delor

The idea of making the LMG more mobile (lower TU to fire) on the colossus is an intriguing one. I also think the LMG in general just needs some love. Despite being a heavy support weapon, it's got the same damage, penetration, armor destruction and range as the standard rifle- it just weighs a ton and takes a lot of TU to aim. The extra ammo capacity matters little, it doesn't reliably suppress stuff, and the automatic fire is a dubious tradeoff for all the extra TU to fire in most circumstances. The role is very niche. Personally, I'd love to see the HMG positioned between the sniper rifle and the rifle in terms of capability to give it more of a distinct place in the weapon selection. Leave the damage as-is (rifle damage) but up the armor penetration and destruction to sniper levels, and split the difference on range, accuracy, and hit bonus. (range up to 25, accuracy up to 60%, hit bonus down to 1%) Tweak accuracy up or down from there as needed until it's balanced.

Hopefully this isn't just me not understanding a mechanic- I posted about it in General Discussion and nobody showed up to correct me- but... Description Fighting cyberdrones for the first time in my Milestone 5 campaign, I'm seeing inconsistent health and armor damage when attacking them with laser rifles. What Happened Shooting at cyberdrones with laser rifles, I'm seeing inconsistent health and armor damage. There's two components, and potentially two bugs here, but what I'm seeing is: 1) Sometimes when I shoot a cyberdrone with a laser rifle, it does 0 health AND 0 armor damage, and sometimes it does damage it normally. Notably, I've also never observed armor damage but not health damage. It feels like it happens more often as the cyberdrone's remaining armor is higher, to the point that I loaded and repeated this repeatedly for about three hours to try to get a better bug report and didn't see any armor or health damage on a full-armor cyberdrone until the very end of the testing. 2) At one point, I had a cyberdrone down to 0 blue (frontal?) armor and 8 gray armor, and when I shot it with laser rifles I would see very low health damage (0-8) and no armor damage. (almost like armor that had been destroyed was still applying?) This happened across at least a half-dozen hits. I'm not sure what frontal armor arc to expect from the cyberdrone (assuming this is the mechanic for blue armor?) but shots taken have pretty much all been from the front- most 0-30 degrees, a few a bit past 45, maybe a single shot over 90. I've also shot the drone with my accelerated rifle and laser sniper, and with those weapons each time both armor and health damage was inflicted. What I Expected To Happen Normal armor behavior where armor is reduced every hit and health is reduced by whatever damage is rolled minus the armor. (and penetration, but laser rifles have 0) If there's an added exception I'm unaware of "if damage is mitigated to 0, no armor damage occurs" this could explain #1, although the fact that I've never seen the accelerated rifle fail to do damage would be a bit odd in this case. I didn't get as many hits with the accelerated rifle to test with because most of my guys are using laser rifles and laser snipers, but I did score a non-trivial number of hits with the accelerated rifle over the course of the night. How To Re-Create Hopefully, you can just shoot at cyberdrones with laser rifles and the benefit of the dev console and see this. (for #2, maybe manually set frontal armor to 0 and then save/load from that state?) I don't have a save for #2- that happened fairly early on when I was still thinking "I don't understand this mechanic" instead of "maybe this is a bug?" but for #1, I've also attached a save you can play with if it helps. Have Pavel Lebedev move forward to the point where he has 37 AP left, crouch, and take a shot at the cyberdrone. Repeat and you should be able to see a mix of misses, no armor/health damage, and some damage. (the bug isn't nearly that finicky to re-create; I spent 3 hours playing with my saves on this mission and saw 0 damage/armor damage from many, many different positions) Further Notes Speculation on issues #1: Weapons with 0 armor penetration do no damage or armor damage when armor mitigates the randomized damage below 0? Speculation on issue #2: At 0 frontal armor (maybe only after a save/load?) cyberdrones are receiving full damage reduction for that armor? auto_groundcombat_turn_2_start-211.json

Could someone describe how cyberdrone armor mechanics are supposed to work? I just encountered cyberdrones for my first time in Milestone 5. I haven't played since Milestone 2 so my memory is spotty, but I don't understand what's going on. I wanted to ask to see if I'm missing something before I try to file a bug report. My theory is that cyberdrones have 25 frontal armor (the blue number) to some arc* and 15 normal armor. This seems to be the case... when hitting them with accelerated rifles and laser snipers. With laser rifles, I struggle to characterize what I'm seeing. To attempt to summarize, exclusively shooting from the front arc: 1) Shots sometimes work normally and sometimes do 0 health, 0 armor damage. 2) For a while, I had a drone at 0 blue armor and 8 gray armor and was shooting at it with laser rifles, and every hit would deal between 0 and 8 damage. It was almost like the drone was still benefitting from full armor. (20-60 damage - 40 armor would produce 0-20 damage) Additionally, these attacks inflicted no armor damage. *The Hooded Horse wiki claims 280 degrees, although that looks suspiciously like a typo of 180 degrees.

Should be an easy one to re-create: If you've got a sniper who hasn't moved yet and mouse over a tile to move to and hold SHIFT to predict a hit chance on an enemy from that tile, the predicted chance includes the no-move bonus even though when you move there the hit chance won't have it anymore.

If a second save would help, I've seen this issue too and have a save that re-creates the issue I could upload; it survives a save/load, unlike some other glitches I've seen like doors graphics being trapped in the wrong open/closed state visual. The problem immediately ended when I killed an alien, for what little that may help.

re: Sebillians, I think gas masks are fine for smoke- one less grenade in exchange for being able to move through your own smoke- but they do trivialize the poison grenades. Simple fix? Make them acid grenades. They always damage you, mask or no, but humans inside the acid at the start of the turn need to make a bravery check or flee for their turn unless they're wearing a mask. The damage isn't that extreme anyway, and this preserves the area denial role of the grenades while leaving utility on masks to help resist them.

One thing I've noticed pretty heavily on my Milestone 5 playthrough so far, but am posting separately from the Milestone 5 feedback thread because I'm not sure it's Milestone 5 specific: When you're throwing grenades in or near structures, misses often detonate directly in front of you instead of dispersing somewhere in the area of the target point. This is incredibly punishing as you'll suppress or damage the thrower and friendlies near them. While it makes sense that a missed throw in tight quarters might clip a wall or bounce of the ceiling and miss by a lot more than it might in an open field, the rate at which people drop grenades one or two tiles in front of them seems extreme to the point of ridiculousness. Could the grenade miss calculation be changed to at least let the grenade get two or three tiles in the right direction before it starts worrying about where the miss might land, instead of regularly deciding the thrower just tossed the grenade at a 45-degree-angle into the doorframe right in front of them or directly into the waist-high cover two tiles in front of them?

Tiny extra bug I just noticed: Engineering projects that don't produce anything (corpse analysis) are still blocked by having full stores.

Hi! I started a Xenonauts 2 campaign when Milestone 2 dropped, and here's some feedback after the first hundred days of the campaign. Days 101-200 will be a second post. Campaign Structure The Cleaners This is a really simple bullet point. I like the cleaner missions and the opening campaign structure in general. The data raid, in particular, is really well done with the heavies arriving right as you might want to get out. I wish I had hit more of those. The worst I'll say of the cleaner missions is that there was this big "cleaner network progress" indicator, but it never felt like I was waging a campaign, making any decisions, or facing any threats. This was just a steady march of missions I easily cleared until it threw the cleaner HQ at me. It could be fleshed out; if nothing else, perhaps the quantity and difficulty of missions could be increased to make the player balance mission tempo versus surviving attrition. Still, as a simple opening phase to the campaign, I think the cleaners were successful. Difficulty I selected Soldier difficultly, having limited Xenonauts experience but extreme amounts of experience with just about every X-Com game and a wide variety of the games they inspired. Overall, it felt extremely easy- I was losing less than one soldier per tactical mission without any save scumming, and that dropped to zero until the psionic aliens showed up once I realized the majority of my deaths were from my grenadiers who were wearing light armor. Dropping some ammo to stick them in heavy armor pretty much put a stop to that. Notes on ground combat to follow. In the air there was an incredibly hard swing from “few, easily defeated enemies” to “waaaaaaay too many enemies that you’ll take significant damage fighting.” I like it, honestly. It’s a real “oh, crap” moment and it’s good to feel something- especially as I’m starting to find the lack of challenge in ground combat tedious. (note that I started before 2.15 so I didn’t get the +500k starting income which may be impacting my lack of aircraft to fight back with) The notion of enemy air craft that have no crew so that we can have more ships in the air without spamming a ground mission every time is a good one. Research The research tree feels very strangely paced. At the start, even without aggressively expanding my science staff, I’m perpetually about to exhaust it. Late into the 70s of days, I get options. Approaching day 100, suddenly I’m overwhelmed with options. This isn't necessarily bad- it does give the different phases of the game a different feel- but it does make the early game research a little dull. I have two basic ideas to enhance this. First, the accuracy module might make sense as a starter research instead of starter gear. It's useful, so this makes sense mechanically as something a player would want to go for. It also thematically makes sense because you're dropping from a fairly normal looking helicopter, and a base the game tells you is full of "cold war tech," wielding M16s, so why do we have their weird battlefield scanner/HUD thing? Secondly, one space that could be fleshed out slightly to give some early game options is map control. I’d propose the following suite of changes to give the player the option to throw some starter research at improving base map coverage and potentially open up some extra strategic options early on: 1) A short-ish research project to make drop tanks give you +30% range instead of +15%. No need to construct them, it’s just a buff. 2) Radars initially are a bit weaker, say -15% radius, but a medium duration research project can give them +30% range for a net +10%-ish reach. 3) A tech that provides +20% aircraft repair and rearm time, to help up for faster operational temp as the alien air menace increases. This would let players who either go heavier on science or who sacrifice something else cover more of the map with fewer bases, as well as just adding a few more things to do in the lab at the start. Miscellaneous Thoughts Any chance we could dump base adjacency bonuses? It’s a fiddly extra thing to think about when laying out your base, but it’s also an incredibly simple game so it’s just busywork. I know the X-Com reboots did it, but I’m not sure it’s adding anything here. At least in the reboots there were extra considerations to the tile layout thing like how expensive a section was to clear and where the bonus energy tiles were. Ground Combat Overall Thoughts I really like the feel and pacing of the ground combat. Combat is resolved quickly in a small number of rounds and you’ve got a lot of mobility, but it still feels highly positional. This positionality primarily exists because unlike in the X-Com reboots the AP system means that there’s a nicely granular tradeoff between how much you move and how much and how accurately you can fire. Lethality is well tweaked- a full health guy with armor can usually survive a hit or two, but can still be focused down in a round if you position them badly. Blowing up walls is awesome. That said, it does feel like there’s a ton of creeping forward and picking off enemies in onesies and twosies. I think the enemy could stand to be a lot more aggressive- except for set pieces like the aliens inside a UFO or the final room in the cleaner HQ, enemies should probably start going active and hunting down the player as the fighting starts. Many of the scenarios also feel like they’d benefit from a few more aliens present. Base Defense Base defense is particularly anticlimactic and probably should reworked. A wave of guys walk into my elevator shaft and get brutally opportunity fire-ed down, then there are groups of 2-3 of them per room in a line of rooms back to the hanger they entered from and with the benefit of my base cameras I march forward and clear them one-by-one. The enemies should be actively attacking, probably need to be taught how to use stun grenades, and it feels like there need to be some base targets they’re moving towards to destroy to force me to reposition from the airshaft and respond. Perhaps in base invasions, the aliens could target key rooms and destroy them? For example, they move towards the generators and destroy them, knocking the base offline for a couple of days per generator destroyed? Or maybe they can just trash rooms in general and instead of rushing the elevator they sweep the base room by room and knock them offline, forcing the player to move out to counterattack? Misc Thoughts It’d also be nice if there were more missions with timers. These are really important for mission variety. Post cleaner HQ I don’t have any timed missions from them and I don’t know I’ve gotten any abductions since either, which has made ground battles a lot duller. Perhaps there's also room for a few more alien mission types. Perhaps alien footsoldiers could get grenades, too, to punish players who clump? (see also "and they need stun grenades for base assault") Air Combat As with the cleaner campaign thoughts, I'll be brief here. It’s… fine. Honestly, better than I’d expected from some of the things I’ve heard said about it. It's not great, it's not really what I'm here for, but it's functional. I don’t have a ton of feedback here- keep polishing it, see where you end up. Equipment Selection Here's the big one. I’m not entirely happy with soldier equipment. It feels fiddly without being particularly deep. Observations 1) We’ve got “loadouts” but they’re not very useful for two reasons. First, the loadout is tied to a particular gear tech level so you still need to fiddle with which actual bits and bobs a soldier has equipped after you select the loadout to adjust for what higher-tier gear you have in stock. Secondly, soldiers have varying carrying capacities and the carrying capacity constantly increases over a soldier’s career so I still want to pre-check the loadout before each drop. 2) Within a loadout, I’m not really making that many interesting decisions. The two main pieces of equipment and a baseline of ammo for them go in. Most everyone gets the aim boosting module if they’re not weak compared to their gear weight. Then I just creep in explosives until near capacity and throw on an extra mag to fill up the space. If someone’s strong and carrying something light, like my assault troopers, an extra module like a gas mask fills in the remainder. 3) Heavy armor feels incredibly necessary, especially with starter armor. I don’t ever bother with light. 4) Ammo use is generally so low per mission that running out is barely a consideration. Even reloading rarely is a consideration, although at least the switch to laser rifles lowers mag capacity some. Loadout Rework Suggestion I don’t think carrying capacity or heavy armor are worth the fiddle. Let’s make loadouts truly useful by just making what a trooper can equip standard: 1) A primary weapon (infinite ammo, grenade launcher can load smoke or HE freely) 2) A secondary weapon (pistol/med/stun/melee) 3) Armor (no heavy armor) 4) Two grenades 5) One utility slot for a module. Suggestions follow. What Then Strength? So, if we don’t have strength or heavy armor, what good is strength? I’d propose the following: 1) Make heavy armor a continuous spectrum. Armor uses its “light” armor value, but every 8 points of strength a trooper has provides +1 armor. 2) Strength continues to help with recoil, making burst/auto fire more accurate. 3) Strength continues to help grenade throw range. 4) For grenade launchers, strength replaces ACC as the accuracy stat. 5) Strength increases melee (knife/baton) damage. Additionally, researching energy weapons unlocks very short range energy cutters that has high armor damage to contrast it with the longer ranged but poorly penetrating shotgun. Say maybe we get a laser cutter and then a plasma cutter, with a fixed max range of 3. These scale with strength too. What About Modules? Likewise, if we've got that utility slot I suggested, should we reconsider how modules work to make the decision reliably compelling? My thoughts: 1) Accuracy and automed stay as-is. Who doesn’t want more accuracy or healing? 2) Detpack and C4 are merged into a single “explosives kit” that can do either and has two uses. 3) Gas mask becomes “riot gear”. It provides resistance to gas, infestation, reduces incoming melee damage by 35%, and after psi alien interrogation also blocks mesmerize. 4) Maybe add a stimpak that provides +AP, bleed resistance, and psi resistance, for a mobility/defense option? Misc Equipment Thoughts I’m hating on heavy armor for soldiers, but know what I don’t hate? Heavy armor on MARS. That’s a really good mobility versus survivability tradeoff. Keep it! Bugs Misc bugs I’ve observed: 1) Enemy sentry guns in cleaner HQ missions blow up and scatter debris, but then the undamaged sentry gun still remains visible. 2) I infrequently but repeatedly see walls and crates that aren’t there (blocking movement or fire) but that are still visible. I at least some of this is destroyed obstacles still rendering, but sometimes stuff I didn’t see get shot still appears to be fake. 3) I’ve fired a grenade at some aliens and hit them, suppressing them, only to then have the suppressed aliens get reaction fire and kill my shooter. Suppression is supposed to stop reaction fire, so I suspect there’s a timing issue here. 4) Rockets don’t destroy those thick thicket bushes? Bullets probably shouldn't but if we can blast walls it seems like explosives should. 5) The game loves unchecking that "Heavy Armor" checkbox whenever you change armor. Please don't, if heavy armor must be a thing. Misc Feedback 1) Swapping research projects shouldn’t reset progress. If it is going to, though, please stop offering me a chance to swap research projects when I unlock new ones because eventually I’m going to absentmindedly take you up on that offer and lose progress. 2) I know I’m not the first to say it, but auto-sell junk loot. This is a dumb mechanic. Alternately, integrate it into the engineering system- instead of building higher tech weapons wholesale, convert alien weapons into human weapons. 3) It feels unfair that auto-doors close at the end of alien turns but not your turn which means that aliens can shoot through open doors for free but humans have to open them to shoot through them.

I really love the idea of giving HMGs an explicit "suppressive fire" mode that just had a guaranteed cone of suppression in addition to whatever damage it might land. HMGs feel kind of weird at the moment. The basic DPS weapons of SG/rifle/sniper offer clear range/mobility/damage tradeoffs. Explosives have a clear niche for AoE and dealing with cover and obstacles. Pistols have a clear role as a secondary weapon for people who don't have a good primary DPS gun. HMGs, OTOH, have a weird mix of niches as unreliable suppression, unreliable cover removal, and situational DPS against huge targets. If you give them a button that makes them act like flash grenades but in a long range cone then they get a more clear role as the thing that'll lay down suppression of clumped enemies at range. The cone can also be quite narrow near the soldier, making flashbangs a better close range suppression. (in addition to the fact that they're not taking up your primary weapon slot) Maybe they don't even need a separate button- just make it part of the "long burst" feature and render the suppression cone on the map while you're aiming.

Having started a new campaign to celebrate the Milestone 2 drop, one thing I'm really noticing on the introductory cleaner missions in the bases is how painful walls make it to view the map, especially when you're moving through hallways on missions like the "retrieve the supplies from your old base" mission. There's the stripe-y green "unit behind wall" feature through to show you your units behind barriers, but I still find myself constantly rotating the camera to get a better view of what's going on- sometimes even if I'm just trying to see what's going on in a single corridor. The same criticism applies to some of the taller cover, as well. There's a couple of ways to deal with this. One is to render walls that might be obscuring vision of the map with transparency- just look for some X-Com 2 streams on Twitch, for example, and watch what happens when the tactical view is panning over buildings. Another older-school solution is to just have a toggle button on the UI that just chops off the rendering of walls and doors at knee-height so that you can see a barrier but they don't obscure any cover or units behind them, the same way you currently have a button to toggle roofs. (worth considering still rendering the frames of windows when active in this case, so it's obvious where holes that can be shot through are)

Ah, I misinterpreted "the old system" because of the context of other people discussing the original games. Eh, disagree. Making a bad interface on the grounds that "a modder might do something that makes this UI meaningful" is bad design. If there's no reason to research multiple projects, don't offer the user an interface that lets them research multiple projects. I'm all for the game making it easy for modders to *add* an interface that supports researching multiple projects, but the shipped product should present a UI designed for the shipped product, not some hypothetical thing that someone might add to it on the further hypothetical that your end user might then have that mod installed.

Splitting only really makes sense if there's diminishing returns on the research.* @Chris is right that if there are no diminishing returns, there's no reason to split. So, unless the design decision is made that diminishing returns are advisable implemented there's no reason to offer players the chance to shoot themselves in the foot with what will always be a sub-optimal decision. That said, queues are a no-brainer QoL enhancement and not preserving progress if the project switches also seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do unless the design intent is to punish a player for switching. *Making this an aside because we needn't limit ourselves to "what classic X-Com did"... @Skitso, I don't think actually was the case in classic X-Com if that is the benchmark. The only game guide that I can find that gives a research time formula for the old games, at least, just gives time as "project days / number of scientists" which is a formula that doesn't reward splitting your scientists. Do you have a source for your claim?

Fourth option: Panic increases funding, either based upon the maximum panic a nation has experienced, it's current level, or a mix of the two. Right near the end of the current panic curve, it drops just a little bit and the player is warned the program is at risk of being cancelled. You can probably dial back mod2 panic recovery a bit in conjunction with this. This has two main advantages: 1) It's a stabilizing mechanic, an anti-death spiral. If a player does badly at the start, they'll have more resources to be given a chance to recover. 2) On the flip side, by giving the player too few resources to defend the planet initially, you ensure things do get worse for a while which is useful for generating a compelling emotional narrative and for campaign pacing purposes. Because of #1, the player does have more room to decide how they prioritize coverage. Players that do successfully cover the planet initially have more panic runway before they start getting shut down. Players that choose less coverage or that do a bad job resisting will get more resources sooner, but be closer to losing. You give the players more agency to have different paths by not shoving them off the cliff at the end of the path, rather than adding an additional interface and thing for the player to juggle. (which isn't to knock the idea of giving the player more control over things; this is just another, less intrusive option)