doubleskulls

I don't mind having a random element, but I think the game ought to provide feedback loops to players so that we know what we are doing well and what badly. So showing that funding is lower because panic is rising would be a useful feedback loop. Personally I'd prefer a tooltip showing a breakdown/rationale of why the funding change as happened, but maybe I play too many Paradox games!

I think there is a very good point that how funding works seems quite opaque. I've started to try and deconstruct it as like Dren608. Off my limited data set I've collected I think there is a correlation between panic and funding. so in regions where panic rises the most the drop in income seems most pronounced. It does look like there is some random factor being applied and I'll just need more data to deconstruct the formula. From a UI perspective I'd much prefer this to be clear and transparent from the page so I understood better why funding was changing. The way it works now, for new players, funding looks pretty arbitrary, and IMO that's not a good thing.

This, along with the saving TUs to fire right click are good candidates for tips on the loading screen IMO.

Thanks for the explanation, that makes perfect sense with what I'm seeing then. My, mistaken, assumption, was that penetration by-passed armour, rather than just negated a proportion of it. Funnily enough that doesn't make any difference to the relative benefits of accelerated vs basic lasers. For rifles accelerated are marginally better right up to 44 points of armour.

I just shot an accelerated rifle at a mentarch with 25 armour, and only managed to do 2 points of damage. I would expect that 40 damage base, worst roll is 50% = 20. So the armour absorbs it all, however accelerated rifles do 5 points of penetration, so I'd expect at least 5 points even with a minimum roll. Is this a bug or is the logic different to what I expected?

In my head I was thinking perhaps just having a "locker" at the back that you can interact with as a right mouse click when adjacent, and it gives access to all inventory available when equipping a solider (other than armour). Anything that's restricted will just go in the backpack anyway, so unless you want to put more limitations on that (e.g. a TU cost to drop items) then any further restrictions are somewhat pointless.

I can see there is some debate among more experienced players about whether accelerated weapons or lasers are better. I'm new to X2 and haven't made much progress so far, but I don't want to fall into the newbie trap some people are talking about. From what I can see it certainly is not clear cut. Armour Accelerated weapons do 5 penetration and lasers do 6 more destruction. For 3 shots with a rifle, Accelerated weapons are better up to armour 13. i.e. they do more damage on average than a laser would. For 2 shots with a rifle, Accelerated weapons are better up to armour 44 Armour can be stripped by other means (e.g. demolition grenades). Weight/Magazine - Lasers are lighter, but you probably need to carry more magazines, as they have fewer shots. I think therefore this is advantage to Accelerated Weapons as you get more shots before having to reload. Lasers require alerium to produce, both require alloys. Accuracy bonus - although this seems good, with a training centre do we really have a lot of soldiers with low enough accuracy to benefit? Shotgun has only 3 penetration and sniper is 2. Laser Machine guns have 5 higher range, so have 7.5% better hit chance <20 tiles. Lasers do double damage to terrain, so are better for obstacle removal. That's sort of making me think that Laser Shotguns, Sniper Rifles and Machine Guns are better, but for Pistols and Rifles accelerated versions are. I can see an argument for laser pistols too, for terrain clearance, but I shoot enemies with pistols much more often than I clear terrain. Am I missing something in the analysis? From a game perspective they are pretty close, which seems odd. They are very close in the tech tree, and I think their performance reflects that. However I think it would be better for the game, and particularly casual players, if Lasers were further up the tech tree and just clearly an upgrade over accelerated.

I had just launched the drop ship to attack the cleaner site in Saigon. Whilst en route a terror mission popped up. I clicked on the dropship to order it to do the terror mission first (otherwise the timer would have run out) and X2 froze - the whole PC unresponsive to alt-tab, ctrl-shift-escape etc, so I had to reboot. Save game attached which is the end of the previous mission The terror mission seems to crop up Day 64. auto_groundcombat_turn_15_start-77.json

In my experience its pretty hard for developers to stop you doing things at a file system level. Are there any games that do?

I've just finished the first mission and I'm really impressed so far. The sound is excellent and the tension in the missions is great.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Maybe make it an option to replenish ammo and other consumables in the drop ship? Perhaps controlled by an option. I would say that it possibly would encourage players to take a lot longer over missions without a timer (constantly going back & forth to replenish) which some may be happy with and others consider abusive. IRL I think the drop ship ought to be able to carry a lot of spares so it feels more realistic to me.

IMO KISS, and just have prices fixed, or implement better transparency, with either DavideesJ suggestion and/or with the market slowly recovering prices if no more are sold. At least that way it stops being such a nasty trap for less aware players.