Solver

It works for non-Reapers now...

This is something I do not understand. It simply doesn't seem to be that way. I'm searching the code for the race names, and only find a few references to them. Caesan: Code that spawns the forced crash site on lower difficulties. And code that creates defaults if maptypes.xml is missing. Sebillian: Exactly the same. Andron: Same, plus code that disables crouching, and that changes their move sound. Reaper: This one has more references, for the old zombify code. Harridan: The glowing stuff code when shooting.

Does this custom alien race attack in a melee fashion or use normal ranged weapons?

There is no research for alien grenades at all.

I'm quite sure they still autosell if any end up captured in combat.

Dunno, I'm a bit too lazy/busy to set it up. Ever use FileZilla or another similar client for adults? Could have you upload to the mod area directly.

Ah that's not the downloads system, it's the server upload limit. Uploading files so big through a simple web interface isn't great. Needs another approach

No. What's the problem?

That's what I was after, thank you

... as it is in xceextra maps now, or as it should be?

The mapinfo fix you posted above?

Do you want to post a small set of the changed files?

Compare the XML Maybe change the name to weapon.grenade.advalien. Some place in the game could rely on it being called weapon.grenade, somewhere.

I'm not sure if I've ever picked up an alien grenade. All I can say is that the game definitely recognizes it's a grenade because there's a slot in the quickthrow, even if it's empty. Beyond that I have no immediate answer - I don't see a limit by name or such in the code, so it's something more subtle.

I don't see anything limiting in the code. Any grenade should work. Perhaps there's something different with the weapon/ammo definition given that the alien grenade shows 1/1 ammo and normal grenades don't.

What's the XML name of that grenade?

Go to bed, it's late over there

I'd even upgrade to 5.99 for that.

femaleSoldierChance is sufficient to change this, aside from the hardcoded special soldiers.

Yeah, map 20-turn map reveal for other missions can't be added that I know of.

Thanks Chris. I'll make an attempt and I'm pretty hopeful of receiving a response due to general developer solidarity if nothing else, but I am also very doubtful of any concrete results.

My impressions of the design doc at least are very positive. It seems to fit well with how I think about the game. I'm also interested in seeing a bigger mod that addresses the game's weaknesses without quite having the same scope as the major overhaul mods like X-Division or Xenophobia. I am hoping to contribute with some useful feedback, and I will certainly consider supporting the coding effort on the X:CE side where feasible. Now on to some early comments about the specifics. Importance of ground vs. air I think this is perhaps the biggest issue to address. I've tried some of your ideas in my (unpublished) mod. I reduced relations penalties from most air-related events, increased landing chances and such, but ended up encouraging grinding too much. This is a difficult thing to balance. GC should be more important than the AC, but that doesn't mean that making GC take up much more time is the solution. It's important to also give players the ability to ignore many of the available GC missions without a huge penalty. Dropship escorts are a good suggestion to solving some of the issues, perhaps in conjunction with increasing dropship speed. For the starting Chinook that is - it's incredibly slow. The purpose of making it so slow originally was to prevent players from grinding every crash site in a wave, but I don't think it's a great solution. Perhaps you should also think about disabling the UFO ability to shoot down dropships altogether. I think it's one of the design mistakes made in Xenonauts. It doesn't sound too bad in theory, but in practice, the best protection is not to fly during UFO waves, and when a shootdown happens, it's just frustrating - it's a very important RNG roll with regards to what happens to your soldiers. You lose the ability to fly to missions for several in-game days (probably for the next UFO wave), you lose some - or all - of your best soldiers and have to just grind it on from there, and it's not in any way a great feature. Symmetrical weapon design The damage types / resistances system is indeed very underused in Xenonauts. I would like XXP to avoid a spreadsheet situation though where you have to know the damage types of 30 weapons and the different resistances of every alien rank and race. But I would really like to see some weapons being better against specific races, thereby also increasing the value of intel. The original X-Com actually did some of this pretty well. Sectopods were extremely tough and would take a lot of shots even from the powerful heavy plasmas, but laser weapons killed them faster. If the goal is to maintain a vanilla-like feeling overall though, it will be important not to go overboard. Heavy micromanagement is incompatible with a vanilla feeling. So if you, at some point at the game, have 30 viable weapons, it's too much. I can only support the vehicle ideas. Armoured Assault is a very good mod for making vehicles more valuable, but it doesn't differentiate them very much. Psionic protection As much as I dislike things that it's impossible to protect against, I don't know how much of an issue this is really. After some bug fixes to the original game, psionics aren't really that powerful except for Praetors, and they should be very powerful. Most of the time your units just get hit by morale-damaging attacks, which don't lead to any consequences part of the time, and usually just end up in the soldier panicking. Annoying but not too dangerous. Hallucinate is more dangerous as it makes your guys go berserk, but again, berserk bugs have been fixed for a while now so it's not such a huge danger, most of the time berserking soldiers don't hit anything. And I've even had them kill aliens sometimes. Mind control is very easy to defend against now. The one-turn delay means you should just run back with all your other guys. The mind-controlled unit may run back towards them but won't have TUs to shoot. Dread is the most dangerous psionic power by far, but again, that's the main power of the Praetors, the ruling caste of the aliens. If players do not fear Praetors, you have a balance problem. Capturing aliens I strongly support more incentives for capturing aliens and perhaps making a couple more captures mandatory, though again, don't overdo it. But in vanilla, capturing is not important enough. You need anyone - Officer - Leader - Praetor. And actually each alien can serve for the previous one as well, so you could just capture some Leader in the mid-game and then a Praetor and thus complete the requirements. The damage bonus system is nice to encourage you to capture one of each race, but it's not such a strong incentive. Selling live aliens for money on the black market sounds like a good idea to me. One thing I really liked in the original X-Com (though it was underused) was that aliens had jobs and so capturing aliens with different jobs gave you different results. There were engineers, navigators, medics, etc. Something like this could be done again. Capture an engineer and learn something useful about UFO construction. Capture a medic and get a damage bonus against those aliens, etc. I am very undecided on using alien weapons. It makes very little sense lore-wise. A weapon that's literally designed for a different species isn't going to be as effective in human hands as a human weapon, and so it's hard to imagine why your soldiers would want to use the alien weapons. You have to balance it, like you said, with giving TU and accuracy penalties to represent that they're not human technology, but at that point, why use them?

Does this affect anything?

Ah, those. Stars are for threads you have posted in, otherwise it's a circle.

Well that's not going to happen The vanilla version of Xenonauts will remain the default one, not X:CE, and this is perfectly reasonable on Goldhawk's behalf. While X:CE is mostly bug-free, Goldhawk cannot and should not appear to take responsibility for whatever possible problems X:CE introduces.