svidangel

V18 I had a whole bunch of marauders by March, I didn't even see battleships until march due to how far back the invasion ticker was pushed, actually. Lots of carrier farming through feb gave pretty much unlimited money. If you expand quickly, Vanilla was pretty easy. Just have to beat the Dec/Jan difficulty bump. Anyway, to OP, the game isn't complete. Once you can handle battleships its pretty much over till they add more working content or you mod your game.

Ah, seems the alien will do it again, here's the save. Should shoot straight down, then go unconscious. https://www.dropbox.com/s/c9az4oercdx8zr6/2013-07-03_03.53.39.sav

Shot my guy straight down through the wall, didn't destroy any walls in the process. Pardon the terrible arrow.

I sent 3 foxtrots at a bomber/2fighter group, and got jumped from directly behind by a 3 fighter squad. However, when combat started I was directly behind the fighters. Not that I mind, but not very accurate. Seems like the game just checked that someone was behind someone else.. and assumed I would be chasing them.

It would just bring up mission launch control. No need for anything new. It just skips having to click up on "Intercept" then back down on the map. If the right mouse isn't doing anything anyway, the whole thing could be streamlined. Oh, and maybe it's just me being geriatric but it would be nice if the target area for clicking on UFOs when you want to intercept THOSE was a little bigger.

Are alien's reaction shots modified by weapon type? I just had a caesan with a sniper rifle reaction shot a guy with a pistol who's reaction stat was around 80... and I've seen this a couple other times as well. Can't be certain but I'm guessing right now there's no negative or positive modifiers for alien weapons? Or just no check?

Oh, and speaking of alien scum, please nerf farmers. They are far too effective at killing reapers, which are really my best option for training up reaction fire now that aliens are carrying sniper rifles and heavy plasma!

I was thinking the other day that I would like the right click to do pop up the intercept screen. I don't think it does anything at the moment?

Heh, LoS in night missions. http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/6143-19-2-ground-combat-Soldier-pause-when-seeing-alien

It is, after all, a core vette.

Tis true, I don't really try to save civilians at the moment. Don't exactly train up accuracy on them either, but don't go out of my way to protect them. Maybe once the civvie AI is improved I'd like there to be much more severe penalties (or just bigger bonuses to saving them) for their deaths. As it is right now, it feels like a crapshoot.

This is rapidly becoming a hot topic.

Oh, and regarding air missions and repetitiveness and the autocomplete, a nice standard feature might be that any combat you have already done before (exact same combat) and resolved, you can have an option to "choose same result." So for Foxtrot with avalanch on single fighter, I wipe that out easily, then afterwards when I run into that combat I have the additional option to autoresolve, maybe with the resolution listed in tooltip form (Foxtrot health 100% Fighter health 0%). Now later on if I have Foxtrot and two Condors all with standard weapons vs a single fighter I would have to do it again. Or if I changed weapons. If I did Foxtrot and two Condor's vs 3 fighters, and resolved it with Condor 1 80% Condor 2 100% Foxtrot 100%, I could choose that same resolution the next time, or try for a better one. Mainly it would serve to eliminate some of the repetitiveness of the minigame, which becomes a bit tiring if I have a single foxtrot or two making bombing runs on larger ships. Just reaching the edge of the screen without afterburner (which I don't want to use since refueling takes forever) can take almost a minute of staring and doing nothing. Each time.

These are frequently uninjured aliens though, and I recently had one or two survive with the 10 damage shown.

+1 for kindle

The always takes damage sounds pretty terrible, since that will leave them out of combat for a week or so at current repair times, leaving them only able to sortie at most once per wave, maybe less.

And here is the "before" save. Happens consistently, just hit next turn and poof. No UFO https://www.dropbox.com/s/34wl1z1ilfgq7fg/2013-07-02_03.35.21.sav

Another example, post invisibility. Caesan with a sniper rifle shot a civilian through the wall of the ship. Ship disappeared next turn. https://www.dropbox.com/s/j395100jp8btey7/2013-07-02_03.30.44.sav

Spose another dirty way to do it would be to sum the total cash spent plus currently owned and determine the invasion schedule from that. It would still be heavily monthly based, but the players should have "enough" resources, if not necessarily enough time, to deal with the upgraded invasion. Would end up slowing down the invasion quite a bit early on if you lose a funding country. Once you are on a roll, a country would just be a drop in the barrel.

The original option did at least "end" the game, so to speak. That alternative might make for some interesting balancing with the air combat, as certain technologies change the playing field far more noticeably there than on the ground, but it seems like it would end up training people to run a certain number of missions each month and no more, in order to find a sweet spot. I do like that there would be some way for the player to influence the invasion though. Random ideas. Maybe the, ah, "intensity" of the invasion (number of missions the aliens run) could be decoupled from the actual tech/ship size advancement. Only one of the two would actually be directly related to the player's efficiency, or maybe both but in differing ways. Or perhaps only certain types of missions affect the invasion ticker, like alien bases and terror sites. If a player manages to snag all the terror sites, they are doing fine, accelerate, but if they can't... shrug.

I guess I was wondering if the intention was to go back to a player influenced progression, or just work on nailing down the "perfect" alien invasion progression. IE where is this going? What would be useful as feedback? X classes of new ships showing up on the 1st of the month seems harsh, maybe if you waited till the 11th to 15th for the changeover that would give players time to use their funding from the end of the month effectively before getting slammed. (But seems like a fairly useless idea if we are going back to a progress based invasion at some later point) Corsairs seem a bit expensive given your income when they are first available and take forever to repair? Hiring scientists before December is probably a waste of money since you can't find tech fast enough for them to always have something to do?

Yeah, I was all for a sun or a moon icon.

Hmm, so I take it the invasion ticker controlling what craft appear at certain times has been completely removed in favor of a month by month progression. This is going to have a dramatically formulaic effect on gameplay. Get X for month 1. Get Y for month 2. Get Z for month 3. Etc. Kinda hurts replay ability from a geoscape perspective when you can set your watch to the invasion regardless of how you do as a player. Kinda hurts it hard. I also noticed a bit more this playthrough that you have to kill the large alien ships to get the tech you want to have to kill the large alien ships. Similar to alenium missiles in month two. You want them for the start of month 2, but you are unable to get them until month 2. Zzz Edit: I realize this was basically stated in the first post. Finally playing HF2 and experiencing it has been... a letdown.

Hah, yes, repair times on a corsair are stupidly high. It's not like it's a fighter plane or something.

Occasionally I will oneshot a Sebillian for... 10 damage with a grenade. Mostly its 80s to 100s, but occasionally it displays like 10-11 and they just fall over.