Tobbzn
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Posts posted by Tobbzn
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A lot of the variety could actually be attributed under the terror site mechanic.
Say, a military research base is under attack. You land outside, clear the area, and the survivors propose to join you as discounted technicians, scientists and soldiers. With rewards based on your performance, it would incentivise some interesting gameplay decisions, much like the proposed MELD system in EW.
Maybe that could be modded in, actually. I don't know if it's currently possible to reward personnel from a mission or temporarily give you control of civilian units, though.
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There are aliens in the game! That's unrealistic!
The game is in 2D and people stand completely still for a long time during combat! That's unrealistic!
Anyway, jokes partially aside, there are a few slight errors I've noticed.
Xenopedia references anti-gravitons, as if that's a thing.
Xenonauts are 40% female at a time when a woman being an officer on Star Trek was controversial enough that they were forced to change the uniforms from unisex to skirts. Where are my xenonaut combat maids? =(
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I've seen UFO's ...several times.
Flying and making impossible manouvers. Instant turns. Massive acceleration changes.
Unless they are some kind of unexaplined and unknown phenomena, I can't think of nothing else that can move in such puposefull, yet bizzare and impossible manner.
unexaplined and unknown phenomenahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO
An unidentified flying object, or UFOunidentifiedSo are you saying that you have identified it as an unidentified thing? Good job.
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This happens from time to time and doesn't seem to be at all related to bagging aliens.
And yes, you can pick up alien plasma weapons, but as they are not designed for human use, you take a severe accuracy penalty for using them, to the point where only being point-blank makes their use viable.
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Our radar stations have what, 1% chance to detect a UFO per minute? While I agree on long-distance missiles being viable against larger UFO targets without much mobility, they'd be pretty much worthless against anything that can dodge unless you nuked every UFO, Iceland Incident-style.
As for the primary topic:
While the wreckage from the Iceland Incident was pretty much all gone, there were inspectable wreckages of military fighter planes once the UFOs returned. An analysis of such could give justification for an experimental plane to be reinforced in a particular way (Likely with heat sinks) and the term "hopefully" being used. Without immediate access to plasma tech, any assertion beyond "hopefully" would be silly, as it couldn't possibly be tested.
However, you can't conclude from a plane being reinforced that a personal body armor version is immediately viable. We get access to a 20 kg Combat Shield from the start, which indeed would be possible to make, but there's no reason to think a full-body version would be light enough to be effective. The shield has the benefit that you can drop it once it starts melting.
Besides, from a gameplay perspective, if we started with Jackal armor none of the starting soldiers would have been strong enough to carry a shield.
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Sounds like a nightmare for a newbie, mousing over every country just to find the one with best funding to place your base there.
Make it a country mod instead.
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I want a skyscraper mission where you land on the helipad on the top and have to fight your way down to the "hatchery" at the bottom. With reapers in narrow corridors as you fight your way through office space.
It'll probably be moddable into the game at some point. I hope.
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I'm hoping that instead of psi power, there will be other mechanics introduced to make you invest in specific soldiers. Something akin to that genetics lab XCOM:EW is introducing. At the moment, losing a soldier is almost the same as just demotion as you get a rookie in their place, robbing him of the randomized stat progression. While it can be painful strategically, it doesn't carry much emotional weight unless you've named them after someone you know.
You feel the loss of an enhanced soldier so much more after you've memorized his randomly generated name because you personally selected him and told him he was destined for greatness. You told him that the nations of Earth had decided to pool their resources and place the burden on him because he was our best and only hope.
When he inevitably dies because your Rocket Launcher snap shot missed its intended target... It's enough to make you ignore the aliens and ensure that your rocketeer is executed by his friends.
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There are mods like http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/6441-Wait-no-more-bullets?highlight=faster that do this, so I'm not sure Goldhawk will consider it a priority inclusion. Perhaps it will be in if the workload for adding such an option is small.
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For Terror missions, running 2 shields and rest snipers works excellent. Shield guys get to spam flares (real men only fight at night), and snipers handle firing through smoke grenades relatively well. Besides, since you always start with a decent cover position near your Skyranger and most of the aliens start out in the open, your snipers can support your exploring shield guys from halfway across the map without even having to move more than a few squares per turn.
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I was about to start my own thread, but this happens to me in 19.6.2 too.
Details:
After researching and producing Assault Shields, they have 0/120 health by default (even on the inventory screen) and do not repair over time. Starting a mission with one results in immediate destruction. I have not checked if it respawns after a mission, as I haven't played Iron Man mode and decided to restart when I saw my shield guys only had a pistol.
There's a chance this doesn't happen to everyone, considering it hasn't been a big deal on the forums...
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I generally split my squad into groups of 4 until I get a dropship upgrade, allowing for flanking tactics.
Pistol & Shield, excellent for using grenades, medikits and flares, and it even fulfills an Assault role if you can get close and unload a clip of snap shots.
LMG if I have predator armor, otherwise normal rifle. With Predator armor, carries extra shield for the Commando in case the first breaks.
Normal Rifle.
Sniper if I have Laser tech, otherwise normal rifle.
For squad tactics, Commando goes first, throwing flares if at night. If cover is sparse, kneels in the open, providing cover for soldiers behind. The LMG then suppresses or destroys enemy cover, then kneels next to the Commando, providing some cover with his armor. Then the sniper and rifle soldiers fire over their heads. This also works to "extend" other types of cover, which is particularly useful during the early game, where you can't risk your unarmored soldiers firing from out of cover.
When breaching, squad group up for a concerted effort, then open a given door with Predator armors and Commando Units in a crouched line, with other soldiers firing above them. Reaction fire is usually caught by my cover line, and the compact formation allows for easy use of medikits. The Commandos then either move in to execute lone aliens, or throw grenades to suppress and blow up cover. Uncovered aliens are then easy pickings for the rest of the squad.
Another tip: Instead of putting your rifle in your backpack, drop it on the ground when ready to use the medikit. This saves a lot of TU. This also holds for throwing grenades; If you want to throw more than one grenade, just drop your gun, as it doesn't use any TUs, and leaves you with free hands and reduced grenade TU costs.
Hope this helps =)
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My apologies for the harsh case of TL;DR. The reason is, somewhat ironically, that I very much realize the perils of time constraints, and so included several example suggestions, which I hoped would be copy/paste-able for relatively little workload.
After all, isn't this a good example of something you could partially outsource to Community Involvement?
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Good day. Anti-fun pseudo-autism calling in.
In the Anti-Gravity generator, the functionality is described as "emitting anti-gravitons". I would like to point you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton and ask you to note that as the graviton is a Majorana particle, its anti-particle is, in fact, itself. This causes a Majorana cringe.
The simplest solution would be to keep the graviton compensation idea, but amend it. Option one is to note that its existence goes against pretty much all current theories in particle physics. Realistically, coming to such a conclusion would take years of research before even being considered as an option, as its non-existence is fairly firmly planted in the current scientific paradigm, and that level of doubt should probably be reflected in the report. Personally, I think this is the most boring option (though perhaps the most interesting option, had it happened in the real world!), so I won't bother typing it out.
Option two would be to note that the anti-graviton actually is the graviton, but that the aliens have found a way to increase the odds of annihilation.
The extraterrestrial Antigravity Generator appears to be what allows such vast alien craft to fly through our atmosphere with ease - the weight of the vessels is so great that it would be virtually impossible to stay airborne using only thrusters. The extraterrestrial solution is brilliant: they have created a device that reduces the weight of the ship. Weight (as distinct from mass) is the force acting on an object due to gravity, and the antigravity generator works by creating a localised field that negates a large portion of the Earth's gravitational pull. It does not appear to affect the object itself, simply reducing the gravitational force acting on it. This allows a large UFO to fly using only a fraction of the thrust that would be needed if the antigravity generator were not active - indeed, any alien capital ship that suffered an antigravity generator failure would almost certainly suffer a rather abrupt end. The science behind this device is incredibly complex, but a basic explanation is as follows:
An elementary particle known as a graviton is the force carrier of a gravitational pull, much like a photon is the force carrier for electromagnetic radiation (such as light). Unlike many particles, force carriers like photons and gravitons are their own anti-particles - this means that they can, in theory, annihilate like matter and antimatter do when they meet. Suffice to say that since you feel gravity, obviously not all of them are annihilated. In fact, there's only a small probability of annihilation. One of our senior staff members drew up some diagrams that to my eyes explain it rather elegantly, but even simplified I'm not sure you'd be able to understand the details of quantum gravity. No offense - even I didn't understand it until yesterday either.
In any case, the antigravity device works by redirecting the gravitons naturally generated by the ship along lines on the hull, where they usually don't interact with anything. However, when a graviton from Earth crosses paths with one of these gravitons, there's a chance they'll be annihilated. More gravitons mean more annihilations, and by my estimates about eighty percent of the gravitons can be annihilated, resulting not only in an eighty percent reduction in thruster fuel consumption, but also harvesting energy from the annihilations to further fuel the antigravity device. How this relates to the laws of energy conservation is a topic for further study, but that can wait until I've finished these designs for a hovertank.
Because hovertanks are awesome.
The third solution is to instead emit the gravitons towards, say, the moon, or a different celestial.
The extraterrestrial Antigravity Generator appears to be what allows such vast alien craft to fly through our atmosphere with ease - the weight of the vessels is so great that it would be virtually impossible to stay airborne using only thrusters. The extraterrestrial solution is brilliant: It increases its gravitational pull upwards, as if hanging by an invisible line of gravitons. Weight (as distinct from mass) is the net force acting on an object due to gravity, and the antigravity generator works by creating an oppositely directed field that negates a large portion of the Earth's gravitational pull. It does not appear to affect the object itself, simply reducing the net gravitational force acting on it. This allows a large UFO to fly using only a fraction of the thrust that would be needed if the antigravity generator were not active - indeed, any alien capital ship that suffered an antigravity generator failure would almost certainly suffer a rather abrupt end. The science behind this device is incredibly complex, but a basic explanation is as follows: an elementary particle known as a graviton is the force carrier of a gravitational pull, much like a photon is the force carrier for electromagnetic radiation (such as light). Whereas most objects radiate gravitons in all directions, this device emits only upwards, and is powerful enough that it can compensate for approximately eighty percent of the gravitons from Earth, leading to a corresponding eighty percent drop in weight. Humanity has been attempting to discover the mechanism by which gravity operates for centuries, and this device provided us an irrefutable answer to a question that has foxed some of the greatest minds in history. I shall write a paper and share the knowledge with the world...once I have finished developing a hovertank, that is.
Alternatively, you could throw out the direct meddling with gravity, and instead have the system affect the viscosity of the underlying air currents, thereby providing an explanation for why it's difficult to shoot down using ballistic ground-based turret weaponry, and providing an explanation of how aircraft-carrier-sized ships can stay "afloat". In addition, it has previously been established that the large ships aren't entering the fray early due to having to prepare for atmospheric flight, but the current description of the anti-gravity generator seems to imply all they had to do was compare the amount of anti-gravitons emitted to the ones received from Earth, which is as simple as subtracting two numbers. If you want to carry the graviton theme from the plasma tech, my fourth suggestion is as follows:
The extraterrestrial "Antigravity" Generator appears to be what allows such vast alien craft to fly through our atmosphere with ease - the weight of the vessels is so great that it would be virtually impossible to stay airborne using only thrusters. At first we thought the only possible explanation to be a device that reduced the effects of gravity on the ship - hence the name - but upon closer investigation the extraterrestrial solution is even more brilliant: Utilizing extremely localized concentrations of gravitons near the hull, it dilates the passage of time for the air molecules beneath it - an effect predicted by my late colleague, Professor Einstein. With time passing at a slower rate, they are unable to move out of the way of the hull as it presses on it, and so the ship is essentially resting on a pillow of almost completely still air. This could explain why it is taking the larger ships so long to start descending through our atmosphere: The algorithms required for such gravimetric precision are nigh-incomprehensible, and even the slightest miscalculation could rip the hull apart. Indeed, any capital alien ship that suffered an antigravity generator failure would almost certainly suffer a rather abrupt end.
Since the aliens seem to have done most of the R&D work for us, applying the same algorithms should allow us to mimic their effects on a smaller scale, even if we don't understand exactly how. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a hovertank to design.
Of course, I realize this still is all science fiction, and at some point you're going to run into a statement that makes a sufficiently learned physicist cringe, but my proposed changes at least pushes the cringe up from "A passing interest in particle physics" level to the point where you'd actually have to do some calculations to see if it'd be plausible. For instance, localizing the time-dilation like I suggested would require an hitherto unknown relativistic metric, and smoothness-requirements for space-time manifolds should make any physicist's alarm bells ring, but actually finding out if an approximate effect is impossible requires some serious math. For that matter, even though I suggest "redirecting" gravitons, that's mostly because that statement, in technobabble tradition, shoves a lot of details under the carpet of seeming plausibility. After all, the trick to good technobabble is tricking the reader into thinking they've had all their questions answered, while hiding the actual plot-holes in the questions they don't think about, and if the aliens already have been established through willing suspension of disbelief to have directed graviton emitters that they use in their weaponry, graviton redirection probably doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to most readers.
/Equip flame-retardant Predator armor
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It's actually on the mission start intel screen, saying something like "We've landed at Sebillian base medium. If you can kill all the aliens we get lots of tech, if you blow up power cores and then pull out, you won't get tech, but the base will still be destroyed. Good luck commander."
V19 Stable 3 - Assault shield bugged
in Xenonauts Bug Reports / Troubleshooting
Posted
This is an old bug from at least v18. It's been reported, but badly, so might as well re-report it in the hopes it'll be understood and taken care of.
In my case, the shields did NOT stop being 0/120 after restarts and revalidates.