Oktober

Well, y'know. Ideas is ideas.

The trade-off is that you might have to wait a while to get a fitting resume. You won't get emergency meatshields right when you need them. (Of course, you could always just keep the meatshields on hand, and then use all your free time to recruit demigods.)

Yeah mine seemed to stall out for a pretty long time, but then shortly after I forgot about it and distracted myself with something else, it wrapped itself up. I think it does that on purpose.

Fancy! Thank you for the suggestions!

Yeah I just found Pinetree's thread. It's amazing!

Thanks for being helpful! Not really sure why my preferences for play have anything to do with your blood-pressure rising.

In poking around the folders (and I'm not an expert, so I'm probably wrong) it does look like there are a lot of duplicate files in various locations. I imagine that'll get cleaned up later on, if it's not necessary to have redundancies for some reason. Now, if someone could tell me where to find the bit that has the "include female soldiers" part set to "on" so I could modify that ....

I dunno if this was an issue or if I was just impatient, but I tried hiring 5 or 6 new soldiers as soon as I started a new game in the current build, and they...never arrived. I'm pretty sure I gave it at least a week, too. I don't recall them being so slow to arrive in the previous build. Chris said something about implementing a new hiring structure in which players get to select their new hires from a pool? Maybe that had something to do with it. Am I supposed to go someplace specific to select these people, or should it just pop up...?

...and what are you guys buying for your second base? Someone on here recommended building the 2nd base right away, since you're probably not going to have much in the way of disposable funds for a long time after the game starts. So I've started a couple of game where I build a new base ($1 M for command center) 2 hangars ($600,000) living quarters, a radar, and a storage area. I think that's about it. Without purchasing anything to actually go in the base, and without even buying any stuff at my starting base (no more hangars or MiGs) I'm already running a deficit by the end of the first month. Suggestions?

Ah ha ha ha so I'm trying to figure out how to get the female soldiers back out of the game, and I removed some stuff from the "assets" folder. I ended up with a team of invisible female soldiers....

Yeah, I gotcha! And again, while various nations' militaries may have cosmetic differences in name, they're generally all built on the same basic structure. I'm suggesting implementing something that more closely approximates that structure within this game. If you're concerned about the Xenonauts becoming overly-Americanized, the UN peacekeeper forces (on whom the Xenonauts already seem to be based, what with their periwinkle uniforms) structure could be an inspiration to keep things nice and blandly inoffensive.

Not really. They have different names for things, but for the most part that's flavor. Functionally, the ranks and rates tend to translate pretty directly from service to service (with a few pretty minor exceptions). What I'm saying is that a team of captains (and especially colonels) aren't going to be a more effective fighting force than a bunch of enlisted people. The enlisted ranks have always "done" the fighting. And while there are many perfectly capable combat officers, rank does not suggest skill. And as a general rule, the higher your rank (in the officer corps particularly) the more distanced you're going to be from the front lines. See, what I described is a parallel ranking structure. I'm not suggesting forcing the player to have mostly low-ranking people on missions. I'm suggesting keeping things a bit more true-to-life while differentiating between your leadership and your general infantry. Again, the point is that a bunch of captains are really not likely to be better at combat than a bunch of E-4s and E-5s. As the game progresses, you may find yourself running around with a bunch of E-8s and E-9s! They're still high-ranking, but if they're in the specialist branch as I propose, their combat skills will be at a level well beyond what your officer(s) will have, and as I stated, the player would choose to have the option to promote further officers from among any enlisted they desire. Considering also the high mortality rate of the game and the requirement for at least 4, maybe 5 bases worldwide, spreading out your skilled troops among all of your installations is just good sense. Limiting player choice is game design.

Yuhsssss finally! It took a while but it's going now!

Also: be careful not to damage scouts too much. If you overkill, they'll be destroyed, and you won't get a ground-assault mission.

You have to be in range. If you're out of range of your target, and you click the missile icons while they're green, they turn red, right? And then when you're furiously clicking, the missiles sometimes launch, and sometimes they don't? All has to do with distance from the target. Red = you just told your pilot not to shoot that missile even when there's an enemy in range. (You'll see why it's useful to conserve ammo later.) Green = Missile will automatically launch as soon as the enemy is within range. Green with a Red diamond = Missile was Red, but now you're in range and if you click this missile icon, it will be launched immediately. As you mentioned, the enemy fighters dodge. Try sending one missile out as soon as your at range, and hitting the target with a combined burst of fire from a couple of fighters simultaneously while the target's barrel-roll ability is cooling down.

Oh my. That's a lot of text. I'm sorry.

Fair warning: I'm ex-military, so the abysmally inaccurate promotion system in X-Com is probably more of a peeve of mine than it needs to be. Additional caveat: I have no idea how promotion is going to work in Xenonauts. I've never gotten anybody past SGT in the game. That said, I have been running a crew of like 9 SGTs and 3 CPLs. In X-Com, promotion runs as follows: Rookie, Squaddie, Sergeant, Captain, Colonel. You can find yourself with a team of 10 Captains running around. I think this is an unnecessary and easily remedied mechanic. As a general rule, enlisted men don't spontaneously become officers, and whether you're upper enlisted or low-ranking commissioned officer, you're generally going to be in a command role, directing your men, and such, not just humping along a shotgun right next to Pvt. Humptyscrunch, with no difference between the two of you but some TUs and a better Aim statistic. In the real-life military, your grunts are going to be relatively lower-enlisted, immediately supervised by sergeants (occasionally corporals), who are in turn supervised by higher-ranked sergeants (Staff SGT or SGT 1st Class) and by lower commissioned officers (usually finding Captains or maybe the occasional 2nd LT in these kinds of roles. The highest enlisted and mid-range officer levels are really going to be administrators, responsible for a command, and anywhere from a few score to hundreds of people. Now, for many years, until some time in the mid-80s (making this perfect for Xenonauts) -- the US Army had a couple of different career paths available to enlisted soldiers. They could go through the --> Non-commissioned officer path: corporal, sergeant, staff sergeant, etc.; or (I believe if they were less promising, and didn't play as well with others) they could become --> Specialists, instead: specialist 4 was an E4, just like a corporal, spec 5 was the same grade as a sergeant, spec 6 as staff sergeants, and so on. Specialists weren't necessarily expected to take leadership roles, they just needed to focus on being good at their MOS. My suggestion is to differentiate your soldiers in this manner. Keep your grunts as grunts. Just promote them through the grunt ranks, so they become ever-more-awesome grunts. Allow the player to designate some soldiers as leaders. One officer initially (the number perhaps varying as the total Xenonaut numbers increase) and a few billets for non-commissioned officers. These leadership positions I think would probably be pretty easily implemented as a morale-boosting presence to help try and combat the panic which can occur in tense situations in the game. (And of course the possibility for an officer to be able to call in air-strikes or something quickly leaps to mind, but while the coding for that sort of thing may be prohibitive, implementing a leadership positions primarily as a morale-impacting mechanic certainly shouldn't be too difficult.) The trade-off for having these types of characters of course could be that the leveling mechanic for these leadership folks would probably take significantly longer. I do think that dividing promotion tracks like this would also allow for a more regular rate of promotion (if you go Private, Spec 4, Spec 5 all the way through Spec 9, that's 7 ranks...and by the time you get some guys to Spec 9, you'll possibly have some slots open to make a few battlefield commissions. You could end the game with some truly terrifying officers leading squads around the world.) People like seeing their mans level up. I think my suggestion would lead to some much-needed carrot in a game that's full of stick, (just in terms of providing promotions more frequently) and also doing away with a silly promotion mechanic which, while fine for X-Com, seems like it would be a bit out of place in a more serious endeavor such as Xenonauts. What do you think?

But bear in mind your funding. North American and Europe are generally going to give you more money than most other countries, so it's typically a good idea to keep them happy, right?

Yay! Does Desura auto-update or do I have the option to play the current build as long as I want before upgrading to the new one? (Judging from what happened just before a TPK on my current save-game, I'm mere days away from Laser Weapons/my first downed corvette/and hopefully soon my first terror mission.)

Yeah I must have done something stupid. Re-installing fixed it.

Hey so quick question about female soldiers in game. I (and I expect I'm not alone) would prefer not to have female soldiers forced upon me. Will there be a way to turn this option off?

Well y'know, what they don't know won't hurt them. The Xenonauts could perhaps occasionally make a point of leaving no witnesses....

I did try uninstalling, yes. I was poking around in the game-files yesterday, and I coulda sworn I left everything as I found it, but it's possible I moved something somewhere it didn't belong. Quick question: whenever a new build comes out, do the previous save files still work, or do we have to (get to?) start from scratch?

So I was playing the game this morning, and then...turned it off for a bit. When I came back a few hours later, suddenly it won't work. As soon as it loads up and that image of the 3 guys standing in the HQ appears, the game immediately crashes back to windows with a "Send Error Report" message. What'd I do?!

Really if you're that interested you could just keep extra equipment on each guy, and drop it in the dropship before he leaves. That way if you need it later, you could send some folks back to collect the additional gear.