llunak

That's rather obviously exploitable (get Foxtrot in range, release torpedoes, magically retreat despite all incoming fire). The air combat retreat system IMO works just fine, except for this one problem that makes it horribly broken.

If you abort a mission while still having soldiers outside of the Chinook, their equipment will be recovered, even though it obviously should have been left behind together with the soldiers. Steps to reproduce: - saved game here: http://ge.tt/68my8hB1/v/0 - check that there are only 2 precision lasers in the game, carried by Takeshi Matsui and Nigel Price, besides these two, there are no precision lasers in the stores, being manufactured or otherwise available - send the Chinook to the crash site - in the GC, make sure both Takeshi Matsui and Nigel Price leave the Chinook - abort the mission, check in the confirmation dialog that those two soldiers will be lost - confirm aborting the mission - check the base storeroom - there are 2 precision lasers available

Saved game here: http://ge.tt/68my8hB1/v/0 In this saved game, if you go to 'Aircraft Equipment', select dropships and try to reorder soldiers in Charlie-1, it doesn't work. I have no idea what's caused it. It sometimes happens to me and after some time the problem goes away.

The air combat retreat forced by running low on fuel is VERY bad. So bad that it's worse than if it didn't exist at all. I've lost more interceptors to it doing something stupid than to all other possible reasons combined. If I select 'Yes' in the out-of-fuel-retreat dialog, one of these things happens: - the aircraft gets redirected out of the air combat area in such a poor way that the exit point is so far that the aircraft runs out of fuel completely and crashes. I haven't figured out how exactly the exit point is chosen (it doesn't seem to be towards the base), but sometimes the choice is obviously wrong - I've had already a case where a far corner was chosen and the aircraft would need to fly at least 5 times the distance it was from the nearest end of the air combat area. - the aircraft gets redirected in a way that it'll get in the sights of a UFO that'll take down this sitting duck. As there's no way to cancel this retreat, the aircraft just has to take it. Presumably if there was a squadron of 3 Condors going after a single UFO and this happened to them, the UFO would just shoot them all down for without any hassle, even though it'd make much more sense to sacrifice one of the Condors to cover the retreat. - the aircraft actually manages to get away. Listed for completeness. I actually now usually chose 'No' in the dialog and let the aircraft crash, since that way it'll at least crash after doing something useful, such as shooting down the UFO, instead of just mostly crash after doing something stupid. Given that aircraft cannot stay indefinitely in the air combat even if retreat is chosen and the game counts down the fuel until the aircraft will crash, I fail to see why this is enforced at all. It just doesn't make any sense, as it doesn't add anything except for trouble. I suggest to alter the retreat the following way: - it is always possible to redirect an aircraft, even if it's retreating - possibly alter the automatic retreat dialog to just inform about the situation and suggest what to do That should be all the magic needed, problem solved.

New Condors/Foxtrots always get Sidewinders/Avalanches as weapons, even if there are already better missiles available (e.g. Alenium missiles/torpedoes). It is necessary to manually change them to the better weapons, or use these inferior missiles in a fight. Given that automatic rearming uses already the correct missiles, and that it's not possible to use the old missiles after this, it's apparently a bug that new aircraft get old missiles. Steps to reproduce: - research Alenium explosives - buy a Condor or build a Foxtrot - once the aircraft is available, you can see it has Sidewinders/Avalanches - changing the missiles offers both old and Alenium missiles - once you change to Alenium missiles, it's not possible to go back to old Sidewinders/Avalanches - if you don't change the missiles for whatever reason, the aircraft will use the obsolete missiles during their first fight

Saved game: http://ge.tt/93CgtgB1/v/0 - select Takeshi Matsui - turn him around - a soldier in the landingship's bridge becomes visible , even though the solder seeing it is standing outside of the UFO

If a soldier is ordered to run somewhere where it's still covered by fog of war, soldier can run there, even if there's an object. If the soldier stops there, he'll get stuck. This is very likely also the reason why civilians can sometimes run through closed door or aliens get stuck inside these objects ( http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8274-V20-7-Ground-combat-Alien-inside-an-object ). Saved game here: http://ge.tt/2bDbqgB1/v/0 - select Dave Lepley - order him to run two tiles to the north (i.e. one through the door and one more) - he'll run through the door and run inside a filling cabinet that wasn't visible at the start of the movement - he gets stuck and cannot leave the tile

In this saved game ( here: http://ge.tt/4rq1ogB1/v/0 ) it is possible dupe a laser rifle: - load the game - go to 'Soldier equipment' - select Henry Nelson in the list - select 'Lasers' in the list of weapons - you can see that there are 0 available laser rifles - right-click on Henry Nelson's laser rifle - there is 1 available laser rifle - right-click on the 1 available laser rifle - Henry Nelson will have laser rifle equipped (with 0/9 ammo), but there will be still 1 laser rifle available - and you can keep creating more

There's no initial LOS for soldiers after entering ground combat for me (like this http://picpaste.com/bug25-tzgn59Ax.jpg ) - can somebody confirm? But otherwise LOS works normally, i.e. the obvious workaround is to make soldiers move or turn a bit. So it's not such a big deal in practice, but it's very visible and looks odd.

Still exists in SC3. It's not game-breaking, but it's rather annoying.

If I start ground combat, I cannot move the view using the mouse - throwing the mouse at any screen edge does nothing. The view moves e.g. if I select another soldier using 1-8 keys though. I'm pretty sure this worked in 20.8 , and I think it worked even with SC1.

If that wasn't just a rhetorical question, I've seen enough bugs there were even "fixed" by just running them in a debugger, so that's hard to say. And right now I cannot reproduce the problem anymore no matter what I try . I can try testing this more later, but by this point all testing is probably just a guesswork - if I was a developer working on this, by now I'd be either running this thing in something like Dr.Memory or reviewing all commits in the revision system since the last build that worked.

Chris: I tried running a compilation in the background while loading the game, and I now have a hard time reproducing the crash even in 1920x1080. That, together with FGART's screen recording, could suggest that the problem is likely to show only on faster machines (I have a dual-core Phenom II X2 at 3.1GHz and SSD disk). EDIT: Actually I now have problems reproducing it even normally, so maybe this is nonsense. Well, race conditions are always fun.

As I said, I play on Linux with Wine. As that should mean I run no Windows code itself at all, I doubt this bug has anything to do with the underlying system (unless Wine is this good with mimicking bugs). My guess is that it's a race condition somewhere in the game that's just more or less likely to show up depending on the circumstances.

This is the same like http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8369-V20-8-Ground-Combat-Large-rock-is-not-solid (there's a save and a screenshot). It's always the same kind of rock, I've seen it in both desert and middle-east maps, but not all of these rocks are affected (or maybe there are two kinds of it that look very similar).

I've noticed that with bigger resolution it seems more likely to crash - I can crash it about 1 in 2 loads in 1920x1080, but I have a hard time crashing the load in 1280x1024. However, as this is apparently a race condition, maybe that's just chance playing tricks.

Similarly, you cannot relocate an aircraft while it's in repair, even though it's apparently airworthy enough to take off for combat.

In reality you'd never get a call about expiration. If currently aliens have a clock set up to vanish exactly after 24 hours, then I personally would prefer the dev time spent on making this vary a bit, causing player uncertainty and tension, rather than knowing it'll be handled for sure, causing the player sit back comfortably.

I got this once when I accidentally selected too high resultion in the launcher dialog, so try checking that. I'd guess this is unlikely the game's fault, one way or another.

Well yes, but as I said, the fact that the Chinook has less is exactly what makes the missions grindy for me. And if the aliens learn to deliver a good punch, maybe I won't be the only one - I perhaps may be the only one who carefully clears the map completely including buildings, but I doubt I'm the only one who thinks there's not much tactics in having just 4 soldiers left halfway through the map. It's not that I'd need the numbers in order to win, it just won't take ages that way, even going back to 10 would make a difference. Maybe this could be different per difficulty level? Or, at the very least, this is modable, right? Great to hear that. In case you'd be in need of insidious bastards who'd be good at finding ways to beat the hell of out the aliens, I think I might know one . Yes, that's what I kind of meant to say, if it didn't across the way I put it. I didn't mean to bash the current AI, it's just that as far as actual results go it currently doesn't deliver anywhere near of what it could, and so it is hopefully fixable. I seem to remember somewhere seeing GJ being somewhat disappointed when grenades were nerfed after he had made the aliens too good with them, so this is exactly the case when making the aliens too good would avoid most of these problems and I would love to see such AI beating me (well, not _way_ too good obviously, I still want to win eventually ).

Try the save from http://ge.tt/4Ah34cA1/v/0 , let the Chinook reach the site and start the mission. I get a crash in the last 5-10% of the load bar. And yes, it's random, but I've reproduced the crash already twice, so hopefully you'll get lucky. This is with 1920x1080, running on Linux with Wine (but I don't remember otherwise getting a crash for a long time, so I wouldn't blame my setup).

Don't get me wrong, I really like this game. But while I initially liked all the improvements in the ground combat, the more I play it the more I dislike it, to the point of now finding it worse than the combat in the OG. It's not that it would be bad as such, but I find several issues which make me see the ground combat as much worse than it could be. As I'm fairly new to the game, I'd like to check which of these are intentional, which are known/unknown bugs and which are just me still thinking a bit in terms of the OG. To give you a picture, I occassionally still play the OG even nowadays and I can handle quite easily even Superhuman with xcomutil's altered research (which noticeably prolongs the time before getting armor or plasma weapons). In Xenonauts I play veteran (the plan is to eventually try playing insane, but forced Ironman makes testing hard), I can take down about 4 out of 5 UFOs that I detect and in ground missions I have like 1 casuality per 4-5 missions. I've never really gotten past November as I restarted several times for various reasons. I can't quite give just a short description as it's several problems that all seem related to each other, but I'll try not to make it too long (and I'll leave out the few problems that I don't find so serious that can be kept separate). Aliens are way too passive and although they come across as intelligent they in fact perform worse than the dumb OG aliens. In short, the game feels like turkey shooting rather than desperately fighting off an evil alien menace. Most of the time aliens stay put in cover or run around like chicken and don't even shoot back much. In the OG the aliens just walked some path, if they saw a soldier, they started shooting, then retreated and repeated the same the next turn. Once one gets the hang of it, it's not that hard to beat them, but they still feel dangerous, because they keep shooting if they can, and they can show up somewhere out of sudden. But I don't get this much in Xenonauts: If I keep my soldiers in cover, they almost don't get fired at. I think the AI maybe computes the chance to hit as too low and decides it's better to do nothing at all, rather than at least give it a shot (pun intended ). So I can snipe a Harridan with a precision rifle with just one soldier with a normal rifle, if the soldier is in cover. Or a soldier behind a picket fence can, after several turns, kill an alien behind a rock, even though the alien could wipe out the soldier's cover quickly. The only time aliens at least somewhat fire back is reaction fire (which I guess is automatic). Aliens pretty much don't move during fight in any way that'd matter. I first thought it was because my battle line wasn't giving them much choice, but I even tried with the in-game editor and if I put two soldiers behind cover and next to them 2 'aggressive' aliens behind their cover, they'll just mostly sit there and take the beating until they die. The most absurd case of this I had was when I encountered a group of 2 Sebillians behind a rock and 3 Sebillians inside a building behind a window, and spent more than 20 turns with almost everybody in my squad firing at them until they all finally died. I don't know how the AI works and how much can be realistically expected of AI, so I don't know how difficult it can be to make them flank me, split up or whatever, but they should have done at least something. One exception to not moving seems to be when inside UFOs - there aliens just run back and forth (and mostly don't fire). My soldiers can stand outside, use e.g. a shield and flashbang to take a peek, unload all they can and step aside again. If there's a suitable cover near the (light or normal) scout entrace, I can put somebody there and wait until reaction fire wears down everybody inside. [*]Alien stats seem to be needlessly high. Ok, I play on veteran and aliens have a technological edge, but on the other hand I start against supposedly non-combatants, and moreover the high stats feel more like nuisance rather than threat. This is probably just because the AI doesn't handle the case well, as described above, but the high stats just make sniping passive aliens behind cover take needlessly long. I don't really care how much beating the aliens needs to take, I can usually deliver it one way or another, it's just that from a certain point up it doesn't make any difference. Saving TUs for reaction fire seems to be pointless. I don't think I've seen a single or pair of soldiers even stop an aliens from doing whatever it was about to do, unless it had already been softened up. In the OG saving TUs made sense, because it was possible to kill an alien on a comparable level with one or two shots, even a Superhuman Sectoid could die after a single hit from a standard rifle. It wasn't nowhere certain, but it was a fair chance, good enough to bother with saving TUs. Here, what's the point, if even the fraillest Caesan cannot be stopped by the supposedly powerful sniper rifle? Reapers are terrible, but for the wrong reasons. They can take so much damage that they need either a load of explosives or at least half the squad firing at them. Which means that once a Reaper zombifies a single soldier, it's time to run, even zombies are so tough that there doesn't seem to be a good way to stop it. Actually, there is one and that's abusing the AI. Since Reapers run straight for soldiers, it's enough to stay around the Chinook whenever Reapers are suspected, wait for them several turns and put them down (the remaining aliens, as already said above, will not really interfere). It was scary the first time Reapers got me, but I can't how I could be scared again - from now on I expect to be either annoyed or upset, depending on whether I manage to kill them during the first rounds or not, and after that I'll know the area is clear of them. The Chrysalid, which wandered on the map, felt like a bigger threat despite being weaker (especially in the zombie form), and I'd find Reapers much more scary if they could show up anywhere, even if they'd be noticeably easier to kill. Thinking of it, it's possible that I would find the high alien stats less of a problem if I advanced my soldier weapons sooner, but if I can usually do the job with ballistics, I don't feel compelled to do so. Especially given that manufacturing weapons feels so time and resource expensive (or maybe at least the time problem is a bug - laser rifle reportedly needs 40 man hours but actually needs 40 man days). [*]I often feel understaffed during ground missions. Maybe 8 soldiers do the job for players who somewhat carelessly walk towards the UFO and play on difficulty where they can get away with it, but I like sweeping the battlefield properly. Farm or desert are easy, but e.g. middle east or especially industrial are way too complex maps. Given that aliens are so tough, I don't want to send anyone without backup, so I sometimes have even to resort to leaving somebody watching a chokepoint and having most of my squad running back and forth, making the missions needlessly long. I can't quite imagine to bring the scout car with the squad and have only 6 soldiers (HWPs are the mainstay of my force in the OG and here I don't even bother researching them). Or, if the aliens managed it, have several soldiers killed and finish the mission with a smaller number - it's not enough to clear the map, and it's not enough to breach any UFO and have back covered at the same time. I remember from the demo that there the Chinook could carry 10 soldiers, so I expect this was reduced for some reason, but I don't know why. If it was in order to make the game feel faster, then it actually makes it slower for me. And, by the way, I'd actually like it a lot if the aliens managed like 1-2 kills on average per mission, to give them the right feel. So I'd much rather have a few more soldiers and aliens capable enough to wipe some of them rather than require almost perfect play which would be nothing like the desperate fight it's supposed to be. There are few more things I don't like about the ground combat (maps feel rather repetitive, grenades always blow up everything upon kill despite being actually weak), but they are nowhere near as bad as these, and I think this is already long enough. Now, is there anything in the list above which seems incorrect for some reason, hard to do, me doing something wrong, being intentionally different from the OG, or similar? I've seen some of these problems pointed at in various places in the forums, so I think I'm not the only one. The game shows a lot of promise, so I hope, if it's agreed that these things are problems, that these could be balanced/fixed.

There may be skill in having 3 crash sites and getting to all 3 of them in time with just one transport craft. Or, in some cases, not having the skill and failing to do that in time, and yet still getting a reward for it. Moreover knowing that a site will be taken care of somehow anyway could possibly reduce the feeling of getting overwhelmed by aliens and having to prioritize. But this is such a minor issue that it's probably not worth all this discussion one way or another.

What I meant to say was that there is no rock/paper/scissors, because you can use any of your fighters for any role if you want and are skilled enough. It's just that each of them is more suited for a certain role and less for another. If you like management of resources as much as you say, then consider choosing the proper fighter setup to be another form of resource management. I was disappointed just as well the first time I saw the basic equipment was infinite, but only until I realized that repeatedly checking in the OG that stores have always enough flares and smoke grenades is most of all just an annoyance. Who really wants to count flares that are 80$ each? I certainly don't, if the stores could take it I'd just have bought a big damn load of those and be done with it. I actually now consider this to be one of the great improvements here. There are better games for bean-counting out there. Funnily enough, as much as I originally disliked the airstrike option, I now think that's just thinking in the wrong terms. The point of the game is to defeat the aliens and that won't be achieved by fighting every single scout they send. I mean, if you think about it, who cares? The UFO recovery missions are done for new technology and for resources, there's actually no strategic advantage from doing them, as long as it doesn't hurt public relations too much. In game terms, one or five crashed light scouts normally just don't matter, what you want is to get the means to get rid of the aliens altogether. And people who want to do lost of ground missions (like me) can and will do them, so this looks like win-win. And it's not like the OG was actually different. If I'm not mistaken, UFO:EU can be won by one ground mission on Earth and the double-mission on Mars, if one would be skilled enough to pull off the perfect first mission. I've certainly seen a play-through video where somebody (with lots of saving/loading) finished the game in what would account to about 8(?) minutes of real time playing with 2 missions on Earth and the double one on Mars.