erutan

In my 18.3 playthrough I skipped having a hunter and went 4x rifle, 2x sniper, 1 LMG, 1 Rocket. My snipers had the most kills, but in third was a riflewoman! If you don't use a hunter, you WILL get hit by reaction fire in the open... it's pretty unavoidable and agree it's a really strange incentive to your front line troops in light armor and your back line troops in heavy.

Yeah, the difficulty level is set to beta candidate.

Yeah, I have my condor launch it's lightweight missiles to use up the AMMs, then have my foxtrot launch it's heavier ones after.

Meh. I run fullscreen in wine so it doesn't trigger my dock/hot corners, but I can't cmd-tab out. Good to know there's a fix tho.

Sounds like compressing/archiving the files caused woes again.

That said the wide spread of fire that occurs due to misses has been a point of contention for quite a while, and is actually better than it used to be!

what latitude did the battle take place at?

@lightzy, if bullets don't travel beyond the current range that's way too short imo. It's more the "effective" range of the weapon, after which your chance to hit dramatically drops but the bullet still travels. Accuracy starts dropping every tile as is - check the charts @ http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/4275-Shot-Miss-Scattering?p=56691&viewfull=1#post56691

A thought on air combat auto-resolve implementation. Instead of having it be a button along with "engage" when you make an interception, have it be a hotkey you can toggle during air combat that fast forwards the battle. This way if you do truly overpower a UFO you can hit it, but if something looks a little off you can go back to normal speed. The downside to that would be having your fighters automatically do missile staggering once UFOs get better at dodging again...

Yeah I was thinking weapon stats for range boosts. A minimum chance to hit sounds like a good simple solution - though re: the max I had a rooftop sniper that had a 117% chance to hit in 18.1 so there still might be some niggly modifiers out there.

If there was a flag so numbered soldiers included in the game weren't in the general pool I'd add mine in for diversity (and figure others would as well). It'd be weird seeing multiple "me" faces in the game as is. Though if my soldier got killed I could try and find another and rename him I suppose.

Names in the credits seems like a nice option, the copy of a game could always be given to a friend but considering you need the game to mod it seems like a little odd of a reward. I'm not sure xenonauts maps would take 100+ hours (there's no texturing etc like with 3d map modding) but it probably would end up an equivalent to $100-200 of work regardless. I'd say no to custom portraits, but perhaps names in the game would be fine.

I think rewards from killing the aliens/recovering UFOs would be increased, so you'd always have a profit unless everyone in your squad was equipped with rocket launchers... it's just a question of how much profit you'd get. If you need more money, use less heavy weapons, but risk your soldiers more. If you want to preserve your soldiers, use a lot of explosives, etc. I think the game is fine without it, but I could see it adding some thoughtfulness to using explosives especially that doesn't currently exist, though tweaking carrying capacity would go a ways towards that too.

@gizmo, one can definitely pick away the logic, but it does a nice way abstracting out the purchasing/creating of ammo. Say that a tier x weapon is built with a reasonable amount of x ammo, but once you use it, it has to be replenished. This system would take away the clicks but still make firing rockets all over the place more expensive than small arms. You essentially have "unlimited" ammo to equip with because it get replaced after being used. The issue I see is when shooting down UFOs that don't generate a landing site - it feels like a "loss" to shoot them down, but if you don't charge airplanes for re-arming it doesn't feel right.

It'd make things clearer too, right now range is often more important than accuracy (a sniper that has moved will be more accurate than a rifleman at range), and we wouldn't have to have the ~5 tiles accuracy boost hack. I feel like the range of weapons should be boosted a bit if we use your formula - or maybe have the out of range taper down to 5% or something. Those wild across the screen shots that saved your ass are part of the xcom fun to me, but I agree that range makes things a little too accurate as is.

Thanks - the intuitiveness is what I was aiming for. I'm not much of a graphic artist, so it'd take me time to make ones that fit the tone a bit better... this was more of a proof of concept that people can use if they want. An easy make them fit the game better would be to take game assets and play with the levels on them to make them solid black and use them for icons.

I like Guads? idea of being billed at the end of the mission for ammo used. It keeps the current clicks saved, but also encourages a certain thriftiness. I'd be down for the OG behaviour for plasma then later being able to research infinite ammo, but I don't really see that happening.

agreed. otherwise you'd just have a soldier to spam smoke grenades every turn.

Sounds good, but it'd be nice to have it in a mod friendly .zip file.

my take on role icons https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ifw07saebni5reo/toxLkTKLOl http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/4889-erutan-s-roles-icon-pack-%2817-roles-woot%29

update: new unused icon, changed texture for "light" update2: created more contrast between "light" and "specialist" groups I made some comments on what direction I felt role icons should go a while back, and took a quick stab in that direction. I found a free icon pack online with a lot of military options and just used that with a few dirty quick edits - the feel is obviously off (and it's nowhere near as polished as DM_Mod) but it accomplishes some goals. 1) instantly recognizable icons 2) a large selection of possible roles 3) backgrounds are split between light, heavy, and specialist so they're easy to scan for "balance" (assuming soldier roles show up in more places in the UI as expressed by many here). e.g. 5 light, 2 heavy, 1 specialist, looks good. Dropbox mod download. Photo Gallery of icons + master PSD Only the existing named ones show up in the equip screen (they all show up in the role select though). I use assault, rifle, sniper, and heavy. Feel free to rename whichever ones you want to use to extra and commando if you wish. For me they'd be rocketeer and rookie. The only calls to uitextures/roles that I could find were in style.lua and they weren't anything like a list of roles, so I dunno. Baked into the exe? Hopefully we can get more default images in the next release.

The small farm map with the one barn between you and the alien craft was well fun - a lot shorter than I expected but some nice cover. The second farm map I played was a bit larger and had rocks in the concrete? That didn't make much sense to me, but the map flowed well other than that. I actually made use of my shotgun carrying thotkins in something other than boarding a UFO. I personally sort of enjoy having the charlie land with the tailgate not facing the action, feels a bit more secure.

The roles look nice, but I'd use the coloring differently / make them more distinctive. Commando should be closer to rifles than heavy weapons.

Aha! The ball lightning space magic ring to rule them all is what is causing some of the civilians to be invisible on the map! It all makes sense now...

I've been seeing a bit more randomness in 18.3 - maps where I "knew" an alien wouldn't be from 18.1 had an alien there sometimes. Then again I haven't had much time play 18.3.