Ol' Stinky

Huh, you're right, he does say that. I've never brought it up before since I assumed they didn't want to spend time coding in spawn protection. Cool. I'll test it out tomorrow, unless someone does it before me.

Do you think lowering the damage and increasing the explosion radius of frag/alen/etc. grenades would work? It'd make throwing from out of enemy LoF easier without screwing up the reaction fire system.

It can if you place the spawn point on the wrong square in the submap. There's no spawn protection, so if I put a spawn point on top of a prop, the game will allow it. There shouldn't be aliens getting stuck otherwise, though. I wish there was a toggleable 1 tile grid. It's pretty easy to make a mistake right now when placing an alien inside a submap, even though I consistantly keep certain spots free. (Well, I find it easy to make a mistake, anyway.) I've always overriden the default number of civs/AIs, so that could be to blame.

That flea market looks really good. (Maps added to rotation. (: )

Do you mean on maps with the number of civs/friendlies set to zero? If those aren't set to zero, and if you don't define spawn points, then the game will place the civs/friendlies down on the map randomly. This is bad because they can appear in places they shouldn't, like boulders and hovering over water. At least, this is my experience. If you have set civs/friendlies to zero, then I have no idea. I'll keep an eye out, though.

Nah, I'm trying them out. These are pretty sweet so far. More, please! There's the odd minor (and I do mean minor) problem, but they're all easily fixed. Just from the first three I played: desert_small_barrens_2_skitso: While UFOs/dropships delete any props they touch, they don't always get everything. For now at least, make sure that Shrikes don't sit on top of desert mesas, as the top layers will hover in mid-air. The below screenshot's the middle Shrike spawn from desert_small_barrens_2_skitso, although I've moved it a bit NE to emphasise the point. desert_small_checkpoint_skitso, maybe desert_small_checkpoint_skitso_lightscout: there's blue pipes blocking one of the possible nissian LR huts. (There's three possible nissanLR submaps the game can choose, when you placed it you'll have gotten one without a door on the SW.) I saw the one below for sure, although there may be others. Checkpoint, Small Petrolstation: aliens can spawn right next to civs. Personally, I don't like civs being doomed on turn 1. Don't be afraid to trim some alien spanws from inside the buildings.

The randomness in soldier abilities is one of the ways playthroughs can feel different. If we did get to recruit the best of the best, there wouldn't be any variation and not much point to the recruitment roster. And soldiers that have mixed skills are specialists. See that recruit with 30 ACC but amazing TUs/RFL? That guy's a great scout, give him a shield but don't let him near an AR. See that recruit with 55 stats across the board? He's boring.

Well, conventional weaponry's a small part of the game. It was always going to be the case that the ballistic weapons get shelved in favour of laser/plasma/MAG weapons, since that basically happens in the original X-COM with laser rifles/heavy plasma. I think the constant resets that come hand in hand with balance testing are distorting the importance of real guns that appear in the game. Look at the research/engineering backgrounds as the game progresses, they turn into something from an old sci-fi comic book. (I approve.) That visual change from realistic to futuristic is what the devs are going for with equipment, too. The names and images of the first guns are fluff, not a commitment to make the game a realistic experience.

At the end of the day, I guess it depends on what you want close range/mid range to be. I'm with Legit in feeling that up to ~10 squares away is "close quarters" (just in a general sense, I'm fine with shotguns having 8 range). I don't like getting very close (under 5 tiles) due to the extreme risks involved if I miscalculate the situation - maybe my cautiousness is why I value ACC/RFL on assaults. Even with the x2 RFL bonus, I'm paranoid about losing the initiative or failing an important accuracy roll. The x0.3/x0.55 I mentioned were the accuracy modifiers for snap/normal, not the TU costs. Sorry for the confusion, I should have made that clearer in my original post. I'll concede the point about LMGs. (:

Chalk up another "yes" vote for reaction fire on LMGs. Stellar sums it up nicely.

You wouldn't think it, but farm's probably one of the hardest to get right. Lots of fiddly bits. Fences, for example, don't come in one/three/end pieces, so you have to make your own. Those should really come by default, otherwise you get fences that don't end properly, through no fault of the mapper. If they don't come bundled with the game then mappers are going to have to mess with the submap editor to make a decent farm map, which is probably not the intention. Edit: Here's some 1x1 walls and fences to save y'all a bit of time. Extract to your Xenonauts folder and if your unzipper preserves paths, it'll correctly extract the files to their proper homes in assets\maps\farm\walls. The downside is that you have to package these files alongside any maps that use them. I didn't want to commit to a review because I wasn't sure it was a problem on my end, but I've had time to re-extract the tiles. First of all, I think it plays well, although I think the hedge exit on the east should be wider to accomodate a vehicle. I wonder if you could place more dropship/light scout spawns. Maybe dropships could be in the hayfield in the NW and another UFO spawn spot in the SW corner? The rest of this stuff is about cosmetic quibbles. 5x5 and 10x10 farm grass tiles have a bunch of submaps in there, but not all of these mesh with each other. Here's an example of the random submaps causing issues: Until that changes, I'd use the 20x20 field grass. Re-doing the ground and mucking about with overlapping/underlapping is a lot to ask, so I thought it'd be polite to go ahead and provide an edited version of your map. It's in the spoiler. Once I did that, it seemed rude to not include the other stuff in this post, too, so it's all in there. You can have prettier hedges by using the hedgerow end pieces (they have names like "hedgerowLR4_endL"), like below. I also wasn't keen on the concrete bit in the middle, near the building. I don't like the way the concrete hits the road, really, so I scrapped the concrete and replaced it with yet more grass: the roads have a grass end submap, so it looks more natural. Before, although the tractor's turned invisible for some reason: After: You can see that the ploughed field's also been replaced with grass. Having rocks in a ploughed field seemed odd to me. I'll finish by saying that it's a hell of a lot better than my first farm map, and I hope you make some more!

A shotgun requiring soldiers to be a few tiles away might be realisitic for all I know. I've never used one in real life and I doubt I ever will. It's a weapon's combat effectiveness that gets them moved out of the base's inventory, though, not their realism factor.

It's the accuracy that turns me off, with x0.3 for a snap shot and x0.55 for a normal. (Unless I've mucked up the install and am looking at the wrong file. It wouldn't be the first time I've done that.) I feel that having to get to 8 tiles is a pretty big requirement on its own, and accuracy could afford to be a bit higher to reflect that. Closing the distance and getting to do around the same damage as an assault rifle shot feels naff. Stat-wise, a shotgunner needs good TUs, good accuracy and good reflexes, which is more demanding than what an LMGer needs (strength, acc), or an AR guy needs (TUs, acc). I don't know how much of a concern that is, but I figure it's something worth mentioning, too.

I'm glad you said something, Skitso, because I think the main problem is with the grass tiles themselves. I'm extracting tiles to make sure it's not a problem on my end, so take the rest of this post with a pinch of salt. The borders on the 5x5/10x10 are pretty obvious, even when placed next to each other, and the road/grass borders seem a bit dodgy regardless of what I tried. I'll post again once I'm up to date.

No-one's really talked about shotguns, unless I've missed some posts. Am I the only one who's bothered by the amount of negatives it has? It's short ranged and inaccurate (relying on close damage bonus). It's got the 2x reaction mod going for it, but for scouting you might as well use a pistol + shield, and a pistol + shield's probably better for when an alien comes around the corner, too. I guess I don't see the issue in having the shotgun be really, really good in its range (8 tiles). If people go with a squad of full shotgunners, it'll be down to imbalances elsewhere, like the previous LoS blocking smoke grenades. Damage seems to drop off really quickly above 8 tiles - shotgun pellets do something like 50% damage at 12 tiles, right? - as well as accuracy. A shotgun that's really beefy won't cause the same balance problems that the sniper does, since when the sniper breaks it's tended to dominate at both short and long distances. Even if the shotgun becomes overpowered, the mechanisms are in place to stop it being a beast at mid-to-long range. I'd rather not go back to this. It was pretty telling that in the v21 b4 request thread that I claimed that splash damage was set to 25%, and it was only on something like page ten that jeon (IIRC) stated that, um, no, it was at 50%. He was right and I was wrong. Between the +/- 50% damage range and the way cover soaks up explosive damage for a unit, splash damage seemed lower than it really was. The %AP change has dominated discussion, but the removal of splash damage was a good move and allows explosions to be balanced as area of effect weapons.

It should technically work, but I don't recommend it: the maps haven't been changed to work with the new and improved map guidelines, so they'll be too big. If that doesn't put you off, go hog wild.

I feel kinda bad that this thread has 77 views and no comments. I'm gonna put this map into rotation and then post my thoughts.

The screenies look nice, I look forward to giving the maps a try.

Yeah, it's a long standing gripe of mine. I wish there was a way to turn objects a certain distance from the mouse cursor translucent and untargetable. By objects I mean anything on layer 1, so cover (crates, rocks, etc.), props that block movement like the train carriages, and walls.

Out of curiosity: what's your squad's loadout?

I haven't checked in a dog's age, but the mod launcher broke at some point. Most mods arouind here will simply overwrite the existing files. Taking Max's UFO analysis mod as an example, you install it into the Xenonauts\assets\ folder and load the game up as normal.

It could be that various tiles have got mucked up somehow. Have you tried verifying your game (assuming you're on Steam)? Right click on Xenonauts in your game library, go to Properties -> Local Files and click on "verify integrity of game cache".

I think it's like the OG now, where each unit has an initiative score based on reaction stat * (current TU/max TU). Walking into LoS of an enemy with higher initiative will always trigger reaction fire. (That's if I'm remembering the OG system correctly.) The previous reaction fire system seemed to be a roll of some kind per action, I'm not sure of the specifics.

Medals are generally +bravery points, right? I'll be honest, I haven't moused over one for yonks. Making them more interesting would be cool, as long as they don't lead to daft behaviour. (The one I'm thinking of is the medal gained through taking lots of damage in a mission, I can imagine ordering my soldiers to pummel the hell out of some unlucky rookie to make him stronger in the long term. As long as there's a check to see if the damage comes from an alien and not friendly fire, I'm cool with it.)

If it takes a long time to get a supersoldier, and superaliens are kept in the game, then the whole campaign comes down to avoiding death as much as possible. Otherwise, losing your best guys in a (say) landing ship mission will mean you're unable to deal with the superaliens zipping around a battleship. The OG wasn't squeamish about murdering soldiers if the player made a mistake, and that's what I remember it for. Supersoldiers in Xenonauts would make that impossible. I'm happy with the idea of soldiers "only" becoming faster, more accurate, and having higher initiative scores. The joy of levelling up should come with unlocking lasers, plasmas, armours etc. and not with gameplay that encourages savescumming. AP% shots don't really require a lot of calculation for me so far, since I can see in the bottom left how many APs each shot takes. Off-topic, but I just want to say that I'm really happy you're prepared to make big changes this late on. GH has made some big gambles - I remember the hoo-hah surrounding the "recover aircraft" change - and I think the game's better for them. Please don't be too put off by people who are uncomfortable with change.