Solver

Top center of the screen, there are "launch interceptors" and "build new base" buttons.

Point is, captured aliens should actually feel like a reward. This is an area where I've always felt the original game didn't do justice. Same here, you're capturing aliens, feels like it should be a boost to technology, morale, country relations, something, while in reality it's not worth the risk if you've already captured one alien of that race.

It is like any other weapon in that it can be balanced. And I would consider it valuable enough for the occasional use even with low damage - it still might mean I need a shot or two less to kill the alien. Night missions would still make for a nice opportunity to use the fire, combining its illuminating and damaging effects.

A few tidbits from the current version. - While manufacturing times are a lot better than they used to be, they feel a bit on the high side for weapons and a bit on the low side for aircraft. Now my engineers can churn out a Corsair about as quickly as 4 rifles. - There's still something wrong with the investment of setting up a new base. One problem seems to be that radars take 20 days to complete, meaning that a new base needs 20 days to be operational if I intend to use it for air combat. Given that bases already start with nothing useful, this feels too drastic. Maybe a reduction to 12-15 days for radars is in order? - I really like how various UFO types are mixed now and no longer a flat boring progression. - In the grand scheme of things, it still doesn't feel like capturing additional aliens has any benefits. Capturing one of each type is nice for the damage bonus, but there isn't a point to capturing the 2nd or 3rd Caesan really.

A few tidbits from the current version. - While manufacturing times are a lot better than they used to be, they feel a bit on the high side for weapons and a bit on the low side for aircraft. Now my engineers can churn out a Corsair about as quickly as 4 rifles. - There's still something wrong with the investment of setting up a new base. One problem seems to be that radars take 20 days to complete, meaning that a new base needs 20 days to be operational if I intend to use it for air combat. Given that bases already start with nothing useful, this feels too drastic. Maybe a reduction to 12-15 days for radars is in order? - I really like how various UFO types are mixed now and no longer a flat boring progression. - In the grand scheme of things, it still doesn't feel like capturing additional aliens has any benefits. Capturing one of each type is nice for the damage bonus, but there isn't a point to capturing the 2nd or 3rd Caesan really.

I concur with Stinky here, incendiary rockets should be in with their niche being flushing non-mechanical aliens out of cover and also illuminating the battlefield in low-light conditions. It may not be the most significant weapon but was an excellent addition in the original. The AI is now a lot smarter and surely it can be told to avoid fire tiles. It's not as much of a priority in my opinion as getting aliens to use their grenades, but would still be very sweet.

Abduction missions are a good idea, and here are a few points. - They have to be sufficiently different from terror missions. Not just terror missions in different tilesets. Timing them is one way to do it, another is just to make small maps for abductions that you'd complete 3-4 times as fast as a terror mission. - Stasis pods are a good idea for giving the mission some focus. Alternatively, having to secure some kind of teleporter field the aliens deploy at the far end of the map. - There could be a few missions where the aliens attack some pre-designed facilities, similar to the Firaxian council escort missions. Aliens attack a research lab, a military base, an airfield, etc. Rewards should definitely be different from the usual missions. - Veteran soldiers. These always feel like a good candidate for a special reward. Not Rambo supersoldiers but just someone equivalent to a Corporal maybe and not a Private. - Weapons. If the game has progressed enough, nations could reward you with some of their stock of laser weapons for instance. For some missions (maybe after you've done several), you could even be rewarded with a Foxtrot/Corsair the nation has built with its own resources. - Military installations. Small military sites on the Geoscape. Radar sites (much smaller range than of normal bases), SAM sites (capable of doing light damage to UFOs in the immediate vicinity), airfields (places for your aircraft to refuel), although I suspect the engine would not support refueling anywhere except the original base. For what it's worth, I would absolutely love the occasional escort or rescue mission. The tactics on such missions would be sufficiently different from the usual kill-all-baddies approach to make them a very fun change of pace.

Abduction missions are a good idea, and here are a few points. - They have to be sufficiently different from terror missions. Not just terror missions in different tilesets. Timing them is one way to do it, another is just to make small maps for abductions that you'd complete 3-4 times as fast as a terror mission. - Stasis pods are a good idea for giving the mission some focus. Alternatively, having to secure some kind of teleporter field the aliens deploy at the far end of the map. - There could be a few missions where the aliens attack some pre-designed facilities, similar to the Firaxian council escort missions. Aliens attack a research lab, a military base, an airfield, etc. Rewards should definitely be different from the usual missions. - Veteran soldiers. These always feel like a good candidate for a special reward. Not Rambo supersoldiers but just someone equivalent to a Corporal maybe and not a Private. - Weapons. If the game has progressed enough, nations could reward you with some of their stock of laser weapons for instance. For some missions (maybe after you've done several), you could even be rewarded with a Foxtrot/Corsair the nation has built with its own resources. - Military installations. Small military sites on the Geoscape. Radar sites (much smaller range than of normal bases), SAM sites (capable of doing light damage to UFOs in the immediate vicinity), airfields (places for your aircraft to refuel), although I suspect the engine would not support refueling anywhere except the original base. For what it's worth, I would absolutely love the occasional escort or rescue mission. The tactics on such missions would be sufficiently different from the usual kill-all-baddies approach to make them a very fun change of pace.

I am a big fan of the improvements. A couple of months ago I felt map variety to be the biggest issue with the game. For farms at least it has improved a lot. Randomness is not only good, it's critical. I do not in the slightest mind the occasional unrealistic element, good tactical possibilities and randomness are far more important to me. So excellent job overall on the new farms. I would, once aliens start using stairs, like to see the occasional 2-floor or 3-floor barn throw into the mix, similar to how it worked in the original game. Currently, the game is still essentially flat as aliens don't use stairs and your own LOS is wonky when firing from high ground.

Officers are one class of aliens, Leaders are another, higher rank. Officers are relatively common, Leaders are a bit harder to find. Your best bet is inside the alien bases.

I've restored it, though it took a while to be noticed. There's been a fair bit of site defacement going on lately. A couple of weeks ago the forums were very briefly hacked, but after that was dealt with, security holes remained in the fairly outdated Wordpress that's responsible for www.xenonauts.com. No harm done - simple defacement with no malware or such things. In the future, also feel free to message me directly if something like that happens, as that would usually cause a fast response.

I've restored it In the future, if anyone noticed a defacement or something like that, please report the issue to Chris or directly to me.

There's been a bunch of script kiddies with these messages exploiting sites lately. I just took the defaced message and will see about replacing it with the real thing shortly. KGB Pancake, really, 2 weeks though? Could have sent me a message or something!

I think leaders are a bit easy to miss if you don't know what they look like in advance, as they are very easy to confuse with the Elites. There should be a leader in an alien base though.

Because that's the goal of OpenXcom. It's not a reimagining or a remake, it's a clone. It uses the original game's resources, which means the graphics and interface come directly from the original. That in itself clearly limits the graphical abilities considerably. The good thing is that X-Com inspired games have their own goals. UFO:ET and UFO:AI are decent fanmade games that also deviate a fair bit from the original formula. OpenXCcom is a clone that actually aims to be mostly indistinguishable from the original, and of course there's Xenonauts.

Yeah, all in all, nothing to worry about. They exploited a vulnerability in the forum to deface the site, tried to leave a backdoor that would not work on this server, and that's pretty much it. There have been lots of vBulletin hacks recently, it was even reported in some tech news. I also sent one of the guys behind it a personal message because he's too stupid to remain anonymous while trying to drop a backdoor

Autocannons are useless that way. I admit I suck at getting them into the right position to even shoot, that was always a challenge for me, but with 50 shots they can't even do enough damage.

We can, though, edit the borders of the regions or even add new ones. Say, moving the North/South Africa border further South, and extending the Middle East region eastwards while decreasing Indochina would decrease the amount of region coverage you can get with a base in Cairo. EDIT: I suppose some of that might be fixable as different nations become worth different amounts of money. Say, if you get decent coverage of North America, you can't really cover anything else at the same time, just parts of Central America. But if NA were worth more money, that might be a reasonable option. This may not be straightforward to solve. The original X-COM had the same problem, where the optimal base location was somewhere in Western or Southern Europe (I usually used Northern Italy) because it'd provide coverage over the greatest number of founder nations.

Here's one thing that bothers me slightly. There seems to be one definite best location for your starting base - that'd be in Northeast Africa, specifically somewhere around Cairo seems to be the best spot. Consider a Cairo base - you have near-complete coverage of North Africa and Western Europe regions, you have 100% coverage of the Mideast region, over 50% of South Africa, a significant chunk of Soviet Union, and you even get some coverage of Indochina, enough to shoot down some UFOs there. There is no other spot with as much potential coverage over the nations. In Central America, you can get 100% coverage of 1 region and partial coverage of 2 regions. You can get near-100% coverage of Indochina by putting the base somewhere in Xinjiang, and also catch a large part of the Soviet Union there, but lose all of Africa and Europe, plus half of mid-east.

Notes on cities as they currently are on the map: Delhi in India is wrongly spelled as Dehli. Windhoek, Namibia wasn't really in Namibia in 1979 as the country became independent in 1990. It was South African territory in 1979. Likewise, Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia then, though 1979 is just before it became Zimbabwe. St Petersburg was called Leningrad, and Yekaterinburg was called Sverdlovsk in the Soviet times. XML with changes that fix these issues: www.xenonauts.com/citynames.zip

Grenade trajectories clearly need work. As for cover, it seems to hit a decent balance between realism and gameplay to me. You can, in reality, shoot at cover that you know someone is behind, and that will suppress them, and may even hit them if the cover is penetrated. The latter point is well done in the game where high-powered rifles can penetrate cover. You wouldn't expect a thin cement wall to fully protect you from the M24. What the game doesn't reflect is the ability to outright remove yourself from LOS. Unless cover is as tall as a standing soldier (like full-height walls), the game considers you to be at least partially exposed, so it basically assumes the soldier or alien is always in a firing position.

I do not really get the nostalgic value of the screen because I never was very fond of it in the OG. Anything like the current version would look bad, IMO. I don't mean bugginess, I mean it looks just like something was put up in front of the screen to obscure it. Doesn't look like an interface element in the first place. My preference would be for something visible yet subtle, like the text-only overlay shown above.

My impression has been also in v18 that advanced planes take too long to manufacture. Yes, I can get more than 30 engineers. With 30, building planes takes too long of course. But the issue is, getting more feels like a waste for anything except planes. Advanced planes require something like 60 engineers to get production times that are at all reasonable, but for just about anything else, that is overkill. I can build a Foxtrot within a day with 30, I can build any weapons or armor quickly enough for my needs.

Thanks, that looks much better. The current implementation hides even aliens firing at me so I can't figure out where I'm taking fire from and what kind of fire, so that makes quite a few combat situations frustrating.

The hidden movement screen looks even more terrible now, and also hides alien actions that you should be able to see.