Kimberly

I'm not really sure what your suggestion is. Grenades show precisely what their blast radius is if they land on target, and how much chance they have to land there--you can't know where else they might stray if they miss; that's sort of the point. Surely it is clear when they miss, because of the explosion.

Congratulations on reaching 300%, guys. Unfortunately, I had to cancel my pledge yesterday for financial reasons... Still, I hope to buy the game when it's out. You've done an amazing job.

I engaged a corvette escorted by two fighters over North America with an F-17 and a MiG-32. The MiG fired all four torpedoes at the corvette once they locked on, and the F-17 launched two Sidewinders at one of the fighters. The first Sidewinder missed, the second one hit, and all four torpedoes struck the corvette, sending it crashing to the ground. I set both craft to retreat and engage their afterburner, the F-17 fired a few shots at the fighter but only left it with critical damage before hightailing it out of there. Both craft escaped successfully, and a crash site appeared on the Geoscape. There were no UFOs detected, though the two fighters had survived the battle. When I sent an unescorted Chinook towards the crash site, the crash site icon began moving towards it and destroyed the Chinook! The message identified the interceptor as a corvette. I reloaded the game and sent the Chinook again, this time escorted by an F-17. The crash site remained in place, the Chinook arrived, and I was able to enter ground combat as normal. So yeah... apparently, leaving some but not all of the UFOs in a battle alive creates a bizarre half-living crash site.

Everyone knows Mossad is secretly controlled by the President of the United States. (Who is, naturally, a secret alien himself, bringing us full circle.)

You can easily tell a corvette by its very slow speed; a leisurely 850 km/h.

Well, it's been called a demo officially, hasn't it? And it certainly feels like one! An alpha usually has way more bugs and instability; this game looks nearly complete and quite polished. (The fact that they're going to polish it so much more is wonderful.)

I think a superhuman tool like that might make it a bit too easy, and would clutter the battles. You can already see whether someone is in your line of fire, and if your soldier happens to be a completely awful shot, well, that's collateral damage for you. I prefer forcing players to use their own judgment over giving them a tool which makes it for them.

For games and films that allow you to get your name in the credits or on a website if you pledge enough, I always justify it like this: if I run for office one day (I'm ineligible for the presidency, but I'll settle for senator), then it won't be long before someone realizes I sponsored those things they loved so much way back when. It's like a time-traveling political campaign!

Well, I hate my legal name--it can't be pronounced in English and has religious connotations. (More so than regular old Biblical names.) There's some gender issues involved that some people know about but others don't, so there's two names involved there. And even with my preferred first name, Kim(berly), it varies whether I use "Quinn" as my middle or my last name--and it's not my legal middle or last name. So uh, maybe not all of them are normal, but it's nothing sordid. I'm working on a legal name change to simplify the issue somewhat.

Even though I didn't pledge enough to have my name in the game, I'm glad you're taking such a sober approach to names. As someone who regularly uses no less than three different names (none of which are my legal name), I don't appreciate being asked for ID.

I actually like the large amount of fighters. Too many crash sites gets a tad old, as well, and keeping fighters away makes you feel like you're really battling for air superiority. The only issue is that they come in large waves, meaning you need to split up your fighters every which way---it'd be better if they formed squadrons of two or three fighters more often. (And a single fighter can be defeated easily anyway.)

Well, money still needs to be balanced, anyway. I think it will already become easier once the "local forces survived" counter works, because reputation will go up a lot quicker. Also, may I ask what inspired your forum name?

I don't like barbecue anymore, after listening to a Christian vegan for too long. It was always fire and brimstone with her.

Well, that's good enough for me.

You can actually perform an autopsy on alien corpses, through the research menu. But once you've researched that, any other bodies are simply marked as "destroyed"---I took that to mean they were destroyed as part of clean-up, not during the fight.

I think a little topic derailment might be a good lesson for newcomers, showing them the way we do things around here. They need to stay steady under fire, after all.

I've taken some of the suggestions in this thread to heart, and I'm happy to report I'm doing much better now---I've outfitted all of my troops with either shotguns or precision rifles, sending the ones with shotguns out ahead (with Jackal or Wolf armor on) as spotters for the snipers. I'm already knee-deep in corvettes, and I've only taken two casualties! Not counting the ones who managed to survive despite being killed during the mission, anyway.

I played a vaguely X-COMesque game called Terraphoenix, and it had you fighting aliens as well as anarchists. (The Terraphoenix world was post-nuclear, so you can imagine anarchists weren't too happy about the forces of law and order being at their doorstep.) I quite enjoyed that, and being able to fight off anarchists and terrorists taking advantage of the invasion or being controlled by the aliens would be something I'd like in Xenonauts. That said, I don't know if the developers would consider recolors of the Xenonauts or local forces to be good enough, sprite-wise, for this to be implementable.

I can understand your dilemma, pack.wolf. It's true that these are not quite as "safe" investments as Wasteland 2 or Shadowrun Returns, or Xenonauts for that matter. But Kinetic Void has a playable demo out, at least---it's not very impressive, lacking most of the features of the game, but they've got something to show for their work. Personally, I didn't like Skyjacker at first, due to them charging $100 just for getting a game with cutscenes! Then they made that version $20, but you still needed to pledge $50 to get both pieces of launch DLC. I'm happy to see that they canceled the project and made a new Kickstarter page, now without launch DLC. You've now got 55 days to get enough money to pledge for this game, so I don't think you really need to choose between this and the others anymore, if you like it. As for Drifter, it does look like a ton of fun. However, it's only going to be in 2.5D, and is not quite as ambitious with the ship customizing or the progressive gameplay. It is after all a "space trading game", whereas Kinetic Void intends to allow for many different things. I'd say Drifter vs. Kinetic Void is kind of like casual v. serious; it's down to preference. I'd support them both, if I could.

I agree that base defense could be incorporated into the air combat screen, with a little work. Turn your batteries this or that way to make sure enemy craft are in your kill zone, and allow you to control a fighter or two as well. If you shoot down the UFOs close to your base, it becomes a regular ground combat defense mission. Shoot them down at the edge of the map, and a crash site appears on the Geoscape as normal.

I quite like the current mechanism, where you get funding from regions if you do a good job protecting them. However, the initial lack of expansion makes this hard to do: you don't have enough money to cover wide swathes of the globe, and soon enough your funding from those areas starts to tank, meaning you can't expand there, either. It's a downward spiral. The dilemma of being strong in a few areas or weak in many is a part of the strategic choice, but you never really get to choose the latter option. It will probably work better once missions start counting "local forces survived" properly, so missions add more to your reputation, and once there are financial gains for shooting down craft over water. If you ask me, the funding model is fine, it just needs to reap the benefits from currently inactive features and perhaps some rebalancing.

I'm a fan of the Python movies, myself. Especially the gay innuendo; I don't know if it's their British-ness, but some of the characters are just flaming. (Too far-fetched?)

I haven't seen any UFOs land, either---are they supposed to? As far as I can tell, a power core remaining intact is just random chance. Every time you blow a scout out of the sky, it may or may not appear on the map with an intact power core. If it's intact, you get it at the end of the mission and unlock further research. (Note that it's possible to blow it up by shooting at it or using explosives near it, so be careful during ground combat.)

...Are you saying Loony Tunes lied to me? No. I refuse to believe it.

It's already lit a flame in my heart!