erutan

There aren't a lot of maps, but there's plenty of stuff to research and the troops have all the classic TBS actions available. If you don't want to play a beta, you can always wait until later, it's your call.

Blod clots. Given soldiers often have multiple 'wounds' this wouldn't make medikits useless.

True, but I'd prefer if accuracy dropped off faster and AI wouldn't take shots below x chance to hit. Though having unarmed cesarians could be amusing I suppose.

I think fixing squadsight / accuracy / AI targeting from extreme range is better than giving aliens ammo limits. Having aliens that can't do anything would be boring, and most of the time them firing off dozens of shots isn't an issue.

3 seems to make sense to me, it's been a struggle for me to see how to balance air combat to make it more interesting without disrupting the economy. If we do go with 2 balancing it around Buzzles suggestion sounds good - maybe there were a fleet of Charlies upgraded after the iceland incident xenonauts can get free, and MIGs are a bit cheaper to ugprade? 1 wasn't actually an option.

Not if you reuse local forces sprites.

Having a map of an area is a LOT different than turning off the shroud - no map is going to show where every bale of hay, hedge wall, parked car, park bench, etc is. Or every tree, rock, etc in the wild. What would be more realistic would be that instead of the shroud being black it had vague placeholder props - e.g. the outline of a house, or of a park, that would then get "resolved" into current game tiles once a squaddie gets into range to notice the details. Then you have the "quick recon of the fighter jet / heli under fire / map" to give you a more strategic overview but still encounter tactical details as you go through the map. e.g. some examples of what maps will tell you: wilderness, urban Implementing such a system would be far too complex, this game is an XCOM clone, the shroud will stay. The game has far less maps than it will later in the beta / at launch, and with community maps being added in the game it's not like we'll have an EU12 situation.

sounds like a metal band being confused for a lofi pop group - 'we're not fog.... we're cloud of darkness!'

The face chooser would be good just because sometimes you get duplicate faces in a squad. I just don't see it being put in - I loved customizing my soldiers in EU12 and enjoyed the IMP in JA2, but I'd say it'd probably not go in... who knows, he's changed his mind on renaming already though. There's a lot of little suggestions that get put into the game even at this stage - he can't think of everything himself.

Given most of the game you're in armor, I'd say no to the clothes switch. Might be kinda confusing to see your units look the same as NPCs as well. Chris wants the soldiers to feel like existing real soldiers, so I don't think we'll get a face selector... you could enter the codes for kickstarter portraits if there are some you'd like to start with though.

Ready costs most likely won't make it in... I think it makes a certain sense but without being able to move readied (a meaningful cost/benefit action) you really only gain a bit more control over balancing weapons + adding in another level of micromanagement that was abstracted before. It is possible though, as the animation already exists. re: squadsight in general... i wonder how hard it'd be to add something like "if soldier has fooPrecisionRifle equipped and movement penalty = off then squadsight" and have everyone else not have it but have larger vision ranges. It'd require rebalancing all the weapons and possibly maps, but we're sort of in that state now anyways. I feel it's more likely that we'll get a real time squadsight and keep it more "classic XCOM" though!

I think it'd be doable if you removed binoculars and moving when readied, though realistically the only scoped weapons are precision rifles. There is already an animation for bringing your weapon up. Combine ready costs with the first shot if not already readied, and jack up the ready cost of HWP (and add an unready for those). You can manually ready if waiting outside a UFO door, etc, where you think you might get UFO fire for reaction time or if you stop behind some cover you're going to shoot from next turn.

re: hour lines: I sort of like the uncertainty of things now when deciding when to launch my transport. Plus a decent amount of the time you might be hitting multiple crash sites in a row. The little icon would be useful, but it'd probably come down to how simple this was to code into the game, and it'd only be useful for edge cases where you're about to land at a site right on the day/night border.

There is no way to avoid someone firing a rocket launcher at an alien another player sees, and snipers should be able to see a spotted alien as they have scopes. A large problem is that accuracy doesn't drop off fast enough - if we moved to something like stellar's formula squadsight becomes less of an issue because lower ranged weapons simply won't be that accurate past a soldiers sight range... it'd simulate taking potshots in the dark. Knowing where something is lets you focus on that area beyond a general scanning, so a bit beyond normal vision range you could still be fairly accurate... but if you don't have a scope given the compressed battlefield don't think that range should extend too far. Adding in a ready cost to weapons might help balance things (as discussed elsewhere), we could make it much higher for HW plus add an "unready" cost to them to make them feel a bit more stationary in practice. Bumping up vision ranges and going to the EU12 model would work as well, but this is supposed to be a more faithful recreation of XCOM. Those lucky shots that take out an alien from a screen away are part of the magic.

@phoenix check the carry capacity thread, a page or two from the end re: armor and space thoughts.

Please read that last sentence again. I'm somewhat confused that you think JA2 and (I assume) the original XCOM had good combat systems since they both a) had bullets that could travel past the optimal range of a weapon b) had squadsight (though JA2s was a bit more advanced). Given that I can't see why you see the only solution as limiting absolute weapon range to soldier sight range. If you really want to get rid of squadsight going the EU12 route in terms of move/vision balance seems a lot more viable than just keeping the xenonauts system as is without it. But then you lose those unlucky/lucky/random shots that are so XCOM.

If you are a sniper, you have a scope... it makes sense if someone points out a target that you can shoot it fine. Iron sights not so much. Having accuracy decrease at a proper level past optimal range would essentially mitigate this... if you have a 5% to chance with a rifle/lmg to hit an enemy that is out of your optimal range (and hence most of the time vision aside) you can still get lucky or suppress (someone yelled that a lizard was by thataway, you fired in thataway) but it's not a standard tactic. imho I'd like a "deployed" sniper (e.g. no movement penalty) to get a much narrower cone of vision but more range, but the idea didn't seem to get much traction.

So you want to make absolute weapon ranges shorter than the current "optimal" and get rid of squadsight... so all combat takes place within 18 tiles or so. That will lead to pretty cramped map design. EU12 had weapon range set at 18 tiles for most weapons and standard movement was 6 tiles (12 for dash). Given Xenonaut soldiers move 4 TUs per tile, and start ~60TUs and grow from there, under your system rifles/lmgs should be effective to at least 30 tiles. I highly doubt squadsight would be taken out, but if it did we'd be using something more like the "long range vision" mod: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5082-Long-Range-Mod-%28another-sight-mod%29?goto=newpost Maybe you "don't care" about formulas, but having accuracy greatly drop off past an optimal range (ala JA2 - I guess that game had a shitty combat system) would solve "shooting across the map" thing.

So you want to make absolute weapon ranges shorter than the current "optimal" and get rid of squadsight... so all combat takes place within 18 tiles or so. That will lead to pretty cramped map design. EU12 had weapon range set at 27 for most weapons and movement was 12 (24 for dash). Given Xenonaut soldiers move 4 TUs per tile, and start ~60TUs and grow from there, under your system rifles/lmgs should be effective to ~30 tiles. I highly doubt squadsight would be taken out, but if it did we'd be using something more like the "long range vision" mod: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/5082-Long-Range-Mod-%28another-sight-mod%29?goto=newpost Maybe you "don't care" about formulas, but having accuracy greatly drop off past an optimal range (ala JA2 - I guess that game had a shitty combat system) would solve "shooting across the map" thing.

Yeah, after the process dies it'll start up fast before it kicks back up again. This forum basically needs to be hosted on a VPS (linode, amazon, rackspace). Shouldn't have to be super expensive (~$20-30/mo), but I think we're outgrowing shared hosting.

Probably more concurrent users now that the beta candidate has been announced? There's a lot of database calls for logged in users vs. being able to cache a more traditional "page". IIRC the site is on shared hosting, which it really shouldn't be at this point.

Flares are pretty lightweight - as much as I enjoy equipping my soldiers I don't want to go down each one (especially late game when there are larger dropships) every time I have a night mission and take out a grenade and drop in a few flares, then go back and remove them for a daylight mission. It'd also suck if you mistimed when your transport got somewhere and did a night mission without flares.

Maybe have 3 of them show up in your quick grenade slot, but still take no space/weight? It'd be annoying to have to change every roles loadout between night/day.

Maybe 95% front, 80% angle? I appreciate the shield doesn't cover the entire body, but it should be noticeably safer due to the decrease in DPS.

@ladlon Yup, that's what I meant and it's a suggestion I made somewhere in the past. I always change how I refer to the games, I usually call it EU12 vs EU94, but that time for whatever I switched things up. We'll see how the hidden movement screen as is works when the camera works better (as gizmo pointed out).