Korgath

Is there any chance hypervelocity could be brought back? You could increase bonuses in cover and encourage more strategical elements rather than a do or die mentality that way.

3x Foxtrot vs 3x Heavy Fighter is another Also going into a battle against scouts with 0 missiles on foxtrots and having an 18% chance to win, kamikaze maybe?

Maybe you could have the corsair have heavy missiles and the cannon or give it the ability to perform rolls quicker than the condor can? Foxtrots are usable for a long time but they have limitations. I do have one problem with them though in that they have no issues taking stuff down using autoresolve when in manual combat they would never manage it. I don't know what criteria you're using for the autoresolve feature but it doesn't match up with what is possible in manual combat and once I've reloaded a save a few times vs different craft I know that between using manual and autoresolve I can get away quite easily without needing to upgrade anything until I get Marauders. The problem is that if you can do with Foxtrots + Condors until you finish researching the Marauder then there's never any need to build Corsairs because you're going to want to upgrade them to Marauders themselves anyway. There needs to be a strong need for the Corsair, either having more ammo to do additional sorties or the ability to avoid damage that the condor cannot. It either has to do something the Condor cannot or it needs to be useful for longer which would be a more fundamental change but I'll expand on in the next paragraph. To make the game 'longer' and give further incentive for progressive upgrades rather than shooting straight for the 'ultimate' version of anything you could increase research time and make the alien progression take longer also. If you doubled the man hours needed on research and then doubled the amount of time it takes the aliens to progress then you would have a situation where you do more ground missions with tech before you get around to upgrading it. It would make the game take a bit longer but it would offer the chance to make intermediate technology more useful and worthwhile to produce. [You could still skip certain tech if you wanted to ultimately but at least if you decided not to you would get more use from the intermediate stuff]

I had a look at my troops again and I agree with Skitso, 0.27 should be the modifier for strength. If that leaves undesirable elements like stacking shields etc that need dealt with then we should do that by changing those items specifically. The only other alternative I see is being able to have items consume less than 1kg each (magazines/grenades in particular).

I would agree that I'm a bit further ahead than usual. I'm on normal just now however so unless veteran changes the research times it should be achievable to get the same results as myself providing you research things efficiently and build a new laboratory as soon as the game begins and then fill it as soon as possible. I could even have shaved off another 1.5 days of research or there abouts if I had the option to hire scientists in advance of the lab being built but we can't. My research was: Alien Invasion > High-Speed Interceptor > Alien Plasma Pistol > Alien Plasma Rifle > Laser Technology > Alienium > Alenium Explosives and now I'm going straight to Wolf Armour (Skipping jackal and investing the money into bases/fighters instead) [EDIT] I got 3 light scout spawns on the first day of play and I believe I also got the first of the normal sized scout spawns on the globe as well. If you don't then that would probably add a few days onto your research of alenium but you could do the improved armour research in between the laser tech and alenium to try bridge that gap.

Sounds like you might be a bit behind. In a new game on this build I got lasers, alienium explosives and the foxtrot in the first month alone.

Yeah I think either 0.27 or 0.28 might be the ticket. I'll need to go back and see how much str my guys have and see what is reasonable. I think unless the soldiers are super high stats then it should be around 27/28Kg - that should be enough for armour + rifle and 2 clips and 2/3 grenades or so. If shields and other stuff can be abused because of that allowance then perhaps the weights for those items should be adjusted instead of changing the formula?

I feel like the strength nerf needs toned down slightly. I think making it half the difference between the old and new value would be spot on. Putting armour on my guys pretty much means either no grenades or no ability to do more than one mission (or longer missions that need multiple reloads) and I don't see how having a pack mule carrying ammo for everyone should be the done thing but it's going to have to be at this point imo, especially early on when we only have 8 guys to use. [EDIT] Also, I didn't play last night because I was busy with other things but the last light scout I done I had a grand total of 2 alien alloys from it, why even bother? I don't feel like I need to do these missions unless I want my squad to have better stats because I can just choose the airstrike option now and get pretty much the same money regardless, only missing out on those two alloys. Generally once Scouts show I only do those and just airstrike the light scouts because they're a waste of time. (unless i really need more alloys) I think there needs to be a bit more incentive to do the ground combat for these smaller ships. I think reintroducing some relationship bonus for doing them yourself should be there, similar to the old score system. It doesn't need to make a huge difference but just a small one so that doing those 5 light scouts that appeared in the month might net you an extra little boost in funding.

I feel like shields should have a better chance at taking more than one hit. Maybe things improve once you throw armour into the mix but for them to be useful at the start I think they need to be able to take around 80hp of damage. That should give them the chance to take one or two pistol hits but a rifle would a much better chance to one-shot. I also feel that for 'normal' difficulty there should be a bigger element to back and forward gunfire exchanges. Just now it's very much kill or die when you see aliens. The only way to avoid losses is to abuse LOS with smokes and hiding around corners etc. It's going to lead to most people using one or two guys to scout (nothing wrong with that) and then guys further back to actually take the aliens out and if things go wrong then you just dump a smoke on the guys in the line of fire and have another go next turn. I don't think there's anything you can do to counter the smoke/LOS abuse to be honest (at least nothing I can think of off the top of my head) but it shouldn't necessarily be the method of playing you push people toward.

First mission was touch and go but everyone made it back. 4 riflemen and 4 snipers. Seb Guard right outside the front of the dropship. First Rifleman auto's at him and misses but they all land close to him, amazing luck to avoid reaction fire. Second guy does the same, hits once and suppresses him and saves my bacon. Could have easily have been 2/3 guys dead right there. Next guard I take out after he misses a guy and the third one hiding in the ship gets captured with flashbangs! I had everyone at the door and used the first guy to throw a smoke causing the seb to miss his reaction shot. All the guys after that just threw in flashbangs, after 4/5 he went down. All my guys had a little bit of damage on them (5pts or so each) but otherwise unscathed. Off to a good start then, all downhill from here I bet.

It's probably because they just finished it and are going to bed themselves or something.

Woohoo, update time!

Eagerly awaiting steam getting the update

Opening doors doesn't offer reaction fire as far as I can tell. I abuse it quite a lot to keep track of what they are doing inside the UFO before I breach. I don't know if it's worth changing either though seeing as you'll end up just getting the guy that's doing it to equip a pistol and shield to reduce reactions against him. (If I read how it works correctly?). Also in my game it looks like the Light Drones have the wrong model, they are using the caesian model for some reason, red shirt. They have the right sounds still but I'm not sure if they are able to shoot or not, I killed them before they got a chance. When this build goes back onto experimental I'll try grab a save for you to look at if you want. I'm just about to try my first landing ship on this play through as well when you put it back up, if I notice anything else weird happening I'll let you know!

I usually just shoot them down but I also have troops and vehicles in each base to defend.

I got everything finally. I just had to wait a bit more. I think I was perhaps a bit unlucky with the alien base spawns which would usually be an easy way to get the leader I assume. I ended up getting two birds with one stone with the Praetor in the terror site though. The Battle Rifle was 2/3 missions after the terror site. It was quite nice to get the additional ramp up in difficulty with most of the aliens being elite but by that point my soldiers were pretty much unstoppable anyway. Things might be different if my squad had not been so experienced (70+ missions for the first 8 soldiers). I'm going to play through again and see how things go. I'll maybe try an Insane play through after this, I've made some notes on what it takes to down UFO's and I'm confident I can shoot everything out of the sky without making any mistakes but I think I want to try one or two other tactics in the ground combat portion of the game before going for it.

Yeah I just stunned a Praetor Leader from a terror site. I had another base pop up but it was a small one.

Alright, I suspect I'll need to wait a bit longer before the rest of the missions etc open up then. I'll push on and see if I can find a leader in the next base that pops up or something.

Hi guys, I'm playing version V19 Stable hotfix marked 02/09/2013. I've been playing through this game the last day or two and I'm at the point of having just about to get strike cruisers spawning. I've already done carriers. Where does the research tree end, I'm suppose to capture a leader at this point (don't think I've seen one yet) but aside from that I've finished the research tree and not sure what's next, if anything. I've got Marauders and Valkyrie, Sentinel/Predator armor and plasma weapons. I know on the wiki there is more after that but I've not had it unlock yet. I've also not seen the last race of aliens spawn yet. Am I missing something out or is that it for the moment? Thanks

In my current game I have 3 bases and they are all right next to each other in Egypt. I have 7 Interceptors currently and sometimes could do with extra if I want to have enough to be able to shoot down things as soon as they pop up without having to wait on things getting back and refueling etc. Starter Base = Research Labs and Drop Ship(s) Second Base = Workshops with hangars for storing/building aircraft Third Base = Interception base with 12 hangars Any additional bases will be the same as the third. Each base also has troops/vehicles for defense. I currently have enough cash to throw up another base the same as the third but I decided to keep the money and invest it into my drop ship and soldiers to get them new weapons/armor. I've not had interceptors pop up yet but if the condors struggle with them I might need to upgrade them to marauders which will eat up all my cash. I'm currently paying about 1.5m in upkeep with 2.1m from funding. The biggest difference so far has been the increased number of aliens in missions. Before hand getting money was much more difficult, it's still not 'easy' but it's easier than it was previously for sure.

Hey guys, I've just had a CTD in December when a terror mission pops up. It briefly appears on the Geoscape with the name #### and then the game freezes, after 2 or 3 seconds it dumps me to desktop. I'll try get a save for you. [Edit] Doesn't look like they want to terrorize the same city again. If you zoom into the map you can see the city is actually called '#####, Canada'. Judging from where it is on the Geoscape I would imagine it's suppose to be Churchill.

My thinking there is that they track stats for other things relating to the human side of the war (Or does that button not really do anything?) and generally the player base itself is better at finding imbalances and exploiting them which could pave the way for the AI to use similar strategies. In a game like this you don't want everything to be perfectly balanced, you want it to be perfectly imbalanced (See this video to see what I mean ) but the imbalance has to be something that the AI can react to and throw you off guard. So far every single mission I do is 4 rifleman + 4 snipers and that works for everything, period. But if aliens started hiding inside buildings or compartments within their ship more often it takes away my key advantage of having high damage, high accuracy, shots coming from outwith their reaction range. I'm willing to bet I could metagame the hell out of whatever the AI tries to do but right now it doesn't do anything to try combat my own strategy. Even if you can implement a rudimentary system that can monitor what the player does and respond with a varying degree of effectiveness depending on the difficulty setting it can change the game from being a dull rinse/repeat to something a bit more engaging; which leads back to my thought earlier.If we end up with a game where the AI follows a distinct strategy and cannot adapt to what we as players do then games replay value dive-bombs significantly and players start handicapping themselves (TFTD Superhuman one base challenge, anyone? What about playing through Icewind Dale 2 on HoF mode with a single character?). Advancing the ticker based on what we do does help combat it but it's not a particularly elegant solution since you are setting up some very arbitrary variables that are still easy to metagame for the player once they learn the 'rules' of how and when it changes things up. Perhaps the ticker could also be linked to how 'smart' the AI is somehow? If the game is set up with a slight imbalance between certain things and the AI can pick and choose from a selection of strategies that are then modified by the difficulty level selected it means that suddenly instead of whoring snipers I might need to throw 2 or 3 machine guns on my ground combat crew or stop the aerial combat from being a simple x counters y since the AI now chops and changes the UFO's deployed and combinations thereof. I don't know anything about actually doing this within a game engine, I'm no developer, and I have no idea if Goldhawk have the resources to achieve an AI that can effectively monitor and respond to player input in any meaningful way but the more they do to prevent players using the same strategy over and over the better the game will be for any level of player skill. It would also help prevent the same tiring arguments between hardcore and casual gamers when it comes to game balance; the AI would be able to cope with both types of players as long as they pick the relevant difficulty that represents their own skill level.

Had this happen this morning on a landing ship. Went through the outide hull when shooting at the door and blew up the reactor. Many aliens perished as a result!

Same issue here, I removed escorts from the files as suggested here but then had a subsequent dry spell of craft that result in a ground mission. Not sure if removing the escorts stopped craft that would have had an escort from appearing or not but it at least made the game playable again.

I must admit that I've not noticed anything weird regarding this but I tend to open the door and use snipers to kill the aliens hiding behind cover. It stops me from being under reaction fire as the snipers can be a fair distance away and the sniper rifles penetrate most cover as well. If that isn't an option I'll usually try grenades one tile next to where the alien is hiding so that they don't need to try throw over cover.