Solver

Sounds like something went wrong in the installation. If you have the game on Steam, just use the community branch there - don't install the manual download from the forums. With a manual installation, things could go wrong, the Steam install just works. Delete the script cache under %HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\Goldhawk Interactive\Xenonauts\internal , then reinstall X:CE from Steam (use the Verify Files option) and see if it fixes things.

Option 3 is the most intuitive to me. When a soldier isn't in a dropship, it makes sense that the assigned loadout is the desired template and not something that actually depletes your stores now. It's the most user-friendly solution, preventing "losing" items and preventing the need to repeatedly reassign equipment. The big issue here is to make sure that's not confusing, but I imagine a graphical cue could address that. if a soldier is unassigned, draw their equipment with some transparency mask applied. It should convey the idea that the equipment isn't really "there" yet.

The most important part! Congratulations Chris, and get some sleep while you still can!

Sad

Maybe hold off on that and just drop the price? Combat shields have been limited items for a long time. At least going back to v7. Never crossed my mind that it might be a bug, and I actually consider it among the best minor changes in X2. Shields were very good in X1, and still are, giving them a cost feels fair.

I think the biggest issue is going to be objects in the grenade's path and blocking chance. It's hard to handle. The idea of checking for a path on the level above is good, but it's only an approximation. If you only use that, you'll end up with impossible paths, so at most such a check can be used for part of the implementation. Consider throwing a grenade over a wide, one level tall barn while standing next to it. The soldier is at X, the rectangle is a barn. +----------------------------+ | | | | | | Target X+----------------------------+ That means there's a path through the level above: +----------------------------------------------------+ | | | ^--------------------------------+ | | | | | +----------------------------------------------------+ | |-----------------------------+ | | | || | | | | || | v | | ++ | Target | | X+----------------------------+ | +----------------------------------------------------+ But the path is impossible for a grenade throw - a grenade can't make two turns at a straight or nearly-straight angle. The soldier would need to stand some distance away from the barn in order to have the possibility of making that throw. Instead, I think the blocking chance of items on the ground level should be (nearly) unchanged near the thrower and the target, and be (nearly) zero in the middle of the path. This is a way of accounting for the grenade's parabolic trajectory, where it would in reality be at its highest point when halfway to the target. Alternatively, you could try and calculate proper parabolic trajectories, but that's easier said than done.

Merry Christmas and happy holiday season to everyone at Goldhawk - your effort in working on Xenonauts 2 is greatly appreciated. Looking forward to seeing how it develops in the next few months

The issue there is mainly with the UI. It wouldn't be too difficult to increase the amount of soldiers that can technically be on a mission, but there wouldn't be any UI to support that. So as things are, 16 soldiers is a hard limit.

Ah right, that recoil is a penalty that should get applied to heavy weapons like LMGs. If the soldier isn't wearing a strength-enhancing armour suit, then the soldier's effective accuracy stat will be further modified by Max(0, (recoil / 100) - strength). Since recoil / 100 < strength for all vanilla weapons anyway, that's yet another bugged formula and wouldn't actually modify anything. New X:CE variables are documented, as for the old stuff, it's of course known, or can be looked up in any case, but it's not documented. There are probably a few hundred variables just in gameconfig/weapons/weapons_gc/aiprops files, and documenting them all accurately would be a lot of work.

Do you mean something else perhaps? There's no hpLimit (or hp_limit or anything similar) in that file. What do you mean by recoil? Accuracy? Scatter? There's no variable that the game calls recoil. Not even close, unfortunately. What you see on this subforum is all there is, as far as I'm aware. Frankly it's not always easy to figure out how something is calculated, many things in the game can have a ton of different modifiers. The best bet, if you want anything specific, is to just ask here.

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