badgerdrool

One advantage of static carrying capacity is that you can use weight as a way to make advanced tech not be a total upgrade. One of the many misses of EU2012 is that it's a flat upgrade to go up to plasma and there's never a reason to go back to laser if you can avoid in. Ye Olde Xcom laser weapons had an interesting place and could be used for a majority of the game. With a minor increase in weight you can add a small downside to an advanced piece of equipment. That's the trouble with a game like this. Everything's so interconnected. Even if each system has 3 different designs..together they'll make many more combinations! @ Erutan. Oh and on the perk thing I suggested. What I'm really suggesting is a different approach to randomized stats. I imagine all stats are like 50 + 1d10 right now. If you categorize certain increases together and make them a static value you get a different result. So say accuracy, strength, and TU where all "perks" with a value of +5 to that stat. That'd make the +5 to those stats mutually exclusive. Each soldier would get 1 of the three and it'll be at a +5 but that's it. Contrast to a "every stat is random on it's own" system and the difference is in the in-ability to get super stats. Nobody is getting more then a +5 and nobody is getting more then one of these 3 categories increased. Mind, it doesn't actually have to be displayed as a "perk". It's just how the math and probability is set up. Making it a perk is merely a way of displaying what the code is doing. Technically it can be hidden factor of the system that people figure out over time. So I suppose what I'm really saying is that I'd favor any bonuses to carrying capacity at charactergen to be a mutually exclusive value alongside a line of potential small bonuses.

Ah well then. That's...really...really...not obvious at all. My big goal was to see how many little polish details I could spot. Stuff that'd throw off a new player's experience. Quirks that vets may already be used to. I don't want just vets playing Xenonauts when it releases. I want a whole new crowd to graduate from EU2012 to this! Still, that'll be easier for me to work with now though.

Yeah that's pretty much the problem with it all. Mind that, for me, lean would merely be a quick LOS glance. It wouldn't allow lean and fire. Alongside sight going away, it'd purely be a way to visually sweep an area without taking full reaction fire risk. Binoculars? Well there can be a lot of difference depending on how it was set up. Imagine a super shallow 3 square wide cone of vision that only extends 10 squares past normal LOS. TU cost, and requires clicking a square. Doing anything else, including facing change, and it stops the scope sight. That'd be difficult to use in comparison to getting up there but useful for scouting an area you saw fire from. Again, I agree it all goes pear shaped when you consider the AI doing it too. That does get into a very related quandary though. What should the AI be doing? How accurate and strong should they be? Would every alien type need to obey the same rules as the soldiers? This discussion in general overlaps with questions about the AI. So much of how the AI works is tied to the players interactions.

I meant even smaller. Have +2-5 kg carry capacity compete with similarly tiny bonuses. Just enough to indicate "hey this soldier is a bit stronger then normal" and similar things.

Well I think Chris is onto something by talking about this. My initial impressions of the LOS system where...that it's a bit odd. Honestly the old Xcom LOS system may be a major part of that game, but it was a bit weird. Same with EU2012 and squadsight snipers. There's a suspension of disbelief going on due to LOS and fog of war being very gamey systems. I'd almost like to see a more involved rework considered. Part of me wonders about allowing a soldier to use TU to look down a scope or binoculars to get a further narrower LOS cone. That'd help reduce the drive for scout soldiers and with a narrow enough cone would still take TU to locate a target. I kind of ask myself "What method of moving my soldiers do I want to see work in xenonauts" and then try to think backwards to how LOS might help that. I think that I'd rather not have to the old school scout soldier into sniper trick. I'd rather have each soldier move in a way that feels tactically appropriate. I kinda wish I could peek around corners too. Be able to select something, then a square next to the soldier to "lean" into and then another square to be the direction to glance. So instead of putting a soldier into the square, turning, and then running back.... Of course then I think about the Aliens and I'm unsure. Too much control and finesse for the player would make it difficult to make threatening aliens...

Can just have Power Armor directly enhance sub fields instead of Fitness. "Improves carrying capacity and recoil compensation with X weapons". Pretty clear at that point I think. Might be able to have HW recoil adjustable in some other way then a soldier's stat? Might be able to have Strength be a sub-stat of Fitness. Adjusts based on Fitness in game with a minor bonus to some soldiers? Though that suggests rethinking the way starting soldiers have stats and maybe adding a "perk" system to allow randomized mutually exclusive minor bonuses. Which is a separate and more involved discussion.

That sounds annoying. More feedback. I was able to figure out the combat enough as I went along to clear my first crash without an actual causality. Granted, I am an Xcom veteran and as such many systems felt familiar. Still a little confused about some of the stuff surrounding aiming and I suspect I'll need to read up on them to get them. I did note that accuracy was acceptable when a target was not within cover. 30%-40% seems low but, was workable with the quantity of fire I was capable of. Post game screen is interesting. Makes me remember that Xenonauts was intended to have you develop your own human style weapons instead of OSP being a thing. So the autosale makes sense. I feel like 1 surviving citizen should be worth more then a +1. Soldier development screen tells a lot but, still misses a bit. I'm basically guessing that whatever stat is shown is what the soldier has increased due to the mission. Be nice to see the previous stat to compare how much development happened. I do find it strange how injury appears to work though. I have one guy that I healed back up with the med kit that has my least injury time to heal. He was reduced down to 1 health! Other soldiers whom took less devastating injuries are taking more time to heal because I didn't first aid them. That sounds appropriate until I think about what it'll do in the future. I basically don't want the last alien alive to die until I've had a chance to med kit up. Rushing a final kill to end the mission is a disincentive as a result. It also seems odd that my soldiers couldn't heal up with all the medical equipment post combat. They have to do it mid combat to receive any benefit. It feels like injuries is, overall, a system that could stand to be more robust and nuanced. The health system itself seems fine, but the healing part is weak. Caesan's are awesome and I shall enjoy murdering them. So from start to post first combat. Pretty good experience. I was pretty confident in this project and I'm happy to see it wasn't misplaced. Clearly it's coming along quite well and I look forward to seeing the progress going forward. Bit out of time tonight so I won't be continuing.

Going to a Crash Landing. Bringing picnic baskets and pain. Finished my first turn. The chopper is so much nicer to deploy out of then ye old Xcom starter. I rather like it. I wasn't expecting soldier movement to look so good. In person it's super sexy and stand up/kneel is very smooth looking. The environments look gorgeous. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd be willing to say Xcom:EU is better looking. Sure, Xenonauts isn't true 3d but, it's got a great stylized art style. I don't think it's as simple as one looking better. Instead I find that I appreciate Xenonauts approach. I recall all the trouble surrounding it but so far it looks great. OMG BUTTON TO TURN OFF AND ON ROOFTOPS OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG Exploring the menu I just love it. Quick reload and quick grenade are great ideas and a surprise to me. Good design idea. TU reserve menu and weapon menu is clear. The movement provides good feedback as well. I can't say it'll be super obvious what it all does for a new player sadly. Fact is this is a complicated game and the combat menu is a major area that would suffer from simplification. Aiming is a bit unintuitive. Noting scrollwheel and rightclick are making adjustments but unsure what the adjustments are at present. I believe scrollwheel is aim and maybe rightclick is adjusting fire time. Will keep messing around. Not fully clear if left clicking will fire or clear aim without hitting 1 to select another soldier. I believe the full release would greatly benefit from a pre-packaged tutorial. Something to walk the player through the interface one element at a time. For now I'll just have to figure it out the hard/fun way. I got shot! Medkits feel really really weird. Had a reaction shot nick one of my guys. Applying a medkit to him was immediately immersion breaking. The hand grenade toss animation might be a placeholder but the actual mechanics are kind of awkward. It seems odd to click back to the medkit over and over to "throw" healing at the target a little at a time. The mechanics themselves may be placeholder but, I feel a pop up menu to an adjustable slider for how many TU of healing to use would be appropriate for the current system. I must admit that I expected medkits to also use up TU on the injured soldier. I also didn't expect the supplies to be burnt through so quickly or for them to be so "health pot" style. I expected more detail such that injuries would be tracked per hit and healed per hit. Something like "Soldier has 3 bullet wounds. Bullet Wound 1 requires X supplies and Y TU to heal". AI isn't taking the bait and running around the corner into the waiting reaction fire of my soldiers. Oh well. Time to huck a flash and rush ET. ....and I flashed my own soldiers. Fantastic. 1 Tile wall and it didn't go over it. Well time to test if there are grenade arcs with a frag then load the mission when I kill my soldiers. Appears to be some arc as the frag went over the wall after I was no longer adjacent to it. Not a ton of feedback on where the Grenade is going to go ahead of time. Be nice to see a throwing arc or something. I'll have to mess with them more to learn how they work. Huzzah I can vault over chest high walls! Well grenades didn't work. Had to move up and clench the buttcheeks. Shot some of my own guys and it took two turns but he's dead. No soldiers down but a couple of them are pissed at me. I note that combat is pretty quick which is nice in some ways. It's not as long or drawn out as ye olde Xcom shooting. However, it seems easy to miss details. I'm still unsure of a couple of those shots and whether I hit a friendly or not. It makes me wish for a combat log or something to alert me of major combat events. Simply so the combat can be fast paced without missing things being a problem. The shooting has some very lovely designs. I particularly like the bar stretching to the target which shows probability and range. I do feel that combat is occuring at a hard to deal with distance for my xenonauts though. The soldiers with scoped rifles feel like they should be able to engage targets that they have very poor hit chance against. Part of that may be AI though. The initial enemies are simply fighting me at a range that's disadvantageous to me. Instead of TU going to fire it has to go to movement to have a halfway decent shot at hitting. It certainly reminds me of old Xcom but, it seems a major gap at first blush. Haven't read any of the other threads discussing the AI but I believe there's still work to do on them. One movement issue is that I have to two part janky movement. Not a huge issue but, it could be nice to be able to plot out diagonal movement better. Gonna clean up this site then post again.

Who is? Hello I'm Badger. I haven't been around since way back when the game first started taking preorders. I followed the project quite heavily back then. Due to assorted reasons, including an admitted desire to ignore the project until it was more feature complete, I have not been paying much attention sense. Merely biding my time with every intention to enjoy myself later. Thus, I think I can provide some interesting feedback. My perspective includes dim memories of feature discussions and expectations. While my present contains what is in front of me in the build. I will be posting my thoughts as they come to me during this initial playthrough of Xenonauts. Initial Impressions of Menus and Music Xenonauts has some nice strong ambient music and I really like the menu system in person. It looks a little less awesome in screenshot or youtube form. In play it loads fast, has good visual direction, and is pleasant to work with. I'm not having too much problem locating what I want to find initially. Stuff to purchase/hire to tweak my initial set up! I started in North America and hired an extra 5 rookies. I then bought an extra plane. The manual indicated 3 can fly together and I figure I'd be best off maxing that out ASAP. Continuing to mess with the Aircraft menu I hit the dropship button. Once I was on this screen it was immediatly obvious what I could do! Tweaking the formation of my soldiers was easy and I appear to have all the information I need. My set up includes 2 Soldiers to sweep out the sides, 2 soldiers on the corners of the front, and 2 soldiers making a Y with the front corners as response to any of the three directions. Thus far my only complaint was on the soldier hire screen. The color difference between different grades of stats is very minor and it's a bit hard to read. It takes a little while to process who in the hireable pool has good stats and who does not. Besides that I feel that the color choices for menus is solid and readable. It's only when comparing those stats is important that it was noticeable. The base layout itself somewhat surprised me as I did not fully realize it was going to be an external base rather then underground. The load time on tooltips seems a bit slow. I'd like to see them load 50% faster. As I am still learning what each ammo box or grenade is meant to be this is noticeable. Though it's generally easy to tell what each equipment is based on picture. Noticed the soldier past experience stuff. It's a nice touch. I think it helps offset some of the simplicity in other areas of the visual design. Imply something more complex that can't be fully shown. The soldiers themselves have a good variety to face/skin color though for obvious reasons they have the same body type. Happy to see female soldiers made it in. I expect they fully have the same model as their male counterparts which is fine. The icons for each part of the base menu are sensible but not guessable. Not an issue since you can just click on them. Pretty easy to remember IMO. Game Options menu could be more robust. Key Bindings could stand being supcategoried. Even if it's just having a bold bit between groups to denote "Geoscape Hotkeys" "Aircraft Hotkeys" ETC. I would like to see a game option to tweak menu colors. Likely complicated to hook up but this would allow players to solve many/most color related issues themselves. Good for any color blind users. Happy to see cancel current movement hotkey. Knowing that's an option is quite neat. Saves are not as robust as I wish they where. Playing through the newer Xcom I noted that their save system was annoying to work with in extended careful games where trying to sort through multiple save files could get annoying. I'm happy to see that Xenonauts saves can be named but, the current character limit would require shorthand to explain the save state. Allowing a "Note" sub field in Saves to attach a tooltip to a save file would likely skirt the issue by allowing players to maintain a more robust explanation of their saves. I am happy that Xenonauts saves provide info on the time/date of save in game and out of game alongside funds. I somewhat wish there was more relevant information automatically displayed but cannot think of anything to suggest. Xenopedia seems to need more art assets. I hope there will be a general Xenopedia splash to fill in for categories (Xenonaut Aircraft, Xenonaut Aircraft Weapons, ETC). Custom splashes for categories showing, say, a bunch of aircraft weapons next to eachother, would be nice but, I can see them as a luxury. Xenopedia menu is a little hard to work through. I wish the selection area was larger and each entry had more vertical height. I think there is a double space in the condor entry. "This has been used to give the Condor a reinforced airframe".. Hahaha if I lose my transport I get to yell "Charlie Down!" and it sounds like a good thing. Xenopedia seems to be a major WIP area. Though I like the direction of it. ------------------- Getting the ball rolling. Speed up time! UFO appears and a very familiar looking screen shows up. Feedback on Interceptor selection - While what is selected and isn't changes colors. The highlight color does not. I have to remove my mouse from an aircraft to see if it's been enabled for the sortie. The feedback on selecting an aircraft is thus a bit delayed. For polish reasons this could stand a tweak. I'd also say that it isn't immediately obvious if highlighted means going or not. A small checkbox field on top of the highlight would be really clear. Noticed the "tail until overland" option but couldn't see the interception. Immediately tried to drag the window...and it worked! Excellent. Condor 1 is my #2 plane and Condor 2 is my #1 plane. Well that was a confusing couple of seconds. I'll be taking the time to rename my planes from now on but, this seems to be a bur worth smoothing. I'd suggest adjusting the labeling of interceptors within air combat. With only three values A, B, C instead of 1, 2, 3 seems an easy fix. Light scout was easily destroyed...though it appears he was over the sea! I suppose that's why the option to tail until over land was there. If that's the only feedback on the target being over water it might be worth considering adjustment to make it more clear. A mistake I'll attempt to avoid moving forward but, a mistake made due to poor UI feedback is never good. First Research and more Xenopedia Finished my first research. I wish there was a button to blow up a section of this interface. I'd really like to increase the size of the text entree when I'm reading it. While assigning my research I found another area worth polishing. One thing I noticed (after quite some time not realizing it was possible) in Xcom EU was that while highlighting a Grey Market field for selling I could use arrow keys to increase or decrease the amount. The click and hold interface in xenonauts is fine but it could be amplified by allowing arrowkeys to adjust values too. Who knows, maybe someone will expect it? Back to intercepting Two UFOs at once? Lovely... I have now noticed that below the UFO itself it says the terrain. This is getting covered by the white text under my interceptors and isn't readable. Now that I know to look for it I see what's going on. If they are over sea the "Tail until over land" option is available but, when over land it is greyed out. This really isn't immediately obvious. If a minor a minor tweak could raise clarity it could help the new player experience. I'd suggest changing "Tail until over land" to "Tail until not over water" when they are over water and also modify the text to read "Target over land" when it is greyed out due to target being over land. No pause button available in Geoscape mode. I have to enter a base or hit Esc. Seems like there should be one. One Geoscape issue I see is that zooming in with scroll wheel zooms in on the center of my screen. Instead of where my mouse is. My personal preference is for it to zoom on mouse. More aircombat Tool tip for evasive roll has a misspelled roll as role. Again tooltips feel like they pop up sluggishly. I feel like the right mouse button is under used in air combat. Just a general feeling since it doesn't do anything. I also cannot currently tell if adjusting aircraft speed overwrites an AI thing and if so, how to make it auto again.

Thank you for the information. Was leaving before I typed that out. I'll be getting a build installed and played this weekend. Excited. As for more restriction? Well...could just tie it into those existing restrictions and add a display for it? The basic idea that I was chewing through was "What if you went from carrying capacity to fatigue resistance" anyway. If there is already fatigue it'd just be seeing if making it more based around that instead of capacity would be better. Also, I realized what term the stat would need to be changed to. Strength wouldn't fit my idea very well. Fitness would. I think that generally "Fitness" might be a good replacement term for strength anyway. It represents a wider range of things then pure muscle mass. Getting much stronger in the course of 1 month doesn't make much sense. However, having a large general increase to your physical fitness does. Assuming just a name change and a 100 point scale. Start soldiers at at least 80 to represent how fit they come. Then there's only really 20 more points to get. If it's tied to carrying capacity that isn't going to be a large range of difference. Throw in some research into vitamin supplements or advanced training regimes to allow researched access to like a 10 point bonus. Suddenly fitness is something that a player maxes with minimal effort without having to only get starting at high fitness soldiers but, still shows some difference between them.

Some warnings before my feedback. I have not played a build of Xenonauts since like build 3. I'm not making assumptions based on old knowledge but using my overall understanding of games in general. So I have an idea on an alternative approach to this. Focus on the "20 minutes jogging around a combat zone" part rather then what they are carrying. I don't know how fatigue may presently play a role in Xenonauts but, it can offer a good solution here. The difference in high strength and low strength could be resilience to fatigue rather then carrying capacity. Imagine a Green, Yellow, Red system to fatigue. Going to have to make up some numbers to show what I mean. They have no attachment to any actual values. First I think an average soldier is needed. Someone that other soldiers can be weaker or stronger in comparison. Let's say they have a Green limit of 25kg, a yellow limit of 30kg. So 0kg-25 kg they are in green fatigue, 25.1kg-30kg they are yellow fatigue, and 30.1kg+ they are red fatigue. Strength can vary the placement of the limits in a few ways. If we assume 30kg is the "max carrying capacity of any soldier" then a higher strength character can merely be reducing the range within which they are yellow fatigue. So Max Hardmuscles could have green fatigue all the way up to 30kg. The weaker soldier would clearly have a larger range of yellow fatigue. So then what can the fatigue levels do for gameplay? Well, perhaps Green fatigue does nothing and a Soldier can drop down to it by dropping items. Yellow Fatigue clearly needs a penalty. A reduction to time units perhaps? (which I assume are still in) Red fatigue would need to be a very harsh penalty to burden. Something that reduces the capacity to do much more then move. One interesting trick that can be pulled with fatigue is having it be a built up penalty. Perhaps Yellow fatigue starts with no penalty and slowly grows over the course of turns. Perhaps Red fatigue simply grows very quickly but allows a soldier to take a Red fatigue burden for a couple of turns? Thus strength winds up representing something closer to strength and endurance. An ability to hold and handle weight over a length of time. Strength may be a poor name for it but, it's also effectively what we mean. The interesting idea about such a system is that it allows strength to be useful without being required. Going off ye old Xcom I imagine an operative picking up a fainted soldier for 3 turns with the fact they are high strength helping greatly. I also imagine being careful with my equipment set ups to stay within my limits. I also imagine shedding gear on a weak/average character in order to drag a friendly to extraction. As I've said a few times though. I'm unsure where Xenonauts is right now and thus cannot speak directly to how it could fold into the current design. If there is no current fatigue system then this would require adding one. A whole new stat basically. I can however speak about how to show such a system. I went with green/yellow/red for a reason. They are well known colors and indicators. The idea is that instead of showing the player a number line. You show something else. A red pop up "Soldier is very overburdened and will tire quickly". A yellow pop up "Soldier is slighty overburdened and will tire over time." Such a pop up warning would trick new players into avoiding fatigue limits entirely, thus ensuring the system doesn't punish them unexpectedly. Veteran players will simply learn when to ignore it. PS: Some other ways Strength can have gameplay meaning. It could be a factor in a Soldier breaking down a door or other object with a shoulder or kick. It could also affect the cost to perform certain actions. The TU cost to set up a heavy weapon could be base+variable with the variable component being affected by strength. (10+ 6-2 for example) PPS: I think that Strength being increased on site is kind of silly. However, I think that a soldier being able to increase his strength via a workout routine would make sense. Unsure how such a thing fits into current Xenonauts. Maybe a research to unlock a better workout routine can increase all soldiers strength (or carry capacity) by an amount? Assuming individual training exercises are not an option. PPS: If it's too much to make strength work. I think outright removing it and hard-lining carrying capacity is a fine solution. PPPS: I also want to say that I don't think large values are needed to make something feel real. A high strength soldier having a relatively minor increase in KG still sells the fantasy just fine. PPPPS: I am very longwinded.

Everything dies. This is neutral. It would be unfortunate if he never lived. Fortunately, he was. Eventually, in the far future when I become a Father. It shall be interesting hunting down a collection of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.

There's some pretty heavy...rumors? Maybe some confirmation? That there will be an X-COM FPS... My speculation? I think that 2k was given two interesting lessons. The initial, very bad, feedback on the trailer and the success of Enemy Unknown. I suspect the combination of both send a major message. That what they had initially presented wasn't going to be of interest to any existing fanbase but, there is a fanbase willing to put money out on the right thing. I thus speculate that 2k and it's marketing wing pulled everything back to the table to rework. That they may have shifted a lot of design plans and intentions with the game. It'll be obvious once they start marketing the game again. Until then I can only speculate. I will say that between EU and Xenonauts my old school x-com itch is well scratched. An interesting FPS with a lot of connection to EU's aesthetics would be pretty cool now. It no longer suffers the pressure of being the first of the IP in forever. It can now simply be a spinoff entry. A far more palatable affair.

Some of us have simply been waiting for a more robust build! Not everyone is forum registered I bet.

I finally went through the process to get my pre-order moved over for the new forums today. I chose to not put in for a refund. I have 0 regrets Chris. I'm happy to have supported the game early on and consider it $10 bucks that's already gone to a good place. I'm going to have to figure out what stuff I missed. I can't believe it's been years already and I'm sure there's some premium goodies that'd be news to me.