GlyphGryph

There's also an "in-between" ground - have an "effective" view range and then a "reduced effectiveness" view range - basically, the same thing you have for weapon range. Your "reduced effectiveness" view range has a chance of NOT spotting enemies in cover or at the very limit at all. But if you have a scout unit call out the enemy position and retreat, the sniper, even if he couldn't see them before, doesn't "forget" where they are - the penalty is only in the initial chance to spot, but once they are spotted they end up spotted for everyone. So your sniper might be hunkered down gazing across the field with no support unable to see anything... but if he's patient, and the enemy runs out into the open, he spots it and gets his reaction fire. Boom! This would mean units like Sebellians could still have an a "reduced vision range" - it's not that they'd never be able to see you at a distance, it's just very unlikely! But once you've been spotted by a unit, the others can tell where you are. Basically, a compromise between "full LoS" and "current view box" that follows the mechanics that already exist for weapon ranges combined with the current mechanics system.

Well, for air combat at least, the auto-resolve is almost always a bad idea since you can do so much better running it manually - and I'd be okay with something similar for crash sites. Simply the benefit of giving my soldiers more time to rest and get geared up or respond after a major setback would be nice, and even if the actual benefits of the ground recovery were less than handling it manually I'm willing to take the hit sometimes just because I really don't want to run another mission of that sort.

Easy - have occassional "scout swams" where many base-finding UFOs are sent at once. If the player decides to have 8 hangars and intercept every scout UFO one-on-one, great! They've made the decision to focus on (fairly expensive) air superiority for base defense purposes. Or they can ignore the UFOs, knowing they won't do any harm that can't be fought off by the team at the base, and focus on the lander or two that popped up and maximizing their relationship score, or relying instead on either taking out the assault ship or their bases anti-ship defenses working well. I think it's /good/ to have multiple options for taking on base defense, and with some tweaks air superiority could be possible - just expensive. The problem is when you can achieve air superiority defense versus base invasions without any extra effort at all.

No idea what caused it. This time I was trying to throw a plasma grenade at an alien in the hangar of the alien base next to an alien ship, (after forgetting to save through the whole thing) when BAM Crash to Desktop. Happens roughly every other battle, so not sure how important the details are. Incredibly frustrating. Sadly, no idea what causes it - I do throw a lot of grenades, so it might be that, but I think it's happened pretty regularly shooting dudes as well.

When starting a new game, I actually load up about half my squad with no weapons - just flashbangs and smoke. Taking out noncombatants with the flashbangs is actually easier and safer by knocking them out than trying to engage in a firefight with them, and you can throw two per soldier per turn and then hop into cover - they can't pursue you to get a shot, they can't take accurate shots if they have an opening, and they can't reaction fire on their next turn. In addition, they can be thrown over walls and obstacles, meaning you don't ever need to be in danger to take out any enemy units AND there's no risk of damaging any valuable alien equipment that may be lying around. It's my optimal opening strategy now for the first several missions, and an important part of my strategy until I get electroshock grenades (which are better all around, though they do suffer from not causing any same-turn suppression).

This is a wonderful mod, by the way. Thanks to both of you!

Hmm. I've had the exact same issue pretty regularly, but reloading the game has always fixed it for me.

Flashbangs (and then electroshocks, pretty much an upgrade) are still absolutely amazing, because practically guaranteed suppression (and a decent chance of elimination) is great. A full team firing at an enemy behind heavy cover might not be able to kill it - but a full team each throwing an electroshock grenade is guaranteed to take it out, without damaging or destroying anything. Combined with smoke grenades, it's a brutally effective strategy - I have effectively taken down landing ships without firing a shot, and just filling soldiers with grenades of various types. The only problem is... I'm pretty sure robotic enemies are completely immune to the effects of electroshock grenades. At least they seem to be when I played - 10 stacked electroshocks had no effect, while 3 or 4 is enough to take out pretty much every other enemy in the game.

The ability to split up and reform squadrons in-flight would really be required to make the concept of escorts effective - as is, there is NO way to escort a Chinook to most Terror Sites until rather late in the tech tree, and the punishment for responding is quite severe - and it's mostly a side effect of the interface, since it should be possible to have the condors escort the chinook out as far as they can, and then have the chinook go on alone for at least partial protection, and it would be even better if they could then meet up with interceptors from the base near the terror site who would escort it in the rest of the way. Of course, getting them back would take some effort, since they wouldn't be able to stop in the local base to wait for the escorts to refuel... Man the whole thing is just sort of frustrating, logistically. At this point I'm honestly going to support the "UFOs don't attack chinooks" thing too, since there's no good way to deal with it and completely random screws you can't do anything about aren't really a great ida.

Yeah, this isn't the place for it, and it doesn't matter - it's broken, as is, undeniable, and is thus a bug. If you think you shouldn't be able to shoot through smoke at all ever take the discussion to suggestions.

Then smoke goes from a great way to control the battlefield to utterly useless, making battle significantly more boring as one of the few meaningful tactical options we have falls by the wayside. Especially since walls don't stop firing or grenade throwing. Do you really think it's intended that smoke be more of an absolute barrier than walls? That doesn't make much sense.

Androns persistently and effectively seek out cover, prioritizing safety even over engaging with my troops, often retreating from battle to find and kneel behind walls or objects that provide them with safety. This is in stark contrast to the behaviour one would expect from their Xenopedia entry, and I presume it's a bug. It can be easily reproduced by entering any Andron-based base assault or landing ship mission. The easiest demonstration is when entering the landing ship - the androns inside will almost always make sure they are constantly, if possible, behind one of the crates or the engines. You can usually catch three or four of them hiding behind stuff, and refusing to engage your soldiers if the cover is destroyed, instead retreating into the engine rooms to hide some more.

You also can't throw grenades through smoke while kneeling in the short bit of testing I did earlier - again, standing resolves the issue.

The whole problem is that you can't. You literally can not fire at tiles sometimes if you are kneeling and there is smoke in the way, it is completely impossible. The smoke isn't blocking targeting, it is blocking firing at all. Even walls don't do that!

In that case, it only blocks the shot when the smoke is up - before the smoke is thrown, I'm able to make the shot without problems (the smoke is thrown specifically to negate enemy reaction fire). So I'd still call it a bug - I can still see the enemy (with other units), my units are all in the same places, the only difference is the presence of the smoke, and the smoke really shouldn't be making a difference there.

My kneeling LMG and snipers have a frequent issue where there is an unobstructed path to the enemy, barring smoke, and I'm not allowed to select the enemy as a target (it is just a red 'x'). If I have the shooter stand instead of kneeling, this effect goes away and I can fire as desired.

Oh man, I have this happen constantly and KEEP forgetting to report it. It makes it completely impossible to (for example) bring my cars into the alien base, and also makes entry a lot more difficult. I've noticed it seems to happen in the initial corridor of medium bases whenever a certain tile gets hit or sustains damage (rocket blasts down the hallway seem to be an easy way to reproduce it anyway) This means it happens a lot for me, since I generally blow open the second door before moving in.

Good to see it's working as intended! I have a habit of finding the ways to "break" things I'm playing, so even though stuff like the base attack buff isn't a bug, and thus probably shouldn't be reported in bug reports, I wanted /some/ way to report it was "broken". So I'm glad I succeeded, and I hope to discover yet more exploits in the future that can be accounted for!

I cannot get this to work. Adding the file just means crash to desktop every time I enter a battle. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Edit: Nevermind, redownloading worked.

On the other hand, I really would like a delayed "ready" action for the precision rifle so that units with less TU. It really could just be the raising the gun animation, and if they move the state is lost. Only effect would be to reduce, say, 30 from the next firing cost.

I was under the impression the "wrong TU displayed" for the medpacks was a known and longstanding bug - pretty sure I saw it reported back in 18, and nothing has changed since then. I've noticed the Andron immunity myself - quite annoying. The Wraits shouldn't be able to shoot after teleporting (I believe, anyway), so that would be a bug. Most of the others have definitely been reported before, pretty recently.

You can throw grenades for significantly less TU by dropping your weapon, throwing the grenade, and picking it back up. Especially useful if throwing more than one grenade.

When I decide things have gone pear-shaped and it's a good idea to abort a mission, I generally try to grab all the alien tech I can on the way out. The only thing is, I'm not sure if this actually /ever/ works, since I've noticed it definitely didn't on the recent base assault I ran (before having some bad luck with Reapers) I thought this had worked on UFO mission failures before, but maybe it's just not working at all - I think if you go to another mission right away though, you do get to keep the equipment, and if you beat it it counts towards the total.

I have found this to be pretty untrue. Smoke certainly makes them LESS likely to shoot at you (and they can't reaction fire at all) but I'm pretty sure I've had them open up on me in the smoke more than once.

Have you found any fairly extreme exploits, anything that will give you a big advantage in-game but makes you feel dirty for doing it? I've figure out one, at least - you can safely train troop health and strength (and TUs if patient) by simply attacking an enemy base and aborting, then clicking the dropship to attack again before it leaves, over and over again. Assuming everyone is weighted up, they'll gain +1 strength each time. If you move them around and empty out their TUs for a couple turns first, they'll gain +1 TU as well, and as those increase they will gain health on top of it.