Solver

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.

I think it's best to quote the most recent dev update on this issue. V9 will reintroduce the X1 air combat. After that, let's see how the game begins to diverge from the original.

The issue here is that you're dealing with soldier equipment, which is limited in terms of what you can take (fortunately, unlike X1). If you're taking the knife, it's at the expense of something else. And from what I see, the knife is far inferior to anything else you could take with you.

Update - I sometimes experience this, not necessarily on the first turn. LOS won't visibly update, but a save and reload fixes it. It's not a very common problem, less than 1 in 5 missions. I haven't noticed any pattern that triggers the bug. Could possibly be Linux-related?

Melee weapons are incredibly inaccurate. I tried seeing what the combat knife is for, and went to knife a Sebillian, only to see the hit chance was 60%... missed both stab attempts. On another occasion, the stun baton had a 40% hit chance, so even worse. I doubt this is as intended, and it's likely a balance issue even if it is. And what is the combat knife for anyway, aside from the cool factor? Getting into melee range is always risky, and I cannot imagine why you might ever want the knife instead of a pistol.

I can confirm the issue for the same wall. It's visible after rotating, but invisible from some angles. Also soldiers can walk through the part where it shows as blocking for shots...

You've been editing weapon files though. Those are possible to edit as one line, if inconvenient, without extra knowledge. Save game files are different. The one line is so long that you need an advanced editor or editor plugins to even be able to load and save the file, and if you can figure that out, then you can also unzip a file.

I found the perfect place for a screenshot. I hope this makes it clear why the behaviour looks like a bug. First a cropped view, camera level 1: Same view with camera at level 2: The top part of this rock formation is visible at camera level 1, and looks the same on both camera levels. In fact the only difference is that my soldier up there disappears if I move the camera up. This is in contrast with a nearby regular building, which looks different on different camera levels due to the roof.

If you assign a soldier to a different role, then the soldier list (bottom left) doesn't get updated with the new role until you click on another soldier.

Since there was no thread for this, I'm starting one. Current balance issues I've noticed: I feel like the 10-soldier squad has a negative effect on balance, but I won't go into detail, I've posted my thoughts in the Skyhawk thread. The LMG ammo problem is still there, that is, a reload won't be needed under any realistic circumstances, as the LMG can be fired 10 times. To an extent, this problem exists with the rifles as well, with their 20-round magazines, exactly as in X1. I understand the desire to keep magazine sizes roughly realistic, but I also don't like how ammo isn't a factor for this tier. Wouldn't it be possible to make auto bursts fire twice the amount of rounds (6 for rifle, 10 for LMG) while halving suppression values? Local forces are very strong in V8. Perhaps the accuracy is high? In my first three V8 missions, the locals killed four aliens. They shouldn't be that reliable. As a side note, it would be cool to support different stats for local forces on different maps, so sometimes you'd be supported by local military who are visibly superior to armed farmers. Grenade throws cost 25 TU instead of being a percentage cost. Too many Geoscape missions are spawned. By recruiting a few extra soldiers at the start, I can do enough missions during the first month to staff buildings and keep an income stream. Either reduce the mission quantity, or make some of them require multiple soldiers (though that is the plan I think).

Amazing timing, I was wondering about the ETA on 8.1 because I might have some time to play this evening. You made the switch back to relative TU costs a few builds ago, but in V8 the costs for throwing grenades (and I think some other special actions like medkits) is still constant. Throws are 25 TU. Is this intended?

Alright. I can say that simply python -m json.tool save.json > save-pretty.json works well on saves to get them into a readable format (quadrupling the file size!) for some quick edits. If those prove difficult to load, I should be able to get it back into the ugly format with another Python one-liner.

I'm on Linux, and vim can deal with the save files, but it doesn't make that very convenient. If you're not going to pretty-print, why not just compress the whole thing? With data like what you have, a quick compression is sure to yield at least a 90% ratio. Yes, you could say it's not then human-editable save files, but frankly I would say the current ones aren't anyway. When you need a special editor or plugins to open the file properly, it means at least some level of tech skill is necessary, and in that case you might as well ask the users to decompress the file first. If I change a save file so it's prettified, should I expect the game to load it properly still?

Further on the 10 soldiers issue, it feels a bit bothersome to move and manage so many in the early missions, where the maps are small and where the UFOs themselves are so small that 10 soldiers would just get in the way when storming.

One small request for the tech team. Would it be possible to change the JSON serialization for saved games to a pretty-printed format with linebreaks? Currently it's just one ginormous line, which means that many editors have trouble working with the file, and it's also harder to manually edit stuff due to it not being pretty-printed.

I find that reaching the UFO with enemies dead only takes a minute anyway. You can move several soldiers at a time, you don't have to wait for the animation to end. Take a soldier, click near the UFO, next soldier, click near the UFO, and so on. Then it takes little time per turn, and you should be ready for the slower UFO breach gameplay in about 2 turns.