Skitso
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Posts posted by Skitso
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double post, sorry
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This is easy to reproduce: just start an ATLAS base mission, enter a room and rotate the unit one tile at at time until a wall should be revealed. If there's a prop attached to the wall, just the prop or part of it becomes visible. When you turn one more time, also the wall will become visible.
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On 12/4/2023 at 9:49 AM, Kouki said:
Yeah was able to repro the second one rather easily, not sure if it's an issue in asset setup of the affected wall tile or with the way vision is handled in the game so I'll have to ask Chris and the team regarding this
This was marked as a fixed issue in the 2.19, but I still have locker doors etc. bugged in ATLAS tileset.
And:
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If I try to rotate a unit by clicking RMB in an open doorway (open door cursor icon visible) it is denied and the game sounds error beep SFX.
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If Xenonaut unit is killed by bleeding, player might not notice it as the camera doesn't focus on it. It also might be a good idea to add a pop-up whenever a Xenonaut unit is killed.
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Great feedback and I agree with almost everything you said.
Especially these I feel should be priority improvements:
49 minutes ago, Goatpile said:- on the negative, UFO, Terror and landings felt very boring in comparison. an optional, time sensitive or difficult side-objective (like Meld or time-sensitive alien Data) (maybe a valuable alien attempts to flee off the map?) might help. since there's no timer, reinforcements or extra reward I could casually take my time sweeping through the map safely.
- on one hand, managing limited resources is vital and it does accomplish that. on the other, I feel it should be the exotic alien materials, not cash. especially on beginner.
- overall I feel the game is best in the beginning and middle stages before you get Lasers/warden, since you're squishy and slow, forcing you to make use of smoke, flashbangs, MARS, suppression, flanking and overwatch ambush to engage in battle.
- as you get your squad of Veterans up, and reach 80-100 TUs and accuracy, the game becomes very easy.
- I feel the alien AI is very simple, or maybe it currently does not have enough tools to really harass or make problems for a late-game team. No grenades, no direct psychic skills, little coordination (suppression + approaching) Sectons have the +accuracy passive, but I have never seen the AI make use of it.
- Similary I found little synergy between aliens so far? the closest is Wraiths and their little fire support drones but they're ofter very spread out.
- maybe instead of spreading out lone aliens, make little groups of them that coordinate so that's a more even Squad Vs Squad fight?
- I just never felt. "oh this is a tricky".
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1 hour ago, Komandos said:
Two text walls of non-arguments
...and with these replies you just proved my point. No point to continue this discussion.
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11 hours ago, Vitruviansquid said:
"Meh," on these posts about realism.
You look at that real life training with firearms, you look at chess, and consider whether this turn-based science fiction strategy game about shooting aliens looks more like those or chess.
If additional realism will make the game deeper and more interesting, then sure. But what I see are posts where Chris, the lead developer, says stuff about how he meant for Strength as a stat in the game to give players an opportunity to make interesting choices with what their soldiers can carry, and then players posting suggestions about how Strength can do just that, and then some dude who really loves realism in the game makes a post to essentially educate everyone about what modern soldiers carry in their backpacks as a way to argue against the lead developer of the game.
I'm "Meh" on that idea
With all love and respect, I think you should read over and check the tones of your own posts in this thread and possibly other threads if you're shocked that people talk to you that way.
Agree. It seems we have few people here who really struggle to grasp the concept of game design. No matter how realistic the game's theme is, all the design decisions need to be made with gameplay and balance in mind. And no, that doesn't mean the game needs any magic or dragons. We can have a nice and realistic milsim themed game where gameplay and balance still comes first.
I'ven seen so many walls of text here describing everything between ancient war techniques and modern SWAT tactics just to justify odd changes in the game that I can't even bother to read them any more. Even if something is objectively more realistic, it still doesn't guarantee to make the game better.
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4 hours ago, Komandos said:
1. There is a page number on "every detective page" and the reader can always see (count) how many pages are left until the end.
2. In games, the final stage of the game is called "endgame" (which literally means "the end of the game"). In books, the final stage of a work of art is called: "culmination".
3. If the game has an initial stage, then the game should have a final one.
I refuse to believe you are serious.
Do you really think that whether it's a movie, book or game, it's a more enjoyable experience if you know exactly when it's going to end?
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33 minutes ago, Vitruviansquid said:
Raising the number of Mantids could do the tricks. I dunno about a ratio of 2:7 normal aliens to Mantids. Maybe 2:3 was what I had in mind.
But yeah, they need something more. They could do anything with the Mantids, so long as Mantids are made more formidable. I thought about proposing they get more armor, 5 more accuracy, a new and different gun, a different auxiliary alien type, whatever. They just need something. Anything.
Yeah, I really thought about upping their numbers significantly.
Just decrease it's specs (accuracy, health etc) as much as needed to allow s lot more units. That'll make them feel really different compared to other races.
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7 hours ago, Vitruviansquid said:
- I know I said this once about Mantids before, but the problem's gotten worse since then. Mantids just aren't scary. They're not scary in the narrative of the game; I just defeated monstrous Sebilians with brute strength and alien regeneration and I just defeated Psyons/Sectons with what are essentially magic powers, I'm not going to be scared of some anxious bug guys. They're also not scary in the mechanics of the game: they're as good at shooting as Psyons, their special reaction shots don't come into play that often, and being small is their only strength. The lacklusterness of the Mantids has only gotten more pronounced now that Psyons and Sebilians have become scarier in the flow of the game. Since rebreathers are a thing in the game now, why not have something like Mantids leaking a cloud of poisonous gas when they die? The gas is very dangerous to soldiers without rebreathers, and gives Mantids an advantage in close-quarters combat to supplement their basic decency at long-range combat. That'd make the bugs a bit scarier.
I've been thinking the same thing. Mantids just don't feel like a proper threat and a solution I came up with is to have a lot more of them. It would tie nicely to their insect-like demeanor and would offer a different kind of challenge. It'd also look really intimidating to walkmaround a corner and see like 7 mantids compared to, say, 2 sebillians
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1 hour ago, ovoron said:
I do not think this is a good idea.
X1 had a funny ending text, and it was funny primarily because the scientist was the one who delivered it. All his prior dialogue built him up for that climactic delivery.
Sure, his high horse remarks are sometime annoying, but If a rando character would have said it out of nowhere the humor would not have worked.
I say keep the scientist as he is.
Well yeah, his character is perfect and funny - I don't want to change that. I just think he could say something useful (within his character) in his speech bubble instead of "the door was closed for as reason".
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I would prefer the head scientist to give some useful and game-play related tips instead of his snarky, useless commentary he currently has. He could give some opinions how to proceed and what the player might want to research next. Tips could be vague and even unhelpful, but it would still make more sense and make the unnecessary speech bubble have some reason to exist.
Same with the workshop dude too, of course.
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MARS should use 95% of it's TU's to bust through a wall. It's way OP atm.
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Completely agree. It's too gamey and breaks immersion. Same with the Cleaner progression counter. It should be way more vague rather than exact percentage.
This could of course be made a difficulty level dependant and a toggleable option the same way the enemy health is currently.
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While it would be a welcomed addition, I'm afraid it's a lot more complicated to pull off than you think. I'm almost 100% sure it's not gonna happen.
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4 hours ago, Vitruviansquid said:
As always, top respect to Chris for being in the trenches with the community, explaining how the developers view things, taking feedback and also asking the community questions. Also, top respect for people discussing the nitty gritty of the game, giving detailed and reasoned feedback and responses to feedback.
On the topic of strength/Heavy weapons/Grenades:
I have seen people say the machine guns are good. Fair. I definitely think it doesn't fit in my playstyle, but it's a good thing that many playstyles exist. I'm still kinda convinced that the HEVY is bad because it is such an overkill impractical way of fulfilling functions that grenades already easily fulfill, so in balancing it, you're actually adjusting its balance compared to grenades, not its balance compared to guns.
I've attached a picture of one of my more average soldiers. He started at a pretty mediocre 48 strength, he's gotten to 56 strength over a few missions, having risen to lieutenant, I can go into recruitment right now (also attached) and pick up 8 soldiers who *start* with even higher strength. Of those, there are 4 with other stats that are so low, they're disqualified for having some glaring weakness, but I just want to give an idea of how easy it is to have a soldier like Luke Stewart here. And look at all the stuff even this average soldier can carry. He can have the heavy version of Warden armor. He can have a shotgun, a baton, a medikit, one of each of the three grenades that I actually use, and two reloads, which I would have to shoot like the A-team to actually go completely through in a mission. When I move onto Guardian Armor, I will be able to wear the heavy Guardian armor by just giving up one of my shotgun batteries or grenades, which is still an extremely comfortable loadout to me. I don't feel like I had to choose anything. I don't really even know what I could possibly want this soldier to carry more of. On a soldier who has actual high strength, I'm just like, "I guess the tactical module is extremely overweighted for its benefit, but I might as well take one? Or load up with an absurd amount of ammo and grenades that I'll never really have to use?"
Consider the arithmetic at play as well. I can put 9 soldiers in a Skyhawk. Supposing each soldier is very average, like Luke Stewart, that means I can do 9 flashbangs, 9 smokes, destroy cover 9 times in a mission, on average, and everyone still has heavy armor, shotguns or rifles or sniper rifles and ammo to go around. In a typical UFO downing, I'm only fighting about 8-10 aliens, as far as I've seen. Of course, there are also missions with more enemies, like if I wanted to do the Cleaner base, or a terror mission, but then again, I can also easily get soldiers way stronger than Luke Stewart without losing much in the other categories. Isn't it kind of excessive to allow players to have the resources to flash, smoke, strip cover, AND then shoot for every single alien on a typical mission?
And I'd challenge anyone else to give the practical arithmetic a legitimate try. Go into a new month in your current game, open up your recruitment screen of fresh soldiers, and then try out what loadouts some of these guys can carry. Ask yourself what, even, you are missing out on when you have soldiers you are likely to actually recruit, that you would want a particularly strong soldier.
Perhaps I am actually inclined to agree with Grobobobo - soldiers have too much stats and improve too quickly in general.
I also think it is way too easy to recruit supersoldiers because either soldier stats are starting too high (or the way they are rolled is allowing too high of a ceiling) or players are simply offered too many soldiers to recruit from at the start of a month. When you give me 17 soldiers to recruit from at the top of the month, I'm going to pick the three or four who bear a striking resemblance to Harrison Bergeron or Roboute Guilliman, and that's filling like a third to a half of a Skyhawk's worth of soldiers.
But besides there just being too much strength so that each soldier can carry too much stuff, I'd say the more foundational design problem is the basic way that strength is used in the game When you imagine building up your Squad, your Team, your plucky band of brothers and sisters who will stand up against the alien threat go from a ragtag team of privates who will be forged into a coordinated platoon... do you imagine that The Big Guy is there to hold a lot of grenades and spare ammo clips? Is that what's cool about The Big Guy?
On the topic of air combat:
On the topic of Sidewinders, I've shot them at Scouts and Destroyers using an Angel armed with one Autocannon or one Accelerated Cannon and one Sidewinder. I understand that Sidewinders are cheaper to equip than cannons, and it's pretty inconvenient to bring an angel with two cannons because you'd have to give up holding anything else... but the Sidewinders still really feel like throwing a bag of crap at a barn door. Perhaps, since I'm also disappointed by the Laser Lance (it just has to weigh 6 so that an Angel can't carry 2 :x), so maybe the real problem is that the cannons are too strong... but they don't feel too strong when you then balance them against the UFOs they'll be fighting.
As for the randomness in air combat, I gotta admit, I was not aware that it actually did have damage rolls. Good to know. I'll play a bit more and then report back on the feel of it.
This might also be a separate topic, and I don't feel up to making a big post about it at the moment, but customizing your interceptors also feels like there aren't realistically that many choices, and the choices don't realistically represent that much difference in play. It's *really bad* with Angels, and perhaps that's a good thing because it's the early game jet and should not need to be overly complex to work with, but I don't think the Phantoms feel super customizable, either. I might make a big separate post about this later.
On the topic of stuff that don't feel good (like heavy armor togglable):
I did a bit of soul-searching, and I think it might also be worthwhile to consider this as a problem of the game in this Milestone as it is.
It is good, in a complex and sadistic game like Xenonauts 2, to show players increasing complexity and give them increasingly complex problems to solve over time. It's like a way to tell players, "you thought you were good at this game? No, you're actually not, haha." You present a new challenge this way, it's like the players got a new challenge to try to handle. For your veteran early access testers, inhouse developer testers, and such, who have played Xenonauts 1, Microprose Xcoms, FiraXcoms, and such, we are somewhat dulled to sensing this, and we tend to want all the complexity of the game in the beginning, right away, because we've already been jaded not by their early games, but by their endgames. We tend not to mind that there are a lot of things to learn in the early game, but for new players, the gameplay doesn't evolve as it goes on, and they may tend to feel the game is boring in the beginning if there are not so many options.
Consider this progression in Milestone 1: You start with unarmored soldiers who can hold a bunch of stuff. As much stuff as you want, really. You don't really have to decide what consumables or modules to use. Then, as you research armor, it can be extremely heavy, and you start having to ask yourself what tricks you can do without and have to ditch. The light armors, on the other hand, like the Stalker armor, can also add to complexity by being kinda weird and thus forcing you to play different soldiers in different styles. As you research, you also get introduced to stun mechanics later in the game and it gives you another option for approaching aliens with a new risk/reward consideration. And you might want to mix and match armors so you consider which soldiers are your heavy soldiers, which are your light, so that you even start to have deeper consideration about soldier stats when you hire.
In Milestone 2, a lot of this sense of progression and increasing complexity has been cut out. You start out with stun baton (the superior method of stunning, in my opinion), so that complexity has been front-loaded rather than letting players feel like it's part of progression. The complexity of choosing heavier and lighter armors to research has been stripped out for a bunch of reasons as we've discussed. It just kinda feels like the armor come in tiers that are straight upgrades now, at least in that early to early-midgame with Defender to Warden to Guardian.
And I think part of my antipathy toward the demolition charges is, as Chris says, the Demolition charge is a very versatile and powerful tool that exists from the beginning of the game. Why should such a versatile and powerful tool exist from the beginning of the game? I think it'd be cooler for you to progress into it. Or maybe progress into some of the other powerful and versatile tools, like flashbangs, smoke, and such. As I said, I haven't played all the way through yet (I'm still only at about day 100, having had work today). Maybe the game really blossoms open in the late game, as it did in Milestone 1, when I last played. But isn't it also bad if a player played for the first 100 days and reports that it feels like the game doesn't really change over those days?
Amazing comment. I agree 100%. Especially the progression part is so true!
Kinda related: The new, more organic way of spawning different Cleaner missions is of course a clear improvement over the more linear Milestone 1 system. The old, more curated system did provide a nicer feel of progression though. I loved the way I needed to raid the Cleaner base for intel and then take care of the VIP. It just felt better and made maybe more sense. On the current system I might not even get the intel gather mission at all. And it's my favorite mission type so far, so thats a bummer.
While the game should absolutely retain the organic and semi-randomized nature, it does need s bit of structure to feel better. What I propose is that the intel gather should be removed from the random mission pool and always be the first cleaner mission after ATLAS base. It should also be persistent (non-missable). We'd still have Cleaner VIP elimination, convoy, soldier rescue and VIP rescue missions for random spawns. If you need more mission types, having a behind-the-enemy-lines agent mission with only one or two units could be tense and a nice change of pace.
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I played on v2.16 one veteran ironman run without training center up to day 110 and found the general difficulty to be pretty spot on for me all the way until I got lasers and guardian armor, which made the ground combat too easy at least until Cleaner HQ and Observers. The aliens just couldn't produce enough damage to be much of threat and were also too flimsy health wise. I didn't get the Dragonfly yet, but could see it trivializing the whole tactical combat part of the game with the ability to deploy two MARS units and 10 soldiers. I suppose at least the Abductor needs a lot larger crew with boosted health/armor to provide any kind of challenge to full dragonfly/guardian/laser team.
I don't play manual air game and just auto resolve everything. I made a mistake of building too many Angels: I had 3 at Europe base and two at America base. I had some trouble catching Abductors, but otherwise having them armed with accelerated cannon, sidewinder and armor plates, I had absolutely no trouble gaining air superiority. Overall the air game felt a bit too easy and I never lost a single aircraft.
First base attack could be a bit easier (the tactical mission) but be harder to avoid. It's too easy currently to spot the UFO heading towards the base and too easy to shoot it down.
I'd say the money balance is in a fairly good spot. I could expand bases and buy enough cool toys but needed to think and prioritize stuff.
On the other hand, I had accumulated way too much alloys by the point where I had researched Warden armor and accelerated weapons. I could just manufacture new gear to everybody at the instant I had them available, which felt boring and too straight forward. I suggest increasing Warden's and laser weapon's alloy cost 2 or 3 per unit. I also had the same issue with Guardian armor and laser weapons; I could manufacture everything in one go as soon as they became available. This time I had other stuff to spend my alloys too (like Phantoms, air weapon upgrades etc.) so I couldn't make everything at once, but I stil suggest increasing laser weapon's and Guardian armour's alloy costs by 4 or 5 abd decrease alloy cost of other things so I couldn't upgrade my whole team at one go.
And why did I play without training center, you might ask? Because it's way too OP. Rookies are already too good when I recruit them and they gain experience way too fast. Xenonauts become homogenous super soldiers in time of maybe 10 missions, and after that everyone can excell in everything.
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I've now played until day 90 and just had the lasers unlocked. I still have the same issue with alloys (and alenium at this point too) as before. I could manufacture 3 laser pistols, 4 laser rifles, 2 laser shotguns, one laser sniper and one laser MG and I had over 100 pieces of alloys and alenium left.
And I haven't even had a good run; I've had lots of deaths so I needed to manufacture maybe six extra wardens, skipped many crash sites, missed at least one abduction mission etc, so I could have had a lot more alloys and alenium...
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Not sure if a bug or just unfinished asset, but here it goes:
Light version of Warden armor uses the same model as the heavy one in tactical combat. (ie. it has shoulder and knee pads, helmet etc. that should only be with the heavy variant.)
EDIT: seems to be the case with the Guardian armor too
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Once again a see through wall. I'm not sure if a save will help you at all, as this seems to be the infamous 'damaged state of a tile is not updated' bug that is fixed when a save is loaded. Annoying. Grr.
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2 hours ago, Kouki said:
Replied to it on the other question you've made, but you'll have to bear with it for awhile unfortunately. It's intentional at the moment because the AI is not well-suited to handling the same vision penalty incurred by night missions on the soldiers you control. We are making improvements to AI however (starting with the Reaper and civ AI) and once AI gets better we'll revisit this issue and might make those changes, thanks!
No worries, it's a tiny issue and I can live with it. For now.
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10 minutes ago, Kouki said:
Thanks for bringing it up, unfortunately I'm not sure if there's a simple way to get this fixed as it seems to be a shader issue, but I'll bring this up with Chris and see what he thinks
As the ATLAS base is an interior space, I'm not even sure if we need such wall shadows in the first place. Is the other issue where all the different cabinets, lockers etc. become visible before the wall behind (if you turn soldier one tile at a time to reveal a room, you can reproduce the issue shown in the image above) them also a shader issue?
Milestone 3.0.0 Released! (Experimental)
in Xenonauts-2 Releases & Patch Notes
Posted · Edited by Skitso
Haven't had chance to try this yet, but most additions sound good. Here's few additional thoughts embedded in the quote: