Ripley

An alien stun weapon akin to the stun launcher from the OG would be interesting, though the OG had medkits with a "stimulant" option to help your soldiers recover from a stun so that you werent helpless agaisnt it. The thing with multiple stun weapons is that the gam doesnt really need them. Your only interest in stuning an alien is to capture it for research and that hapens only once per alien species sans a single oficer and leader. Anything else and its just to get more points at the end of a mission or because stuning can be a more reliable option than shooting in some cases. The OG had a reason for having a wide variety of stun weapons, namely you got quite a bit of research points from interrogating diferent types of aliens. But in Xenonauts we only have combat ranks. We have no alien navigators that always hang around inside specific parts of the UFO, we have no alien engineers that are always in the core/reactor room, etc. Would be nice if certain alien clases allowed you to interrogate them for research bonuses in their respective areas similar to how the OG and Firaxi´s version worked. Then we would have a reason for stuning aliens other than just geting more points.

Smoke and flashbangs is a great strategy for breaching UFOs....when the aliens are suceptible to it. When you got androns and dont have electroshock grenades I smoke and move into mele range with shotguns and rifles on burst, which can lead to several casualties. Shoving c4s, rockets and grenades into the ufo can be god as well, but you miss out on tech and money. The safest way I found memorizing were the aliens are, smoking and then burst firing blindly through the smoke. This works very well when breaching a landing ship´s comand room. Especially with androns.

They probaly rest as best as they can in the Chinook/Charlie in-between missions. Its not exactly uncommon for military squads to have several missions in a row, especially in a war. I personally dont find it that much of a problem and the fact that they retain the equipment they had at the end of the last mission at the start of the new one (alien weapons, medkits in their hands instead of their rifles) along with any seriously wounded person missing from the mission, is good enough for me as a showing of the fatigue of battle-after-battle. If you want to get realy realistic you could have them get a penalty for doing subsequent missions in a row that reduces their max TUs, or add a "fatigue/energy" bar/timer that must be filled in base (like fuel) before they are ready for a nother mission and it takes longer to recharge if they do more than one mission in a flight, with increasing penalties. This would be more realistic. But it would not be fun (and not in a "grenade right outside the dropship in the first turn" kind of "not-fun" but a "this is just tedious and frustrating" kind of not-fun). PS:Im quite grateful Xenonauts doesnt have the boring energy bar of the originals. Shit was a pain when trying to relocate people to the UFO entrance after clearing out the map.

Since the thread is about general Geoscape balance as oposed to only planes I was wondering about a few things that have been nagging at me: If you want to setup a "research only" base and a "manufacturing only" base, transfering anything, even a single alien allow between bases costs 1,000$ minimum per item even though it says it costs just 25$ per alien alloy. This obviously makes it impossible to have a dedicated manufacturing base as getting all the materials your teams colect ends up being very costly. Is this a bug or has item transfering between bases not been fine-tuned yet? On another topic I havent been able to dicern wether having more scientists in an "EXCELLENT" research is wasting personel that coud be used to advance another research in parallel or if it actually makes things go faster. The mayor threads about this matter that Ive been able to find seem quite old and dont specifically mention this. Finally I was wondering wether the build and research times are meant to be as slow as they are. Im on December on the Steam version (Veteran) with about 30 or 35 scientists and just finished my first twon plasma weapons while having two foxtrots and a fleet of 3.4 condors per base equipped with gatling lasers. I have been shooting down every single detected UFO except maybe 4 and doing every mission with a base in the Americas by the second month. Only in this month have I had my first terror mission and have yet to suffer a base attack mission. And of course I have been doing every single crash site I could reach in time. If my air superiority efforts have been too good (only now have heavy fighters and bombers shown up, still on landing ships) I am grateful since my gorund and air forces are woefully unprepared due to how long it takes to research and manufacture anything (managed to get 5 people from each squad in wolf armor, but only 3 lazer rifles have ever been produced.). Im wondering if this is intended.

Having to search through cellars, inside buildings and 2nd floors with the limited TU pool your soldiers have at the beggining, on a timed mission seems like a counter-intuitive design to me. Or at least, quite challenging. If its timed you want a small map with open spaces (filled with small and varied cover of course), or at least spaces were your line of sight wont be inconveniently blocked like the desert and artic maps. If its timed you want to be engaging the aliens as soon as posible since taking out a single alien on the first month can take 1-5 turns depending on positioning and cover. If its a bunched up group of aliens (as im assuming its going to be) hoding out it can take a whole lot more if you arent using explosives (since you dont want to get the pods caught in an explosion from a grenade/rocket; if we are using people pods in the first place).

[Hello, new to the forums, been following Xenonauts for a while now and felt like adding my opinion.] If the purpose of this mission type is to serve as a "spicing" for the early game so that its not only light scouts, you might as well use them to give players a tool o adress the main duress of the early game: namely the need to get money from selling alien weapons, increasing country relations to get more money at the end of the month and get reseach artefacts to be able to survive the mid game. Since its supposed to be a "terror-lite" mission you can have no civilians for the alien AI to shoot at but still have civilian presence (they could be encased in pods that serve as props but give you negative score if you break them) and even an increased armed civilian presence to help you out (once armed forces AI is improved). Regarding Rewards: If you go through with the "timed mission" plan then you may indeed need a diferent reward that justifies having to play more recklessly, or you can design the maps in such a way that you can find all the aliens easily, the hard part being killing them in time (lizards take forever to kill with balistic weapons). Some suggest free personel as reward, which is a bigger and more tangible incentive early game than a region relationship boost (which should be present anyway since you are doing a mission there). You could make aliens killed in these missions worth double the points of aliens in regular missions (though I dont know the details on how the mission score affects relations). Reducing the alien ticker by a bit may be good as well since you are always on a non-stop race to get the upgraded weapons, vehicles, and armor since the game starts because you want to be ready in time for when the aliens get serious. That the mission is a way to have more mission variety and the variety is the reward itself is good too, but then id rather ignore those mission in favor of the regular ones were i can use all the turns I want to ensure my soldiers stay safe. Regarding "more mission variety": I think Firaxis´s X-COM:EU, despite all its flaws, managed to introduce some interesting mission ideas that helped variety a bit (escort the VIP, timed bomb mission), but there is quite a bit of potential for more mision variety in Xenonauts, and maybe even a "breather"-type mission would be good. There is also always the posibility of "help the local forces fight" missions that have several soldier NPCs to help you fight aliens that can serve as "breather" missions combined with fleshing out the world´s narrative. TFTD also had artefact and the terror cruise missions (though I dont think many people want to experience the ships ever again). UFO:Aftermath also had "just scout out the aliens" missions among others that were not about killing everything, though those may not fit the style of Xenonauts and X-COM since Aftermath´s world is already half blown to bits when the game starts. The posibilities are endless as long as there is suficinet time and money of course.