Twigg

I second the request to rotate soldiers in the dropship. I'd also love it if you could set them to crouch in the as well. I know it seems small but not only does it help make the world feel more alive but with the amount of times I've been attacked while still in the dropship every TU can make a difference.

I think this would be a great addition to the game and would like to see it happen as units get hit. Balancing it could be a little difficult because you don't want to get into the 'misery' cycle of getting hit -> having limited hit back because of the decreased accuracy -> getting hit again.

Adding more enemies doesn't make the game more interesting or fun, it make it more tedious. There are only so many aliens you can fit on the current maps before it becomes a clown car situation which ruins all the tense atmosphere and immersion the game worked so hard on building up until that point.

Are save games from the experimental 26.3 compatible with the main release branch version?

Some of these may relate to v25, but I skipped that version so I apologize if any of this is old hat. Is there a way to repair the MARS now? I know the medkit to repair a robot was silly but I now can't find any items to repair it which limits it's usefulness. The new alien base commander center with the teleportation changes are incredible. I knew I hated the old version but I didn't realize how much I hated it until I played this one. This is probably wrong but I feel like aliens can teleport around in the base as I often get attacked from behind even though I very meticulously push forward and clear areas out to prevent just that. Air upgrade costs finally feel reasonable, I've only used the machine gun line of weapons and that has been totally viable. What exactly is 'advanced gauss blaster' and how do I unlock it? (see attached screenshot) My guess is that it is meant to be 'advanced gauss cannon' and it is a bug but I am not sure electroshock grenades make all other forms of stun weaponry pointless. I personally think this is more of a reflection of how poor the rest of the stun roster is but that could just be me. Why is the observer bounty so much higher than any other ship? I am shooting down harvesters and I think they are giving me 125k whereas observers give me 200k. The economy is not great atm. The price drops for some things are massive and don't see to recover. This is aggravated by the fact that I am often forced to fight lots of ground battles to get the required alien alloys so I have this huge amount of alien corpses, guns, and grenades that barely sell for anything. Why does the gauss battery require the laser battery upgrade? Why does the plasma battery require the laser battery upgrade as well? I feel like the player should be allowed to skip some of these if they think the rest of weaker batteries is worth the resource savings The tier upgrades for both weapons and fighter ships are very linear and dull. I built my first Gemini and if you were to tell me they were two Angles glued together I'd believe you. Sure they are better but not in any interesting way. I still use Angels 220 days in because as long as something isn't shooting at them they are basically as good as the most advanced fighters I have if they have the same weapon. Is the expectation for the player to use each weapon tier? There are a lot of them now and going through each one doesn't feel like it is worth the cost for the performance gains. The binary state of damage is this game makes combat less interesting. My soldiers (and the aliens) perform just as well on 1 hitpoint as they do on 100 so my only real concern is if my soldier got 1 shot or not. Large ufos become a massive grind after a while between the high number of aliens, the killbox nature of the ship, and the fact it is all the same map. I honestly wish I had more alien bases to do because those feel a lot more fun. I haven't gotten an abduction mission in a long time. Those quick missions would be such a great palette cleanser from the hour plus harvester grinds, I don't know if I am getting unlucky or they stop showing up at a point. I'd love a scout vehicle. Something that can fly and is very hard to hit but has limited offensive capabilities. The MARS is nice but I don't need vehicles to kill aliens, I have tons of soldiers who do that pretty well all on their own. A lot of this sounds like complaining but I am genuinely enjoying the game, keep up the great work.

Pretty straight forward, the game crashes when attempting to use a medkit to heal a wounded soldier. Roughly 150 days into the campaign, using the advanced medkit and I believe I am on the arid map for a crashed medium UFO. Let me know if you need anything else. output.log auto_groundcombat_turn_4_start-556.json

How could you possibly not love Van Doorn, he's humanity's greatest hero

Not exactly sure if this is a tooltip error or an actual bug. I have researched heavy lasers yet cannot build the aircraft laser gun. I can build the laser machine gun and upgrade my base defenses to laser lances. I say I am not sure if this is a bug or not as maybe the research text is wrong and this isn't the tech (or at least the only tech) required to build the aircraft laser guns. I have attached screenshots and a save file for context, let me know if you need anything else. user_crucible3-18.json

I understand your point about scalable rewards, I was trying to kill two birds with one stone with regards this mission and the sometimes terrible random selection of soldiers available. I think attaching panic reduction to tubes past 5 is a good idea because that is a rare enough effect that it can be worth sacrificing soldiers for. I'd made it so it starts small but adds up small, something like -1 each for the 6th and 7th tubes, -2 each for the 8th and 9th tubes, and -4 for the final tube. That way a good player will regularly be able to get -1 or -2 panic reduction which feels like a nice bonus but will rarely have enough impact to mess with the balance of the game but if a player is desperate in that region they have a solid incentive to risk important soldiers and gear for a potential -10 panic reduction to a region that is is desperate need of it.

The opportunity cost is too high past the 5 tubes required to make the mission a success. I never felt the extra materials was worth the very high risk of running into more aliens with your pants down (no TUs remaining). Getting 8 or 10 tubes is so much more difficult and risky then 5 that the reward for doing so should be suitably valuable, maybe something like a quality soldier, extra research to the current assignment, or a nice relationship boost to the region the mission took place.

I agree with Solver, whatever immersion or gameplay value is lost with the randomness of procedurally generated maps it is more than made up by the fact I won't be able to immediately do an MTV Cribs style walkthrough of the map once I step out of the dropship. I think some form of procedurally generated maps would be a great thing to test in v25 or 26.

I don't think you are factoring in cost. I can build and equip 3 foxtrots with torpedoes for nearly the same price as 2 foxtrots with cannons and plating. 3x foxtrots 350k * 3 = 1.05m 6x torpedoes 150k * 6 = 900k Total 1.95m 2x foxtrots 350k * 2 = 700k 4x cannons 250k * 4 = 1m 2x plating 100k * 2 = 200k Total 1.90m Even battleships will go down to 6 torpedoes as long as you maintain technological parity with the aliens and since there is no upside to killing the escorts you can completely ignore them and focus all your fire on the main UFO. At worst one of your fighters will be badly damaged by the escorts but since damage doesn't actually affect anything it is irrelevant as long as you make sure for the next air combat one of your other fighters takes the attention of the UFOs.

I am glad and excited that air combat is getting looked at as I think it isn't far off from being really interesting. I love the fact you can deploy your fighters all along the combat zone, both using the preselected options on the left but also just clicking your ships before the combat starts. I mostly use it to 'encourage' the UFO to focus on a particular fighter so the more damaged ones are safer during the engagement. I've even had UFOs try to run away when I deployed all my fighters out of their path and unknowingly given them a straight shot to freedom. The only downside to this mechanic is that it isn't explained at all, I only found it by accidentally clicking on one of the premade redeployment options. The new retreat system is great, maybe even too strong. Not only can your torpedo bombers immediately retreat after firing their payload to save fuel but it is pretty easy to save a ship from being shot down. I would consider making it a longer time, maybe 5 seconds? I honestly never noticed a difference in armor and health in UFOs as I always use overwhelming force to shoot down UFOs. I am not sure it is affecting gameplay all that much but there have been times where a UFO has escaped with barely any health after I ran out of ammunition so it will occasionally do something in edge cases. The opportunity cost to aircraft weaponry is too high to make customizing ships for different UFOs feasible imo. Not only are they incredibly expensive and time consuming to build but switching weapons means you need to refit your ship which also takes a lot of time. I'd love a way to recycle or reuse older aircraft tech so it isn't so bittersweet when you upgrade but outside of hand-me-downs to your secondary base I am not sure how to do that. I would lean into making the different weapon and secondary slots (which for now is just armor) feel more unique. I said previously that cannons could cause you to fly faster but I think you can do more here. What if some weapons allowed you shoot down UFOs while doing less damage to the ship or even have a chance that crew would be knocked unconscious instead of killed during the crash? I can see a scenario where you have 3 types of weapons Cannons-missiles/torpedoes-electromagnetic and you would use the first two to weaken a UFO and the third time to shoot it down and preserve as much of the ship and crew as you can. That gives a player a great excuse to mix and match their aircraft weaponry and potentially gain an advantage for their air combat skills. The different fighters feel like a simple linear progression and outside of hand-me-downs there is no reason to use or build an older model. I would love if that wasn't the case somehow. Currently there is very little benefit to having a second based and none for building a third. I think the air combat could be a bigger part of a player's game plan if you were trying fighting the aliens for domination of the sky and not just covering your little patch of earth long enough to finish the needed research and trigger the final mission.

I have attached a strategy layer save from my v24 save on day 300, roughly 2 weeks before I lost via orbital strike. I hope the save helps contextualize the points I will make about the game in it's current state, particularly the air game. I started this campaign with the test out the viability of shields/pistols and aircraft guns and see if using them enabled fun new playstyles. Let's start with shields and pistols, this was a failure imo. In short I don't think they are a viable option in the current version of the game and need more consideration. Both the shield and pistol have their own issues that combined make for a poor toolset. The shield is heavy and can only 'block' shots from one side, even that is giving it the benefit of the doubt as with the change from X1 you can still take significant damage on first shot even if the shield is hit. This means that the cramped corridors of alien bases and UFOs where I would need the shield the most are still better suited to someone with a shotgun who at least provides some kind of threat. That brings me to the pistol. I am not sure what purpose it serves. The 15 round magazine and poor accuracy/range makes me think it should be a rapid fire weapon of some sort but it costs too much TU to fire. Not to mention getting close means that I am more liable to killed by alien fire on their own turn or block my other soldiers from killing the alien. This issue got worse as the campaign went on as there is such a long gap between regular shields and assault shields so you quickly feel like even the theoretical armor bonus of shield doesn't do much for your soldiers. Nearly every time I used a shield soldier I found myself wishing I had someone with a shotgun and within the first 100 days I wound up doing just that and never looked back. On the aircraft guns side, the results were mixed. Tactically they are a great option and opened up the possibility of a single wing of fighters being able to take 2 air combats and win, which is certainly not an option with torpedoes. Fuel becomes the major limiting factor and you have to juggle your aircrafts health more which adds a little more depth and fun to the air combat (I am one of the crazy people who enjoys the air combat). The problem is on the strategy layer. The cost of outfitting your angel interceptors with laser cannons is double the cost (2x250k + 1x100k vs 2x150k) and nearly double the cost of the interceptor itself as the armor is necessary when you can only use your weapons in range of the UFO guns. That combined with the extra refit time from health and fuel means you are definitely cutting costs somewhere to make this tactical approach workable. This is made worse by the fact that torpedoes have less need for upgraded fighters so you have more leeway on when to upgrade your fleet vs going the guns approach. Put simply while most air combats were made easier by using guns over torpedoes that advantage was far outweighed by the strategy layer concessions I had to make for that approach. I think both the pistol and shield need something. For the shield I was thinking an innate resistance to reaction fire (or maybe fire in general) to simulate the extra difficulty of hitting the few parts of a soldier not covered by the shield. For the pistol I think removing stun guns entirely and making the pistol able to accept both lethal and non-lethal ammunition would be a huge bump in it's flexibility and give it a real purpose. Each new pistol would give you an equivalent non lethal ammo option (ie stun laser rounds) which would help with scaling alien hp and the advanced stun research could allow rifles to have the same flexibility. I don't have a great solution for aircraft guns other than changing the cost, which isn't interesting imo. Another option is increasing the fire rate so you can kill UFOs much quicker with the same amount of ammunition which will help with the health issue but not fuel. You could boost the speed of fighters with guns which might help with the fuel from both reaching the target and the actual dogfighting. user_day_300_manual_save-122.json

I find accelerated weapons definitively not worth the cost. They were barely worth it when you got an infinite amount of them for a single cost, now it actively feels like a trap. Now that we have to manufacture aircraft equipment individually not only do I have less money and resources to spend on luxuries like accelerated weapons but more importantly I don't have time in my manufacturing schedule for them. I found myself constantly reevaluating my manufacturing priorities based on what new research I built and what new fresh hell I found myself against in either the ground or air combat. I found I could make it to laser weaponry from basic ballistics without too much problem with heavy use of snipers, demo charges, and shotguns for UFO assaults.