Rogueywon

Just a minor one here, but reporting for the sake of completeness. I've replicated this on both of my playthroughs (I do two per build, swapping .xmls when I switch playthroughs - one is completely unmodded, the other has a huge sale-price for alien alloys and vastly accelerated manufacture speeds for swift access to the later stages of the game). If, during a combat mission, I click "abortmission" but then cancel and return to the mission, the next time I try to save my game during that mission it will instead abort the mission, resulting in failure. Loading my last save from that mission will not fix the problem, unless I quick to desktop and restart the game first. BTW, despite all the bug report posts I'm making, my overall impression of 19.4 is that in terms of both balance and playability it represents a big advance on previous Steam builds.

I've come across an odd bug in 19.4, which I also hit once in 19.2. It's a difficult one to replicate and posting a save might not help, because quitting the game and reloading usually seems to make the problem vanish. It seems to occur when you have one or more Sentinel Battlesuits deployed on a mission. Occasionally, after a Sentinel-wearing soldier has fired a shot, all of my remaining units will refuse any move orders. As in, I can see the TU count and they have enough TUs to make the move, but no matter how much I click, they just stand there. They can still shoot ok, though. If I reload my last save (from within this ground combat mission), the problem will go away temporarily, but will generally recur the next time a Sentinel-wearing soldier fires his weapon. If I quit to desktop and reload the game, then it seems to go away for the remainder of that mission. Thing is, it doesn't happen all that often - maybe on 1 in 6 missions or so where I deploy one or more Sentinel users. It can happen on any tileset that I've seen (including alien base missions). It might be linked to circumstances where I've already loaded a save already once in the course of a mission (but I couldn't swear to that). Sorry this is so vague - I tried a few times to replicate it last night and failed... only to have it happen to me a couple of missions later when I wasn't particularly trying.

Not sure if this is a bug or not. Ground mission against a shot-down (minor damage) Landing Craft UFO. I'm deploying a fairly standard mid-game squad from a Shrike. I've got the usual "large" farm tileset. I do my normal deployment and fan out across the map. There is not a single alien outside of the UFO - but I note that the alien turn is taking a little while to play out each round. When I eventually open the door to the UFO, it is absolutely RAMMED with aliens - all of them with reaction shots. From this point on, the aliens start behaving normally. The I eventually clear the thing, though even with massive save/load spamming, I end up losing a good chunk of my squad (and relying on blowing up the UFO's engines to take out a good number of the aliens). Also helps that the density of aliens is so great that some of them kill each other. The after-action reports lists 21 aliens killed - all of them within the UFO. Not sure whether this is a bug, or just one of the possible configurations for the mission. It was many, many times harder than a normal Landing Craft mission - but maybe it's not such a bad thing to have the chance of missions like that?

I've had this occur after downing UFOs with my own interceptors and also on one occasion when I managed to land a dropship on top of a UFO while it was doing a "build alien base" mission. It only seems to happen in the early stages of the game - and seems to be particularly focussed on the Corvette "generation". Never seen it happen on a Landing Craft or larger.

I've had a few "instant wins" like this, not limited to any particular tileset. Seems to mostly happen early in the game, up to and including Corvette-level UFOs. Until the other day, I was tempted to dismiss this as a "working as intended" - as exactly the same thing can happen in the original X-Com and in TftD (usually when all aliens bar one die in the crash and the last one expires of its wounds on the first turn or something). However, I recently had it happen in 19.4 in an assault on a grounded UFO that hadn't actually been damaged. That felt more like a bug.

Posted about this issue in another thread. The solution - such as it is - is to shoot down both escorts in the first intercept, shoot down the zombie escort in the second intercept and then kill the Corvette itself in the third. Works, but it's a pain in the backside.

The 19.3 crash on 3-UFO intercept bug is reduced in 19.4, but not gone. I'm still getting it in certain circumstances. It seems to occur when you get one shoot-down-able (eg. Corvette or Landing Ship) escorted by a pair of destroyables (eg. Fighter or Heavy Fighter). However, this is much more situational than the 19.3 bug, which crashed the game whenever a combat vs 3 UFOs ended. The 19.4 crash happens when I win a 1xmain +2xescort fight on the first attempt. In other words, if I enter combat and kill all 3 UFOs, the game CTDs. If I lose the fight, or if I retreat before killing all UFOs, it doesn't occur. If I kill both escorts and retreat, the next time I engage, there will be one escort. This may be invisible on the game-screen - though I can still target it by guessing its location from the tracking-line. If I kill the main and the escort on this run, I get a CTD. If I kill this escort - but leave the main UFO alive - then the next time I intercept, I will see only the main UFO and can shoot it down safely. So it takes 3x combats to take down a 3x UFO pair in some circumstances. This does not happen 100% of the time. So far as I can see, it seems to occur when the UFO has a terror-attack or base-attack objective (but not 100% confirmed on that).

So far as I can tell, that seems to be a "working as intended" feature of this build. I tried fast-forwarding a bit with the escorts back in to see what happened (if I just didn't actually go into any 3-fight combats). The ratio of shoot-down-able UFOs to destroyable UFOs seems much lower in this build. If this is indeed deliberate, the plus side is that you need to grind rather fewer tactical missions per advancement level. The downside is that with current manufacturing balance, you just can't get enough alien alloys/alienium to keep your squads and interceptors updated. We are playing "unstable" builds here, so some of this is to be expected - but while 19.2 felt like a fairly optimised and playable build, 19.3 feels much rougher. There's actually quite a bit here that's moved on behind the scenes, but the flipside of this is a big hit to playability and balance compared to 19.2. Happy to be told by a dev that I'm talking complete crap (which I might well be).

I've got a work-around. It's not a good one. It's definitely a "work-around", not a "fix", but if you are desperate to keep playing, it might do until this particular game-killing bug gets fixed. Go to your Xenonauts\assets directory and open all the files beginning AM_ in your favorite .xml editor. Now, look for all of the lines beginning "e:" (without the "s) and delete those lines. You may want to back-up the files before doing this. Now reload your game and abort any pending intercepts you had on 3x UFO groups. Any future groups that show up will not have escorts. Yes, this is cheating and disabling a bit part of the air combat game. But for now, it's the only way to keep playing on the "unstable" build through this bug.