Ol' Stinky

That would be cool. The really dedicated people could basically play by e-mail, sending the save over to the other player. Yeah, not to mention the difficulty of overcoming cover since it doesn't make sense that psionic attacks can hit a rock instead of that Caesan. If some brave sod wants to mod in psychic powers, though, he might be able to get something that works. I'm not that brave sod.

The trouble is that there aren't enough trees, if you're talking about making a forest in the farm tileset. You can't have a forest made out of stumps, and although the industrial trees look good, they're more for decoration than to be significant props. (I also don't like the way stumps look, but I might be alone there.) If you want a lumber mill or a base in the woods, you're better off doing it in arctic.

Multiplayer's not gonna happen. I reckon you could mod in some form of psionics. I'm thinking of a psi-amp weapon with different "modules" (in actual fact, different ammo) with different effects. Stun you could do. Once aliens get proper morale, you could make a morale-breaking power, too, although it'd suppress at the same time. I don't think the abilities the aliens are able to tap into are possible, so no MC.

Tooltips on the soldier equip screen are also kind of massive. Even at 1920x1080 they inevitably cover up some of the soldier equipment and that looks messy to me. Why not shunt all the flavour text into the Xenopedia? Have a brief note above the stats that spells out the stuff that a newbie might not pick up on, sure, but that's all that's needed. For example: Pistols: "One handed weapons like pistols allow soldiers to use shields or throw grenades for less TUs." Shotguns: "Best at shredding unarmoured enemies at close range." Rifles: "Use single shots for long range kills and burst for suppression." LMGs: "LMGs are not very mobile and require a lot of strength to use properly, but are very good at suppression." Smoke grenade: "Smoke is more potent for each smoke tile between you and the enemy." Frag grenade: "These explode at the end of the turn and will destroy any equipment enemies are carrying."

I'm going to use real-time FOV as a springboard for a question about game mechanics: do aliens have the same real-time FOV mechanics as player units at night time? Right now with human units, moving out of the 18 vision range means you lose sight of the alien if there's low light, if no-one else can see the alien directly. While you can indirectly fire at the square the alien's on, there's a hefty aim penalty attached. Do aliens follow the same rules, or are they effectively playing in daytime? For anyone who doesn't know, you can mod in the night LOS rules for daytime GC by editing config.xml: look for <LOSNightMultiplier>0.6</LOSNightMultiplier> and change that value to 1, and change <NightMission>0</NightMission> to a 1 as well.

Does the launcher take a long time to load (~1 min) for anyone else? Just on the first time you load it up, mind, after closing the game and starting the launcher again, it loads in around ten seconds. I don't know if it's a problem on my end or if everyone else gets it, too, otherwise I'd have put this in the bug forum. If it's only me then I'll reinstall the game.

Not really. Outside of unit spawns, I think they're great. It doesn't feel like there's any dead space, which is impressive considering that on some maps you have 4 possible chinook spawns. You have good mix of clear lanes and prop heavy ones, so long range sniping and close combat both get a look in. I encourage anyone reading to download your map packs.

It says UFO placement at the top is a very flexible rule, as long as you don't block the UFO entrance. On the other hand, about spawn points it says: "Aliens (red): There should never be any in direct line of sight to the dropship". So I guess maps with aliens spawning in LOS of the dropships are breaching their own guidelines. ;P

For the light scout version of fleamarket, you might be able to switch the UFO/dropships around. There'd be enough room in the south for units to get in/out of the UFO. It'd also make the LSct/SctCorv maps play differently, without changing the map's environment.

They don't roam that aggressively. Depending on how much they value allied influence, you're also giving them time to group up if they're scattered, too: life's easier if you can pick them off while they're too far away to support each other.

GC: grenades' listed TU cost on the right-click quick grenade slot thingy not reflecting reality. GC: some indication of TU costs of reloading weapons. GC: settings for projectile speed, so we don't have to edit weapons_gc.xml to get faster or slower bullets. GC: more leeway with throwing grenades. Here's a soldier that wants to throw a flashbang into a building, but doesn't want to get any closer for whatever reason. Here's the view from level 0 and level 1: Throwing a grenade into the building from here is unreliable, because sometimes it'll bounce off the top of the doorway and onto the doorway square. I know it's a 24% chance, but given how pivotal (and, frankly, cool) throwing flashbangs/grenades into buildings is for breaching, the results shouldn't be so chaotic. You think he'd be able to get it inside the building at least. Geo: some sort of max weight indicator on the soldier equipment screen. Horrible mockup example:

You're too kind. Ta.

I'm not a fan of aliens starting within eyesight of the dropship. If you are going to place spawns so close to dropships, I'd at least make 100% sure you block LoS with environment/buildings etc. This is especially true of fleamarket, although that's going to be tricky to fix. (I updated the maps to make sure this wasn't somnething already fixed up.)

Thanks for clearing that up. Can suppression and stun damage be factored into the decision making process or is it too late for that? Like 2 stun damage being worth 1 real damage, and 5 suppression being worth 1 damage. Aliens only have damaging grenades at the moment; if someone were to mod in a stun grenade for lower alien ranks, is there a way to get aliens to throw those grenades? Right now it seems that only pure damage is considered.

Congratulations! Do spelling/grammar mistakes count towards the bug reset? The sticky thread for the Xenopedia correction thread's not in the bug forum at the moment, which is why I'm unsure. Are you going to unsticky that one?

In the UFOcontents folder, the .xmls that determine the aliens around for each type of mission are given various scripts. Aggressive, passive, defensive, command. I'm guessing they control stuff like spawn location and what the goal variable from aiprops.xml does. What's the purpose of the passive script, and how does it differ from aggressive in practice? Can we mod these scripts, and if not, are we ever going to be able to?

Hm. Maybe it's to do with the passive script in the UFOcontents .xmls? I don't know what the difference between that and aggressive is. Or even if there still is a difference, now that aiprops.xml has all the fancy variables. As far as I know what the scripts do (beyond the obvious) isn't up for modding. Unless someone out there knows how to do that...? I haven't tried it in 21exp6 but there is (was?) a bug with aliens using burst fire only weapons - if they had no single shot option, they'd get all moody and refuse to fire at all unless they were close. You have to make it a snap shop though, otherwise they get upset and don't fire. If light/mdeium drones are too annoying try that.

I've put up a modified aiprops.xml here that sets the minimum accuracy to take shots to 10%, except for alien assault units. Extract it into your Xenonauts folder and it should unzip into the assets folder. My only concern with this approach is that heavy alien plasmas might shoot from out of range, which won't cause suppression. But if they're able to be suppressed that's still better than nothing, like kabill says.

So I made a test map covered almost entirely with submaps full of crates, but I haven't been able to replicate your spawn bug so far. (5 loads at time of writing.) Each time the aliens have successfully spawned in a free square. I've looked for this purely through quickbattles, which shouldn't make a difference, but you never know. Do you know if he actually spawned there? There have been bugs where an alien can run through/into things it shouldn't be able to. Hopefully it's that instead.

Cool. I guess those soviet guns are relics of when the Cold War setting was more important.

Well, the coding amounts to copy/pasting existing files and tweaking a few values. It is odd that the sniper rifle and assault rifle share the same soldier sprites, though. It's even stranger given that there's a perfectly good AK-47 in there, only used for the fringe case of looting friendly AIs on Middle East maps and using their guns. Would anyone mind if the current AR visuals were replaced with the AK? Edit: if anyone wants to try it out, here's a quick mod that makes riflemen use the AK-47 soldier sprites. Install to your Xenonauts dir and it should put soldier_spectre.xml in Xenonauts\assets\units\xenonaut\armour.basic\weapon.rifle - to uninstall, delete this soldier_spectre.xml file. The rifle will still look like normal in the geoscape/inventory/UI. Edit 2: there shouldn't be a space in "weapon.rifle" up there, but the forums are trolling me and inserting one. You win this round, forums, but I'll have my revenge.

If they do, I'd prefer new assets for maps than a rework of guns. (There'd be hardly any coding time involved in adding new props to maps, it's so easy even I can do it.)

"Wilderness" and "military base", right? If you have more ideas, don't be afraid to share them. I think there'll be more variation once there's a bigger map maker community and people with art skills create assets; I can't make desert maps that have archeological digsites (tents, remains, ruins) or mines/caves (cliff face wall, mine carts and tracks, lighting, stalagmites and stalagtites, rock pools, digging equipment) because I can't draw. To begin with, there's going to be a lot of asset reuse.

The stances are in, and aggressive/defensive are easily spotted. It's just done on a per alien basis and not a grand strategy. You'll notice that some aliens will never leave the ship. There's also a "passive" stance, which seems to be a stance for sniper/camping aliens. As for the tactics, there's a set of moddable traits for each rank of each alien race. The traits include how aggressively aliens will go after humans (or run away from them, depending on the value of the trait), how keen the aliens are to seek out humans, how closely they stay together/spread out, whether to prefer hidey-holes, and so on. It'll be cool when the values are sorted and everything's up and running. Drones that only have burst fire weapons are bugged right now. For some reason they're insanely reluctant to fire if they don't have a single fire option.

Oh, yeah, and put a few more spawn points around for the aliens. You could fit some on the western side, near the boulders.