Sorbicol

So: Having got to day 278 in v25.5 I've got a couple of thoughts. Ultimately my defence of Earth failed because I didn't get enough coverage up quick enough to prevent Latin America and Asia leaving the coalition (this was mainly down to me not really realising how those panic counters worked) but I also felt like I fell behind the power curve a little. Some of that was me I think, some of it was what I would consider some odd design choices, and some of it what I assume are bugs? Not sure if they are deliberate or known about for v25.5, so apologies if they are and I just didn't realise. General Thoughts 1. Overall balance on Veteran felt about right - a proper challenge requiring some decent tactical thinking not to suffer continual losses. It did take me a while to work out some optimal play patterns there, but there are enough options in terms of grenades and things to shake things up if you feel you need to. 2. Weapon progression felt fine, but you seem to get stuck on Guardian Armour before you get to the Colossus suits for a very long time. Before I got near the power suits, if I got hit (and boy those late game Aliens are very accurate with their fire) then it was one-shot death time. It does feel like you should be hitting the power suits about the same time as the Gauss weapons, not after. Maybe that was me and my research choices, but it didn't feel like I was actively ignoring better materials. 3. The cost of aircraft and aircraft improvement is prohibitive, and one of the reasons why I didn't expand new bases as much as I apparently should have. I would never have been able to afford the amount of interceptors that would have needed, and build the bases, and arm them etc. The economy felt distinctly off there, missiles / guns costing that much should be like Vehicle weapons - one payment enough for an unlimited supply. 4. I think one of the main factors there was the reduction in sell price once you'd sold a few items. I get the idea, I like that idea, but maybe that reduction should be on some sort of "supply and demand" basis rather than a flat, permanent reduction? It felt overly stingy to be honest, funding your organisation on the black market has always been a major component of XCOM style games! 5. Air Combat - manual Air Combat - felt right, finally. No longer was it just a case of endlessly clicking "auto-resolve". Big thumbs up from me there, much better! 6. The Cleaner base needs to appear later in the game. No matter what I did, at the time that occurs in-game (Accelerated weapons, Warden Armour) I couldn't complete it with losing the majority of the team I sent in. You don't like to let it linger due to the panic penalty. It just feels like something that maybe should happen later in the game. It is the biggest difficulty spike in the game by some distance. 7. Your vehicles - MARS/ARES - correctly draw a lot of fire. However no matter how well armoured they were, they never withstood more than 2 shots before blowing up, often just the one late game. I did feel like they should have a little more survivability than that. The Sentry Guns in the Cleaner HQ withstood several shots from my soldiers with markedly less Armour. Again, I wasn't sure if that was a feature or a bug. 8. Clearing out the larger UFOs became something of a chore in the late game before the end. They are very very big! It's just a personal feeling I guess, but could you make the UFO the focal point of the map so you spend less time clearing the map before storming the UFO, that would be nice. It just felt like it was dragging everything out unnecessarily. I appreciate that might be a minority viewpoint though! Possible Bugs - I never got the option to research or build laser cannons - there was a long wait from accelerated cannons to Gauss cannons. Similarly, Gauss Blasters never became available , although Advance Gauss Blasters did - but I couldn't build any as I couldn't build the previous level blasters. I wasn't sure quite what was going on there, whether it was a bug or deliberate for the v25.5 build. It made aircraft progression very disjointed. Having said that, if I transferred aircraft weapons back and forth from my original and second base they did seem to reproduce, although they would correctly show as "transferred" on screen, I would end up with 2 new weapons in the destination base, while the copies would still be available at the source base. I won't lie, I ended up exploiting that. I guess that's a definite bug, not a possible one. Over all thoroughly enjoyable!

I've reached day 330 of the campaign and I have just shot down the first battleship. After entering ground combat and attempting to take a turn the game will CTD - sometimes during my first round, sometimes in the alien's first round. I've not been able to get past this, although I did try going back to the previous save of shooting the battleship down in air combat and trying again from that save. It does not appear to have made any difference. Save File attached. auto_groundcombat_turn_1_start-344.json

For what it's worth I've had this exact same crash with the same version. Just came to post but it looks like the latest update is downloading now!

Hi Chris No there were no options in the interceptor menu when I was trying to get it to return to base. I tried everything I could think of but nothing seemed to work.

Hi - first attempt at firing up the game, sent out a aircraft (Single interceptor) to investigate an anomaly. Gets there, runs out of fuel and asked it to return to base. It's now stuck and sort of twitches in place. I have attached the save file. Aircraft patrol stuck.json

I wouldn't put it as strongly as that but Deura have done nothing to make me want to continue wanting to use their service once the steam keys are released. Taken them weeks to do nothing about this, and the standalone download has taken me 5 hours to download. On a fibre optic internet connection! Not impressed, although I know that Goldhawk have nothing to do with Desura's apparent lack in interest in sort out the problems.