Tiktaalik

To be fair to them, their wheelhous series is a joke. They don't give any game a fair chance. Their humour is largely about making themselves look like idiots. So I wouldn't bother being insulted.

It appears in their Wheelhaus series so it doesn't come off well. [video=youtube;6Tbv03td0p8] Its towards the end.

I can totally accept the idea that this is a limitation from the way the game is coded, rather than a design decision, and I think I assumed that's what it was. And it's obviously not a huge deal, just a frustration that arises when ufos are coming thick and fast. I just wanted to dispute the idea that this would be a desirable way of doing things as opposed to a more realistic arrangement.

Well there are alternate rulesets for chess. Fairy chess. This limitation doesn't make you make strategic decisions, it just makes you guess and hope her magesty RNG is smiling on you this time. In this case getting rid of this limition would make it a better game.

There are an infinite number of arbitrary limitations you could place on the player, literally. I wouldn't call them all 'strategic'. Obviously there are a lot of limitations to the player in the battlescape, for instance, but they're pretty much all because of it's turnbased nature. The geoscape is real time, so it should play more realistically. The inability to break up or rejoin squadrons doesn't fit with the mechanics of the game.; it doesn't make any sense. Limitations for their own sake don't make challenging games good challenging games.

Seeing that always reminded me of this gif

That wasn't the point I was really making. The problem is that there are recurrent situations when you really want to join and divide squadrons and there's no real game-play/strategic reason why you shouldn't be able to. It doesn't feel like a feature, it feels like an oversight or a bug or something yet to be addressed. All you can do is put up with the arbitrary limitation and shake your head in annoyance. On a tangential note, something else that I think is frustratingly wrong is the fact that you can't reassign airborne interceptors without going through their dialogue box. There's a squadron of 2 interceptors on their way back to the base and a new ufo pops up on the radar with its dialogue box but you can't hit the 'intercept' button and send airborne craft. Why?

I think they're more likely to attack your bases if you're really hammering them. I think it's an aggro thing.

Is it a known bug for the game to crash when one of your non-selected troopers goes through a teleporter? I just encountered this one. Heard the 'fwwwingg' sound effect (which by the way really needs to be made distinguishable from the psyonic attack sound) and then the game immediately froze.

I know this is an old topic thread so I apologise, but I'd like to say I'd have much rather gotten zenonauts with a curved projection and no scrolling than a retangular projection in which the world truly is a cylinder. Any way, the zoom fuction makes scrolling basically redundant. You could have that oval projection with craft poping off one side of the map and appearing on the other side like pacman. And the maths is pretty simple determining the warp of circles youd use to represent radar coverage. You would at least feel like the planet was round, which I think is important. I mean it really bothers me that greenland looks almost as big as the whole african continent when it's like a 14th the size in reality. If I could program, this is the mod I'd most like to make. A geoscape fix.

I was a bit taken aback when I saw that, I didn't expect it at all.

But before you have the alien communications structure, it's difficult to anticipate which craft you need to attack as a group, and when there is a half dozen or so UFOs, you really don't want to group craft together since you know you can't split them up again. I think the inability to split up a squadron is too hard to sell as a feature when there are so many times when you want to do it and you know that in reality there would be nothing stopping you from doing that.

There's still no reason why you couldn't send craft to them. I mean, the notification effectively act like blockers peppering the geoscape with little areas you can't set destinations in. Also, as mentioned earlier, there really needs to be a way to split up a group of fighters (or indeed join them up to attack a ufo together). Right now you have to send them back to the base (where they may or may not be temporarily grounded) and send them out as a group - or tag team a ufo which can be much more inconvenient.

Oh well that's good I guess, not dealing with terror missions. I beefed up my bases though waiting for a base attack and haven't had to deal with that yet sadly (kinda). So about the guns, is it just an oversight that the AKs and things are retained in the stores? I mean, if you can't re-equip them to soldiers and they don't sell for anything, why do they go to the general stores?

Any word on when the steam page is going to stop saying 'Early Access Game'? I'm waiting on it so I can put up a review. Also the wikipedia article needs to be made more current too, come to think of it.

And I don't mean alien weapons that get sold. I picked up an AK from from a dead mujihadeen chap (gave it to a shield class soldier who's shield got destroyed), I noticed later it was in my general stores with a sale value of nill. Is there a way to re-equip it from the soldier outfitting screen? Also since I updated to V1, I haven't seen a single terror or base attack mission. Am I inadvertantly preventing them by shooting everything down?

I guess then if 1.05 is expected to be the final version of the game my hope of an intro video are dashed. Still it feels so nice to be playing a finished product of something I've been looking forward to for several years. This plagued me so much that I completely re-thought my strategy for engaging with aliens. Basically whenever I see an alien that I can't actually shoot at, I retreat. I couldn't quite work out if it was a bug or a feature.

I wouldn't care much except being the hanger is two units long. The command centre automatically drops itself one unit from the lowest edge and 3 from the top.

The idea is that in my first base I end up with more labs and workshops later on than I want because later I have other bases and I need the floor space. It would be much nicer to relocate staff than to fire then hire 30 scientists. That shit's expensive, yo.

This might be because I'm familiar enough with the game and the game it was based on but I don't really have any complaints. There are obviously a lot of very small issues that could be commented on like Gazz has but very few major issues standout. Except one maybe. My principle dislike is the personel screen which feels annoying to use and somewhat redundant since with it all the useful current information about your soldiers is split between it and the soldier screen. But also there's no relocate personel function on that page. I found out how to relocate soldiers recently by coming to the forums, I'm still not aware if I can relocate scientists and technicians.

Well I was wondering if doing what you said would get you something more, as if you had something specific in mind. Lovely.

Just the UI. What would be the point of changing things any deeper?

Can anyone tell me how to change weapon names? Given the Mig and F14 have realistic names, it feels kinda weird refering to the generic "balistic rifle" and whathaveyou. I'd like it to say Barreta, M16A1, AK47, etc.

The game is really starting to shape up nicely. The main thing I wanna say I think is worry about the UI less. Other people's priorities might be different and I suppose the relative amount of work might be weighted to the UI side of things but I want to see the game mechanics working tight and with very few bugs more more than I want to see it look beautiful but play mediocre. Examples at the front of my mind (I'm actually writing this in the steam in-game overlay) might be the lingering UFO icons on the geo screen or awkward alien disk behaviour/targeting. Having a blast with this built though.