Jebediah

+1 to that. Kinda doesn't make sense that a blast door can open and close in the time it takes a frag grenade to go boom.

I find the best way to go (usually only results in one casualty-guess who it is) is to use smoke to try to bisect the room, so that you can handle one blind corner at a time. Following that, I send in someone with a shield to try to cope with the reaction fire, then try to baton/gun down the people in that corner. Finally a barrage of flash/frags to the other corner to try to suppress whatever happens to be over there before their turn starts.

Much, much better, just one suggestion for you though. It looks like the helmet's riding a bit too high on the sides...the level it sits at on the front is correct, usually you want your helmet to come to about the tops of the eyebrows. But compare here, notice where the edge of the helmet is in relation to his ear. I can see the tops of the ears, which shouldn't be visible. Looking at the picture, I see you did flare out the back of the helmet a bit to attempt the back-half curvature common on most military helmets, most prominent in the Soviet SSh-60 that Soviet Army soldiers would be wearing in this time period. I just think it needs to be a bit more pronounced, it seems like the entire helmet's horizontal-ness might be coming a bit from that. Try to imagine a profile view of it and work from there, that might help.

Sorry about the gravedig, I followed the link off the mod list and didn't notice how old the thread was.

I say a balancing measure could be 250 rounds, in 50 round belts, that take two turns to swap out. Have you ever tried reloading dual solenoid-fired MMGs in a cramped-ass turret in a moving vehicle on rough terrain? Well, I haven't either, that sure isn't my MOS. But from what I gather from the occasional armor guys I bump into, it's not a cakewalk.

What if there were reverse crash site missions, guys? Hear me out: you failed to provide sufficient air supremacy in your base's AO, and there are fighters prowling the skies within radar range. A vital military/government aircraft carrying something essential to the war effort (high ranking personnel, captured alien equipment, prototypes, etc) is shot down by fighters with EMP/other less-destructive weaponry, and apparently an alien strike force conspicuously similar to ours is moving in to secure the crash site and take the hardware/personnel. It's extremely time-sensitive: you get there in time, you get to array your forces nice and strategically like a base defense mission, and there are plenty of survivors ready to help you defend it. You drag your feet and don't make it there fast enough, it's a blitzkrieg rush to hopefully reach the downed plane...or hell, downed Charlie, I feel like it would save you boys some time with the artwork...before the aliens finish their collection. I think it would be really cool to occasionally find yourself in a role-reversal situation, in which you are the one with the crash site and they're the ones trying to kick you out. Victory conditions: wipe out aliens. Loss conditions: lose all men, they control crash site for five turns.

You do bring up a good point, although I would like to point back to the titanium armor developed by the Soviets in this time period while cross-applying the Condor's page that states titanium holds up better against their weapons than anything else. Don't know where there was titanium in the 1950s, but still. I'm not saying it would offer protection from energy weapons, I'm just saying that a vest of titanium probably wouldn't cause the negatives a steel trauma plate would in terms of molten hellmetal right next to your vital organs.

I suppose I didn't play enough Tetris as a child, I didn't think of that until just now. Could we please have a "hold fire" button for preventing reaction fire that risks friendly fire? At present I have to physically rotate soldiers I think might hit their buddies with stupid shots, and that seems silly. I used to think they'd only fire if I hit the TU reserve button, but I suppose not.

If someone happens to mod the game to allow it, do remember to alter the code so it doesn't explode the next turn. A friend of mine tried to do this exact thing for another game, I seem to recall it being Fallout Tactics. He threw in elements of grenades' code to facilitate it...the explody part being one he unfortunately forgot to remove. First thing he tested it on was a single bullet. Hilarity ensued.

At present, there are only two things a terror mission can be for players- an opportunity to lose a number of good troops, or an opportunity to lose funding and standing. They can either send a ground force into the city and take heavy casualties trying to clean out the...twenty or so aliens that are terrorizing the entire city, or stand by and let the military deploy tactical nuclear weapons to wipe out the...twenty or so aliens that are terrorizing the entire city. (On a side note, whose tactical nukes get used when the terror mission is in, say, Mogadishu? I know it's a tiny, trivial detail, but could we amend the failure message to only say that when the country in question HAS a nuclear arsenal, and just mention intense casualties when they're...Somalia?) In my opinion, there should be more than those two choices. We have plenty of fighters that can be used to wrest air superiority or at least air parity over the AO, and we have helicopters that can be used in evacuating civilians from the AO. Why not give players these as alternate choices rather than the current "send soldiers or let everyone die" forced dilemma? Sure, sending fighters to provide support would be less pleasing than sending boots on the ground, and sending dropships to evacuate civilians would be less pleasing than either. But it still would be much, much better than the "all or nothing" bizarreness we're looking at now. Sending fighters would result in an air combat screen just as sending soldiers results in a ground combat screen, while sending a dropship or two would just take them out of ready status for twenty-four hours or so. The idea being there's more than one way to assist the host nation's forces than just being the big damn heroes and mopping up with eight dudes the mess their whole army couldn't fix.

They certainly don't mind color-coding their leaders on the battlefield, even though they communicate telepathically and logically should have no need whatsoever of any sort of distinguishing insignia.

The one thing I've noticed about suppression values in-game is that (at least as far as I can tell) the shotgun has the worst of all ballistic weapons. I suppose this makes sense at long range where the blast has dispersed somewhat, but at close range, even when the shot misses (which is relatively common for the 20-TU option), the mere sound and power of a shotgun blast up-close should be more suppressive than a three-round burst from a rifle. Two consecutive near-misses from a shotgun at a range of four tiles just failed to suppress a Caesan non-combatant in the game I'm playing now, which is the reason I came over and posted. This just seems insane. Just a suggestion- perhaps shotguns should receive added suppression value below a predefined range, say seven tiles or so?

I haven't had a chemistry course since my junior year of high school, but it made sense to me. You're fine.

Flares for night missions could be treated as normal grenades (loadout-wise) for higher difficulty levels. That's one immersion-breaker for me, when I get infinite flares but only forty spare M16 rounds.