Ol' Stinky

You'll find alien stats in aiprops.xml. There's also a general alien accuracy modifier at the top of weapons_gc.xml.

Well, I'm still working on the black units. I've still got plasma precision rifles, MAGs and assault shields to go. Whew. Here's an updated version of the rifle mod, with: six pellet shotguns frag grenades correctly set to incendiary type (x4 damage to environment) incendiary armour for aliens end of turn explosions for grenades disabled tweaked suppression values (they now increase for all guns as tiers go on, not just for LMGs, but LMGs are still superior) x1.5 reaction mod for shotguns/pistols, for both alien and soldier weaponry And my mod for the day is this: fragile cover. This has everything the above mod has, but two extra changes: cover now is x1.8 more effective (so a 50% cover crate now goes to 90%), but everything does incendiary damage. Pistols, shotguns, rifles, alien weaponry, whatever. Also, the AI knows this. I think the x0.75 cover mod in v21exp2 makes cover too unimportant, but playing with it at x1 did slow the game down. Tweaking the health of every prop would take me a daft amount of time, so instead I've enabled incendiary damage for everything. Give it a try. I suspect it needs the incendiary damage bonus to be reduced, but I didn't want to nerf grenades/rockets, and this is as much a proof of concept as anything.

I think Jorgen's asking why weapons.xml affects ground combat as well, but only when it comes to clip size. It's something that even the devs have forgotten about from time to time, like that experimental version that had 1 "ammo" medkits by accident. I know that damage, accuracy* and range don't need to be synced up, but I can't say for sure that weight etc. don't have an impact. As to why it's this way? I'm guessing it's a scar from Xenonaut's development history. I can't think of any other reason. *This seems to be a meaningless field anyway, since the accuracy's all in the aim mode of the gun. Right?

What I'm thinking of doing is bumping up the Androns to scary stats, but lowering their numbers. So hearing that I've not overshot is nice to know. 1) I assumed this had been done by devs already! Yeah, I'll sort that out. 2) Good point, for some reason I've only tweaked kinetic/energy armour. 3) Splash damage is still something like 25% of a direct hit, and I don't think I can change that. I'm sure it used to be 50% or so, which is much better to work with. I might increase the incendiary bonus against terrain from x4 to something like x6 and work from there. 4) Another good point, although mini-nukes are fun. I'll probably lower it to radius 3 instead of 5 and see how that feels. Given the damage buff I've given to rifles, I want to be careful that shotguns don't get left in the dust. Shotguns had the worst accuracy/AP and I don't think that's justified given that they're naff outside of range. I'll increase pellet count (changing damage accordingly) and lower reaction mod like you suggest. I've given shotties six pellets in the past and there's no doubt it looks cooler than three.

Yeah, you're right. One medbay gives eight beds. I don't think I've ever had that amount of wounded in a base before. Without any beds, healing's noticeably slower: I shot a soldier in the leg with a pistol, taking him down to 72% hp, and with no beds it'll take him ten days to recover. General Stinky's orders are arbritary and cruel, but they're also informative.

Yeah, I can't find anything either. Bummer. I've never looked at buildings.xml before, but it turns out to be cost and display data. I guess both the rate of recovery and the medbay boost are hardcoded, at least for the time being. Sorry to get your hopes up like that. I've had soldiers taken down to below 10hp in the first mission before, which takes something like half a month to heal up. It probably should take longer, for the same reason that airplanes take ages to repair: either you need to splash out on better facilities, or you need to get more manpower, or you try and make do with what you've got and spend your money on other things. I build my medbay at the start and then never think about it again. I don't even know if the medbay effect stacks, because why would you build more than one in their current state anyway?

You're making me blush. (;

The C4 one was around in the previous build, in all fairness. Not that that's any consolation. I've gotta say, I'm a convert to C4. What with aliens squatting in houses now, slapping down a mini nuke and blasting the house, squatter and all, to kingdom come is really satisfying. The last time I had this feeling was, ooo, Syndicate Wars?

Couldn't you get the same effect from nerfing medical centres? Right now soldiers fully heal up between waves. And medical centres are available from day one. I guess nerfing the capacity of medical centres or their healing effect might do the job, at least until research later on improves them.

If it existed, I'd expect to see something like this in config.xml or gameconfig.xml. I've skimmed both of them, but I don't see it there. Sorry.

The morale mechanics are moddable. They're in moraleconfig_gc.xml, in the Xenonauts\assets\ dir, and you can open it with the text editor of your choice. The system we have right now takes into account losses (both soldier and vehicles), leadership, safety in numbers, how wounded a soldier is, and more besides. I see from the file that there's a morale penalty for each rookie in the squad, so that's the anti-rookie measure you're asking for. All you need to do is increase the penalty, if you think it's too soft currently. It looks like it caps out at two rookies? I haven't played with morale myself, but it looks pretty comprehensive. Happy modding!

Welcome back! Yeah. I even get a load of crashes when doing quickbattles to test stuff: around a third of the time it'll straight-up CTD when loading the ground combat. Although that might be a different bug for all I know.

I don't like the way assault rifles are snipers' baby brother. APs aside, it feels like snipers are always better than assaults. So here's an experiment: Sniper and assault rifles have their damage values swapped, pretty much. For ballistics, sniper goes to 30 from 50, and assaults from 30 to 40. Assault rifles go from 30 range down to 18. Assault rifles' burst mode down to 35 APs from 40. The accuracy's also down a little (25 from 30), but that shouldn't affect the suppression. Assault rifles and LMGs now don't benefit from short range bonus: that's for shotguns and pistols only. Shotguns recieve an accuracy boost. They're now ~4.5 acc/AP, which gives snap shot an accuracy modifier of x1. In the humans' tongue, that means a soldier with 50 accuracy has a 50% chance to hit. Ballistic LMGs have 40 suppression while scatterlaser/plasmacaster/MAGStorm have 64. They're the only gun to currently do this: a plasma rifle does the same suppression as a ballistic rifle. LMGs are meant to be King Suppression, but they suffer from having to reload more frequently as they upgrade. This change gives a reason to upgrade to at least laser LMGs. Shotguns and pistols now get armour penetration as they go up the weapon tiers, but the armour pen's always lower than the rifles/LMG of the same tier. The reasoning behind the changes is this: assault rifles are now the best gun in the ~10-18ish range, while snipers are better for ~20ish-30. LMGs are the best for suppressing, especially after an upgrade. Shotguns should still be best in close combat, since assault rifle burst is always inaccurate. Also included are some more armour changes. Caesans start to get armour around soldier level, and Androns get a TON of armour. It might be too much. Hopefully it puts the pressure on upgrading weapons, though. This is for v21 experimental 2 and affects the aiprops.xml and weapons_gc.xml files. It includes yesterday's primitive-but-aggressive AI, but not the alien variety mod.

Welcome aboard! Save files are located in the Xenonauts folder in My Documents (or just Documents, whatever is it that your Windows calls it). There'll be a bunch of .sav files in there, named by date of save creation, and not by what you call it in game.

This one is kinda stating the obvious, but I've never let that stop me before. Tech. Info Xenonauts v21, experimental balance patch 2 Observed Behavior The AI doesn't plan what to do after taking a shot. For example, imagine the player is on a desert map. An alien pops out from behind a mesa and sees Xenonauts. The alien will fire if MinimumAccuracy is met, but won't save enough APs to get back behind the mesa and to safety. He might be lucky and have the APs, he might not. If he doesn't, the Xenonauts will easily shoot him to pieces. I think we've all seen an alien shoot a couple of times, move two or three squares to the side, and then end their turn short of cover/walls. Desired Behavior (Optional) Before taking a shot, aliens should consider if they'll have APs enough to get out of enemy LoS/into cover. It should be race specific as it helps distinguish races: an Andron doesn't hide behind rocks, but Caesans don't want to leave themselves exposed.

Jackal won't be too bad since I can leave the north-facing sprites alone (hopefully). Basic armour's definately the most work. Still, I've got all combat shield and ballistic tier weapons done. Half of laser guns, and plasma, MAG and all of assault shields to go. There's also the question of little used weapons (AK-47, aliens weapons); I'll probably finish the common weapons, release, and then finish those off while waiting for any bugs to become apparent. I took a break from it today and mucked around with AI. Here's the mod of the day, which I'm playing with right now. Sebs' behaviour is simple: they should come at you and stop for nothing. Caes, on the other hand, will group up if you don't head out and get them. The mod doesn't include any of the stuff from the alien variety mod, this one's purely aimed at AI. The files modified are aiprops.xml and the contents of ufocontents. I started by setting all the pathing weights to zero and starting from there, so it lacks sophistication right now. Hopefully you'll find it less passive, though!

The game would be balanced around not having every funding nation, so I'm not too concerned about losing some. It makes the geoscape more tense. I do agree about the two strikes system. It's not as intuitive as the current system and I'm not really sure it solves any problems. The reason why not many funding nation go red is because of the UFO spawning system and lack of alien strategy, not because the current system is flawed. Maybe if there was a chance each game for most of the waves to focus on one area of the map, some countries would be turned, since the player happened to set up on the other side of the planet.

It's a different set of armour to the normal basic one which you select back at base. Unfortunately it's not automatic, the player has to manually select the black units. It's going to be trickier to do the manufactured ones since white and black versions of armour will have to be manufactured separately. Hopefully, I can put in an engineering project that lets you trade one type of (say) Jackal for the other.

They could make new "alien spotted" icons for it. Have the white elements turn black if the alien can see the selected Xenonaut. So there'd be four icons instead of the current two.

Would anyone be interested in having black units be in the game? I've not finished basic armour yet by a long shot, but I'm hoping to be done in around a week's time. Here's a preview if you're interested, complete with grenade throwing bug (whoops): [video=youtube_share;ArVosVjJE10]

Nah, 1 point of RES = 1 point of HP and that's yer lot. Armour's entirely equipment based (basic armour has none).

Seconding this, particularly the first two. I'm also gonna repeat that since Xenonauts can't get the aliens' psychic powers, there's no reason Caesans can't have some powers from the get go. The AI seems to prefer taking a shot to using powers anyway, which is great since psychic powers become a non-lethal counter to Xenonaut smoke spam. Obviously stuff like Mind Control shouldn't be present in light scout battles, but Fear works fine there. Aaron: I don't know if you're talking from a coding perspective or a gameplay one when it comes to Hallucination. If it's the former, well, I can't argue on that point since I have no idea. If it's the latter, I'll get down on my knees and ask you to reconsider. Every response I read regarding Hal. in action was really positive, on the lines of, "What just happened - whoa!"

Did anyone try that slapped-together mod I put in the thread? I've never really thought about it, but I don't know if aliens have the same LOS decay that Xenonauts do at night. I do know that aliens keep their normal visual range, but that's a simple variable in config.xml. If aliens don't have night-time LOS decay, you can mod a kludge. You could set the aliens' engagement ranges in aiprops.xml to their visual range. Last I checked, aliens will not fire if they are outside the engagement range (set to 25 by default right now). To make it even, you'd lower the ranges on the Xenonauts' guns in weapons_gc.xml. Just remember that weapons firing outside of range cause zero suppression, so I'd set the LMG's range to 18, minimum. Edit: lowering the engagement range causes quickbattle to crash for me. I'm verifying my files to make sure it's not a problem on my end. Edit 2: okay, verifying seemed to fix the crash, and engagement range DOES still work like that.

Try this. It's based on this post by Jeon. Extract it into your Xenonauts folder - you'll know you've done it right if it asks you to overwrite config.xml.