Solver

Ah, so that's what hypervelocity is. I see the point, but my sniper rifles generally seem to go through a wooden box or similar cover, while alien sniper plasma seems to penetrate just about anything. I don't know if it is intended for cover to be useless against those. And I feel same as lightgemini does about accuracy. Except with sniper rifles, accuracy against open aliens doesn't reach 50% even with aimed shots.

Absolutely. As long as illogical maps are avoided (buildings with doors that open into walls), I'd prefer randomness over hand-craftedness. Sometimes low distance from dropship to UFO. Sometimes difficult sections with no cover or inconvenient paths. Sometimes narrow 1-tile corridors. It's okay. Better than hitting a crashed scout on a Farm map, seeing the tractor and barn immediately from the Chinook and thus recognizing that it's the map I know by heart already.

Yes, there are issues with accuracy in this build. The spread is crazy, as your troops very commonly hit guys standing next to them. Accuracy in general seems to be low, though I haven't checked to see if it matches the displayed odds. And a surprising amount of misses hits the ground 1 tile in front of the alien, possibly at an angle. The three tiles in front of an alien (directly in front, and the tiles either side of that) seem to take a huge pounding.

I am suspecting something unintentional might have been done with alien sniper rifles. Harridans shoot right through cover with excellent accuracy, I've had a plasma bolt kill my soldier and hit another one further down the map, and they also manage to destroy cover like haybails and still hit a soldier behind it with the same plasma bolt. EDIT: Another shot from them hit the Chinook, and it looked and sounded like each tile in the Chinook got hit, a lot of sound. It feels like an alien plasma rifle shot will actually hit every tile in its path.

When attacking UFOs, I just chuck grenades. Open doors, throw a nade, step aside. A few high-precision guys can shoot, but it's mostly nades. It works and is even kind of boring. At least on small/normal Scouts. This is mostly because aliens are hiding behind consoles anyway, so shooting seems less effective than throwing grenades. I do not think the new grenade throw range is working, though. Seems to 5 tiles for me instead of what I gather should be 10 for a 50-strength soldier. Accuracy sucks all over the place for me with assault rifles, but suppression is still high. Aliens will still get suppressed by 1 bullet sometimes. Inside a small scout, both aliens can be suppressed by firing a shot at one! First 5 guys shooting at that open Seb missed completely. That's some impressively bad shooting.

Ah yeah, didn't figure some would have a problem with the direct XML link. I'll momentarily put all the files together and upload a zip with everything together - weapon and gas fixes. Here goes, unzip into assets folder: www.xenonauts.com/v19fix.zip Includes global smoke dissipation changes (thanks Stinky), Medkit fix (thanks lightgemini) and the fix removing smoke/fire from all weapons except smoke and stun grenades.

Two observations so far - suppressed aliens (Caesan guards) do autofire with Plasma rifles. Also, weapon spread for inaccurate shots might have been overdone a bit. I am hitting my own guys constantly at a 45 degree angle.

Temporary fix for the smoke crash: http://www.xenonauts.com/weapons_gc.xml Updated weapons file (drop into assets folder) that removes fire and smoke from grenades, rockets and alien weapons. Note: I left it for smoke and stun grenades because they're often extremely important to have, but if you use them, make sure not to end the mission before smoke dissipates. Which means that you can not use stun grenades to capture the last alien on the map or you will get a crash. EDIT: Stinky did the same thing at almost exactly the same time, so credit goes to him, too.

Has anyone been able to play at all? I consistently crash after the first mission, even after reloading from Geoscape to re-generate it.

On a terror mission gone wrong, the last survivor trying to make it back to the Skyranger while firing at everything that looks evil. Ended up killing the remaining aliens, the last of which was close to the Skyranger ramp. And one of my first encounter with Ethereals. Felt confident deploying to a mission only to have my veteran team butcher themselves due to psionic panic and mind control. Ouch.

Same, crash after my first mission.

Excellent list, looking forward to starting with this. The balancing phase of a game can be extremely fun if experimental builds keep coming often enough. Any chance that the fighter chainlocking bug fix is also in this build?

I only figured out about com arrays from viewing the game files. Can't get em. The alien leader is usually standing behind the array and destroys it by shooting. And if not, my soldiers soon take care of it.

If you win combat, everything gets collected. The game logically assumes your troops secure everything that can be obtained from the site. But carrying things to your chopper will let you keep them even if you have to abort the mission.

Initial impressions on the mod are very positive (playing on the Steam version) but it's giving me a bad case of the mission-end problem. After killing the last alien it takes upwards to 3 minutes to get the report screen. No idea if related to the mod at all.

The current game is in no way suited for playing a year. You will run out of things to research in 5-6 months tops. And starting in January, it seems to be just Elite aliens with highest tier UFOs everywhere. For it to be playable for a year would be a huge rebalance. The pace of everything would need to be slowed down, and also the frequency of UFOs in that case (doing a hundred crash sites in one game is a no-no).

Well, the game starts in September, so that would be 6 months. Which is less than the original game could go on for.

I completed my first game last night, it was in February, and I also had a Praetor command a base in January. And the impression I got was that it's approximately the time limit. It felt like March might be the last survivable month, that beyond it would be just endless waves of battleships attacking everything that are no longer possible to deal with.

I don't know how much forcing the player's hand is needed. In the original, you could last for more than a year if you wanted to, I'd rather lose the game due to losing nation support than just an endless barrage of UFOs that clearly feels designed to make me lose. Anyhow, how do you win without the invasion at full force? You'll need to capture a Praetor to complete the game, and those guys only show up in the very late stages. I get the impression it's very near to full force by the time Praetors make an entry.

Fair point, I suppose it slows down the rate of the invasion and that makes things easier. Well, in a way - you still need the invasion to reach full force to complete the game.

I don't see the "many times". Does anyone know the typical duration of a UFO mission? Like I said, you'll detect UFOs 83% of the time with 1 radar if they spend 3 hours within your range. I can assume that I am not detecting all UFOs in a wave, but I even doubt the usefulness of that as it would possibly lead to more missions than I can handle with my forces anyway.

Okay, then the dashed circle is tracking range and the solid one is long range, while short range is not shown. In that case, I am not convinced that building additional radars is worth it in a base. I can't really find the amount of time that a UFO spends on a mission, but some quick observation reveals that UFOs routinely stay in radar range for 3-4 hours at least before heading back into space. If the probability of detection at long range is 1% per minute, it means that the chance of detecting the UFO within 1 hour is 45%. Within 2 hours it is 70%, and in 3 hours that rises to 83%. An extra radar would mean that it's 70% within 1 hour and 91% within 2 hours. I would tend to think that, given your ability to only run so many missions, the numbers as they begin are already good enough, and that improving the detection chance further is not especially worth it.

I'm running into some unclear things with the radar. How does it work exactly? It has short and long range. Around your base, you see a circle and then a second circle with a dashed line. Are these circles, respectively, the "short" and "long" range? Or is the first circle the "long" range with the second one being tracking range? If so, where exactly is "short" range? Depending on the answers to this, something may be fishy with the numbers for radar in the game.

Well, a few soldiers could attempt the psychological tactic of going into combat naked. Worked for Sectoids in the original.

Currently it is not smart enough, I assume, or else the default loadouts would also get updated with time. But a Rifleman's default remains the M16 unless you change it of course, even as you develop laser/plasma/mag.