Skitso

That's amazing news Chris! I chatted with Aleksi at Discord few weeks ago and it sounded like he was more than willing. Please consider adding mission win/lose jingles and loading screen music. Adding a bit of silence here and there between tracks might also be a good idea.

No. Micro managing your research queue by optimizing scientists between multiple projects to fight diminishing returns does indeed add major depth and interesting choices. It also makes managing research easier and more intuitive to have multiple simultaneous active projects and being able to tweak reasearch personnel freely between them if the situation calls for it or circumstances change unexpectedly .

Hmm, now that I've played a bit further, I feel the new armour system needs acc penalty back. The new system felt fine with the starter armour, but I feel the upgrade to warden was too binary. What I mean with that is that as soon as I researched it, I just manufactured 10 of them and equiped the whole team with it and switched everyone who has the carrying capacity into the heavy variant. That's it and it was a bit too one note experience with no interesting choices to make. With the old system I needed to at least consider the accuracy. I didn't want my snipers for example to wear any armour until stealth armour was available as they all decreased aim. Old heavy variant (armour module) also decreased inventory so that also added things to consider. As the new system is indisbutably more intuitive and should be kept, what I propose is you add some acc penalty to heavy variants and make inventory grid size armour type dependant. This gives the player more interesting choices and forces you to make tough decisions about what armour to wear.

New armour system feels nice and intuitive and a clear improvement of what we had before. Should the heavy variation decrease the accuracy a bit too like before? Now that the autopsy is manual research, I feel it costs too many man hours to complete. Something like 1d or 36h instead of the 3d we have now. Did I understand the system correctly: interrogation gives damage and train boost while autopsy generates multi tier manufacture project that also boosts damage?

Started a new playthrough with prototype 2.06 and here's my thoughts about the first 3-4 hours: Pacing feels a lot better and I really like the slow start. However, the early story beats felt like the game assumes I should know what Cleaners are and it's a bit odd their initial introduction is so self-evident. Also, going back to the original base, while a cool mission, felt out of place for me. The whole organization was on a brink of total destruction at the end of the tutorial, people just barely fleeing with their lives, and only a few days later we go back and kill everyone. Sure, it's hand-waved in the briefing text, but it felt wrong nevertheless. I'm not sure how to make it feel better.... maybe make it an intel gathering mission instead of requiring to kill everything? I'm aware it's way too early for a (timed) intel gather mission, but maybe put it a bit later and have the first mission be something else? Difficulty curve felt almost perfect. Only VIP (cleaner cell) missions still felt too punishing. Convoy ambush also took me by a surprise by giving the AI the fist turn. (which lead to a brutal blood path). More thought on these missions later. I like that the Cleaner progression is more organic and tied to player actions/completing missions instead of a simple timer like before. As I mentioned above, I still feel the VIP (cleaner cell) missions are way harder than other missions at that point of the game. It might be a good idea to keep them persistent like before and spawn few of them at 50% progress so you can decide when to tackle them. It makes more sense lore wise for them to be persistent instead being available for only 3 days. It would also give a nice sense of progress and a change of pace at the half way point to have these bit tougher "mini boss" missions. Same with intel gathering missions, they should be persistent. Troop and reporter rescue missions, abductions, convoy ambushes make more sense to be timed. Troop rescue mission is a great idea and I just wish the map was something more distinct than just a normal deathmatch area. It might also give the mission even more of a unique feeling if you needed to play with only six units until you find the three troops and only then you gain the control of them? Convoy mission map was also a nice change of pace, but it left me thinking wouldn't it make more sense for the ambushers to have the first turn - the whole point of the ambush is the element of surprise, isn't it? The convoy map also left me wanting more higher ground and proper sniping positions. Mixing persistent and timed missions would make the geoscape gameplay more interesting by having situations where there'd be more than one mission available and the game would feel even more dynamic and organic. The new probe UFO is a great addition and finally downing a first real UFO after hours of Cleaner missions felt properly fascinating and rewarding.

Hasn't looked like this before

Thanks for the detailed answer. Few thoughts: Is it actually beneficial for everyone to be able to wear to most modern armour as soon as it comes available? I've felt that the units have already becoming too homogenous after few months in the campaign. Having part of your team wearing older tech (both armor and weapons) gives much needed diversity. Armour module buff could be a certain percentage of the armour it's attached to, instead of a flat value? Carrying capacity is too generous already - at least for grenade spamming. I can also have most of my troops always carry a medkit without it feeling like I need to leave something out for it.

Could you open up the thinking behind this change a bit? Soldiers have way too much carrying capacity as it is, so removing armour modules make inventory management even more trivial. I would like there to be even more choises to be made what units can carry. You could have each armour have different inventory grid size, but is it a better way to balance it?

Would probably make more sense if the autopsy report is displayed after interrogation at least?

Have I mentioned original X-Com somewhere?

Old system gets my vote. If I remember correctly, @Chris once justified the new system by saying that splitting your scientists to multiple projects just postpones everything and it's always the most optimal to focus to one one project at a time. I kinda disagree, as there was a diminishing returns in play in X1 and it was a cool little detail to try to optimize research: As the research was closing it's completition, I started to move scientists to other projects where they could contribute more effectively.

Not true. This bug has been in the game always.

Smoke doesn't block LOS, but just reduces accuracy.

Melee attack hit animations, hit reaction animations and damage/stun numbers are all out of sync. Makes it look and feel unsatisfying.

Hmm, yeah... but wouldn't it make more sense for those people to play Jagged Alliance or similar tactical games instead, where the point is to try to preserve your units? That kind of slow and methodical gameplay is not what xcom styled games (including Xenonauts) are about. It's generally a bad idea to add all possible game mechanics people enjoy in a single game just because. X2 doesn't have prone for a reason, same with corner peaking. On the other hand Xenonauts have some mechanics other ganes don't have.

It would certainly break the pacing as it would further encourage even slower, more careful and reaction fire dependant game style. In xcom styled games, players troops are mostly expendable cannon fodder, so why bother? Regarding sound design, I completely agree. It kinda sucks currently.

Or make the globe slightly transparent? Changing the geoscape is probably out of the question at this point, but maybe a paid DLC might be a possibility?

I'm not sure if making gameplay/campaign progress decisions based on the fear of Steam refunds is the correct way to do it. (While I certainly understand the reasoning) ....and if you really, really want to have an abduction mission as the 2nd mission, make an exception in it's rules for the first time. For the record, I personally enjoy trying to save the people while avoiding aliens as much as possible until they teleport away.

This caught my eye... jetpack would be extremely useful if the maps were just more vertical and being higher grounds provided more buffs. Changing accelerated weapons to being an upgrade to ballistics sounds like a good idea, but I'd like the upgrads to be weapon type specific. Similar upgrade path to armor doesn't sound like an improvement Item upgrades sound sweet. More the better. Regarding the module system, I kinda enjoy the Tetris mini game we have atm, where I need to balance my backpack between modules, weapons, grenades and other items. Changing the abduction missions to be one more "kill all aliens" mission feels a step in a wrong direction. Regarding the cleaner mission chain and progression: Gathering intel for intitial progress is fine and I love the mission (best map so far), but the daily automatic percentage gain after that feels somewhat gamey and boring. You should add more quick and simple cleaner missions where player could earn that progression instead, capture additional intel, capture and interrogate cleaners etc. I also suggested somewhere that cleaners could be added to crash site missions to clean the wreck and alien corpses. This would add a nice new dynamic to those missions where the more player waits before raiding the site, the more there would be cleaners. Avoiding these add-on cleaners could also push people to do these crash site missions at night, before cleaners arrive. Edit: Here's my initial suggestion

Mapping, as far as I'm aware, is out of the scope of the modding tools unfortunately.

I agree with above. I've also given some thought on the other cover issues... here's two suggestions: cover value should decrease the further it is from the target. firing from higher ground should decrease cover values on lower levels. The larger the height difference, the lower the cover values.

This is true. However, as it's not a bug, I encourage you to make a suggestion of this in a relevant thread. Edit: actually, make a new thread about shooting rules. I might also have something to add.

This seems to be correct behavior: cover that is adjacent to the shooter is not counted.

Yeah, X1 version: This is much more intimidating. Now that I look those old autopsy images, I like the X1's more realistic tone.

It was me! Can't believe someone remembers that still