Rogueywon

Congratulations guys. I played this your experimental builds heavily for a few months after the Early Access went live on Steam and submitted a few bug reports etc, but have been inactive for months now. I'll be coming back to give the game another go with the 1.0 release. The development process here has been a great advert for the benefits of the Early Access methodology. There are a lot of questions being asked about Steam and Early Access at the moment following a few disasters like Towns - so nice to see a good example from the opposite end of the spectrum.

Good stuff. That's a lot of long-standing bugs fixed. If those work as intended and don't throw anything new up, I'd expect 19v6 to feel pretty damned good.

I think there's a need to be careful with adding too much "clutter" to UFO interiors. The cover system in Xenonauts means that random bits of furniture potentially have a much bigger effect on balance than they did in XCom 1994. I'd really love to see aliens making more use of the middle floors of Carriers and Battleships. Those have some quite narrow, twisty areas which are quite reminiscent of some of the UFO designs in XCom 1994 and TftD - great for tense battles and ambushes. Unfortunately, the aliens at present just tend to cluster around the entrances and the command centre.

Yeah, I think the impact that Geoscape economy balancing will have is generally under-estimated. If you don't believe this, try tweaking the .xmls to do a couple of playthroughs with different economic settings. In many ways, the impacts of geoscape balance on the tactical game are bigger than many of the tweaks that have been made to weapon/unit balance directly. Deploying against a Corvette with a squad in full wolf armour, armed with laser weapons is very, very different to going in with a squad in basic/Jjackal armour and ballistics.

I've just fired up X-Com1994 to test! (I've got a few games on the go). Early missions with ballistics, I'm averaging 2 hits to kill a Sectoid or Floater. A mid-game save with ballistics and lasers vs Mutons has me taking far more hits to kill them - one particular Muton doesn't die until the 6th hit from a ballistic rifle and lasers are averaging 3 hits. Late-game mission with plasmas - heavy plasma is indeed getting 1-hit kills on Sectoids. I don't have a late-game save on a convenient Muton mission, so can't check that. In TftD, Lobstermen could have whole clips of harpoon ammo pumped into them before they'd go down. Edit: Dear god it takes a lot of shots from a ballistic rifle to kill a Cyberdisk. But a single rocket does the trick.

I think on balance I'd also like higher lethality - but my point was that this probably needs to be off-set by some changes to the game-economy and the soldier advancement system so that losing a veteran soldier or two isn't as catastrophic as it is at the moment.

Some thoughts after trying this: Overall, mixed feelings (and yes, I was one of those asking for higher weapon accuracy). In many ways, it does indeed feel better with higher accuracy. Close-to-mid-quarters combat flows more naturally with the modification in place and it definitely replicates the feel of the original X-Com much better. However... What the changes seem to me to highlight are the extent to which the game is, at present, balanced quite fundamentally around low weapon accuracy. To explain what I mean by that properly, I'm going to need to step back a bit. In the original X-Com (and Terror from the Deep), combat has extremely high "lethality". Both human and alien troops die quickly and easily - and in large numbers. Once you're past the early missions and the smallest UFOs, you expect casualties - often heavy casualties - pretty much every time you deploy. Losing veteran units can be painful (particularly once they're psyonics trained), but it's going to happen and it isn't game-endingly catastrophic. Losing rookies is going to happen constantly and the inconvenience is generally limited the (pretty small) cost of replacing them after each mission. In both Xenonauts and the Firaxis XCom reboot, there's a definite push towards making casualties matter more. The improvement in stats - and the importance of that improvement - as soldiers gain experience is much more pronounced. The costs of replacing them (in both economic and tactical terms) are much higher. Keeping your troops alive is much more important - particularly if you're playing in Ironman mode. So if combat is as "lethal" as in the old X-Com, the player's life will very quickly become impossible. Firaxis's way of getting around this was to increase soldier health relative to weapon damage. Once you've got a veteran squad with decent armour in the XCom reboot, it is very, very rare (almost unknown) that you will lose a full-health soldier to a single enemy hit. It's fairly rare, unless you leave some poor sucker out exposed on his own, that you'll lose a soldier from full-health in a single enemy turn. The top armour in Xenonauts does provide more protection than the top armour in the old X-Com generally did - but even in Predator suits, soldiers are generally not the walking-tanks that they quite quickly become in Firaxis's XCom. This is amplified by the very large number of TUs that aliens get, which enables them to make many reflex shots, and make many, many shots on their own turns (particularly in the late game). With the default accuracy settings, the fact that a large portion of alien shots will miss mitigates this. Turn close quarters accuracy up, and suddenly you're back to lethality levels close to those of the original X-Com, but in a game that's generally less forviging of losses.

These builds are intended as "work in progress" - they're not designed to reflect the final play experience. It's normal procedure to focus on tracking down crash bugs rather than "balance" bugs, not least because they can sometimes point to more serious flaws in the code. The idea (though not always the reality) is that you kill all of the "known" bugs before you release. Purely from the player's point of view, it sometimes feels like a particular build is "one step forward, two steps back". A good example is 19.3, which was only live for a week or so - probably because the frequency of crash bugs made useful testing very difficult. However, this doesn't mean that it was actually a step back from other builds - it's quite normal for the process of adding features to add new bugs - and indeed for fixing one bug to trigger another to emerge.

Looking at their size relative to soldiers, the "tanks" in Xenonauts are nothing of the sort. They're small, armored UAVs - able to be as compact as they are because they don't have to carry any crew or secondary weapons.

I guess the intention here is that the hedgerows are supposed to be like the boccage of Normandy (for more info on which, see any decent account of the campaign following the D-Day landings). In which case, you shouldn't be clearing those hedges with small arms and probably not even with the small UAV tanks seen in Xenonauts. So having them as non-destructible "feels" right.

I get occasional UFO missions where there are no aliens at all deployed outside of the UFO, but an abnormal amount of them inside it. I fought an Andron Battleship yesterday which gave that configuration... my kill-count at the end of the mission was 56. I was seriously worried at one point that I just wouldn't have enough ammo to kill them all as they just kept coming. Fortunately, the AI made the mission just about doable. I set up a firing line in the main ground-floor room and just killed the waves of them as they came through the door from the teleporters. Plus they got a good few friendly-fire kills.

Prior to 19.4, the furthest I'd gone in the game was the carriers-wave. However, with some time off work, I've managed to plough through a 19.4 playthrough up to the start of the final mission, which I gather is as far as you can go at the moment. As much of the discussion - particularly on the 19.x unstable builds where saves get wiped out quite regularly - has focussed on stuff from earlier in the game, I thought I'd offer a few thoughts on late-game ground-combat balance. I won't talk about Geoscape balance, as I'd been using hacked .xmls to reduce production costs/times to accelerate my pace on this playthrough. - Even with experienced (Major/Commander) soldiers, weapon accuracy still feels too low in general. I'd hoped that I'd be depending less on grenades as I got more experienced soldiers, but in many situations, using a gun when you could use a grenade is just too risky. Close range accuracy with rifles and carbines really needs examining. - The way the aliens are deployed at present doesn't really make use of the larger UFO types. I've only ever once encountered an enemy on the middle floor of a Carrier. Meeting an alien on the middle floors of a battleship is likewise rare. Those floors are actually fairly well designed for ambushes, but at present, they just feel like time-sinks that you have to move your soldiers through. - For the Buzzard and Sentinel battlesuits, it would be nice to have some option to force them to stick to the ground (short of moving them one square at a time) when the situation demands. There are times when I don't want them to pop up to a higher layer and expose themselves to fire, but the UI isn't very accommodating of this at the moment. - Alien TUs really do get excessive in the end-game, with aliens capable of making 5+ single-shots in a turn. I might just be noticing this more because of the line-of-sight issues in 19.4, which mean that many aliens fire their full quota of shots harmlessly into a wall even if they don't have a shot on any Xenonauts - making the alien turn take forever in the early stages of late-game missions.

Probably not the refueling thing, then. You can't actually bring up the weapon-toggle while an interceptor is repairing or refueling.

Were the Condors being refueled? I can't remember whether newly bought ones arrive with or without fuel. I've certainly noticed that I can't change the loadout on interceptors while they're being repaired or refueled.

As an addendum to the above, I have a worry that the current deployment cycle for unstable builds - and the fact they break save compatibility - is making it harder to track down bugs like the one described above, which are more likely to become apparent in the later stages of the game. If the answer is "no", then I fully understand - but would it be possible for new unstable builds to come with a late-game save right from the start? Perhaps something from around when carriers start showing up? Hacking .xmls to accelerate progress is all well and good, but you still end up repeating a lot of low-tier UFO missions to get back to end-game testing.