vaultdweller

The name and logo still make me think that they should be fighting the Brotherhood of Nod.

I don't think that the gamey strategies once used to avoid reaction fire on UFO doors represented better breaching tactics. It was just another variety of cheese.

Good analysis, Max. I remembered there being a lot of frustration with the slaughter of anyone opening doors in previous versions, but didn't have the evidence to back it up. At the time, it seemed like opening a blast door (instead of blowing it) was seen as suicide for the poor sap that does it, even with the more powerful shields that we had back then. There always seemed to be threads about how to properly move through alien bases without being massacred trying to pass the first door.

I'm inclined to agree with Solver. Possibly the CE could be made to support reaction fire on opening doors, with the option to enable this behaviour through an XML value?

If Steam Workshop places all zipped mods in a directory, then I do NOT think the game should automatically install/activate/enable/whatever all of the mods found in that directory. If the files are automatically extracted, that's fine, but the mod loader needs to be able to pick and choose which downloaded mods should be active. Being able to quickly enable or disable mods is an important feature for any mod manager. Nexus Mod Manager is an example of a pretty good mod loader interface. The built-in mod managers for Bethesda's games would be pretty solid as well, if they were not missing the critical functionality of letting you set the order of precedence for selected mods (which is why everyone uses 3rd party mod managers for TES and Fallout).

Once upon a time, I pirated so much software, I swear I could have skewed national statistics on piracy on my own. For years, I downloaded every game that was released, and no, I never would have bought them. I never even would have played them. In many cases, I would not have played them unless well compensated for the thoroughly unpleasant use of my time. I continued to do this even when my only use of the pirated games was to play my legitimate purchases (cracked games, with the copy protection removed, offered a less buggy and more convenient experience than uncracked retail copies). I continued this piracy habit for a few years after becoming a Steam junkie that bought more games than I could ever find time to play. I did this with all software, too, not just games. And I do mean all software. If there was a scene release for anything, I downloaded it. I pirated OSX and OSX versions of software, despite never owning an Apple device of any kind. I seem to recall downloading packs of iOS apps as well. I definitely had a robust collection of software for Sparc and Itanium-based server platforms. IBM WebSphere or MQ series releases? I had that. Oracle middleware products? SAP ERP distributions? You bet your ass I had that. This was all too much for me to store on hard drives or optical media, of course. When it got to the point that I needed to burn 15 DVDs per day to keep up, I realized that something had to change... so I bought an LTO-3 tape drive. Those retailed for about $2200 at the time, but I managed to get a new-in-box unit for about $1700 from a company that was going out of business. The cost of tape media varied over the couple years I used it, but I was generally spending about $300/month on archiving all my downloads. Thankfully, I eventually realized that I had a problem, and that it was absolutely insane for a person with a rising debt level to be spending so much time and money on growing an illegal collection of media that I never used. I stopped hoarding digital content; later, I discarded all of the optical media (there were thousands of DVDs) and erased all of my tapes to have them available in case I needed to do large backups or something. These days, the only time I download a pirated game is if I really want to be sure that I'll have a playable copy in a decade or two (when Steam and publisher activation servers will probably be gone). Last time I can recall actually playing a pirated game was Skyrim, because it was available on Usenet before the release date, and I was impatient to get started. Not sure why I'm rambling about this. I guess I just find it to be an amusing anecdote about a hoarder of a different kind than you might see on reality TV. Maybe also a little bit to demonstrate that any assumptions you might make about why people pirate games (they're all just cheapskates that want to play for free! ) won't hold true across all pirates.

Isn't the cash reward mainly from the sale of alien weapons? That means that the cash basically comes down to the number of aliens present. You're not selling the craft or the base, you're selling the gear. If you encounter an alien base with more aliens present than a cruiser (there are multiple base sizes), then you'll get more reward from the base.

You can shoot over cover from higher ground in some cases, but the effect is not as pronounced as it often looks like it should be. All actors and props fill the volume of their tiles (vertically and horizontally), regardless of how they are drawn - whether it's a tall wall or a log on the ground, it still occupies the full volume of that tile. Moving to higher ground will let you shoot over cover if the trajectory for the projectile can reach the target without passing through the covering tile ('cube' would be a better term than 'tile' really). In your case, the higher ground wasn't high enough to shoot over the wall, but it didn't put you at a disadvantage, either. The alien didn't shoot over the cover, it shot around it. It would have been able to hit you at ground level, too. The trajectory for shooting around cover seems unintuitive to some. I believe the path of the projectile is calculated from the best possible corner of the shooter's tile, to the center of the target's tile. This means that a shooter can often shoot around the corner of cover, and be completely protected from return fire.

Your video is private.

I could have had a fancy green name all this time? I had no idea that setting existed.

I like you.

I'd just like to respond to a couple players who have commented that launching a squadron is done blind until you have the Quantum Cryptology Center, and that you don't know what kind of air power is needed until that point. This simply isn't true. There are only a handful of UFO types in Xenonauts, and you can distinguish between them reliably without any additional intel. Air superiority UFO's can always be differentiated from primary UFO's, whether they're flying independently or escorting a primary craft. The primary craft can be differentiated by their size. Certainly, the situation in the air can change when new detections occur, and you might want to change your squadron deployments in response to that. When it comes to any specific engagement, though, you should always know what it takes to bring down the enemy, unless you're dealing with a new enemy or have new tech on your side.

I am sure that is not the case, or at least it wasn't in V22. On at least a few occasions, there were aliens popping out of the UFO when I didn't have troops in close proximity.

What kind of magnitude of change did you go with? Similar in scale to the 20% reduction in combat rewards?

Probably just bad luck. A few weeks is a short enough time span that you might not have had any waves spawn over there. If there are UFO's flying around outside your radar range, you should be getting notifications of events in the ticker at the bottom of the screen, along with markers briefly displaying on the Geoscape map.

Congratulations, Goldhawk. Now, go get drunk.

If it's already mostly implemented but balance is the primary concern, is there any chance it could make it into the game as a hidden feature that can only be enabled through config files?

Lack of peripheral vision just makes the Sentinel armour feel that much more special.

I don't think people are saying that the engine considers the log to be infinitely tall. They're saying that it is exactly as tall as every other prop. If it exists, it completely fills the vertical and horizontal space of its cell. So, graphically, the log appears to be about 1 foot tall. In-engine, it's actually the exact same height and width as a 1-story wall. I may be wrong. I don't know how the engine handles it, but that's how I'm reading what people are saying.

I don't think many developers plan to need post-release patches for their games, but rare is the game (or any other software package) that ships without bugs that later need to be addressed.

Speaking of saved game compatibility: what are the post-release expectations there? Presumably the game will need patches after release. Is the invalidation of saves with each build a conscious decision for the experimental phase only, or are post-release patches expected to break save game compatibility as well?

I would absolutely murder the local forces and take their guns.

I'd go 3x2. I think 4x3 might be a bit excessive.

Alternately: you are an invader, you have 100% confidence in your absolute superiority and regard the human forces as insects that can never truly oppose you. You're in the atmosphere for a specific assigned mission (scouting, abduction, terror, whatever). It's understandable that you'd stick to your mission, and not take a detour to swat at gnats.

I've only skimmed this thread so far, so my reaction may be a bit premature... but will you marry me?