Comassion

Cool, thanks. I figured that would literally quit the game.

In the current build, I build another base right away with the cash I have on-hand at the beginning of the game. Due to the low profit margins each month, it would take several months to generate enough cash to equal your starting amount, so I figure there's no better time except to start early, and you'll be protecting a second area of the globe (at least with interception capability, a ground team may have to wait) within the first month.

What would be better there is if the icon remembered the soldier's fire type - then if you want to burst fire all day you set it and it stays on burst fire (or aimed, or whichever) for that soldier.

I don't know if I just haven't seen the button for it yet on the UI, but can you retreat from a mission currently? I always like that as an option when things went south on a mission - it was far easier to replace half your soldiers if you could get out of there rather than having to replace all your soldiers and the transport they came in.

I don't know whether a plasma shot would indeed cauterize the wound, but there's a ton of secondary effects beyond direct blood loss from a serious wound that can put a severely wounded person's life in danger. Hydrostatic Shock can cause internal bleeding to other areas of the body, and wounded soldiers can die from suffering circulatory shock as a response to severe injury. The plasma blast could also have done damage directly to an internal organ (say, the lung or the diaphragm) and cause difficulties breathing such that immediate medical attention could mean the difference between life and death. Plus, we don't know how the plasma is being generated - plasma isn't a 'thing' by itself, it's a superheated state of matter. If something is that hot, it doesn't just cool right down after it damages you. It could cause a prolonged burn (which would be an excellent case for plasma weapons causing MORE bleeding wounds). For a comparable real-world weapon, check out white phosphorous. Even small burning fragments could cause extremely serious damage over time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus So I'm fine with the general principle that when someone is hit by just about any type of weapon, it's a good idea to get them some medical attention immediately, and doing so will improve their survival chances - plus, it's easier to code.

Ah, cool. I'm late to the party, thanks for the info.

I hear ya. Steambirds (link above) is definitely worth looking at in that regard if you haven't seen it - they did a great job with varied craft and the overall combat system, and it's short to boot.

Cool, thanks for the consideration.

It's practically impossible to prevent exploits in all but the simplest of systems, simply due to the sheer number of minds involved. The actual developers of the core system are always few in number (and having more does not always increase the system's resistance to exploitation). The number of users will far, far outstrip the creators. Even during beta testing, expect to see lots of exploits discovered (and if they're bad for gameplay, addressed in some fashion). But how many beta testers do we really have? (and I don't mean people who just play their download - I mean serious bug reporters and exploit finders) Probably something in the dozens, or hundreds if we're lucky. When the game's released, the user base can expand into the thousands or more (hopefully!) That's an order of magnitude or more people hitting the game's systems and looking for ways to get around them - and they'll be doing it over a period of years, not months. A game like Xenonauts is too complex to possibly prevent everything that could happen - but that's ok. An exploit or two does not ruin a game (X-Com being a great example). That said, it's good to learn the lessons of the past and not repeat X-Com's exploits. Any such things in Xenonauts will be entirely new.

This is pretty good as is, but I would love to see wound treatment of 'killed' soldiers tied in to the game. Right now I've noticed that some soldiers really die and some don't when they're 'killed' on a mission, and I'd like to see the use of a medpack within X turns of their death (or perhaps to prevent them from going too far into the negative HP range) help improve their survival chances. So, as soldiers have 50-odd HP, a shot that takes them into the negatives is very likely to cause bleeding. Right now I understand that HP is tiered somewhere to the effect of between -1 and -20 you have a 50% chance of surviving, and lower than -20 you have nothing. Perhaps a more gradual tier structure will encourage more rapid first aid. Assuming you took a 50 HP hit, on average that'll cause one wound under your current system. If that brings the soldier to, say, -3 HP, I've got a whopping 8 turns to treat him before he gets to -20. However, if we put different survival tiers at Hp levels that are closer together (say, every 10 HP), that puts more immediate time pressure to tend to incapacitated soldiers, and if we stretch it out longer, then every battlefield casualty becomes worthy of attention (as opposed to the guy who you know just went to -23 damage, who is currently not worth treating). Try these tiers on for size - the survival percentages can of course be played around with, and could be improved by advanced medkits: 0 to -10 HP: 80% survival rate. -11 to -20: 50% survival rate. -21 to -30: 20% survival rate. -31 to -40: 5% survival rate. -41 or less: Dead. This absolutely encourages people to give their soldiers immediate first aid to prevent them from slipping into the next tier, as well as encouraging players to not give up on heavily wounded comrades as there's still a chance they could be saved. Edit: Also, yes, the notification that your soldier is bleeding is a must.

That was indeed a very cool aspect of the game. I haven't seen it in Xenonauts yet, but I do fondly remember trying to get to wounded soldiers to save them in time in X-Com, so I'd love it as a feature.

The former would probably be easier to implement, as adding a 'crash timer' (or percentage chance) in the code for the air battlemap would likely be easier than adding it into the Geoscape (since that keeps the event self-contained in the air battle). I considered the second option here, but decided that it didn't make all that much sense realistically. Having the armament cause exponentially higher damage could work under the current model though, and keep players careful (though I'm also not totally sold on the 'manage your weapons for a good tactical experience' thing that's going on now in general). For now, the best 2D tactical air game that I've played is Steambirds, and happily anyone can give it a shot since it's just a flash game: http://armorgames.com/play/5426/steambirds Xenonaut's air combat could do worse than emulate aspects of it. I like the sort of freeform turn-based thing they have going there, and they've got a ton of unusual craft to fight against, including much larger (and more dangerous) foes.

Right now I feel like the air combat is a little bit backwards with the 'overkill' model in terms of nuanced tactical play. At the beginning of the game, when you're not experienced, you need to exercise more tactical nuance in air combat to avoid over-killing UFOs and leaving no crash site. Later on, when you're more experienced, the bigger UFO's become much harder to overkill, so you can just let loose with everything you've got. This has the odd effect of actually reducing your responsibilities as a tactician as the game proceeds onward to 'harder' air combats. What could be done instead would better simulate the sheer size of these vessels, as well as introducing a different tactical element that makes air combat more involved, rather than less involved as ships get bigger. When a UFO takes a certain amount of damage (perhaps enough to kill it now), it becomes 'seriously damaged'. This means it can no longer go back into orbit and is certain to crash at some point, but it stays on the battle map and can still fight you at reduced effectiveness. Once you've seriously damaged something, you'll want to break off combat with it (too much more damage could bring it down catastrophically and you lose your crash site), but you'll need to do it carefully as the vessel can still hurt you as its going down. The analogy would be to a damaged B-17 - if you took out a couple engines from one of those things, it could still be flying for minutes or even hours before crashing (and sometimes even make it back to base), but during this time its machineguns can still harass and harm attacking fighters. I notice on the battle map ground combat that they've made allowances for varying damage levels of the UFO - you could tie that in to how much damage the UFO sustains while already seriously damaged. Bigger ships can stay in the air while 'seriously damaged' longer than smaller ships, which means they'll remain dangerous longer than the smaller ships - thus leading to a greater need for tactical nuance (planning not just your attack runs but your exit routes) as you begin to fight larger and larger vessels. Something like a Scout can still crash right away and a Corvette can remain on screen for just a second or two, but a giant battleship can stick around for 20-30 seconds or so (or even minutes or hours, if you want to let people escape from the combat and then see where it crashes in the geoscape). Alternately, instead of a timer, being seriously damaged can introduce a percentage chance per second that the craft will crash, leading to random amounts of time before a vessel is brought down. You could do the same thing with player craft - once it's below the 50% mark in damage it needs to get out or risk crashing.

I could understand that if we had things like 'snap burst fire' and 'aimed burst fire', but we don't. There's just one 'burst fire' mode, which it appears to me could be incorporated seamlessly into the right-click cycle.

To clarify, I don't want burst fire mode to go away at all. I just want it incorporated into the right-click cycle menu rather than being a separate little 'gun fire mode' function.

Why not just make burst fire a standard fire mode selectable beyond 'aimed' fire with the assault rifle? I find it gets annoying to toggle between the two modes of operation with the little click button (especially because it seems a bit bugged for me and sometimes doesn't click over). I don't see a good reason to separate out the fire modes, and unless someone has a good reason why the two modes should exist, I think I'd like to see the 'burst' fire mode incorporated into the standard right-click cycle options for shooting at a target (so when you right-click a target, it goes: snap, normal, aimed, burst, snap.)

The presence of civilians on the battlefield introduces a time incentive to get to the aliens to stop further killing. While that may be a safer strategy for your soldiers, the cost in civilian lives will hurt your standing each mission. That said, moving slowly tends to be a good X-Com strategy in general, so while there are incentives to go faster, the risk to your troops may not be worth it - losing some standing isn't the end of the world, so you're not forced to save everyone. So there's incentives to play it safe and to hurry, and the choice of what to do is left to the player.

With the new build coming out and the game rapidly approaching beta, many of the 'fixed' issues are going to disappear, and there's a ton of them. Maybe it's time to start a new master bug thread (with more explicit instructions so people don't post in it? Perhaps it could be locked.) Right now we need to search the forums to see if a bug is already reported, but with multiple ways to word something (Do soldiers 'vault' over fences? 'Jump' over 'obstacles'? Etc) it would be really handy just to be able to read a concise list of known but not yet fixed issues for the purposes of reporting (and also to link each bug in the master thread to the forum post reporting it.) While we're at it, we could also come up with a standard report format - we do that to an extent, but people can often be bad about, say, posting 'steps to replicate', which are really important to have. Thoughts?

This is a known issue - if you just click on a game name, it won't activate the save button. The workaround for now is to click on the text box, then click on the game you want to save over, then hit space, backspace, and click 'save'.

One thing the AI could be programmed to do is to try to pick up Xenonaut (or other human) bodies and carry them off the map. That way you could still have won the mission, but you have an M.I.A. or two at the end. Plus players will flip out if they see an alien grab a trooper who may still be alive and try to carry them away.

AI is gonna be quite a bit of it. Those are very difficult to do well.

I think the main alternative if suppression turns out to be too powerful is to drop the AP damage, but keep your other effects (remove reaction fire and crouch). As long as the AP's remaining to a suppressed unit are enough for it to at least take a snap shot (and perhaps a normal shot) back at its attackers though, I think it'll work out.

If anything, shots that hit should cause MORE suppression. Being wounded is even less fun than being shot at.

Sure, but suppression != dead. Without someone to move in and exploit suppression, it becomes useless - and the MGs and other high-suppression weapons need to be balanced so that they aren't effective weapons on the move (options there: really high TUs for use, or really low accuracy values, or perhaps even changing accuracy values for soldiers who move vs. soldiers who remain still, which would be a nice addition to the game in general.) Maybe your complaint is that it always works? Perhaps the 'suppression damage' done could be a variable range by weapon instead of a static numeric effect, so sometimes you'll get it and sometimes you won't.

That's an option, but you'll eventually run out of ammo, and each soldier you bring that's dedicated to doing that isn't storming into buildings and killing aliens. Plus, with all that machinegun fire going on, you're going to need to be extremely careful with your own troops to avoid having them hit by friendly fire.