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.

Got a save here with soldier 3 behind a wall and out of direct LOS from an alien that usually still shoots right through the wall when ending turn. It never actually even saw the soldier prior to that, having been turned away from the window that my soldier saw the alien through. https://www.dropbox.com/s/zo8f0a9svsugsho/2013-11-18_22.43.57.sav' rel="external nofollow"> Dropbox link Three more issues in the same file: Targeting reticules stopped appearing automatically: Was trying to shoot the alien hiding partially behind the pipes with soldier 3 to see if I had a shot through the window and I could swear I saw the reticule simply flash and vanish only to have it no longer work again without manually selecting the gun each time to shoot. Then again, that may be unrelated to how the soldier was still able to "see" the alien as if in plain sight without actually having a LOS anymore through the window when I was trying to target it. There's also a van on the west corner parking lot that is right on top of another car. Another alien spawned inside an industrial device and indeed, getting near UFO doors is suicidal.

Since it applies to all units, it ought to be a decent balancing act, as previously I've had these long drawn shootouts between half a dozen aliens and all of my units in cover. Neither I, nor the aliens were able to effectively hit each other past cover, over a distance where I'd have to expose myself to get close enough safely. Even the snipers' accuracy capped out at 65% without an obstacle in between, which was rarely the case as the aliens were efficient in moving to cover. Now that they've fixed those issues with crouching bonuses and hit penalties, I'm actually able to hit with more than lucky sniper shots, while having to be more mindful about all around cover for my soldiers too. As was noted already about the multi-story UFOs, not only can the aliens shoot through the floors still, but I've been able to clear these UFOs by actually just shooting through the floors myself, mainly troop ships. The aliens tend to try and shoot targets that are in "direct line of sight" in relative safely behind a wall by an alien reactor, so I can just move a few soldiers right underneath them and take them down with a couple turns of potshots. @Mordobb I thought that now that we have proper role icons that they might've been used on the dropship loadout screen as well, but this seems to not be the case. After I realized that the soldiers' positions aren't saved per unit, I just loaded them in order from the soldier roster screen, without ever bothering with the dropship menu at all.

Seems that way, I've had three caesan large bases during the normal game, which is where I got the first battle rifle, and one caesan base during the ironman one, but no luck so far... Strangely, my easy gameplay has a dozen bases all over the place and an endless number of UFOs during incursions building even more bases at a rate where I can't find and take them down in time. In harder difficulty ironman... they just seem to appear sporadically and I can pretty much clean them out as they appear, so no endless hordes. How's that for a difficulty ramp up?! Edit: regarding battle rifles, I just finally managed to get some, apparently I hadn't gotten far enough earlier to get them to spawn in the base or something, now there was a praetorian and plenty battle rifles.

I've managed to flank some aliens and killed them with concentrated melee attacks, however the two soldiers that contributed only to these melee kills didn't gain any bonuses at the end of the combat, unlike the other soldiers that killed the rest of the aliens with a random assortment of guns. Was this an isolated incident or a design oversight? I'll try and replicate it... Another issue I seem to have is that on my normal gameplay, I've had multiple alien battle rifle units roam around, but in either easy mode at around march 1980 and ironman mode in january 1980 I have yet to see a single battle rifle, thus no MAG weapons or Magstorms, which makes fighting escorted battleships pretty suicidal. As a balance wise suggestion: Marauders without Magstorms are woefully underpowered with just two missile slots, so even six of them have trouble taking down an escorted battleship, but with a little bit of editing I gave them a third missile slot, giving me a fighting chance... However, since the autocannon takes two weapon control slots, I don't have a button to control the activation of that third missile slot, so is it possible to edit that button to only take one of the four button slots? Edit: correction, I meant magstorms, not railguns on the Marauders. Confusing when both the soldier heavy magstorm and the craft magstorm share the same name, but the tank weapon is the railgun, when I'm so used to having them on space craft >_<

Finally managed to reproduce a glitch that causes a soldier sprite to turn into a larger projected version of itself on top of black areas of the combat map when walking diagonally through areas where part of the sprite is obscured by other objects on different levels. Here's a screenshot of it occurring while transiting through a doorway in alien base: And another one:

Quite interesting, I loaded the save a couple times without zooming in to an empty area and got the freeze. Reloaded, zoomed in, didn't freeze, ignored the UFOs and advanced a couple days until the next incursion and got the same freeze when zoomed out and could repeat the zoom fix on that later date. Not all incursions seem to cause the freeze, however and loading another game before reloading the one that freezes might fix it for an incursion or two. I guess it randomizes a new set of UFOs and missions...

It would seem to be the same issue as I have in the previous post, since I was able to prevent the freeze by zooming in... it would seem that the issue is not, as I thought it might be, with the overlapping radars or multiple bases I have, but rather the specific alien incursion that occurs at that time.

Oh right, silly me I forgot I have a dropbox account. Here it is I tried a couple times before selecting the savegame (named E17) where it occurs most reliably and it still takes some coaxing, as the detection and spawn locations of the UFOs is quite random, so I had to load a couple different saves to get a new random seed that causes the lockup, but it should happen around 20:00-20:15 game time depending on time warp. If I had to guess, it has something to do with the overlapping radars, but how or why zooming in to an area without a base prevents the freeze is beyond me.

First off, thanks for finally making a game that really has that original X-COM feel to it, I've been waiting for one ever since X-COM Apocalypse and being disappointed by many of the knock offs. I played twice all the way to the point where the alien invasion escalates to an impossible level, having my first iron man attempt thwarted by infinite hidden movement bug and the second attempt ended due to multiple massive ships and interceptors shooting down most anything that lifts off, which lead me to decide to see what it takes to fight back. I then edited some tens of millions of dollars into a new game and built multiple bases around the globe... Here's where the problems started: All went smoothly until at a certain point where the game started to inexplicably freeze in geoscape at certain times. I determined this to be due to predetermined times for alien invasions and having multiple UFOs being detected at the same time. I tried different methods to prevent the freeze from occuring, from dismantling some radars, to using different time warp speeds to reach the event time, none of which helped reliably on subsequent incursions or reloads. Finally I noticed I could circumvent these freezes entirely by zooming close to an area of the map where no bases were visible and the UFOs would then spawn and get detected normally, allowing me to continue to a point where my bases started being attacked by multiple battleships almost every wave and having the game crash due to a known related base destruction bug. The freeze doesn't stop music, but all visuals freeze and it ends up stressing a single CPU core to the max for an indefinite time, preventing exiting the game normally or with ALT+F4, requiring task manager to do the trick. If I could, I would attach a savegame where the freeze should occur within a few hours, but apparently as a new poster I get a forbidden error when clicking the attach button and a mere description is hardly useful =/ On a sidenote, I guess it's already known, but even if you build an entire base full of different anti-UFO defenses, only the first hit counts for damage or a miss and the subsequent hits merely mirror the numbers and percentages of damage or misses without actually doing anything. I also ran into the already submitted bug where defenses missed, but the UFO was somehow destroyed, leaving a notification window that can't be closed.