Waladil

A few versions ago the Hunter was starting tech and could be purchased. Now you gotta make 'em yourself.

WELL, if you really wanted to experience base battles... ***Warning: This is highly untested. Following these instructions will mean you will almost certainly lose. It also has a strong chance of crashing stuff, so back up all files.*** Step 1: Open the AM_BaseAttack.xml file in assets and find the line with the word "Ticker" in it. The next line down should have the number 600. Set that to 0. Step 2: A couple lines later on, a line should be labeled "Chance." Set the value in the line after it from 15 to 100. Step 3: Same as above but change the value after "OncePerWave" from true to false. Step 4: Play the game. Should be attacked soon and die. I may have missed a step, because this should make it so that the base attacks can be generated at any time but there might not be any enemy ships that could launch a base attack. Give it a shot if you want, I'm too busy right now to sink a couple hours testing.

Yes, the aliens do attack your base. I've been on the receiving end of it a few times. You can intercept and shoot down the ship coming to attack you, so it's quite possible to never actually have to fight a base defense. The battle is based on your bases design, so the tactical map is a representation of your geoscape base layout, which is cool. (I suppose its a bunch of submaps that people are discussing above.) Also, all troops and vehicles available will be present to defend the base, perhaps up to some cap I'm not aware of. So I've had like 10 defending soldiers and two tanks holding off a small army of Sebilians. ...With all that said they were quite broken when I played them and some enemy spawn points were disconnected from the base: You could shoot or throw grenades across the empty space but not walk. Really made the battle easier, preventing like a third of their forces from attacking.

Andorra. Should that be my request? No, too mean. Eh, screw it. Have fun researching Andorran military and combat history! (Apparently they were technically at war with Germany from 1914 till 1939. Who knew?)

Added a couple screenshots. I was going to originally, but my copy of Xenonauts kept crashing and I was too tired to try and suss out the problem last night. Today I took another look at it, and turns out Xenonauts will crash very aggressively (on the main menu after a few seconds) if there's any unrecognized files in the earth directory. Extra folders with extra files is fine though. This was true for both compressed .zip files and also .ahk files (which are basically .txt files that I used for doing this). So don't leave spare files lying around, it will crash things a lot apparently. Thanks a lot for your kind words, everyone, feels good to get props. As for future changes in the map, I should be able to adapt to future changes pretty easily, thanks to automation. EDIT: Added a couple new versions in different colors and thicknesses. I'd appreciate feedback on which are nicest to play with.

Allow me to introduce what may well be the very first globe mod for Xenonauts: The timelines. I'm going to open by telling you guys that it's not, honestly, that cool. It's a simple change to help commanders plan battle times by adding 24 evenly spaced "hour" lines on the globe. How does it work? Well, it takes a little work on the commander's part (like all good things in Xenonauts, this requires skill!) Let's say you want to clear a crash site, but it's night there and you really hate playing night missions. So you just need to find out how long it'll take to get there (which Xenonauts provides already in the form of a dropship ETA), and then count that number of hours eastward. 4 hours = 4 lines. As soon as the terminator has passed the noted point, you've got a day mission. Now, I know that everyone has a version of this they already do. We ballpark it, estimate how many hours it "looks" like. However, using this would dramatically increase the accuracy of your ballparks. Although I admit it wont give you 100% precision, it's a big improvement. I was clever enough to not do this all by hand, but set up a set of autocommands to do it for me. (If you've never looked, the Geoscape earth picture is split into 80 separate image files ) One advantage of this method is that now that I've done all the legwork I can make variants really quickly. So if you've got a color request, I can oblige. I'll admit, this currently suffers from a kinda major problem that I don't know if I can fix: The lines are very visible at day but nearly invisible at night. It has to do with the way everything's built in, and it would take a better image editor than I to play with things like color masking. I will see if I can find a particular color and line thickness that finds a sweet spot between being visible at night and not being super-annoying during the day. Gray lines: Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/10o855t9c7if0oy/HourLinesGray.zip Teal lines: Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qyvajw1v093pdg0/HourLinesTeal.zip White lines: Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8pwemuaasme3h80/HourLinesWhite.zip Double thickness (2 pixels) teal: Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e04hezjj8djtzow/HourLinesTeal2px.zip (The difference is a lot clearer when you open the image in a new tab) To install, download your preferred color and find your Xenonauts\assets\earth directory. Backup the 80 geoscape images there, then extract the mod packs there. IMHO the teal lines are probably best, because the white ones are somewhat annoying and the grays are nigh-invisible. Feedback in the form of compliments, criticism, and requests/suggestions is very much accepted. Feedback in the form of death threats is less so. If you want to issue a death threat against me, find a better reason. There's plenty, you just need to look a little bit. Post edited to add screenshots as requested, white version, and 2 pixel teal version.

As per my original idea, I've re-started work on adding hour lines. Last time I made the mistake of trying to edit all 80 files manually. That only gave me a splitting migraine. Also, I chose a silly shade of turquoise. This time, I'm using a much more sensible gray. Also I'm using automation to do the work for me. On the icon, that would be nice to have but it'd be really hard to mod (at least at the current level of moddability). Also not particularly useful because it only tells you what the current time is at the site which is very rarely unclear: It would only clarify things in about a half-hour gray area where the terminator is hard to gauge. I wouldn't hate having it though.

Well, I'm... "glad" that I'll have to use clever tactics for fighting alien bases now. I suppose putting all the aliens into one small, easily-grenadeable room was a little too easy. I'll give this version a shot, I pretty much could not play the last one. Literally: I had white tiles every mission I tried to play (which was like two or three, grand total), and when I alt-tabbed out and back in the game crashed.

I actually fully agree with you, OP. I really don't like the "Hidden Movement" screen. Just have the camera pop to motion when you can see it, and stay still when you don't. The "Hidden Movement" screen is really flow-breaking.

This is something that seems really easy to add, so easy that I might do it myself, in point of fact. It wont look as good as if someone with better image editing skills/programs did it, but it would work. Anyway, the actual suggestion: Add 24 lines on the globe images, evenly spaced, representing hour marks. These would be for people, such as myself, who have a distinct preference for certain mission times. Me? I hate night missions. I much prefer to do day missions if possible, so I try and time my Chinook launches to arrive before dusk/after dawn. Basically the way it would work is you would get a crash site, and the ETA of the Chinook. Then, wait for the terminator to be the appropriate number of lines away from the crash site. (If you've got a 2:30 ETA, then 2 1/2 sections away, etc.) Launch at that point and you'll arrive at the desired time! Yes, you can ballpark this now, and I do so constantly. But having a visual aid would be nice. EDIT: Started work myself. It really is far cruder than what someone better than I could do, but it works.

Orange, later weapons (in current balance) have much smaller clips and reloading is absolutely a concern! MAG weapons have tiny clips (8 for the rifle, like 3 or 4 for the sniper, I forget exact values) so ammo conservation is a big issue with those weapons. THAT SAID, I wanted to make the following point for game balance: I'm not sure about the laser/plasma weapons, but MAG weapons should have larger clips than basic ballistic. Since a MAG weapon fires a metal slug -- and nothing else -- the overall size of one round in the magazine would be much smaller, therefore more rounds could be fit into similarly-sized magazines. This holds true even if the MAG slugs are twice the size of the actual bullets fired by ballistics now. TBH, I think MAG weapons ought to be straight upgrades of ballistics in every way, except for possibly slight downsides in accuracy and TU cost, considering that the Xenopedia mentions (for laser weapons, but this would hold true for all late-tier weapons) that ballistics have the advantage of "centuries of general useability improvements." So things like ease of use would be best on ballistics, accounting for TU useage, and the sights and ergonomics would be the most conducive to accuracy. Range on the other hand, I model based on relative projectile speed. The reason most weapons would cease to be within "effective" range is because it's becoming impractical for the soldier firing to actually hit the target. The faster the projectile goes, the longer the effective range. Therefore, lasers have the longest effective range (lightspeed, baby!), followed by MAG. So how about this for overall balance: (Note that philosophically I am designing this so that later tiers are almost always better, based off the concept that if lower-level weapons were better then players would have no reason to continue weapons research). Ballistics: Lowest TU cost, highest accuracy. Offset by shortest range, lowest damage, and weak armor penetration. Lasers: Average TU/accuracy, highest range. Clips similarly-sized to ballistics, very low armor penetration* and high damage. Good for long-range takedowns of basic troops. Plasma: Extremely high damage, high armor penetration. Smallest clips, highest TU costs, average accuracy, and somewhat short range. All plasma weapons are essentially cannon versions of whatever weapon type they may be. MAG: Ridiculously high armor penetration, largest clips, only slightly outranged by lasers. The only weaknesses are damage that's only slightly above-average and the average TU cost and accuracy. ** *This low penetration is predicated on the concept that most aliens don't have armor versus laser weapons. The aliens with anti-laser armor (drones / front-line troops) would be very difficult to kill with lasers. **The reason that MAG weapons have really high armor penetration but low (comparatively) damage is similar to the reason that the alien sniper does: The shot is fired so fast that it punches straight through whatever it hits, but doesn't tumble and tear like traditional bullets. Mitigated by using much higher-caliber rounds.

Light, I hate to sound purely argumentative here but did you not see my large, thought-out suggestion for restricting squad sight without instituting an arbitrary maximum range? And yes, bullets do have maximum ranges beyond which they fall to the ground. That range is pretty far out though: The longest ranged confirmed kill with a 7.62x51mm round* is at one and a quarter kilometers. Of course that should never be practical in Xenonauts for so many reasons but limiting military bullets to ranges of about 50m is moronic. Far better to institute tighter restrictions on what qualifies as a "legal" target. And making a 0% CtH is also idiotic, considering that if you've got a target's general location then firing on them is still often tactically sound: You can always "get lucky," as it were, and the target is likely to be suppressed if not hit. There's a difference between SHARP accuracy penalties, which I can understand, and 0% accuracy, which is stupid. In case you actually didn't notice my alternate suggestion -- and saying that nobody else here is making recommendations implies that you didn't, or chose to ignore it -- I recommend simply putting a cap on SQUADSIGHT, restricting SQUADSIGHT to either being a hard cap of 20-30 tiles (with accuracy debuffs for range) or only transferring from one soldier to other soldiers that see that soldier, rather than allowing gaps like we have now. So say you split a team into 2 groups of 3 and have them sweep opposite sides of the map. (Maybe this is tactically sound, maybe it's not -- just go with it for the example.) One of the soldiers in Group A, Frank, moves forward and sights a Sebilian: He can target the Sebilian, and the other two soldiers in Group A can target the Sebilian, because they can see Frank. However none of the three soldiers in Group B can target the Sebilian because they can't see either the Sebilian or Frank. Even if they could see the other two members of Group A it doesn't count unless they could see Frank or the Sebilian. Again, this does have the flaw of munchkin-y players who abuse the manual targeting, but it does prevent the aliens from targeting you at ridiculous ranges. And it would be possible to code an "edge" for targeting based on the soldier's legal vision range. *The 7.62x51mm is the same round that the Xenonauts' Precision Rifle uses. This kill in particular was made with an M24, which is a gun made first in 1988 -- but that's just a militarized variant of a different rifle originally made in 1962: So this level of firepower and accuracy would be available to the Xenonauts in '79. Edit: Heck, I just noticed that I opened my first reaction post with "offer an alternative," and then you subsequently claimed "rather if you propose your own changes." So that raises some pretty serious questions about your ability to read other people's writing. Is my style that bad? Seriously, are my posts incomprehensible to everyone? Because if you can't follow what I'm saying, please tell me.

I wanted to respond to one specific point of your ideas, Lightzy, and offer an alternative: "6) lower the ranges of all guns so that their max range is as far as the bullet goes. no dropoff and no nothing. max range. the way the 'green' range is now, that's how I'd keep max range. there's no point at all in damage/etc dropoff and all it's causing is annoying bugs where aliens all shoot from all across the map the moment you're sighted, because they can. And also, almost all of my kills are with soldierse waaaaay way out of danger shooting from far far away. And pretty much all my deaths too are from a blue bolt that comes from somewhere from the other side of the map." Okay, so I can't accept removing all dropoff. That's a really silly concept that makes no sense: Even a .22LR round is effective to about 50 meters, and the military calibers we use are going to be much longer ranged. Lasers and plasma would, hypothetically, suffer degradation from the atmosphere, but that would be measured in kilometers. We sacrifice a lot of "reality" concepts for good gameplay but that would be such a huge break from how the world works that it would seriously kill the game. INSTEAD, how about nerfing squadsight? In fact, I had a really neat idea: All soldiers (alien and human) can only fire on targets that they themselves can see OR targets that can be seen by a friendly they see. No chaining of friendlies. This would drop maximum range to somewhere around 30 tiles, if the sighting friendly is just barely within the firing soldier's LOS. It allows for sniper/spotter functionality, and is better than just removing squadsight because it doesn't create instances where only the closest soldier is able to engage. A simpler idea (but less cool) would be to just make a hard firing range cap of say 20-30 tiles, where soldiers simply cannot take shots beyond that. The problem with those is that munchkin-y players know they can just manually aim their shots, although it would prevent the aliens from doing it. Another option is to make all weapons suffer a severe accuracy penalty beyond their effective range. Something like 5% per tile for non-sniper weapons, and 2% per tile for snipers. This penalty would would effect both the current accuracy but also the max accuracy (so a rifle being fired at 5 tiles past its effective range would have an accuracy cap of 70%). This is also reality-friendly in that the actual limiting reagent in firearms is not weapon accuracy but human (/alien) precision. In fact, a major factor in how "accurate" a given gun is is the sights. A FAL is known as a highly accurate rifle, but fires 7.62x51 rounds that are very similar to say, an M1 Garand's 30.06 rounds. Why is the FAL more accurate? It's got better machining, being more modern, but it also has very thin iron sights that can be used effectively out to 400 meters. But no matter how you look at it, making bullets magically stop after like 20 tiles is dumb. I'm sorry but that's the truth.

As to # of missions, I made it to the final battle in 18.3HF2, and played almost exactly 50 missions. Maybe a few more but it was less than 60, judging by mission counts on my most-experienced soldiers, who'd missed few or no missions. 50 missions felt about right for the amount of tech and alien types to fight, by the end I was reasonably familiar with all the main enemies and ships. A few more ought to be added since Dreadnaughts are essentially non-entities now and I only fought like two Praetors the entire game. So lets call it 60-65 missions in a game, unless the game gets sped up or slowed down dramatically. On the subject of balancing stat gains, let me just add my two cents: If a soldier is aiming for ~85 in all after 25 missions, and we assume that they started with an average of 55 in each stat, they're gaining a total of 180 stat points, or over 7 per mission -- that needs to be slowed down, probably. Discussions took place elsewhere about how certain stats especially have been growing too quickly (Strength). So how about this: In each mission, your soldiers are ranked relative to one another. The algorithm doesn't have to be perfect, just something like (damage done) + (hp healed) + (enemies killed * 25) + (enemies suppressed * 5). Once the soldiers are ranked in order, stat gains are generated: The soldier that performs best gets the most stat points (Lets say 6 here, going for a slower balance than suggested above) and the soldier that performs the worst gets the least, say 2. The other soldiers get 3, 4, or 5 based on where they fall compared to the group's mean. This would lead to soldiers having about 95 in each stat after a 60-mission game, since they'll be getting an average of 4 points/mission. Chris is calling for closer to 40 missions above, and this system would give about 82/stat after 40 missions. Which stats are assigned is based on how heavily each skill is used in the current mission. So the current system of progress points would work for tracking that variable. If you needed a soldier to gain strength, have them bring a lot of stuff and schlep it around the battlefield, but you will be sacrificing other point gains. I know this is pretty dramatically different than the current system, but I think it's a system that's harder to outright game and still allows commanders to groom their troops. It also encourages players to spread around responsibility rather than having two or three troops do all the work in every mission, because they'll eventually outstrip everyone else. Gotta let someone else take the spotlight and get a lot of points. One problem with this system (and it's also a problem with the current system) is that some stats are really easy to train and others aren't. My endgame people all had at/almost 100 strength, over 100 TUs and accuracy, and 50-70 bravery and reflexes. Finally, I'd recommend figuring out a point at which soldiers will stop getting better, and express it in terms of total stat points rather than per-category. So in my recommended system above set the final point at say 510 stat points (average 85 in each stat). When a soldier reaches 540 points, two things happen: 1.) He/she is removed from the ranking system entirely. They aren't included in any future rankings so they can't gain points or affect the rest of the team's skill gains. You can still use them at will without hurting everyone else's stat gains (this is important! I hate being encouraged to sideline my best troops!), and 2.) They get a "capstone" amount of skill points that's assigned to their LOWEST stats, bringing the total stat points to 540 (90/stat average). Final stat distributions would probably look something like this: Acc 95 Res 90 TUs 95 Str 90 Rflx 65 (+20 capstone) Brv 75 (+10 capstone). And of course I used nice round numbers for my example, real numbers would have a lot more 6's and 3's and the like. But here's the cool thing: Each soldier who reaches the cap will be DIFFERENT than any other soldier who hit the cap. They'll all have 540 stat points, but maybe your snipers have 100 Accuracy but only 60 Reflexes. They'll "settle into" whatever role you have them assigned to. However, the final capstone bonus prevents you from accidentally gimping your troops by neglecting something that becomes a lot more important later. P.S. I did everything above based on my memory that there are six stat categories. If I managed to forget one then I'll have to adjust all numbers.

What always makes me jump a little bit is receiving reaction fire from an unseen and unknown foe... I think it's because I turn the game's music off and the PEW is such a sharp change from the crunch crunch crunch of walking around.

Also, pick your battles. If you're behind in the air game then maybe you can't deal with larger ships in addition to escorts, so sometimes you'll have to let them go. Wait for a couple to come by without any escorts and you'll have a much easier time. Getting a good manufacturing base up and running is an important strategy, but not something that's immediately obvious from the early game. I can usually manage with only a single Corsair per interceptor base (although if manpower and money allow I prefer having 2-3), so being able to produce one in about ten days is enough, which means you need around 3 workshops minimum. I should point out that I managed to get to endgame with only Corsairs, Foxtrots, and Condors, it's manageable. (I couldn't get any of the later planes because of missing datacores T_T) Sometimes you will have to look at the enemy and realize "I don't have the firepower to take down that thing right now," sometimes you'll have to use complicated attack strategies including multiple runs. Sometimes you'll lose Condors, that's no biggie. (Losing Corsairs is a biggie, though.)

The Condor isn't supposed to beat Heavy fighters -- Corsairs are. Also to defeat dodging enemies you can use various tactics. For example, lets say the light scout actually becomes able to dodge missiles properly. Then all you need to do is send two Condors (and you start with two, remember), launch one missile and wait for it to dodge. As soon as it dodges, launch the other three. Also also you ought to remember that cannon upgrades are quite powerful -- the later plasma blaster and MAGStorm weapons actually outrange fighter/heavy fighter/interceptor weapons and do massive damage, which makes those dogfights much easier.

The base settings, unmodified. So "normal," I guess? The question doesn't really apply. Also given that a lot of those base values are currently under active development and passive review, it's hard to be sure what difficulty the current game will be comparable to in the final.

What I think the actual problem with AI combat rolls is is that human missiles have an overly-large detonation radius. If your planes combat roll, the enemy missile can pass within a few pixels and miss -- which makes sense. If the enemies combat roll, your missile can detonate over half a scout/fighter's width away and still do full damage -- lolwut? Also, my experience is that the later ships don't have point defense turrets per se -- they've got AMMs, anti-missile missiles. And they always have two of them, so assume that the first two missiles will be destroyed but all others will hit.

Yeah, I've tried chilling in the UFO for a lot of turns, mostly when I couldn't find the last guy (damn night missions...). It doesn't work, you gotta kill 'em all. My standing question about the scoring system is... "What's it mean?" The points don't seem to correlate to anything back on the geoscape, at least nothing I can find. Maybe I'd be more proactive about protecting civvies if there was an actual apparent benefit to it, like increased local funding or something like that. All it appears to do is give a little shoot of endorphins when you see lots of green and no red. Endorphins are nice, though.

So anyway, do we have an ETA for Steam access? If this build is supposed to be "the one" for Steam then an ETA would be great. And feel free to keep it vague if you need to -- "This month," "next month," "a couple weeks" are all good enough for me. Plus I bet I can get a friend to buy it once it hits Steam. So there'll be at least one new purchase for your wallet, Chris!

Zolo, look one post above yours. Literally. The post right before you answers your question. No, it wont be compatible. Savegames aren't compatible between hotfixes, why would they be compatible between completely new versions? Especially with the new archival, which is likely to wreak havoc with old savegames.

I haven't taken a look at it myself but I'll say (in lieu of a direct answer from staff) that the archives will probably be accessible to modders. 7-Zip can open pretty much any non-encrypted archive, and since there has been issues with file retrieval from the archives, encryption would be silly to add at this point. Modding might take longer to do, and it might take a bit more savvy to make and add mods manually, but it shouldn't be stopped. When I download 18.4 I'll take a look and see if I'm right or not.

Having this if you say, held alt or shift or something would be really nice. Maybe also have an indicator showing what that specific soldier's LOS is, just for conveniences sake.

There's a few places you won't be able to reach. Starting from equatorial Africa, you can't quite reach, say, New Zealand. As to the other points, I prefer interceptors first, since I end up dealing with them more, mostly because once a dedicated team works out on the Chinook I don't have to fiddle with it. The reason for six portraits is probably because you're expected to be using a Hunter*, which takes two slots, leaving six soldiers. I don't recall if the Hunter gets a portrait, but I don't think it does. Being able to predefine drop points based on class would be really cool -- I like my Hunter out front and my six troops arranged in two lines behind it, with a gap between them. My snipers, oddly enough, are in the front line. If needed, they can shoot from within the dropship without having to move once the Hunter gets out there and clears the way. *All instances of "Hunter" can be replaced by "Scimitar" or "Hyperion."