kabill

Out of wonder, would it be possible for this to be visible only once you have done the Sibellian autopsy (or, better, the Sibellian interrogation)? In the autopsy report on the Sibellian, there's the speculation of regeneration and this is only confirmed when you do the interrogation. However, if the player has already seen the healing numbers it'll be a dead giveaway and makes all the fluff text redundant. Plus, it's a nice little bonus for doing the research. On the other hand, I can imagine this being quite a lot of work for a relatively minor feature. But I thought I'd mention it anyway.

I've had issues with aliens seeing/shooting through walls as well. When I've noticed it, it's been where I've had a soldier in a corner (like the OP's screenshot - indeed the particular time I'm thinking of it was the same kind of corner with walls placed in the same manner, although the alien was not adjacent). Figured it would have been a known issue, though, so didn't report it.

Yeah - most of my air combat involves kiting with unengaged craft attacking from behind (there's no way I'd be relying on cannons for a head on attack!). A lot of this is because I very much want the air battles to feel like a dog-fight, which sadly they don't (even when I make an effort to try and make them so!). But I also had an initial poor experience using torpedoes, which put me off using them until recently. So it was pretty much the only way to safely win air battles. Sadly not quite my experience. I have two soldiers in medbay and one in the morgue waiting for gas to kick in (although, in fairness, this was largely prompted by one of my soldiers being shot through a wall and a terrible chain of events following). One other thing that I've not been using recently: labs. My first two games I built a lab quickly and ended up blitzing tech, so I ended up with a lot of idle time. In a new game with 19.4, I've stuck with just the starting lab and 15 scientists and have finished all the tech that can be researched in the first two months comfortably (indeed, my scientists were idle for a few days both months having completed, so far as I know, all the research I could do owing to the hard limits on captured tech). I assume as the game goes on more scientists are needed to keep pace, but I'm seeing no advantage at the moment to an early research-heavy strategy, as it's (too) easy to keep pace without any expansion and the limiting factor is actually the rate at which you capture alien tech, not the rate at which you study it. Not only is there no trade-off in terms of developing science vs. something else, but there's also no trade-off in terms of *what* you research, since it's easy to get it all done in time (and simple enough to prioritise projects that lead to manufacturing, once you know what they are, to ensure maximum production time).

Perhaps. For me, the important thing is that fighting different aliens requires different approaches/tactics. While I've not fought Androns in 19.4 yet, in principle I approve of their immunity to suppression because this changes the way you have to deal with them compared with other aliens. Psionics (though I've not seen it yet in Xenonauts) should do the same thing. Neither of these things are simply 'flavour' - they change the nature of the engagement. Abilities aren't the only way to do this. For example, I think the new XCOM: EU game did a very good job of making aliens different by virtue of their AI. Floaters are an awesome example - their being crazy fearless berserkers gives them more character than their ability to fly or their hp/stats, while making fighting them different as well. As regards Xenonauts, then, I can see how you could make fights between Caesans and Sibellians different merely by virtue of their AI (the former fighting defensively, wearing their opponents down with psionic attacks; the latter fighting aggressively and being ultra-tough). It might be that this is already planned (Xenopedia entries imply this), mind. But my point is simply that abilities aren't the only thing that might matter. And if they do matter, it should be because they make a significant difference to the combat). With that in mind, I think a new specialist could work, but this places all the distinguishing elements in a special unit rather than the race as a whole (for this reason, actually, I'd like to see psionics much more common among Caesians, with the caveat again that I don't know how powerful they are!). The abilities you suggest, though, I'm less convinced by since they don't (in my head, anyway) create a substantial enough difference to the combat. Personally, I don't see why you couldn't produce the same (or better) effect by simply giving them a lot of hp/armour - armour especially since it makes armour mitigation on weapons an important issue (an implicit ability of "immune to low-damage kinetic weapons" would make them fairly terrifying and definitely different, especially when coupled with an aggressive AI!).

Pretty much agree entirely with the OP, with two exceptions: - Aircraft Cannons: I do use these, quite a lot. Not necessarily because I need to, but where I can I'd rather shoot something down with cannons over missiles to save the missiles for if I really need them. - Stun Batons: I've not actually used these, but I've had a couple of instances in 19.4 where (because of the Stun Grenade nerf) I've taken hits as a result of waiting for the gas to kick in. As a result, I'm tempted to experiment with Stun Batons to see if they're any use (Baton and Combat Shield might be interesting to try). @Aaron, re: armour and sight - I'm unsure. I was going to say that I think weight penalties alone would be ok, but thinking about it, actually I'm not so sure. Like the others above, I've not used heavier armour much because of the vision penalty, but it is that trade-off between armour and vision that is key and I don't think a weight-armour trade-off alone would be enough to make me think. For me, it's key that the vision penalty can't be negated by anything else, which means it's *always* an issue regardless of where you are in the game. In contrast, weight can be off-set by developing soldier's strength, which means the choice about armour will become less important as the game progresses. Having weight as the only balance might simply create a tiered system between new soliders (with low strength) being unarmoured and elite soldiers (having developed their strength) being heavily armoured. I guess, then, I'd rather see armour get buffed in terms of improving the protection it offers rather than reducing its penalties.

Thanks, both.

Yeah, that's right. I was doing this before I made the alterations I'm presently playing with. I did it by hand (with a calculator!), but a spreadsheet would, as StellaRat says, be quicker. This is one of the things that, all other things being aside, I think is spot on with the game balance at the moment - the fact that high TU shots have a better chance to hit than multiple low-level shots. Much better than UFO: EU!

Sorry, wasn't clear. At the moment, you can do precisely what you are saying the problem would be with high damage shotguns. Only you do it with a sniper rifle. From across the map. Since they ignore cover, their hit chance is high, and they have a comparable damage with the shotgun. Only, the risk is smaller, since if you miss/fail to kill, you don't have any of your soldiers exposed or at close range. And, you don't have to have gotten a soldier close enough on previous turns to make sure they can get in close to make the kill-shot. That was the comparison I was drawing. In other words, making shotguns more powerful would only seem, to me, to make them equivalent (there-abouts) to an already powerful combo (suppression + snipers) which, if snipers retain hypervelocity would seem fair. If snipers lose this, perhaps buffed shoguns would replace them as being the single viable strategy. Though, I'd still argue you'd have to work more for it than shooting aliens across the map. In any case, I think we mostly agree - it's suppression that's the main issue since it overwhelmingly advantages the player over the AI. I have a hypothesis that more aliens (which I'm sure I've seen are on the cards, somewhere) and a more aggressive AI might resolve this, however (more aliens = harder to suppress them all; more aggressive AI = more likely to be attacked first and therefore *be* suppressed).

Can anyone explain to me how precisely reaction fire works? I get that you need to have TUs left; I'm mostly interested in how it interacts with actions that the active player is taking and how the relative reactions scores of the combatants factor in? I'm mostly asking because the only times I remember seeing reaction fire is when I was moving, not when I was shooting and this seems odd. Maybe I've just been very lucky?

I'm not sure the shotgun would be any more overpowered in that situation than the precision rifle is at the moment, and probably still less so since if you miss you'll be exposed to a close range snap shot from an alien which will still have a fair chance of wounding/killing. Furthermore, I'd argue that if you've set up one or two soldiers to lay down suppressive fire and gotten another couple of soldiers close enough that they can move in for a kill, then you've earned it. Ans, in any case, if a suppressed alien is truly 'harmless' it doesn't matter what you're attacking it with afterwards (since it's harmless). All this said, I do agree (ideally) with your point about suppression. Before I played the game, I assumed suppression would work basically as TU damage for being shot at (so the more you're shot at, the more TUs you lose) rather than a straight suppressed/not-suppressed. Personally, I think this would work better by making it less 'all-or-nothing'. But I can imagine changing mechanics like that isn't likely to happen at this point In which case (some more feedback), suppression feels a bit too easy at the moment - it's very rare for me to encounter an alien and *not* be able to suppress it (because usually there's four+ soldiers all shooting against a single target, and burst fire seems to almost guarantee suppression if no one else can). This is against earlier aliens, mind, so maybe it drops off.

There *is* 'cover shooting' in the game. You just have to do it manually (and given the TU system, that's exactly as it should be). The Firaxis game needed their mechanic for full-cover because of their move-action system; Xenonauts doesn't need it because action is more gradiated.

Fair enough. I'm new to the game, so I've not got a feel for what is/isn't a known thing (and didn't want to risk it not having been reported). Apologies.

I wonder whether some of the advantages of the MiG over the Condor come from experience. As a new player, I've found myself much prefering Condors and will use them against pretty much anything I've encountered so far (up to Mediums - not so far through!). I wouldn't think twice about intercepting three fighters with 2 Condors (except they can't always catch them!), but I'm reluctant to use two MiGs for the same purpose. The reason for this - I think - is that I've not perfected missile use yet. I assume, once that's mastered, that you can make pretty much every missile count at which point you're sorted and the air game is solved. But if (like me) you lack the experience to get the timing and approach right, there's a fair chance that some of your missiles are going to miss and with MiGs that means you've lost the fight. In other words, Condors seem to me to be more forgiving owing to their cannon and dodge and I think this gives them a role at least for less expert players.

I agree that it's an exploit; that's why I'd like to see a fix! My first thought with regards to this, like you, was AI improvements (with the caveat that I'm aware these are ongoing). re: C4 door opening - if this was to become standard, you'd need to make sure that C4 was on at least one (and possibly several) default class load outs and/or make it very clear to the player that they need to blow open the doors with explosives. I can't imagine anything more frustrating than not knowing/forgetting to equip the right tool and failing a mission by default (although, I guess this depends on how vulnerable the doors are to direct fire). re: assault rifles - still think a reduction on TU cost for all/burst fire would work here (making them more mobile but less effective suppressers than LMG). re: hypverlocity - One problem (or so I'd argue) with reducing damage for passing through cover is that this mechanic isn't very clear to the player. At the moment, the hit chance for sniper weapons is the score without cover modifiers. I assume this would stay the same with the damage-reduction change. But, strictly speaking, there's a second (hidden) value which needs to be beaten to score a full damage hit (e.g. if it shows 70% to hit, you might have only a 10% chance of scoring a proper hit without having any clear idea of that). This is one reason why modifying the cover penalty to hit might be better, since you can factor that more easily into the UI (or so I'd have thought, not knowing anything about the game's code!).

You can already do this. Line everyone up, open doors, fire! (LMGs work best first to suppress aliens inside). Keep enough TUs to move soldiers out of line of sight after firing. Alien turn, they can't see anything to shoot and don't have the TUs to move up and attack. Back to Xenonauts turn, doors close. So, you line all your guys up again, rinse and repeat. At least if the doors are left open, you can't merrily wander all your soldiers back into position after the initial attack. Like the idea of using C4 to open UFOs, but I can't think of a good gameplay reason to do it (it would be cool the first few times, but would probably become tiresome after a while). re: hypervelocity - I agree its a cool feature and it would be a shame to lose it. But I'm not sure its needed to make sniper weapons distinct; even without hypervelocity those weapons seem to me to play an important and unique role. Would happily try lower damage hypervelocity, however, although I can't decide whether this won't just involve using the same tactic as before but taking longer to do it. Alternatively, could you have it offset, rather than entirely mitigate, the cover penalty to hit (say, by half)? That way, sniper shots shouldn't be more accurate against in-cover targets than out-of-cover shots from other weapons, but you still get a to-hit bonus relative to other weapons when shooting at covered targets.

re: Snipers: No reason why sniper rifles couldn't have a base aim upgrade to compensate for lack of hypervelocity. This still makes them dangerous (if you're outside of cover), especially as they have a high base damage and armour penetration (maybe? The xml files don't seem to indicate this). Assuming no other changes, maybe remove hypervelocity and increase accuracy to 120-130 aimed (I've played with 150% for aimed and it was useful but not overwhelming, but this was in the context of generally higher weapon accuracies)? re: shotguns - I think high damage shotguns have more of distinct role. At the moment (in theory), you have snipers for long range, high damage, high accuracy; shotguns for short range, high damage, and high accuracy (close up); rifles which are flexible and provide reasonable suppression; and LMG for good suppression. Changing shotguns to make them weaker and quicker would make them similar to a rifle or pistol; there'd be a distinct lack of a close-range high-damage weapon. Basically, I think they're fine as is but need an accuracy buff so they can actually hit; rifles and precision rifles still have the advantage of range over them (and the rifle has burst fire) so I wouldn't say it would make them too strong compared with these. re: frags - I've not used them much, to be honest, and I think part of my issue was because I'd expected them to have a larger radius and therefore not targeted well. But I guess my question is whether grenades need to be or should be largely precision weapons. We've plenty of those already (i.e. guns); it feels (to me) like there's a wasted opportunity for doing something different with them. This isn't to say that I don't think there's balance issues with having a larger radius (mass-explosives were a problem with UFO: EU and I presume the devs are keen to avoid that!). But having lower/gradiated splash damage is one way to deal with it; more important perhaps is the overdamage (is that right?) penalty (which is the primary reason why I've barely used explosives so far). On the other hand, I guess this isn't actually a balance issue (in that I'm not saying they're not balanced, just that I would like the balance to be different to how it is at the moment). So, I guess, off-topic for this thread. Sorry!

Two possibly related issues: I completed a base defence mission. During the mission, one of my soldiers was killed, another wounded. The wounded one was currently assigned to Charley-1. After the mission, the soldier listed on the personnel roster as wounded as would be expected. However, in on the equip soldier screen, the solider was listed *neither* in the Charley-1 crew or among the unassigned soldiers. Even so, the game was still registering the soldier as being assigned to the aircraft - I could not replace them; they appeared in the troop deployment window for Charley-1; and in a following ground mission the soldier was present. In this ground battle, my soldiers also arrived in exactly the same condition as they had been when the base defence mission ended. Many had partially loaded weapons and equipment swapped round as if they had just flown directly from one ground mission to another. Overall, it seems like the soldiers did not reset properly after the base defence like they normally do.

Had the same issue just before, but it went away after I reloaded my save game.

Very much in favour of thothkins/smoitessier's suggestion. Don't know if there's a points penalty for losing aircraft at the moment, but one could be added/existing penalty could be made bigger to represent funding nation's displeasure at you throwing expensive planes away.

Only started playing yesterday, so sorry if any of this is old news. Main comment, having not played any of the earlier builds, is that the tactical game seems to be limited by a serious lack of incentive to close with or aggressively attack the enemy. This, I think, seems to come from the very low hit chances, even at close range and especially with the weapon which is supposed to be best in close quarters (i.e. the shotgun). It seems to be the case that I can get very high % shots with a precision rifle even against targets in cover (~70% is not uncommon). In contrast, when I close with soldier armed with a shotgun or assault rifle, I'm usually looking at ~35% at most (against uncovered targets). Obviously, this is comparing an aimed shot (with the precision rifle) to a snap shot with the rifle/shotgun, but given the TUs required to move into position, they're about equivalent. The consequence of this is that its never worth attacking in close quarters. Not only are your soldiers less likely to actually kill anything, but they're also made more vulnerable by being close to the enemy and out of cover. It also leads to what seem to be quite silly situations. In the terror mission I did, I was fighting a Sibellian with three of my own soldiers. One was attacking it from a position where it was covered, the other two shooting from its flank, with all soldiers within ~7 squares of it. It took me at least four turns to kill it (quite possibly more). Fortunately, it didn't hit my guys either, but the situation was such that there didn't seem to be anything I could do to improve my chances (short of pulling all my guys over to kill that one alien) and there was utterly no reward for having outflanked it) and the outcome was determined by luck. Overall, then (and to echo comments above) I wonder whether close-range combat doesn't need to be made more viable. UFO: EU was all about long-range sniping; it would be nice for this game not to be. Other things: - LMG seems stronger than the rifle. While the rifle can be used for single shots with a low TU cost (therefore making it more flexible), the chance to hit with these shots is low enough that it doesn't really matter (and the aliens are tough enough relative to the damage for them to shrug it off even in the event of a hit). The main use for both weapons therefore seems to be suppression, but the LMG is far better at this because it gets more shots, while the move-and-fire penalty is almost irrelevant, since you're not likely to hit with burst fire anyway. I'd like to see the TU cost for burst fire for LMG and rifle differentiated, such that rifles use less TUs to use burst fire. That way, the rifle can be used to suppress with greater mobility, while the LMG is actually better at it (at the expense of mobility). - As above, I didn't see any damage numbers at all. Only floating numbers I saw were for healing. - The first month's battles overall don't show a lot of variety. By the end of the first game-month, I really wanted to be doing something other raiding another small scout. None of those missions had very much of an intensity to them; I wonder whether a more intense/challenging mission in the first month wouldn't be a good plan to mix things up a little bit? - I know AI is being worked on, but I'd like to see aliens in the UFO be a bit more active (by, say, poking their heads out of the UFO occasionally). It's very easy to at the moment to get everyone nicely lined up to attack the UFO as well as to exploit the UFO doors closing every turn, because the aliens never come out to get you.

So, I bought the game yesterday and played through the first couple of months (before a bug ate my save-game). I've been lurking for a while and when I first spotted this change I wasn't massively convinced either. Then, a day or two into October, I screw up and two of my planes fall out of the sky. Having completely forgotten at that point that my craft would come back, I went to buy some more (expecting them to be too expensive and therefore the game being pretty much over) and when it tells me there's no space in the hangers I remember. From a new player's perspective, then, this was awesome, since it meant I hadn't just lost the game a fraction of the way through (as a result of not knowing my planes would get one-shot-killed/as a result of accidentally not setting my missiles to not fire). While I basically lost control of the skies for half of October (which felt like a fairly hefty penalty, although I never got to see what effect this had on funding), it was nice to have an opportunity to learn from that in the same game, rather than suddenly being at an end point with not much of a time to reflect on what went wrong. On the other hand, I do find the explanation for it a little jarring and, of the ideas I've seen around here, I'm more inclined towards free/cheaper (subsidised?) aircraft than magic repair work. Perhaps, if (early) planes were free, there could be a hit to funding/score penalty (or, a larger one, if there is one already) for each one which goes down (since they're not cheap, and losing them implies incompetence/futility).