Stromko

I don't think going prone would be of much use in the sort of combat we see in Xenonauts. It would only provide slightly more cover and stability than crouching, and to be done proper it would make turning and moving cost greatly more action points. This is fine when you're up against a line of soldiers advancing on you in JA2, but it wouldn't do very much good at all against aliens that want to annihilate you with plasma cannons and inject their eggs in your spine. Fighting aliens just isn't the same as fighting soldiers in JA2 is my point, and the same tactics don't and shouldn't apply. If they were using some kind of 3D-to-sprite tool and they could add new animation sets to the game with relative ease, then I'd say go for it, and let the people who want to crawl through missions do so, but I'd rather they focus the significant energy involved into features that are more vital and interesting in this setting.

The most bothersome thing right now is when I send out three jets to take down a medium UFO, and a Fighter UFO keeps intercepting the fighter wing and running away over and over (and over) again. Clever girl .. annoying me so much I just want to quit the game. =)

A lot of those missions sound too typical, but I think it's a matter of presentation. This type of game is best with emergent goals chosen by the player. You're the supreme commander of the Xenonauts, not just a grunt, meaning that no one's going to tell you to kidnap X or acquire Y or activate Z-- instead, it fits better to have opportunities that present themselves, and you choose how to take advantage of them. It's not as complicated as it sounds. For example, say you discover the location of an alien base. It's up to you whether you want to send in a team loaded with stun grenades and shocksticks (capture as many as you can for intel, high risk), a tactical team to carefully defeat the enemy (an operation focused purely on retrieving technology, moderate risk), or a slash-and-burn team with rocket launchers and heavy weaponry to annihilate the alien scum with extreme prejudice (an operation to take the base down ASAP with maximum chance of success). All they need to do is give us a diverse range of tools, and sufficient feedback mechanisms / goals to motivate us to use different tactics depending on the situation and our intent. It really helps playability and replayability to be able to pursue goals in different orders and at our own pace. For instance, there might be a particular type of alien from which you can get a useful, optional piece of research from, but only if you capture one of their scientists or leaders. So suddenly you see a sufficiently large UFO or base of that race. You realize they're going to have a scientist or leader aboard, so if you want that research it suddenly changes the context of the operation. It's not just another bug hunt, your main goal is now to capture that scientist. No one stepped down from on high to tell you to do this, it's just an opportunity that you're canny enough to realize and now it's up to you to go for it or not. That, to me, seems more in the spirit of what makes this type of game special. I would like to see new mission types and scenarios as well, I'm just putting in my two cents about how I'd prefer to see them implemented. I think player agency is really important, and having abstract goals foisted onto you would spoil it a little.

Yeah I'm liking the art as well. Not every game has to have pretty characters, and I think the grim characters work very well for the setting. edit: They do have pretty characters as well actually, that woman in the funding screen is nice. Somehow the bags under her eyes just make her better. So the ugly people are an artistic choice, yo, and I respect that.

It seems a little strange, that they don't just keep the weapons and hotglue on iron-sights and a way to pull the ammo out so they can reload it. It's fine though, and it shows they aren't slavishly devoted to the parts of X-Com that don't matter. Considering how many things are automatically sold off, I suspect everything that you manually sell must be useful later (or as an emergency reach fund to get that replacement fighter you needed yesterday). Except I'm pretty sure you can just sell flares for a profit, I think they're kind of a bug.

When I look at it in game, I believe it means a percentage chance to detect a UFO every minute that it is within that range bracket. Once detected, it will remain tracked until it escapes to space or leaves radar coverage. I would suspect the size of the UFO would have an effect on detection, and obviously it's possible to detect very small and small ufos in the kickstarter build, so there must not be a very great penalty for small UFOs, if any. I seem to always detect aliens within my radar coverage before they can cause alien attacks / events, so I think the chance of detection with even a single radar is pretty good right now. I've found it more useful in terms of protecting my funding / humanity to build several small bases with a single radar, storeroom and hangar. This alone seem successful enough to protect my funding and keep it increasing. As they continue to develop the later stages of the game, I imagine they'll tweak this to make detection and interception harder, at least if they want us to invest in better radars, etc later in the game. At the very least, larger UFOs will be way too nasty to handle with a single hangar, so one would need to invest in bigger side-bases.

Alien alloys will obviously be extremely useful for body armor and a host of other things, and it sounds like plasma clips might not be differentiated by weapon type so they might be useful to (I don't know if they'll work in reverse-engineered human plasma weapons though). It might be possible later on to make alien alloys, I don't know. I haven't seen anything you can actually make out of alien alloys in the demo build, however. I've ended up researching everything available, including the post-powerplant alien alloy research, but never got the option to make body armor, and there was no option to make lasers after I researched plasma rifles.

I would think to have any chance against the aliens, your troops need to be highly specialized and elite. I get the sense that the Xenonauts are cherry-picked as some of the best from units all over the world. It just isn't reasonable to expect a soldier to be world-class in both infantry operations and vehicle operations in other words, so I don't agree with the idea of just having soldiers stand in as pilots and vehicle crew, even though I respect its elegance from a game-play perspective. I think the concept of experience gain in Xenonauts makes the most sense as that even though your soldiers are experienced and highly trained, they've never fought aliens before, and so they're still acclimatizing and rapidly improving as they face this alien threat over and over again. I do think though either vehicle experience has to go in, or they should just go ahead and make the tanks remote controlled (thus expendable). Vehicles aren't worth it for a variety of reasons, and the fact that when they kill an alien they're stealing experience from your troops is really the last straw. Maybe if my first experience with the Ferret wasn't it dying in one shot from a plasma pistol, and the impromptu cover of the tank disappearing two shots later, I'd consider them worthwhile, but as it stands I never deploy them. Having four extra troops instead of a Ferret is just vastly superior, and if one of those troops has a rocket launcher then the Ferret serves absolutely no purpose. For all my griping though, I'm sure this is going to be changed in balancing and based on the xenopedia it sounds like the Ferret is supposed to be able to resist plasma pistol shots at the very least. I really like the art design and the way it works (running over terrain is fun), so I'm definitely willing to keep giving it a try as it gets reworked. It would be sweet to be able to layer on some alien alloy once the requisite research is done and make it an actual tank that can ignore small-arms fire, but obviously that's a dream for the future. Speaking of upgrading vehicles, and the devs apparently saying that crew won't be transferrable, well what about having significant upgrades be available for the vehicles you already have? There's already a Garage tab for managing loadout on these things, it doesn't seem like a stretch to have a slot for Armor upgrades, Drivetrain upgrades, Powerplant, sensor systems, etc. These things could be researched and built in your workshop just like Alenium Missiles for fighters. A Ferret with alloy armor, armored wheels (or an anti-grav option), motion tracker / thermal tracker and an Alenium core would be utterly beastly, and you could definitely handwave that since these upgrades are human-designed that the same crew could acclimate to it no trouble. Maybe even get a fire-prevention upgrade or other crew-survivability tweaks, so that after a mission where a Ferret is disabled you can keep some percentage of the crew and their experience alive.

Doesn't the lack of a cannon already limit the MIG though? Also it seems weird that a single shot will just make it go bamf sometimes. It can't roll, so obviously it's going to take more damage regardless. I think there's more replayability if you can choose to focus on one or the other. If I want fast, high-risk interceptions, then I'll go with MIGs. If I want maneuverable dogfighters, then the F-17's are better. It simply isn't viable to throw away 250K on an intercept, and half the time when I send out MIGs they're gonna die and I can't do anything about it (Unless I keep them out of combat range, in which case the question is why send them at all?). And if I have to send them in with F-17's, then the high speed of the MIG-32's won't achieve anything. I should remember that balancing is later, though, and not get too bent out of shape. I'm okay with MIG-32s being fast, fragile hit-and-run type craft, so long as they don't have this 'one shot = boom' behavior that I'm noticing in the demo. Ahh, you are correct. That's good, means changing their call sign doesn't destroy their differentiating info.

I hope once they get together as a studio they will be able to produce content and work out bugs much quicker, and I think I'll decide to chip in to make that happen. There's plenty of time to think it over and decide, and it will be a much easier decision as the end of the month approaches. I think it's all the same to them if I think it over, since they won't get any money until the Kickstarter closes anyway. I'm already in like three or four paid alphas right now, and it's starting to make me gunshy. I'd prefer to have a game I could really sink some time into before I put money down, but I really like the design they've got so far. Little touches like the Chinook having side doors are just excellent, but there's still little annoyances like being unable to assign designations to tell my soldiers apart without erasing their names altogether, and I really hope they don't intend the Mig-32 to spontaneously explode like it does now (though maybe there'll be an extra research like 'Self-Sealing Fuel-tanks' to fix that, who knows ). I have the kickstarter in my bookmarks tab as 'Fund this by the end of the month', and I intend to do so.

Against the fighters it is advisable to use evasive rolls skillfully. Also, click on one of your missiles so the icon turns red, and then a second or two after the other one launches automatically, click your remaining missile again to fire it. The fighter UFO will roll away from the first one, and get nailed by the second. If you only sent one fighter, you'll still have to dogfight a bit. Just get on its tail and try to shoot it as much as you can without it doing the same to you. I find that manual control and properly executed rolls can really up your chances here, but it's tricky. Try to intercept the fighters when you still have a decent amount of fuel, as one way or another a low-fuel fighter is a dead fighter in a dogfight. Remember you can completely pause air combat with the space bar so you can plot out your moves. I find it's way too tricky to manually navigate in real-time. The tooltip for the roll maneuver actually tells you that it's wise to pause so you can pick your timing perfectly. Even though the Very Small (Fighter) UFOs never give you crash sites, they can be helpful to intercept as knocking them down will make the allied nation happier. If left alone, they can cause a lot of casualties and reduce your funding. So a lot of money is on the line, but if you can't kill them without losing a fighter then it won't be worth it.

It should be possible to send the chinook along as part of a squadron of fighters. They don't have as much range as the chinook though, and it looks like the whole squadron slows down to the same speed as the chinook, which might reduce their range even further. I just hope if the UFO does take off, and your fighters are in a separate squadron, they can still intercept the UFO first instead of the chinook 'squadron' getting hit first and dying instantly. As for air battles, my only frustration is that the Mig-32 seems to die from the very first shot 50% of the time, when going up against light scouts and the like. Sometimes it takes incremental damage, sometimes it just goes poof. Definitely not worth paying 250K for a craft that randomly dies in every dogfight. Sure you could send it in alongside some F-15's, but then you don't benefit from the increased intercept speed. Please don't tell me that it's supposed to be that fragile. I believe faster fighters are usually quite a bit sturdier, both because of the demands on the airframe at those speeds, and the much larger size necessitated by the larger engines. Not to mention it has four hardpoints instead of two. It's clearly supposed to be a bigger fighter, so why it explodes so fast in the Kickstarter demo I do not know. I'm planning to preorder Xenonauts soon via their site (as I don't want to wait a whole month for the kickstarter to finish so that my card can be charged and I can get a key). I'm wondering though, is there more content in the actual alpha, like is a lot of it locked away in the demo?

I honestly think they should just focus on making the game better and more expansive. I really doubt there's that many women out there that care more about being represented as soldiers in a game, than they do about the game actually being a better game. As for theme, well, I don't believe it is thematically accurate at all to have many female soldiers in 1976. There have always been some female fighters in the world, but the chances of them ending up as one of the few dozen / hundred soldiers that pass through the ranks of the Xenonauts would be rather unlikely. Even if the administration of the organization is very progressive, you've still got a bunch of grunts born in the 40's and 50's, from all sorts of national backgrounds, that would probably make it difficult for women on the front lines to operate. Politically, you would risk international incident to enroll women in a program where 10 - 99% of your troops are going to end up vaporized by plasma guns or much much worse. But seriously? Theme doesn't matter that much here. The real meat of this issue is that design resources are limited and there's a whole lot of ground to cover. If they can get another artist whose job it is to just make more portraits, then okay, making those 30 female portraits is just as vital as adding more male portraits, so have at it. I would just hate to think they're going to have less terrain tiles or a few less research options due to lack of pictures for them, just so they can add a feature that might actually detract from the Cold War setting, but that probably won't happen. So, if this stretch goal actually helps get much more funding, then hopefully that will translate to plenty more time spent polishing and expanding the game. I just disagree with the notion that, in and of itself, this is very important. If it gets them more funding, cool. (edit): I don't know if it's all that wise to make new animations for female soldiers. In uniform, soldiers pretty much look like soldiers, and that's by design. Trained soldiers hold guns like any other soldier, they scale over fences like soldiers, they run like soldiers-- having gendered animations rather implies a lot. Besides which, once the heavier armors come in, or even just the Jackal armor, the bodies are really going to look the same at least from your zoomed-out view. So, even with female soldiers added in and implemented, I think having their own animation set would add very little to realism or immersion. Furthermore, if they wanted to animate a whole nother body and put it into the game, wouldn't it be a lot more useful and interesting to have another type of alien or a new set of body armor for your troops? Again though, if people want to help the studio reach the stretch goal just so they can have female troops, then it's no skin off my back.