Solver

They gain a certain amount of points per event though, taking/giving reaction fire once may be insufficient.

I'm happy to report that the source code lines for reflexes progress have never been touched in X:CE, therefore it's the same behavior as vanilla.

But that's just how quickly they gain their reflexes stats, you cannot change the circumstances under which you gain reflexes. Then again, it's already as the OP wanted - troops do indeed improve their reactions also from taking reaction fire.

Sorry to disappoint, the reaction fire mechanic isn't something you can tweak.

I understand it's annoying to work with long strings in the UI, but this excludes too many soldiers with common, realistic names from certain countries. Which will probably be an issue once you start adding the Kickstarter ones. And would be an issue for mods that add more soldiers from other geographical regions.

Since the discussion has turned to secondary weapons balance again, it bears repeating that melee weapons are broken balance-wise, primarily due to their low accuracy. I've encountered situations where I send a soldier up to an alien with a stun baton, miss 3 times, which then leaves the soldier dead. The combat knife is even worse of course.

Smoke might need some thought, yes. While I am not a fan of artificial limits on items you carry, such as limiting smoke to 1 per soldier, smoke grenades are too powerful currently. They pretty much act like a wall, offering perfect cover for your exposed soldiers, protecting a flank, etc. I see a few possibilities for improving smoke balance. 1. Make it reduce accuracy significantly instead of just setting it to 0. Units in smoke should still be theoretically possible to hit, although rarely. In X1, accuracy would be reduced for each smoke tile in the firing path. Importantly, this change means units in smoke can get suppressed. 2. Let the smoke build up over one turn. Currently, the smoke grenade pops and you get the thick cloud, which then partially dissipates the next turn. Smoke buildup should perhaps be the same - the grenade pops and only covers some tiles in smoke. Say, the grenade tile itself, and then a 50% chance for each tile within 2. Then on the next turn let the smoke screen reach its full size. 3. Changes to alien AI. Let the aliens exploit your smoke by running into it and hiding. Make them throw grenades into smoke. I suspect that slowing down the buildup of smoke in particular would improve the game. It would make smoke much harder to use as an "oh shit" button to give perfect protection to a soldier caught in a bad position, while encouraging planned use of smoke such as crossing a dangerous open area after throwing a couple of smokes and waiting for them to build a thick cloud.

On the subject of secondary weapons. My general view of them has been that they (should) have two roles. One is a cheap, TU-wise, backup weapon. Especially the pistol. The other role is for close-quarters combat, such as in the UFO, for soldiers whose main weapon isn't a good fit for that. For the pistol to work as such a backup weapon, the changes by Max seem very much the right path to take. But for the other case, I think the game needs to penalize certain weapons at close distances. The sniper rifle shouldn't be useful in UFOs or a building's corridors. A sniper soldier that has to fight in close quarters should rely on the secondary.

In the original X-Com, with certain UFOs it was very cool to blow some holes in the roof and simultaneously assault from there and from the ground. If there are no technical hurdles, roofs should also be made destructible now.

Yeah but you can build two hangars + radar, or three hangars right away in X2 as well. It makes your base look less pretty perhaps, but that's what you get when rushing construction. Otherwise you end up having scenarios where you can cancel the production of a building that connects your lift to another under-construction building. You have to either disallow that or handle it... what does the extra complexity get you really?

I'd not allow it, but decrease the Access Lift construction time a bit. I think it's reasonable to have a "start-up time" for bases, and it also makes more sense that you need to finish something before expanding farthre out.

Hmm, they definitely feel smaller in X1/X2 then in X-Com (which I do not mean as a bad thing). Perhaps it's because of the AI, which in the 90s was quite prone to moving towards the edges and corners, whereas the aliens in Xenonauts rarely end up stuck there. I'd like to comment more on maps with buildings, because that really ties into issues with secondary weapons, but I've seen too few terror missions in X2, I'll comment after a couple more.

Thanks Chris, it's very useful to see the thinking behind some decisions. With that, I can make some more specific comments. Very interesting, because I never got the impression that the intention was to give you energy weapons. My feeling was that converted weapons exist as a cheaply manufactured suboptimal solution, as in, you'd rather have lasers, but can use converted weapons to save money and workshop hours, at the expense of having less suitable weapons. Hence the high TU costs. So it might work to make that the niche - cheap, limited by alien ammo, rather powerful, a bit unwieldy. If there's time, a solid pass on the economy would be on my wishlist. I often played X1 with a small personal mod that basically decreased Alloys and Alenium from missions, and increased the amounts required for production. It would be great to have a real resource economy. And a great opportunity to make landed UFOs more attractive by increasing Alloy rewards from them. I would say in general, a good starting point is to assume X1 provided twice as many alloys as it should have. Okay, I think that's a solid goal. I don't think it works well though. The early X-Com battles also took place on bigger maps, versus more aliens. The maps in Xenonauts are smaller, more concentrated, with more functional cover, and alien crews are smaller. With 10 soldiers, I don't find it to be more of a bloodbath, on the contrary, I am taking fewer losses because it's easier to fire a lot of bullets at each alien, or use other tactical options. This being another key difference versus the original X-Com, that game didn't have much weapon variety. Due to the weapon variety in Xenonauts, the two extra soldiers remove some tough planning choices (do I take a grenade launcher or another rifle? now I can have both!), which leads to less bloodbath. Instead, I would say you can recapture the same idea by making losses likely across more early battles. You shouldn't be in highly upgraded gear on your third mission. This ties somewhat into the previous point with alloys, but also it's about tech requirements in general. Give players more missions with just the basic equipment, ensure slower introduction of lasers and other gear, and you'll recreate that desperate X-Com feeling differently.

Have spent minimal time with V9 so far, but I'm inclined to support the points Max makes. Sebillian Brutes were too strong a few versions ago, but are a bit too weak now. I think it's just their reluctance to fire. Brutes are still quite tough, but between general AI algorithms and suppression, they rarely shoot. Addressing that (higher bravery? higher accuracy to make them likelier to shoot?) would likely be sufficient. Lots of good discussion around converted weapons in the V8 thread, so I won't repeat that, but the key takeaway remains that their TU costs are punishingly high, putting both cmags and cplasmas into an awkward tier where their niche is not clear. Geoscape has obviously not been balanced at all, it's mostly a mess, but I would in particular point to the early research projects. You can start researching better armour right away and, with a bit of luck, have a couple of suits ready before you shoot down the first UFO. I think it should be like X1, where you have to use the basic equipment for at least a couple of missions. Also I still dislike the 10 soldiers change, it's the most unnecessary change the game has had.

Hey, congrats on your rapidly developing technical skills

This also happens to be why I'm highly skeptical of any X1-style approach. The Xcom genre is turn-based combat, with a smaller grand strategy part. Top-down arcade shooters are incompatible with the genre due to rewarding a very different set of skills and providing an experience that feels very different.

Unusually, I have to agree with Charon on the subject. If there is any airgame except autoresolve, it should be playable with actual player interaction. Even if I would prefer a turn-based system, the current X2 system that's being removed isn't really like gameplay, it's more like watching a cutscene.

Now that X1-style air combat is coming back, I'm going to give it a try with an open mind, but I'm in the minority (I guess?) that thinks the X1 minigame was bad, I'd even call it the weakest part of the game. The tactical part of the minigame was negligible. Several types of engagements only had one way to play them at all. For squadron engagements, the only ones with any tactics involved, there were also few different things you could do. Bait with a fast plane, use one plane to get behind the UFO - options, yes, but very few. The replay value was low because you'd figure the tactics out after only a few engagements. Instead, your success would be determined by mechanical, twitch-based skill. The pause button wasn't tactical, you didn't really use it to think - it was a twitch button, as you should pause at the right moment to correctly time your rolls or missiles. In a few scenarios, you wanted to make quick, tight turns, which meant many fast and reasonably precise clicks. At the same time, you could master engagements so you would always succeed in a particular scenario. My favourite example, albeit not the only one, is two Condors vs a Corvette. The four missiles from the Condors will kill the UFO, but the Corvette will have time to fire its cannon once. So the engagement has the following success formula - just let your Condors fly towards the Corvette, pause when it fires, roll the targeted Condor (or both), unpause. Corvette down, Condors unharmed 100% of the time. Simple, formulaic, gets boring the 3rd time you have this engagement. And none of this was really related to the game's strategy layer. Airplane ammo was free and unlimited, so if you could use superior tactics to spend one missile less, that had no effect on anything anyway (I hope in general X2 has the time to do something more interesting with the economy). Then there's the problem that making the X1 minigame more difficult would mainly be on the account of additional reflex/speed requirements more than tactical thinking. Like I said, I'll approach the X2 real-time combat with an open mind, but I would have preferred to see the turn-based approach evolve.

I think it's enough to fix that in V9, it's not a game-stopping bug, you can continue playing the mission as is. Although I still think the starting squad should be reverted to 8 soldiers anyway.

It's this one, I think: Some great ideas there indeed.

Yeah, the vanilla game has some incorrect airplane and weaponry parameters in the ufopedia, and those instances are not fixed in X:CE.

I don't see a terror mission fix in the list. Both in v8 and v8.1, terror missions make the old helicopter return, meaning you also get two soldiers stuck in the terrain.

This paints a rather worse picture of converted weapons than I would say my experience is, but I haven't run the numbers. While Cplasmas are definitely very expensive to fire, my gut feeling has been that Cmags are only moderately more expensive to fire, but I'll need to play more, or do calculations on the actual numbers. At any rate, I agree that further balancing work there is needed. One possibility could be to give converted weapons a buff all around, but also make their ammo limited, that is, make the weapons only use ammo you loot instead of having infinite ammo at the base as for human weapons. Not saying it has to be the solution, but it'd be good to keep in mind that ammo can be a factor to use in balancing, not only damage, accuracy and TU costs.

I have to say this shows why Goldhawk is an amazing studio. There's a real willingness to try new ideas, but without necessarily committing to them - you can admit when something simply doesn't work. And offering refunds to people who specifically wanted now-changed features is very admirable and honest. On the gameplay front, while I liked the bold ideas behind the "shadow war" on the Geoscape and all that, I'm also really pleased with where the game is headed now. X1 is one of my favourite games, and I'm definitely in the camp that will be pretty happy with an improved X1. While the strategy layer is currently an almost exact copy of X1, I'm very happy about the improved tactical layer. There's a bunch of really small improvements but it adds up, and the boxy destructible UFOs are my favourite feature.

I might say the early missions are too easy, but that's largely a side effect of the unnecessary change to 10 soldiers. Weapon-wise, I kind of like the current balance between ballistics, mags and plasmas. Converted plasmas have high damage but high TU costs and no burst mode. Converted mags are pretty much better ballistics, with moderately higher TU costs, with burst mode, and damage somewhere in between ballistics and plasmas. I would perhaps lower the TU costs of plasmas a little bit, but in general I feel like the tradeoff is interesting. My first encounter with Androns in V8 was rather lucky, it was an Observer crash site, and both Androns were in the UFO. I took one out, and the other one died in the explosion. They're a good deal more difficult than other enemies, but I think this is something X2 does well now. An X-Com game should have those moments where you're suddenly faced with a greater threat and see that it will not be easy. Sebillian Brutes and the first Androns you encounter are great in that role.