crusherven

I'd dramatically increase the base for completing a terror mission. IIRC in the OG you could gain/lose around 800 points on a terror mission (or lose 1000 for ignoring it) whereas a small scout would only be a couple hundred. IMO terror missions should be worth several times what a small ship recovery is worth, even with heavy casualties. After all, the alternative is losing the whole town. That said, successfully saving most of the civilians should also be worth significantly more than letting them die. Max_Caine, I'd say losing all the civilians but still winning should net a score of a couple hundred. Keeping [all] the civvies alive should be quite valuable; worth several hundred points. That's the objective of terror missions, after all. The trouble would be to make sure you don't lose points from civvie deaths in UFO recovery.

I can't remember, when will we see the new UI? When it goes to Steam/beta?

For myself, I've been treating it like it's going to be normal (in terms of how I think it should be balanced).

Ahh, that would make sense. I've never actually had the patience to sit in the UFO for 5 rounds to even test it.

I could have sworn someone else had a thread or post about this but I can't find it. Can aliens actually escape? I didn't know that was possible. Otherwise I generally agree that actual performance in missions should matter a lot more than it does now.

Wow. That kinda needs to change, imo. At least as far as the research requirements are concerned.

Ah, gotcha. Yeah, it would be nice to have a grenade range indicator and/or some way of seeing the blast radius.

You could probably do both--slow strength and TU growth and have it grow logarithmically.

I guess all I can say is try to get alenium explosives asap and try to take advantage of the advanced weapons. I had one game that went somewhat similar, except in my case the terror mission vs androns was a 1-off and most of the other missions were more what you'd expect. Terror missions seem too common to me.

I agree. Sometimes air combat is a little too easy--if you know what you're doing. If you're still learning, or if you make a mistake, you can easily be crippled for the remainder of the month. For example, sending a single Condor against a medium scout is suicide. Sometimes it's really easy to lose an interceptor when engaging multiple fighters, as well--if you have the wrong aircraft evade, for example.

If this were added, I'd want to be able to turn it off. It doesn't take long to get a good feel for how far you can move, and you can always verify with a click and use that information to estimate range in any direction.

IMO smoke should be a bit of a double-edged sword.

Yeah, I think the simplest thing to do would be to assign a certain number of points per shootdown, be it over land or water. In fact they probably do; I think the issue is that it's not clear whether events over water (which aren't in a particular funding zone) are getting credited. I guess you could always count events over water as "global" and divide their effect over all nations.

Well, the smart commander would do that unless he knew that was where he was expected to be. In our case, if the aliens sometimes stand in "dumb" places they can actually become more interesting and dangerous by surprising the player. On a certain farm map with small scouts, I know that I never even have to look into a field to my right, and that if I reach a certain point I can stop being cautious and just sprint for several full turns until I reach the UFO. That's because the fields in question have no cover and aliens don't spawn or move there. An alien standing in a "dumb" spot would really mess me up at that point.

To me the problem with the morale system is that we have so few soldiers. In XCOM, you could send 14 rookies on a mission, lose half, and still have enough to finish. With the Avenger you could send 26. Losing a few men would only slightly hurt your ability to cover the map, but would badly harm morale. In Xeno, if you send 6 men and a tank, a few casualties is half your squad. Losing even one man can leave a critical gap in your lineup. This leads to the situation where losing a few men is already catastrophic. If the rest panic, it feels a bit like gratuitous punishment for messing up. On the other hand, it's hard to lose enough men to cause panic and still have enough to finish the mission. I guess the only solution to the latter is to greatly increase the morale lost per casualty. For the first problem I'm not sure what to do short of increasing squad size.

I think cover itself could use slight improvement, and intervening objects should be less of an obstacle. In some cases, it doesn't really make sense for multiple intervening objects to count--if I can avoid hitting the waist--high brick wall, why should the flowerpot further decrease my accuracy? I might miss and hit that object, but it shouldn't be counted as an additional obstacle. That might be difficult to code, though. I'd maybe reduce the effectiveness of (some) intervening objects by 10 or 20%, and increase the effectiveness of actual cover by the same.

. I hope you had an LMG and rocket launcher ready to go. And how did you make it so far still using ballistics? That's cool that they gathered up to defend the ship, but you're right, they probably shouldn't resemble a nineteenth century line of battle.

lol. Let me fix that.

I really loved the tactical options that melee weapons gave me in TFTD and would be thrilled to see them appear in Xenonauts. Currently we have the stun baton, and that's it AFAIK. Some sort of high-level powerful blade would be awesome.

It might be nice to have (for example) a normal shot followed by a snap shot be slightly more accurate than normal on the second shot, so long as it's still less accurate than the first shot. The idea being, you take an aimed shot immediately followed by a quick shot without taking time to reallign the sights. It would be nice, but I suspect Chris has other things to work on (like getting accuracy to work right in general).

Transportation should leave me terrified that the aliens will flank me and cause heavy casualties, not annoyed that I have to find them again. I agree.

Yeah, with the current income level I think 30k is about right.

Could be nice. Or something over on the missiles themselves to show how long before they'll be in range. I still haven't figured out what the diamond symbol means, or the little countdown.

I think the problem is that although guns have different aim levels and fire modes listed, there's no reason to think you can adjust the number of TUs a medikit uses. I don't really think about applying a medikit more accurately. Probably if there were some visible indication that the TU use is adjustable for medikits, right-click/scroll would make more sense.