TMP

If moving onto a teleporter tile triggers reaction fire from an alien, the xenonaut will not be teleported and the game freezes. Happened to me every time, so no save (I can make one if you want me to). Using windows "end task" to close the program works, so it seems like the event handler is still working.

The 3 heavy fighters are imho the hardest battle you will normally fight, but it should be doable with any 3 craft, if you have enough fuel. Heavy fighters have two weaknesses: They can't hit a target that is circling around them (their shots will pass behind your fighter - you might need to use the afterburner with condors for this to work) and they have a REALLY slow turn rate. Once you are behind them, they can no longer harm you. The idea is basically to circle around the heavy fighters (this takes some practice, as you slow down if you turn) with the aircraft they are targeting, and get behind them to clean them up. Corsairs are so fast and agile, they can completely outmaneuver heavy fighters by themselves. Heavy fighters are extremely strong, I was surprised that the following air superiority class of the aliens is almost completely harmless.

Money, and it's not guaranteed that you get engineers in the first abduction to build a second uplink in the first month. Sure, if things go well you can get even more satellites up (during 1 game on classic I had complete coverage and no country lost after 4 months).

I doubt it's possible to lose the game simply due to bad luck on the strategic layer, unless you play with impossible, marathon and diminishing returns - simply because you can't really built any satellites. (300+$ for the second one, 1000+$ for the fourth...). Just impossible without second wave? Nope, you can't lose that solely on the strategic layer, especially because you can always do the alien base to reduce panic levels if necessary. Let's just do some quick calculation: You can get one satellite in the two months, two every month after that (assuming you go for the quarantine) - you can do the alien base during the third month at the latest. With 2 abductions per month, you lose one country in the first, and one in the second months, the third you won't lose any with the alien base. After that, you have enough satellites to guarantee that you won't lose a country due to an abduction, because you can just launch a satellite there. So, at the most you are guarenteed to lose a maximum of two countries, claiming to be able to lose the game due to bad luck at the strategic layer is bullshit and impossible, even on the highest difficulty setting. Only marathon and diminishing returns changes that. Seriously, after reading some of the comments about the game, I get the feeling that people who are complaing are just really bad at it... Apart from that, I agree with the most (though not all) of the criticism in the first post. I'm sure Xenonauts will have some weaknesses as well. I'd call it weaknesses and not flaws, because sometimes a strength and a weakness comes a combined package. For example complexity and accessability.

I'm not really convinced to make the whole AI code lua based - it could become relatively slow. I don't know if the source code will be released but I'd assume it won't. You could load the AI as dll however, and publish the interface - that would allow full control over the AI, while keeping it still quite fast. Depending on the general code structure, it also shouldn't be hard to do.

Hm, a few thougts concerning realism. I was trained with the MG3, a heavy machine gun. Aquiring new targets with that weapon is really slow, because you need to use your whole body to stabilize the gun and as a result have to move your whole body to aim at a different target. So reaction fire is quite hard imho. Another thing I want to mention: A 100 round belt gets used up within 5 seconds, though you probably won't hit anything with such a long burst - and you would get overheating problems within a minute. In general I would call a MG a kill weapon. If you have a target that doesn't have 100% cover, you kill it. The (maximum) spread if properly handled (with bipod, 2-4 round burst) is rather low by the way. No more than ~4cm at 25m distance, translating to 40cm at 250m distance. Just talking about realism here. What makes the game fun is a completely different question and I have admittedly no experience with light MGs.

(I hope the other questions are answered as well in the following text) In essence, yes. I absolutely do not think that building production facilities for the generation of income should work. It's not a strategy I like, or one that I ever used. I basically tried to argue: "You can have that much gross/net profit and it will still be impossible to use production as a money-making scheme." (That you could even have a net profit is the whole "return on investment" stuff). I think I communicated that badly. I have to say after looking at Mac_Caine's calculation that I severely misjudged the relevance of the initial investment and the maintenance cost. As a consequence there's a very thin line between "making no net profit" and "making too much net profit". Setting the sell prize for a laser pistol to 29 000$ gives you a net loss, setting it to 30 000$ will give you too much profit. Setting it to 29 700$ (40 months ROI) or 29 650$ (80 months ROI) would probably be fine, but who wants such weird sell values? Seem like the possibility for a net profit is actually not really relevant. So, how much net loss do we want? I think want as little as possible, but it looks like you guys see it differently.

The labour cost is an additional cost to the manufactoring cost, so I don't see it as justified to use it in the realism argument. On the other hand I would admit that it's not impossible for a final product to have less worth than its original components. It's just not really common. Firing engineers doesn't cost anything, but it doesn't help you either. They get paid for being hired and at the end of the month, not for the time they are hired. Sacking staff for less than a month doesn't save you any money. (And you can't reasonably reduce other maintenance cost)

First question: 1 living quarters with one workshop completely in use. From there on, everything scales linearly (investment and maintenance). Someone made calculations about this in the beginning. Second question: Yes. Third question: Doesn't really matter. You could have the profit margin increase continously the higher you get into the tech tree. But it doesn't have to be that way. Fourth question: More like 1.03 to 1.05 million, to increase the time until you get back your investment. Last statement: Eventually is the important point. Time is not an irrelevant factor. Neither in real world economics, nor in the game. If you use the stuff yourself, the sell price is irrelevant. You are financing the stuff you use by using the funding. That principle is not violated. On the other hand, assume I have either 200 engineers or 50 engineers. But 50 engineers are sufficient to build everything I want to until I get the next upgrade. So having 200 engineers means I pay 4 times the maintenance but I get absolutely nothing back. That's "penalizing" in my book. But when I start the game I don't know if I will need 50 or 200. That's a problem I see. Sure, you have a similar problem with research. There are other solutions for this, though. Unfortunately, building and dismantling infrastructure isn't a no-cost thing. Engineers don't get paid for each day afaik, but for each month. Not that easy to cut back to save money in the short or mid term. This gives me the feeling you missed my point. Producing for profit DOES NOT mean it's helpfull to build more factories to get more money. Example: 3% return on investment per month. I have 1 000 000. But I do nothing, while you build production for 1 million. Ten months laters. You have now 300 000. While I still got my 1 million, so I'm better of. 30 months later, I finish the game. I still have my 1 million. You have 900 000. So I finish the game with more money than you with your "making money" scheme. So how again is building production facilities helping my cashflow in this case? I used 2 years, because that's roughly the maximum that I stayed in the game in TFTD. You can finish that game within 1 ingame year without problem. It isn't really relevant for the principle, though. There are two reasons why I would like to be able to get some profit. The first one is realism. I don't see it very plausible that the raw materials cost more than the final product (you already pay for the wages of the engineers and facility maintenance). The second one is to make certain "wrong" decisions less punishing. Knowing the exact amount of engineers you will need at which point in the game becomes less important. It would still helpfull, but not as much. While this would punish the inattentive player, not being able to build for a little profit will punish EVERY player (and the really inattentive one will build for profit and lose additional money - don't laugh, I know someone who wasn't aware that building stuff costs money) I don't see how this opens the game for exploits by min-maxers. If the (maximum) net profit per month is 100% / (average game time in months), how can it be exploited? It can't.

I think you are focussing too much on "profit" and not enough on "return of investment". Let's say you have a manufacturing base that produces a net profit of 1000$ a day. Let's also assume a normal playthrough will take around 2 ingame years. So if you have to invest 700 000$ for your manufacturing base, you won't break even until the game is finished - if you invest that money from day 1, and don't use it for any of the other juicy stuff you would like to have. That means being able to sell at a profit doesn't ruin the dependency on funding by itself, which I think is the greatest concern here. I think the existance of some stuff that allows you to at least finance the maintenance of the production facilities and technicians has one advantage: Players who invested in a decent production infrastructure won't get punished when there momentarily isn't any stuff they need for the fight. You don't have any fair chance to know how much production is "too much" when playing the game for the first time, because it depends on result of research you have no knowledge of.

Due to the game crashing occasionally, I often save and load. Sometimes this seems to double the number of available scientists. I was starting with 10 scientists. First time the bug occurred I had 20 out of a maximum of 10 scientists, and 60 out of a maximum of 50 lab space. Next time it's been 40/10 scientists, 80/60 lab space, 80/10 scientists 120/60 lab space up to currently 160/10 scientists and 200/50 labspace. This only applies to scientists available for research. I still have only 10 scientists hired.

Anytime I saved on the Geoscape while a crashed Corvette was on the Geoscape, the selected save in addition to the latest save became corrupted (Game hangs up during loading). Bug might only trigger while overwriting an old save. One time the game hang up during saving in that situation. I will see if I can get more precise information.