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.

Another mid-level bug - has the potential to irritate, but not game breaking. This one's fully repeatable, I've tested across multiple missions/saves/playthroughs. Certain mission types begin with a Deployment Phase - Xenonaut base defense, alien base assault and any mission you launch from a Valkyrie. However, if you reload the auto-save that's created at the start of this mission, you won't get to redo the deployment phase, instead, all of your units start in a big cluster together. Particularly bad on alien base assault missions, where if you have a tank, it can spawn partially inside a wall and be unable to move for the remainder of the mission.

Ok, a low-impact but still fairly irritating repeatable bug here. When more than 14 friendly units are deployed (generally via a Valkyrie), the unit-selection bar at the bottom of the screen runs out of space and overlaps the icon for units 15 and/or 16 with 14. I'd upload a screenshot, but the function doesn't seem to be working. Clicking on the icon in question selects the "highest" unit. So to select unit 14, I have to either click on him on the field, or scroll to him using my mouse-wheel. As this may (or may not) only occur in some resolutions, I should add that I'm running in 1920x1080 fullscreen on an Nvidia 680.

Interesting that it happened on your first Corvette mission - judging by the fact you retrieved the datacore. I've got 2 playthroughs on the go with 19.4 - one with edited .xmls and one without. On both playthroughs, my first Corvette mission turned out just like this. Wonder if there's something that gets triggered on your first Corvette mission?

There are a few instances of this. I suspect it's placeholder text rather than a bug. Flavour-text is one of those things that's relatively easy to add during the final stages of a game's development.

Yes, you can. Funny story - I had a save during a base assault mission where I'd ballsed up my save-alternation and got into a position where, no matter what I did, I couldn't keep a certain veteran soldier alive until the next turn. How did I get around this in the end? Stunned him with one of my other soldiers... then revived him on the next turn (having cleared out the hostiles a bit).

I can't replicate the bug in that way. Let me give an example of how this flows: I had an instance last night where at the start of turn 2 of a mission (I was saving at the start of each turn), my first action was to have a Sentinel soldier take an aimed plasma rifle shot at an alien. After he fired the shot, I tried to move him into a better position, but the bug had taken effect and neither he, nor any of my other soldiers, could move. Even if I ended the turn and went to the next one, my squad was frozen in place. I reloaded my save. This time, I moved the soldier before shooting. He moved just fine. However, after I fired his shot, I couldn't move any of my other troopers. I reloaded my save. I had a trooper in Predator fire then move. Everything's fine. Next I have the Sentinel guy fire; now I'm bugged again. Reload and try again. Firing on a different Sentinel guy in the squad doesn't cause the bug. But trying a third one does. Rather than load my save again, I quit to desktop and reload the game. I load my save (same save that I'd been using all along) and repeat the very first action I took - the first Sentinel guy fires then moves. No bug. The rest of the mission plays out just fine. There's only one save in play here and there isn't really a "before" and "after" state. Indeed, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the save at all. Rather, it seems that some part of the game code that's loaded into memory during gameplay has glitched out and until it's cleared by restarting the game, the glitch will keep recurring. I've had this happen 5 or 6 times now, generally when I have a lot of Sentinels deployed on a mission. I'm not running any external mods, though on this playthrough I've bumped the sale price of alien alloys up to 5 mill through .xml editing so that I can boost through quickly to test the end-game before the next unstable release breaks save compatibility. It's not a game-breaking bug once you know how to get around it, just an irritation. EDIT: May try testing this further by keeping saves from multiple missions-with-Sentinels. When I get the bug next, I'll load a save from an earlier mission and see if it re-occurs when my Sentinel guys there start shooting.

The problem with that is that even if I had a save game from immediately before it happened, quitting to desktop and reloading that save would make the issue go away - so loading the save on another PC entirely is likely to remove the issue. It's something in the game-state that goes awry, rather than in the save itself.

A few thoughts. Easy difficulty (or Very Easy, or whatever the bottom option ends up being) needs to be accessible for people who either never played the old X-Com games, or who may have only played them in passing. This isn't the 1990s, when games were relatively few in number and expensive; if people who take a look at the game because they're just curious find it impossibly hard on their first attempt or two, they'll just move on to the next Steam Daily Deal game or whatever. That said, I think there's also a valid point about catering to the hardcore. Beyond that lowest difficult level, I think all of the others needs to be tailored to more veteran players. In the rest of this post, I'll focus mainly on how I'd separate the lowest difficulty from the other difficulty levels (and I think this is actually quite a big gap). I'll break my comments down between the different sections of the game: Geoscape, Ground Combat and Air Combat. GEOSCAPE There are three real axes here for difficulty that need to be considered; strategy, resources and politics. On strategy, there are, at present, too many crucial make-or-break decisions to be made in the early months for novice players. I'm thinking particularly about the decisions you need to take early on around the siting of your base, how you develop that base, when to construct additional bases etc. I'd suggest that on the lowest difficulty setting, players be allowed to site a number of "freebie" bases at the beginning of their game. Not enough to get through the entire game with, of course - you want them to have to think about expansion when they've got a better feel for how the game works and how their choices shape it. Three feels about right. I'd also have these start out with a layout that is a good way along the path in which a veteran player will eventually develop their bases. So they've got a few hangars, a garage etc. They'll still need to build more facilities - but they've been given a steer as to the kind of direction they want to go. I'd also consider (and I'm not quite as settled in my views on this) having newly constructed bases later in the game spawn by default with a basic set of facilities already in place along with the command centre. On the higher difficulty levels - fewer bases (probably just 1 at the top end) and less developed "blank slate" bases (all bar the first one being just a command centre to begin with). As a relatively veteran X-Com player, I prefer doing my layout from scratch anyway. Still on strategy but switching to the invasion side of things, I'd have the balance of alien missions adjust differently depending on the difficulty setting. So on the lowest difficulty, you would be told right from the outset (in the difficulty descriptor) that the aliens will not attack your bases until later in the game. In practice, this would mean no alien assaults on your bases until around the Carriers stage - so you wouldn't need to invest in static defences until the plasma/MAG tech level. On the harder difficulty level, you'd get base assaults (albeit with smaller UFOs and fewer aliens) from much earlier on - meaning you need to invest in static defences and/or well-equipped defensive squads much earlier in the game. I'd also make "friendly forces shot down a UFO" events much more common than they are at present on the easiest difficulty. In terms of resources, it's quite simple; more on lower difficulties, less on higher. I'm not just talking about funding here, but also about alien alloy/alienium salvage yields from UFOs. And in terms of politics; I'd like keeping sponsor nations happy to be harder than it is at present on the higher difficulty settings. However, the current level feels about right for the easier difficulties. GROUND COMBAT In some ways, I'd actually worry less about tweaking the difficulty of ground combat between the difficulty levels. I'm not sure I'd even bother with spending much time on things like alien stats. The real differences here should flow from the differences in difficulty on the Geoscape game. If you have more resources on the Geoscape, you'll have better equipped squads in ground combat. In terms of what can be done, I think the key thing is to make sure that differences between the difficulty levels don't break immersion. That means making sure that aliens are never either improbably fragile or improbably resistant to damage (seriously, health adjustments aren't the way to do difficulty). It also means avoiding cheap tricks like letting aliens see through walls on higher difficulties. I think there might be something to do here with the number of aliens per crash and with their deployment. On higher difficultly levels, you might have more live aliens to deal with per mission and those aliens might be more inclined to stick to defensible positions, rather than wandering around randomly in the open. AIR COMBAT I think there's quite a lot you can do here, both in the intercept minigame itself and also on the geoscape interception game. On the bottom difficulty level, you probably want lots of unescorted UFOs wandering around, with relatively "unthreatening" assignments like patrol or terror attacks. On harder difficulties, I think it might be worth making even getting to the intercept a challenge. So not only do you have to take care of the main UFO and its escorts, but you have to run through a gauntlet of aggressive alien squadrons trying to intercept your interceptors (or your dropships).

I'm relatively new to the game, having only started playing at the Steam release (and having switched over to the experimental builds, so that I've not really managed to take a game much past the introduction of carriers). However, I did want to put my two-cents into the debate on stats etc. I've seen the comments earlier in this thread on the dominance of the sniper weapons later in the game. I'd agree with that based on my own experiences - but worry that simply reducing accuracy further is not the solution. If anything, I'd urge that consideration be given to increasing accuracy with other weapons (particularly in the early stages of the game). Carbines in particular seem to suffer at the moment from a difficulty in filling their intended role because, even at point blank ranges, their accuracy is so poor that using them either involves playing roulette or doing massive save/load spamming. It approaches immersion-breaking levels at times, when supposedly elite soldiers, stationary and crouched, are missing shots that I'm fairly sure I could make myself (and I'm no marksman) while drunk and with one eye closed. Even if you don't go in the direction of improving the accuracy of non-sniper weapons, please make sure that any nerf to the accuracy of sniper weapons doesn't translate into an equivalent nerf across the board.

It's happening for me across all UFO types and it seems to happen in both directions (as in, aliens inside can see out through the walls). It's particularly bad with the cruiser type UFOs. Aliens on the upper deck can see the outside area by the various doors to the UFO. Trying to close in on those doors triggers countless reaction shots from them. It's not dangerous, because their shots don't pass through the walls, but it does slow things down a bit. Can confirm this didn't happen in 19.3 and earlier.