. Furthermore, on page 6 when you counter Gauddlike's points, you include as part of the $700,000 base investment you discussed on page 5 labour costs! Furthermore, I would argue that ultimately every product is finally worth less than the goods they are made from. Consider the iPad. From the offical apple store linked to the UK site, first-generation iPads are £100-£300 cheaper than their later cousins new iPads for comparison. With every new generation of iPad to come out, the price of first-generation iPads will continue to tumble. Their worth drops until they aren't worth what's inside them.

Concerning realism, it can "make sense" that a final product sells for less than the raw materials and labour costs used to make it if the market for that good either nonexistant or weak. In that case, the manufacturer has made a bad bet on what would sell, and ends up making a loss. For instance, making MiG-23s. The Soviet Union could sell the airframes at an inflated price to Xenonauts. The cost of making, then installing the specialised avionics and detection equipment suitible for detecting and fighting Ufos then preparing the hull for ufo attack could inflate the cost of the MiG beyond what Xenonauts could get back for it if they tried to resell the aircraft, as said aircraft is useless for non-ufo combat without a considerable overhall. Secondly, in the current alpha engineer requirements for any manufactured product are very precise. An exact time/date for the manufacture of a product line is given. Therefore, the player will always know how long a product line will take to produce. If the player knows manufacturing time per engineer, the player can adjust engineer requirements as necessary. Additionally, also in the current alpha, the hiring and firing of staff is very streamlined and instantaneous. This may change in subsequent builds, but as things stand, there is no penalty to sacking staff. If I find I have too many engineers, I can sack them until I need them.

So, just out of interest, how long did those 10 portraits last before they were snapped up. 15 minutes? I don't think Nike shoes move that fast!

One of the editors there put out the new trailer for Xcom:eu. and said "this is about as close as X-COM loyalists are going to get to a new version of their favorite game", and I couldn't help but notice the first comment on it was a big shout-out to Xenonauts. Here's the link to the thread. Mr T would have been proud.

I’m sure this has been brought up already, but I can only see one way of making manufactured goods work as an alternate revenue stream and not as the only revenue stream. And that is to introduce market economics. That was the biggest problem with xcom:eu. The prices were static, so it was easy to work out the most efficient way to make manufacturing work. If prices react to flooding a market with goods, then manufacturing might work as a short-term prospect, but couldn’t be figured into long-term goals. But would that be fun? Would it be fun to watch price trends and try and work out when the best time to buy and sell would be? Or would market trading take over as the new revenue stream? >_<

Drop tanks are a good idea, but will probably only be valuable to early-tier interceptors, and in the early game. There are late-tier interceptors that will be available for research and manufacture and I’m willing to bet that they will have bigger fuel reserves and a longer operational time. And, by the time you get to producing later-tier interceptors, it’s likely you’ll have several bases, covering a larger area of the geoscape, negating the need for drop tanks. Regarding the % damage issue, it really depends upon the barriers to getting an interceptor. The barrier to getting a new F-17 is money. The barriers to getting a new MiG are manufacturing costs, transportation costs, manufacturing time and transportation time. With more barriers in place to getting a later-tier interceptor, would players appreciate the difference between factory-fresh and war-torn, or would they become annoyed that their investment in money, time and the opportunity wasted in other manufacturing projects that could have been taken instead will slowly sink down the plughole of depreciation?

Swe_Racoon, I have a strong suspicion that regardless of who wears those nostalgia goggles now, they will be very swiftly ripped off the moment Xcom:eu is released in October. People are excercising their right to grouse, but people did that with Diablo III, Left 4 Dead 2.... remember the "boycott" with Modern Warfare 2 over no dedicated PC servers? It didn't amount to a hill of beans then, I don't think it will amount to so much now.

Icevamp, I would argue there isn't an immediate reward for shooting down fightercraft. There's a reward at the end of the month, certainly - but nothing that you get right away, like you get at the successful conclusion of a ground battle. RotGtIE broght that up in the "funding" thread over in suggestions. Windex, I drew those questions from your post. Let me quote you: and So, yes I would ask if you are upset with having to go into the air combat mini-game every time because from those two passages, it looks like you are! Furthermore, I wasn't asking if you knew you had to undergo the air combat, I was asking if you were upset having to do that. Another poster has already asked if they have to do air combat every time, and could an "auto-resolve" option be available. From your original post, it looks like you are in the same camp.

Has anyone noticed that there doesn't seem to be any inventory management outside of the base? Everything a solider can do is listed on the action bar - shoot an LMG, shoot a rocket launcher, throw a grenade.... so it probaly means they can't pick anything up! That's quite clever, actually. Almost as clever as what they do with alien weapons. You don't recover alien weapons. You recover a generic "weapon fragments" item. I can see an impotent yell on the horizon from xcom die-hards when they realise that!

Windex, the short answer is – almost. Xcom was all about shooting down ufos and recovering the crashed vehicles. Which meant air combat. Lots of it. However, what are you most upset about? - That you must undergo the air combat minigame for each ufo you want to shoot down? - That there is no immediate reward for killing fightercraft? - That there isn’t a ground battle for every ufo type shot down?

Hands up anyone who has had to evacuate a large building. Anyone? In a previous job, I worked in an unemployment office. There was a long bank of ‘phones that our “customers” could use to ring up employers, call about benefits, that sort of thing. Several times in my time at that office, we had to evacuate the building – not because of a fire drill, but for a real, genuine reason. Almost inevitably two things happened: 1) My colleagues would wing it upstairs to go and get their bags and coats, even though we knew that every second counted and we needed to be out of there ASAP. 2) There would be 3-5 customers on the phones who would not get off them, even when the alarms were ringing. We had to actually cancel their calls before they would get up. These people, who you would expect to behave in what we would consider a rational manner, behaved irrationally. My colleagues risked their lives for their personal possessions. Customers would rather stay in their seats and finish their phone calls, then get out of the building. The problem as players is that we behave in a rational fashion, and it is my belief we expect the characters on the other side of the screen to behave as we think we would in their situation. I believe that we expect civilians to GET OUT OF THE DAMN WAY, because that’s what we feel we would do, given their situation. This is not true. In that situation, civilians would have a variety of reactions to ongoing events, from the fearful to the curious, from what we consider rational, to what we consider entirely irrational. It is not beyond comprehension that a civilian would get in the way between a Xenonaut and an alien, in the mistaken belief that the Xenonaut is the aggressor and the aliens need saving! But none of that “makes sense” to us, so we dismiss irrational behaviour and annoying and incomprehensible. We have no tools to understand the mental state of civilians during the ground assault. They don’t have faces. They don’t have voices. All they do is flap their arms (and in certain cases, set themselves on fire several times). Without something to help us understand what a civilian is feeling at the time the only response is “what the hell?”. Perhaps what we could use is some kind of mouseover tooltip so we can understand, rationalise and strategize civilian behaviour. Let’s say (for example) civilians can express four behaviours – curiosity, aggression, fear and panic. If we could mouseover on a civilian and get a smiley face that corresponds with their current mood, the incomprehensible becomes the comprehensible, and we can factor civilian behaviour into our strategy.

thothkins, I'm glad to see that you've come up with some reasons why the aliens would run away, but the civvies wouldn't. Sadly, those reasons don't matter a hill of beans to people playing the game. I'm still talking of course about the small fib that people choke on, and that fib is: why wouldn't civvies run away when aliens can? It's the same kind of fib that people are confronted with when they cannot use alien weapons in the next mission. We know the reasons why, on the forums. It says why in the damn research text, but people don't see it like that. What they see is "well, I wouldn't do it like that". This is the crux of the argument. They can buy that you can't use alien weapons until they are researched. But because a player in his or her own head would carry an alien weapon from mission to mission, because they can see the weapons, because they can be used by Xenonauts in a particular mission, it doesn't, as a consequence "make sense" that a Xenonaut couldn't continue to use them regardless of the reasons presented. This is the same kind of reasoning when it comes to aliens being able to escape, but civvies can't. Players can see civvies, civvies acting like some special kind of monkey (buddhist civilians, anyone?) and they can grasp that yeah, civvies may very well be present where an alien ship crash-lands. But because they can see civvies, a player would first consider what would "make sense" to him or her. And if an alien could escape, then it wouldn't "make sense" that a civvie couldn't. And I can see some apocalyptic flame wars if aliens escaping/civvies can't happening on this forum if such a thing were implemented, all because it doesn't "make sense". (p.s. I have used the "alien weapons" argument as an example. It is the only reason why I have brought it up. Please please please don't bring it up as anything other than example of what "makes sense".)

I've been following the comments quite closely on the Xenonauts kickstarter page, and comments made by people who have come here since the kickstarter began, and there seems to be a common thread throughout them - that people are treating the released alpha like either a late-stage beta, or a release-candidate demo. Now, why is that? (this isn't a retorical question. I have spent too long playing the alpha to think of it as anything else other than an alpha. I don't know how people could see it as anything other than an alpha, but comments lead me to believe that they don't think of it like an alpha. Anyone cleverer than me got any ideas?)

Well thothkins, we come back to that idea of "realism" and how it applies to other aspects of the game. Once you let aliens start escaping, then it isn't "realistic" that civilians, who don't start a fart in hell's chance of surviving even an alien crashland, can't escape just as aliens could. But civilians provide an unscripted random element in the scenario. If Xenonauts don't keep civvies alive, then they get marked down and potentially loose funding. On the other hand, if they keep them alive, then the get big smiles and gain funding support. Terror sites loose their bite if civvies can run off the closest board edge, and why shouldn't they? It isn't "realistic" that they would stay around where aliens can shoot at them. But it's critical in game terms to a terror site that there are civvies about who can be shot by aliens, or just what are the Xenonauts protecting? To prevent civvies from being slaughtered en mass, we have local military forces in terror sites and in crashlands - that buys the player time to secure their landing zone, discover where the aliens are and start shooting them. I don't know if you've ever read the book "Maskerade" by Terry Prachett, but one character in it says that "people will cheerfully swallow a big lie, but choke on a small fib". As it stands in the UFO recovery missions, people buy into the idea that there would be civvies and aliens. But people will not swallow that aliens could run away, when civvies can't, and furthermore, if civvies can run away, then why aren't they running away straight away?

I think if an accuracy cone were to be added, it should be added as something that a scout armour should do. Of course, the problem with adding it even as part of a scout armour package is that I would always then pack that scout armour as a observer, to help guage my other troops.

It's something I would like to see, as I would argue that aircraft operative range in Xenonauts is more significant than radar range.

Well... the aliens do go after Chinooks and transports in the geoscape. No reason to think they wouldn’t be as proactive in the ground assault. It would probably depend on the type of alien. I suspect that in game terms, they aren’t likely to be allowed to escape or blow up the core, at least, not straight away. The problem with allowing aliens to escape is part of the game is a question of fairness. As a player you don’t know what the map is like until you touch down, but the aliens do. This means that if aliens were allowed to escape, they would know where the nearest “board edge” is to escape off, but you, as the player, would not. Players would not consider it fair if they didn’t get a chance to have a crack at all the aliens on a map. One solution would be a designated “escape zone” where the aliens can escape off-map if they reach it. If the player knew this as well, and it was within reasonable distance from the dropship that would be fair and would add an extra dimension to the level. But while reasonable in game terms, it wouldn’t seem reasonable from a “realistic” point of view – after all, why can’t aliens escape from the board edge? For that matter, if aliens could escape, why can’t civilians escape from the board edge? The same would apply to blowing the core – a question of fairness. Far more players would complain if they didn’t feel they got a reasonable chance to recover power cores. The solution there would be perhaps to indicate on the map a “countdown timer”. But then, players don’t like to be unnecessarily hurried either. From a development point of view, it’s not a cut-and-dry solution.