llunak

It's about the same with me (one of the many best things about original game is that can be played over and over again, right ? ). And when starting with Xenonauts I felt the same way about it. But meanwhile I've already moved a bit, and I think you just need to realize that although this is a lot like the original game, it's not exactly the same, and it probably shouldn't be. I actually still dislike some things about this game, but if you give it more time, you should find that some of the things you see as good or bad are so only because you're used to them that way. That's actually one of the things that I now think Xeno does a lot better. Foxtrot is not not really a plain upgrade, and if you use the proper weaponry for it (Sidewinders instead of Avalanches), it can kill the easiest UFO quite easily. And it's not really rock/paper/scissors, a pair of Condors can still down even a Cruiser if they have Alenium explosives and manage to catch up with it twice, and a pair of Foxtrots can stop aerial bombing even if the bomber has fighter escorts. I'm not sure if the cruiser thing is wanted, but the bomber case leads to interesting choices - will you rush them past the fighters and risk getting them shot down, hoping they'll at least manage to launch the torpedoes in time? That said, currently air combat feels like a costly part of the resource management. No, sorry, it was a strategy that was completely lame and made both funding and artifact recovery next to irrelevant. The only thing it did to depth was removing from it. Many of those should be impossible one way or another - the reason that page exists is because the original game, once you get the hang of it, is ridiculously easy even on fixed Superhuman, so somebody wanting a challenge needs to explicitly make their game harder. It just doesn't make sense to be able to fight off late phase of the war with just interceptors and other plain human technology. On the other hand, I think Xenonauts takes this too far and the curve is way too steep. Ah yes, I'd agree here, especially given that this all originally was Laser Squad 2 and everything around it was flavour. But I hope the devs can balance this right.

No. Air superiority seems to be already important enough to be the highest priority (at least I pour most resources into it whenever I can), so making something else less important is not going to change the importance of the already most important thing. Reducing the ramp-up in ground combat (or anywhere) would only make the game less susceptible to missing some important advance and failing completely because of it. For example, I think I might have already lost my current game, since now I get noticeably better equipped and more tough aliens than before and given the time and costs to manufacture anything, I probably can't catch up anymore. FWIW, the game feels to me rather susceptible to fatal mistakes, unlike the OG which was much more friendly in making things gradually harder and there weren't any sudden changes (anything new first appeared only sparingly) or all-or-nothing situations. I once lost a research base in OG on Superhuman, it took more than a month to rebuild it, and I still could continue the game. I don't know if it's on purpose, but I can't imagine surviving anything like that here - besides the current game I've already practically lost a game because Sebillians attacked my primary base, rushed the command center against ballistics and I didn't have resources to continue with my remaining bases; I once got all my best soldiers wiped out in a terror missions where I first time met Androns; I'm quite sure the first time I met a plasma cannon was during a terror mission too; and I could only be grateful Repears were disabled in the build where the first time I met them was during my base defence. I know veteran is supposed to be at least a bit tough, but although I mostly find it easy, there are times when I think it's too tough for the wrong reasons.

No, I don't know if this is a bug or not. According to both what's written in the Xenopedia and my understanding of principles flashbangs should work here, so if something doesn't work but it should, it's a bug to me. I can't tell if this is intentional for whatever reason or if this is really a mistake e.g. because weapon fire suppression and stunning are handled by the same code which doesn't make the distinction.

Apparently throwing a flashbang doesn't do anything to a reaper. That's presumably because the Xenopedia claims that they "possess only rudimentary swarm intelligence, making them fearless and difficult to suppress". The point is, intelligence has something to do with supressing only with weapons fire, but flashbangs have nothing to do with intelligence whatsoever, as they are purely physical/biological - they temporarily blind the eyes, deafen the ears and disrupt the sense of balance, something to which Reapers should in fact be even vulnerable, given that they are "possessing well-developed sensory organs". Even for gameplay reasons I see no reason why they should be immune to flashbangs - they can be horrible enough as they are, soldiers will not have infinite amounts of flashbangs, and if somebody manages to hit a Reaper with a flashbang, they very well deserve the halved TU, especially given that throwing the grenade cost a number of TUs too.

But there is already extra cargo, as StellarRat has pointed out, it's just that it's rather inconvenient to use. Besides, all my soldiers except for snipers actually carry rifles as their primary weapon and have their speciality in the backpack, they don't even need to be that strong to handle it. So this would be just a convenience feature (and it presumably makes it even less of a priority if it's not easy to implement).

I don't think anybody has said that doing ground missions causes penalties on its own. The point is that doing ground missions results in negatives as a side effect, and sometimes these negatives can be so large that one will in fact airstrike the site not in order to save time, but in order to gain a better result. Which is IMO just plain wrong for the game. Consider these two possibilities: 1) UFO is shot down and airstrike is done. There's relation boost for it, there's money for it. No negatives (except for not getting as much money as possible, but I'll get to that). 2) UFO is shot down and a ground mission is done. In the ideal case, the advantage is that new technology is gained (which is not that often), soldiers will be improved as a result and more money will be made by selling stuff, but there are so many things that can reduce this: - soldiers die - there go the stat improvements - equipment that need to be manufactured gets destroyed - have few soldiers with laser weapons die in an explosion and the money loss is bigger than the gains - alien equipment to be sold may be destroyed during the mission, reducing the money gain, e.g. once aliens start to use grenades too, it's either giving aliens an advantage, or destroying their equipment - there's a chance of getting relation penalty for civilians dying, which sometimes cannot really be helped - did I forget anything important? Now, seeing these two options, why should players be tempted to do more ground missions than strictly necessary, if doing that is risky and can potentially result in a much worse outcome than blowing up the site from a safe distance? Yes, ok, players can do ground missions all the way if they want, but why should they, if a much better strategy seems to be aiming for air dominance and doing only the few ground missions that are really necessary? Given that ground combat should be the core of the game, and players should be afraid of the aliens, this both discourages doing what the game should be about and reduces game immersion. In short, it seems that in the current game the air option is way too overpowered and doesn't just serve the original purpose of skipping unimportant ground missions. IMO ground missions should significantly contribute to funding, and the gains from a ground missions should be still significant compared to just shooting something down and airstriking it, even if the ground missions is not performed perfectly. After all, if the crashsite is not important enough for a ground mission, then presumably the player is not really interested in the gains from it or finds them not to be worth the effort, so why should the gains for it to be big? And, thinking of it, since this is meant for skipping unimportant ground missions, it shouldn't be possible to just airstrike first let's say 5 UFOs of each type, otherwise this is again just cheap gains that feel like working around the game. It should be ok to airstrike the 12th light scout, but it should not be ok to airstrike the 2nd landingship.

Arguments based on how things work in reality work only so far, and I think they don't work here, in a game where one helicopter is sent where otherwise a small army would probably show up. For example, since some aliens are staying in their ship the whole time, any airstrike to kill them would need to be devastating, powerful enough to destroy anything inside the UFO, including anything of value. Trying to call it 'recovery mission by the national forces' doesn't work either, why call the Xenonauts if some local army can do it as well? It's also unlikely anybody would be able to tell for how long a crash site is going to stay or whether the aliens are going to self-destruct, because nobody can see what's going on inside the UFO without shooting everything in their way first. And e.g. Androns are unlikely to die from oxygen poisoning. The airstrike option is a device that tries to improve the gameplay, and so it primarily matters to discuss if it helps or not, and here it matters to discuss if automatic airstrike is worth it or not. And, as I said above, I think it isn't: - you can airstrike anything right after it's been shot down, so there's little to be gained from it being automatic - if you don't airstrike it immediately, you presumably have other plans with it, and if the site disappears before you manage to do it, why should the game reward you for missing out? - removing the airstrike option would be confusing, because it would make some people think they need to do all ground missions, so it'd be back to square one and there goes the argument about it being simpler and easier for beginners (and you can write it down somewhere as much as you want, some people would miss it)

Do those have any effect on regions besides the one where they take place? If not (which I'd guess is the case), then I seriously doubt they'll make any difference. Already with 3 well-placed bases it's possible to have a reasonable coverage for more than half of the regions, where these terror sites of course will not take place with sufficient air superiority, and these regions should make up for the rest of regions. Especially given that uncovered regions will probably be lost one way or another - in my veteran game, by November, all my undefended regions are about to drop their funding below 100k$, making them next to irrelevant even in a normally played game. Belmakor, out of curiosity, could you please list your funding per region after November?

I know what you're talking about. But you seem to be missing my point - _how_ is the computer supposed to know you didn't want to do a ground mission, especially since you didn't airstrike it yourself the moment the UFO was shot down? If you shot down 3 UFOs at the same time, wanted to do ground missions for all of them, so didn't airstrike any of them, and failed to get to some of those in time, why should you be rewarded for failing?

What if you do want to recover a site but fail to get there in time? Either you airstrike the site immediately when you see/decide you're not going to do a ground attack, in which case this is not going to buy you much, or you intentionally delay/avoid the airstrike because of a ground attack, in which case the aliens are not going to tell that they're about to leave and that you'd better bomb them.

This is a follow-up to my opinion that the funding may be still broken (posted at http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8344-V20-Experimental-Build-8-Available!?p=94226&viewfull=1#post94226 by mistake instead of here). In short, I think the economic model is now doable, but it probably should be tonned down a bit on easier levels, at least initially (if it's not already better there). I tried to start two games, one again just for the first 2 months, without any ground attacks. This time I started in the US (which I consider to be a poor choice, but I except a number of players will do that). During the entire September I detected only a single UFO heading for South America and that was all, not a single kill (no terror or bombing either). Summary screen was of course awfully red and I ended with -300k$ change. However, during October I got ready another base in Mongolia and I actually ended October with no significant decrease in funding. I didn't continue this testing game any further. For the second game I played normally, including ground combat, research, etc. I play on Veteran (which may be perhaps still a bit easy for me, but Ironman makes testing things hard). Primary base located in Libya and although initial budget is not enough, I managed to gain enough money in ground combat missions to have a second base intercepting already during September. I shot down 9 out of 12 UFOs detected (i.e. not counting those with only events). My funding change was only -67k$ (roughly +20k$ in each areas I covered, and various losses elsewhere: NAm: -21, EU: +20, NAf: +24, In: +17, SU: +17, SAm: -10, CAm: -67, ME: +24, SAf: 0, Au: -70). I had only 1.3M upkeep (5 Condors, 15 scientists, 15 engineers, 14 soldiers), so the 1M$ profit allowed me to start another base in North America. During October I shot down 12 out of 18 UFOs detected (I think, based on their serial numbers, I think I shot down few UFOs above sea). I had 2 aerial bombings in North America out of my effective reach by their time, but I had already stable funding with about no change in total (NAm: -121, EU: +19, NAf: +50, In: +16, SU: +67, SAm: -40, CAm: -33, ME: +49, SAf: -8, Au: 0). By now my upkeep 2.1M (7 Condors, 3 Foxtrots, 15 scientists, 15 engineers, 19 soldiers) almost matched funding 2.4M, so this appears to be the ceiling for easy expansion. Halfway in November, with 7 Condors and 5 Foxtrots, predicted funding change is already +75k$, and my upkeep equals the funding income, so any actual development money comes from ground combat missions (I only airstrike if I can't do a ground combat mission). I'll see how the game continues. All in all: - It appears that it's possible to have a stable budget with this new economic model, but it's not exactly easy, and fast expansion is probably a necessity. It's quite probable to have one or more regions drop their funding to only 100k$ by the end of November or even October. - Air combat difficulty seems about right to me. I occassionally lose and have crashlanded interceptor(s), but I can keep up and shoot down most UFOs that I detect. (Ground combat is easy in comparison to this, especially because of aliens often sitting in their cover and not minding getting shot at from a safe distance until getting enough hits to die.) This is however on the Veteran difficulty with me playing it (I can play Superhuman in UFO:EU with ease). If hunting down UFOs and the economy are this tough on easier difficulties too, I think less experienced players won't be able to keep up. And having a game like I had with the starting base in the US, the first report about decreasing funding by 300k$ would have probably made some players quit the game. So, as already said in my previous post, I suggest to reduce the negative impact on funding by some factor during first few months, at least on easier difficulties. Otherwise I think the margin for error is rather small. I hope this helps.

I disagree. This is almost like asking to be allowed to do a ground combat on a site that's about to expire. Managing crash sites is a matter of prioritization.

You can apparently cancel disengage by clicking on UFO - see http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/8300-V20-7-Air-Combat-Cannot-cancel-retreat-even-when-having-enough-fuel .

That names site is odd. Some of the names listed there I've never even heard of. I think people would consider those to be actually foreign (some other Slavic country) or historical (which is probably the case, given the site says it's for role-playing). I can't imagine ever meeting or even hearing of somebody with some of the names, the few names that I removed from your list in the patch seem perfectly normal compared to these (and I really did remove only few that seemed too far). Oh, so it's possible to have two nationalities[*] with the same name, so that there's grouping? I had a problem that could be fixed by this already when I was fixing the oficial name list[**], but this wasn't mentioned to me. I'll give it a shot somewhen. [*] I guess that should be technically called citizenship (Czechoslovakia), nationality being actually either Czech or Slovak. [**] If I just fix your list, will that also make it in the oficial game?

I wonder, how do you collect the names for this? I've had a look at the nationality for me, and I see a number of issues there: - various mistakes in names, some misspelled, some being in an incorrect form (female surnames are irregular enough to be hard for anybody who doesn't speak the language, several of the male surnames listed are not in their nominative form) - a couple of the names are more or less foreign, some are clearly wrong, some are possible but atypical (e.g. as if a US soldier was named Dubois) - some of the names are diminutive or very rare/obsolete (e.g. Silvestr is nowadays seen by most people simply as the name of the last day of the year) - some of the names are duplicated, I assume that's to make them appear more often You can find a patch adjusting these at http://pastebin.ca/2504389 (I fixed the mistakes, adjusted the duplicates and removed atypical ones /only the ones I find very atypical/). I suggest to try to use most-used-names sites for this, preferably in the actual language (Google Translate should be your friend there).

It is possible to walk though a large rock as if it wasn't there at all. Saved game: http://ge.tt/3DZomn91/v/0 , picture http://picpaste.com/bug24-9h1ouOI2.jpg . Some other these rocks in this map appear to work fine (but e.g. the topmost one is broken as well).

But that's the best outcome and it means you did your job well. Players generally just want the aliens to put up a good fight, not have soldiers instagibbed from a distance by one grenade tossed by an alien so tough that it takes barrage from half the squad or several grenades to put it down. So the better you make the AI, the better the game will be, even if it'll mean the aliens will have weaker stats (which on its own can make the game better in some ways, for example I now consider keeping TUs for reaction fire to be practically pointless, because it never stops aliens from doing whatever they are going to do, even if it's the most frail Caesan hit by the supposedly powerful sniper rifle). And mind you, I do like it if aliens score as well, having just about one casuality for each 4-5 missions in 20.7, where I had to stay at ballistics and jackal armour for the entire 3 months until the economics collapsed, yet the aliens didn't feel like shooting back at my soldiers firing at them from their covers, that felt kind of weak for veteran difficulty. So keep up the good job .

I have a save game here: http://ge.tt/8fU94d91/v/0 And I swept the battlefield twice, so if the alien is there somewhere, it is indeed well hidden, like inside a big rock.

I don't want to make quick judgements, since this is based just on a couple of minutes of playing, but it's quite possible that the funding is still unbalanced enough to make the game eventually unplayable. I just did a quick test of quickly playing through September, just to see how funding now works. Veteran difficulty, I only placed the first base in Libya, built up to 3 Condors and 2 Foxtrots and hunted down almost all UFOs that came into my range (10 out of 12), but did no ground missions (not even airstrikes, now that I think of it), and there also were no terror sites or aerial bombings. And the total funding after the month went down by 175k$ : NAm: -85k, EU: +10, NAf: +17, In: -33, SU: +33, SAm: -70, CAm: -83, ME: -12, SAf: +60, Au: -10. In other words, I lost about 75k in each of Americas (that were completely out of my reach), and with the exception of Middle East I was somewhat positive in all areas I at least partially covered. I didn't try a single ground mission, so I don't know how much it would improve, but I guess it wouldn't be much. The initial money also wasn't enough to start more than one new base, so I don't see a way to have a better coverage. Is that to be expected? If I'm extrapolating this right, this should mean that at least 3 bases are needed to stabilize the funding, which means that at least 2 months some regions will have serious drop in funding, until it's possible to cover them. And that's being optimistic about the base buildup, I expect at least part of the money will have to be spent on development instead of expansion. As I said, I don't want to come to quick conclusions and will test this in practice, but if the idea is that funding is the main source of income, then IMO it should not drop so badly if the player does at least somewhat decently. EDIT: Thinking more about this, I might have been too quick with jumping to conclusions after all. If I start with 2.5M$ funding and it drops this way for first 3 months, it'll drop just to 2M$, and after that it will (hopefully) increase, so this probably won't make the game unplayable. Still, if proper playing of the game confirms this, I think this is not good for player motivation, seeing such a huge drop despite doing reasonably well (given the possibilities). In that case I suggest to reduce negative funding effects by a certain factor during the few first months (and this factor itself would be decreasing towards 1, making aliens effects eventually reach their full effect on the funding). This should make the players feel better, in practice it shouldn't matter more than adjusting initial funding, and the lore explanation can be that since Xenonauts are the only ones actually having some kind of success, even regions without cover can initially keep faith in them and only later get really upset that nothing is done to help them.

I can , but that's probably because I play it occassionally even nowadays. I don't remember ever seeing one alien to run out though. Well, no. It's just that, without knowing the internals of the game, it seems noticeably less work than any of these (and to me about as difficult as implementing optional unlimited ammo). But if you think it's not even worth that effort, fair enough.

Question of the day: How many people have noticed that 20.7 works exactly this way? Yes, in case you haven't noticed, aliens already do normally run out of ammo and can't even reload the single extra plasma battery they have. And they do act kinda stupid when out of ammo, but has anybody complained about that except for me? So I think you overestimate both the difficulty and the impact. If aliens learn how to reload (and I don't see why that should be technically difficult) and get enough extra clips to have say at least 30-50 shots, I think that's good enough for most people. And those who would notice would just as well notice that aliens cheat with ammo.

You can redefine keys in game options (where the action for the default space key assignment is actually called 'reset view'). Just set space to mean the slowest speed instead.

This feature would be actually rather easy to implement. Since the game lore says that only Xenonaut interceptors are somewhat capable of taking on the UFOs and standard interceptors get fried if they get close, the Allies button would just increase the casualities number by the count of pilots who were called in and didn't make any difference. Simple as that . I don't think having tons of ideas matters at this point. If you want to make a difference, try spending tons of time with the map editor.

I'm talking about the fact that if you start an Ironman game over and over, enough that preparing the roles is a significant part, you are not really playing Ironman. And non-ironman should not need it - just do it once and save the game. No. My point is that if Ironman requires a perfect start to be doable, the right fix is changing that, rather than make players save 3 minutes every restart that should not be needed in the first place. At least, that is one of the great things about UFO:EU - as long as the overall performance is good enough, occassional screwups, no matter how big, don't mean the game is over. And as far as I can tell, Xenonauts is mostly on the right track here as well.

Ironman is not supposed to be friendly . Isn't the point of it to go with whatever happens? Why should the game help with avoiding its own rules? Besides, if such an early screwup really means the game has to be started over, maybe there's a different problem with the game than a default loadout.