llunak

"stupidly heavy and inaccurate" is spot on - personal minigun is movie nonsense and it's completely unrealistic for Xenonauts. The second sentence should say "most soldiers wouldn't be even able to carry this, let alone fire it". That's against the lore. Read the first sentence of the Xenopedia article.

Sorry, if this is not because of getting stuck in an object, then this is not a duplicate of mine, as I assumed after reading this first.

In the OG this depended on how much damage the UFO took before it went down, so maybe it's similar here too. If you hit a Light Scout with 5 Sidewinders at the same time, it will be completely destroyed, so my guess would be that minor/severe damage depends on this as well (with some chance involved perhaps).

If you have a soldier wounded in a ground combat mission, they cannot be fully healed up (as indicated by a part of the health bar going black). However, if such a soldier is taken into another ground combat, that part of the health bar is only gray, and the soldier can be easily fully healed up. Which means that it is rather easy to get elite injured soldiers immediately back into battles, and this makes the injured status somewhat pointless. Especially given that if the soldier is quickly healed in the first ground combat, they'll rarely end with less than 50% health that'd make them impossible to take into another ground combat. As a fix, I suggest that at the very beginning of each ground combat mission, soldiers which don't have full health have the missing health set as not being possible to heal (i.e. ensure that it's black again instead of gray).

One can use the same logic for the opposite claim - if you rarely need more than 40 seconds, what's the point of burning the fuel so fast, when burning it more slowly wouldn't actually make a big difference? Well, except for actually having the fuel to do any meaningful maneuvering or not having the game do suicidal retreats, of course.

I'd guess the point is that the mod says it is supposed to add more realism to the game, and 40% is very unrealistic, even 20% is. Soviet Union in WW2 had a number of female soldiers/pilots/whatever and I don't think they came anywhere close.

If there is a squadron of (heavy)fighters on an air superiority mission, they try to attack any squadron I send somewhere. However, if my aircraft simply retreat from the air combat, they start being ignored by the UFO fighters, even if I order my squadron to continue their original mission. Steps to reproduce: - have UFO on air superiority mission (let's call it UFO-1) - send e.g. a Foxtrot to attack some other UFO (let's call it UFO-2) - UFO-1 will go after Foxtrot and start air combat - immediately make the Foxtrot retreat from air combat - when the air combat finishes, the Foxtrot will be set to return to base, and UFO-1 will not attack it again - order the Foxtrot to go after UFO-2 again - UFO-1 will still ignore the Foxtrot I understand that this was presumably coded in so that air superiority UFOs would not hunt retreating interceptors endlessly (although, is that really bad ? ). But they should not ignore interceptors that no longer return to base, as that's very easily exploitable.

I think the basic rule is that you need to watch your expenses compared to funding and not over-extend. I'm nearing end of December on Veteran, I keep it on about breaking even, and I'm considering 4th base in January (you can try the save in http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8592-V20-stable-24-12-2013-Ground-Combat-Possible-to-exit-Shrike-through-walls if you want to compare ). An important part of me keeping up with it is however doing as many ground missions as possible (for the extra money which actually pays development) and being rather good at taking down many UFOs effectively. And the fact that the AI in the ground combat is currently easy to snipe probably helps too . Few things which might help you: - You don't actually need air dominance or to take down every single UFO. I would say shooting down more than half of them is okay (I get like 3-4 out of 5 I'd say). - It really helps to be very efficient with aircraft. I always wait for all UFOs in the wave to show up and then prioritize. I always try to first attack UFOs that are close and generally attack when UFOs are headed my way (or guess their path and head them off) rather than chase them, in order to maximize the number of sorties. I have generally 2xCondors and 2xFoxtrots in each base, Condors can easily take out anything light or escorts, pair of Foxtrots can shoot down anything bigger if you keep up with missile technology. - Do not risk aircraft carelessly. My Condors rarely go in fair 1-on-1 fights, crashed aircraft downtime is so long that it's sometimes better to let the UFO get away. But I've already flown in a pair of Foxtrots against escorted UFOs few times if it was critical (incoming base assault, aerial terror), with sufficient skill they can sometimes even make it back home. - I use aircraft as the defense against base attacks. It's possible to guess which UFOs might be dangerous, and it's a pretty safe way. I find extra soldiers in secondary bases not be worth the money (and base attacks are dangerous carnages anyway). Although, now that I think of it, I built a pair of missile defenses in each base, but that was probably a silly waste of money. - If the wave includes UFOs on air superiority missions (3 (heavy)fighters), I always attack those first. 3 Condors or (2 Condors and 1 Foxtrot running around in the air combat as a bait) can deal with them easily if you are skilled enough with air combat. - Being skilled in air combat helps in general (I've already downed even bigger UFOs by repeated Condor attacks with enough maneuvering). If you want tips, 'Xenonauts declassified' on youtube should find you videos with some tricks. - I don't rush scientists or engineers, as I can keep up even if they go slowly (fixed AI may change that though). - I try to avoid getting new things with high upkeep in the last third of a month. When building a new Foxtrot near the end of a month, giving it less engineers to work on it can time it so that it's ready on the 1st day of the new month. - It's quite normal that you lose some funding in the first 1/2 months. But I think you don't need to worry too much about doing poorly. If the Geoscape situation is not noticeably easier on Normal difficulty than it is for me on Veteran, then this part probably needs balancing anyway. Heck, if the ground combat AI now gets fixed to actually fight back, Geoscape may need balancing even on Veteran.

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8555-V20-Stable-24-12-2013-Ground-Combat-Soldier-can-run-inside-an-object-(gets-stuck) already has a testcase. It is not specific to any room, it's a movement bug.

It might make sense to wait until V20 gets the AI fixed. Right now, if you use cover, V20 is rather boring due to AI's reluctancy to fire. Also, as a nitpick, "over and out" is movie nonsense. It's either over or out.

Saved game here: http://ge.tt/1HKuRyB1/v/0 There is a tile in this ground combat where it's not possible to finish the move, but it is possible to pass it. Steps to reproduce: - select Ryan Davies or Itsuko Takada - click on the tile between the soldier and the nearest open door - it is not possible to select the tile for moving there - click on the tile on the other side of the door - it is possible to walk to the problematic tile as a part of a longer movement, if you hit Space at the right time, the soldier will even stop there

This is about the current/maximum health/TU/morale bars in the ground combat main panel. Their current order is health (red), TU (green) and morale (blue), but I find this order unnatural and occassionally confusing. The problem is that they are not in the logical order of importance - the most important is definitely the TU one, as TUs are the most often used and checked, and they matter whenever a soldier does anything. But the TU bar is the middle one and so it is somewhat "hidden". It has already happened to me a number of times that I just quickly glanced at the bars and got the number of available TUs wrong. Moreover this is inconsistent with Geoscape, which lists them in TU/health/.../morale order in both Barracks and Soldier Equipment (and Barracks also calls TUs "APS", but that's a nitpick). Therefore I think the bars should be ordered in the more natural order: TU, health, morale.

Saved game here: http://ge.tt/1CyCqxB1/v/0 It appears that the Shrike has only a large exit at the front and back, but it is actually possible to exit/enter the Shrike also through the side walls. It is also possible to see through them.

Like others, I'm also not exactly thrilled about the reduced cover and improved accurancy, as I fear it might lead to changing the ground combat from tactical game to shooting game, where everybody will just run towards the enemy and hope to get more lucky than the other side. And as StellarRat said, it'd be good to first get just a build with the AI fixed, as that may prove to make the combat deadly enough already. But I have a different proposal for cover and accurancy: If I understand it correctly, right now snap makes a shot less accurate, aim makes shot more accurate, and only after that factors like cover and crouching are applied. Which already makes aim rather pointless, and if accurancy would be made any better, even normal would often barely make up for its TU cost. So how about changing it so that snap/aim not only reduce/improve accurancy somewhat, but also improve/reduce effectiveness of cover? It should make sense even thematically, a wild shot is very unlikely to hit anybody taking a cover, and if there's already a reasonable chance to hit somebody crouched or in cover with a normal shot, taking the extra time to aim should still make a difference. Not way too big difference though, cover still should be useful. One more thing that might make sense to change is shields and grenade overdamage. As far as I understand it, overdamage was introduced because people ended up with soldiers with shields and a load of grenades, running up on the battlefield close to any alien under the shield's cover and bombing the alien up. How about making it more likely to hit a shield? It's a relatively big target after all. That could make shields to be used primarily only during breaches and not all the time, and it'd hopefully also reduce the need for overdamage (which I find really annoying, given how weak the grenades actually are, but it always wrecks all equipment if the grenade manages a kill). Oh, BTW, grenades. How about there being e.g. a 5% chance that even a guard gets a grenade? Right now it's pretty safe to play it's-not-a-soldier-I-can-go-close-without-worries. This game should make people feel tense and uncertainty is a pretty good way to ensure that. As it is said, emotions don't always have to be good, but they should be intense .

It's a bug. As a workaround, click first on any UFO, that'll cancel the retreat.

All missions being defend-the-Chinook doesn't sound like a lot of fun. It certainly wasn't when the terror mission was that way.

But the number of aliens is not the only factor that decides a suitable minimal number of soldiers for a mission to be reasonably doable. The more complex a map is, the more you need to split up your soldiers if you want to sweep the whole battlefield (unless you want to head directly for the UFO and guard your back the whole time). Right now, with the buggy AI making aliens passive and stupid, it's not a big deal, you can easily split up your soldiers and even send one alone (it's sometimes needed in complex maps such as industrial). But if the aliens learn to shoot and move on purpose, a lone soldier may end up being as good as dead. And even relatively open maps such as farm sometimes require splitting up into 2-4 groups, and just 2 soldiers with ballistics may have a hard time keeping away charging Sebillians for several turns until reinforcements come. And of course the more soldiers die during the mission the worse this will become. Because with just 8 soldiers you simply don't have a backup for anything - you either need to perform nearly perfectly, take a much longer time to do the mission (since ironically less soldiers can make the mission take much longer) or you can wrap it up and go home after the first thing goes wrong.

Could somebody please post exactly what changes need to be done to fix the AI? Without my soldiers getting blown up all the time of course.

I understand that, but it's not "obviously". If a corvette with 2 escorts gets shot down, it's mission over, whatever it was. If one out of 3 more-or-less-equal fighters gets shot down, there's no good reason why those 2 couldn't continue (except for it being coded this way now).

In order to get a popup for any icon on the geoscape (change orders for a squadron, see details about UFO, etc.), it is necessary to highlight the icon first, meaning one must click exactly on it. This can be somewhat annoying, especially now that scouts have a very small icon. Moreover, after any such click, one gets to chose with which icon to interact, in case there are several around the point clicked. This has the somewhat funny consequence that it's enough to manage a click on something, even if this something is not the thing wanted. E.g. if there is a large UFO icon and an interceptor near it, it's much easier to click on the UFO first and then select that I in fact want to interact with the interceptor. However, even though clicking on such two near icons brings up a choice for them, clicking inbetwen these two icons does nothing. It should be enough to just click somewhere near any icon for it to activate.

I myself would rather have it always than never. I often find myself repeatedly hitting Q and clicking random location to see if an aircraft I really need is finally ready. If this was configurable and defaulting to off, I can't see people complaining. But maybe an even better idea would be having it listed along the "event" notifications as suggested in http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8518-Aircraft-ready-message .

I had 3 heavyfighters flying around and I had only one Condor and one Foxtrot available, which is not enough to shoot down 3 heavyfighters. But since there was a terror site and they were in the way, I thought that maybe I could manage to shoot them at least one by one. So the Condor and Foxtrot intercepted them. Heavyfighter 1 (I'm not 100% sure, but I think it was number 1) locked onto the Condor, while heavyfighters 2 and 3 went after the Foxtrot, which activated afterburner and lured them away, allowing the Condor to take down the first heavyfighter and then escape with afterburner as well. However, even though 2 out of those 3 heavyfighters still remained fully functional, this fight removed the whole squadron. This is obviously rather exploitable.

Good catch, it is refueling. So this is a part of the bigger bug that an airworthy aircraft can leave for a mission, but can't do simple things like transfer to another base or reorder troops within.

Ok, question of the day - how do I get rid of 6 laser rifles (or 120k$) if I actually don't want to cheat?

If your Chinook is away from base, it is still possible to alter equipment of soldiers it carries. I haven't tried, but presumably this should also make it possible to resupply soldiers if the Chinook lands at several crash sites without stopping at the base. Steps to reproduce: - start a new game, send the Chinook away from the base - go to 'Soldier Equipment' - you can see in the bottom-left view two groups, 'Charlie-1' and 'Unassigned' - the 'Charlie-1' group is grayed-out to show it's inaccessible and the 'Unassigned' group is shown as selected, but the list of soldiers next to it actually lists soldiers in the Chinook - it is also possible to change equipment of these soldiers - if you change it, the soldier will have the new equipment available for a following ground combat mission As explicitly selecting the 'Unassigned' group shows soldiers that are at the base, and after that it's not possible to choose 'Charlie-1' again, it's apparently just a problem with initially showing the wrong list of soldiers.