rowenstin

I was going to suggest pretty much the same, with other options being planetshot down are gone for good, are recoverable or are available immediately; soldiers are immortal, have a chance to survive but gravely wounded, or death is final period, initial number of bases, research takes more/less time, etc. Then make predefined bundles of those option into useful packages calles "easy" "normal" "hard" and "superhuman" for those who don't want to fiddle with too many options.

As an alternative or addition to making all props dissapear, a key that makes all (visible) sprites turn a uniform shade of bright red or other highly visible color, and also forces the cursor to prioritize sprites over objects. Sprites turn black in areas of poor lighting, so I imagine the engine admits this possibility.

Clicking the spotted icon centers the screen on the alien, but if it's obscured by some prop or darkness it's often impossible to mouse over it.

Ok, I won't comment on the gravitons since it's not my area of expertise. About alien alloys and plasma, a start could be something like this. I imagine I could do something better with the actual text, but I don't know how to access to or modify the relevant files. We could start with these, tell me if they're too technical and I'll try to simplify them in the future: About alien alloys: “We've found that the alloys used by the aliens use the same elements we know of, but the extraordinary thing about them is the ways they are arranged. Either their crystalline structures were previously not known or thought to be impossible, or the crystal themselves are disposed so their interaction results in properties that the structures it's formed from do not possess. This is hardly new – we do exactly the same with our steel, the speed at which is cooled determining it's hardness and tensile strength among other things, but these materials suggest aliens can create them one layer of atoms at a time. This is something that we can't even conjecture how it's done, so sadly the chance of replicating these are slim as much as they would revolutionize every known branch of science and engineering.” About alien alloys and plasma: “The alloys used in heat shielding have both an extraordinarily low thermal conductivity and a very high latent sublimation heat value. Even when subject to large gradient of temperature, heat transmission is extraordinarily low; if subject to a sudden influx of energy, all the heat is concentrated into the first few nanometers of the plate, which is vaporized consuming all the energy in breaking the bonds between the atoms, a process which cools the material. I layman terms, when the piece of armor or hull is hit by a plasma bolt or laser beam, a few layers of atoms ablate dissipating the energy without further harm. The amount of material lost this way is very low and the armor is able to withstand many of such hits without losing any significant amount of mass or structural integrity” About manipulating alien alloys: “We've figured out how to use the materials recovered from alien craft. Melting them was, of course, useless since the very property that made them special in the first place, their atomic arrangement, is destroyed in the transition to liquid phase, and the unique properties of the alloy used in armor plating and hull doesn't have a stable liquid phase at room pressure; it sublimates directly into vapor. That said, many of the alloys share a common structure; an amorphous matrix that holds small crystals made of atoms arranged in an ordered structure, much like as our composite materials like fiberglass or steel for this matter, at much smaller scale and greater complexity. This amorphous phase, in the right conditions of pressure and temperature, become soft and malleable (much like glass when red hot) and we can mould or extrude them at will. As easy as it sounds, the thermal properties of many of those make this a complex and tedious process, but I suspect this property was specifically engineered by the aliens precisely to make the alloys useable.”

It's particularly funny because most of the work they do is actually engineering, like designing weapons and vehicles. I don't know if this is the place for this, and it's a bit nitpicky, but some of the technobabble and logic I found on some entries is a bit faulty. For example, the entry on the Reaper autopsy says that given the amount of Alenium on it's body a “fresh” reaper can only create 10k copies of itself. This is true only if the specimen they dissected is a first generation alien, just unloaded from the ship, which they don't have any means to know if it's the case or not. If we're talking about just a third generation reaper (a grandson of the original) then the original has the potential to create 1 million copies! Another thing entirely, the entry on allien alloy fabrication states that they use the same elements in the periodic table we know of, but what makes it special is their arrangement, in ways we didn't previously think it was possible. This is ok, but then they look for a way to melt the material using lasers of whatever. When you melt something, what you're precisely doing is destroying it's solid state atomic arrangement; it'd be the same if you took that specific proportions of pure elements and melted them. As a suggestion, and given that many of them have an amorphous configuration, you could say that given their special properties they have a glass transition temperature at a very specific point, at which they become comprartively soft and able to be moulded. It may not seem to be that much diferent from melting or indeed scientifically accurate, but it'd be enough. Thre are more, mostly related to materials science and heat dissiparion which, as a chemical enginner, are somewhat cringe worthy. I understand it's not very important as most people won't realize them or won't care, though.

I'm Spanish, and I pride myself in having a modest command of both languages, so I think I could be useful. Tell me how I can help.

First allow me some disclaimers. I've been playing the game only for about a week. This means I've not completed it yet, nor tested end game or advanced options. I'm not playing the latest versions, and I some things that I'm posing as problems might actually be in the game or solved, in which case you should read it as “the game's interface is obscure enough for an average user not to be aware of this”. Finally I've been perusing the forums for a while and I'm aware that some of the horses I'm about to flog have been dead for a long time, and comparisons with X-COM 2012 will be inevitable. In any case, if I'm making your eyes roll too much now, I suggest you leave the thread. Overall I found the game reasonably fun and addictive. I see potential in it as long as the main issues I found are resolved. In no particular order: - Repetitive maps - Overly mechanical and artificial combat - Unintuitive strategic combat and too much emphasis in air battles. I'm sure the issue of repetitive maps have been adressed, so I won't comment much more on it. Only that a game of this kind absolutely need randomized maps or at least maps with random elements that potentially make each battle different. It's underestandable that x-com 2012 had a small number of maps, since the amount of eye candy and 3d modelling was perhaps too high for random maps, or the game isn't deigned to have so many missions that maps start repeating themselves, or is not meant to have that much replayability. Those factors don't apply here, so random maps are a must. About the second point, there's the factor where xenonauts is meant to clone the original game as much as possible. I admit that if that's the intent my complaint doesn't make much sense, but certain elements simply lead to weird gameplay. I'll elaborate. I started running the squad as I'm used to do in other strategic games, in fire teams that use cover. This lead immediately to disaster, as fire teams didn't have enough firepower (or I should say accuracy) to reliably kill aliens quickly enough, and aliens always could usually shoot first having superior sight ranges. So I remembered how I did in the original game, using one scout with just a pistol and grenades to discover enemies, and the rest of the squad to kill it, rinse and repeat. As far as military operations go, it's quite hilarious o see one heavily armored guy in front running froward and backwards like an overly excitable dog, and a ball of guys with heavy weapons and snipers (quickly replaced with just snipers, as they were the most effective) advancing slowly behind. The point is, I liked he original game because it had the right blend or strategic and tactical turn based combat, but that doesn't mean I liked some particular examples of how that combat was developed. Copying those accidents and mechanics because they were there, just for the sake of nostalgia, is IMHO a mistake. If you're not introducing bugs like being able to throw grenades through ceilings, I don't see the need to copy the least interesting aspect of the original game's mechanic. It leads to repetitive and uninteresting gameplay; either you repeat the same sequence of actions every turn, or you lose soldiers. Plus the hit rates are so poor, even using leveled soldiers that you absolutely need the whole squad to kill just one alien. More than strategy, it's an exercise of patience where tactics that intuitively you think should be used like flanking, positioning and using a variety of weapons for specialized roles lead to worse results than repeating a sequence of actions; advance with your scout, discover alien, everyone shoots, move the scout back, preferably behind opaque cover. I should add, if doing this during daylight can become boring quickly, night missions are an absolute pain that I just refuse to take part in. It's more or less the same, with the added task of the god forsaken throwable infinite lights. I let cities to be nuked rather than fighting at night. Continuing with the issue of supposedly realistic mechanics leading to unrealistic behavior. I quickly learned that in order to increase strength you have to carry a big load in battle, so every soldier goes with as much useless stuff as they can, I make them run in circles to make sure they get their TUs and spend a couple turns shooting at aliens with their most inaccurate shots, so they train accuracy. That's just one example of many. About the geoscape, I found it mostly ok, but for the life of me I can't figure what strategy to follow. No matter what I do, I always hit the same wall: lack of money. The thing is, most of your money comes from selling stuff you get on missions. To get missions, you need to down UFOs for raiding, as they either rarely land or they take off way before the chinook arrives, and terror missions are comparatively rare. To down UFOs you need expensive planes equipped with expensive stuff that need expensive hangars to house. This means that losing air battles halts progression immediately. Even if you don't lose the crafts, or if you lose them you have enough cash to replace them, you're not getting the needed cash and tech from the UFOs not downed, plus you get reduced funding and the game enters a death spiral where your lack of tech and money leads to not getting tech and money. I understand that measures are being taken about this, like reducing the cost or planes or increasing their survivability, but I'd suggest just making more land missions that not require you to down an UFO first. Compounding with this, air battles are plainly not really good. They rarely hit the sweet spot where the fight is interesting: either it's a sure win (boring) or a sure loss (frustrating) depending on what planes you have and the strategy. Right now, as far I've discovered, is “as many foxtrots as you can have in the air, with missiles or torpedos depending on craft size, reduce speed to minimum and fire them in the right sequence, then flee”. If you don't win with this tactic, the you don't have enough tech and therefore you lose the game because you are never going to have the required tech. The point is, the aerial battles have to improve a lot before launching to justify having it rather than a simplified version like in the original game. It also needs a smoother transition between "1 condor can kill anything" to "the whole squadron is wiped out". Some transition where your planes are damaged or you start struggling with keeping them alive, encouraging research into better aircraft. Why should I bother improving my fleet when I'm doing so well? Part of the strategy is economic management: using your resources where they are most needed. If the game punishes you so harshly for doing well, in a realistic sense, but bad in a metagamish "I know from past playthroughs that, in X days medium sized UFOs are going to appear, so I have to hurry with those hugely expensive hangars and planes" way, then it's not a very good game. I'm also finding base strategy hard to grasp. If I concentrate my attention in one base, then I barely have enough money to keep up with alien tech in terms of armor, weapons and planes, but quickly lose funding in unatended regions and lose them. If I try to build even a second base, then I don't have the money for the planes in them or build more laboratories/workshops. I find myself in a lose/lose proposition no matter what I do, which leads again to a new game. I might seem overly critical, but don't forget I said first I liked the game. I think it has potential, as long as some outstanding problems are solved.