GlyphGryph

This is sounding pretty good. Looking forward to trying it out.

Why no mention of shotguns? 2x Shields (one with pistol, one with nothing in other hand), 2x Shotguns and and LMG - that's me breaching approaching. Lead with shields, fire pistols to draw reaction fire, hide behind cover, so on so forth. If there are more than three aliens, they will flashbang a group of them (or, once we get it, electroshock instead). If there are three or less, we advance, and the shields hold enough actions to throw a grenade each. Then the shotgunners head in, move right next to the enemy and fill it with lead at short range. Each shotgunner should be able to take out an enemy - if they don't, the both of them will almost certainly kill at least one. And the best way to prevent an enemy from damaging your soldiers is for that enemy to be dead. Now, for the LMG - he acts last, because depending on how things have gone he might do different things. Were there three aliens, and we killed two? Then depending on distance he either advances to point blank range and opens fire, or takes cover and opens fire. If there are still two aliens alive, he smokes the shotgunners and takes cover, at which point the shield dudes throw flashes at the survivors unless an alien dies. But basically - shields to eat enemy reaction fire, followed by point blank shotguns and lmgs to kill enemies, with grenades (smoke and flash/electroshock) to minimize risk from survivors.

This is awesome. Thank you! I have one criticism, though - these are all supposed to be obtained upon successfully downing an alien ship, right? There seems to be shifts between the reports resulting from a successful alien action, and from successfully preventing an alien action. If I loaded this into my game (which I haven't done yet) what would be the exact situation that would cause these to be added to the Xenopedia? The difference is most glaring between the Concert Terror Attack (where it's clear the aliens slipped past and succeeded at something, and we're only just being informed!) and the Bombing (where it's clear we intercepted the vessel and learned about what it was GOING to do). I really love the picture and text, on their own, for the Terror Attack, but I'm not sure how it actually fits in.

Yeah, that's been my experience - I'm just hoping that ability isn't lost if it's changed so units don't reaction fire through friendly squares.

I don't suppose we could have kneeling units in front of other units not have a chance to get hit, then? So I can set up a wall of kneelers in front of a bunch of standing gunners in a defensive position? This might be the way it works now - I haven't noticed people getting hit in this situation, any more than low walls do - but I think it's important the reaction mechanic takes that into account.

Or it could simply be that a UFO enters atmosphere, drops the invading force at a distance, and they are moving in on foot specifically to avoid any possible air defenses or getting shot down by xenonauts? Heck, it would probably be pretty interesting to have some sort of not seen but told "alien orbital drop pods" that accomplish this. So the base sees them come down, sends out a call for help, but has time to respond while the invasion force gathers back together on the ground and prepares to storm the base.

Specifically, it's important they get reaction fire against people who are NOT the guy opening the door. Honestly, though, I think the solution here isn't going to end up in a mechanics change, but an AI change. If the Aliens didn't immediately forget you were behind the door the moment it closed, except through their magical detecto-ability, it would be a lot less useful as a strategy.

Their primary use before was as a diversion, since the damage output of the condors is higher but the foxtrot is faster. Now that it's harder to actually get the enemies to target the foxtrot, it's not even good for that. Or so I'd guess anyway - I found them utterly useless in v19 and them getting worse isn't really a noticeable difference.

As I mentioned in the other thread, for the big automatic multi-tile doors, it would be nice if open/close actions occurred at end of turn, like with grenades. For smaller doors, just requiring someone to stand in front of them and risk reaction fire from the open action should be enough.

Not sure I like the change to the UFO spawning. It was nice for there to be a reasont to have a base in the Oceania/Australia area, and now it's just a waste of time and money. I also liked larger nations being bigger targets. The prevalance of attacks on Australia was basically the only thing that made it worth defending! I'll play a bit more before commenting on the other changes, but I like them overall.

Why not just have doors (at least base doors, the big sliding types) open and close at the end of turn, same way grenades explode at end-of-turn? It would make sense since they are supposed to be automatic, and make them a lot less abusable, since moving into the doorway would actually give aliens reaction fire, and leaving your guys in front of it when it opens would mean the enemy just plain gets free shots on them. Would be a LOT more tactically interesting, I think. For regular doors, it just needs to trigger reaction fire, which I think it doesn't right now, and require your guy to stand directly in front of them.

If anything, I would like to see the boundary of the map visible in some way from the start of the game. It would certainly invalidate this "exploit".

1) Scientists and technicians do very different things. Overall, you'll probably want more scientists - but you'll soon want more techs as well. I've settled on around 30 techs and can keep them working pretty much around the clock, but about twice as many scientists. 2) No idea, actually. 3). There is no point in ever getting foxtros, they are terrible. 3 condors can take down pretty literally everything, assuming you give them your best missiles and guns and you've been keeping up, though eventually you'll want to upgrade to better interceptors just for the increased range. Marauders are awesome, but very expensive. I'm into the endgame now, and still have a base with only Condors that's managing to control Oceania's airspace without problems. Condors do require you to pilot well, though! 4). Honestly, opinions on the vehicles are mixed. They have huge LOS range though, so are a very nice addition to certain team compositions. 5). I've found the priorities are: Air superiority > weapons > armor > everything else. Air superiority insures a steady income stream, and isn't hard to get. Getting to plasma weapons ASAP is a huge advantage. Heavy Plasma is an amazing ground weapon. 6). I have two shieldmen with pistols and tons of grenades (stun and smoke to start, then add eletroshocks), 2 assault soldiers, 2 heavy weapons guys, and 2 snipers. Snipers carry the medpacks, and assaults have additional grenades. I don't bother with batons, don't really see the points. 7). Everywhere and all the time. Grenades are amazing. Remember that they do significantly more damage if ON the same square as the unit they are effecting. Flashbangs can suppress and knock out enemies from over walls, and a decent soldier can throw three in a turn. Smoke is just amazing, both defensively and offensively. Plasma grenades can take out even quite tough enemies with a single grenade, and two will take out basically anything. Electroshocks do lots of suppression and knockout, and is actually more effective than stun batons at capturing aliens. Gas grenades are useless, don't bother. Throw distance is based on strength, something that is good to know. 8). I'd say yes - the pistols are cheap, and you'll struggle to have enough cash to keep everyone outfitted in top of the line plasma later on. Esp. once you get the better dropships, and you're busy pissing away money on Marauders, it will be nice to have something to equip your second string and base defense squad with when the plasma team is away, and getting laser weapons definitely increases your odds of survival until you do get plasma. Definitely worth it. 9). Again, don't worry about overproducing the basic armor - you'll have plenty of dudes who will appreciate the hand me downs. I run my snipers (and rocket dudes, and for a while heavy gunners) unarmored for a good chunk of the early game. My shieldbearers and assault team get priority on armor up until predator - then my heavy team gets it, and when I get the cash my assault team becomes another group of heavies, heh. 10). One troop base is perfectly fine. Expand slowly so that you don't put to much of a drain on your resources in maintenance costs - that did me in a few times before I learned caution. Focus on getting one base up to par, with good coverage, first, and once you're in good shape expand to a second base. After that base is up and running, and you've got your planes kitted out with at least laser tech and alenium torps, then you can consider starting your third base. You don't really need more than three. 11). 3. Eventually you'll want to destroy ships, but if you stagger your base building, you can just pass off the hand-me-downs as the new ships come into service. Make sure to have an extra hangar in your main base/manufacturing base. 12). Research. Specifically, take down tougher alien ships like carriers and battleships and cruisers and whatnot - better ships come from looting better ships and researching what you find. 13). Good equipment, and lots of smoke grenades, are a pretty good place to start. Spread out and try to flank the enemy, and focus on Assaults/Heavies/Explosives if you're having trouble. 14). It's a give and take. If you're keeping up, you'll have periods where it feels like you are holding your own, but there will be options to push yourself a bit further. 15). I rotate if I know the mission won't be too hard. I'm currently running 25 soldiers, though the rookies die pretty regularly and it drops as low as 15 not infrequently. 8 of those are my "all explosives all the time base destruction squad" who have a remarkably high casualty rate, but let me drive deep, blow up the enemy base and get out with as little time spent as possible in real life. 16). Electroshock stack. 3 or 4 should do it. If you don't have those, flashbang stack. 6 or 7 should do it. 17). Nope.

Stats are only ever increased by 1. Every stat listed is one that went up by a point.

In the final room of the large alien base, explosions touching various walls of the base result in the walls moving out about a square and floating in the air.

Several times now, I've directed a ship to leave the battle due to low fuel, had the low fuel message pop up, accepted that yes, I'm trying to leave the battle, have the ship get to the edge of the grid... And then it turns around. It locks back onto the enemy ship, dotted line and eveything, and flies to it's death, despite the "escape" action still being highlighted! Quite frustrating.

When you have enough troop members to require scrolling, assigning a soldier to the dropship returns the the view to the top of the list. Incredibly annoying when you're trying to make a squad to send out from your rookies.

One of my heavy gunners consistently respond to enemy movement of any sort (even unseen enemy movement) with the reaction fire animation and sound. Except that no bullets come out, it doesn't use any AP, etc. I can provide a save if it would help. He's done it across several battles now.

I too would like the ability to speed up. Don't care about slowing things down.

Engine limitation, too late for them to do anything about it, sadly.

I honestly don't understand the argument about "switching to a pistol" anyway. Again, all the alien weapons take the same ammo - why would they ever want to switch to a pistol? Okay, they can't pick up non-alien weapons - but if you have run the aliens out of ammo after a long firefight, and they are finally in a state where you can waltz in and kill them, they won't have any ammo on their corpses either, so it's not like it's a particularly good strategy. And there are almost always a lot more aliens than Xenonauts, esp. in a long fight, meaning that even if the aliens were winning the war of attrition there would still be other alien corpses to loot. And since all alien ammo is exactly the same, looting those corpses would just mean reloading their primary weapon and scooping up clips. "Letting the aliens shoot at you until they have no bullets" doesn't sound like it would EVER be a good strategy. But it would make losing a long, drawn out battle a lot less cheap if you didn't know that the aliens only emerged victorious because they get to cheat instead of having to follow the same rules the player does. And the player DOES run out of ammo in longer and more drawn out battles. And drones being unable to reload is fine too, it's not like our vehicles can reload. And them having some essentially infinite reservoir of ammo isn't even that bad, because nothing to the contrary is ever communicated to the player. Again, I think it's important in a tactical game to at least feel like you're fighting someone who's operating under the same rules as you, which is very hard to do right now. There's an argument to be made that it's not worth doing this from an AI development perspective - all of these things (aside from the straight-up-need-to-reload-thing) could get pretty difficult. I also understand the argument that 'waiting out the enemies shouldn't be a valid strategy', but I think the solution to that would just be to give them plenty of ammo. I just think the objections raised so far about sprites being the thing holding this back just doesn't pass muster. I expect the AI to cheat pretty atrociously in tactical games, but the cheating in X-com is just a wee bit too blatant to sit well with me.

All the aliens use the same ammo, though. Being able to scavenge ammo from existing corpses still wouldn't require a sprite change. Things like or picking up new weapons don't make any sense when they all use the same ammo! I honestly am failing to see how this is a sprite problem - there isn't even a sprite for picking up ammo from a corpse, is there?

Okay, I have succesfully destroyed some bases! It does not involve destroying the things I thought it involved destroying (the blue lit up ball things). It doesn't involve destroying two of something either, oddly enough. There is a big square machine, very large, fills up most of the room. In the medium base it's just past the second hangar. This is the machine that needs to be destroyed. However, if it's destroyed but your squad dies it still doesn't destroy the base - you need at least one survivor to "escape" for it to count. So there goes my valiant falling back with my last survive to destroy the machine and make a last stand in that room, taking the whole base out with me, hah. The description is wrong, essentially, but the base destruction mechanics do seem to be working (occasionally)

There are a few either bugs or annoyances with air combat, I can't be sure: Control Locking If you click too close to outside the air combat arena (not as close as one would think you'd have to!), your ship will enter "flee" mode. Fine - but it will ignore all future commands and you can't turn it off... UNLESS you double click the enemy ship. Why? It isn't intuitive, and worse it doesn't make any sense even after you realize it. Either the inability to control your ship OR the ability to regain control has to be a bug, I'm sure, I just don't know which one it is (I hope its the first). Dodge Failure Dodging seems to make you immune to enemy missiles but NOT enemy torpedoes - the torps will still hit you while dodging, unless you actually get out of the way, while the missiles will pass through you harmlessly. This is confusing and doesn't make sense and the first several time it happens leave you confused as to why your ship was just insta-destroyed even though you pressed dodge before the torp hit it, just like you always do versus enemy projectiles. Escape Suicide Pressing the escape button almost always sends you to the opposite side of the screen, including when you use the fuel escape option.This basically destroys your ship pretty consistently - it would be nice if it pathed to the closest edge at least, or even let you choose the edge - as it is, how inconsistent this is makes me think it's not behaving as intended and is buggy. Low Fuel Problems If you get the "low fuel" message and decline (so as to manually choose your escape point, perhaps moving past an enemy to lob some missiles as you hightail it out) even if you get out of combat BEFORE you would have with the escape option, with fuel still left in the tank, your ship is still destroyed. Again, this doesn't make any sense and is jarring when it happens since it's hard to understand why it happens.

Yeah, there are some DAMN frustrating problems with fleeing from air combat right now. Always manually leave the combat area, preferably before running out of fuel (then you can't control the path and get screwed AND it chews up more fuel overall!) If you need to repath, and aren't leaving for fuel reasons, select the ship and double click the enemy - this will return control to you.