Josip Broz Tito

As always= good point. I'd say that if there isn't cover outside the UFO, your way is safer definitely.

Absolutely safest way to breach: 1. Clear all the aliens from the map except the UFO. 2. Position your rifles, machine guns, and snipers about 3/4ths to 1 screen from the door. Behind cover preferably. 3. Click each troops weapon to create an aiming reticule. Hover it over the door until it turns green. You will see a %. Since this takes a few turns, use the highest aim cost. Click to fire at the door. 4. You likely will not see dmg done to the door, but fear not! It is indeed taking damage. Keep shooting at the door. 3 turns with ballistics is normal. 5. The door should be destroyed without damaging any alien corpses or splattering living aliens inside (more $ for you!). 6. Keep your distance and kill all visible aliens at range. Move 1 rifleman up closer to the UFO to spot, but keep enough TU's on him to back out of firing range. 7. If there are any aliens you cannot reach, first try waiting a few turns and spotting again. If they won't show themselves you can throw a gas grenade into the UFO with the cloud enveloping where you think an alien is (you don't actually need to see it! This can save you from reaction fire. That should cause them to move. Re-spot and kill it. If even that won't dislodge an alien= screw it, use C4. Always keep 1-2 blocks on each rifleman. *When sending riflemen up close to the door, always approach it from the sides, never head on. This prevents aliens from firing at you on their turn easily, and lets your other troops get reaction shots if an alien does come out.

I thought landingships were designated as supply ships, base-constructors, and sometimes terror ships in the xenopedia. The insides look right anyway : )

People don't give the devs enough credit for the more subtle balancing they've done between the weapons: the MG and rifle burst cost is just one example of this.

Burst fire is fine where it is as far as TU's. If you're trying to hit aliens from further than 4 tiles= aimed fire is what you should be using with rifles. Burst fire's not meant to be a reliable hit except from 1-4 tiles away. What it is meant to do is allow your riflemen to act as jury-rigged machinegunners in order to suppress an alien. The other side of the coin is that it allows a rifleman to act as a jury-rigged shotgunner and deal decent up-close dmg. Making it cheaper breaks riflemen away from their intended 'jack of all trades' role. They don't excel at any aspect of combat in xenonauts, but they're usable in most situations. As far as a change like burst fire TU reduction for machinegunners= it'd make them OP. Aggressive usage of machinegunners will make them your highest statted squad member as it stands now. When they break that 80 TU mark, you'll know why they shouldn't get reduced burst TU's. 80 TU+ machinegunner with a scatter laser or plasmacaster will easily get the 5+ aliens killed in combat medal each mission. The guns are inherently accurate enough and throw enough projectiles at an alien to ensure 1-2 hits+ each time for high dmg. Lowered burst TU's would lower that threshhold of firing twice per turn down to within 1-2 missions experience of the start. The game's already mind-numbingly easy after the third mission or so (when you get jackal) until the first terror mission shows up. Adding in OP machineguns would make it even easier and skew squad composition.

I like the idea of 15 or even 20 alenium corsairs. Whenever I had the option to make them initially I was always just starting to accumulate a stockpile.

Use of factual military capacity info based on that time in history isn't geopolitical in the slightest. If that were the case, someone could be reasonably offended about Roman provincial military capacity. If the data's there and up to date= it's data. People can deal with it. The Soviet Union would obviously be ok w/ more force used in it's least populous area, rather than the Japanese in Tokyo, a densely populated area. You could say the same with the Soviets if a UFO crashed in Moscow. They'd obviously avoid large amounts of damage to the city and populace if the Xenonauts could be used instead.

While I do like how the game is and can accept it: changes like the above would make it harder. I like difficult games and would prefer Xenonauts to be on the scale of Dark Souls where you get punished for not thinking. Accuracy with reduced dmg vs the aliens would be great.

Only one I could think of is allowing the chinook to land at cities to refuel...but that's basically like having unlimited range except with more annoyance. Other option is letting you place 2 bases at the start of the game: a main and a small interception base. They would have to be within chinook range of each other. The chinook could stop at the 2ndary or any other base you set up as a stepping stone to the destination. Obviously, the terror mission would need to stay up while targeted. I really don't know what the best decision is here or even what my opinion of this is.

Elydo, that's a great idea.

On topic: how do you guys go about finding alien bases? I would say I'm not doing as well at it as others in this thread. What I try to do is send out interceptors as scouts in the flight paths of past UFO's, or to spots where UFO's landed. I occasionally find a base.

Now THAT's an idea, Big Z!

Only nice thing about andron bases are that they use cover poorly. Plus, you can tend to camp in good cover areas while most of them walk at you...although they sometimes show signs of sneakyness.

If Dranak says something can be won with a certain combo of planes= believe him. It's also very possible to kill off the 2 fighters in the first sortie with condors/corsairs then come back with foxtrots for the corvette if you want an easier option. And as far as realism goes- it's not realistic for 1970's aircraft to be fighting UFO's well at all. Having to make choices about how many aircraft to keep on hand and whether or not you want to shoot down every UFO are integral parts of xenonauts now. The game's designed to force you to make choices constantly. You can't have it all, which seems to be a running theme for some posts.

Yeah, now if the devs had the time to code in some research or artifacts tied specifically to bases= we'd now have a great decision: do I use heavy weapons to win the day, or do I risk my troops to capture the contents of the base intact? It'd be better to have each type of base and each species have different artifacts available to research inside. This would prevent the 'capture one base= seen them all' problem and keep you thinking for the first few bases. Floor tile bug...hope it gets fixed soon. It'd be cool to see how well vehicles do. Scimitar and hyperion should get the extra hardpoints to make them more viable than 2x veterans: especially for situations like bases. Having them ram cover= nice niche for them. Edit: Lemm, I have had a few medium bases where I could avoid the central room (except for holding it's doors to prevent aliens from coming in) and work my way to a side shortcut to the reactor. Is this what you mean by vents? It might be a nomenclature issue since I see them as hallways...cuz they are : )

Good point : )

It could be called 'Local Forces Attack' since Baj is correct. Precision bombs were available, but primitive and not widely utilized in 1980. Artillery was precise though, same with tanks. edit: In this case, it's still the local government being able to claim it defeated a UFO while paying off the Xenonauts for keeping their mouths shut. Cept with artillery and or tanks being used= far less chance of collaterals. As for locals= pay them off/lie to them.

Yeah, it's more economical to use gunfire on doors, or c4. Rockets don't seem to do their full dmg on doors IMO. Machine-gunners seem to level up faster than riflemen for me at least. Bet that guy of yours is accurate as heck. Paint slurs and vulgarities on those warheads and let the aliens see them up-close : ) GL! I haven't been able to dig into this build as much as I wanted w/ the new semester starting up. With how the plasma shotguns for aliens are though= no casualties is a no go for me too, even with taking much more time than others and expending an armory's worth of ammo.

I don't see anything wrong with foxtrots. You can already do most of the game with them on the cheap. I feel that multiple sorties if fighters are involved is fine. Avalanches suck, but once you get alenium, then plasma torpedos: you're set until battleships. 2 foxtrots w/ plasma torpedos>landingships. 3 foxtrots w/ alenium>corvette. You are supposed to be sending multiple primitive planes vs a capital ship, otherwise the game breaks down even further in logic. The only issue I see is making it so scouts are a bit more prevalent since they are absolutely key to surviving. Same with corvettes, I'd like to see a few more. Regardless of how it's designed, explosives research or anything that affects the geoscape will always be close to required for when the turning points show up.

Stellar knows what's up. You can do the same thing I described above with ballistic machineguns if you wanted (good luck). But for the cost, a scatter laser does make a huge difference. And I do doubt that it's cheaper to suffer 50% casualties each time, especially if you're throwing armor on them. You have to look at bases and terror sites a lot differently than grounded UFO's. You aren't there to salvage, you're there to kill aliens asap without endangering your men. Rockets, machineguns, smokes, and C4 are your go-to tools. This is one case where I wouldn't recommend a vehicle, since you need the extra rockets that 2 men can carry. Take your time and bring extra ammo for all your troops. I also recommend shooting through cover rather than trying to flank in one room. C4, like Stellar mentioned, is great for saying hi when breaching a door. I also recommend shooting through smoke with your machine gunners and rocketeers if you have an idea of where the aliens are taking cover in a room, but don't want reaction fire. You can try to save money in the short term, but getting lasers is very useful for when you eventually split your squads into 2 separate ones later in the game. You can give the rookies the lasers. It also makes it far easier to do alien bases and will allow you to actually get a squad of veterans that you can split off to lead a second squad. With the additional money people have in the beginning of the game, I really wonder why they're skipping a tier of weapons that they could finish the game with. Lasers are far better than ballistics. At least give your snipers and machine gunners the upgrade.

Idk, to me it doesn't sound like you tried vehicles w/ explosives or diff squad compositions. Been noticing this with a lot of gamers these days: they shy away from challenges. Instead of trying different approaches or self-analyzing= they cheat.

It's not that bad (aside from alien plasma shotgun). When you get plasmacasters (plasma machinegun) you can really start to go to town on alien bases. Shoot the doors open and slowly kill everything that pops out, then slowly work closer to the room and work the angles. Load down your machine gunners w/ only ammo. Remember, you can shoot cover down to get at aliens. The plasmacasters work far better than rocket launchers in bases, since you can carry way more ammo. BTW, there's no way to 'sneak' in. Once you get to the reactor= you've likely had to kill half the base. Might as well get the whole thing. Remember, take your time and make your squad machine-gun focused for bases.

Well, we can justify the increased funding lore-wise with the host nation being able to claim to its people that it defeated a UFO. Yet they'll still need to pay off the xenonauts since they lack the ability to actually deal with aliens. Yay, propaganda. I always kinda assumed that the extra points for captured aliens were for either holding public 'trials' against captured ones, or for the host nation to vivisect and do its own research. I kinda miss being able to sell bodies like you could in TFTD. Xarquid Sushi- could be a hipster band name. It'll be interesting to see how this change affects gameplay.

Aliens are definitely a lot more unpredictable in some aspects now. That's great progress. Game still needs a bit more in the AI department, but it's pretty good right now.

They seem semi-bugged when used in UFO's atm. I'm not sure myself since my playstyle involves not going near doors, but shooting them open.