Endominus

Of the triad of specialist weapons, I feel pretty confident in claiming that the HEVY is the least useful and easily applicable at the moment. Its feels like it's intended to be a parallel to the XCOM rocket launcher, but lacks the reliability and lethality that made that weapon so effective. Which is a shame, because it's still a lot of fun to use. I thought it might be worthwhile to collect some thoughts about the weapon and suggestions for possible changes that might give it more utility. Additional ammo types, or a split of functionality. There is one function that isn't really captured in the current specialist weapons; armor shred. Splitting the current explosive HEVY ammo into two types (a wide AoE blast that does little against armor, but maybe has decent suppression values, and a smaller blast with less raw damage, but great armor penetration/shred and terrain destruction) makes the choice of ammo a more difficult one. Maybe add a sabot round without an AoE but is more accurate with great damage. There is a little crossover with the LMG and it's suppression role, and the sniper and its penetrative damage role, so it's worth considering de-emphasizing those aspects in this weapon. Instead of magazines, have the ammo be loaded one by one, or at least lower the cost of swapping. This would encourage use of different ammo types a lot more. Burst fire mode, like the MARS rocket launcher. This goes the opposite direction; I recently found out how damned fun this can be, opening a terror mission with my Skyranger pointed at an open park full of Sebillians. A couple turns later, I turned the place in Verdun. Having this as a panic button, where everything in a direction just needs to die, could be a fun addition to the weapon. Might be useful to increase the magazine capacity if this is done. A slight arc. This is a more involved change, I understand, and probably isn't appropriate for launching the game soon, but I thought I should mention it. Having the projectiles arc a little, so that a miss isn't going to just sail off to the edge of the map almost every time but is probably going to hit something nearby would make the weapon feel more reliable. (actually,thinking it over, this can sort of be simulated by jury-rigging the grenade scatter code into the weapon, assuming that's possible, then modifying the scatter tile result likelihood with a function to stretch it along the path of travel - which probably also makes sense for thrown grenades too. I don't know if the weapon scatter code was made to be modular in that way, however) Mortar mode. This is another big change, so I'm not really hopeful about it despite how cool it would be. Having the weapon basically be able to function as an extremely powerful grenade throwing arm, launching its ammo over intervening terrain and guaranteeing a hit against the ground somewhere, would make it extremely valuable. And also, probably, too powerful. That can be mitigated somewhat if this is made to be very inaccurate (perhaps the projectile would always scatter 1-3 tiles?), but I think this would make the thing very difficult to balance because it allows the player to have a weapon that's perfectly safe to use in many situations, which runs contrary to the design philosophy of most other weapons, I feel. Ammo should lower in weight as it's used. Don't know how complex this change would be in practice. I'm guessing it wouldn't work with how you've programmed the game's item lookups, or at least it would be more complex than just adding another variable, like current_ammo and max_ammo, but for weight instead. It just feels bad to have a 1/4 of an ammo rack in a soldier's inventory and have it weigh the full amount. Not a major issue, just a niggle. Remove damage dropoff at long range from the explosive HEVY projectiles. Just seems weird, considering the damage comes from the explosive charge. Long range play is discouraged with this weapon anyway due to limited ammo and inherent inaccuracy. Any other thoughts on how to enhance the HEVY? Ideally, ones that would require minimal changes to code - it wouldn't be prudent to make large changes so near release. Or maybe I'm all wrong about the HEVY and it's actually aces; I can't claim to have the greatest insight into the game's balance, given how I play.

Muchos gracias, Chris.

The form to preorder at http://www.xenonauts.com/xsolla/ was still working as of three hours ago. Since I just bought the game, will I not receive an order form, or is there someone on their side I should contact with my information to manually specify my choice (given that I prefer GOG to Steam and so the default doesn't work for me)?

I was just suggesting something for the tonal shift it would cause, not the gameplay shift. I don't imagine that this should take preference over balancing Reapers in general, and understand the difficulties in implementing complex behavior patterns this late in the development cycle. Don't get me wrong; it's doubtful that my ideas are in any way implementable in the game in its current state, but I like to think about the design of games and this alteration I believe would be interesting as a thought experiment. Although... Imagine the scenario you described; a soldier is infected, but you kill the last alien on the map and everything is fine. The transport returns to base, and a few hours later the base is assaulted! That soldier that got infected is gone! All your scientists and engineers and janitorial staff are running around and something keeps turning them to reapers! That's basically a horror movie plot. You could go even more extreme (and this is totally in the realm of fantasy - infinite development time and resources to test out drastic gameplay changes); any given terror mission starts out with at most only one Reaper but each civilian on the map has a chance to be infected when the mission starts. Although that would raise the issue of what happens when you miss one of them by the time the mission ends; going with the darker theme, we could assume that everyone who witnessed the event was "silenced" to prevent the spread of panic, but that might be a bit too grim. And not only do gibbed zombies become Reapers, you know how sometimes your "casualties" in ground combat remain alive with 2% health at the end of a mission? One of my best agents got zombified, gibbed, gibbed again, and survived the mission. I believe even her corpse was gibbed. She got renamed Kane afterwards, in honor of her alien parasite.

So, this suggestion might make thegame a bit darker, but might result in more interesting decisions in Terror Missions; what if Reaper attacks didn't cause instant zombification, but the target turned in 3-5 turns? You see a civilian running toward your lines, you know there are Reapers around; do you take the risk of letting him live? Is the score he gets you worth the risk of having a possible reaper running around? Plus, imagine the look on a new player's face as the civvie he's trying to shield explodes into a zombie, which all his soldiers shoot to reveal a reaper, which then takes out half his squad. I suppose that's a reason not to do it that way, in addition to the added complexity of reaper/alien AI (to make them pick their targets more judiciously). Although, this would provide a possible upgrade for the medical kit (perhaps after performing an investigation on a live Reaper) - the Reaper Egg Extraction Kit. Then again, that might neuter the fear that they engender in players.

I encountered the same issue. I had previously attacked the corvette with an interceptor wing, it had sustained heavy damage, and my laser battery did, in fact, hit it. If it makes any difference, my base had two laser defense systems in place, but only one appeared on the message.

Honestly, I love pistols, particularly when I can stop using terrible ballistic weapons. The laser pistol is the first laser weapon I develop, followed by the carbine, because my commandos are just unstoppable killing machines (in my stable playthrough, my initial commando had a kill-to-mission ratio of 2:1, and had been on almost every mission). Mostly, that's a result of them being really liberal with grenades, but the utility of a one-handed sidearm is fantastic. I only expect this to get better once I really begin using shields in my gatecrashing maneuvers. On balancing assault rifles... While I agree that they do little damage, I honestly find no fault with their accuracy (except at extremely close ranges, where everyone seems to be incompetent. I find that they give me much more mobility than sniper rifles; I can actually move around with my riflemen without feeling like I've lost every semblance of accuracy. Starting the TU reduction from 1kG would be very interesting. I would definitely have to rethink how I outfit my dudes. But wouldn't it make strength a useless stat? Unless it worked purely as mitigation (so that x kG of weight reduce your TUs by x*(100/(100+STR)), I suppose.

Didn't notice it GizmoGomez, thanks for the heads up. I'll make sure to use it in the future. Yeah, that workaround totally works for me SnowiiFrog. Hopefully this'll be fixed for good by the next release.

The hidden movement screen doesn't go away when the soldier can clearly see the filthy alien scum squirming around. I apparently don't have permission to attach the saved game to this post, so I can (hopefully) PM it or email it to an interested party. As a side note, I did have the transparent hidden movement screen workaround in place before the update, but I never tested it out. It didn't work in the new version, so I replaced the transparent image with the backup of the original, but that didn't change anything.

Hmm... I'm still getting the Hidden Movement screen bug. The screen just isn't going away. Guess I'll start a thread on the bug report forums about it.

I just append a 'k' to the casualty number to make it look more realistic. I mean, that's how war casualties are estimated, and it gives a much better idea of why these countries are so pissed at you all the time. I also like to imagine that the Xenonauts are just one of any number of organizations vying for resources to defeat the alien presence; they just happen to be the one that "wins" in the end. That would explain their relatively tiny budget, and why they're not instantly being swarmed by the aliens as soon as there are warships in the atmosphere. There are bigger fish to fry, security through anonymity, all that jazz.

I don't know what you're talking about. Alien entertainment was ALWAYS worth it. How else would I know who's clone-baby tried to kill Zorblax in "Days of Our Galaxies"?

I'm not entirely sure if this is a bug or a design feature. If it is the latter, I would consider rethinking it. One of my soldiers was wounded in combat (not just injured, but completely unable to be selected in the equipment screen type of wounded) while wearing jackal armor. When I went to the equipment screen to equip the armor to a different Xenonaut, it was missing. When the soldier recovered, she was still wearing the armor (I would have thought that those unable to use it would give it up). She had also had her weapons de-equipped. I don't know what happens to the weapons; they may be returned to the stockpile, they may be gone for good. Luckily, it was just a shotgun.

Presumably not. The original post says that it will be "updated as things progress," and given that Desura does not seem to report an update, I think we may have a while to wait yet.

The use of a finite state machine does not inherently enforce strict action flow; I think in this case (with the admittance that I am obviously not privy to the central designs of the system in question and have not fully researched how it will be implemented) the states would simply be altering certain weights that the AI actor uses to evaluate his decisions. If, for example (and again, these are highly speculative ideas) the actor just witnessed two friendly agents die, he may enter a "Seek Help" state where more value is placed on running to friendly or secure locations rather than fighting back. This would not, however, entirely eliminate that option; the actor would still evaluate risk/reward (if the only enemy he can see is a clear shot and wounded, he may decide to stay and fight after all) and Gijs-Jan is probably going to implement some kind of fuzzy logic in the game just to add another layer of unpredictability or spontaneity to the AI's actions.