llunak

Everybody. Until they get a second base operational, which takes a while even if it's the top priority. Given how punishing leaving a region unprotected can be now, it makes a big difference. The other thing you don't seem to realize is that this is not only about one place being the best place, but also about most others being bad places. Right now placing the starting base anywhere in the Americas can turn out to be a very silly choice.

No. If the number of regions matters (as opposed to pure land mass; and yes it does), there's just one best place - very roughly somewhere around Egypt you can at least partially cover 6 regions, which is unmatched. I personally think that non-equal funding should help with this a lot. If NAm, Eu and AA are the richest and Africas the poorest, the choice is suddenly not so obvious (although if both Eu and SU were both among the richest, ME would still be probably the best spot).

That's not Hotfix 2 (which identifies itself as V20 Hotfix 08/01/2014), but it's the experimental patch 2. Use Steam to verify local files of the game, or install it again properly.

It would be nice if clicking the soldier portrait centered the view on the active soldier (and maybe if there was a shortcut as well). When scrolling around the map, it sometimes takes a while to find the active soldier again (especially if obscured by something).

Steps to reproduce: - select a soldier and make it crouch - wait a bit, scroll the view around, or whatever - click the soldier again - the soldier will stand up I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, but if it's intentional, then I consider it to be a misfeature, as I often make my crouched soldiers stand up by mistake e.g. when I don't notice the soldier is already selected and click again. It is especially annoying if the soldier crouched behind a cover with few TUs remaining and this misfeature results in the soldier standing up and not being able to crouch again. If it's intentional, then please at least do something to prevent it from being triggered so easily (either configurable, or change the click to a double-click).

This is a bug (or a feature gone wrong). There are more things you cannot do, you cannot relocate the aircraft, you cannot reposition soldiers in Chinook. It's also the same if fuel is less than 100%.

It's hard to judge without trying it out for real, but I think I'd consider this to be unnecessary screen clutter. Barring the panel, it would be the only other UI element in GC, and it'd probably catch attention repeatedly (e.g. during view scrolling, the fact that it's not moving and in the corner would probably make me automatically notice it all the time). So I'd like to have a way to get rid of it entirely, meaning not even minimized. Alternatively, maybe the button for minimizing could be somewhere on the panel, where it wouldn't visually get so much in the way. But is this actually needed for Veteran+ ? It doesn't really say anything that an experienced player wouldn't already know or find out. Some of the useful things like holding UFO for 5 turns can be in the GC loading tips, or in the explanatory tooltips. Moreover, things like "Capture Praetor (Optional)" gives away information, so it may be ok for lesser difficulties, but I wouldn't want to know.

I actually don't have a single heavy weapons soldier in my squad, as I don't consider somebody with a rocket launcher with a single shot to be a heavy soldier. LAW (which I'd consider to be about as effective as the game's rocket launcher) is less than 3kg according to wikipedia, so I can't imagine having that on the back being any noticeable burden to the average soldier. You could argue that this is a game and I shouldn't insist on reality, but I can use the same argument the other way around. For example, my assault soldiers have assault rifles and a shotgun on the back, and my shield guys have assault rifles and shield on the back, and they all switch before breaching (and mind you, it means they carry only very few grenades, so I actually have to juggle it carefully as soon as I start equipping armor, and don't me started on the trouble with laser clips). You could argue that a soldier shouldn't carry that much, but if this change will mean they won't, I'll simply dump the secondary equipment in the Chinook and run back to it before breaching. Or maybe I can give up on soldier roles and just give everybody the same generic stuff. It won't add anything to the game except for annoyance, so the game actually becomes worse. If I have only a single sniper and single rocketeer in the squad, they're next to useless, because they'd have to run around to wherever they're needed, which may take ages. Or I can't split up, which means the ground combat will take longer. One way or another, again, the game gets worse. I thought the basic idea was that the soldiers are fighting an enemy that is superior in many ways. That means that nobody should be fine by themselves (and especially a shield guy with insufficient firepower). A lone soldier entering a building with an Andron inside should be as good as dead (and you said that aliens should sometimes lurk inside buildings, didn't you, so that should mean they will need cleaning). That yet again can be solved by proceeding slower with the combat, again with the consequences. Unless you want higher difficulties to be hard because of being annoying rather than actually being difficult. That's why I'm providing feedback.

I find that way too low. 50 STR is about the average starting strength, and 22.5kg means armor, assault rifle and one extra clip. And nothing more. Even for 70 STR, which is pretty good, that means two extra clips instead of one and 3 grenades and that's it. That means that weapon specialists will be awfully expensive, because they'll be useless for carrying equipment for normal fights. I'm already sometimes stretched as it is with 8 soldiers where 6 of them are capable of carrying assault rifles (plus 2 snipers). Now, if I also want a shield for breaching and a rocket launcher for emergencies (and I'd actually prefer pairs), how am I supposed to search complex industrial maps when half of my tiny squad cannot even do anything safely without getting an escort?

Not for me. If you try the save game from http://ge.tt/9zoOO8D1/v/0 and walk up Leonid Korsak to the door and open it, he won't be fired upon. He has only 44 reflexes, which is not much, and had only 19TU left after opening the door, rendering him unable to fire. Moreover, setting up this save showed how exploitable it is that aliens end their turn facing the nearest opponent. If I move the other soldier close to the ship from a side, opening the door is as safe as it can be.

By the way, could these changes mean also that opening door would (=could) trigger reaction fire? I think this system would make it more fair, and the open-unload-close cycle feels like an awfully cheap exploit.

I'd like to suggest two small changes that should make it easier to provide save games, as those as often asked for when reporting bugs. - Make it possible to turn off Ironman even for Insane. Especially now that the experimental patch makes the previous Veteran to be Insane. E.g. I myself play Ironman style even though I have that checkbox turned off, and this would help also with cases where somebody loses the whole game because the game crashes. It's ok if this is enforced for the final release, but I don't quite see the point now. - Make the game autosave more often. There are many cases where the save needs to be done before a problem occurs, but that's hard to do without a crystal ball. It would be useful if the game had additional autosave slots for right before ending turn in ground combat, right before entering air combat, and possibly more (right before starting ground combat, right before research is finished, etc. - I guess Matthew could have a good idea what saves he asks most often for). Saving, at least for me, is just a short moment, so I wouldn't even really notice. If it's not so for some people, this would be at least useful as a debugging option in gameconfig.xml .

Or it could trigger reaction fire. After all, if you walk up to the UFO door and then start fumbling for that flashbang, you should make an easy target for a moment .

You probably want to look at the experimental patches from Chris. Some more wishes ?

It technically might work as "intended", but one Condor and one Foxtrot being enough for "destroying" 3 (heavy)fighters feels like exploit to me.

Do you have the same feeling also after you start equipping your soldiers with armor? I certainly don't.

I don't think it's specific to any alien type. Try the save here: http://ge.tt/1DzzJtC1/v/0 . After you load, make Josh Eales close the door, get away from the smoke and wait several turns until you hear screams. If you open the door after that, some of the aliens will be in this strange state (not necessarily all of them though).

Incorrect (steps, door opening, firing, deaths), incorrect and incorrect.

Yes, because earphones are so expensive and nobody has any at home. Nothing, because they cannot achieve that? First of all, I don't think knowing exactly what kind of damage a shot achieved in a game is anywhere near the top of their problems, and second, they already lose enough information in the game as it is (everything during 'Hidden Movement', for starters). Unless you actually know what it's like for hearing-impaired to play the game, you shouldn't try to play this card. If you think that pretty much everything in the game is communicated visually, you should actually check. You cannot have that, unless you want everything in the game to have a label, which I think we all know how that's likely. Read Ol'Stinky's post, in case you missed it somehow. Everybody does, so do I. But that doesn't mean we get it. Would they? If the shots do have at least some effect on the target (which they do), maybe they'd be rather a fool not to spend that time shooting. And there's a difference between guessing what a weak point is and knowing exactly everything about it.

I didn't ask for all the stat names to be in full, only when there's space for it. Like with the old (current) screen, where if two attributes improve, it spells them out, if six improve, it's shortened. I don't know if it's automatic for native speakers, but I'm not, and even though I have a lot of experience with English, seeing "ACC 60 RFL 55" for the first time would still get "huh?" from me, given that it's not labelled in any way (and you presumably don't want to waste space on that). Not that I wouldn't figure it out, but the code for this is already in anyway. Three? So it'll overlap if there will be more, which I think is possible (e.g. # of missions, # of kills, 5 aliens in one mission, wounded, special mission).

They should buy a cheap headset? I myself find it amusing asking for seeing all these details in the game. Fighting in this game is supposed to be a bloody scary battle, not some spreadsheet management. Carefully checking exactly how big holes are in an alien's armour is the last thing soldiers would be bothered with. One doesn't need to know everything. In fact, it's far better gamewise for most people if they don't.

Now or not? There's something missing.

You must be kidding. Ammo management in OG was a tiresome hassle that added nothing to the game but frustration when one forgot to check on something as "expensive" as a smoke grenade and had to wait several days to get resupplied. And _everything_ in the OG is forgivable. While in most games one has to start over after a screw-up, in the OG you can keep going and make up for it, and that was an excellent feature that even Xenonauts right now doesn't have balanced properly right now. But indestructible planes are actually about right the way they are - since unlike in the OG air combat is actually challenging here, everybody is bound to lose them on occassion, and if they'd need to be rebuilt, the game would be either unplayable, or the cost of that would need to be reduced so that effectively the game would be just like it is now, except that you'd need to do manually what the game now does automatically. I've never played the Firaxis game, and I played OG even this, er, I mean last year. If there's anything ridiculous here it's considering beancounting of ammunition that costs next to nothing to be an important feature. And BTW I think you'll find enough people who'll claim that will all the air combat and so on Geoscape is actually more important in Xenonauts than in the OG.

I think the HP line shouldn't be there for dead soldiers - the value is obvious and redundant, and it'd also make it easier to see such soldiers in the list (the colors alone don't quite do it for me). Also (if it's not only because this is just a mockup) the stats should be still spelled completely if there's enough space, like in the current screen - not everybody knows outright what "RFL 55" is.