Ol' Stinky

... ... ...D'oh!

There are some floors/rooftops that were obviously drawn as a bigger tile, then broken down into appropiate, smaller tiles. For example, take a look at industrial\ground\concrete10\ . It's a 10x10 tile concrete floor. The numbers in the file name refer to rows and columns respectively, so paint them on in the same kind of order as in the picture below. It looks a hell of a lot nicer than the same tile repeated over and over, but the downside is that it takes longer to place.

Yeah, that's the way I've done it, too. Also, you can have a go at using the same damaged/destroyed ground .pngs the game itself does. Those are in assets\tiles\ (not any of the various subfolders), complete with spectres. Paint them on layer 1, not 0. If you want to see what it can look like, then here's a pic of a desert submap I haven't used: it's a barracks (original, I know) that has an undamaged version, then three differently smashed up versions.

[XENONAUTS BASE TOUR GUIDE]: ...And this is the recreation room, where our brave soldiers spent their downtime during the First Alien Invasion. You'll notice that's it's made entirely from bones and the broken, twisted bodies of the invaders. Moving on...

I think he meant for use by us, so I'd curse every time I wandered into the land mines I kept planting around alien ships.

I'll cast the first vote for the bottom one. With the guy resorting to the pistol and about to get his face wrecked by an Andron, it does "oh God it's all gone to hell" better.

I've updated the mod to try and make civ AI a bit better. Redownload and extract, and hopefully civs shouldn't hug Xenonauts.

I dunno about manufactured shields. It doesn't discourage shield spam because I'll pump out as many as I can between interceptors. Unless making shields costs money, of course, in which case I won't make shields at all.

For the mystery panic: do you have any idea if civvie death happened? Civs dying hurts morale. If that guy had something like 30 bravery, it might set him off.

Melee damage (press 'm' when next to an alien) can stun aliens, too. Your soldier will smack the enemy for ~12 normal and stun damage. I think I might have done some stun damage to the alien in question with a flashbang first. Melee might kill them before stunning them otherwise, I can't say for sure because I'm not sure how stun HP works. Is stun HP equal to normal HP?

Sure, it shouldn't be a guessing game. I haven't been past Jan for a good long while, so I'm out of touch.

No problem. I'm guessing by "more bullets" you mean shotguns spraying more pellets, so that's what I did - they now shoot 9 pellets instead of 3, but total damage remains the same. I also made the grenades do bonus damage to cover/walls/etc. since I was making them insta-explode anyway. Let me know if the civs don't follow troops well enough. Grab the mod here. This will probably break again for v21 experimental 5, for those people reading this post from the future. I know you're out there.

You're not meant to repel the alien invasion forever, so I guess my question to you is: do you think it's unreasonable to have done the final mission by April?

I'm afraid not, I've been playing unmodded/slowly working on black units (MAGs and assault shields to go now). But I'm open to requests. If you want just the more aggressive AIs, I'm happy to make it happen.

Yep.

It's a +1 to the stat. Shoot at an alien and you'll (usually) get +1 ACC at the end of the battle. I prefer it this way to the X-Com system, where you could end up doing training on the battlefield to get skill-ups. I really don't want to worry about how many times my soldiers have shot at an enemy on a mission like I did in earlier version of Xenonauts. Experience should come as a result of playing the game, and not some kind of minigame where units run laps around the chinook or spend three turns firing at aliens they can't see or hope to hit. One thing I do miss about ground combat giving both funding boosts and loot money is being able to get bonus points for stunning aliens instead of killing them. Completing scout missions by stunning every single alien and being rewarded for it was kinda cool, like getting style points. "Stick with the prod." - Paul Denton, Deus Ex.

I feel a bit dirty for linking one of my own posts but: have you had a look at the mapping subforum and the how-to thread? The only tricky parts are extracting the tiles files and getting a grip on the submap editor. The former because it's easy to misplace the files and the latter because it's powerful, so it's always going to take some learning time. If you're happy to use existing buildings and the like, it's easy to make maps. GH should be given major kudos for this, imo, too many games nowadays that would benefit from a map editor don't include one. My only gripe with the map editor is that we can't place spawns on specific levels, so dropships/UFO can never be on anything except layer 0. As I understand it, that's an engine constraint and there's nothing to be done about it. The only reason I'm not making any more maps at the moment is because a) I want people to talk about what they do and don't like about maps and b) see where the default map sizes end up. Community Map Pack 2 is already out of date with v21 experimental because the maps are generally too large in relation to number of aliens now. If that doesn't bother you, go right ahead.

I think that's due to suppression drain also affecting morale. Moraleconfig.xml has 1 suppression drain causing 0.25 morale loss at the moment (although I might be reading that wrong), so an alien plasma rifle should cause 55 * 0.25 = ~14 morale loss per shot right now. Right?

Soldiers have to meet certain requirements to get a skillup in each stat. You can only get one per mission. APs: use 150 APs in a mission. STR: move one square while carrying 80%+ of the unit's maximum carry weight. ACC: shoot at an enemy once. The enemy has to be within 150% of the weapon's range (usually not an issue with an assault rifle, sniper or LMG). You don't need line of sight to the target. REF: In v20, if a soldier undergoes a reaction fire test he'll get a point, whether he successfully reaction fires or not. I don't know for sure how this works in v21 experimental and the much better initiative system. I'm guessing there a soldier gets a point for reaction firing. BRV: Gained if a soldier panics in battle. HP: One point gained for every four skillups of other stats. This is remembered between fights, so if a soldier gets +1 AP and +1 STR one battle, and +1 AP and +1 ACC the next, he'll also get +1 HP after the second battle.

In terms of numbers, yes, ESs are a straight upgrade. But the end of turn detonation makes them worse than FBs for suppressing - most of the time if I'm using grenades to suppress it's to stop reaction fire - and naff splash damage makes them worse for stunning. ES only does 60 stun damage on a direct hit, you're looking at ~15 stun damage to anyone else. That's just sad. The stun gas making aliens waste APs on movement's a nice extra perk. We both agree that giving ESs instant explosion's the only buff they really need. Edit: I worded my original post (and initial response) poorly. I guess I shouldn't have said they're worse than FBs at suppressing, but that they're less useful than FBs. Sorry about that.

What Max said. Variety among the aliens is probably my biggest beef with ground combat. I'm gonna type out a whole bunch of words now. Watch out! Alien heavy plasma guns shouldn't be a default weapon for alien soldiers+. By all means have an assault rank (so Andron WarriorAssault or what have you), but the "standard" weapon should be an alien plasma rifle style gun. Otherwise, outside of base missions, too many aliens are sitting ducks. I'm gonna support the cause to remove the end of turn detonation on electroshocks, if not all grenades. The end of turn nerf was one of the measures to rein in grenades, along with throw range reduction (since reverted). Grenades were too good because cover was too good. Cover has been nerfed, so it's safe to scrap the end of turn explosion. In the case of electroshocks, they're worse than FBs at suppressing, worse than stun gas at stunning, and worse than gunfire at taking out robots. That last point leads nicely into... Increase splash damage. Right now I believe it's 25%. That's not an impressive amount. It means that, say, an electroshock only does significant damage if it lands at the feet of an Andron. Any Andron buddies around will hardly feel it. Grenades being a mostly single target weapon seems odd. Credit goes to Jeon for this one: the frag grenade family currently do kinetic and not incendiary damage. Unless that was an intentional change I missed along the way, and not a temporary measure for the incendiary damage multiplier bug. I think it was Skitso that raised this more recently in the Ground Combat Feedback thread, but the variety in alien guns is lacking. This can be used to promote alien variety as well, but doesn't have to be. Aliens get pistols, rifles, snipers, shotguns and a rocket launcher, or whatever you want to classify the plasma cannon as. You see all of this around, what, landing ships? Maybe even corvettes? Where's the exotic weaponry? Right now it's possible to mod in guns that spew fire (NOT FLAMETHROWERS), gas guns, stun weapons, explosive ammo, kamikaze units, suppression weapons, fear inducers, weapons that screw with line of fire, weapons that are more likely to cause bleeding... Granted that for modders, some of those are as exciting as "make the weapon hit for small amounts but multiple times" (that'd be the frequent-bleeding one), but you have more power over this. Also, you can get away with re-using the same assets and putting a justification in the Xenopedia. I don't care if there's more than one type of alien plasma rifle and you can't tell by the graphic alone, or if you use recoloured sprites. I don't know if I'm the only one that feels that way, though.

Did you take any shields along for the mission? Think of shields as being the rookies from the OG X-Com: they're there to take the reaction shot hits for you. Also, don't use assault rifles, use sniper rifles for your generic guys. Finally, take a load of smoke grenades. Smoke tiles stack, so being behind five tiles of smoke helps a lot.

No. It should work with your current game.

I agree with all of this, although maybe hitting armour could show sparks or something instead of nothing at all. And hitting a prop would show a bit of dust, like a smaller version of the nice prop destruction effect? So that you know for sure you hit the floor/prop and not the alien. Maybe the flinching animations should be slowed down a tad as well. --- The rifle/sniper balance seems off again to me. I don't really take along rifles. I bring along an LMG for the wider suppression (4 tiles' worth), and the rest are snipers with shotguns in the bag, except for mules and shield guy. Rifles did have a niche before experimental in that they had decently accurate shots and were more mobile. Snipers had to cough up 50/60 APs for normal/aimed to an assault rifle's 30/40 - ouch! A knock-off effect of cover being reduced and AP costs for guns is that it's screwed up this balance. There's a whole bunch of stuff to mess with; I don't think all of these are needed, I'm just posting ideas. Swap assault and sniper rifles' damage around. Snipers do loads more damage than assaults. This is partly because of the buffs they recieved when hypervelocity was removed, and partly to reward a player who managed to get a sniper into the right place for the shot. Neither of those are really factors anymore. Snipers currently do 50 damage to the assaults' 30, and snipers also don't have to worry about armour (not that armour's used much right now). Change rifles to have a shorter range so that snipers don't become obsolete. Instead, snipers become safe and steady damage, but at the cost of raw stopping power. Assaults become strong, but they have to be in (or nearly in) sight to get used. Increase the heavy weapons' accuracy penalty for moving. It's 50% at the moment, which doesn't generally stop me from sniping on the move. Obviously it's better to not do this, but I still get a good hit % popping around a corner to shoot. The downside to this is that LMGs also get hit by the nerf. They could be compensated by getting higher accuracy, I guess? Buff assaults' burst fire. It costs 40 APs and is only for suppression. Snipers cause as much suppression over the same radius without sacrificing killing power, regardless of shot. If you want a good chunk of suppression, a snipers' snap shot is currently the best option, and that seems odd. LMGs cost 35 APs to fire and while they cause the same amount of suppression as assault burst and sniper single shots, they have a bit of a wider radius. I don't mind whether assault burst becomes better at suppression or killing, but right now it's the poor choice for either. Give assaults a higher reaction mod. Right now snipers, assaults and LMGs all have a reaction mod of x1. Maybe there's a niche to be had in long range reaction fire. I can't deny that this is the weakest of my suggestions, but maybe someone can build on it a bit.

Yeah, they don't have a separate file for their armour. That's defined in the armour tag, as you suspected: <Armour kinetic="30" energy="30" chemical="100" incendiary="30" /> Bear in mind that armour protects against suppression (in all honesty I forgot that until Jeon pointed it out to me). You might want to alter the suppressionMultiplier of races accordingly, which is usually defined right after the death/injury sound info. A value of 0 makes a unit immune to suppression while a value of 1 causes each point of Bravery to equal 1 point of suppression "health". Or you could directly change bravery, or the suppression value of guns in weapons_gc.xml.