GreyArcher

I agree with all of your points individually, it's the combination where things get painful. Take an early scout assault (Ballistic tech, no jackal armor) for instance. 6 aliens (I believe), several with plasma rifles. I'm given the choice of 8 vs 6, or 6 vs 6 with an armored vehicle. Plasma rifles shred cover, frequently kill in one hit, and I can expect to lose at least 1 soldier to an alien carrying one, usually more. Armored cars can usually survive one turn of rifle fire, but a 2nd will take one down. The 'nauts are seriously outgunned in this situation with starting equipment. Original Xcom dealt with this by having huge squads. I could afford losing 6 rookies to horrible plasma death taking a ufo when I started with 12. Alpha Xenonauts dealt with it with allowing basic armor at the beginning, Soldiers were occaisionally one-shotted to death, but more often could fall back and spend a week or two in medbay. Having roughly equal sized squads when one side is much more advanced in tech is sending my poor guys into a meat grinder. If this is the intent, I'll try and make it work, but it's taking a change in mindset. (We're not out to wipe out all the hostiles, we'd get burned down. Kill a few of the uglies, haul the bodies and tech onto the chopper for future research, and live to fight another day. Or if the path to the ufo is lightly guarded, run like hell for the alien ship and hold it till the aliens outside decide to go elsewhere (mission victory).) I agree that the earlier builds were too easy, I'm not saying to go back to that. Having armor and tanks and 2+ to 1 numerical superiority made most missions a cakewalk. I'm just thinking that not having ANY of those three is brutal. (Maybe offer a choice at the beginning for starting with hunter tech, jackal tech, or increased chopper capacity?) Regardless, I'll stick with it though and see if we can pull through. (I didn't expect the 75% casualties from my early Xcom missions either, but we pulled through eventually.) I like challenges...to a point. As for the pop-ups, wouldn't the jackal armor and the hunter armored car still show in the Xenopedia even if the team started with them?

I can vouch that it works. After some unfortunate losses, the remnants of my squad weren't feeling so brave. We holed up in the cleared ufo with guns trained on the entrance. Apparently the remaining alien was too far away or didn't want to assault entrenched positions, and after a few turns we went to mission success.

Hello, I've been playing Xenonauts for a while now, but stopped back around November or December to give the developers some time to work out the bugs that kept crashing the game. When I saw it appear on Steam, I figured I'd give it another go. Here are my opinions so far, just shy of one month in on normal. (My memories of the previous build are hazy, feel free to correct me when necessary.) No Jackal body armor to start with: Can't say I'm thrilled with the decision, but it does bring back memories of throwing legions of disposable rookies at the aliens from the first x-com, so I suppose I can work with it. Except for... Decreased capacity of the choppers: (I forget the exact capacity from the previous builds (12 soldiers, or-8/1 maybe?), but I'm pretty sure that it was more than 8 troopers or 6 troopers/1 armored car.) Excuse me?! Part of why I preferred Xenonauts over Enemy Unknown was because you could have enough soldiers on a mission to provide decent overlapping fields of fire, and losing one soldier wouldn't cause an entire flank to cave in. I'm ok with making do with lots of fragile troops on missions, I could accept being limited to a smaller number of armored troops, but being stuck with small squads of unarmored soldiers at the beginning is not acceptable. No starting armored car. I was never a big fan of the early game armored cars, but they did have their uses. (i.e. moblile cover for stun-stick capture teams) I'm not sure that it improves the game to have us spend time and resources to research and manufacture them rather than have them available to purchase. (Now that armored cars drop the already meager squad size down to 6, I don't think I'll use them much at all anymore.) Can't afford 2nd base right away. My previous games always started with me breaking ground on the second base the first month, usually before the first UFO was spotted. You pretty much had to if you wanted any kind of decent global response capabilities (given the limited range of our choppers) by the time the alien terror raids began. I'm trying to save up enough to get Base 2 funded, but given the rate I'm bleeding money replacing armored cars and soldiers I expect the world to be their playground by that point. No cover symbols: There used to be symbols that indicated the level of cover you could expect from a piece of terrain when you moved by it. I've been confused at several points now whether a given piece of terrain blocks line of sight, provides cover, or is just decoration. Better stability: Hasn't crashed once yet. This alone makes it worth coming back to the game, and I want to give my heartfelt gratitude to the developers for fixing the issues that made playing before so aggravating. (If it can make it past month 4 without seizing up I'll be really impressed.) Path of fire display: This is an excellent feature and I'm glad it's included. In addition to providing indications on how much you can expect cover to affect your aim, it gives you an idea how close you're going to be to shooting your teammates in the back. Squadsight is still present: I'd heard rumors people wanted to see it gone, I'm glad to see it's still with us. Considering how short soldier's range of view is, I think squadsight is a necessity. (Besides, the only people that have much hope of hitting at extreme ranges are snipers (who have every right to hit at long range) and machine gunners (who spray so much lead they're bound to hit something. Improved graphics: Maybe it's just me, but the ships look much better than they used to. Also, I have yet to NOT see a civilian due to invisibility, or have an alien corpse remain standing. Those are all the points so far, I'll update as I get farther in. In summary, I like that the game looks great and is a much more stable play, but several changes to recalibrate the difficulty went too far. I'll admit the last version I played may not have been challenging enough in the early game (Going the first 2 months without a KIA doesn't seem right), but the current arrangement is a huge disappointment and I hope a compromise can be reached. (I may start another game on EASY and see how it goes, but my pride really doesn't want to take that hit.)