BlckKnght

The soldier path finding in the game right now really annoys me. This is because it ignores the game's own movement mechanics regarding the TU cost of turning. This means that the paths it calculates for any reasonably long move will waste some TUs. Since using TUs efficiently is critical in the tactical game, this is a big issue. Any player trying to play the best they can will be forced to manually path the units around the map, using short straight segments, rather than letting the game handle the details for them. I'd much rather focus on tactical concerns rather than needing to fight against the game over efficient TU usage. To give an example, here's a plotted move costing 35 TUs: The unit turns five times, rather than running three squares forward (to be just behind the guy with the shotgun) and then turning just once before going the rest of the way diagonally. Four of the TUs are wasted on unnecessary turning, more than 10%! Here's what the path should have been: I'm not the first person to notice this, and it's been reported in some older threads like this one, but its not on the FAQ page and fixing it doesn't seem to be planned. I suspect most players who try to play optimally will have also noticed this issue (perhaps subconsciously), and have incorporated various workarounds for the issue into their gameplay (e.g. by moving soldiers only in short straight lines, rather than with long moves under the pathfinder's control). I have even more doubts about the path finding when I start looking at very long moves (longer than would actually be practical in a game turn). I'm not sure what's going on with this one, for instance (it seems to turn back and forth almost at random, wasting 6 TUs out of 77): Now, I know that path finding code in games can be quite complicated, but I don't think a fix for this would be too much work. After all, the game is already calculating and displaying the cost of the inefficient moves correctly, it just needs to use that same cost calculation to pick a more optimal route. If the pathfinder is using A* or something similar, you might be able to do this by including the unit's facing in the state information you generate for each potential move, and using that facing information to compute the TU costs. Anyway, I hope this issue can receive some attention.

I've just had this happen to me when running over a rock in the desert tileset. It's not consistent though. It crashed when I played yesterday. When I tried it again today (loading the autosave) it crashed again the first time I tried it, but not any of the later times when I tried to reproduce the issue. Here's a screenshot showing the rock in question (from one of the playthroughs where there was no crash): I've backed up the autosave so it won't get overwritten. If you need it to investigate the issue, I can upload it somewhere. I'm not sure how useful it will be though, since as I said, the crash is not consistently reproducible.

I've seen this issue too. Marwik's description of how to reproduce it is exactly what I had done (tried to move a just outside the top door of the engine room from the inside). The walking sound does end if you order that soldier to move somewhere else (even if he has no TUs left to actually make another move).

In my latest game I've twice seen aliens walk through solid walls. Both times it was on the Industrial map while trying to claim a crashed scout. The first time an Caesan ran from the fenced area in the far right corner into the building along the bottom right edge the map. My troops hadn't seen the part of the wall he ran through, but they saw the beginning and end points of his movement. I was surprised when I killed him and entered the building to see that there was no door, just a tool chest up against the wall, roughly where he walked through. The second time was in the building adjacent to the power substation (the closest building to the drop ship's exit ramp). I had two soldiers in the building, facing towards the door in the top corner. Much to my horror, an Sebillian soldier ran right through the wall on the upper left (to the left of the door), and ended his movement right next to them in the middle of the room. On my turn my soldiers each shot him, but he survived the damage and killed them both with reaction fire. A shotgun blast at point blank and four or five pistol shots (from my missile launcher gal) were not enough to take him out!

The decreasing funding is not really a bug. When the aliens build a base somewhere in the world, it will cause a steady decrease the funding from the region it is located in. If you move the mouse over that region, you'll see its estimated funding change steadily becoming more negative. If you do it over the ocean, you'll see the same thing for your worldwide funding. Moving the mouse doesn't change the rate that the funding is lost, just the rate at which the losses are shown in the UI. The fact that the funding amounts only update when the mouse is moved is probably a minor bug. Ideally it would be updated all the time (though it might be reasonable to do it every game-minute or so instead of every frame).