Kaorimoch

The ground missions are challenging, but the air missions are pretty insane. Until they balance the game, this is what I suggest you do. Go into the manufactures.xml and edit it with notepad. Decrease the cost and build time. I think theres an aircraft.xml file around as well (Can't see because I am at work) and triple the damage output of the weapons. Then you will have a fighting chance. Its not cheating, its balancing.

You don't need a valkyrie, but on the other hand you do. Umm, let me explain. The shrike, the 2nd troop aircraft was causing map errors when you get to locations as the locations didn't have a place for the shrike to land so the map would crash to desktop upon loading. Quite frustrating. Since the valkyrie shoots drop-pods onto the battle field, the whole landing issue isn't a problem.

With single shot selected, hover the target reticle over the enemy. Then right click to scroll through the options.

My idea for soldiers and training. When you have a soldier reach the top rank, you can retire them (as the military does) and put them in a training school as an instructor. This improves the rookies available for hire from the soldiers experience, or it could improve their base statistics by 10% of what the soldier earned during their tour of duty. This gets rid of super soldiers that players have that don't really improve from further deployments. It keeps ground missions more rewarding. For aircraft. I like your ideas. Let the troop carrier arrive at locations a bit faster too. The better aircraft can increase deployable soldiers (for the most part) and improve speed.

I am enjoying the game so I just wanted to know if there was more to look forward to or sink my teeth into with the current state of the game. If not, I might stop there since older saves are not going to work. Great game.

My idea would be 1. Change the base to a 6x4 arrangement for building. Instead, have building that are fixed to a base when a base is constructed, ie a hanger for the troop carrier, radar station, living quarters etc. Allow players to upgrade the fixed buildings. Bases always have particular buildings as a stock standard. 2. Instead of hiring or firing engineers and scientists, (a) have each project cost more to represent the cost of the research or in building the asset. More research / workshops can reduce the time and cost. Less micro management with staff. (b) Have the player start with a certain amount of scientists at the beginning and allow them to recruit more based on the friendliness of particular areas. Friends with Africa? Hire Mr Mwambe the scientist in February as a one off cost. Review each countries offerings each month. Add specializations to recruitable staff. Don't have the scientists stuck to one location, have them as a floating number that exists between bases. If you have 30 staff but only 20 of room in your lab facilities, you need to build more to take advantage of your staff numbers. © Make specific Recruit/rescue scientist/engineer missions. (eg CERN is under attack, rescue the place by eliminating the forces there for +5 scientists and better chances of recruiting scientists later). 3. Improve detection chances with additional radar stations, rather than range. It will screw up players decisions to create base locations. If you did want to look at ways to implement increasing range - (a) You could include an option to increase range a bit at the cost of additional funds per month to represent the increase electricity costs (or patrol costs) which would become prohibitively more expensive as the range increased. That would encourage people to build bases to lower the monthly costs for radar monitoring. (b) You could upgrade the radar station to a satellite station (or allow a satellite station to be built if a radar station existed there) to increase the range (or allow a separate area to monitor in a particular location close to the base to cover funny looking areas like Alaska, New Zealand or the UK). I like making decisions on the bases as it provides a welcome reprieve from the constant deploys of soldiers.

My main group of soldiers are about 122 TUs (which appears to be the maximum) and I only have a 95% chance of hitting an alien with them when I am standing right next to them and I use a single shot with the maximum available TUs. Most of the time, I use 30 TU shots for 30-44% chance of hitting. I don't mind the high miss % as long as the aliens are similarly affected.

I never played the original xcom, I must have missed it in my teens, but I played the UFO After series to death. Anyway, here was my experience in point form as feedback for the devs. I have played the steam build up to March 1980 with 4 bases up and running getting 3 million each month in funding. Things I like 1 Those battleships filled with autons that come out at you in waves, Love it. I kill 30-35 so its a great stand up and hit em fight that ends with victory so I dont have to clear out the ufo. Keeps things varied so each map has differences. 2 The balance at the start of game really gives a great challenge upgrading from M16s to lasers. Annoying things. 1 I once spent real time 30 minutes chasing a wraith around the map that teleported every move. It was farm map so there were many LOS obstacles. Very frustrating. 2 Air is very unbalanced since the big ufos come in 3 months and the better interceptors require a lot of build time and money. The build time is more of a problem. 3 It takes about 2 months to set up a new base properly. 4 The UFOs come in waves of like 12 at a time. Great revenue opportunity, but it means each base needs a lot of interceptors to take advantage of it all. I found it balanced for me well when I had 5 marauders at each base. Modifications I made to make the game more fun for me. 1 Increased the damage for magstorm and plasma blaster fivefold. 2 Reduced the build time for the interceptors to 100 for corsairs and 150 for marauders. 3 Reduced cost to 320 for corsairs and 400 for marauders. 4 Increased base sight range for soldiers to 22. 5 Reduced build time on the armor to 30 days for wolf, 90 days for sentinel. Xenonaut bugs I have noticed 1 When the last enemy on a map was a zombie, I killed it, out came the reaper.. and then it showed mission complete. And I lost points for letting an enemy get away. 2 When selecting a plane to build without an engineer on the project, I went to the geoscope, the money was taken off me, went back to the manufacturing plant, removed the project and no money was refunded. It was gone. 3. When putting on the sentinel armor while having a weapon equipped in the squad screen, the weapon disappears. Usually the weapon might go back to inventory, but in this case it actually disappears and I have to reload and unequip the weapon to equip it. 4 Using the shrike to visit some areas such as terror sites leads to a crash to desktop. I used the maps someone had altered to allow a shrike to land since some maps didn't have proper shrike deploy slots. Later on in the game, I was unable to add more soldiers to the shrike and trying to click on the grayed out shrike button to assign a soldier to it led to a crash to desktop. I had to spend time getting the valkyrie going or rely on the chinook. (I was secretly hoping for a Macross Valkyrie for a cool mech battle but ... yeah) 5 The game would crash to desktop if I tried to transfer a soldier to another base. This led to me having to level up soldiers from scratch at each base, so getting soldiers with 55 TUs to take on a downed battleship - not fun. Weird less important bugs 1 When attacking a downed ufo that severe damage was inflicted on, after the first turn, I win the map! There were no aliens. 2 Healing someone with a medkit counted as an action that aliens could react to with a shot. 3 When deploying with the valkyrie, the deployment phase seems mixed up with the first phase. That led to a nice terror mission opening where the aliens took out 3 of my team members. To get around this, I saved the game after deploying my troops, then I reloaded that game and I was able to take the first move. Recommendations 1 I cannot see the aliens when they are just on the edge of the viewable space during a night mission. I have to wiggle the cursor around the area the alien should be to find it and on that note, when you enter a ufo during night, the ufo interiors go dark when you cant see them (eg when moving soldiers) which does not occur during the day. Pie in the sky recommendations 1 More in game indications of where the story is going. 2 Perhaps you could “retire” soldiers when they reach a certain point and put them into some sort of training academy to give rookies a boost when they hit the field. This would give players a way to get rid of super soldiers and make rookies more effective, keeping players interested in leveling up soldiers in the field. It makes the ground missions more rewarding. 3 Upgrading radar stations to improve detection?

Disappointing but it is an early access game. I need closure. I might post about my gameplay experience later for the devs.

I've managed to bypass most of the crash to desktop errors and save game corruption issues, plus I modified the manufacturing table to reduce the time and cost to build interceptors (I was getting carriers by month 4!) and now I'm in March 1980, no research since December 1979 to do and gathering 300k-1000k from each downed ufo I assault. Apart from building a lot of bases and outfitting my soldiers with sentinel armor / mag rifles, am I waiting for something to happen? Is there an end coming soon? Have I missed an area of research somewhere. Note - This is the steam build.

I think I have worked out why my game is crashing after 3 hours of testing. Whenever I try to move a soldier from my Russian base to my North American base, then save, that game is corrupted.

Upon loading a savegame from a ground mission, saving again from that point results in a crash to desktop with the error message "Xenonauts has stopped working." Previous savegames from that mission worked fine but upon reloading any of them, the same result occurs. Only workaround is to load an autosave from before the mission commenced and play from there. Note - Not allowed to add savegame attachment.