Miyuki

Since sniper rifles can't benefit from close range bonus, instead they lose accuracy as you get that close, so their maximum is always 95% for a standing target and 75% for a crouched target. Unskilled soldiers shooting at the very edges of the weapon's effective range usually get barely 60-70% with 60 TUs without cover between the target. But the more skilled they get, what makes it harder is usually the cover that aliens are behind, which is a flat percentage reduction and that is where the higher minimum accuracy really comes in. Earlier I could be shooting forever at targets behind a cover with only 5-15% hit changes, but now it's much more reasonable at around 25% when the targets are behind half-body height covers. In my opinion, you should benefit significantly from outmaneuvering your enemies, or getting lucky and catching them in the open, especially because they later take multiple hits to take down. However, the greatest benefit of the newly balanced accuracy system is that assault rifles are by far more useful than they used to be at medium ranges, where as shotguns get great benefits at short ranges, where I've seen percentages upwards of 170 right next to the target with maximum TUs, so just choose to use enough TUs to hit, but not too many to waste some. Though pretty much only non-combatants can be one-shot that way, so you still have to be smart with time units. I didn't used to really use assault rifles for anything until now, where their damage and accuracy was utter crap compared to snipers who raked in most kills and even then after long-winded series of misses. At times I didn't have enough batteries for the lasers and had to scrounge up alien weapons in some alien base missions. Combat so far in my opinion has been quite good, as the difficulty ramps up nicely and few weapons can ever one-shot any alien at any time. The aliens have been quite smart with cover as well, so it's been mostly about exchanging shots from cover, while trying to keep soldiers from bunching up within a grenade's blast radius, which I find quite realistic.

I'm quite certain I've shot equipment off of the hands of aliens with plasma weapons, where an alien survives a burst of fire, but is then sitting there without a weapon. I started noticing this when they sometimes ran off unarmed and without their weapon being left on the floor, instead of shooting back. I wager it's a feature, like how sufficiently powerful grenades can cause equipment to blow up outright. Basically it seems that items and soldier armor can actually absorb damage and especially higher tier androns can take multiple shots before they start taking damage from the likes of projectile and laser weapons. I just wish there was some kind of an indication of this, other than leaving the player wonder why the soldier made a hit sound, but no damage was done. Edit: I suppose our soldiers don't lose their weapons like this quite as easily, as any damage sufficient to destroy a weapon like that, would be enough to kill the soldier outright.

That could help explain the issues from 20.8 persisting over to 20.9, yes it's an old save. Started a new game from scratch as the latest savegame with that problem encountered a freeze issue every single time at the same hour same day when that Fury research was supposed to have finished, regardless of whether I ended the research or not. So far it's been working extremely well balance wise second month in on normal just so that I could actually get as far as, or further than that earlier attempt. Now there's enough cash to actually manage more than one base and enough craft within reason, instead of losing funds each month to the point of having a balance of less than 200k on third month with just one base. The aliens behave better, the air combat is more manageable and relies more on tactics and figuring out which craft is being chased to lure the UFO in a good position for the other craft. The difficulty curve overall has been much smoother too. Oh, right... soldiers can now walk into objects when they don't know they're there and get stuck.

Completing certain research being completed, like the Fury, seems to freeze the Geoscape if it is run at 4 times speed prior when the notification is supposed to appear. It always freezes as soon as the notification of it being available for construction appears in Geoscape, which is a tad bit unfortunate. Some UFO missions spawning still cause freezes, but at least bombing missions seemingly start without a hitch now, or at least Strike Cruisers worked fine. I'd say some of the long range shots from Battleships and such are a bit too slow now, what with corsairs, let alone marauders being able to fly around them in circles pretty much. However, being able to flank the craft at least now gives the player a chance. I'd go as far as increasing the range of the defensive weapons a bit further out, to make them more of a threat. Alien behavior in combat is much improved, at least from the couple missions I've been in since patch. Edit: Regarding what Ilunak said, the most prohibitive thing about many bases was the maintenance costs quickly sending budget to the red, no matter how many successful ground missions you did for $50k+ for even scouts and such, $150k for the bigger ones, unless you go crazy with explosives. I'll have to try and start from scratch once I've hit a wall with my current playthrough, but looking at the fundings at this point, it seems that not being able to cover a region is more punishing than doing well in others, especially as you start losing them to aliens. Even excellent relations with Russia don't really cover up for the bad relations elsewhere. The likelyhood of downing a UFO over some of the smaller nations that require a relations boost is just so small that I'd hope the relations boost to radiate to countries affected by the actions of that UFO, not just the one it was shot over.

More oddities: had a soldier with an empty plasma caster and approx 30 TUs do a reaction shot twice in a row. First shot played both the empty magazine "click" and the burst sound, the next one just the burst.

Well, that was odd... Sebillian leader had the ordinary grunt sprites. And before I forget, a couple saves via DropBox. First one crashes in geoscape instantly when being loaded, second one crashes during next alien turn in terror mission: Save 1 Save 2 Shouldn't be relevant, but I did have to cheat a lot more cash to continue and build extra bases, as I almost ran out by start of third month due bad relations with distant nations. At first I thought the geoscape crash may have been related to getting those millions of city under attack notifications even after saving the city, but as I was able to load the subsequent saves up to a point where the next UFO incursion was imminent, I have no idea how to replicate this crash. It just happened and has yet to occur again during this play-through. Good to hear there's a patch coming up.

He means the airstrike option introduced in V20.3 for downed UFOs in geoscape, where the local forces destroy the UFO and you get a set portion in cash as a thanks for the alien tech and get to skip the ground combat without the alien resource benefits. I've been mostly using it when I know I won't have the time to reach multiple downed UFOs with my slow charlie, or when there's smaller UFOs with too little gains for the time it takes to deal with the UFO, but still get monetary benefits.

Indeed, I always make sure I have someone with enough TUs to close the doors. Now I'm trying to survive a night terror mission with wraiths in it again. I noticed the same rule with doors applies to smoke. As long as they've seen one soldier or a civilian run into the smoke next to another that they haven't seen, they throw grenades. If they haven't seen to soldiers within the smoke, they don't do a thing, nor can I do much. Edit: wraiths do seem to behave a bit too clever sometimes with smoke, where they or other units see you moving into it. They teleport around the smoke, surrounding it in a way that makes it really hard for my own units to move out from it to shoot, as they react much faster than my own units and get close proximity bonus for instagibs. It's pretty darned annoying in such open spaces to not be able to utilize the close proximity bonus to morale, so even one of the commander rank soldiers being injured is enough to start a cascade of panic. I guess it's partly because the darkness makes the soldiers more paranoid?

That's pretty much exactly why I found that particular case strange, since... I fully get that they should be able to deduce unit locations, but only to a point. However, I probably should've been more specific in that the alien in question, or any alien for that matter on that map at that point shouldn't have known that I have that soldier behind that particular container. All it should've seen was that civilian running next to my soldier. How it could've deduced that there's 2 targets there to lob a grenade at is beyond me, even with these fancy algorithms that seems to have worked pretty well so far, aside from these few instances of precognition or omniscience. Similar things happened in alien bases. I'll try and make a demonstration next time I get a save in one. Probably the easiest way to demonstrate it: Unopened door in an alien base. Place one soldier behind the door and open it so that the aliens see it = gunfire response. Place one soldier visibly at the door and another one two tiles adjacent to the door within grenade range but in a spot where the aliens shouldn't know the difference = suddenly grenades!

I'd say that the aliens are a tad bit too proficient with grenades now. Combined with an almost precognitive ability to know wether there's two or more targets within the grenade's range, they've been lobbing grenades from the very edge of their visual range at targets they haven't even seen from behind walls. It's been worst in alien bases where I've accidentally left a door open with my units standing behind the walls to the sides of the door, only to get some of the aliens approach and throw a grenade at their feet. I'm currently trying to resolve an issue with a certain civilian always moving next to my units and causing a certain harridan to invariably throw in a grenade, killing any one of my units next to that civilian they've seen, despite the aliens not being able to tell that I have a soldier behind a box container. At least they sure as heck shouldn't be able to, yet. Edit: An alien just committed suicide as I moved my units behind the same cover that the alien was using. Thought it might've been suppressed enough, but clearly it had enough time units to throw a grenade at its own feet pretty much. Maybe it decided that 3 kills justifies suicide I'd agree that improving the chances of autoresolved air combat by doing it without losses manually would be a great addition. As it stands now, it's been a bit of a hit an miss, where I've lost to even scout crafts with corsairs equipped with plasma explosives and laser gatlings at times, despite being able to kill them manually without even getting hit. Edit2: Wraiths most certainly shouldn't be able to teleport and directly toss grenades or use heavy weapons with explosive results of guts splattered over the walls. I've lost far too many soldiers to that already, as there is no defense aside from constantly hiding in smoke, where you can't attack back either.

So, a light and heavy scouts UFOs appeared and I thought I'd see what happens with 2 Foxtrots and a Condor with autoresolve on the light one. They obviously won, so I thought to try and see what happens if I select new target, as the heavy scout was in range. To my surprise, they had full load of armaments, so I downed two UFOs in one loadout. Edit: Tested a bit further and found that occasionally it does use armaments and shows it as a percentage, same with damage. However, when even two Foxtrots can down a UFO and come out of it with either 100% weapons, or just blank stats, it does raise some eyebrows and is an obvious balancing issue. At best, when 3 scouts appeared close together, I was able to kill all in a single excursion! Edit2: A corsair and 2 Foxtrots that with combined alenium weapons and no laser gatling can damage a landing ship up to 96% but not destroy it, even theoretically. However, autoresolve decided that it was not only OK to defeat the UFO with 0 casualties, but also just fine to destroy the lone interceptor UFO that decided to attack the squadron on its way back to base.

Issue should be self-evident from the image: Here's the DropBox link for the save. The issue occurred as I intercepted the next UFO, so this save file may or may not help depending on the RNG. The interceptors did however rearm from that state just fine, so this is not really that much of an issue, especially if it's just an isolated happenstance.

Apparently the small scout still has the issue with aliens being able to shoot through corners, at least from a very specific spot with my unit standing right next to the door to the left. The alien who one-shotted that soldier with a stray burst aimed at another soldier, three squares away from the one who died, was standing next to the upper control device. Stray shots may require a bit of tweaking in that respect. Which lead me to realize that I can't take screenshots from the Xenonauts without running it through Steam, as print screen takes screenshots of anything other than the game itself! Alt + print screen doesn't help either.

Well, after I verified the files through steam and ran the game, it killed the steam bootstrapper entirely to the point of having to restart. Running from the .exe file creates an unkillable process stuck at 135 K working set in memory and 744 K Commit that I can't even create a dump file out of. Even taskkill from elevated command prompt doesn't help with whatever ghost process it has created. Baffling to say the least. Edit: actually since I can't be arsed to restart again, I left the process running and it's been almost 15 minutes now and the memory usage finally increased to 136 K Edit2: No longer confused! Be adviced, Avast antivirus, when active while running the game client totally mucks things up; Add an exception to steam folder, or wherever the game is saved.

I thought it was a feature of the Predator armor to allow for the same ability to crush through walls as Androns have? I've used the ability to my advantage since V18 release when I bought the game at least, but the behavior is a bit inconsistent if it is indeed a feature.