Solver

The AI is much better, but underscores certain issues with reaction fire. That is, I'm convinced certain triggers shouldn't be there (turning around, possibly throwing grenades), and the overwhelming power of the Hunter. The scout car is extremely desirable not because of power or anything but because of reaction fire. Aliens reaction fire a lot, and have longer vision than your soldiers, so it's very hard to move without endangering yourself, while the scout car is too perfect for it not to use it. One thing I'd consider would be to make smoke act as a defense against reaction fire, where units moving through smoke are less likely to be reaction fired at.

Yeah, I know first-hand what an unlimited-bandwidth server costs Hence just grumbling while waiting on Desura and not actually suggesting any change, especially since the game is due to go on Steam anyway, which will make things easier for everyone involved.

Waiting for them to authorize the download for the standalone sucks. Would have been nice to just download from a Chris-owned server with something like uniquely coded links sent to people. EDIT: Every time I see a third party system that sucks like this, it makes me appreciate Steam more.

I for one would hope the AI continues to evolve as long as the game continues to be developed. And I also didn't know the UI needed further improvement, it's quite impressive from where I stand.

Yes, this build is broken. The AI works fine but there's something fishy with the research, I couldn't hire extra scientists, and the infinite AI loop seems to appear far more often. Seems essentially unplayable.

Any hints on what exactly this should change? Presumably the ability of aliens to fire at you from anywhere?

Yeah, I've encountered it several times actually. In my experience, reloading from an in-mission save does not help - no matter if I try to do things differently, it freezes up. I've tried not moving soldiers, moving quicker, moving slower, nothing changes it. Encountered both on UFO crash and terror maps. The only thing that worked for me is to restart from a Geoscape save so the mission would be re-generated with a different map/spawn positions.

Was the same for me in 18.4, I even assumed it to be intentional.

I find squadsight to be mostly fine except cases where aliens can really shoot at you from all the way across the map without anyone actually providing sight. Making LOS update either with movement, or at least upon death, would fix that. Other than that, I really don't see much of a problem.

Actually in the original, you could always safely turn in place without triggering reaction fire, and I'd like to see that mechanic return, it was a very good subtle point in my opinion.

Works for me by right clicking a tile that you want them to face.

Yeah, I am comparing Reapers against the old Chryssalids, not the ones from the new XCOM. In the new XCOM, they were only terrifying on the first terror mission when your soldiers might not yet be durable enough. Reapers lack the super-awesome mobility of the original Chryssalids, but on the other hand there's lots of targets for them to zombify. I just remember that in the original you'd occasionally survive one Chryssalid bite with a strong soldier, which doesn't seem to be the case here with Reapers. EDIT: On that note, I'm still not a fan of how the local soldiers pose a major threat to me on terror missions. They're somewhere behind my lines and have horrible aim, so typically succeed in suppressing my soldiers or causing them to bleed, not to mention that they're yet another Reaper target. Those things get scary when half a dozen rush you!

Two questions: Is it at all possible to survive a Reaper attack? They seem to instantly zombify even armored soldiers with high HP. Is it a bug or intended that you can pick up and use alien weapons during a battle?

Realistic costs are not the point here. Yes, realistically, the cost of RPG rounds, let alone bullets, is tiny compared to the cost of air superiority jets and their missiles. The Sidewinder missile, an old and cheap design, costs 85000$ per missile, you could have an infantry regiment armed with rocket launchers for the cost of a missile. But the point is that these things should be an in-game factor. The idea of doing it on the mission screen cost is excellent because it saves you from the manufacturing / purchasing timesink, and it lets you immediately see how much money goes to rearming, letting you judge if your ammo use policy was sound or not.

After some careful consideration, my preference would be for a two-tier system where ammo is both a strategic and tactical concern. Tactically, it's obvious. There should be a real choice of how many ammo clips to bring, with the real danger of running out of ammo if you did not plan sufficiently. Most likely the way to accomplish it would be through smaller clip sizes, as indeed right now for laser weapons ammo matters much more than for ballistics. But even the current system seems insufficient as you're generally fine if you bring one extra laser clip. Strategically though, ammo should also be a concern for some part of the game. It should be a factor, a cost, but not just a boring timesink. I really like the idea of charging some resupply money after missions, as then it'd suddenly matter how much ammo you expended. Now, if your heavy guy goes into a mission with 4 rockets, you want to shoot all 4, as there's no need to conserve ammo whatsoever. Ideally, it'd be a cost that's fairly significant early on, like the first month, and gradually becomes insignificant as rewards increase. For higher tier weapons, I think the strategic concern is even more important. I'd love to see a situation when you've researched the guns, but for some time you have to worry about actually keeping them supplied with ammo. This is what I'd see as extra half-tiers. The optimal approach to me seems to manufacture advanced ammo types until some time later you get a technology that gives you infinite ammo for them. The in-game explanation is fairly simple, you discover how to re-use expended laser/plasma clips by charging them directly from your base's power supply, allowing you to have as much ammo as you want, compared to the previous state of manufacturing it.

Don't tell anyone, but some of the best results in strategy gaming community have been achieved by having open-sourced AI code

A few more assorted thoughts I can post here since not much changed in 18.5. On the AI, which is a specialization of sorts for me in strategy games. Alien AI, which of course needs additional work, seems to have a few recurring patterns of bad behaviour. Most notably so far: * Spinning. An alien looks like it spins (changes direction it's looking at) multiple times on its turn without moving anywhere. * Always reserving TUs. Aliens reserve TUs for reaction fire extremely often, possibly even always. They do it even if caught out in the open, or if some other action could be desirable. * If they shoot, they only shoot at the beginning of their move. There's no move-shoot-move or move-shoot possible for aliens that I've noticed. Especially move-shoot-move is a powerful tactic, as you can shoot and still go back into cover. Of course if aliens insist on reserving TUs for reaction, they will not have enough to do this anyway. * New in 18.5 is the fact that always at least one, and usually two, aliens rush out of the UFO after I've approached it with any unit. The behaviour just serves to make them easy to shoot. I've started 3 different games so far, and in two I got elenium to research early on, and in the third I had none after 2 months in-game. I am not sure what the difference was causing this - it's one of the non-obvious things about the game. I reiterate that stun explosives need to go later into the tech tree. I tried the stun rod to stun a lizard. It didn't even stun on the first hit, needed two! There's absolutely no advantage to getting in close with the rod as opposed to the easy way of lobbing stun grenades over. If shotguns have a point, it's utterly lost on me. To effectively use that short-range weapon, you'd have to be fighting inside a building (doesn't really happen) or UFO (also happens rarely at least in the early stages). Just seems so very... not worth it.

I got a mission that seems to go into an infinite loop on the AI turn several turns into the mission no matter what I do. Attaching a save just before it happens, you only need end the turn to get the loop. If I get to this point in the mission without having vision of the UFO, then the loop happens with the "Hidden movement" screen on so I guess it's an alien in the UFO causing it. I hope your debugger's warmed up Since the attach feature is once again not working, save's at: http://216.18.20.7/loop.zip

Yeah, same. If the management is interested, I can offer hosting for the whole place on a dedicated server that has way too many resources free most of the time

I enjoyed XCOM:EU quite a lot, though I recommend also looking at re-balancing mods. It's not really like the original X-COM, it's more of an X-COM inspired game. There's more emphasis on the combat missions which are themselves much faster and more intensive than in the original or in Xenonauts. The gameplay is different, but it keeps some true characteristics of X-COM like being really unforgiving, one wrong decision can easily cost you a soldier's life. A lot of the complexity is gone but it's still a fairly complex game, and some new mechanics (soldier abilities) are very fun if less complex than in the original, and as said, the game can be totally unforgiving. I don't think it's a game that can entertain you for years, but it's definitely worth playing.

Absolutely. There are plenty of good games out there, but for me the reason I got interested in Xenonauts and pre-ordered is the hope to see a faithful reinterpretation of XCOM. There are similar games out there that don't capture the feel (like UFO:AI), there's Enemy Unknown by Firaxis which is a very good game but with different features, but there's nothing out there that just takes the old XCOM and plays with those mechanics plus some needed updates. To me, it entails that core features of XCOM need to be present. Squadsight needs to be present because that's how XCOM worked. Ditto reaction fire, or fine control over loadouts, or individual soldier stats, or many other things.

Which is considerably better than XCOM:EU or UFO:AI anyway. EDIT: Note to self and other unfortunate souls, buildings can be built vertically not by right clicking anything but by rotating the mousewheel while trying to build.

Interesting with those maps. I'd have to take a look at the code or some internals at least to understand the system, but I'd hope random maps would be possible by following the general approach of splitting them into subregions and building maps out of these subregions with specified adjacency rules. I think for the game as a whole, random maps have a huge effect. It's what kept XCOM unpredictable. I understand the problem with the props as given in that thread though... As for soldiers not healing, I just got the impression that wounded soldiers only heal up to some level of HP but never get fully restored. That may absolutely be wrong.

More notes in progress. Reaction fire feels a bit weird when an alien doesn't respond to movement yet responds to me shooting by reaction fire. I am also not sure what suppression does as I see suppressed aliens run or shoot on the next turn. Is it just a TU decrease or what? I really like the maps so far. While I'd like more randomness in true XCOM style, I was pleasantly surprised by going to a terror mission in a Soviet city and finding recognizable Soviet objects there. This is good for immersion and easily beats the Firaxis game where the maps all had high quality individually, but no relation to where in the world a mission occurs. Then again, a friendly Soviet soldier killed two of my men, proving a bigger threat than any aliens on the mission. Do I then get it right that my soldiers never fully heal from their wounds? Speaking of terror missions, it's nice to see that they replicate the feeling of the original. In a night terror mission, thinking out I had cleaned out all the Chryssalids, whatever they are called here, but one remained where I did not expect... lots of pain ensues.

It's not that the soldiers are too accurate in my experience, they miss a fair bit early on. But the mag sizes are fairly big, and by the time it's possible to run out of ammo either the aliens are dead or my soldiers are. I need an occasional reload, but with one extra mag per soldier I never run the danger of being left without ammo. I don't really see how you can increase ammo usage significantly in the context of XCOM. There's not enough men ad not enough endurance to have a storm of suppression fire. But also giving magazines a capacity of just 10 bullets is a very significant departure from what makes sense.