SuperBazza

Your tactics musn't be really razorsharp, equipping everyone with the same stuff. There are benefits. Then there are penalties. It is by the balance of those that you create strategy. You see, the jackal armor is really shitty, but it does save your soldiers from the first direct shot most of the time. The advantage in its use is relative to what that soldier does, and it should be like this - it is the very first armor in the game. The workaround for this, of course, is to avoid using this armor on your slow-moving units or your expendable frontrunners, because they are easier to hit. The armor works better protecting people drawing the fire from protected positions, so use then only when your soldiers have enough TUs to fall back when necessary (like 60-something).

Works great for me in V18.

I don't really know what, when or how it is going to be done, but I am fairly certain I'll take this challenge in the nearest future. I mean, consider this a declaration of intentions for now, but I think it is needed. To get going, I'd like to see if there's anyone else in these forums who are lusophones, because discussing language transalations tactics would be awesome before getting our hands dirty (with sweat and tendinitis, mostly). Brazilian, Portuguese, Angolan, Mozambican, Timorian and all other lusophones must unite! Show up, guys.

Pinetree's mod seems quite good, really. I feel that representing the countries sends a message of unison, so the more nations are included and the more they are highlighted, the more "Humanity as One" messages the game conveys. This needs to be added the to vanilla package ASAP, so that clueless dummies like me can enjoy the benefits of it too.

I don't really see nerfing the other guns as a good alternative for a lackluster assault rifle. I mean, you should give more options to the player, not take them away because you couldn't think of something else. The thing with weight/TUs trade-off from the first kilogram is a good idea, as is taking recoil into account. But I maintain that the accuracy in assault rifles should be higher. As for the pistols, I don't see them working, really. I mean, maybe for training... maybe with shields... but I feel the opportunities to benefit from them are too limited, as opposed to what they actually do in real life (which is to serve as kick-ass alternatives or discreet ranged weapons). Maybe the inclusion of suppressors and ZERO TUs to draw them would bring them closer to their real counterparts. It's true that specialized guns come with high price for their effectiveness, but this doesn't explain the use of assault rifles as a first choice. Besides, some of the most modern rifles come for no less than 40 thousand dollars, and there are snipers that cost no more than a few hundred, so that's debatable. The thing is: you give a guy a sniper and see he go face-to-face with someone bearing an assault gun, or even a pistol. Snipers won't do most of the time, they are slow to aim, difficult to hold, take forever to get in optimal position. Sure, once you are in the sweet spot, you are god among men, but it is unthinkable to give a soldier a sniper rifle and say "Go kill aliens out there". This is done with infantry weapons.

I don't get this. Every soldier in this game is either American, Russian or Japanese. Names often repeat themselves, and they all involve anglo-saxon, soviet or japanese ascendances. Why is that? What about the rest of the nations, do they have no troops to offer? I find this not only inconvenient for emotional involvement, but slightly xenophobic. As a Brazilian, I feel - I don't know - excluded, I guess. Here's a great tool for generating names: http://www.behindthename.com/random/ Do you guys think you could fetch a couple of each country and throw it in the mix? It's a bit silly, but there's a very deep, irrational urge for people outside those three countries to see themselves represented.

This is more of a heads up than anything. I'm not sure this is supposed to be like this, but I feel it needs to be said. Standard assault rifles, in this game, are thoroughly useless. There is a range in which shotguns work great, there is a range in which snipers work great. Same for grenades, heavy machine guns, bazookas, stun prods. Assault rifles, though, seem to fall short in every category in some aspect: they use up too many TUs for single firing, are too innacurate in burst fire, their damage is too little, even at point-blank range. I mean, what is the tactical advantage of using one of those instead of shotgun, for example? I have no riflemen in my entire team (20+ soldiers), as I have replaced all of them. Worse, my tactics got all more efficient as I got rid of this kind of weapon. Another obsolete firearm is the pistol, which for whatever reason is more innacurate than shotguns even at medium ranges and use more TUs than most weapons, considering the fact that you have to shove your main gun in the bag and equip it. My feeling translates as this: I have never seem a situation in which the use of a pistol would be the optimal choice. WHAT COULD BE DONE: the main thing here is, there has be an exclusive advantage for each kind of firearm. I'll agree shotguns, snipers, bazookas and machine guns are all more powerful than assault rifles, but there is a reason most men in armies go with the usual AK-47 or similar: they are functional in most situations, as opposed to those specialized guns. In my view, this would translate into the game as the use of minimal TUs in either fire mode. Accuracy, while not great, should definitely be better than that of a shotgun after 10 meters/squares. Firepower doesn't have to be changed. For the pistol, I think there has be a different paradigm in using it: it really is weaker than all the rest, but soldiers use them because they are the quick option. In the game, that would translate in a sidearm which use almost no TUs to equip, almost no TUs to fire from the hip, and would weigh next to nothing. In fact, there are pistols today that weigh as little as 200g, so why not incorporate this into the game? That would give some use to the pistol. Tactics game get richer the more alternatives you offer. At the moment, the justified roles (in my humble opinion) are centered in 4 areas: assaulters with shotguns, sweepers with HMGs, pinpointers with snipers and painters with explosives. Add these tweaks to the assault rifles and you could have true supporters too. Change the way the pistol is used and every soldier would be two times as flexible. What do you guys think?

Quite frankly, semitransparent walls and wireframe vision both their limitations, even if the second option would have that kind of futuristic taste to it. In practice, they would translate poorly into gameplay, causing frustation in different situations. The outline option, even if hard to implement, is in my opinion the most well-established feature to solve occlusion situations, least of all because it doesn't mess with spatial perception. Of course, there is the other problem of seeing inside buildings when there is no soldier inside - in this case, removing the roof would be just right -, but these are different things. Concerning the outlining method, maybe you guys don't have to go too far. If there's not enough manpower to do the usual thing, I suggest you make a "rectangular outline", which would fit the tech-savvy themes of Xenonauts while merely requiring the outlining of the sprite itself. Maybe add a couple of fake technical lines beneath each rectangle when the show up just for aesthetics, too, as if the position of those occluded aliens were given by sensors or whatnot. Point is: there's got to have a way in which we see aliens with 100% of ease. Once soldiers spot them, we shouldn't have to go through any mouse-hovering-where's-the-enemy.

This game is fantastic, but there are some very strange design decision that need to be fixed. One small detail, but of particular annoyance, is the fact that we cannot see enemy outlines when the fixed camera puts them behind something. I'm not saying that we should be able to see EVERY enemy's outline, but if they are in a soldier's field of view, then the game must let me see them. I've been through the same situation over and over again: enemy behind a building is seen by a soldier, but the camera won't let me see it. Then I spent the next 5 minutes TRYING TO hover the mouse on top of that enemy to see hit percentages and such. This is. Just. Not. Fun. So there you go. Small tweak, huge profit.

So, this sad tale involves a mission gone wrong, a ghost tank and the end of my Iron Man dreams. After a ground combat session deriving from a crashed UFO in which all but 1 person of team survived to run away, I went back to base to regroup and draft more soldiers. Thing is: the tank which was destroyed during the mission was there, as if it was never used, but occupying 2 slots in my dropship. Upon trying to remove it from the ship, the game would just ignore my command, leaving it there. So I decided to decomission it, so that I could open space for 2 more soldiers. Just after I confirmed decomissioning, the game crashed. When I tried to reload the savegame, which was an Iron Man one, the game crashed again. And now it's doing it every time. I have no idea of what happened, but here is the save game: http://www.4shared.com/file/1mAceIGP/AutosaveIM2013-07-08_113035.html