Skitso

We should have Operations Director visible in the Soldiers screen the same way we have Chief Scientist in the Laboratories. Maybe add a Storage manager in the Base Stores screen too. Any hope to have these large character images redrawn by the same artist that did the cutscene portaits?

Switching to armory looks unpolished as you can see different UI and other elements appearing one by one. Consider delaying the image until everything is loaded.

This bar here flickers annoyingly when hovering cursor over the buttons above. Adding a bit of fade would probably make it look a lot smoother.

Many soldier portraits have clipping issues near jaw line and neck.

Some research images are cropped wrong so it overlaps the UI edges

This is a thread we can post small issues that don't warrant a bug report and are more of a small nit picks and things that might need some polish. One issue per post No discussion

These are not a big deal, but I'll put these here if you have time to fix it at some point: Smoky Joe's sign is busted. Gas station roof has z-fighting with LOS

So your solution is to just have the current half-assed / boring game mechanic in game just because making it better and more interesting with more tactical depth, some people might not get to experience it? IMO this is the same thing with any content in the game, flesh it out and make it proper. After that, it's a question of balancing it out to make it work. I think the base defense missions are currently rather boring as it doesn't tie in the overall geoscape strategy at all and the consequences are too binary: you either win and lose nothing or are defeated and lose everything. @Chris any thoughts on this?

I don't. Sorry. :/

As far as I'm aware, soldiers that are under 50% health shouldn't be able to be in active service.

Now that I've played the milestone 1 through, I have a better view of the maps we have at the moment and here's what I think: DESERT: Not my favorite at the moment Too samey maps with too many construction yards Needs more open wilderness maps with just sand, rocks, shrubbery and cliffs for elevation changes. More shack village and trailer park style maps ARID: I like these maps quite a lot visually. Nice theme Submaps need more variation with some higher buildings and other elevation changes Needs some elements to restrict movement but not visibility like chain link fences POLAR: I like the vibe of these. The Thing movie styled science bases are nice, but again, not every maps needs to be like that. Many polar maps could maybe be more sparse with longer LOS to differentiate them more More wilderness maps with no or very few buildings. More trees, lakes and cliffs. DOCKS: I like these maps too. One of the better looking biomes. Too many containers. Needs some other elements to break LOS. More water and for example narrow bridges to split maps and make it more difficult to close up on enemies. Two story buildings Both cleaner cell missions are too samey with identical main buildings. JUNGLE: Nice to look but needs something more to spice it up. Maybe make them more dense with even more trees and tight cliff crevices with shorter LOS Too many ancient ruins. Might also have some shack villages or similar More elevation changes with 2 or 3 story cliffs. Water areas looks bad. It should be more lush around water: more shrubbery, grass and rocks to make ponds more grounded. BOREAL: Nice theme and visually pleasing biome. Lots of large but empty feeling buildings with only outer walls. Needs more smaller rooms and props inside. Also more shacks and other smal buildings. Some areas suffer a lot from asset overuse. Like, I understand it's an area to store piles of logs, but does there need to be 9 of those similar piles side by side? Could a few of them be a small storage shack maybe instead?...or, nice there's a cool looking fork lift. Does there need to be 3 of them side by side? Could you switch one of them to like oil barrel and pile of boxes? Train rails? Very nice, but do we need 10 rails side by side? You get the point. FARM: My least favorite biome. Boring, formulaic maps with long straight roads and hedges, empty fields. Large concrete tiled areas with concrete walls look ugly and boring. Desperately needs more interesting and multi story buildings, trees etc. Needs more variation to block FOV other than hedges and concrete walls, like trees, tall wooden fences, small buildings, shacks etc. Too much same props side by side here too. WESTERN TOWN: Cleaner intel mission map is my favorite map in the whole game: It's excellent and feels like a real office building. Tight close quarters battles, multiple optional paths and lots of cool visual detail. I wish I got the same feeling from more maps. The few terror maps we have atm are also pretty good, but they need more higher buildings, tighter side alleys and more complex interiors with smaller rooms and corridors. Terror maps could be made more "terrory" by adding more chaos. More aliens, more civilians, more local forces. Aliens wrecking places, burning houses and cars etc. Also ambiance sounds like people screaming, explosions, warning sirens etc. More indentifiable places like gas station, restaurant and grocery store. With some imagination, you can probably do a lot with existing assets already. Some apartments, bars and and maybe an arcade or barber shop. Many buildings feel too much like a general approximation or a movie set. Restaurants don't have toilets, Gas station doesn't have a storage room or any back areas for staff etc. Everything feels too empty and sterile. GENERAL: Most maps feel too flat. More verticality is my number 1 thing that needs improvement. Having more movement blocking areas like water or chain link fences, higher ground areas and two or three story buildings are super important, as it forces the player to think more how to deal with the threat more than just run next to a target with a high TU unit and shotgunning them away. This route planning gameplay is something X2 is currently missing a bit. If I see an alien sniper in a third floor window, I need to infiltrate the building, find stairs and fight my way to the upper floors to kill the sniper or try to shoot it from afar. This kind of map design also gives more reason for jetpack which is currently pretty useless on flat maps we have. Maps lack light sources like street lamps to illuminate night missions. Many maps suffer from asset overuse where same prop is used multiple times inside a small area. Many maps could use a bit of ambiance effects. (rain in jungle, dust clouds in desert, snowing in polar, seagulls in docks) As the UFO's grow larger, maps could be made smaller. Largest ufo's could be almost the whole map and you wouldn't need to make so many maps for them. Many buildings are too simple with just outer walls. More complex buildings with tight spaces, corridors with lots of doors and small rooms with good ambush locations. I'll put this in general too: many buildings feel too much like a general approximation or a movie set. Restaurants don't have toilets, Gas station doesn't have a storage room or any back areas for staff etc. Everything feels too empty and sterile. Many things look and feel they are just randomly thrown there for player to have something to crouch behind.

I love base defense missions - in theory at least. They are tough, tense and offer nice variation between offense oriented missions. However, current X2 base defense missions are somewhat dull and one note assaults where the bulk of the conflict is often resolved in one huge, non tactical firefight in on one or two of the hangars. Here's few thoughts to improve them: Add a command room to defend like in X1 Aliens should have other objectives than to just kill all Xenonaut units like destroy rooms to disable them so the player needs to repair them later, assault command room for direct loss, kill scientists etc. to force player to be active defending them. Aliens should have few free turns at the start to better spread out. AI improvements needed of course. Room design is a bit dull and repetitive. Especially with adjacency bonuses, you often have three or four identical rooms side by side which looks fake and makes gameplay boring. On geoscape, UFO's on the base attack mission should spawn later in the wave to be more of a threat and be possibly companied with air superiority UFO's. (Same with terror and base build missions which spawn too infrequently) Thoughts?

In armory, if there's only wounded soldiers left to choose from, I can assign the first one in the list that is already selected into the dropship.

Is it intended behavior that MARS rocket explosion splashes through floors? I'm not sure if its all floors, but at I noticed this on abductor.

Yeah, X2 has issue that many crash site missions play too similarly to each other regardless of the biome. It would be nice variation to see extremely dense and claustrophobic close combat battles, vast open maps with long sight lines and maybe small maps with tall buildings to clear. Some open ended while others more linear.

Shouldn't be too hard to add variety. Each biome could benefit from a few completely "empty" wilderness maps with just desert/forest/jungle where variation can be achieved relatively easily with randomised submaps of rocks, shrubs, trees, bigger cliffs, ponds etc. Then you could make a similar wilderness map, but with one straight road through it and add one building submap next to the road than could be a warehouse, gas station, factory or a scrap yard. Every building submap should also have 3 or 4 variations.

Not a bug per se, but anyways...

It's better to just ignore Alienkiller. I'm sure there's some language barrier, but his ramblings are almost always about as useful as dick flavored lollipop.

Read this first

Yeah, this is a reported issue from closed beta. While it's probably pretty low in the priority list, I'm sure it will be fixed eventually.

This is what I would concentrate on. Fun is always more important than perfect balance when talking about a single player experience. Currently accelerated weapons' fun is limited to just 1-2 missions before you FEEL the lasers being the better choice with more FUN being had. It's not just about balance, but also the feel it generates.

MARS is remote controlled by a human operator...