Anon_Spartan

If the abduction missions were only carried out by researcher Caesians and maybe a guard or two, I don't think even a chopper of rookies only would have a problem, even if they were rushing around. Yeah, slow and cautious is usually best, but we can't always operate in ideal situations.

I knew that when auto-resolving air combat came out this would be next. Airstrike is a good idea. You kill the surviving aliens and get some Alien Alloys and Alieum. Maybe the nation doesn't approve and your relationship doesn't improve. Or let the local forces deal with it when the token disappears naturally and get the boost in relations as they revel in the alien technology that the Xenonauts always toss in the trash. But a player that goes through the whole ground mission by themselves should get all the benefits. They should get the nation's praise, the stronger soldiers, the teeny bit of loot, and all the regular rewards. Don't penalize players who are not skipping missions just because others think it's boring. That's not fair to the players who want to do the missions because, I dunno, they think they're fun? I hate to sound like a dick but I'm beginning to think this game is losing sight of its goal of being an alien defense simulator if you just auto-resolve everything. I liked playing house and designing my base and just running the affairs of X-Com in the OG too but there was far more to the game then just that.

How many electrostatic grenades does it take to deal with an upper level Andron? Or are they bugged beyond usefulness? I tossed like four at a red one and it didn't do anything before he cut my guys to ribbons and this was only on normal difficulty. Besides fast tracking to plasma weapons is there a way to deal with Androns?

When did flares get so cheap to throw? Not that I'm complaining but it didn't seem so bad when it took thirty TUs.

I haven't had much chance to play with the better weapons in Xenonauts before my file eventually comes down with a save game crippling crash, but it kind of feels that all the high level weapons are just stronger than the previous ones but with less ammo (and listed ammo didn't even match total ammo but that might have been a v17 or v18 problem). That's not bad, but X-Com's weapons were more diverse. Even when I had glorious heavy plasmas, I kept laser pistols around because they were great for destroying walls and terrain. In fact X-Com's engine limits with how much stuff I could bring made the unlimited ammo laser pistols really useful. And then laser weapons were useful against those one terror units used towards the end. Do weaker weapons in Xenonauts still maintain any use at higher levels?

I usually go with Last Line of Defense in Turkey, Area 52 in North America, and the Gulags in Russia if I ever get that far. But I really want to do a roman-based game soon which would basically be Emperor Caligula vs. Aliens.

We've already had this debate weeks ago.

A few builds ago, I remember there being a accuracy problem with aliens being adjacent to cover made them damn near immortal, even if they were attacked from an unguarded side. Is that still an issue? And unless I'm remembering incorrectly, but doesn't the Light Scout barely have 16 tiles in it? I thought it was 4x4. It seems a bit cramped to fit so many aliens into that space, although I don't mind for more aliens to kill for experience.

Wait, was low weapon accuracy the reason why my high accuracy soldiers couldn't hit an alien with a rock covering their boots even with the highest AP attacks? If so I'm glad for that to be taken care of.

Wow, that throttle thing is pretty cool then. I thought it just went from normal to afterburner and always thought "Aw, what a cute effect." That certainly helps then. Was this something you just figure out or was it written somewhere? I can't believe I never saw it. I'll give v5 a shot and check it out with all these new gadgets and tricks. If the current UFO AI just targets the closest aircraft, what are the odds a future AI might make do more dastardly things like target more expensive aircraft? And yeah, I hear ya, Lorebot, although one of my favorite things in v18 was to use 2 MiGs and a Condor to bomb a landing ship, run away as soon as it turned around, and keep doing that. Haha, it was great.

Sorry, but requiring the ships to nearly bump nose to butt exactly makes it slow and boring. As for aliens picking their targets, it always seemed they were going for your bomber on delightful purpose, but choosing the closer (and faster) target would be explain why they always went for the poor MiGs. However, unless this is new in 19, I've never seen the option to go slower, only faster. In earlier builds it would have been unthinkable to have the Interceptors have increased speed, since that was the MiG's trick. But now we've shared it. I see no reason why the transfer can't go both ways. I honestly can't imagine it being game breaking. It's certainly better than losing the ship to bad luck then save scumming. As for the manual changing of directions, that is possible, but given straight flight paths to designated points on the map just ends up wasting time, while if it were already a feature it could shake things up.

Are you talking about the accuracy problems in the experimental builds? I know that when I played Version 4, I could not hit any alien who had so much as a pebble in front of him, no matter how close I was or from which direction I fired. Even point blank shots deviated into the rock.

Would it be possible take ships like the landing ships and fill them with cargo to create a maze effect? That way there is no big change, just adding destructible environments that can make a twisting maze?

A few weeks we had a heated debate (I.e flame war) over air combat and it was eventually decided that an auto resolve option would be implemented but people would still be allowed to play it if they wanted. I have not played Experimental Build 5 but I played 4, and it felt like the Air Combat mini-game was made impossibly difficult in an attempt to turn public opinion against it. Missiles now had a range of automatic weapons, meaning you had to get up close and personal with the aliens. This was bad enough with Interceptors, but at least those could evasive roll. I never built a MiG because my files kept corrupting and crashing but I'm assuming they have to get close too, and since they can't dodge I assume you'd be losing you MiG every time. Even before this, alien craft always targeted the MiGs almost as if they knew they'd be taken out for sure. I still think that the solution to saving Air Combat is to break up the monotony. Give MiGs the ability to dodge. If you thought the missile range was too long (I agree, I could usually blast a UFO with a pair of MiGs and escape before the alien craft could even react). And instead of having all the planes come in from the same location, have them come from different points, so the UFO might have an easier time of targeting one. I still think there is plenty that could be done to save Air Combat, and us flight simulator adherents still really want to see this implemented in the game.

I'm not sure if this was added already but will players ever get rewards for taking down alien fighters? Reducing the number of them spawning certainly makes it more bearable. And even a randomly determined number of alloys would be sweet. And can UFOs be destroyed outright in air combat? I guess I've just never applied enough destructive force to one.

Don't worry Chris, compared to others posting in this thread your post is amazingly civil. I do agree completely with minimizing air combat's importance during the beta so that actual testing of gameplay can be done. Hopefully it can be addressed at the end in some way or another.

I like to pretend that the aliens invested in awesome security turrets and cameras, which is why they seem to know where you always are. Geez, if it werent for that little bug where having an alien base in the stable beta makes you constantly lose money, I would just ignore them.

I know I'm inviting flames by saying this, but the death spiral is one of the things I believe was most important in X-Com, and therefore should be present in its successor Xenonauts. The whole idea was that if you sucked enough, you would lose. Not lose a battle, not lose some planes. You would lose the game. And then you would have to start over and play again. And you'd hopefully do better but still likely lose. And as you did it, you would get further each time, and the game would cement itself in your mind. And while i'm not sure about later UFOs, I know that at least early in the game, you get UFO's 'shot down' (even though they're completely intact:confused:) by allied forces that you can loot. So even if you lose all of your planes in a terrible mistake you can still have some recourse and income. If anything, make this more common. Perhaps on Easy, every 10 days the player gets a freebie. On Medium it's every 15. Hard and Insane wouldn't have it. This could stop when scouts would stop appearing, or maybe include some bigger ships. This way, players can at least get some kind of income even if terrible fortune blasted them. Plus they get to avoid the apparently reviled air combat mini game. Maybe someone who has made it past november can correct me, but if Tier 2 aircraft only have more health and speed, that doesn't justify the Corsair costing 8 times as much as an Interceptor, especially when I believe their damage is identical (Both carry two torpedoes and a light weapon). Unless the Corsair holds 4 light missiles or something, I believe this is ridiculous in terms of balance. Also, a well stocked lab should take a week at most to make one (with the standard being 3 days to get another Interceptor) so if you lose them, which you should, you're not doomed. If air combat is to be made less of a big deal without being axed, then certainly decrease the price and construction time for aircraft. Make a Corsair only $150,000, maybe take 6 days to make with a single stocked workshop (remember that you need a vacant hangar to make one so you don't want to leave yourself under-staffed for too long). By the time Corsairs are available, you should be pulling over $200,000 from crash sites (using v18 terms, not sure what the changes are) so if you lost one, you can replace it and still have some spare cash. If you lost 2, then you really suck, better replace it with an interceptor until you can afford better. You could also make the price of the three interceptors 50,000 -> 100,000 -> 150,000 and the three MiGs 200,000 -> 300,000 -> 400,000, which would make replacing lost planes even easier. Maybe the bombers could even be knocked down a peg, although the price tag for the first bomber does feel right to me. Those things really can turn a fight around unless there are heavy fighters everywhere.

Is the indestructible corsairs thing due to people being upset they sank a ton of effort into making Corsairs and other advanced craft only to have them destroyed? Maybe that's the problem. In all my time playing the stable beta I never used anything more advanced than a MiG because by the time I would have such facilities ready to produce a corsair, my game would crash or become unplayable somehow. I don't know how things are in the experimental releases but I knew that a $50,000 interceptor was highly expendable and as soon as one was shot down due to carelessness, I would be ordering another. As for upgrading planes, I suspect newer models can move faster or take more damage but they can still have the same weapons so you can get very far with cheap and quick to produce tier 1 aircraft. And on a side note, it should not take a full workshop of techies a full month to make a corsair. Unless the plane can solo three heavy fighters or something, it is in no way worth that much dedication.

Oh yeah, even different starting points would work out, and be even better than what I suggested. And if moving the UFO only worked when it was tiny, that would be fine. Just starting in a new spot would be a big enough game changer in my mind

Oh, and if we're going to talk about gaming companies that lost the way, my money is on Bioware. I'd really like to read a comprehensive history of that developer to learn just where everything went wrong. Was it being bought out by EA, or was it losing a visionary developer?

This is probably just a stupid suggestion, but is there any way that maps can be flipped? Maybe if there was a layout like farmhouse in the north east, hay in the north west, crops to the south east, and a shed to the south west, and just flip it so that the top components on the map become the bottom ones? I have many years of experience with D&D and it still amazes me how I can stupify players by taking the very map they were just playing on a few days and turn it 180 degrees, and suddenly they think it's a brand new map. Obviously, given the isometric view of the maps, they can't just be turned around, but is mirroring possible?

Wait, does armor get destroyed if the poor shmuck wearing it died? I never really noticed playing the stable release, but I assumed this was a holdover from old com. It makes sense that if a rookie was torn apart by Chrysslids, there wouldn't be enough armor left on him to slap onto another rookie. One could argue that the armor could be repaired, but it certainly wouldn't be ready for the next mission that day. And if Air Combat is going to be optional, is there any point to doing it? The only times I ever lost planes was usually due to blurry eyes at 4AM and not noticing missiles and things, so if I can get top notch results every time without risking messing up, why would I ever play the mini game?

Making a feature available for different difficulty levels is not hard. I'm certain each level of play controls the number of aliens spawning. And the devs already have it for Iron Man mode so players on high difficulties can't savescum. And it will most likely affect AI decisions later. Otherwise, what would be the point of different difficulty levels? This isn't old Com where you played on easy no matter what you chose. As for air combat being repetitive, I don't see the validity of the excuse. I've been playtesting these demos for over a year and everything gets repetitive. It's the nature of the game. I can see your complaint early in the game where air combat is just 'fire one missle...then fire second a few moments later so you catch the scout after it rolls'. But later on when you have to take out escorts and still make sure you have enough of a payload left to take out the main ship, it takes much more skill as you must use strategy. Furthermore, I assume that damage dealt will affect the ship's condition for getting loot, so you have to learn how much is overpowering to a certain class of ship, and what is the bare minimum needed to take it out. These tactical decisions make air combat crucial, even if you think it's 'boring.' I'd rather see the devs add new features to air combat instead of wasting time making it skipable.

Then make the auto-resolve feature a feature only for easy mode. I'm sure that most of the loudest voices on this forum will never play beyond that difficulty, since losing isn't fun for them. Maybe I should add Dwarf Fortress player to my signature. It might make my views easier to understand.