Lorebot

Air combat is a lot more intensive and has a much higher priority than previous games. I wouldn't mind if it didn't require so much investment and wasn't such a comparatively small part of the game. That's part of the reason I think the Foxtrot needs to be better than it is in 19.5. I don't feel like the expense in research, manufacturing, and funding shouldn't give you a big step up in air combat. I don't think I'd ever do it, but investing in full wings of Foxtrots should be a major advantage in the early game and should be viable until you get another craft that can carry heavy weapons. I think one of the major difficulties the devs are going to face in balancing not just Air combat, but ground combat as well is that ammunition is free and in infinite supply. In past games balance was achieved not just through the effectiveness of equipment, but how much it cost to keep your troops supplied with that equipment. Having to supply my aircraft with missiles meant having to be picky with what targets I'd spend my heavy missiles on, if I don't need to pay for them and they're effectively as accurate as the smaller missiles when you know how to use them there's no reason not to use heavy missiles on every target. Getting laser weapons in EU1994 was a huge advantage just because ammo was free and infinite, it kept them viable through the entire game even when their damage wasn't the best because it meant not having to spend Ellerium and manufacturing time replacing plasma clips. I think the best thing that the Devs could do right now to help balance air combat is to make us have to spend time building the Alenium missiles and torpedoes instead of just giving them to us for free, same with the alenium, stun, and electro grenades. Give us the standard human ammos for free, but make us have to invest manufacturing time, money, and maybe even alenium to build the upgraded stuff. Same could be said for the advanced ground combat weapon ammo, it doesn't make much sense to me that building the clips for the laser or plasma weapons would be so simple as to not require manufacturing and allow us access to an infinite supply. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to me that they would not just build their weapons to accept the alien clips. I understand having to build human weapons to allow human soldiers to use them more easily, but why would they waste time designing something that's already fully functional, readily available, and doesn't require a different design to use well? But perhaps that all deserves its own thread?

In the original EU1994 you could program your grenades to control when they'd go off. It was a very useful feature, but not particularly realistic and I rarely used settings other than 'Now' or 'End of Turn'. I'm not sure whether or not I'd request its return given how powerful grenades already are in the game, giving them even more utility doesn't seem like a great idea at this point in the game's development.

HEY! I like my rookies and squaddie titles!

Every military organization in the world has some monument to the fallen. One of the things I really liked about EU2012 was the Memorial page in the Barracks. Being able to keep track of who you've lost and what they'd accomplished helped make soldier losses feel that much more personal. You could go and check to see a soldier's record and sometimes that had a real impact on me.

Well, I guess I'll have to give that a try for my next play through...there's no way I can afford to rebuild all 3 of my Foxtrots in my current game

It doesn't...it's not using an Alenium reactor as a power source it's still using normal jet fuel and it would conceivably have larger fuel tanks since it's a larger craft with a longer range and a greater top speed than the Condor. But then a Condor taking 8 hours to refuel is in itself confusing...such planes can refuel midair in 30 minutes or less and they can generally refuel even faster on the ground, though that requires actually landing and then taking off again which makes ground refueling slower just because of the extra steps involved.

Even SEALs retire or get discharged. There's nothing saying they're active duty soldiers being recruited, just that they have combat experience. Is it hard to imagine a soldier getting sacked and then being approached by a Xenonauts recruiter? Most mercenaries are trained soldiers from various special forces branches around the globe as well, there's nothing saying we're not poaching from a PMC either. And the modifications to the F-16 to turn it into the Condor are done at the Xenonauts base by their personnel. That's a good enough explanation for me to believe in a 3 day wait time. The channels are already in place to make the purchase so all you need to do is make the order and some nation will ship you one of their F-16s. First day your people are ordering the craft and getting it shipped to the base, sometime on the 2nd day it arrives and begins conversion, end of the 3rd day it's ready to fly. Suspension of disbelief is important, especially in a game where aliens are invading earth but are spending more time terrorizing the population than wiping them out with a bioweapon or simply bombarding the planet from orbit and a small team of 8 soldiers and a few dozen support personnel at a secret base are the best line of defense the entirety of humanity can muster. Would it suit you better if the counter for the aircraft cannon started at 1250 and just counted down in 25 round bursts instead of starting at 50 and counting down in 1s?

Not exactly the OP's idea there, but thanks

I'm not sure how you'd be able to build so many of them. I'm not too bad at the game and I can barely afford to build gear for my soldiers, and I certainly wouldn't have time to spend on that much construction. I tend to build 1 Foxtrot per base and use Condors for support. Condors may not be as good, but they're cheaper and I don't need to devote manufacturing to them. I'll agree that a wing of Foxtrots can be pretty devastating if used skillfully, but having 3 of them at every base is a huge investment in cash and production time that could be better spent building armor and weapons for your soldiers. But even used to their full potential a wing of Foxtrots just doesn't carry enough damage to take out a medium or larger alien ship in a single engagement if it's got an escort, and they usually do.

Sherelian, EU1994 had ZERO back story. There were about 3 cut scenes in the entire game, one of which was for you failing. The only story was in the manual for the game and amounted to 'Earth is under attack! Nations of the world have appointed you to lead this newly formed and super secret task force to fight back!' Xenonauts is already well ahead of the curve on story, you just need to read it yourself. Sure they could spoon feed it to you in cut scenes or in game dialogue, but that can get in the way once you're familiar with it and just want to have a good time playing the game. As for how that all translates into the game, think about what the situation really is. The Xenonauts organization has been around since the Iceland incident 21 years ago. In that time they made no major breakthroughs and sucked up millions of dollars worth of funding from nations around the world. By the time the game starts they're probably looked on more as a joke or a failed experiment in multi-national cooperation. Their funding has been reduced to next to nothing and their facilities, whatever they were, have been shut down and probably reclaimed by the military of the nations they had been built in. They've lost access to 'special forces' type recruits and are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Then the aliens show up. Do you really think that after a decade of continued reduction in funding and being looked on as unnecessary that the nations of the world would unanimously decided to throw everything they have into the Xenonauts program again? Highly unlikely. It's far more likely that they'd try to handle things themselves and give little more than token support to the Xenonauts. $100k/month is a joke when it comes to a military organization's funding...and that's where you're starting, every nation is only giving that much to the Xenonauts when the game starts. You need to prove to them you're not a joke, that you're capable, that they can't handle it themselves, that they NEED you. If you do you get more funding, if you don't you lose funding and nations withdraw completely. The dire situation is there, you just need to look for it

It's true that real troops in real combat don't leave base without at least 500 rounds of ammo, more or less depending on the weapon they're carrying. It's also true that the standard combat outfit and gear weighs about 50lbs. But that's life, this is a game...and in a game losing a soldier doesn't require letters to family. Engagements in life can last hours or days and you need to be prepared for that. A mission in a game can last a few turns, maybe a lot of turns, but in the end the number of enemies you're facing is finite and balanced by the developers to provide a challenging but manageable experience. If you want to run Xenonauts like RL then you'll need to make all the rifles full auto or burst and make the game move either a lot faster or a lot slower. You'd need to increase the size of the backpack in the loadout and make room for rations and water. You'd have to implement endurance and exhaustion and make units less accurate as they get wounded. There's so much more that if you worry about replicating it all correctly you end up not with a game, but a chore...a job...and it stops being enjoyable. Besides that it creates so much work for the devs that the project becomes impossible without far more funding and support than the guys making Xenonauts have. I don't want 100% true to life. I want something that's reasonably realistic while still being fun and balanced. I want a game

Gizmo, for the record if you change aircrafts.xml to give the Foxtrot 4 Heavy hardpoints the slots do indeed appear on the loadout screen where they're supposed to be. The screen coordinates for the slots are still there in the table, they've just been disabled by lowering the hardpoints to 2 instead of 4. The problem is that they reappear blank and if you click on them the game crashes. I'm not sure why it crashes, but something somewhere was changed that's making it behave this way and I'd love to know what and find out if I can undo it or not

Removing a functioning UI element for balance reasons is overkill. If it's a balance issue then just restrict access...but in a game with so much access for the community to build mods and make changes it's damned inconsiderate to remove it entirely.

Agreed. Having a cannon without the ability to dodge would just turn the craft into a sitting duck as it made it's approach anyhow.

I agree with most of what you've said. The Xenopedia mentions the Condor being specially modified for intercepting UFOs. Extra fuel tanks, better sensors, and a reinforced frame and armor all add weight to the craft. Sacrificing most of the payload for range, speed, and survivability is a viable trade if it's the only way you'll ever get to actually engage your targets reliably. As long as you can bring enough munitions to do some damage that's enough initially. The Foxtrot is another issue for me. It's researched and designed AFTER you've downed some alien craft and gotten a hold of some of their tech. You know what you need to fight them, and the Foxtrot is built to fill that role knowing that larger ships are on the way. So it's even faster than the Condor and it's more durable with a longer range, but it's also much larger and it's less maneuverable (ie. no dodge). It's given the ability to carry heavier and more damaging munitions, but it loses the cannon and survivability in the trade. With 4 heavy hardpoints it was pretty overpowering so I understand the nerf, but not only is it a bad move for game balance it's also somewhat unrealistic. The designers know what it takes to at least down an alien light scout and probably know what it takes to down a regular scout too, they wouldn't design a ship with such limited damage dealing capability and the pilots certainly wouldn't want to go up to fight with such a limited armament knowing that it takes 2 shots to deal with an alien craft that can dodge your fire and that it takes more than 2 shots to deal with something that can't. The Condor may only have 2 missiles, but after you've used those to kill your target you've got that cannon to help your wingman deal with things if they go badly. The Foxtrot doesn't have that option, and with such a limited flight team there's no way such a craft would get approved. The Foxtrot should have a cannon or 2 normal missile mounts to compliment the 2 heavy mounts. Having 4 heavy mounts is unbalancing to the game, but striping them down to only 2 mounts is simply not acceptable nor is it realistic. It's still a fighter, not a bomber, it needs to at least be able to try to protect its wingman in a fight once it's delivered the torps to their target.

Haven't read all 14 pages so I'm not sure if any of these have been mentioned before: 1. Clicking on the Soldier portrait in the ground combat UI should center the camera on that soldier. Can't tell you how many times I've clicked on it by habit when trying to find my soldier again after doing some shooting only to remember it doesn't do that.... 2. There should be a way to change what ammo is in a weapon with multiple ammunition types (ie the Rocket Launcher with explosive or stun rockets) WITHOUT actually firing the weapon. It would be great if you could drag and drop ammo onto the weapon in the loadout screen to change what ammo is in the weapon before a fight starts too. 3. We should get a chance to modify the loadouts on our soldiers and vehicles before a base invasion. There have been a few times when I've stripped a soldier of his gear because he was wounded and I needed it for his replacement in the dropship squad and never got around to reequipping him. Then my base gets assaulted and there's time to evacuate the non-coms and fire up the base defenses...but there's no chance to give my soldier a weapon or change what's mounted on my vehicles.

Why would you remove a functioning UI element like that? Seriously, what could prompt them to do that? It doesn't make any sense to me at all...

I could do that if I wanted to carry 4 of the same thing. The advantage of having 4 hardpoints is that I can mix-up the loadout more. 3 Torps and 1 Missile or 3 Missiles and a Torp aren't possible with just doubling up on weapon ammo. Granted the main reason for this is to let the Foxtrot carry 4 Torps to handle the larger alien ships easier, so doubling up on ammo would satisfy that. But atm I'm sort of more interested in why this is causing a CTD than actually getting the desired results. I want to know if I'm doing something wrong or if they changed something about the aircrafts so you can't alter them this way.

I think you misunderstood my reply. I let the Condors handle the fighters, but can't dish out enough damage to kill the larger ships with only 2 hardpoints on the Foxtrot. If I do everything I can and then head back to base to rearm, the Foxtrot refuels way faster than the Condors. So in order to prevent the alien ship from escaping I send the Fox back alone to finish the job, which it can if the phantom fighter bug doesn't hit me...which it invariably does. If by some miracle the bug doesn't occur and I'm able to kill the alien ship the lone Foxtrot usually get attacked by a wing of alien interceptors on its way back to base and dies a fiery death without Condors to back it up. Sometimes the fighters will attack the Foxtrot before it even gets to the alien ship to finish it off...or worse they show up while the Fox is tailing the ship till it's over land... The result being that I just don't send the Foxtrot out solo and about half the alien ships I attack and don't kill in the first engagement escape because I have to wait for Condors to be refueled before sending the squadron back out to finish the job.

So I've been trying to give the Foxtrot back some of its teeth by readding some hardpoints to the craft. Trouble is that every way I've tried to do it results in a CTD in the ship loadout screen when I click on the new hardpoints. I'd like to enable the 2 forward hardpoints as normal slots. So I went into the .xml and changed the Normal column to 2 and then further down the row added ;AV.SIDEWINDER;AV.SIDEWINDER to the Loadout column. I figured these 2 changes would do the trick. Once in the game my Foxtrot displays the 2 forward hardpoints, but they're blank and clicking on them causes a CTD. So I figured maybe it had something to do with mixing slots, no other craft does it. So I went in and gave it 0 Normal and 4 Heavy slots. Then changed the loadout for only AV.AVALANCHE. Start the game and the same thing happens, 2 forward hardpoints are blank and clicking on them causes a CTD. The Slots and WeaponPositions columns seem to still be set up for 4 hardpoints, and they show up in the loadout screen so I'm not sure what the issue is. The Foxtrot still works fine as long as you don't click on the 2 blank hardpoints. You can launch it and fight with it, it rearms, refuels, and repairs properly. The extra 2 hardpoint slots appear in the air combat window, they're just blank. So clearly I'm missing something. Anyone got any ideas on how to make this change work properly?

I too only use 1 Foxtrot per base, they're too expensive to do otherwise without cheating. Which I've done just to see how a wing with more than one would perform against larger ships...the results weren't pretty. Without Condor cover and only 2 hardpoints you end up wasting all your torps taking out fighters, 1 to make them dodge and the 2nd to finish them while they can't get out of the way. The reduced refueling times are great, but sending a lone Foxtrot back into a fight because you can't afford to wait for the Condors to refuel tends to get the Fox killed when a flight of fighters comes out of no where...which happens often enough that I've just stopped trying to send the Fox in solo to finish a fight.

I'm not sure what build removed 2 of the Foxtrot's hardpoints or what explanation was given for it but after a couple weeks of dealing with the change I'm still having trouble with it. The Foxtrot really lost a ton of utility and effectiveness because of that change. It helped balance the Foxtrot in the early game, but it's turned it into a sitting duck once the fighter escorts start showing up. It's also a huge problem once the larger alien ships start coming because you just can't carry enough torpedoes to bring them down without bringing only Foxtrots to the fight...and if you do they'll usually just get picked off by fighters. I'm sure that air combat is still being balanced, as is much of the game, but the Foxtrot really needs those extra hardpoints back, even if they're limited to only carrying missiles with them. Especially considering that you spend a lot of time and resources gaining access to them. They can't evade and have extremely limited payload even with 4 hardpoints.

whoops...wrong forum...meant to drop this in the experimental builds forum >.<

Never seen this before so I'm assuming it's new in 19.5 and it's happened twice in two separate occasions. I'll engage a group of alien craft, either 3 fighters or a normal ship with an escort. If I retreat with 1 alien ship remaining (usually because I run out of ammo and can't bring them all down), fly back to base to rearm, and then re-engage the alien ship 1 alien fighter will consistently respawn for the 2nd engagement. On both occasions that this has happened the respawned fighter doesn't have a icon on screen, just the cones that indicate its firing arcs are seen, but it's very much there and has killed a few of my interceptors. As a kick in the pants, if I'm able to bring down the main alien ship in the group and escape without killing the respawned fighter I get a CTD. I can post a save to illustrate this if needed. I haven't been able to reproduce this reliably, but that's mostly because I'm not trying to...I just wanna kill the alien ships

I have to disagree. I've been playing these games for a very long time and I'm very good at them. I lose soldiers very rarely and that's usually in the first month of the game or because they're rookies coming on later missions and I push them into situations they're not ready for because I'm accustomed to my veterans. The addition of Ballistic Shields has vastly improved my starter soldier survival rate. I don't think I've lost a soldier in the first 2 months for quite a while now. I understand tactics and how to use my soldiers to get things done and I play cautiously. I'm very rarely surprised and I tend to creep across the map clearing as I go. There's really no time limit to the missions so taking extra turns isn't an issue, go as slow as necessary to ensure survival. Don't take unnecessary risks, stay in cover, and use those wonderful shields to soak up reaction fire and provide cover where there's no terrain to take advantage of. Certain tactics will be less viable if those aliens ever start using those grenades they drop...but for now creeping across the map in a column with a ballistic shield wielding guy at the head is a great way to move around without taking damage as long as you don't get flanked.