Solver

Role-based can actually get more complex. If I have 10 soldiers with Riflemen roles and those are set to plasma rifles, but I only have 5 plasma rifles, what will the other 5 have? Will they be smart enough to grab laser rifles, or will they revert to M16s? Just give me the option to equip them when the base is attack. I believe that was also the case in the original.

There is enough time for your defenses to fire at the alien ship, for all non-essential personnel to be evacuated and the aircraft to be evacuated as well. This is first and foremost a military base, as soon as the alarms sound I expect everyone to be ready and armed within 5 minutes. Really the problem here isn't whether the guys in sickbay have enough time to get to the armory, the problem is that for some reason they will always prefer to grab a M-16 and not a plasma rifle. I think it's just easier all around if the game goes to the equipment screen first during a base attack. Of course, one could also argue that sickbay personnel should be excluded from the battle.

Two related things. When your soldiers get transferred to the medical bay, their equipment reverts to the default and they will not have armor. So you need to re-equip them when they go back into the dropship. This also means that for base defense missions, any wounded soldiers will start with basic ballistic weaponry. I would suggest fixes to both. Let my soldiers remember their last equipment even if transferred to sickbay, and before an alien attack on a base commences, give me access to the equipment screen so I may kit out my soldiers instead of just defending with whatever they happen to have equipped at the moment.

Example: you need to capture a Leader for the storyline, and you capture a Caesan Leader, but hes your first live Caesan. Then you get "Caesan Analysis" research but not the leader one. If the first Leader you capture is a Praetor, then indeed you get neither the Leader nor the Praetor storyline research, just the standard Praetor analysis.

Not being a developer, I can clearly see your arrogant style. I am just pointing this out to let you make more useful comments - I know that, if I were a developer (and I've developed other things), I would just ignore something written in your style. And the sniper rifle does count as a heavy weapon, for instance, which is helpful to know. As for most things that you say, please remember that this is a first beta version so the balance is currently way off, and no, the game isn't "fair" in many ways. This will be the main focus of development for the coming weeks. Which the developers are glad to have help for, but I know that posts written with an attitude of "все пидоры, а я - Д'Артаньян" are far less likely to be taken into account by developers. If you just want to leave your impressions and do not care about whether they are taken into account, then there is also no need for you to adjust your form of writing.

Why not? Lasers (which are real) are not necessarily red. They can be blue or green, for instance. And while reality has nothing like "plasma bolts" you see in the game, plasma is indeed of different colors, too. It's usually blue, but you know those neon signs, for example? That's plasma, and can be red or green also. Color of plasma actually depends on the specific gas involved in the plasma creation process.

Is there a specific instruction after which you invert ZF?

Ah, that would explain a lot. I know I am always happy to see aliens with plasma cannons because then I'm quite sure my soldiers will be fine even if caught out of position and fired upon.

This is not Belarus, we're used to a slightly more civilized and polite form of argumentation First, stop thinking that everyone except you is an idiot. Developers know how to write code and that it should be good code. This isn't your high school programming assignment, it's actually difficult to make something complex, so there will be bugs and incomplete things, like how grenades currently work. Please report that, it is very helpful, but quit treating developers like morons that write broken code on purpose. Second, do try to understand some aspects of the game first. It can be confusing even if you've played X-COM, with things like heavy weapon movement penalties. I've played the original X-COM a fair bit, yet it was hard enough to get used to certain things in Xenonauts, and I am still learning.

Much as I don't want to say that the aliens are overpowered, and they are not really, there might be a problem with the heavy plasma. It's like your LMGs only much better, and indeed often 1-shot well-armored guys. My first proposal would be to reduce damage to the environment on that gun so that it would not usually destroy a piece of cover right with its first burst. Got burned by this yesterday - hiding behind some console in a UFO, got fired at by heavy plasma, first two bolts destroyed the console, the remainder kills. Ouch. On the other hand the plasma cannon (or whatever the 1-shot splash gun is called) is kinda useless. It usually suppresses while doing no damage even to guys in scout armor, either the splash damage is too low or the thing is too inaccurate.

Well, I'd say there is an ideal spot somewhere, and Caesans miss it by a very wide margin. It's just that they are not visually distinct from humans. Their skin is grey, but you only see it on the head, while their body proportions are exactly like humans. They're as tall as humans, their limbs have human proportions, they have human standing/crouching postures and movement animations. I am not asking for them to be changed, just trying to point out why I see them as a particularly uninspiring design.

By the way, what does logically happen in the game, lore-wise, if you secure a UFO? Who flies the dropship back? Do your troops fly back in the UFO? Does the last alien die due to poisoning or run away?

If all you get is a 10% bonus to damage for each alien type captured, I do not feel that is enough. There should be stronger incentives for capturing all sorts of aliens. Maybe letting me sell their (undamaged) artifacts for a higher sum of money, or something else. I think this was one of the flaws of the original game. All you really needed to capture was any random alien (1st storyline step), a leader (2nd storyline step), a commander (final storyline step), a navigator (for Hyperwave) and a psionic alien (for psi). That's a maximum of five aliens but it could be less if the first alien you captured was a navigator, and if the leader/commander was psionic, so just three aliens minimum.

What about now?

Another Geoscape balance thing, somewhat related to UFO types. There's an issue with the tech tree right now. The tech tree should have several viable options at any point in the game, but in the early game as it stands now, you must get Alenium & Alenium Explosives researched ASAP. So you need to shoot down a Scout with minor damage done, and then research alenium explosives. There isn't really a choice so the other options in the tech tree are then not viable. This is of course mainly due to the need for alenium weaponry on your fighters, without which even Corvettes become difficult and there's no chance of taking down a landing ship.

I am not sure if that change would be beneficial for the AI, though. Would it not then make sense for me to rush straight for the UFO (which aliens will be defending anyway with AI tweaks), clear it, and then just set up a defensive position inside to kill the remaining aliens easier than "in the field"?

True, part of the idea is to avoid "hunt the alien". But sometimes I want to, which is why I want a popup. Case in point from my last time, I cleared a UFO only to realize there's a Harridan remaining outside. And that I have no live Harridans captured, so the lone guy should make an easy target with my team hitting him. But... no popup as the mission can end. What I'd like is just a simple popup like the abort mission one, "We have secured the UFO and can return to base, but alien operatives remain in the area. Finish the mission or continue?" Though speaking of that Harridan situation, I am still not sure what the benefit of capturing aliens is, aside from the ones you need to progress in the storyline.

Now that it works, I think there should be a popup asking you if you want to end the mission. I secured a UFO, turned out there was another alien outside. Sent half my team to hunt him down, then the mission ended before I could because I held the UFO. Now I know that, if I clear a UFO and want to hunt down the last alien for whatever reason, I need to quickly evaluate the UFO.

Yeah, I'll express my support once again for smaller UFOs in later parts of the game. As for funding, I'd like mission bonuses to still be important. Nation funding should definitely be more important, right now it barely pays maintenance and doesn't feel like a reward that it should. But I think the importance of mission funding should still grow. At the beginning it may be a nice 10-20% bonus, but later in the game mission bonuses should account for half of your funding at least. I also hope manufacturing costs get another look. A base with 2 full Workshops that can build a Foxtrot in a day will need a month to build a Marauder. Yes it's a super-advanced craft, but a month is ridiculous, while getting 4 Workshops to build it in a decent time is counter-productive because you don't have anything else that could benefit from such numbers of engineers.

Why not just application? Alien Alloy Application. And yes, when I saw "Alien alloy fabrication" my first thought was that it'd allow me to manufacture the alloys.

Civilians are idiots. They are supposed to be panicking, yes, but a panicking person that's hunkered down in a safe position will not suddenly run towards the threat. I'd make civilian AI mostly run away from the closest alien, and perhaps run towards the Chinook if a civvie sees it.

Maps can be randomly built out of submaps, the problem is props, as far as I understand. I'd be happy with strangely placed or even no prop maps as long as they are completely random, at least for a section of maps. Really I think the best solution is a combination. Some heavily randomized maps, some that are more or less static.

I would be willing to live with fewer props, illogical layouts or many other things if there were more randomness. The OG did it brilliantly. I would not know where the UFO was, and I would not even know where buildings were. On a terror map, there could be a warehouse in the corner, or not. It was amazing, and it's hard to replicate even with 50, 100 or 150 maps. I would love the randomness of X-COM to be back. For a farm map, just put them together completely randomly out of submaps in a grid, and woohoo! Otherwise, having more random alien spawns would be great. Should again be less predictable.

I think Chris wrote recently it's meant to be global, but it does not seem to be. I've failed to go to Indonesia from a European base.

I was actually thinking about the atmosphere and aesthetics of the game yesterday, and would have to agree that alien design might be the weakest point. Caesans and Sebillians are just uninspired. Caesans don't look humanoid, they look human. My first thought on seeing one was a Star Trek redshirt. They look like bald humans, that's it. Not very alien. While the Sebillians are a bipedal lizard. Nothing wrong with it per se, but it's a design that has been around in many games and other media. Does not stand out. Harridans kinda look like they are wearing Yoda masks. I like the other aliens visually, especially Androns. It may indeed be nostalgia, but I think the OG had very good alien designs. Celatids were just alien and weird, while Ethereals were creepy with their robes. Although Mutons were silly, looked like bodybuilders in green pajamas.