Solver

It's not there to shoot. To me, its entire purpose is to keep your soldiers alive. Surviving soldiers = stats increases = better success later on and higher mission rewards. Every time a Hunter dies, it's a soldier that doesn't die because he wasn't fired at. Use it to spot aliens, then fire at them. If the alien doesn't die, just make sure your Hunter is the closest unit to the alien. Then your forces survive, and you can still afford new Hunters even by losing them every other mission.

No. There is cover, cover comes in different quality, and the system is also directional.

Did you have enough money? Hangar space?

Not sure how much TUs aliens are supposed to have, but I notice suppressed aliens have enough for one 3-round burst from a plasma rifle. Don't know if that is intended. And I am surprised some people find the Hunter to be weak now. It's weak but still overpowered, which is not a contradiction in this case - it's still better than taking two extra soldiers, because it's capable of ensuring higher survival rates with its spotting and ability to attract fire.

Feels like points for missions have been way turned down, I now can't get better than an Average rating at the end, and that's even when I kill all aliens without taking any casualties, and securing a lightly-damaged UFO.

It's a good point, I assumed the current night mission setup is temporary. There's not really any FoW in night missions, it's just pitch black. Not so much like being out at night but rather like being in a windowless bunker. Outlines of buildings and the like should still be visible and FoW-covered, not just disappear. The original did it well by having a small visible and illuminated area around your soldiers, and dark FoW elsewhere.

Yeah, maybe it's related code-wise to the launcher ammo changes that support the new explosives, but to me this has happened both with regular and Alenium explosives so far.

I am fully supportive of Chris's decision not to use Steam forums in an official capacity. They offer no customization, are strangely designed, and technically much inferior to a proper forum like this one. They also do quite easily become a cesspool indeed. However, still worth checking occasionally because constructive feedback does sometimes happen even in places like that. Also importantly, the forums do need a voice of reason that provides helpful posts, even if such posts do tend to be quickly drowned in the noise. Ignoring the trolls is not very difficult with some experience, at least I'm many years past the point where they'd anger me

Max is right. I feel confident saying that as someone very experienced by now with forums. People will concentrate in different places, and people will be on the Steam forum in large numbers. Because it's the most easily accessible one, because you can go there directly from the Steam client. Like it or not, people will be there. Unfortunately, forums like Steam's generally have a lower signal-to-noise ratio, but there are still good posts that are worth reading. I'd also really suggest rephrasing the top thread on the Steam board. "We do not use these forums" is a very bad title that immediately creates an antagonistic impression. A much better title would be something like "These are not official developer forums". The text of the post does a good job by saying that devs may occasionally check there, but it really needs to be friendlier. With the gaming community at large, things like that matter, and Steam gives enormous exposure.

Sometimes, but never on a soldier's first mission as far as I can see, a rocket trooper becomes useless. The soldier begins the mission with the rocket launcher showing 0/1 ammo, as if it needs a reload. However, it is impossible to reload either as usual or by dragging a rocket onto the launcher, this is as the soldier is normally equipped with extra rockets in the backpack. No idea so far what triggers the bug.

I've observed a few times that, if a scout car gets destroyed, it just resurrects - it's back in the Chinook when it gets back to base and goes happily on the next mission. This happens only in special circumstances though - when you have multiple scoutcars built and it is NOT the first one that is assigned to the Chinook. That is, if you have Hunter001 and Hunter002, then assigning Hunter002 to the chopper results in this bug, while Hunter001 would behave and die normally.

Initial impressions on the new balance. 1. The Hunter car is wrongly rebalanced. It's now sower, so I will just move my troops slower, but still behind it. The core of the problem remains unchanged, and it is that putting the scout car in danger is extremely preferable to putting soldiers in danger. I'm fine with losing a scoutcar every other mission if I have to. 2. Too much suppression now. I see aliens suppressed by the first bullet from an assault rifle. It's probably too much to effortlessly suppress everything. 3. The TU costs are now such that a high-accuracy shot from an assault rifle costs the same as burst fire, and so I don't really see when burst fire is good anymore. It's better to take an accurate shot which will probably hit and suppress, while a burst will most probably not hit. 4. Grenades might have been a bit overnerfed in terms of their effective range. This is still better than them being perfect artillery like before. 5. Pistols still need a slight buff to be a viable backup option for heavy weapons guys or specialists that are low on ammo or TUs. 6. This is not a problem of the combat values strictly, but ammo is still not a factor with ballistic weapons. Every soldier is either dead or heading back to base before needing to reload.

Got my key. Hopefully this means I never have to download anything off Desura's site again. This is great!

Then I assume UFO spawns have also been considerably decreased? At least it feels that way. Previously I'd get 2-3 missions in the first few days by shooting down UFOs in radar range, now my first UFO in radar range showed up after about a week. So it looks like the frequency has slowed down, though it is probably a good thing.

That's fine, I just don't believe they should come up before you intercept a single UFO. Also they should clearly have damaged UFOs.

Slightly strange things for me - starting a new game with the hotfix, my first two missions are "local forces shot down a UFO". This is before I see a single UFO on radar. Also, these missions where it was "shot down by locals" seem to be interpreted as landings - there's actually an undamaged UFO sitting on the map.

One solution somewhere in the middle could be to make air combat itself a bit less forgiving, like remove the alien missiles that can insta-kill an interceptor fairly early on. I am not sure if it is a random chance or what, but I've encountered that with, I think, Fighter UFOs.

This is a very interesting issue. On the one hand, the idea of indestructible interceptors is exactly the sort of thing I normally dislike. It's a mechanic that treats you gently when you fail, and always having an interceptor once built is very reminiscent of the dumbing down in contemporary games. On the other hand, I agree tat air combat feels too important currently. I find the first engagement with a Corvette for instance to be absolutely crucial, if I lose a plane there, I am toast. Air combat should not be a snoozefest like in the original Xcom. I definitely want a game where it's possible to lose, and here the two main ways of losing should be ground combat (you run out of soldiers to effectively respond to missions) and funding nations (enough of them lose trust in you to pull out). Losing in air combat should not be that punishing, but it should be a contributing factor. I guess if you ground critically damaged aircraft for long enough, you ensure that it still costs you a couple of UFOs that you can not engage.

I'm happy to report that, as we approach 24 hours of the forum being hosted here, the server hasn't had any slowdowns, and the forum is consuming a negligibly small amount of resources. The attachments are indeed still broken and I've made sure it's not a plugin-caused problem, nor is it a forum style problem, nor a server-side setting messing with them. I will investigate that further though it is an unexpected issue. EDIT: If anyone experiences the forum redirecting to another forum, please do not be concerned. It means I momentarily did something wrong with the settings and will return things to normal within minutes.

Realism should not be brought into the discussion too much, because it does not always lead to good gameplay. In realistic terms, yes, military-quality smoke grenades can build up such dense smoke that troops inside of it will be invisible from the outside, but that actually has little relevance to the game. In the original X-COM, I'd also say there was only a small problem with smoke grenades. There was nothing wrong with them in principle, it's just that the smoke cloud was big and provided a serious reduction in visibility. If you were near the middle of a smoke cloud, you were only detectable by someone right at the edge, IIRC, making it extremely powerful. Xenonauts already does this better by having smaller clouds of smoke.

Reduced accuracy and reduced probability are only equivalent if the two are reduced by the same factor. If you reduce accuracy in smoke by 10% but probability of reaction fire by 30%, it's not the same as reducing accuracy by 10% across the board. Even further, accuracy penalties are two-sided, while reaction fire penalty is not. If you sit in smoke now, you are better protected, but you are also less dangerous by exactly the same amount. If smoke reduced reaction probability, then moving into smoke would provide more protection than reduction in offensive capability, not both equally. Advancing under fire makes sense, but also smoke is used as concealment, hopefully allowing you to move somewhere without the enemy even noticing that movement, which I'd like to see.

Welcome everyone! If you're accessing the forum now, it means you're on the new forum and not on Dreamhost anymore. The new forums may not yet be accessible everywhere in the world, but the hosting change has already propagated quite widely as evidenced by the people being here. Almost everyone should be able to access the forums within the next few hours, and it will be working for everyone tomorrow. Please do report speed or other issues.

UFO crash for me, I re-loaded several times from an autosave and mid-mission saves, losing the mission in any way crashes.

Stability wise this is almost perfect, though I've verified that losing a battlescape mission results in a CTD reliably. Other than that, no crashes so far when loading, mid-mission or anything else.

Yeah, my proposal is a reduced chance of reaction fire. And perhaps nerf the accuracy protection even. I think smoke should be primarily an anti-reaction-fire thing, not act like extra cover (which is essentially what it does with accuracy reduction). Smoke gives -20 accuracy (nice guess Waladil!) - my initial rebalance if I were in charge (wait, I am not in charge? what happened?) would be -10 accuracy but a 40% or even 50% reduction to reaction fire chance. Thus making protection against reaction fire the main reason for laying down smoke, and making sure you want to put smoke somewhere before you go there if you suspect aliens.