Twigg

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.

IMO the most difficult parts of the cleaner base is the initial push and the final room. For the initial push I wait a few turns in the initial area to see if the cleaners will push through themselves and get done by reaction fire. Once that is done you have one soldier open the door and the rest far behind. If you find an enemy then have one of the soldiers out of line of sight throw a smoke grenade at your exposed soldier (which won't trigger reaction fire) and then pull that scouting soldier back in hopes they don't get killed. You have to scout very carefully and once you fine a turret use the large blast radius of grenades (I prefer the demo charge over the regular grenade before you hit alenium explosives) as guns below laser don't do much to the armor. For the final room I open both side doors and only shoot at cleaners who are facing the other way. For example if I open the right side door and there is a cleaner facing it I shoot at them with the soldiers from the left side door. Not only does this not trigger reaction fire but the soldier will turn around so I can then shoot at them with the right side soldiers. I try to ignore the turrets in this room initially and hope I can line of sight them but very often I fall back on the strategy of smoke grenade and pray. Chris mentioned that there was a bug that caused too many turrets to spawn which is great news but this will probably be the most difficult mission to do once we go back to 8 starting soldiers.

Man I loved this so much. Your slow descent from 'Oh this'll be a fun adventure with the team!' to 'Oh wow this is harder then I expected' to finally 'WHAT CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY DID I COMMIT TO BE DROPPED INTO THIS DEEPEST ABYSS OF HELL FOR WHICH NOT EVEN DEATH PROVIDES A REPRIEVE' was not only incredibly funny but it was very relatable.

I want the aliens to be a threat, what I don't want is for the aliens and the player to be most effective/threatening by essentially ignoring movement and reserving time units for reaction fire.

It is important to remember that this game isn't even in early access and the game is still going through changes, some of which are quite impactful. I remember an older version where you only had 8 soldiers on the initial dropship but the cleaner base mission was pretty simple and it was something you wanted to rush as there was a guaranteed mentarch in the main room that was a great option for capturing to progress the plot. In that version the cleaner data retrieval mission was brutal and I was happy to end that mission with only 2 dead and 2 grievously injured. I think reaction fire as is further incentives slow playing tactical missions which is a problem I think needs solving but I don't have a good solution. My initial thought is baking in some kind of reaction fire resistance to the shield and/or pistol as both of them are near useless as is. I'd happily take a dedicated reaction fire soldier even with only 8 spots in the dropship if it meant I didn't have to play red light green light with guns.

I find the cleaner base in particular to be a gear check, much like the gargoyles in the original dark souls. If you don't have warden armor and laser weapons/alenium grenades then you are almost guaranteed to lose and it is almost solely down to those damn turrets in those small rooms/hallways. It is essentially impossible to shoot at them without them shooting back and they are much more lethal then you are. I have found success throwing alenium grenades around corners from positions outside of their line of sight but that doesn't feel satisfying or fun. My strategy for breaching the alien base control room is sending in with good armor, high health, and immediately throwing a smoke grenade at your feet. If you are lucky the accuracy modifier from the smoke will help cancel out the insane close range bonus they get when you teleport right into their nose hairs and you have a decent chance of that soldier only being out for 20+ days. If you are really unlucky not only will they die from the reaction fire but your other soldiers outside the room will get suppressed. I really like the idea of reaction fire in the beginning of the game when everyone's aim is shit and weapons aren't as lethal but alien numbers and damage scale pretty quickly but the maps don't scale at all so you often feel like you are playing minesweeper every time you move a soldier. Late game terror missions are a great example of this as the maps are already small so you have to spend the first half a dozen turns at least sitting in the dropship waiting for the seemingly infinite amount of aliens to fall to your own reaction fire to the point where they are reasonably thinned out and you can actually move around the map.

This save perfectly encapsulates my issue with alien bases. Not only are there 5 aliens covering roughly 3 sides (so the only direction I won't get fired on is from behind) but even with smoke I am guaranteed to get suppressed and quite likely killed. Shields would only help against a single side and even then they would have to be something that made it through the rest of the combat in the alien base intact. Also my soldiers outside the teleporter room can get suppressed by shots aimed at my soldiers inside the teleporter room which would be hilarious if it wasn't so frustrating to deal with. I am hoping this is a bug as otherwise I will need to keep my soldiers even farther away from the teleporter which leaves me with less TUs tp deal with the aliens. I haven't yet taken down battleships so maybe this will change but this is the only situation where I am expected to kill/incapacitate 5 aliens in a single turn and this is on top of running the gauntlet of their full TUs of reaction fire. Let me throw a grenade through the teleporter or send a scarecrow with armor in to absorb some of their reaction fire. There is definitely a bug with air targeting, using short range weapons like laser cannons makes it easy to spot. Basically one or more ships will refuse to fire on their target within their weapons range even though the weapon has ammo and is set for firing. The ship will still follow the enemy so I know it is still targeting it but there is no firing of the weapon. I can tell it is going to happen as the fighter that the bug affects always moves much faster in air combat then the other fighters in the wing. It doesn't seem to happen consistently but I am trying to get a save that it happens more often then not. auto_groundcombat_turn_30_start-301.json

I don't think the writing in X1 was any more engaging but I viewed that game through a different lens. The fact that X1 exists and is as good as it is was impressive and I was happy to have it warts and all. X2 feels like an evolution from that solid framework and I am hoping the atmosphere and narrative improves like the mechanics are from 1 to 2. I want the soldiers, engineers, scientists, and pilots to feel more like characters in my story and less like lines of code if that makes sense. I will say that the music is phenomenal at bringing about that oppressive atmosphere, just loading up the menu gets me pumped to play them game and lose so many soldiers due to poor decisions. I hated them in X1, between the psychic powers and the incredible range of the wraith snipers it really sucked the fun out of the game. I think I beat the campaign only a handful of times in my 200+ hours in the game as once I got to that point I would consider the campaign 'done'. X2 is much better in that regard (though I am not sure if psychic powers do anything yet), I think I am just looking for an incentive not to overwatch creep. Something as simple as a sliding scale of extra research progress based on how few turns it took you to take a larger ship or alien base would be great. I would love a good reason to load everyone up with shotguns and go buck wild running around an alien base. I think it is the rng nature of the portal rooms that bothers me the most. Sometimes there are 3 aliens with only one facing the teleporter, sometimes there are 5 all of which are waiting for you to blink before they unload into you. The close quarters nature means even if you drop a smoke right on top of you you're still likely to get hit with reaction fire. As part of my new campaign I am running shield soldiers and not using missiles/torpedoes so maybe they will help but given the very limited covering arc of shields and the likelihood aliens will be on all sides of a teleporter entrance I don't think it will make it less frustrating.

You make a good point with the escorts but I have found that health on my fighters pretty irrelevant as they are just as effective at 1% as they are at 100 and it is rare with the refitting times that I will get a chance at another UFO in the same wave. Sometimes I do get that second chance and when I do I make sure the highest health fighter attacks from the front so the injured one is safe. I think damage is only part of it as the range and therefore safety advantage of torpedoes is great and the thing they are weakest against (fighters) you don't want to shoot down anyway. Things like the gatling gun/laser cannon should offer a high risk high reward playstyle imo and right now all they offer is high risk.

That is already the best strategy, the difference the long rearming/refueling time makes is that you have to go into each air combat with overwhelming force to ensure you can kill the UFO (or main UFO if there are multiple) in one attack. It's simultaneously frustrating and funny letting UFOs run rampant on the map well within radar range because you know you don't have the firepower to kill it and you don't want to lose the opportunity to shoot down another ship that you can actually kill and generate a mission from. The combination of long research time and the need to build and equip each individual weapon means you don't really have the opportunity to experience with less efficient combinations. Even the loss of dodge doesn't have an impact because you will quickly fight UFOs that fire much faster than your dodge cooldown will allow so face tanking UFO fire is a necessity. I have no idea how to fix regular missiles but for the guns I recommend that they increase your speed in combat and they either hit incredibly hard or do increasing damage the closer they get. That plus either giving fighters equipped with them an innate dodge chance or giving UFOs blind spots will open up an interesting and viable alternative to the torpedo meta.

I wanted to provide my feedback on my 270ish day campaign where I am fighting battleships but have yet to do a ground mission with them. From the top I want to say that I am not a good player at these kind of games and I am here more for the atmosphere and emergent narrative then for a tactical combat simulator. The text in the game is too dry. When I research a new tech or shoot down a new UFO I don't care about how thick the armor is or strong the new torpedo is, that data is useless and uninteresting to me without scientists/soldiers/engineers contextualizing it. For example as part of the laser weaponry research text the head scientist could mention that these are actually the second version of the laser rifles as the first version had a serious heat dissipation issue that Corporal Jacobs learned first hand when he lost his pinky touching the battery after a full auto discharge. Or maybe there is an addendum to the plasma research saying that plasma grenades are perfect for 'digging' new latrines. We are dealing with first contact and a massive technological advancement, I want to feel that human wonder, excitement, and fear coming through to the people most directly involved in it. The little text blurb on a technology in the research menu needs to give a better idea of what you will get out of the research. The plasma research is a great example where I was under the impression that I would unlock tier 3 weapons but that was actually from fusion research which came later. Medals are a great idea but are barely relevant narratively or mechanically. It would be more interesting if they gave effects like bleed resistance, psychic resistance, quicker healing, etc to better represent the specific circumstances that the soldiers earned those medals and help make them feel like like clones or androids. I love the new mission. It encourages more aggressive play and is a great palette cleanser from the regular missions. The extra reward for clearing more tubes isn't nearly worth it though, it would be great if you got a more valuable resource than alloy and you were better rewarded for your 7-9th tube instead of it just being a flat rate. Alien base and larger ufo missions not fun to play, partially because they take too long and you are so heavily punished for not playing slow and steady but also because the teleporters turn the end of all those missions into a Mexican standoff. Maybe there is some clever gameplay option I am missing but the end of those missions often feel like a roll of the dice as to whether I can flash bang the aliens before they kill a soldier with reaction fire. I miss stun smoke grenades. Yeah it was probably too easy to throw them in a ship and knock out the last few aliens but now the best option is the bring a bunch of snipers and shoot them out range like it's an execution via firing squad. It is still as unengaging a strategy but is less fun imo. Manual air combat is not fun or interesting. Torpedoes are by far the best option which means neither you nor the enemy can dodge so you just fly towards each other and let loose your weapons. The closest thing to skill is pressing the retreat button right after you've fired your last weapons so you take as little extra damage as possible. Autoresolve has it's own problems where if you don't have the firepower to shoot down the UFO you will always end up out of fuel and given the long rearm and refit times for aircraft it essentially guarantees you will never get a second shot at that ship. Air combat with multiple enemy ships can get wonky. If at the start of air combat I tell one of my fighters to target a different ship there is a chance they will never fire their torpedoes at anyone. I've yet to find a pattern to it but it makes air combat even less fun. Rifles and sniper rifles seem by far the best weapons. I used two shotgunners as scouts and while they were occasionally clutch at killing the massive Sebillian bastards I know I would have been better off with a Mars vehicle and lots of rifles out of LOS of the aliens. machine guns might actually be worse as not only was their aim terrible but once I hit laser weaponry they seemed duty bound to blow up every vehicle, gas station, wall, soldier etc etc between their target and themselves. I think I lost more men to their file than the aliens.

Will the loading time issue make into the main branch once v24 gets pushed?

Have you found shields to be effective? in X1 I normally had 2 shield users who acted as scouts and overwatch absorbers, which was particularly useful in taking alien bases/large ufos with teleporters. In X2 they aren't nearly as useful and I can't tell if I am using them poorly or not. It is incredibly frustrating to enter the command center of an alien base and take overwatch fire from 4-5 aliens with zero counterplay available.

No worries. I have been mostly doing manual air combat. I did notice an issue with the guardian armor but wasn't sure if it was a WIP or an actual bug. I have started a new campaign and haven't run into the same issue yet but I have also not yet unlocked guardian armor so we will see if that triggers the issue again. I am also having an issue with targeting during air combat but I can't tell if that is user error or a bug.

This game is so different to any of the rpgs you mentioned that there is basically no overlap other than how many player characters there are. By your logic there are many tactics games with 10+ characters, they are sports games. One of the great aspects of a game like this is the tension that comes from knowing defeat (both on the tactical and strategic layer) is just around the corner and you need to constantly play catch up to the growing alien menace. That tension works best in relatively short missions and is one of the reasons I love the reasons I love the new mission type, it is the perfect palette cleanser. Significantly increasing the alien and soldier count would turn that tension into exhaustion for many players and wouldn't open up things much tactically imo.

I am able to reproduce the bug consistently with the attached save. I approach a terror site with the dropship and once it arrives I get the popup to start the combat mission. I select yes but nothing happens. I know the game hasn't crashed as the strategy clock is still going. I have tried moving the dropship away and then reinitiating the terror mission and the same thing happens. This is the second time this has happened to me this campaign but I forgot to document the first one. Let me know if you need anything else from my end. output.log user_strategy3-70.json

I am currently playing V24.5 and just completed a terror mission. It was the map with the supermarket in the lower right hand corner, gas station in the upper left hand corner and the restaurant in the upper right corner. Near the end the of the mission I went to the edge of the supermarket roof and shot down at a Sebilian who proceeded to Air Jordan himself to reflex melee attack my soldier from the ground floor. I am pretty confident it was a melee attack as it hand the melee animation and there was no gunfire sound. Suffice to say I was pretty surprised (and impressed). Is this expected behavior? I understand that if you are within a tile you are in melee range but I assumed being a floor up put you at a greater distance. Should I create battle plans moving forward on the assumption that the aliens are not only great shots and psykers but were also failed draft picks from the NBA?