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Yeah the knife needs some love already (currently too heavy I think), sad that it is not expanded upon as a backup weapon for high-TU soldiers.

I don't think the current map is Mercator, it looks way more like Equirectangular which doesn't suffer the projection issues as much. EDIT: also AFAIK your vehicles and UFOs treat the map as a flat 2D space without taking projection into account, so they would also need to tweak navigation on top of the radar ranges and that would probably make a mess for most players trying to understand the map and non-uniform unit movements. Equirectangular: Mercator:

I fully agree with this, simply increasing their TU is not the right choice I think. Right now overall it feels like either you kill them in the same turn you spot them, or they kill somebody in their turn because of their strong melee, there is little middle ground here (unless you spot them from really far away). Especially this: Increasing their TU without tweaking their AI will only make this worse. But Devs already said the AI of all types of units will get overhauled, so I agree with giving them interesting and unique AI.

Nice job, cool to see the entire current tree in a properly formatted diagram

Keep in mind the Dev team is very small and juggling support for multiple OSs is not as trivial as you make it out to be. Mac gaming is an extremely niche target audience (~1.8% of all Steam users), and the overall Mac share compared to Windows and Linux (which runs the game thanks to Proton) is not really rising. So that additional Dev time and effort is better placed somewhere else in my opinion, especially now during the crucial Early Access period. That being said, there might be a Mac release in the future, I think the Devs target it for the full release version or something like that.

Yeah I agree, I was a bit bummed when I took it for the first time on a mission and realized that you realistically will never put a dent into the 100 round box of ammo of the secondary machine gun, a 10 round burst would be nice here, other than that I like the different configurations it provides for different playstyles. And yeah slightly more armor if you are going for the heavy version would also be nice, right now I think even with the TU deduction it is still quite agile but not armored enough, I sometimes feel like I should maybe even take the light armor version and get even more mobility for wall-ramming/cover-destruction out of it, if the heavy one can't survive a particularly unlucky roll anyway with 250K down the drain. Speaking of the costs, yeah maybe decrease the build cost, but in turn increase the upkeep, I feel like the 5K is more a symbolic gesture than a proper upkeep cost considering your guys will fix the thing after missions instantly.

I know many oldtimers and fans of the original X-COM miss that, but I 100% agree with you on this, I rather not be forced to find the optimal item to produce and sell just to finance the resistance efforts, it is just busywork to me that can be just as well be simulated by the regional incomes, and as you stated we are already selling alien tech looted from UFOs.

@Skyfire Thanks for making the effort and being reasonable, I appreciate that. After reading through your calculations I agree that the Generator-upgrade as it stands in the current version (1.29b) is not worthwhile for many bases. I thought I had mentioned that the last missing third of the game offering more high-power-demand-buildings will change this balance further towards its usefulness, I apologize for not putting that into my earlier posts. I was focusing on making points against broad claims of optimality, and stating my general wish that the game shouldn't even offer all research as straight must-pick improvements in many cases in the first place, which would inevitably lead to a, in my opinion boring, but mathematically truely optimal, meta-strategy. Maybe I should have emphasised that mathematical optimal solutions are something I don't find good in games these days, because I have personally ruined some great games' replay value for myself by chasing optimal strategies and solutions, even though it brings me a high degree of pleasure to pick them apart for that goal. Once that optimal solution/combination/path is found, you can't put the genie back into the bottle (at least I can't, sadly). Artifically gimping myself afterwards just to avoid the optimal path is something I sadly could never force myself to (even though I find it hilarious to see Youtubers try to beat a game on max difficulty with rookies only), I rather offload my shortcomings in this regard to the Devs to make the game offer me novel yet effective paths for at least a couple of campaigns. I also am thankful for you explaining to @bonerstorm why the wording and the tone in which the posts were presented were just very obnoxious to me from the get-go, because that was the main source of my disagreement as I wrote before, but I didn't get that through even after my last post it seems, so maybe I didn't write my arguments well enough. Your only point I would disagree with is for us to mentally insert the proper phrasings for others, because as stated there will be areas and topics where there indeed are truely mathematically optimal solutions and combinations to be found (regardless if one likes their existence or not), and if so, they are OK to be called as such, assuming they are backed up properly by a proof of their optimality. @bonerstorm I am glad you are finally understanding that and I very much appreciate the apology, in return I apologize for not writing clearly enough about what I was trying to convey to you, maybe there is even a language-barrier at play here as English is not my first language, I will try to better myself in the future.

Devs said it is in a very rough state at the moment (V1.28) and they will overhaul/balance it in a future patch.

My pleasure! The points you wrote sound good to me! And yeah the hit-percentages might seem a bit off sometimes, but we have to remember that they are not really meant to be 1:1 "my soldier stands less than a meter away from this standing alien, why can't he hit it?", it is a turn-based game after all, the aliens are not standing around patiently waiting for the soldiers to run up to them and getting shot from point-blank The "standing right next to alien and can't hit" really means "this soldier is shooting from this distance" without showing the layer of combat that gets lost in translation from a real-world real-time to turn-based combat scenario, in which things are not shown directly like the rookies' lost stamina after sprinting from cover to cover, adrenaline fucking up your fine-motor-control, the alien dodging where the barrel of the gun points at the last second, etc. Also I agree what @Skyfire said, your squad is basically still fresh and will get MUCH more accurate once they get more experience later in the campaign (but don't worry I also have missed 98% shots with my Colonels who got 90-100 accuracy too, that is just part of the game ) As to if the % shown is really the dice-roll that is done behind the scenes, I can only assume that they are ment to be true in Xenonauts 2, all I know is that for the new XCOM games they were even deliberately cheating the rolls in favor of the player in a hidden mechanic, to reduce the amount of players complaining about bad rolls. We humans are famous for being bad at judging probability because we pay way more attention to failure than to success. For example for most people, when they lose/miss half the time in a couple of rounds in a game and if they are not told the exact 50% chance, it feels like really bad luck, even though it is correct. So far I saw a couple of questionable situations in this game myself, but they were mostly about rough spots in some of these Early Access maps, not about bugged hit-chances, but always good to report anything that seems broken EDIT: almost forgot: Yeah AFAIK you can (in the current game version 1.28) safely sell all the corpses, Cleaner data sticks and even the alien weapons from your loot, that is one of those many areas where the game still needs some Dev work, it has been reported already by many people that this is not clear to new players. I had to google the answer to that too when I first started, because like you I didn't want to miss out on any research/engineering later, but so far nothing seems to actually need items (except the alien materials) to be stocked, just encountered once.

@bonerstormI think you are still missing the point I (and I assume others) are making. Your original post literally said this about Alienium Generators (and a whole list of other things): As you and @Skyfire have agreed, Alienium Generators free up base slots if you rather want to increase another aspect of your base. Again, I am not claiming you are forced to take this upgrade, and I agree you are free to skip it if you rather want the materials and cash instead of more slots as you have said. I am not even going to calculate all the myriads of possible base layouts where maybe the Generators even free 3 or more slots, I could argue about many other things you have listed as awell, but I am not focusing on this single topic. I think many upgrades should neither be an too-expensive upgrade that is always bad (= "trap") and not an upgrade that is a must-pick (="optimal") because it is unavoidably powerful, but instead allow you to specialize or just increase certain aspects of your base in your current campaign. For example, if you play so defensive during battles that you really rarely get a lot of wounded, is the surgery upgrade really worth it over the normal medical facility for your campaign? If your squads are so powerful that you fend off full-scale base attacks really easily, do you really need to spend the upgrade cost, slots and upkeep on the highest tier turrets in your base? If you have specialized radar-bases that cover the entire globe, do you really need 3 radars in your main base? Maybe, maybe not, depending on your preferences, but that doesn't make things a useless "trap" in general as in the claim, even in the current version of the game (1.28). That is something the game should let you and even force you to decide. That on top of my disagreement with your opinon on Generators and some other things is why I disagree with the notion that your way of playing is the, and again I quote, "optimal" way and every other choice just "traps", even in 1.28. Maybe you mean "I don't pick upgrades A and B in my current campaign where I don't care about X and Y and rather focus on Z", then by all means do that instead of always claming your single way is the best and everything else is a "useless trap". After all, if you are forced to make tough decisions in your building/spending choices, that fits right into the rest of the game, it would be quite boring to me if I could easily afford all upgrades with zero drawbacks every single time, so you get everything every single campaign anyway and settle on a single meta-game strategy that kills the replay-value of so many other games.

@bonerstorm In regards to Alienium Generators: You claimed that your base is optimal, and you said it yourself, you could put in 1-2 other buildings instead, which means your base is not optimal, the upgrade cost is almost trivial in the grand scheme of things. (EDIT: Even more space is saved the more power you need to generate, so if we consider power-hungry late game buildings the power-generation-density-increase might even become more and more important later on.) Save two slots right now which is an entire hangar, if you don't think another jet/dropship out of the same base is a reason in itself for the investment, on top of all the other things you could build (more anything is always better), I don't know what to tell you further. As others have said, you seem pretty sure of claiming your ways are best and optimal before thinking things through properly, while I am always open to reading other people's ideas, that is just bad form.

I think others have said this before, but I want to repeat that the knife really needs a weight decrease I think. While I find the idea hilarious to bayonet-charge at advanced aliens really hilarious, the weight-cost is far too high considering it goes in the secondary slot instead of a medi-kit or a pistol. Personally I don't mind going to the storage menu and sell things when I need the cash, in some primitive caveman way it is satisfying to me to actually hit buttons and the "you sell alien kidneys to shady dudes for cash and can afford stuff! again"-counter goes up with each click, it kinda makes loot feel more "real" to me beyond the pure cash increase. To be fair, I am trying to think of a reason get they money right away but I can't think of one, maybe they are considering making loot into crafting materials, e.g. spend engineering time to bypass the DNA lock of an alien rifle, grind up Reptilians into health-goo-injection-kits or something? That being said I am not sure I would like loot-based crafting, because the alien types you fight are random and if you are unlucky you will not get the corpses you need. But yeah kinda odd at the moment that there isn't even any indication if you can sell something safely or not.

I loaded up your save and looked at the screenshots, the hit-chances seem all fine to me considering the covers and the situation, but I noticed other things: where are your demolition charges? they are a really important tool to massively increase hit-chances, but no worries, you got a MARS here left with 3 rockets, a single rocket could take care of the alien cover here, I realize you don't wan't to not drive it into the UFO and lose it, but you can easily fire the shot from outside after one of your guys opens the doors for it (future missions should have demo charges though) where are your pistols? pistols excel in close ranges and you get a couple of shots off in the same turn because of the small TU cost the Wraith cloaking field is working as intended here to ruin your hit-chances, you need to uncloak them to have "real" hit-chances against them, you got a couple spare frags and rockets for this task still though your entry-stack is clogged up, you can't run in, shoot and run out/into cover further down the UFO easily, so you are commiting your entire squad to 1 single turn opening yourself to the counterattack should any alien survive, also the guys who have to run in might not have enough TUs left and will block the guys who stand in the back from getting proper LOS for their shots and nades speaking of MARS, you can supress the aliens, drive the MARS into the UFO airlock-doors to permanently break them, drive the MARS back out into safety, and take pot-shots and throw nades all you want with your soldiers standing outside on the street, that way you can utilize your sniper advantage more if you want get rid of the tazers for now, their current accuracy is crap and will probably get balanced soon in a future patch, go for the baton for now if you want to capture aliens I loaded the save and noticed you could just throw 1 flash and all your frags, or triple-rocket with the MARS and end this mission that way without any trouble, but maybe you don't want to lose their loot in the blasts, so I loaded your save and breached the UFO 5 times in different ways with this risky stack without any further preparation: threw flash, uncloaked with frag, and then rushed in the entire squad and just started shooting, only 1 missed attack by your soliders out of 7 attacks taken (last solider and MARS didn't spend TU), mission won with no resistance threw flash, moved a frag-carrier into the UFO and threw to uncloak, other soldier shoot (I think 2 miss), mission won with no resistance threw flash, move the squad a bit to make way for MARS, have MARS steamroll their cover, squad has no trouble gunning the cover-less aliens, mission won with no resistance and no misses variation of the above things, mission won with no resistance variation of the above things, mission won with no resistance So yeah maybe you just got really unlucky in your attack-outcomes on top of the tactical considerations? (after all even 50% hit-chance means you will miss half the time) If you would spend a turn stacking the squad up properly before breaching, it would go even more smoothly I bet, best of luck! P.S. Don't forget to sell that massive pile of loot in your base's storage, especially the Cleaner data and the corpses, you get a ton of money for them

What were the hit-chances for your shots? Can you give screenshots of the lower right info box that shows how those hit-chances were being calculated? EDIT: or upload a save, I can take a look! EDIT 2: also put some shields infront of your breachers, you want to direct the reaction fire to the shields instead of the fleshy shotgunners ideally nobody is out of cover at the end of your turn

Known bug that has been reported a couple of times lately (I did so too), they are working on finding and fixing it. For now, (quick-)saving and reloading should clear it up, if not upload the savegame for them to look at

Great response by thixotrop already, but yeah, you could imagine countless other ways in which molecules form complex structures that encode genetic data, so it is indeed super weird and extremely unlikely to the in-universe scientists why the aliens' genome is encoded in recognizable Earth-like DNA and not some other way. Correct, and all of these living things stem from Earth, not some other planet, all life on Earth shares the same genetic mechanisms and common ancestries So you naturally would expect all lifeforms from another planet to also have some or all of these mechanisms, but share other common genetic ancestries, most likely very different from ours, even if most likely Carbon-based (Carbon chemistry is famously complex and an extremely broad subject, aka Organic Chemistry). A rough analogy would be languages, you can easily recognize that somebody who speaks a totally foreign language from your own (e.g. Chinese vs. English) is using stuff like sentences, questions, shouts etc. and is using their mouth to form words, but you will have totally different words for the same things, so you can not easily communicate together even though you share the mechanisms of communication. From an outsider's perspective a conversation in Chinese sounds totally different than the same conversation about the same topic in English, right? Now imagine e.g. Christopher Columbus landing in the Americas, should he expect the locals to be speaking his mother tongue and have no trouble communicating with them, or should he expect them to be speakig an (to him) alien language, even though everybody can easily recognize that both use stuff like sentences and their mouths? Not sure how far you are into the story, I don't want to write spoilers here, but it is explained later in the campaign why this expectation of alien genetics is blown away by having the aliens have familiar Earth-DNA, and I really like that in-universe story explanation that also unveils more things!

Oh yeah no doubt, I agree with you on a MARS being quite the mighty thing to always bring (if you can afford to buy one) like I said in my first post, but putting all those actual tactical considerations into neat linear theoretical equations is not something you can just whip up like you can with the pure budget cost That is the kind of thing where you need a hundred, if not a thousand battles to analyze All I wanted to test with the calculations was where we stand on losing a MARS units from a purely budget point of view compared to expendable rookies with only infinite starter gear (aka zero extra budget or alien materials spent on them) acting as some kind of kamikaze reckless HEVY grenadiers. The high relative cost of losing even one MARS surprised me, I felt like it was high before I ran the math but it seems it is even higher than I thought! But I don't think this means that the HEVY in its current state is viable as a MARS replacement, because as we all seem to agree the actual tactical value of a MARS is higher still, so the lower costs of HEVY grenadiers alone is not enough to outweight that.

I can confirm something really weird going on here, I loaded this save several times (EDIT: on version 1.28 experimental) with random seeds and autoresolve indeed loses all 3 craft every single time with not a single weapon fired (says 1/1 weapons on all the dead fighters, is that really what that means here?), while manual wins it easily no matter what I did or didn't do. I even ran one battle with the fusion-equipped fighter on "hold fire" on both missiles so it was just flying and not shooting at the UFO at all and the battle was still a win with a bit dinged up armor without any further input from me. And lastly I even a run where I disabled all missiles on all fighters, so it was just the 2 fighters with their Laser Lances fighting and that battle was also won, even though 1 fighter died this time, without any further input from me. I think we all realize air combat is in a basic shape right now, but I thought autoresolve is just a sped-up version of a no-player-input battle?

[V1.28] here, I can reproduce this, it is only visible for a frame or two before vanishing.

Yeah probably, but still caught my attention, it isn't anything high-priority. Dev said a balancing patch is coming soon too, so it might be on the TODO-list already

What are you talking about? Alenium Generators are super useful if you put thought into proper placement, because not only does the single-generator-power-rating go up, the bonus-adjacency-rating goes up too, freeing up base slots for other buildings! I disagree with your post in several other points, but your claim that you found an optimal base structure considering your generator oversight stuck out.

Not sure if an oversight or intended, one would assume the superior Dragonfly costs a bit more or the Skyhawk less than 100K.

Almost all medium-to-small islands in the oceans are not selectable (Malta also comes to mind), I always assumed this is because land that you can build on needs a light-blue highlight overlay for its assigned funding region on top of actually being buildable and assigned to a region, having all the islands available is more work than one might think at first glance (e.g. right now New Zealand is missing its highlight but is selectable, already reported as a bug). That being said, looking at the radar-range for a fresh base without upgrades, a base on Hawaii would get very few missions because it is far from most cities and you would need to chase what small amount of UFOs you do detect over the city-less Pacific and hope they fly over the continental USA or something before your planes run out of fuel (luckily there is a button to have the interceptors chase until the UFO is over land, so it isn't entirely impossible to pull it off), so that could be another reason not to have it zoned for base-building, but who knows. (EDIT: Just to be clear, I am talking about players placing their starter base there, not if you already got later jets that have no trouble chasing UFOs across the globe.)

[1.28 experimental] I can't send my wounded soldier who sits at 33% HP to a dropship, the assignment button on the left side of the UI just says "Recovering 17 days", the "Auto-Fill" and the "Select Soldier" button on an empty dropship won't let me place her either, so I cannot reproduce this bug at all, weird.