DNK

It'd be nice if you could just get civilians to follow your units, so you could "rescue" them and take them out of the combat zone (into the dropship or a secure building).

What's the problem with having assaults always being better? The problem is that assaulting is so much better than not assaulting that people feel compelled for strategic reasons to always assault every UFO downed. If we just reduce the opportunity cost of not assaulting by enough, players won't feel the need to assault, or at least the desire to streamline their gameplay by focusing on important missions will override such a need. So giving them 80% of the expected net profit and leaving it at that will probably accomplish this goal.

This makes a lot more sense.

RE #missiles on planes: This benefits gameplay how? The UI alone for that would be a mess, you'd have like a scrolling menu for missile launches. F-16 would have 6 "sidewinders" based on typical A-A loadouts. Again, this just overcomplicates things. There are elements in the game that aren't totally realistic. It's a game, based highly on an older game, which itself wasn't terribly realistic. Ultimately, you can mod in 10 hardpoints and 1000-mile mission ranges to the fighters if you don't like it, but I wouldn't expect devs to sacrifice gameplay for very minor realism points and then balance everything again for that. For balance, do note that you're not supposed to be able to shoot everything down, so the fact that you're always low on planes is on purpose.

The alloys. They seem to survive explosions pretty well. The Xenonauts are saying, "here, take all the alloys you can find, and any additional tech that manages to survive your assault. We're willing to give you that for a fee and as thanks for shooting the thing down in the first place for you (since we're the internationally-recognized force responsible for this and otherwise have full claim of the technology and artifacts at the site)."

RE: Heavy Plasma Might just need additional alien weapons, you know, variants for each tier, like "heavy plasma sniper" or whatever, like the humans have.

I like this proposed system.

I suppose so. It's effectively ARM-based with the ARDA.

Why not just say it's an expanded range version, where armaments were sacrificed for more fuel space? That also explains why the jets can travel halfway across the world and back, which is way, way farther than any standard fighter/attack jet. Typical real ranges are under 1000km. These things can go almost 15,000 miles on one tank. That needs far more explaining than the payloads... There's really no realistic way of explaining the radar/arda ranges in this game. It's a gamey feature. Sometimes, simply ignoring something when explaining everything is better than concocting clearly false nonsense.Also, for the base ARDA, you could indicate that although there is an array in the base, additional arrays are constructed in the surrounding area, and the base facility is just the most central in the network. Since they are purely passive, there is no concern of the aliens attacking these unprotected outside-base arrays. This makes no sense. The missiles are guided by the launching craft to their target, or at least most of the way, so that would not be a limiting range factor. Just say that the sensors in the missile were much larger than traditional radar guidance, and as such took up some space for the fuel. Additionally, the warhead is expanded for the harder targets, also taking up fuel space.PS Ishantil isn't the only other person in this thread, and maybe wait more than 1-2 hours between when you ask for final feedback and you consider that feedback closed next time...

I think giving the player the ability to hand it off to local forces for a funding boost is best. The local forces would, presumably, just carpet bomb the area, but since they can keep whatever they find, they're thankful. I also think allowing UFOs to be totally destroyed by overdamage needs to be in. Light scouts getting hit by plasma torpedoes should not generate ground missions. If the player wants to grind up, he can refit his craft with standard explosives or something. Additionally, refitting time should not take very long at all (the same as rearming). Lastly, the recruit pool really needs to increase a bit with the ticker. Like +25% from start to finish. This reduces the need to grind every mission, and the player doesn't get totally screwed if his elite squad gets annihilated at some point in the later game.

Regarding difficulty: make it brutal first, then balance it for lower difficulty levels with bonuses and maybe switching off certain behaviors. Of course, my long-standing demand to make a lot of sliders/options for the game and difficulty remain.

You could just make the money trickle in each day, while having monthly reviews that affected your daily income. I think that would really improve the day-to-day planning and base management while not overwhelming the player with constant funding status reports, and giving them time to reverse a few mistakes so as to not have an immediate funding loss (or territorial loss if a base is found but they can't get to it soon due to whatever reasons).

These guiding others' missiles capabilities are pretty new and were nowhere near present in the time period of the game. I'm not sure if they're even proven abilities, being cutting edge stuff. Theoretically, it's possible at least, but whether the DoD has actually gotten the kinks out and made it a workable system is another thing.Also note that AWACS are large sitting ducks without a considerable amount of offensive aircraft to give them a safety bubble. Given the nature of engagements in this game, they would not be viable.

Cliffs: wiki "range" estimates overblow the missiles' actualy abilities by a large factor. "Effective ranges" are usually much shorter, around 10nm for the latest, and even then they only carry coin-flip odds of successful hits. Advanced counter-measures and jamming would also likely limit both the missiles' effectiveness AND the ability of xenonaut craft to actually obtain a lock. The in-game range is quite realistic, if not far higher than expected in such an asymmetrical scenario (probably the missiles would be useless). Eh, not really. Against a highly maneuverable opponent like a UFO (that let's assume can pull more Gs than a jet fighter and do all sorts of thrust-vectoring and beyond what we have in the 21st century), the effective range for even the most modern medium-range missiles (AIM-120D) would likely be no more than 10nm. Against the larger UFOs, they likely contain ECW systems to jam radars effectively at a similar range. In reality, a modern MiG has a jammer that's fairly effective against typical US AESA radars (last-gen at least) up to about 25-20nm. And that's in a relatively small bird.You need to remember that the stated "max ranges" on wikipedia are just that. That's the maximum theoretical range of the missile. The actual range it would be used at in combat is much less, as pilots would need to wait to get closer in order to assure a higher percent-kill chance. Certainly, there are situations where a missile will be shot beyond this high-PK point, but those sorts of situations (putting the opponent into a defensive maneuver to maintain the initiative, etc) aren't modeled in game by the AI, so it's pointless to also model the ability to pull such shots. You need to be looking at the "effective range", not just the "range". Same is true for firearms and other weapons: max range means little, effective range is what you want to model in a game. For example, you can point to the 54 Phoenix as an example of a missile that could hit them from 100nm away, but the fact is that such shots would have an extremely, extremely low chance of success against a maneuvering target with countermeasures (basically 0%). Additionally, the Phoenix was totally unproven as a weapon system. It's old as hell, basically untested in combat (and DoD tests are notoriously biased towards success in unrealistic non-combat situations, eg vs straight and slow drone planes and such) and given the low PK odds of successive weapons systems, any long-range shot (>20nm) would've been extremely low-odds. As I said before, the current AIM-120D really only has a good chance of success around 10nm (on average, and it's in the 50% PK range, I think, but maybe that's the C version), and that's against 4th and 4.5th generation fighters. Only the DoD can guess at the effective range against 5th-gen stealth fighters, but it's certainly lower, assuming you have a craft actually capable of obtaining a lock before hitting the missile's effective range. Given that this is the 70s, the old radars might simply be incapable of obtaining such a target lock before the "missile range" in-game. It's not the missiles' faults so much as the planes'. I think it's safe to say that any alien craft would be at least equal to a 5th generation fighter like the F-22. They do appear to be a bit larger, but advanced stealth technologies would hide most of their radar signature. And here you're firing 1st and 2nd gen missiles (which sucked, and rarely actually hit) against like 200th generation fighters. 5-8km ranges are being extremely, extremely nice to the xenonauts... I will have to search down this entry. Is it in the xenopedia? Under what heading? That sounds iffy as hell, yes, although the in-game range is wholly expectable in terms of realism (for other reasons than stated perhaps).And so long as the UFO emit radiation, you can track them passively without an actual radar lock. For example, the passive radars on 4th gen fighters can track signals (directionally) up to 60-80nm away, though the active radar can't really lock beyond 30-35nm (and far less against jammers, as mentioned). Now, what about the counter-measures? Another note: if this radar emission is consistent, it could be used for a home-on-signal targeting system, vastly increasing the possible range of the weapons. Could be a nice research tree, weapon targeting/radar advancements...

What is the actual entry that we're discussing here with the missile range? I'm not aware of the claims. Regarding countermeasures, what is it claiming there?

Both are good, if it takes skill to figure out the "gamey tactics". All games require gamey play, so it's silly to argue against it. If you don't like it, stick to reality.

Yeah, I suggested this a while back. It would be nice to have the option to reduce speed, or increase speed about 20% with a 20% reduction in fuel efficiency. It would also be nice to allow for afterburner use, for additional 20% increase for 50% efficiency, or 50% increase for 10% efficiency. This is somewhat realistic (speed:efficiency, as well as AB changes to efficiency). I would also suggest getting rid of the "combat fuel use" multiplier when in the minigame, and just making alien craft faster, requiring more AB usage (at the above rates, sliding scale). There's a lot more that can be done to add additional elements of strategy/tactics to the air game, like further jet variants and altered fuel efficiency/speed depending on weapons on-board (using all your weapons = faster/more efficient plane). Looks like the devs "don't want to focus on it", though, despite constantly focusing on further complicating it and making it more difficult, so here's hoping that works its way into the geoscape as well.

Why not have both carbines and shotguns?

I modded that into my own game long ago. It's vital to making research actually a part of the game, so kudos.

How I've done carbines is make them do a 5-shot burst, with 85% range, 85% damage, 85% accuracy, and about 85% weight of a rifle. They're far better in close encounters, but otherwise just aren't as good. I think I lowered TU costs a bit (~90% of rifle), save for the burst, which is higher but not a full 67% higher.

Yes, yes. The XCOM UFOs were all levels in themselves, generally as non-linear and with as many corridors/"surprises" as their size would allow, and varied, with plenty of props cluttering their interiors. Arguments can be made for the realism of that, but for gameplay it was awesome. Other UFOs:

Could just double the amount of points needed per skill and cap it at 1/mission, so that you still need to do the same amount of "stuff" as before for each progress point, just you get half as many. New system: half the work for half as many.

I like limiting most progress point mission caps at about 85% of a full progression. It makes it a lot harder to keep experienced units since that experience doesn't count for nearly as much, and it makes the overall ground game a lot more challenging.

Regarding DMR versus AR, to balance you need to give them roughly similar damage and make sure the increase in accuracy for the DMR isn't too big and is offset by the increase in TUs required (which makes very perfect sense anyway). The real tradeoff should be that the DMR is far more accurate at longer ranges, meaning past the effective ingame range of the AR. The rifle then becomes more useful for CQC situations where the burst fire (at shorter ranges) is way more effective (and suppressive), while at moderate ranges the two are roughly comparable. This creates a tradeoff dilemma: both are equal at mid-range, one is clearly better at long, the other at short. There may be other balancing issues (shields, pistols, weak AI) that keep rifles from being used fully, though. I'm trying with the AR at 16 range and the DMR at 21 (with an additional M40 at 26 and carbine at 13). I'm liking it so far.

Agreed on these. I think agreed on rest, but it's less important.This should at least be moddable.