Ol' Stinky

It's made a huge difference for me. The summary comes up pretty much instantly after battle now.

So THAT'S why I "blocked" a shot that came from behind. I did wonder. (:

Wait, hang on. Config.xml has this line in: <Shield angle="180" angle2="90" stoppingChance="100" stoppingChance2="60" /> Shouldn't stoppingChance be 60 and stoppingChance2 be 100? I might be being daft 'cos I'm tired. Roll on the weekend.

I'll try that, thanks.

Enjoy your holiday! You've earnt it, commander.

Would it be improved for you if it was quicker to get back into the skies, or is it the sheer number of big UFOs that make you reach for the little red cross? I'm guessing it's the latter but I thought I'd ask. Edit: whoops, this is in reply to Skitso.

I meant aliens that spawn with the heavy plasma rifles (the ones that have scattershot) and snipers...or don't spawn, in Dranak's case. Sorry for any confusion. If anyone wants to try night time LoS rules all the time, then I slapped this mod together in five minutes. It changes config.xml. Install by extracting into your Xenonauts dir, you'll know it's going in the right place if it asks if you want to overwrite the default config.xml. Every mission is a night time mission. Every mission has the usual daytime visual range for units (so soldiers, Sebs, Caes, Androns see for 18 tiles, Wraiths 19, Harridans 20). I couldn't see a way to disable flares - no NightTimeWeapon="1" in weapons_gc.xml that I could see, for example - so I set their light radius to 0, and they only last one turn. I'm not sure this actually renders them useless, so all I can ask is that you don't use them. They might break the spirit of the mod for you, and what's the point in that? While you can shoot at the tile an alien's on, if you can't see him there's an accuracy penalty. You're better off having them in LoS if you want the kill. Jeon says that there's something odd with how that's implemented, so if you're netting a lot of out-of-LoS kills, try opening up config.xml in a text editor. Jeon's advice would be to alter <NoTargetPenalty>0.75</NoTargetPenalty> to 0.25. That spooky night time music gets heard more often.

Is anyone else seeing long load times when it comes to the ground combat summary screen? Sometimes it's fine and takes hardly any time, sometimes I have to wait a couple of minutes, and sometimes I have to wait ~7 minutes.

Aerial terror sites would be fine if there were non-interceptor heavy strategies. If you could go for a ground combat heavy strat, or a research heavy strat, or an engineer heavy strat, it'd be a way to punish a skeletal air force.

If you're only encountering aliens with plasma rifles (as opposed to the snipers or the shotgun type ones), it's something I ran into back in the buggy v20 balance patch. I haven't seen it since, though. Guard support units are meant to carry those guns but they didn't. You can try going to aiprops.xml and changing the support ranks to have alien plasma rifles instead. I can't give any guarantees this will work, I'm afraid, and probably not for a save where the aliens are already unarmed.

A flashbang failed to suppress a Caesan guard, and the reaction shot went through his shield, even though he was facing the alien. This all happened outside, so no UFO tomfoolery. In case takes you to the start of the video, skip ahead to ~6:20.

Yeah, there were some problems with industrial maps. I've updated Community Map Pack 3, please reinstall and overwrite the existing industrial maps. Remember that for the com packs you install to ...\Xenonauts\assets\.

I agree about having a prep screen for base attacks. It'd be infuriating to a new player if their base got completely wiped out so unexpectedly. How about this compromise: aliens will make a bee-line for your base on easy and normal, even generating an alert of some kind, but on veteran and insane the aliens are as sneaky as they are currently.

I think this is a good idea, especially merging the event generating alien mission ("Farmers report that 3 fat kids were literally shot into orbit by aliens", "Oh no, dead fish!", etc.) with the alien mission where they silently land somewhere, and do dark and secret things. Maybe chinooks could have some sort of "rearming" mechanic to keep them grounded for a bit when they get back to base. The idea here is to encourage a two chinook start, as opposed to the current "interceptors or bust" strategy. If slower chinooks are meant to be doing this, it's not right now. I admit that might be down to not needing more alloys/alenium, though, so I don't have to run as many ground missions anyway. I can only speak for myself, but I'd really rather have chinooks with some sort of downtime than painfully slow ones. I'm not sure the bonus secondary resources thing for catching a landed UFO's all that good an idea when resources are still being sorted out. If that has to go for Max's idea, so be it.

I'd say it's a bad idea because it's overkill. The money balance of v20's fine, where you can get ~x2 cash for scout combats, but more than that for bigger, more interesting ships. All that really needs to be done is to give aliens another plasma cell or increase the value of ship components or whatnot to make up for the fewer numbers. The relations boost should continue to be significant so that a couple of unfortunate missions don't cause a snowball effect where you're better off restarting/reloading than seeing the game through. The comeback factor's what makes the OG a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it achieved this by having a broken economy, which isn't an option for Xenonauts. I don't want to be massively penalised for civilians dying while I can't do much to stop it. I didn't like it in the OG until I realized the negative score from civ loss wasn't a big problem, at which point I was perfectly happy to butcher innocent people. (I'm a bit of a jerk.) Changing this for Xenonauts will be frustrating and make ground combat feel less rewarding, since I am being punished for something I can't control. How about a manufacturing project that costs alien alloys, where you can speed up the recovery/repair rate.

Shields absorb any excess damage, so a shield with 1hp will fully absorb a 999 damage shot before breaking. Shieldbearers usually take some damage from explosions though, so that's weird. In the past I've had shield guys block but take damage from alien plasma canons and the like, I'm sure.

They can attack when the chinook's out, but I had a few wounded soldiers back at base, so I don't know if it skips to base destruction or not. I don't see why it wouldn't. I'm thinking base attacks should probably be telegraphed because they can end the game in one fight. Let's face it, no-one's probably going to recover from a destroyed main base. Then again, I might be biased because it happened to me. ):

I won't deny that there's a huge focus on air control. I don't think that's the fault of airstrikes, though, I think that's a symptom of other problems. For example, research. Air combat upgrades tend to be just that, upgrades. Look at the first couple of months: what techs will you get done ASAP, every game? I'm going to say high speed interceptors, alenium, and alenium-based weapons. HSI is vital for foxtrots, alenium-based weapons help air combat at least as much as ground combat. All other research topics are arguably sidegrades, fluff, or researched solely because they're a prerequisite to something important later on. I can do corvettes in basic armour and ballistics, so what's the rush to upgrade my squads' equipment? A 100hp medkit's great, but I don't really need it, since most soldiers tend to be wiped out well before a medkit's used up. The corsair's the first air related research that doesn't make me go "hell yeah!", I'd say, unless I'm forgetting one.

Nerfing airstrikes isn't really a fix to the problem, which is that there's not enough incentive to do a ground mission. The real way to deal with this is to make secondary resources - which you get none of by airstriking - valuable throughout the game. People are never going to agree on the sweet spot for the cash rewards; back when there was no airstriking option I'd do every damn mission I could fly out to, because I'm only going to "have more money than...needed" when I have full coverage of the earth.

- To have the chinook face the way you want it, you place the correct version of it - you'll see chinooks for NE, NW, SE and SW. Use the level viewer if you want to see how they look on the map, just note that they'll only appear on the level viewer if you have the spawn/target layers clicked. - In the quickbattle the amount of aliens that spawn depends entirely on what you put in the .xml. In the game proper, it's defined in the Xenonauts\ufocontents\ bunch of .xmls; you don't need to do anything to get that part of it working right, it'll place the normal amount of enemies inside and outside the UFO. As long as you have enough enemy spawns you're good to go. If you don't place enough, then enemies will be spawned in random places. You don't want that since they could spawn on a prop and get stuck. I'd put down a minimum of 15 red crosses. - As far as I know, there's no way to set up a map playlist. - Probably not. Xenonauts is changing rapidly. - I'd check out the mod section, but as I said, Xenonauts's development is going at a fine pace. Mod makers will wait for the dust to settle before setting up shop.

I think it's inevitable that more emphasis will be placed on ground missions. We've had the devs say that secondary resources aren't being appreciated and they don't like that (as is right and proper). Once alloys and alenium feel more important throughout the game, people will hopefully be thinking, "I have enough/will get enough alloys from this landing ship, I don't need anything from that light scout: I can airstrike it safely". Right now, I can safely bomb all light scouts and regular scouts after the first: there's nothing early game that requires alloys or alenium, and even for lasers I get all the alloys needed from a shooting down fighters. I'm imagining something along the lines of jackal costing only alloys to make, and lasers earlier (or an "upgraded ballistics" tier) but costing more alloys and less cash, along with tougher than guard level aliens for corvettes. You'll want to do enough ground combat on light scout and scout missions to upgrade your troops in time for corvettes, but it'll cost alloys instead of/much more than money, so that base expansion isn't horribly slow. Airstriking all the scouts would make corvette ground combat extremely tough, along the lines of an unexpectedly early Muton mission in the OG. You wouldn't want to fight Mutons with the starting weapons.

Yeah, when it happened, the shot hit the tile every time. I figured it might be a bug to do with the new "shoot a tile beyond the target and be rewarded with hitting the alien's feet instead, bwah ha ha haaa" feature going wrong at close range, but I'm guessing you were at range. I'm afraid all I can do is reassure you that yes, there is a gremlin on the wing of the plane and yes, he's gonna crash the plane into a squad of your soldiers. I can see the little blighter too.

Yeah, it'll load a random map if something's wrong. You're meant to put in the file name without the extension. So here's levelsetup_quickbattle.xml for one of my farm maps: <?xml version="1.0" ?><LevelSetup> <Map tileset="farm" mapname="Farm_FarmStink1_Lightscout_Stinky" /> <SpawnTarget dropshipType="airplane.human.chinook" ufoType="airplane.alien.lightscout" ufoLandStatus="landed" /> <Aliens> <Alien name="AI 1" race="Caesan" rank="NonCombatant" script="defensive" isKilled="0"/> <Alien name="AI 2" race="Caesan" rank="NonCombatant" script="defensive" isKilled="0" /> <Alien name="AI 3" race="Caesan" rank="NonCombatant" script="aggressive" isKilled="0" /> <Alien name="AI 4" race="Caesan" rank="NonCombatant" script="aggressive" isKilled="0" /><!-- <Alien name="AI 5" race="Wraith" rank="Soldier" script="offensive" /> <Alien name="AI 6" race="Wraith" rank="Soldier" script="offensive" /> <!-- <Alien name="AI 7" race="Lightdrone" rank="Lightdrone" script="defensive" /> <Alien name="AI 8" race="Lightdrone" rank="Lightdrone" script="offensive" /> <Alien name="AI 9" race="Lightdrone" rank="Lightdrone" script="offensive" /> <Alien name="AI 10" race="Caesan" rank="Soldier" script="offensive" /> <Alien name="Civilian 1" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="civilian" /> <Alien name="Civilian 2" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="civilian" /> <Alien name="Civilian 3" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="civilian" /> <Alien name="Civilian 4" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="civilian" /> <Alien name="Friendly AI 1" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="friendlyai" /> <Alien name="Friendly AI 2" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="friendlyai" /> <Alien name="Friendly AI 3" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="friendlyai" /> <Alien name="Friendly AI 4" race="Human" rank="NonCombatant" script="friendlyai" />--> </Aliens></LevelSetup> Here's what the map looks like at deployment. If you still can't load the map even with all of this, check your map to see that you have: a) appropiate spawns for the player and that they match up with the quickbattle file, i.e. make sure there's a chinook on the map if you state dropshipType="airplane.human.chinook"; b) appropiate UFO spawns, both landed and crashed, for the aliens. i.e. make sure there's both landed and crashed lightscout types on your map if you use ufoType="airplane.alien.lightscout" without defining ufoLandStatus. If you're completely stumped, copy and paste the contents of your levelsetup_quickbattle.xml and Farm_FarmBartec1_LightScout_Bartec.xml (it'll be in Xenonauts\assets\maps\farm\ ). I'll have a look over them either tonight or when I'm supposed to be doing work tomorrow.

They were the ones that came with floaters, right? I didn't even remember them until you brought them up. I never thought "oh no! reapers are here, everyone, back in the ship!", which is a crime for a 2x2 unit.

I don't think it affected the alien, but I have had a soldier miss something like four pistol shots at point blank once. It was displayed as having a 95% chance to hit. That's it, though, and both units were inside the same room in a ufo. You're targetting the alien and not the tile(s) behind him, right?