Big Z

I've been erasing the helmets off the various armors just to suit my own taste, when I'm done fiddling with it and think it looks good enough to share I think I might throw it up on the mod forum if it hasn't been done already.

The numbers of aliens in most crash sites was increased significantly on purpose during the v19 development cycle as part of a difficulty and funding balance change, IIRC; the lore hasn't been updated to reflect the change on this and several other things, the Xenopedia entries are fairly low priority as far as developer focus goes.

I don't know if you've tried this yet, but most of the ineffective grenade bugs when dealing with entering a spaceship can be avoided by walking into the very first tile of the ship itself, and then throwing the grenades. Assuming you can get that far without being ventilated, that seems to alleviate the issue.

Seconding this, I feel compelled to put my men through every encounter humanly possible if only because getting them to a point where they can shoot semi-straight or move at more than a brisk jog takes forever. Even the slightly better than raw recruits you start with are frankly painful to use for the first two dozen missions, considering they're barely statistically on par with scrub alien non-combatants despite allegedly being hand-picked combat vets, and the gap only grows ever more obvious as the game progresses unless you force them to improve at every opportunity you can muster. I've always thought that there being more a focus on your troops being outmatched due to technology rather than physical fitness makes more sense in context, considering all the in-game lore about their poor adaptation to terran atmosphere. Starting out, trained troops in their physical prime are being outmaneuvered and outperformed by the alien equivalent of office workers with asthma. Perhaps putting less emphasis on increasing troops physical stats (currently being able to nearly double virtually all of them to the 100-ish range) by giving them higher default stats, but also a slightly lower maximum ceiling on improving those scores would work. Say, a troop who starts with 50 strength would only ever be able to increase it to 70 at most, meanwhile someone who started at 80 could easily max it, representing the difference in their current soldier conditioning versus the absolute best their body could ever allow for.

Dang, loving the pace of updates. Do you know if the EMP damage glitch will be hammered out by the time the official v19 branch hits Steam?

Forgive my ignorance on the subject (I've only been playtesting since the release of 19c1), but is the current mid-game combat balanced around seizing alien plasma weaponry, or is doing so considered glitch abuse since the implied accuracy penalties from using alien weapons are non-existent?

I know it was only recently brought to the devs attention, but should we expect the implementation of EMP damage as a hotfix coming any day now, or is the problem with it so grave that we likely won't see it for at least another candidate release?

I'd wager that once the vast majority of engine kinks are worked out and the early-game balance has been hammered to a fine point, future beta revisions will start coming with prepackaged mid or late game saves just to get people testing those specific areas of content immediately.

Phew, this is making getting past the Andron-heavy levels a nightmare between it and their erroneous continued use of cover and evasive tactics.