Solarius Scorch

So much yes. The original problem seems valid too.

I disagree with the scrolling. Switching soldiers is something I do constantly, and changing levels is pretty rare. Although keybinding option is always nice. As for the rest... Sorry, I can't decipher what you meant. I have some ideas, but nothing solid.

Well, the idea is that they wouldn't enter flames unless you specifically click on the burning tile.

I'm afraid this would be like extinguishing napalm with a blanket. I can see the fire pretty well myself, thank you very much. What is needed is some sort of mechanism to prevent walking into fire that you can't see - therefore I vote for changing the pathfinding system to automatically avoid flames. Stun gas, too.

I've already posted it in the ground combat UI thread, but then I've decided to make a new thread as it's a specific issue. Please tell me if you agree. To sum up, this is a surprisingly major issue for me. Sure, it's rare and technically can be avoided, but... it happens anyway! And is stupid.

For anyone interested, here's how you change refuelling and repairing times: 1) Open gameconfig.xml. 2) find this: <!-- AIRCRAFT REFUEL / REARM RATES --> <refuelRate value="70" comment="The refueling rate for aircraft in KM/MINUTES." /> <repairRate value="0.02" comment="The repairing rate for aircraft in HP/MINUTES." /> 3) Change values accordingly. (The ones above are already changed, since I've fiddled with this file a little and can't remember the original values.)

I'd certainly rotate my pistols to look cooler on the belt. Even if I have to mod them to be 2x2.

In the research selection screen, the category for weaponry says "weaponary". A simple mistype which always makes me smile a little.

Hmm, black screen with green lines is already used in the air combat, so you could argue that it'd be good for style consistency. On the other hand, I'd reverse the colours like Stinky did to make the minimap compatible but different; after all, I think it's natural for empty space (air) to be marked black, while ground generally should be non-black.

Oops, looks like I missed the 1.19 shotgun update... Sorry.

Yes, muzzle velocity, but I was thinking about average impact velocity (shotgun pellets get slow quickly). Anyway, while my numbers may have been wrong (I got them from somewhere), getting hit with shotgun pellets cannot possibly be equivalent to receiving 50 pistol bullets to the chest.

Umm, not at all. If it was so, a shotgun would be a short-range minigun. Buckshot indeed has similar size as a 9 mm pistol bullet, but the bullet is almost twice as fast (300 - 350 m/s vs. 200 m/s), not to mention other issues like shape. Just saying. Anyway, shotguns are useless in the current edition. I'm personally modding all weapons anyway so I kinda forgot about it, but... yeah. Excellent observation. This is wrong indeed... Perhaps the TU cost for quick throwing grenades should be dynamic? Calculated based on what you have in hands?

When we start seeing 8-bit parodies of Xenonauts on YouTube, then we'll know the game is huge success.

Umm... Sorry, but what? Are you telling me that doing my best will actually make things harder for me, not easier? Sorry, but I cannot accept this; this might solve some gameplay problems easily, but it'd be an awful case of schizophrenic design. I can accept a lot in the name of gameplay, simplification or fun, but this is going too far - no matter how elegant it would be (and yes, well, it would). I thought the idea was to allow the player to influence invasion by preventing the aliens from completing their missions, since each mission advances the ticker. Which, truth be told, is a wonderful, if simplistic idea. (The following paragraph may contain actual game content presented as my own ideas. If it's the case, it's only because I honestly don't know how the game works yet; in such cases, sorry for kicking down an open door.) A way to make it a little more complex, without putting much additional development work in the game, is connecting the ticker advancement to the alien bases only. Bases represent alien activity and their various efforts to take over the planet. A base can only be built if: 1) several reconnaissance missions are completed for a chosen location, 2) a base construction mission is complete, 3) the aliens perform a certain number of abductions and research operations to give the base a purpose. Preventing these missions would hinder the aliens. As for new ships, they wouldn't be governed by the above-described ticker, but by time passed; after all these UFOs are already built, they just need some adjustment. The ticker can give a bonus here (research conducted in bases on Earth means faster adjustments on UFOs). Finally, after some time (a year?) relations with funding countries become progressively more difficult, since our organisation is starting to be seen as ineffectual. This penalty grows slightly with every month. While it's possible to mitigate it by being very effective, it will become progressively harder. Also, events like "warship strafed" etc. will increase this penalty or even unlock it earlier. Alternatively, they can be divided into morale-related (abductions, terror missions etc.) that add to this penalty and military-related (attacks on military installations) that advance the general ticker (because the global military power decreases, therefore allowing the aliens to work more openly and therefore faster). Tying alien progress to the player's progress was how it worked in UFO: Extraterrestrials. While not inherently terrible, this is a very crude system, which leads to a lot of metagaming (like postponing research on plasma weaponry until nothing else remains, because plasma weapons for us will unlock ion weapons for the aliens and we don't want that). Yes, something like this (well, I was getting to the same idea just before). EDIT: I also agree wholeheartedly with ThunderGr (who posted at the same minute as I, so I missed his/her post at first) that it'd be nice if aliens somehow reacted to Xenonauts' actions. Alien retaliation missions and all that.

I wanted to make it into a separate thread, but since it's an aspect of ground combat UI, I'll just put it here for now: Walking into fire. My people keep blindly going through fire, therefore losing HPs. This happens even when I'm careful, for various reasons - mostly because it's not always obvious where the fire is (fog of war, fire behind walls) and when moving the whole squad fast. This is exceptionally derpy. Proposed solution: the movement paths should avoid fires. Walking into fire should only be possible when you click on the burning tile. Hopefully it'll also prevent locals from committing suicide whenever fire breaks up.

I know it's only indirectly related to the vision range question, which is only indirectly related to the combat shield, but I resent the fact that now Sebilians have human-like sight range. It's contradictory to the Xenopedia and it bears strong marks of "oh no, humans are actually better at something, let's take it away quickly because no fun allowed". Honestly, sight range is a very, very delicate issue.

My theory is that the aliens' data were accurate, but outdated by 100 years or so. They never accounted for interceptors, radars and SAM stations... They expected to be fighting cavalry.

Hmm, unless the TU would stay the same, but each step would take more TUs. That'd make some sense.

Thanks! That's a very roundabout way of doing things, but I'll give it a try.

Sadly, as Xenonauts has a fixed AP number for every manoeuvre, this would also prevent Predators from, for example, firing their machine guns twice when normally these soldiers would be able to. Kinda defeats the point of a power armour, no? Of course this wouldn't matter if Xenonauts were like X-Com and had this system where the cost of each shot was a a percentage of the soldier's total AP. Which honestly makes a lot more sense, I think.

I wonder what would happen if aliens started throwing the flares back. Oh wait... Active flares aren't objects in this game... Damn.

Well, I see what you mean. However, I do not believe in overspecialisation. I believe that every soldier, well except the rocket jockey and the shield bearer, should be reasonably versatile. Elaborate plans where every unit has a strictly designated role and intricate cooperation is required look good on paper, but they tend to blow up in my face. Plus, they're boring and tedious as hell, but that's beside the point. As for the shield itself, I don't really think it needs vision impairment (though it'd be defensible). While indeed it gives good protection, any attack from the side is still lethal, so using the shield for scouting is far more dangerous than one could think at first.

Yeah, excellent work. I hope to see more soon! Especially on submaps. EDIT: Okay, everything's peachy except for testing. I have no idea how to test my map. I do not have the Xenonauts_gc_editor - Quick Battle.exe file; what I have is Xenonauts_gc_editor - Quick Battle.bat, but it seems to simply launch the Xenonauts as normal.

Well, back in the EU1994 you did just that and everything was fine. As for the vision limit, I find battles harder with armours than without them. That's why I only used Buzzards (because no sight limit), period. Then I modded the sight limits the hell out of everything. Well, if we really want using various armours at the same time make sense, we could make a scout armour (Buzzard) with greater vision range and a battle armour (Predator) with more or less normal range. Okay, it can be slightly lowered, but not if it's a Wolf with a giant windscreen!