EchoFourDelta

The game actually works perfectly without it. With a bit of work on the game's scripting, you can disable the "discovery" phase (activated when XCOM troops first gain visual contact with a pod of aliens and they scurry away to cover) and enable their normal movement beforehand. The aliens have two kinds of movement: the first is the "teleportation" that gets harped on so often (for those not familiar, until they're discovered, individual groups of aliens will port around the map in a rough approximation of a patrol route), and the normal behavior you'd expect to see, that is following discovery, the AI packages go to work, and the aliens will hunt you down, actually conduct search patrols if they've lost contact and are the more aggressive sort, or fall back into cover and set up ambushes. Disabling the discovery and pre-enabling the AI packages and standard movement of the small groups of aliens not only works just fine and dandy, but enhances the gameplay to a significant degree, as you're fighting the AI the entire time. Also of note is that there are two different AI packages; the easy/normal one and the classic/impossible one. In addition to changing up the aliens' stats, the higher difficulties use what is basically an unshackled version of the AI package, as well as rescinding fire and movement restrictions on the number of aliens that can be active at any given moment. Anyone looking to make these changes to their game is welcome to message me; I'd have trouble walking you through it remotely, but I can point you to some excellent resources you can use to get started. It really enhances the play of the game, and brings at least the tactical level back much closer to its roots, while making it feel more natural.

I only carry grenades whose names rhyme with drag, selenium, asthma, and intrusion.

There was a significant degree of randomness to each alien deployment is all. Each individual ship type had a certain number of aliens of each rank, with a random modifier that could be added to the base number of aliens of that type. This was also regulated by difficulty; easy and normal used one set of numbers, with the other settings using another; (both used the same "random" modifier. For example, in the OG, a Base Mission could involve 1 Type #1 Terrorist, 5 Soldiers, 1 Navigator, 1 Medic, 1 Engineer, 2 Leaders, and 1 Commander. On the other end, it could have up to 3 Type #2 Terrorists, 4 Type #1 Terrorists, 11 Soldiers, 2 Navigators, 1 Medic, 2 Engineers, 4 Leaders, and 1 Commander.

That's more believable then 20% of every shot melting through and slowly slaughtering the soldier; it stops it or it doesn't, and has a much better chance of stopping it than not. This not only keeps the trooper safer in the long run, especially if they're wearing stronger armor, but follows more in spirit to what a ballistic shield's actually supposed to do, in addition to keeping your soldiers out of medical.

Yeah, OG was all or nothing; the only variable was in whether or not a craft was shot down or if it landed.

Yeah, aliens had an inventory just like your own troops. They could load and fire, change weapons, run out of ammo, etc. with anything they had, with one difference: they kept everything in their inventory in the right leg item slot.

Well, yeah. It is absurdly rare, especially close in, due to how troops are trained. The farther away you get the more likely it is you're going to have blue on blue due to poor communication and lack of recognition; up close, even in a kinetic environment, it's exceedingly rare, due to how easily communication and recognition; individual awareness of the situation is key, and again. Remember who our troops are supposed to be.

> A larger, meat grinder-y platoon (11-18) > platoon (11-18) > mfw the Xenonauts hardly ever deploy more than a reinforced fire team or squad > PLATOON

... I like this idea.

It's not exactly handholding if you fill a soldier's inventory, and then expend their loadout on a large crash site or some other mission before hitting up another one. Yeah, suspension of disbelief, and gamey element, but some shit is just absolutely and implausibly stupid. I hope they don't take that particular aspect out, because it's one of the few things left indicating that the Xenonauts aren't colossal morons, and actually have at least some idea of how to do what they're doing. As a side note, this is far from being an occasional thing in game design. What's with the tendency to star these super elite troops as your protagonists, and tell the player that they're the absolute best of the best/this organization is the pinnacle of human technology/we're the only ones with the capability to stop X... and then go on to depict them as less capable than someone who couldn't make it through Air Force boot camp. I mean, if you're going to depict them that way, stop telling us they're humanity's elite. (Granted, I understand that the concept's basically necessary for this particular game, but it's all in writing and depiction. I'm speaking on broad tendencies.)

That said. I can understand not being able to get back to the dropship and refill during missions. Between drops on a single flight is another story entirely. Assuming these guys are too retarded to keep spare munitions and ordnance in the craft to refit after a drop, especially if they'd know they might have to make a second landing... that's just an unacceptable level of stupidity to be asked to swallow.

Yeah, but it's not like troops freak out and gun each other down every time they hear someone fart. A significant portion of any soldier's training is how to move and fire in close proximity to other troops safely; this goes beyond even basic or specialized military training; it's basic firearms handling safety that gets drilled into you from the day you're issued a weapon.

Stellar here raises an incredibly pointy point.

I will say that the Hunter's gun is where things get a little too ridiculous to be taken seriously. These guns have literally thousands of rounds hooked up when you deploy a vehicle like that. "Oops, sorry guys, I'm done." "What the hell are you talking about, we got here 30 seconds ago!" "Yeah... our gunner only took a half can of 7.62." "Doesn't that come in a hundred-round belt in the can?" "Yeah... they only let us take half of one." "You know that's enough to fire both of those weapons for a total of, like... .75 seconds, right?" "Yeah..." I mean, hell. Stick a can for each gun on the outside, let them grab it and reload or something. The guys carrying a gun that apparently fires the same round can carry hundreds and hundreds. Strong flesh, weak steel, I guess.

Resupply in the dropship en route between missions makes sense, but being able to head back in during a mission to resupply would be "unbalancing."

Key to this is that it's not so much their class as simply an easy way to handle quickly changing a soldier's loadout - the gear they're carrying. To change this, click the "R" by the soldier portrait. From here, you can change the equipment in that loadout, change it's name, or select a new one for modification. You can also create new loadouts by using the blank spaces. I forget the exact steps, but click around with the left and right mouse buttons, and you'll see; it's really simple. There's just no indication anywhere in the game where you're told about this.

Also, random aside. Night vision equipment was nowhere near as ill-advanced or bulky in the period as a few here have made it out to be. Consider the following: http://i822.photobucket.com/albums/zz146/75MustangII/Misc%20Photos/M14Infrared.jpg Note also that the "infrared" designation there is does not mean "thermal" in this case; this is a starlight (i.e. "night vision") scope, dated October 1964. Technology took a long walk in 15 years to 1979. By way of explanation, night vision devices prior to this were active - rather than passive - systems, meaning they required a means of infrared illumination for the "receiver" scope to detect. Systems prior to this one were not yet at the level where they could simply collect enough ambient light to resolve a workable image, requiring the infrared "spotlight" device somewhat similar to the non-visible "flashlight" installed on most modern night vision goggles, such as the AN/PVS-7B (in this example, the flashlight functions as a flashlight normally would, providing illumination in an area where there simply is no ambient light, such as in a shuttered structure, or an underground area with no lighting; it's essentially a non-visible flashlight functioning in the same role for the NVGs as a normal flashlight would for the human eye).

They actually took a far more different route for the actual canon appearances in Halo: Reach and Halo 4, though, and one that's a good deal more realistic; you simply can't armor up a female identically to a male without destroying their hips and back. Sticking most females in armor made for a male squishes their breasts up and can make it difficult to breathe when worn properly (read: snugly), and the material where it rides above the shoulders beside the neck are usually a good deal too wide, reducing the degree of freedom and ease with which they can move their arms. The vests themselves are another issue on their own: if they do loosen them so they can breathe normally and so their chest isn't so cramped, it typically rides too low and puts a massive amount of stress on their hips and lower back. Either way, you have armor made for males dangling around a female's frame, or armor sized and designed for the female body type where you can equally clearly tell it's a female.

Nah, the troopers "wear" a powered suit; they have their limbs replaced, apparently, which interlocks with the MEC suit.

It's not even modern, though. I mean... the NATO phonetic alphabet has been around for a hot minute. I mean, Charlie came out the same way: Viet Cong > VC > Victor Charlie > Charlie/Communist > Charlie.

>Open ResourceHacker >doodadoodoodoo >Ahhereitis >"MeldContTurnsToSelfDestruct: 9001" >Compile >Save

Also, this is mechanics, not fluff; we're coming up with fluff to actually match mechanics.

Sure they can be. They have systems specifically designed to track alien craft, and the aliens aren't using the same craft they did before (which was in and of itself difficult to detect via radar). At any rate, part of the silliness is coming from saying we track them with radar, and then it moving to "our missiles have to track by radiation, because we can't track by radar" even though it would be even easier to paint them with onboard systems, as close as the planes are. There's two different statements being made in the Xenopedia.

Not really. A great deal of their materiel was abject shit, and designed to overtake Western dominated battlefields by sheer weight of numbers; if you haven't picked it up, this has been Soviet/Russian doctrine for a while (and in large part still is). In this case, the weapon could only have its trigger pulled ten times, and could not be fired again until its cocking charges were replaced (even if the pilot had ammunition left). Another critical problem is the muzzle velocity compared to similar weapon systems; velocity is key here: a marginally larger projectile does little when the rounds have trouble hitting the target - engaging targets with gun systems on aircraft is dicey enough... which brings us to the last concern. A great many Russian autocannon systems were... poorly-built. Like, not "failed to fire," or "catastrophically malfunctioned." This particular design was prone to damaging (already subpar) ammunition (and poor fuzing systems), which could then explode inside the weapon, destroying the craft. Another not so small problem was some systems physically destroying their mounting systems and the aircraft they were attached to when the were fired due to sympathetic vibration, resulting in the gun literally ripping itself from the mounts, destroying flight controls and cockpit equipment, or other equally hilarious (and disastrous) problems. Also, the reason there are "fixed numbers" is because the figures in the files are metric, and they actually list the maximum range of the weapons.

Awwwwwwwwww shyt, son. Downloaded. Way badass, Jsleezy. Strong work, brah.