Ol' Stinky

Increasing the mobility of aliens would help with player LoS tactics. Right now they don't tend to move a whole lot, so scout'n'snipe is that much easier. Along with 30 range for both rifles and the LMG for random firing and suppression, it's not too hard to overwhelm guards at the start of the game. If the aliens did the same thing to the player, then the game would be harder and more tense. It's scarier to get shots out of the dark on the aliens' go then it is by bumbling into an alien's line of fire without realising it. I think "kill or die" is what they're going for. The feeling I got from Chris' posts about making the balance patches was that back and forth was boring. I'm sympathetic with gripes about shields, though. So far I've been lucky, but failing a bunch of 20% shield failure rolls would annoy me. I think the fact that they have 60hp in the light/regular scout phase of the game's fine.

Heyyyyyy, you're right. Nice! That's new, it only used to be min/max age and the ever controversial ~*female soldier chance*~ in those soldier generation variables. Mind you, with the current carrying weights, it's just as well we can't get 30 strength soldiers or whatever the minimum was. Edit: I'm going to start again, then try and upload vids of me doing ground combat. the first one. Apologies for crap video etc., I've not recorded games before.

Play v20 stable. If you don't want to lose save files, do not play v21 experimental.

Soldiers have been free for a good while now. I wasn't around for the mid-v20 experimentals so I assumed it was a deliberate change: soldiers cost nothing but should, in time, have a higher penalty for dying. I first noticed it in v20exp7 I think? I figured the reasoning was that someone short of cash can afford recruits and pay for them later, to encourage spending on the geoscape. /shrug Can you fix the variance, Solver? I've looked for min stats in the .xmls before without any luck. Stat caps are in gameconfig.xml, but not the minimum ones. Keep us updated! Edit: I keep forgetting to post this, and every time I breach a UFO I think, "Right, this time I will bring it up on the forums." Could you please remove the ability to shoot at the UFO? We can't damage it, even if we wanted to, and it makes it awkward to target the door/someone standing around the door at times. Also, the UFO top comes back on if you can't see a UFO interior tile at the start of the turn. This means that you can't throw in grenades/fire suppression shots inside without having someone put themselves at risk, which is annoying and encourages door-scumming.

If they'd focused on Milton Keynes this whole invasion could have been avoided.

Thank you for making shields easier to use in going around corners. I'll miss the reaction fire code. It worked really well, especially considering it was a prototype.

It should do, but I'm not sure that AI's pathing gets updated when it sees an enemy. These are the values for civs: Sight="1" Sound="1" Cover="-1" EnemyInfluence="0.5" AlliedInfluence="0.2" EnemyLOS="1" AlliedLOS="0.0" ProbabilisticSearch="0.0" NearestEnemy="1" Goal="0" /> What should hapen theoretically is this: the civ opens the UFO door, hoping to find a nice hiding hole - a positive value for Sight has this effect. The door opens and there's a million bloomin' aliens inside. The civ sees them and now recalculates based on the new data. Although he has a strong urge to head inside due to a Sight of 1, the positive EnemyLoS and NearestEnemy values overrule Sight and the civ runs for his life. What seems to happen is this: the civ opens the UFO door, hoping to find a nice hiding hole. He opens the door and sees the aliens, but his path has been set and he's locked in for the ride. He runs towards his doom. Either that, or the civ can see the cover inside and the combined worth of Sight and Cover beat EnemyInfluence and EnemyLOS, and the civ believes that hiding behind a UFO console is the best course of action.

Tech Info Xenonauts v20 Balance Patch 2 Observed Civs won't allow Xenonauts to help them, and prefer to find a cubby hole to hide in. Which is all very well, but what if you have an open desert level, or if the only buildings around are the focal point of the map? Also, I think we've all seen civs make bad decisions. But they have a visual range of 16, so how can they make good calls when they're murdered by alien reaction fire? It's not their fault, a Xenonaut could easily meet the same fate. Desired A way to communicate with civs so that the player can protect them has been suggested in the past. What if we didn't need to implement a "follow me!" or "get to safety!" type command in the game, and instead the civs tag along behind the Xenonauts naturally? That way it's up to the player to protect them, which they can do with a smoke grenade. Unless the player is flanked, the civs will be low priority targets if they're even seen at all. If the player is flanked, then they've been outplayed by the AI anyway. There'll always be a player in the level, so civilian behaviour doesn't need to be designed with different types of map in mind. The existing high Sight value means that they should LOVE smoke, which is handy since it's the perfect tool for saving civs. All that needs to be done is to tweak AlliedInfluence and AlliedLOS so that they try to stay behind Xenonauts instead of running away from them. Finally, give civs a sight range of 20/21 so that they don't die to reaction fire. The aliens need to hunt them down.

I hope you don't mind a question. Do you plan to implement AIs that always explore the map? Right now, it seems that there's nothing there that'll make an AI go out and look for Xenonauts; they seem to bump into me by accident, such as chasing a civilian or looking for a suitable place to hide. Sound would be reactive, while ProbabilisticSearch's function sounds like a revamped version of the AI "guessing" where units were. If there was a variable - let's call it "Explorer" - which put a weight on fog of war tiles, it'd be possible to create a scout version of each rank who could head out into the unknown and get some idea of where the Xenonauts were. I'm thinking Explorer would be 0 for most aliens, but a scout would have it be a value that gets him out into the fog.

I prefer the current system where a single press selects the soldier, and pressing the hotkey with the unit selected causes the camera to zoom to the relevant unit. Edit: I missed llunak saying this. Whoops. Sorry. And now I've double posted. Today's off to a good start!

Sorry, double post.

There's a section in aiprops.xml (in Xenonauts\assets) that you'll be happy to see: <!-- FloorPreference: A positive value will attract to upper floors, a lower to the ground --> <PathingMechanics EnemyInfluenceValue = "1.0" EnemyInfluenceDecay = "0.95" AlliedInfluenceValue = "1.0" AlliedInfluenceDecay = "0.95" FloorPreference = "0.2" /> I haven't messed with FloorPreference yet, and I suspect it's a W.I.P. anyway. It looks like they're playing with height levels behind the scenes though. Given some of the nasty bugs that have cropped up before in regards to levels, such as the "crash when shooting at something below you" one, I can see why they would be wary about unleashing it on us.

Sorry, I should have explicitly said that aliens still attack my guys. It's the pathing that's weird, here. Even when I set EnemyLoS to something like 3, they crouch down next to the wall or still try to get in after firing. There are props around outside to take cover behind, but no LoS blocks. Here's a screenshot of what I mean: It's odd because this is the only map I've seen this happen on. I tried setting Sight="0" for the Caesans and only one of them started trying to get inside, so that's something. Maybe I'm underestimating how powerful an effect Sight has on the Decision weights. On other maps when I've pushed the EnemyLoS values up a bit, it's never failed to make enemies duck out of sight after taking a shot if there's no cover around. I was expecting the Caesans to shoot at my guys and then move back around the concrete wall SW corner on the outside. Edit: I've set Sight to negative values, but two of the Caesan guards still want to get into the compound. The third one does what you'd expect and sits behind cover, out of sight.

Disclaimer: this might be me borking something on the installation of the balance patch or something, so if no-one else has the problem with the save provided, we're cool. I'm having a problem with the AI in my game. One some of my custom, desert maps there's a compund surrounded by sand. The compound has solid concrete walls except for the one and only entrance. The civs and allies spawn inside the compound, but there's no way the AI should know that as they've all spawned outside. Besides, the civs are inside a building. However, these two Caesans are making a beeline for the civs. The trouble is that they're so desperate for civ death that they're not taking much care about my men, electing to forge on through gunfire to get inside the compound. Or maybe they're not trying to get the civs, maybe they just really like it and want to move it. Either way, it was easy for me to form a firing squad like below and murder the two of the three casean guards who want in. What's also weird is that while they'd see me and fire at me, they'd move towards the unseen civs. Here's the link to the save, although you'll need Stinky Map Pack 2 to play (I think the map's in the community pack as well, but I could be wrong as I'm not sure exactly which map it is). If the Caesan guards don't show up at first, give them a turn or six. The guard who prefers to stay outside will be crouching behind cover if you go straight SW from the chinook. The other two will creep along the SW perimeter of the compound until they find delicious meat. PS: I also had trouble shooting a non-com inside the light scout at point blank range. I had to move a space away before the shot would land: four 95% shots missed at point blank with a pistol, which seems more than a bit unlucky. Also, shieldbearers don't seem to use a grenade throwing animation, or it's speeded up to the point where I can't see it.

I see what you mean, you'd get shield guy to drop it on the first turn and pick it up later. Bleh. The trouble with shields back when they were really heavy was that with armour you could barely carry any grenades at all, meaning you had a guy who could only shoot a pistol. That's pretty boring considering that grenades are this game's equivalent of spells/psi powers/whatever name for special abilities. I can't remember what the weight of shields used to be, so it might be a case of jumping from one extreme to the other. I'll admit increasing the weight seems like the only solution. It probably wouldn't be as bad in the balance patches because you can actually hire a high STR guy if you're lucky.

Hm, yeah, you're right in that lower HP means you simply bung another shield in the backpack. I confess I hold two shields in the bag as it is. I'm not sure a TU penalty will help either, all that means is that the entire squad moves slower. The extra size = extra chance to be hit - but only on the shield - is interesting though. Maybe they shouldn't be able to be stored in the backpack at all. They're either equipped or they sit in the base stores/on the ground. (Increase their size by 1 box in each direction?) It used to be that they weighed a ton, but that sucked when the shield guy had to put on armour; it's not cool having a guy who can only shoot a pistol since he has no grenades.

Max brought up shields earlier, I know, but I want to vent a bit. Sorry! I'd like to see them pushed up to 90% or even 95% chance to block a shot. I'd also like to see the two angles (45 and 90 degrees) made the same in terms of block percentage. In exchange, the first shield (I can never remember whether we start off with combat or assault shields, sorry) should probably have less than 200hp. 120 perhaps? 100? So shields are more reliable, but for a lot less longer. The shields we start off with don't need to be that strong. Really, they need to have stricter tiers. The requirements for a shield against light scout and scout missions are not the same as requirements for a shield that needs to navigate an alien base, which can appear around corvette time. Either in balance patch 2 or v20 vanilla, against light/normal scouts my shield guys won't get that much fire coming in compared to a base that has a ton of alien reaction fire opportunities - especially once doors trigger reaction fire! As for the artwork, will anyone who buys and plays the game at proper release notice or care that you reuse the combat shield artwork? It's a hunk of square metal, just have the Xenopedia say something along the lines of, "It's a shield, but now it's made out of alien supermetal" or "This time, we refined our techniques and our equipment and shields are even sturdier!" In an ideal world, I'd like a shield failure not be "completely ignore the shield" but "split damage between shield and shieldbearer". That way you can have shields be riskier than armour without the game wiping out a shield guy at random. But that's probably reasonable to ask for at this point in time, so I'll sit here and pout instead.

Please don't force me to do a bunch of light scout missions I don't want to do. The tutorial screen can come up after the player's downed their first UFO and clicks on the crashsite. If they don't read it then, they never will.

Would you need to do that though? When breaching, if I can't/don't want to use smoke, I have the shield guys go in and suppress w/flashbangs, and then everyone else pours in for all the fun, or snipe all the aliens if it's got a ground floor landing ship-type layout.

I'm for it. It makes sense to me that weapons for CQC are better at CQC. And if anyone's scouting with the RL, they deserve that reaction shot coming their way. Also, like Max, I now actually look at soldiers' reaction scores and make the best ones my scouts. Before this, I considered it a fluff stat. My question: what happens if a pistol guy's carrying C4? A pistol is x2 while C4 is... x0. Is C4 reaction fire mod only there in the code to look pretty or will it wipe out a soldier's initiative? Have I missed something, by the way? I went into the game to try out the C4 thing, but I can't see my exp. version saves. Was there an update pushed out over Steam?

One thing to bear in mind (that I forgot to mention, whoops) is that incendiary stuff does 4x damage to the environment. But really, that's not too hard to work with. I don't think kinetic/energy/chemical have inherent properties like incendiary does. Now get out there and mod those tech trees, champ! (Inspiring montage music plays as Gorlom turns his dreams into reality.)

Last couple of things to post tonight: 1) I got an AI loop hang on a terror mission. Y'all might want to edit out reapers on a terror map since it's caused by them reaping civs, iirc. Go to Xenonauts\assets\ufocontents\ and you'll see which file to edit. 2) Cae guard supports don't seem to have weapons either, and I can't see an unenclosed value like there was for the Sebs. Is it something to do with a low EngagementRange? I've only seen them at 25 before (and when I was looking for that Str bug, I only ever increased it, not decreased it).

If you still want to play on normal but really hate those numbers, browse to Xenonauts\assets\config.xml and open it in a text editor. Look for the following lines: <DamageText offset="-84" offsetCrouched="-64" displayDelay="1.5" fadeDelay="0.5" difficultyEasyOn="1" difficultyNormalOn="1" difficultyVeteranOn="0" difficultySuperhumanOn="0"> <DamageColour red="1.0" green="0.2" blue="0.2" /> <StunDamageColour red="0.3" green="0.3" blue="1.0" /> <HealingColour red="0.2" green="1.0" blue="0.2" /> </DamageText> All you need to do is change difficultyNormalOn="1" to difficultyNormalOn="0". Save and you're good to go.

There's four types of damage and four types of armour to mitigate them - kinetic, energy, chemical, incendiary, and heart. For example, vehicles have 100 armour against chemical attacks. So you could do resistances to some extent. The type of damage doesn't have to match the visual, so you can change all plasma blasts to kinetic and things would still look the same to an unwitting player, giving you a bit more wiggle room.

Light scout maps are going through some flux at the moment, so I'd avoid doing any of those. Also, check out the guidelines thread, because the experimental guidelines in there seem to have stuck for now.