EisenKreutzer

I always assumed the players were suspended in some form of temporal stasis field while their opponent moved. I migt be confusing chess and the TARDIS again though. I tend to do that.

I'm baffled by this debate, actually. Would chess be better if it was real time?

Meh, I think it is a suitably simplified representation of dogfighting. It is tactically deep enough to be challenging to master, and simple enough tha we all know what is going on without having to deal with movement in three dimensions and real world physics. I like it. I would, however, absolutely adore a Terror From the Deep mod/expansion to this game. Most likely not going to happen, but I would buy the shit out of it.

I find this happens when your jet is actually targeting a different alien craft than the one in front of it. Make sure to right click on the ship you want your fighter to target.

The game is 95% done at this point, it's a little too late to suggest they redo the core gameplay.

I have finally begun to master the air combat. The trick with escorted Medium/Large ships is to have two Condors and one Fox. Immediately fly the Condors to either side of the larger ship, the escorts will target them. Make sure you have all missiles locked, you want to have full control of when they are launched. Also make sure to right-click the Foxtrot to the main ship, to make sure it doesn't fire it's torpedoes at a stray fighter. I have lost a couple of engagements that way, and it is rage-inducingly annoying. Also make sure the Fox is not hurtling forward at top speed. Save the afterburner fuel in case it needs to make a run for it. As your planes get close to the enemy firing arcs, pause the game and start double-tapping the space bar to quickly unpause and pause the game. Make sure you are zoomed in for this. As soon as the fighters start firing, identify which plane is under fire and dodge immediately. Make a course correction shortly after dodging to make sure your planes are facing the fighters, or you might lose your bead on them and lose valuable milliseconds (I am not kidding). Don't fire your missiles at the escorts, you can take them down with your nose guns (get laser gatling guns as soon as possible btw, or you won't be able to take out heavy fighters this way). Save your missiles for the main ship. Keep doing this, double-tapping space bar and watching carefully for enemy fire, until your Condors are within gun range, and let them take out the fighters using the same pause and unpause technique. By now the Fox should be in range to fire it's torpedoes. What does the Fox say? Cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-CHOW! As soon as the Fox has launched it's torpedoes, afterburner it out of there or it is toast. Let the Condors close with the ship, launch missiles and take it out with the nose guns. The most important thing is to never let the game run for more than an instant when anything is within firing range of anything else, dodge liberally, manage your missiles and give move orders to your planes to keep them flying straight towardds their target. Using this technique my Condors almost never take damage, and I rarely lose a plane. And when I do, I scream at the monitor. Because nothing makes me angrier than failing at something I know how to do, because I didn't do it well enough.

Ìn my current playthrough, which is like my fourth or fifth attempt at mastering Xenonauts, I started experimenting with different approaches to base design. Instead of building an interceptor and chinook-base in month two, I built a base purely for manufacturing equipment, staffed with as many Engineers as I could afford (as well as Workshops and Living Quarters. I'm in December now and it's actually working pretty good. I managed to get a full squads worth of laser weapons and Wolf armor much faster than I have previously been able to (not that it did me any good, Veteran difficulty is throwing all but impossible terror missions at me with alarming frequency.) I placed my first base in Israel like I always do, and stuck the second on Cuba just for fun. Have any of you guys done things differently to mix things up? (This might have been a common tactic in the orginal XCOM games, I don't actually know since I never played them growing up)

nevermind, I'm an idiot.

More importantly, why would the aliens interpret red and green the same way we do? It's all cultural for us, there is nothing about the color green that carries any sort of message in and of itself. An alien species might understand those colors very differently from us, if they even use color to signify any kind of meaning. Perhaps an oval shape means "go" to them, while a square means "stop?"

Those droopy-faced soldiers is actually one of the reasons I like Xenonauts. I am in total love with the visual style of this game. The soldiers look so weary, like the war is slowly eating away at them. It's very fitting IMO.

My emphasis. Thats not entirely true. Due to how the AI works, stun grenades can be used to flush enemies out of cover. In fact, they are much better at this than they are at stunning aliens, which speaks volumes about how useless stun grenades are in the current build.

I miss this feature from the OG.

I had this happen to me once. I managed to save scum until I only lost two soldiers, an acceptable loss. Sending fighters to escort your dropship is a must later in the game, so make sure you have fiter coverage of the majority of the world.

What if countries gave us requests for equipment, in return for money or personell, like in The new XCOM? That would give us a reason to keep producing equipment and keepour engineers busy.

The smoke is there to confound enemies. Layering an area with smoke and shooting bursts through it isn't unbalancing IMO, it's just another tool in our arsenal. The amount of ammo you will use and the fact that your chances of hitting any aliens will be fairly low is a good trade off over the benefits you recieve.

I find anything other than smoke and possibly flashbangs completely useless with the current range. In the OG you could throw grenades pretty far, and they didn't make guns obsolete.

Fair enough, but I have no problem with it as a game mechanic. As I said, it is a legitimate tactic.

I thi k it makes sense for smoke to block Line of Sight, but not Line of Fire. Being able to blind fire into smoke is a legitimate tactic. Plus, it's smoke, not a wall. It shouldn't stop bullets.

I think alien equipment you pick up never counts towards your money total at the end of a mission, instead showing up in the soldiers inventory. It did in my last playthroug atleast.

I like to get creative. My last playthrough, I chose names from the Wizard of Oz. My primary base was Kansas HQ. The Chinooks were Dorothy 1, Dorothy 2 etc. Condors were called Tin Man 1, 2 etc. Foxtrots were Scarecrow 1, 2 etc. And my second base i christened Emerald City. Oh, and the Hunter Scout car was called Toto.

I am in total love with Xenonauts, and I'm looking forward to seeing your next project. Seeing that you would be willing to return to the genre (if not the Xenonauts universe) in the future is also very cool.

I have encounters this bug as well.

I found one a few days ago, not sure if it is reproducible: I had no laser rifles in storage, and one of my soldiers had an equipped laser rifle with two or three rounds missing. I unequipped the rifle with the missing rounds and re-equipped it thinking it would return reloaded to the soldiers inventory. It did, but afterwards there was a new laser rifle in storage where previously there had been none, ready to be equipped on another soldier.

There sort of is a launcher though, with the stun rockets for the rocket launcher. But I haven't had much success with them either. Theyre good for launching stun smoke into small scouts, but thats just about it.