lemm

I don't think you need to make the Condor or the Mig indestructable. Given their current prices, if you're losing Condors or MiGs at a rate that you're actually put out of the game in the first couple of months, then I think you need to rethink your air battle tactics.

I noticed that the projected funding amount starts going down when I move my mouse around the screen. If I don't move my mouse, then it doesn't decrease.

I think the problem only occurs when you fast-forward into fighter squadrons that have 3 ships. You can reliably see the bug in this save game when you select Squadron 1, target UFO-62, and then fast forward into battle. http://www.filedropper.com/2013-06-07180837

(I had several points to make, so I figure another post was warranted) Here is a suggestion for a mechanic that appears on Hard and Insane modes. The aliens set up a defensive perimeter in the airspace that surrounds the a terror site. This is visualized by a red circle around a terror site, perhaps with an alien squadron marker that constantly positions itself between your dropship and the terror site (but remains bound to the circular path). To engage the terror site, you need to break through the perimeter by first sending in a fighter squad that either defeats the aliens, or makes them retreat. If you're successful, then the red circle disappears and you can send your dropship in. On hard mode, there is only ever one perimeter, but there might be a heavy fighter or three. On insane mode, there may be two, even three or sometimes four perimeters (concentric circles) with weaker ships in the innermost circles. This actually forces you to take out the alien craft with your guns. This point is worth emboldening, because you don't just have to be marginally more efficient at something, but you actually are forced to do it the hard way rather than the easy way. ========================================================================= Responding to other suggestions in this thread: I don't like it when games let you tailor the variables in game. It's great to have that capability in the XML files, but having 20 different options menus just makes the game look like an experiment rather than a game. It's something more suited for "OpenXYZ" revivals. I disagree with the suggestion of only modifying one variable. You should modify many variables or else the difficulty increase feels "cheap." I don't like the idea of hiding information at higher difficulties. XCOM (along with other turn based strategies) is really just a fancy board game that requires a computer to play. All important information (i.e., chance to hit, TU requirements,etc) should be clearly computed and displayed in some fashion, and making the player get a feel for damage calculations shouldn't be a source of difficulty. ======================================================================= And, even though you didn't want this, here's a list of geoscape things you can tweak (maybe there's something here you didn't think about): Build times are marginally longer Research times are much longer Healing times are marginally longer (with chance of permanent injury) Recruits don't gain experience quite as fast New base costs are a bit higher Radar ranges are a bit smaller Alien ships repair much quicker (i.e., fast enough to force a night mission). Alien ships have fewer dead aliens on impact Power cores are destroyed somewhat more frequently Alien fighters are far less likely to flee Xenonaut Base defense missions are far more frequent Alien bases (do we even have these in Xenonauts) appear much more frequently

If I can sum it up in one sentence: On the higher difficulties, make the game BIGGER, not just harder. Many will suggest that you should start with even less and make the aliens tougher. I disagree with that suggestion. Yeah, the game might be a little bit more tricky, but it's still the same old thing. Consider the fairy tale career in the corporate world. When you're a new employee, you have a couple of menial tasks. When you make middle management, you have a few people under your command, and so there's more to think about. When you're finally the VP in the corner office, you have the several floors of the building under your command. Your job never really became more technically demanding; it became harder because your decisions matter more and there's bigger things to worry about. Maybe not the best analogy, but the point is that the harder levels should be bigger wars, not just tougher aliens. So... Beginner mode and normal mode are the normal xenonauts game. Beginner is just a little easier. At hard mode, you start out with two bases, but you have to deal with 2x the alien fleet. The second base is just a strike base; meaning research is done at the same pace as it is at the normal difficulty, but you just have to deal with more alien incursions. And of course the aliens start to tech up a bit quicker, they're a bit tougher, and a dozen other variables are bumped one notch to the right. You get 2x the budget. At insane mode, the geoscape is radically different. You start with four bases, two with complete research facilities, two with strike only capabilities. Therefore, at the game's start, you have eight condors, two Charlies, forty men, double the research capacity (although research takes twice as long) and double the production capabilities (production is at normal game speed), and 6-8x the budget. The aliens aren't screwing around either. By the end of the second week, you see corvettes and terror attacks. By the third week, you see cruisers and your base has been attacked. There are terror sites you will just have to abandon, and you will have to try to down landing ships and corvettes by sending in multiple waves of interceptors. There are fighter squads everywhere as well; unescorted Charlies are essentially goners. In spite of all this, the research speed doesn't change, and the aliens are not that much stronger, maybe 150% of normal at most. You are being showered with money; the challenge now is trying to stay alive while you research the new technologies. I've always wanted an XCOM game where I actually had to use 8 bases. Even at superhuman difficulty in the original games, you really didn't need more than one main base and maybe a workshop/radar post. EDIT: Of course, you don't have to have program in new base types; just give the player a huge wad of cash with the expectation that he'll build several bases. If he's playing at insane he'll probably figure it out sooner rather than later.

There was a good discussion about this a while back. Basically, smoke has "range reduction" and "precision modifying" values which are somewhere in the .xml files. You can play with them as you like. There was a suggestion that smoke could also have a reaction fire suppressing effect. Personally, I thought this was a great idea as it lets you use the smoke as cover to move across an open area or to peek forward, but it doesn't make you invisible or invincible in the middle of the battle field.

The aliens seem to be a lot more docile after hotfix 3. I'm not receiving nearly as much reaction fire by creeping into their LOS. In general, the "sentient" aliens (not the terror units) seem to run backwards into cover whenever you confront them. This is pretty good, but it gets a little boring after a while if the player is always the one initiating the engagement. Here is a couple of general behavioural suggestions based on general tactics from UFO2000. 1) Have a "scouting" behaviour. The primary goal of a scout is to move forward, in partial or total disregard for his own safety, so that other aliens (snipers) can get vision of the Xenonauts. Snipers should be prepared to find firing lanes to shoot at anything the scout sees. 2) Create a flanking behaviour. So far, I haven't seen any aliens attempt to flank me.

There is a sizable community map pack already, and I think there will be lots of mods, maybe even a couple of total conversion mods. Most of the "replayability" will come from the community.

If I select a UFO to intercept and then wait for interception at the highest time compression, I get the "double air combat" bug. Thereafter, the game crashes.

Are any of these maps going to make it in to the final game?

I can only comment on the first month of play, since the game starts crashing too frequently thereafter. All of my opinions are based on Normal difficulty. Pistols don't do much, but then again, every soldier should be carrying more than just a pistol. I agree that shotguns are useless 90% of the time, but they are the ideal room clearing device given their low TU cost and high damage at close range. I don't think they need to be changed. Assault rifles aren't that bad any more in my opinion, but perhaps the AR accuracy could be increased very slightly. I agree that grenades are OP at the moment, but I hear grenades will be addressed soon. If I had to change any of the ballistic weapons, I would start with the machine gun by making it less accurate but giving it a higher rate of fire.. maybe two 5 round bursts per turn so long as you don't walk. The rocket hunter could carry a couple more rockets I think. Two people can carry 14 rockets, while the hunter can carry four. Either that, or make rocket launcher rockets a lot heavier. I think the biggest problem is your tenth point, spotting the aliens who are beyond your sight range. I like the idea of some sort of indicator that shows up at the beginning of your turn and tells you the general area from which the shot came. If you're able to spot a civilian defense unit, perhaps they could also share their sight information with you in the form of these indicators.

I think one of the biggest issues with the smoke grenades in the original XCOM is that they were far too powerful. The smoke cloud acted like a shroud of invulnerability. You could just move out in to the middle of the field, drop a smoke grenade with 2 TU remaining, and be practically undetectable. For this reason, I like the idea of having smoke reduce the accuracy or probability of reaction fire without penalizing regular fire too much. It gives the player one turn to move across the open and "do something," which could be either finding a better cover or scouting ahead to spot an alien beyond the visual range of his snipers. In other words, smoke grenades have to be used "tactically" to augment the initiative that you have on your turn, and not just as magical cloaks that let you advance with impunity. With respect to realism.... well the game has plasma guns and flying saucers and soldiers who can see no farther than 30 yards, I don't know how far we need to approximate reality. If you need an explanation, you could posit that the smoke makes it harder for a soldier to initially acquire a target, but once the target is spotted, the smoke then has little concealing effect. I have no idea if that has any basis in reality.

Okay, so it's not exactly combat-ready, but it's still neat nonetheless. http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/nuclear/plasma-ring-experiment-offers-new-path-for-fusion-power

The game always crashes to desktop after the entire squad is killed on a terror mission. Whether or not this is a poetic statement of some sort, I still think it should be fixed.

Cool. In XCOM and JA, I always felt like the combat was taking place at half the distance it should be. I'll have to try this out.

On the flip side, I've been able to hurl grenades halfway across the map. Xenonaut soldiers are throwing fastballs and not arcing lobs.

So this is why I never heard about the black women who served in Vietnam. They were all secretly recruited to XCom and hidden from media exposure.

Ah, this is good to know. I take it that the precision penalty affects weapon accuracy but not vision. What exactly is "range" reduction? Does that reduce the range of soldier vision, or the range of the gun? Does (3) and (20) refer to a range reduction of 3 tiles and a precision penalty of 20%? Yeah, this is sort of what was used in UFO2000 (not to mention vanilla XCOM) all of the time. The scouts (which were really cheap, throwaway units) would run through the smoke as spotters, and then snipers in the backfield would pick off any targets that they spotted. With that being said, I think smoke grenades should penalize precision to a higher degree than they penalize vision (which is more or less the case right now, although I think that the precision penalty could still be higher). I say this because it's incredibly difficult to take out an alien who is camping in the corner of an open map. They have superior vision, there's no way to flank them, and the programmers made them smart enough to reserve TUs so that they usually get the first shot off if you run at them (compared to the stupid aliens in XCOM who would waste their TUs). Anyway, if the penalty for precision is high and that for vision is low to moderate, you can have your spotter run through the cloud of smoke so that your sniper can pick off the alien from a different angle. This is illustrated below: Spotter can see the alien, but neither he can shoot the alien nor can the alien shoot one another with good accuracy. Alien can't see the sniper, who has a good shot. If the alien persists in camping, he is doomed. If I recall correctly, the smoke in XCOM didn't penalize precision, it just reduced vision, which means that this tactic would not work with XCOM smoke grenades, because the spotter would have no concealment from the reaction fire that is inevitably drawn.

I've yet to see any alien use a smoke grenade, which is odd, because smoke grenades are one of the most important pieces of equipment in XCOM. I even made a thread about it

1. Does smoke do anything yet? I was playing on the latest build today and my soldier was able to spot an alien at the edge of his sight range after TWO of his squad mates threw smoke grenades in front of him to conceal his advance. Perhaps it was lowering my hit percentage (I think it was), although I didn't see any little percentage indicators along the line of fire to indicate that this was the case. Regardless, I should not have been able to see an alien at that distance through that much smoke, at least by XCOM physics. 2. Can smoke clouds persist longer? Maybe the cloud could persist at maximum diameter for an extra turn before dispersal. 3. Can we have smoke rockets? 4. Are aliens ever going to use smoke grenades to conceal their positions? I get the feeling that the development team really doesn't appreciate the importance of smoke grenades. The very best players of UFO2000 (the one-on-one online XCOM remake that was faithful to the original game) would chuck 2 or 3, even 4 smoke grenades EACH TURN at the opening of the game so that their scouts could get flanking positions and spot for the snipers in the backfield. After two turns, half of the battlefield would be encompassed by smoke. The excessive use of smoke grenades in UFO2000 was partially based on the "scout and snipe" method that worked well in XCom, which may not be so effective in Xenonauts, but in both games it is useful to provide instant concealment in the open field. For example, aliens should automatically throw smoke grenades through the ship doors before they bust out. If they decide they need to retreat (which they seem to do a lot in this game), they should throw a smoke grenade in between their retreat path and the incoming fire paths. 5. A common rebuttal against increased sight ranges is that it would ruin the "tactical nature" of the game if soldiers could shoot all the way across the map, but I disagree. Rather, the use of smoke grenades, especially on the flat arctic maps, adds an extra degree of strategy, for players are required to generate their own concealment to advance through open fields, tundra, and deserts.

You have to stagger your missile fire so that the first missile forces an evasive role and the second missile hits on the cooldown period. Condors have guns too. It's extremely easy to defeat a light scout without using missiles at all.

Micromanaging ammunition supplies is the most boring part of the game. If you really wanted to add something like that though, I would make it so that you're only micromanaging the latest tech level. For example, once you get all of the laser weaponry researched, then your sponsor nations, impressed by your progress, agree to waive costs for all conventional weaponry.

I give a couple people rocket launchers and everyone else gets sniper rifles. The AR, pistol, and shotgun are worthless.

Current Favourites: http://koalabeast.com/ http://www.haxball.com/ Games I have enjoyed: http://curvefever.com/ http://altitudegame.com/ http://freeinfantry.org/ (Used to have a lot of players; not so much anymore) Whereas I enjoy complicated single-player games with involved storylines or intricate artwork (like XCOM or JA2), I prefer minimalism in multiplayer games. In my opinion, the draw of a multiplayer game, specifically that which pits two small teams against each other, is the creation and the execution of team strategies. You should be able to pick the game up in ten minutes so that you can focus on the team dynamic right away without having to learn a bazillion different controls or raising your character's level.

Crash sites are just appearing at arbitrary locations on the map for no reason. This seems to happen not too long after I shoot down a fighter or a scout. The game then becomes unresponsive (it doesn't crash, but I can no longer access the menus, although I can still hear clicking sounds when I click on the UI buttons).