Brochacho

Does Xenonauts literally model the path of every projectile like the original UFO:EU did? I'm a little confused as to how fired projectiles work in the wake of these accuracy changes. The original game's system was great because it rewarded the player for actually looking at the battlefield and using his brain, not reading toHit percentages.

That's for game balance; it's not supposed to be realistic. In reality, an organization tasked with protecting the entire planet would have hundred of tanks, trucks, mortars, artillery, and thousands of infantry at its disposal. But since we only have ten-odd guys with assault rifles and machine guns, everything costs more to compensate for this abstracted scale. If it didn't, air combat and base-building would account for 97% of the player's spending.

Please god no. The risk of friendly fire adds a lot to the game, as does the ability to blind fire at targets you cannot see.

I suppose at this point in development it's probably better to tweak the existing system (airstrikes) than make any radical alterations to geoscape pacing.

Why would anyone assume they have a "right" to ground combat after blowing up a spaceship? The only people who would make this connection are people who have played the original UFO, and even then it's a stretch. Even then, why not just increase the number of air superiority fighters and decrease the number of "ground mission" ships? Would that not also work (with some tweaks)?

To be perfectly honest I liked it when the hit calculation was more in line with the original game, as that made it virtually impossible to miss at close range and, more importantly, much easier to hit improperly positioned troops. This may not be particularly "realistic" but from a pacing and gameplay perspective it works very well.

For future reference, when someone jokingly says "citation needed" probably the last thing you should link is a Wikipedia article. This particular claim is not in any way supported by either the Wikipedia article or its referenced sources. If you find a source that does, feel free to link an actual quote along with the article. If you can't find any real-life precedent of militaries endorsing self-destruction or fire-lock technology, maybe stop and think for a second about why that might be the case. There is a big difference between a policy of scuttling technology and implementing literal self-destruct / fire-lock mechanisms on pieces of otherwise functioning equipment. That's why basically every military in the world uses the former, and to my knowledge very few, if any militaries use (or even plan on using) the latter. If your argument is that advanced aliens will have super advanced technology that works so well that implementing self-destruction triggers on all weapons would benefit the armed forces instead of hurting them, fine. But that's a completely separate claim from what you initially said. I don't have any problem, game-balance-wise, with self-destructing weapons, but it was a little tough to sit back and watch someone vehemently defend something no with real-life military precedent as realistic. So, unless you can find, like, you know, a source... Peace.

Is there some reason why every downed, non-fighter UFO needs to leave an intact crash site? Surely someone has brought this up.

Squad sight is a pretty realistic abstraction of how modern infantry combat actually works -- what's unrealistic is the concept of a unit having such an arbitrarily limited sight range. That said, the sight range limitation is in place for gameplay/tension reasons, not realism.

[Citation Needed] If you can't figure out why a military strategist might object to weapons that stop functioning due to malfunctioning components that have nothing to do with a weapon's actual ability to operate then I'm not sure what to say. There's a reason the Mars rovers don't run on Windows 8 and an Intel i7. I'd imagine military helicopters and planes and such are scuttled because their designs are significantly more valuable to the enemy than a basic assault rifle, and they aren't scuttled via onboard self-destruct systems. One change I'd actually agree with is the aliens actively trying to destroy their downed craft before the Xenonauts can secure them. Biometric imprinting makes plenty of sense for law enforcement agencies, though, and I don't see anything particularly odd about that. But alien invaders aren't law enforcement.

Okay, I understand, but I'm saying that ground combat should be required, because that's the whole point. The player shouldn't want to put his little soldiers in harm's way so that he can be "rewarded" with technology and money. He should have no choice* but to send his soldiers to recover the UFO, even if it's dangerous, stressful, and potentially very costly. Tension and fear of failure in ground combat is what makes this game — and what made the original UFO — so exciting. Some guy no one's ever heard of called Julian Gollop sums it up quite nicely in this video, at 16:32 [video=youtube;z8zZsecTRfM] There are definitely too many light scouts (and early ground missions in general), but I think best solution would be to lessen the number of missions, not lessen the impact of the player's performance. * I'm speaking generally. I actually like the idea of airstrikes and don't see anything wrong with skipping a few ground missions here and there.

Definitely remove the "reaction fire" notification. There's really no reason for it to be there and the sudden gunshots add a lot of character to the game.

Lore-wise, equipping soldiers with weapons that cease to operate if and when a piece of equipment totally unrelated to the operation of the weapon malfunctions does not make much sense at all.

I'm kind of at a loss as to what point you're trying to make.

No, because you also risk that if you intend to follow up with a ground mission.

Maybe: - Make reaction sequential, as in UFO:EU. - Make "reacting" at all significantly more difficult without either high reflexes or a pistol / carbine. - Add a bonus to reaction whenever a unit has been facing the same cardinal direction for a turn or more. ("Focusing" on the door/chokepoint/whatever.) This makes perimeter defense viable without turning the game into a reaction fest. You could also just add an additional diceroll so that for every "reaction event" each soldier has a chance to fire sequentially based on his/her reflexes and bravery. If you fail the check, you fire, even if the target is dead.

I usually either stack up outside the door and send a shield guy to open it at an angle or stack up outside the door and blow it open with C4. Interior doors are useful to the Xenonauts currently because the alien AI has no fucking clue how to handle them. You can stack your entire landing team up at range, tell one shield dude to open the door, have everyone unload, then tell the same shield guy to close the door when everyone's finished shooting. End turn, repeat. If the aliens camp out during their turn, you get another free round of massed shooting. If the aliens try to open the door, they do so by charging en masse at the doorway, ending their turn two steps inside the room with 0 TUs in reserve. The first problem can be solved by implementing a delay on how often a door can be opened or closed. Perhaps, if opened, a door must stay open for a full turn (or two) before it can be closed? The second problem requires some sort of AI script to let aliens know it's a bad idea to open a door when the entire rest of the squad just ran fifty meters down a hallway.

This change is the opposite of what needs to happen. Ground combat execution should be a big deal; it adds tension to the gameplay. Letting too many civilians die, killing civilians, letting all the local forces get killed, letting the aliens escape, failing to secure the UFO, etc, should have real repercussions (either as penalties or as simple opportunity costs for missing the reward). If the player doesn't have to worry about things going horribly wrong then he doesn't care as much when things go right. Airstrikes should be reserved for smaller craft that you don't want to (or are unable to) clear manually, such as mid-game light scouts. If you're worried about new players relying too much on airstrikes, add tooltips on normal/easy informing them that airstrikes result in much less recovered equipment/relations increase/whatever.

Just to be clear, the "problem" -- and this was a problem in the original UFO:EU -- is that, due to how line of sight/reaction fire works, the most effective strategy almost always to advance as slowly as possible so that your squad always has TUs in reserve to shoot. Cautious, tense gameplay is great, but since there is no realistic penalty for literally moving at a snail's pace the ground combat frequently encourages the player to bore himself rather than take risks. You can solve this by making aliens much more intelligent and aggressive, by giving the Xenonauts time-critical goals to achieve in ground combat, or both.