maxm222

So it's a breastplate on your belly? I suppose that describes some Kugelwagens. Sort of. If you squint and turn the lights down. And get stoned.

My impression has been that new uplinks keep appearing (slowly), but I'm not sure. It would make sense that, since building the uplinks are the only way to keep buying scientists & engineers, uplinks wouldn't run out.

Heh-heh, right you are! It breaks my immersion to see my squaddies do something that stupid. If anyone is interested, there are a bunch of YouTube videos showing Major Fails of the Javelin anti-tank missile which are pretty funny, and nobody gets hurt--as far as I can tell.

Ah, well, I had two Mars vehicles using laser SMGs--using the ammo and weapons available in the armory--and I almost always use right click for equip and unequip. I'll go back before the base battle and make a point to avoid any dragging in equiping the Mars platforms. Thanks for the info.!

The Rule The Waves approach also sounds interesting, and it addresses the issue of replayability. One of the things that often makes replays of Xcom/Xeno-type games more boring for me (at least, after a couple of completed campaigns) is that I learn which tech advances I need or want, and that aspect of the game loses much of its interest: I know what's coming and tech advances just become a predictable chore. I don't know what the best approach is, but I don't see an obvious way around needing to play-balance any additional tech achievements or complexity, which I believe adds a lot of additional coding and play-testing. No perfect approach, I guess.

>At the minute its implementation reminds me of that Taliban terrorist on YouTube who fired an RPG into the wall right next to him.. Hehe...you probably want to encourage your enemy to use those kind of tactics. In terms of "real life" (whatever that is) usage, a weapon which blows up friendlies even two times out of every 100 would never be used, but in the game environment, the failure rate is way of increasing tension/suspense by introducing random problems for the player. So do we really need more suspense due to weapon failure when we already are unsure of how effective our fire, and that of the aliens, will be? I doubt it, unless we're trying to make things more "realistic," in which case the chance of firing duds would be much more common than catastrophic failure. The only other reason I can see for having any weapon failure (duds or booms) is for balance purposes--like Mars vehicle-based SMGs missing 4 out of 4 shots unless very close to the target.

Yeah! Both of those sound good. And: - A "combat" scientist (CS) or engineer (CE) has to accompany a squad to test a new weapon - A CS/CI has to go on a mission to disable alien security measures (locks and mines) - A CS/CI is able to be an interpreter of alien language, allowing him/her to interrogate captured aliens on the battlefield and discover alien resources and deployments for that or future missions.

output.log.1output.log.1Went back to the beginning turn of the battle mentioned above, got a few turns in, same thing that happened above: crash to decktop. Files attached. The larger output.log failed (10 megs) content_manager.state output.log

Was in the middle of the human turn--I think. The game disappeared and I was back on the desktop. See files. content_manager.state output.log

Perhaps I missed this being mentioned somewhere above, but with any game mechanic/system I think it's useful to think about what you want to see a player encouraged to do--and whether players who don't share your preferences can deviate from the "encouraged path." For example, a dev might think it's more fun/challenging/suspenseful to have to be aware of and try to compensate for, ammo level and armor--so the dev decides that players don't get unlimited ammo and impervious armor. With science research, the fun/tension tends to come from choosing how many resources to put into which weapons and abilities. Perhaps there is some way to make choice of scientist type or skill interesting, but I think it would be difficult to equal the fun of choosing the mix of troop abilities and specialties when considering who to hire. One thing I thought of was making the scientists go on missions, perhaps with special abilities to operate or repair complex equipment or something of the sort. A scientist-soldier could be another factor to consider when hiring more troops. And having a scientist or engineer along on a mission would present another level of tactical challenge. Unfortunately, it would also mean re-balancing humans v. alien battles. Oh well.

I bought "Corruption 2029" and have played it a bit. Like the others have said, it's Mutant Year Zero---with space marines. I wish it still had the duck and the pig, though. I love great gameplay and beautiful graphics. The fact that some devs are working on getting the prettiest graphics out of current hardware/software and pushing the envelope is fine with me: somewhere down the line my favorite games will have those graphics, and it's nice seeing what I have to look forward to. That said, I also really like destructible environments and more variety in maps. Which, along with many other things, is probably why I have logged 260 hours on X2 so far, and look forward to more!

The Matrix..

>The HM screen is only meant to be displayed if action is occurring that isn't in the LOS of your soldiers; it's literally meant to hide movement that is hidden. Okay, so the assumption is that the HM graphic is not hiding anything that it shouldn't hide, yes? And what I'm saying is that the HM is covering what should be visible. I have taken casualties from "ghost" aliens that were hidden from view by the HM, and when I can scroll quickly enough to defeat the HM, I can see aliens who are in LOS moving around under the HM graphic. The reason I'm trying to clarify this: if everyone else believes that the HM graphic is ONLY covering up movement that would not be visible anyway, I will need to document what I am seeing, since otherwise I can understand why no one else would be reporting or prioritizing the issue.

Thanks for the response.

"reasonably fun to use." Good advice, hard to follow. Read the Steam reviews where "Utter piece of crap" follows "best game I ever played." One player always plays a good guy in RPGs, another loves being pure evil. Tough crowd. I still say the key thing is to give the player reasonable knowledge about what effect a weapon is likely to have, since you can be certain that some will love and some will hate it.

See screen shot below for the results of a terror battle against Sebillions(sp?). I did a search on vehicles and balance and found 1 comment by Kharkov (I think) from the last 6 months or so. Also, I vaguely remember some discussion of platform capabilities and protection in the past 6 months or so, but not out of concern for imbalance. Sorry if this is a rehash. I'm using the term "platform" to describe the Mars1 mobile weappons. I just finished my first trial of a "Mars1 x4" strategy: two shotgun platforms and two LMGs along with the usual mix of the remaining six humans in the drop ship. I've never finished a battle so fast. Any time I could bring up two of the shotgun platforms next to an enemy, it was toast--even the big lizard guys never had a chance to regenerate. The two LMG platforms were almost as effective if the distance wasn't too great. As the results show, I lost only one of the platforms--no other KIAs. Although I loved shooting everything in sight--at least, as a novelty--four platforms with those weapons seemed to me likely to unbalance any of the earlier terror or downed-UFO combats. I think the reasons that the four platforms did so well include: - The enemies in early battles are relatively weak and the full enemy AI isn't in place. - The platforms have great mobility, allowing them to get up close and personal very frequently, and they often had enough action points left over to get back to cover, or at least further away from the enemy - The enemy AI didn't target the platforms as priority targets (I think the platforms were fired on twice). - The abilities of the humans and those of the platforms seem to mesh unusually well, with the platforms protecting the humans and the humans repairing the platforms or delivering the final shots to put away a shredded enemy.. Of course, inexperienced players will take a while to come up with the right number and armament of platforms, but at least something to think about.

Whatever the final rules decided upon, I think players should be able to make a reasonable choice about using weapons based on the evidence they already have about unusual results. If I can't see an obstacle on a map, then my grenade shouldn't bounce off an invisible obstacle. If I fire a grenade or missile launcher, it shouldn't go 5 inches and then fall at my feet- (as just happened to my squaddies)-unless I have some way of knowing that it may do so (like putting in the manual: "grenades and missiles may occasionally misfire and blow up the operator and adjacent friendlies"). Also, if we're going to have "catastrophic misfires" where the missile/grenade blows up in the same hex as the operator/thrower, that should be: the chance the weapon misfires time the chance that the misfired explosive blows up (ex.: .2 chance X .2 chance = .04 chance..I think). Some number of dropped grenades will be duds or else be immediately picked up and thrown again; some number of missile misfires will only cause damage from the propellant burning down but won't explode.

> had to fight against Androns, Flying Disks and and other Alienlive.. You forgot the Barnyans.

>Was the Local Forces Soldier Dead or has he / she survived? Pretty sure she survived. I'm still not clear about the consequences for having no non-Xenogrunt survivors; on just one occasion so far (including all revisions) I "failed" my anti-terrorist mission because none of the civilians survived, but I've had that outcome several other times where there was no penalty. I think.

Thanks for the info, will check it out.

Thinking over Chris' comments, I've gotta complain just one more time: I just finished a turn in an early terror combat in the shipping container yards where almost every alien turn was covered up at some point by the "Hidden Movement" graphic. By hitting the edges of the screen with the cursor I can usually see something of what's going on, and none of what I glimpsed was anything that needed to be hidden, although it was often some action that I needed to see for planning and which was within the squad's LOS. This is the one thing that really interferes with my enjoyment of the game, and I'm not expecting a bug-free or finished product in a beta. I know that there are aliens creeping around where I can't see them. The HM graphic is like creating tension by randomly blinding my entire squad: it's neither realistic nor fun. If a lot of you really like this graphic, I'd be interested in hearing why. Maybe players are assuming that the stuff that's covered up is stuff your squad really couldn't see with the current LOS rules? I do, of course, understand about other game priorities for the devs. Just wanted to gripe. Now I feel better.

Wanted to mention that the new victory screen (see screenshot below) is a huge improvement visually and informationally (if that's a word). The kill stats, promotions, and time to heal are all excellent, and the kill info in particular adds to the sense of developing characters with performance histories. The one improvement that occurred to me would be something visual (large and shiny) to show the new rank and/or achievement next to a soldier's name. I know that info is on the armory screen, but the graphics are pretty small and timid. I'm thinking of how cool it felt in X-Com (?) to see a squaddie reach some achievement.

See screenshot and logs. I think all the objects should be lined up and not let go until one of them confesses to failing to reference one of its instances. One of them will talk eventually.. output.log_2.b32ffc316c1208a660c9d638af86b860 output.log_1.bf105a2febb8b63f2ac22161d40de64d

Had the same problem, although it's much less bothersome now than it was a couple of builds ago. Usually doesn't take much to shake the text boxes loose.

The grunt in the wheel well hasn't gone away. This battle is cursed.