compactset

Personally I am against this because it removes one of the key parameters differentiating the soldiers, thus simplifying unnecessarily the management of your squad. Also I do not see why it should remove fiddling with the loadout: instead of looking at the soldiers with most strength and giving them the heaviest weapons or loading them with additional ammo/grenades we'll pass to giving our favorite weapons to the soldiers with better accuracy-reaction and then we will give more ammo/grenades or an extra sidearm to the soldiers with the most remaining carrying weight. But the problem of maximization and associated fiddling will remain. Possible solutions to the problem you said are the following: -register for each soldier a familiarity statistic for class of weapons (pistols, smg, machineguns, assault rifles) which should increase with practice like all the other stats but could decrease if the unit uses different weapons or does not uses weapons of the class for a bit of time. A similar idea was implemented in Silent Storm. In this way then we have identified the role of a soldier after examining his statistic we would be encouraged to stick to one kind of weapon and we will consider changing it only when a better variable is available (eg we pass from ballistic assault rifle to laser rifle). -Limit the number of weapons, spare magazines or grenades by the shape of the belt, vest or any kind of armor the soldier is wearing. For example the starting armor could have a belt with space only for 3 spare magazines and one grenade and admit a backpack for additional ammo, but the heaviest endgame armor could not admit a backpack because it is considerably bulkier and it could admit only two slots for ammo or grenades. This way we should choose between an additional magazine or a grenade. -Add the option to create templates which we can select to equip a soldier immediately with the loadout we chose. This way we can equip immediately a replacement for a died soldier who should cover the same role, like rifleman, sniper, heavy weapon guy and so on. Also you should add the option to memorize the loadout of a soldier before a mission, so that after a ground battle the unit automatically restocks ammo, grenades or disposable gadgets if they are available in magazine. In this way you cut considerably the trivial micromanagement.

No offense taken, as you said repeatedly this beta is a really early stage of the game. My comments are just for sincere feedback, I am not complaining. Regarding the functionalities to implement. 1) Priming grenades: if I remember correctly you could not do that in Xenonauts. Adding an option do it before trowing the explosive like it was implemented in Ufo defense/terror from the deep and Apocalypse would be very useful. 2)Changing the elevation level: this was implemented in Xenonauts and I suppose you will add it later. Also it would be nice an option to cut the walls of the buildings at half height to have a better visibility of interiors: such feature is present in Invisible Inc and I found it very helpful. Currently when one of my units goes behind a wall I have to use the UI to see where it is and select it but I cannot see directly. I do not remember how these problems where handled in the first game, so excuse me if you already had implemented similar or alternatives solutions. A roof/ceiling toggle was present in Xenonauts but now it is replaced with one for line of sight. I guess also this will be implemented in the future. 3)For inventory management during ground mission it would be helpful to display the TU cost for all the manipulations of the items on the ground or in your backpack. It would remove situations where you find yourself with not enough UT to fire/move because you misjudged the UT costs. Like for example: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=869192010 As you can see in the image the character inventory is opened during a fight, in the upper right corner (above the amulet) are displayed the AP cost of all the changes to inventory and equipped items and your current AP pool. You can freely experiment without losing AP to find the optimal setup before continuing the fight, when you are satisfied you select the Apply button at the lower right corner of the screen and all the changes you made are final. I think it should not be difficult to implement this to Xenonauts 2 (I am not an expert but it does not seem complicated). 4)Related to the base management I noticed two things. The first is that I cannot display the stats of new soldiers during one recruit screen, since this is an evident lack of information I think it is obvious you will work on it. But when I looked at the inventory screen of my soldiers when I outfit them for a mission I saw that there is no strength stat and everyone has the same carry capacity. Is this intentional?

I am making a topic to express some random thoughts on the current state of the game, if there is already an appropriate topic already present you can merge this post with that. As for the aerial battles: seriously I cannot understand what are they about. In Xenonauts they where a real time minigame about maneuvering your craft while shooting the enemy and evading incoming fire, not elegant nor particularly complex but it made sense. Now I am presented with a turn based battle in which I can move my craft and make an attack, except I can unload two missiles but shoot the gatling only once. Now my current strategy is to shoot both missiles, approach the target then use the machine gun and hope that I deplete the UFO hp. I know that probably I am ridiculing it just because I do not like but I think it has some serious flaws: for example we are not given any indication what the distance does influence. From the animations I suppose that the closer you are the more accurate the gatling is, so it does more damage. But what about the missiles and the UFO attacks? I think if you want this to be a compelling minigame you should make more clear to the player what are the risk vs reward involved and you should obviously tie it well to the global strategic overlay of the game. Then there are two concrete problems that you should fix: 1) you should at least display the ammo on the machine gun/ how many time I can fire it. Now it lasts only for one fight and then I have to go back to an hangar to reload, but what about if I want engage another UFO or I am attacked on the way home? 2) The bottom of the screen is labeled "escape zone" but I did not see any command to actually escape combat and I have to wait the fixed number of turns to end combat even if my fighter is in bad shape. Are you planning to add this option in the future? Regarding the ground missions. First of all I already noticed that the UI is almost unchanged from Xenonauts: I honestly believe there is much room for improvement. For example it lacks basic functionalities like priming grenades (and selecting how many turns it will delay before exploding), choosing ground elevation, toggling rooftops/walls and reserving TU for shots. I really hope they will be added later. Also if possible you should implement shortcuts (possibly rebindable) for the actions displayed in the UI. For a better inventory management on the field I suggest you as follows: when manipulating objects (swapping/leaving on the ground/picking up) do not apply the changes (and the UT cost) immediately, instead display the total cost in UT for all the actions done and add a confirmation button to finally confirm the actions. This way you eliminate any error the player makes by misclicking, present him with a better management of the soldier UT and also the solution is not at all difficult to implement: you just need to add a line showing the TU costs and a confirm button in a suitable corner of the inventory screen. Moreover I would change the color for displaying the damage a soldier has received: I noticed that the health bar has a darker color for the health you lost in combat but if you are planning to add bleeding or injures that temporarily lower your attributes like maximum health and maximum TU you should make it more evident. Finally I noticed that now the prone position does not give any to hit bonus: at first I thought that it was a bug but somewhere I read that this is a conscious design decision. Can you confirm this? If yes, what is the reasoning behind this change?