Ashery

My understanding of the balance is that Jackal armor serves as the early game heavy armor. That is, you won't be using it save on soldiers that you'll be putting in the line of fire (Shield, assault, certain rifle builds, etc).

One alternative to level out the distribution a bit: Most soldiers could start with two stats in the 55-70 range with the rest 45-60. Or something similar. Could also mix things up and throw in different distributions (ie three 55-70, but one 30-45). This would keep the random element and cut down the number of terrible (and overpowered) recruits.

Pretty sure that bug's related to any equipment used in base defense. In the previous version, I noticed troops not rearming after a base defense. I had one soldier that ended the first base defense with five shotgun shells remaining, and at the start of the next, he started the fight with those same five. It might be a similar bug. Re:Shields: Pretty sure they only have an 80% chance to block a shot from head on. Probably should be bumped up considering they only have 60hp now.

Hilariously enough, I'm strongly considering adapting machine guns to close-range breaching. Shotguns often don't take down aliens in a single shot and thus have to deal with reaction fire one shotting them in turn, and while machine guns may not get the kill in a single burst, they at least provide substantial suppression and open up a small window in which I can safely nade the rear of the light scout. In complete agreement re:AR's burst fire being underpowered. Ballistic weapons in general seem to do fairly low damage. I once had an unarmored sniper go down to my berserking shotgunner only after three full point blank shots. The sniper had actually gone back to heal'em, too, which pissed me off even more, heh.

Technically speaking, it is on sale relative to the price post-release; currently $20, moving to $25 once officially released. A demo could be argued for once the game is pretty much complete (ie a release date that hasn't just been pulled out of someone's ass to placate overly needy folks), but it wouldn't be worth the effort at this point. That said, after casually following the development for over a year, I only picked the game up a week or so ago. There should be enough impressions/LPs floating around on the net that you can make a judgement on the purchase; this isn't exactly a particularly crowded genre niche.

On the "ACC 67" or "ACC +1" debate, can't you just make it an option that the player can change? I can see the reasoning behind both camps and it shouldn't take much effort to satisfy both via the options menu.

Well, the .exe is showing a last modified of 1/8 @ 11:57am (Nearly half a day after I had last played/messed with files) and it's displaying the strategic layer UI instead of the usual main menu UI at launch, which is exactly what happened when I failed to replace the .exe when I initially installed the balance patch. My saves are also from the pre-balance patch install. The assets/maps/ directory is still showing an earlier date, so that side looks good, but I'm a bit weary about using the .exe from the balance patch without knowing what was changed in the more recent one.

Easiest way would be for weapon switching to trigger reaction fire after the action is taken. Or, better yet, take the scores both before and after the weapon switch and take the lowest of those two values and use that for judging reaction fire. So if you're switching from a rocket launcher to a pistol, you won't be lightning quick in putting the rocket launcher away. Can't really suggest the easiest way to approach that without knowing all the intricacies of how the whole setup is designed. That said, I've noticed two bugs, once of which has been mentioned: Light scouts often don't have a sprite; there's just a door and a black blob, but once I open the door the inside looks normal. I initially thought that it may have been due to the craft's footprint not being entirely on the map, but I'd need to see the bug again and compare it to how it should properly look. The second was on an arctic map, when my troops were deposited sans dropship. That is to say, all eight of'em were unceremoniously dropped on the corner of the map...which just so happened to be right next to the downed scout. Not quite sure how that happened, but I never saw it in my prior games (Then again, arctic maps aren't exactly common).