Ashery

Good to hear. Curious as to what the actual issue was, though.

Initially posted this in the release thread, but I figured I post it here as well. From the other post: B Ash Crashingmap.sav B Ash Crashingmap.sav

Looks like I've got my first encounter with a consistently crashing bit of ground combat. All you'll need to do is load the game and end the turn. It's crashed at this exact point three times now and there have been two other crashes from the initial autosave. Edit: And while I'm at it, a rather nasty visual bug on a terror mission. Apparently there are train cars present but not displayed. You can just make out the connection between two undisplayed cars. B Ash Crashingmap.sav B Ash Crashingmap.sav

The new targeting mechanics seem to still be fairly buggy. I've had multiple instances where several high chance shots end up hitting cover despite no block chance displaying. And when I say "high chance shots," it's happened with several consecutive 95% shots. Also, enemies still occasionally move on top of cover and leave me with 0% chance to hit. I heard it mentioned somewhere recently, so but I'm not quite sure if it was others mentioning the problem, you guys thinking you fixed it, or what.

Also, air combat autoresolve seems to have, at least in some situations, swung a bit too far in favor of the alien ships. I've had Foxtrot squadrons take significant damage (Down to 10-30% hp, which means being grounded for a couple days) when dealing with non-dodging UFOs that they can take down in a single torpedo volley (One Fox vs a Scout and two vs a Corvette). The fights are quick and easy so it's not a huge issue, but I figured I'd bring it to your attention in case it hasn't already been mentioned.

Odd little funding bug. New game, usual Crete starting base, and I got absolutely terrible RNG rolls as, up until Sept 22, the only UFOs I even had a chance of downing were two fighters. Needless to say, I was sitting at a rather nice -215k for the month up until this point: Notice the +84k North America funding despite it being impossible for me to reach that area. The events pictured seem to be increasing funding rather than decreasing it. Prior to this series of events, North America had been in the low negatives.

That's a really, really shitty opinion to have, and for a wide range of reasons. One of the primary reasons being what Max_Caine wrote: It's an experimental build. The whole point of releasing experimental builds is to both push some of the bug hunting onto a voluntary subset of their player base and to test on a wider range of systems than the devs have available internally. If you want a more stable version, play the V21 stable release. As others have also said, it's way too late to suggest major gameplay changes. Constantly tweaking fundamental mechanics is what a good number of people refer to as "Development hell" and it's pretty much a death sentence for smaller indie devs. Re:Bugs mentioned earlier: The crouching bug's already been addressed, but I'll throw in more confirmation that the "grenade" bug is still present, and it's present when any weapon is fired at the terrain outside a UFO. Stated in another way, I'll see the fire cursor only when I target a Xenonaut, an alien, or the ground inside a UFO. This happens with grenades, rockets, and rifles.

Serves me right for moving my Colonel HW guy up a couple tiles to avoid stacking three soldiers in a line (Watching a long hall in a large base assault with two snipers and the HW; alien grenade spam has already taken two soldiers due to mistakes on my part), but this is now the second time my sniper has brained a soldier of mine due to friendly fire on a reaction shot. The first was pretty much a rookie, but this time it was my second longest serving soldier...second behind the very sniper that killed'em. It'd probably be easier to implement the threshold instead of redoing the whole cover system so that a unit standing two tiles back from a crouching unit doesn't have the maximum chance of hitting the crouching soldier. Doesn't even have to be a soldier; all cover has this element. The damn sniper has 101 accuracy, too. First time I've rage quit the game.

Ditto. Now my time's getting sunk into battleships and large bases; overbuilt Corsairs and so have limited Alenium for Marauders and such. Bit surprised at how few aliens are outside battleships, though. The base mission was really enjoyable despite its length. Only issue was the usual passive nature of the troops in the command room; made for easy capture of the white dude. Enemies largely stayed near the room they spawned in, though, so being flanked wasn't really a concern (I remember spamming proximity nades in the original to cover my flank, or at least warn me when I'm being flanked).

Looks like Ol' Stinky was having a similar issue and someone advised him to turn off stat tracking, which I'll try out on my next session.

In some ways, the game's less restrictive in base placement than the original: UFOs shot down over water still influence nation funding. So, while you'll lose out on the one time income from the airstrike or alien tech, shooting a Scout down over water could easily be a 50k/month funding swing (Preventing a couple events over water (20k) and the Scout itself (30k)). Not quite sure what to say re: the rest of your complaints...Yea, your initial play will almost always include one or two hangers, but I fail to see what's wrong with that. In almost every game, a predetermined set of opening moves will eventually be found to be the most effective opening strategy. As it stands, there are probably two viable opening strategies: Immediate construction of a second base with two hangers and a radar array or research and hanger expansion of your main base with a focus on keeping upkeep low enough so that you'd be able to build two bases after the next month's bit of funding comes in. The balance issue that needs to be addressed is the ease in which fail cascades can start on the geoscape level. A single bad wave can swing funding down a massive amount, enough such that my monthly income can no longer meet my maintenance costs. And without that monthly income, I can't afford to expand my force, despite that being the one thing that'd keep me afloat. Changing the balance such that ground combat has enough influence on nation rating such that you'd be able to hold on in situations where you lose air superiority is what I'd consider the core geoscape balance issue. UFOs landing more frequently, and landing for longer periods would go a long way towards that goal. As far as pacing goes, perhaps that could be tied to difficulty level? Easy being heavily scaled to the player's level, normal being less so, and veteran and up being as they are now. It goes against what I consider to be the spirit of XCom, but I can at least understand how/why people find the lack of it frustrating.

I had the same feeling around the beginning of January when the game transitioned from me being able to handle nearly every UFO that showed up on radar to barely being able to scratch the surface. However, as I'm now in mid-February, the feeling has long since passed despite still using the same tech (First time playing this far; didn't know what to research). Sure, I still've got a 0% chance to down an unescorted battleship, but there's no longer any sort of dread or urgency felt re:the need/inability to take them down. About the only thing I currently worry about on the geoscape is making sure I down UFOs that I can kill over North America as they're down to 80k funding while Central America is capped at 500k and always seems to be the place I score kills. Hell, I was feeling more overwhelmed in the first couple months when you don't have the cash for expansion and have to eat repeated funding hits to nations outside your initial base than I do now in February. Ground combat also seems a lot less emotional. Probably due to the combination of poor AI function inside UFOs and the fact that these massive UFOs only carry twice the number of aliens that a Scout does. The recent terror mission being the one exception, but that was in large part due to the small map given to me for a mission with ~24 hostiles. At deployment, I think I had line of sight on four or five of'em without moving a single tile. Also, am I the only one with obscenely long unload times? I've got no issues with the loading time, but finishing a terror mission generally leaves me waiting 5-10 minutes to unload the map, and that's not an exaggeration. If my old computer was functioning, I'd just browse these forums during the downtime, but it's not, and there are only so many dishes that need to be cleaned, heh.

Alternatively, instead of that gamey approach, you could feed the player the takeoff timer via the alien communication building (Forget what it's called as I just got access to it). That building's not accessible early on, though, and that's when this issue's greatest... Making them stay grounded if en route also eliminates the chance of your transport being downed. I'd argue for increasing the Chinook's speed and just making landing sites last longer.

Throw in a couple experienced snipers and riflemen that never scout unexplored terrain and there's virtually no risk of losing them while they provide the firepower to completely steamroll the handful of aliens in a small ufo. You might lose a low ranking shield user, but until overdamage goes back in, that's pretty much a non-issue. On top of the small monetary benefit, your highly experienced core gains even more experience.

Uh...I can autoresolve a single Condor vs Scout @ 100% (Plasma cannon + alerium missiles). And you weren't just saying it's a joke: I'm not losing. That's like playing Civ, never settling a second city, and wondering why you never win. The original may have been designed (Or been broken enough, depending on your view) to permit a single base, but it's not viable here. Even if the game's changed such that there are more landed missions and you're able to use those to generate enough nation rating to offset air loses, you'll still need multiple bases due to the speed of the Charlie. I was simply stressing that the ongoing activity is what matters to the humans. A set of ground combat encounters is pretty meaningless in their view of the grand scheme of things. Edit: Bumping up to just 3-3.5x the cash reward would be substantially more than 200k a month. A single medium craft would be nearly 80k. Making ground combat that much more rewarding doesn't quite force the player to do all combat, but they become a lot more tempted to grind out every downed ufo. If overdamage is reintroduced, I could see the cash rewards being bumped up a bit, but not until then.

Autoresolved 90%+ of my air combat (Couple practice runs and a couple encounters with only Foxes) and I'm doing perfectly well on Veteran. Experience, for one, and that can't be bought. A sniper with maxed TUs and high accuracy is a fucking beast. Other classes benefit as well, but tend to have higher casualty rates, heh. Smaller UFOs should have next to no risk once everyone's armored. You'll lose a shield user on occasion and might have an unlucky reaction shot insta-kill someone while scouting outside, but that's why scouting is a rookie's job. If overdamage was reintroduced, I could see the argument for bumping up ground combat rewards, but that'd also likely require a rebalance of the manufacturing side, not so much the raw costs (Those can be balanced via increased value in alien tech), but in production times. My understanding of the airstrike's purpose is to remove the tedium of the mid/late game grind. Making such a significant chunk of your income depend on ground combat will encourage a player to grind through combat that he'd find tedious. That's not to say airstrikes should be exactly on par with ground combat, but the current game's setup is closer to what I'd consider the ideal than your initial numbers. Note, however, that I'm assuming overdamage isn't in effect. One big thing about tying relations to civilians in the current build is that their AI is currently a work in progress. Would be frustrating as hell if I took a massive relations penalty due to civilians deciding to take cover in the middle of an ongoing firefight. Worse yet, deciding to end their turn directly in my line of fire and forcing me to either a) kill the civie myself or b) risk losing a soldier. Now, once the AI is working well, I could go for making ground combat influence your relations, but I'd still argue that airstrikes should provide the same amount as a "neutral" ground encounter. The player already loses a fair amount of "resources" when airstriking: Experience, alloys/alerium, and 2-2.5x the income. These are fair points, and why my first game fell into a fail cascade, but I'm not sure how they can be addressed without completely rebuilding the game from the ground up. Aircraft losses have to be meaningful, otherwise you'll just throw wave after wave at a 20% autoresolve, but it's hard to say how. Perhaps speed up recovery but attach a cost to recovery? It'd prevent the wave after the one you lost a bunch of crafts on from being a guaranteed failure, but you'd still be dealing with a fail cascade if you fall behind. The air game's the war and the ground combat's the battles; the war's what ultimately matters in the end.

Ah, my bad. The original had really poorly balanced air combat, with Avalanche missiles upgrading to the plasma cannon and you're able to take down most everything, so one shouldn't really compare it to the original. Even with autoresolving air combat, I'm still quite happy with the shift in focus. The ground combat could still be considered the core of the game, but the air combat is no longer nearly meaningless. It definitely takes a shift in style, though, but that'll happen in any game that's not a line-for-line remake. The trivial nature of the original's air combat is what lead to the limited number of fighters per base. Compound that with the waves you see in Xenonauts and, yea, you already know where that gets you, heh. Same could be said for a lot of things in the original. Knowing that Avalanche missiles -> plasma cannon trivializes air combat and all the little other nuances that an experienced player exploits to win. You're exactly right that it's largely too late if you notice you're severely underbuilt in the middle of a wave, though (Like my first game; 200k swing and the massive wave was still ongoing). Not quite sure how that can be addressed without completely redoing all the funding and air combat mechanics, however.

Glad to know I'm not the only one with AI issues. Almost all of my losses are now jackal wearing shield users getting killed in one shot (Hilariously, I had just retired a shield user after fourteen missions prior to a streak of losing my shield user nearly every map; one downside to a passive AI is the frequency of reaction fire during the initial scout). My snipers ended up shooting fish in a barrel during an Adron terror mission.

@StellarRat: You're definitely a bit behind tech wise. Korgath seems to be further than most should be, but I'm at a similar tech point as you and it's only the start of November (Immediately expanded to thirty scientists and have stayed at that level). @KateMicucci: I believe your issue boils down to both not using Foxtrots and not building a full squad of three planes. Overbuilding is also a huge issue (500k for a third base is enough to fully (for the early game) equip your second base with two Condors and a Foxtrot) and I made a mistake in a similar vein on my first game. You should only be expanding as far as money allows; a new base is a pointless investment if it doesn't have the fighters to handle the types of craft that are being thrown at you.

Yes and no. Part of the problem with the Firaxis reboot is that you don't have room to soak up a bad RNG roll. In the original, you could lose a handful of troops every mission and still be nearly as effective as before, you'd just be covering less ground and not sending a wave of shock jocks in to capture an alien. While Xenonauts doesn't quite have the numbers of the original, it's a hell of a lot better than the reboot. Roguelikes (DCSS is what comes to mind mainly) also follow the "yes and no" point in that skill boils down to small bumps in your chance to successfully pull off some action with "resources" like health acting as your number of attempts. That is to say, it all boils down to playing the statistics, and knowing when to run like hell. Now, I'm not able to make a judgement on how well cover is currently balanced, but I wanted to argue against your quoted bit.

But then that can be exploited in the other direction and smoke becomes a very effective distraction mechanism. Hell, just smoke an alien and let its buddies kill it, heh. The kind of situational awareness required to properly (without cheating) counter smoke seems like it'd be really difficult for an AI to pull off. You'd also have to tie up the loose end of the AI knowing where your troops are and facing towards the soldier closest to them, even if the soldier's inside a building and outside line of sight, while the alien's taking sniper fire from its rear.

Stuff's mostly been covered, but flashbang use, especially during the early game, needs to be emphasized more. On light scouts, you can usually suppress everyone inside with a couple bangs if you've got troops diagonally-adjacent to the door. In that position, the only alien hidey-hole you have to worry about is the front-corner of the room across from them, and you'll usually have at least one corner free to bang without reaction fire. Combine that with snipers outside visual range firing straight in and you should be golden.

The term "indie" in this sense isn't particularly useful; compare it to what's actually out there in terms of the genre niche. Firaxis' recent reboot that'd be nearly three times the price if you grab the original+expansion? It certainly *looks* more expensive, but from what I've seen of the gameplay (admittedly, rather little), I'd be surprised if the gameplay's on the same level as Xenonauts is currently. That's especially true if you factor in the fact that this game's incomplete and AI issues and the like should be ironed out. The reboot also seems to lack a critical component of the original, where your ability to effectively fight the aliens depends more on technology parity than high level units. "Level ups" just run completely counter to that. That's not to say I'm completely happy with some fundamental design decisions in Xenonauts (Actions taking a percentage of TUs as opposed to flat amounts; flat values make experienced soldiers a lot more valuable), but it's going in the direction of getting a lot of things right. There are always older XCOM variants, but I'm guessing you've already gone through what's available, as it isn't a particularly active niche. Also guessing that you've already done some playthroughs of the original with XCOMUtil and played with some of those changes (Love the requirement of unconscious aliens for alien tech progress).