GlyphGryph

If you leave and revisit a base (I enjoy the concept of making "tech runs", killing some guys, looting their stuff, and getting out with some quick cash and training) it will be a completely different type and as the game progresses will also change from small to medium.

Did you check the vents? Mind you, that would be a bug in its own right, but worth checking out. (Destroy the vent wall tiles to get access, assuming a medium base there should be three of them)

My main problem with the grenades is that they should really fill the entire area with gas. It's frustrating that they leave big gaps, so even my strategy of throwing in a dozen of them can leave the aliens perfectly safe and non-inhaling of the gas just by standing in the right place. It's kind of silly.

Huh. I actually like stun grenades, and find them pretty effective. I use them to "soften up" capture targets - pop smoke in front of the door, open the door, toss in a bunch of stun grenades, close door, wait. Repeat once more a couple turns later. After a time or three, smoke the door again, and throw in several flashbangs to suppress (and likely finish off a couple of the gassed aliens). Move someone in, toss an electroshock grenade on each of the surviving aliens (if I have them, else more flashbangs) and then retreat until it's all toasty. It's a good combination of "safe" and "not destroying of every valuable in the room you want to loot". I think they key is that you just have to have patience.

Actually, returning to the base and exploring further revealed a third glowing orb. I was under the impression the Xenopedia entry said you only needed to destroy two, but maybe all three need to go? (Since the third requires eliminating practically the entire base anyway, doesn't seem very useful anymore) Edit: Checked Xenopedia entry and it confirms there should only be two, so either there are too many or I have no idea what the power cores are supposed to be.

Landing sites sometimes last beyond when they are "supposed" to - either after visiting them they remain on the map, or after when they should be timing out. Clicking on one of these landing sites crashes the game, and is easy when things start to get crowded. Reloading from save wipes all these deprecated sites from the map, so unfortunately a save for them cannot be included.

It appears that simply visiting a lander UFO and then aborting removes them from the map. Is this intentional? Or is it a bug?

Infiltrated an enemy base, destroyed the two glowing orbs, and retreated (with a truckload of loot) with my worn down troops. The base remains. Will try again in a little while - is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

Also interested in knowing if there any modifications to these guidelines since posted. (I would really like to make a suburban non-middle-east-but-rather-generic crash site using "city" tiles, and at the very least know if multiple UFO landing areas should be defined now) Also don't we have industrial crash site tiles of some sort now? The one with the parking gate areas. Are there other sets available as well? I only just saw the Middle East one for the first time today in-game, and it's probably my favorite of the bunch.

Certainly a few different ways to do it. From what I understand, the intent was to have a relatively uncommon mission type, and while I often dislike escort missions, reverse escort missions are (in my experience anyway) pretty enjoyable with quite a few opportunities for variety and keeping it fresh. For a mission type that is supposed to be relatively uncommon and break up up the standard UFO assault strategy, I think they would work well. Better than mini-terror-missions-without-civilians anyway. I think any of the currently existing maps would work well enough for it, if the enemies had to get from one corner to the opposite corner, and players started in one of the other two corners. Some would probably work better than others, and obviously custom maps would probably work best of all (especially smaller ones, so the player doesn't have time to just get to and camp the extraction point well before the enemies arrive). There's also considerations like how you'll probably want the runners to be unable to move at full speed (weighted down with supplies, maybe?) to give the player the ability to catch up if engaged early and someone slips past, that would be more or less important based on map design. The only maps I don't think would work well would be the farm maps - you'd have to be careful that the player can't just park a hunter car or a few units and completely block off access to the rest of the map, or send all your guys to a little 3x3 box the enemy HAS to go through. And it seems like the design of the farm maps would probably make that pretty likely.

Well, my suggestion is a bit in-depth, yes, but the nice thing is that it is pretty trivial to "scale down" as it were. The key is just to have two different NPC behaviours and an "extraction point" area of the map where the escape-behaviour NPCs try to get to. If you want to do a time-limited mission, this is a non-frustrating way to do it, where planning and strategy can play a role, and arguably it wouldn't be terribly difficult. (For certain definitions of terribly difficult) The actual difficulty obviously depends on the engine and infrastructure which... certain signs seem to indicate may not be particularly versatile, so it might not even be possible (esp. to have the extraction point). However, there would be ways to fake this or work around it (a teleporter to an otherwise inaccessible area with many powerful enemies who won't come out and are just waiting with reaction fire, and the match ends when all runner enemy types are dead or within the sealed off room the teleporter goes too. But even that may not be possible - I don't know the code. If it IS possible, though, there are additional benefits - it could also then be reflavoured in many ways, for example as an "interrupt the convoy" mission or something with the larger UFO drones being the ones with the "escape the map" AI, or a "king of the hill" sort of mode you need to prevent enemies from entering an area where someone is working on some special project or something. It's a bit more work, but I think the original proposed abduction mission just isn't worth implementing. (Being able to defend against alien assaults on various human facilities would be fun too, though, but it would be even better with some new AI behaviours, like trying to destroy the human's computing center or something, to actually be much different from the things we've got now.) Basically, I just want a mission that isn't a bug hunt. What's nice is that regular UFO missions aren't! They can be /played/ as a bug hunt OR as a "secure the objective". These fluff missions seem strictly inferior, since they would likely play out exactly the same except requiring the player to play them as a bug hunt.

What might be an interesting alternative here is an anti-escort mission. You've got a group of aliens trying to traverse the map with a number of (presumably important) captives. You need to kill the aliens without killing the captives to save the day. The aliens come in two "behaviour types" - escorts and soldiers. The escorts might be carrying the captives (perhaps they need to be stunned rather than killed) or simply traveling with them, with the captives on some sort of floating stretcher that stops moving if the controlling escort is killed. The goal of the escorts is simply to get to their "extraction point". Meanwhile, the soldiers travel with them initially but adopt standard battle behaviour upon encountering your troops (attempting to tie them up and buy time for the escorts to escape with the captives). This would make for an interesting, high-stakes, time-pressured mission with interesting choices - Do I stay and fight the guards, hoping to clean up fast enough to catch up? Do I split my forces? Do I expose my troops to enemy fire by rushing the escorts on initial contact, and hope I suffer minimal losses in the unopposed fire by the guards and can fight them off after the escorts are killed? Do I use heavy weapons and rapid fire to maximize damage output at the risk of killing the captives myself? Do I advance cautiously or rush forward trying to insure I have more time to respond? I think it's the sort of mission that could really, really break up the the standard approach that exists as-is right now, and make things exciting and new - a change of pace that would really make the mission special. Since the captives are presumably important, cash for each captive saved is obvious but a variety of rewards obviously present themselves. If you were told who the captives were going in, and they were noticeably different, you'd even get the fun of deciding which captive it is most important to prioritize saving. Unfortunately, this is more work than the initial proposal - but I'd prefer to not have the initial proposal at all as it stands, since it just plain doesn't seem fun. A time-based bug hunt with minimal important decisions, the need to put my troops at risk for no immediate goal because the alien hiding in the barn is going to magically disappear next turn and it took me a bunch of wasted time to figure out he was in there behind the hay stacks? It just doesn't sound fun.

I want to throw in my two cents as well: This game is amazing. Just amazing. If you're goal was to completely replace classic X-Com with a superior product, you've succeeded wildly. Air combat is engaging and enjoyable (I didn't think it was possible), planning and designing loadouts and team composition is fun, battles are tense and (if you've got a mind like mine anyway) quite cinematic, with lots of interesting things happening - having civilians able to fight back is beautiful and really makes the map feel alive. Overall, it's an absolutely amazing job. Thank you so much for making this.

I enjoy watching my characters reaction fire and mow down aliens, but I never get to see it - the game will frequently be centered on where the action is, but it's almost always behind a "Hidden Movement" placard - despite the actual movement of the aliens being visible as they walk behind the placard, and my guys firing on them. A minor thing, but watching reaction fire take down an alien is pretty satisfying and I hate missing out on it all the time. Can probably recreate without too many problems thanks to the convenient "load game forces enemies out of UFO bug". Also, does anyone know how to actually use the most recent version/experimental version? I'm probably reporting a lot of things that have already been fixed.

A few here, might be related might not, I'll look into it more tonight: On the inventory screen, right clicking (which, on the Base View inventory screen "drops" stuff) switches characters instead of dropping equipment as expected. When scrolling the screen to shoot at the enemy, the game will often switch to a different character, requiring the original character be reselected. This will also often happen in the middle of movement. Had more than one character killed by this as I tried to move him somewhere and moved someone else instead.

Yeah, I've had the dislocation after alt-tabbing too, but this doesn't seem related. Did not know I could click the bases to get to them - that will certainly make things a bit less frustrating than saving and reloading (although that already wasn't that bad). I'd imagine the keybindings work as well, but I'll check for sure tonight - it seems to be solely related to actually manually clicking the button icons.

Sorry - I screwed up. I was making sure stat tracking was /unchecked/ - but it actually needs to be checked to disable it. My mind just seems to fail to come to terms with the idea of enabling the disabling of something, heh. So yeah, it was stat tracking - I uncheck the box to turn it on, and it hangs forever, I check the box to turn it off and everything works fine. Sorry for misleading. Wish I actually had internet at home so I could have responded to this sooner.

Not entirely sure what causes this, but I'll frequently lose the ability to select any of the buttons on the geoscape to allow me to navigate to the various base screens. I can still click UFOs, send out intercepts, etc. and so on, and if something prompts me to go to base (research, workshop, etc.) going there fixes it. Saving and reloading also fixes it, but it took me a bit to figure that out, heh. It happens pretty regularly so I'll try and keep track of exactly what I was doing leading up to it next time.

Yeah, personally the damage output of the condors seem significantly greater than the equivalent foxtrots, and if you have more ships than the enemy it's pretty trivial to lead them, have other guys come up behind, and then take them out from behind. Even if there are several of the enemies, the Condors can either focus fire to quickly even the odds or, if the enemy tries to focus fire, create the same sort of situation where one ship can get behind them and operate in relative safety. Most importantly, stagger missiles. If you're focusing fire, have one ship fire a missile to trigger the dodge, and then halfway through it have the other ships fire, and boom - you suddenly outnumber them, and then you win. Personally, the damage output on the Foxtrots just doesn't seem worth it for the cost - they do less damage overall than the Condors, they cost more, their missiles are useless against small dodgy ships (while the Condor missiles are merely less effective) and they can't dodge. The only point they have in their favour is speed, which isn't much of an advantage since there doesn't seem to be a way to get the enemy to prioritize them over the Condors. And that advantage quickly loses out to the Corsairs. I know they are supposed to be better at taking out the big ships, but I just don't understand how. The 360 degree arc on Carriers is probably the biggest problem with the smaller ships, but it's range is slightly less than cannon range, so it's still possible to take them out with the same strategy if you use a bit more micromanagement and do attack runs where you launch some bullets and then pull off.

I'm assuming this is a bug and not intended behaviour, but units can be melee attacked and zombified through solid walls - an example being the vent walls in the base assault missions. Nothing like having a dude get insta-gibbed for stepping too close to a wall, I guess...

I've noticed quite a few missing sprites - a few where the sprite is wrong (and I assume the correct one just isn't there yet, and the other sprite is being used as a placeholder) but at least one has resulted in soldiers just disappearing, which makes things pretty confusing. This occurs when soldier is carrying an alien plasma pistol he's retrieved from the field, and is facing down and left. It seems to occur when holding just the pisol, and when holding the pistol and shield, but only when looking in this direction.

Upon killing the final alien, my game locks up and actually locks up most of the computer too. Mouse can still be moved around, but even if I switch to the desktop or another app the game cursor is still my mouse pointer and clicking other things (like the 'end task' button in Task Manager) is impossible... except for the main bar at the bottom of Windows 8. I have stat tracking disabled (been without internet for a while, so if it is trying to make a connection anyways it wouldn't have much luck...) and consistently have the game lock up on killing the final alien. Let it sit for half an hour, no progress. Pretty much every time. However! If you save and load at /any/ point during the mission, it prevents it from happening. So simply loading from the autosave created at the beginning of the mission prevents the problem from ever occurring - whatever is causing it is set when the mission is created and not carried over as part of a load. Of course, saving and loading also resets the enemy AI to be hyper aggressive and makes them all rush out of the UFO at you, but that's a different issue. Since this happens for me every time pretty much consistently, I'm willing to do any further testing requested if it would help.

I'm getting this as well, pretty frequently. Same specs as above, same situation.

I disagree - while details are quibble-worthy, it's important to get the overall "feel" of such things right. With my proposal, it "feels" like the player is enabling the locals, that they still need us, even if it only ends up being a byproduct of our research rather an application of direct efforts. "Gassing" the area and waiting for the aliens to oxygen suffocate feels like we're doing something good - we're not just letting other nations throw people into the grinder, we're not abandoning civilians, we're not abdicating responsibility. A lot of the complaints in this thread have been that letting the locals take the UFO doesn't fit thematically, because it downplays the player's importance - I think this addresses the concern. It also allows for easier suspension of disbelief by explaining why you're able to get more monetary value out of such an approach (something the traditional airstrike or mass of local forces doesn't, really) which isn't super important but every little bit helps. It also means players can't avoid the smaller UFO's until they've gotten several researches in (good for gameplay balance) and provides an easy justification for why it won't work just as well against larger UFOs. The "how" is important - here, for both mechanical and thematic reasons.

A Superior Alternative (thematically) to Airstrikes Comment about the airstrike - lorewise it's terrible, and we have a better alternative just a bit of the ways into the game that is justified as being primarily useful against smaller targets. Allow the player to choose to gas the site instead (blanket stun gas). Gassing the site and gifting it to the locals would mean they could take the UFO with minimal resistance by simply executing the stunned aliens, it would keep civilians alive (making local forces happy) and fit the lore of the game. It could be unlocked as an option after research. Obviously, this wouldn't work against ships with gas-immune crew members or large enough ships that everyone could hide inside indefinitely while the gas clears. I think it's a better alternative than a simple "bombing" run, and it would even be nice if we could equip Foxtrots with this gas bombs and have to deliver them ourselves - then we can justify the increased benefits of "skipping" the missions because we are actually earning the rewards through intelligent application of our technology, and it is still /us/ earning the money. It fits the theme of the game far better, and as long as it's an investment it's okay if the monetary reward is better.