Mutton

Sounds like the aliens have been buffed a lot, looking forward to trying this out I hope they rip my balls off. One thing I've just recalled wanting to ask about is if you could implement a non-hardcore mode for Insane difficulty just while the games in beta as it's a bit annoying to try and test that difficulty with hardcore when getting crashes (as is bound to happen in experimentals) and then realising the game hadn't autosaved for 20 minutes.

Yeh I can second this, said 2 of my guys (who would of otherwise been dead) were wounded for a day but inside the base it corrected it to 17 days.

Not sure why this happened as I've already created two classes at my main base and selected them before in this campaign with no problems but upon creating my latest one it crashed. This is briefly what happened. I sent over 2 soldiers from my first base in the middle east to my new central american base containing no soldiers. When my 2 soldiers arrived in the central american base I went to the soldier equip screen inside that base and selected them in the unassigned area. I clicked on a soldier and first assigned his equipment as the default equipment for the current class he was in (which was a custom class I'd created earlier). I then clicked on the second soldier and assigned their equipment as default as well, that soldier was in the default sniper class. I clicked back on the first soldier then tried to create a new custom class with him, I selected the Grenade symbol to be the class icon and I named it Base Crusher then ok'd it. At that point I tried to select the newly made class with that soldier and then the game crashed. Let me know if you want any more information.

So far I like the smoke changes though (I've no idea if this is intentional) the smoke created by blowing things up with c4 still appears to be the darker stuff you can't see through just so you know though that feels right I don't know if it is. On the subject of c4, does it do less damage vs people? One of my shield users in jackal armour threw some at his feet and with no ap's left (...it would have been a cool clutch move had he not thrown it at his feet....) ate it right in the face but instead of being blown to kingdom come he just had a broken shield, other then that he was completely fine which was a bit of a suprise.

Most of what I'm saying here applies to the first V21 though I did just do a few normal missions and take an alien base in V21 experimental 2. Aliens I'm finding are back to being too passive in this build (I mean all of V21 inculding this new balance patch) compared to what I heard they were like in V20 with Hotfix 2 (I never tried V20 with the hotfixes). Their accuracy is far better and their reaction shots are consistenly lethal but they just don't move. I played through a 'storming an alien base' mission and almost all of the androns were extremely passive. The last 2 androns, one of which was their leader (the purple one) literally just stood in the corner of the room and didn't budge an inch up til they were killed. Yesterday I also had the aliens attack my base and I was a bit worried on account of only having 6 people at the base since my main 8 were off on a mission and I hadn't thought to equip them well as I didn't even consider getting attacked in October but after setting up my dudes and waiting for the attack 20 or so turns latter they never arrived so I had to go hunt them down and they were all just mingling in the medical ward next to their entry point. Maybe aliens are more intelligent now since it's a wise idea if you're going to be camping in a room for 2 years to stay in ones with beds and medical supplies but I've got a sneaking suspicion they weren't playing the long game they were just idiots. Anyway a few of them advanced a little bit after I'd been shooting at them for several turns but they mostly just stayed put letting me snipe and rocket them all which I'm going to do in bad situation even though it feels cheap since there's almost no counter to it due to them refusing to push forward but the alternative is stepping forward - boom boom reaction fire dead so you're pretty much forced into it... ....though to be honest I'd probably still snipe either way since even if something feels cheap I'll do it if it's the best thing to do, I abuse door open/closing too, I don't like it and think alien doors shouldn't be closeable and/or that aliens should get reaction shots on doors triggering but if it's in the game I think it's fair to utilise it unless it's clearly a bug and not a design choice. So yeh all in all I don't mind the alien accuracy (though that could change vs more aggressive aliens) but the aliens are still way too passive for the most part and are sometimes nothing more than turrets in base missions. PS: Does anyone know if you can actually be attacked and lose your base in an instant while your soldiers are off doing a mission? I hope so even though that would very nasty for new players who may not even be aware their base could be attacked but if aliens only attack when there are people there to defend you could quite easily abuse that hovering your dudes around your base when you've only got 8 or less people to potentially defend. Knowing aliens could wipe the base while you're gone gives a good incentive to train up more dudes and give's you more to do/worry about.

I like this a lot, in theory (obviously hands on is what really matters), it's more realistic as to how smoke actually works and aliens should actually respond better to it too since they don't think you've just spontaneously disappeared from the face of the earth due to not being able to see anyone any more* so it should give you more protection but not give you an easy cop out for any situation that seems even slightly risky. * I guess you could argue we're an alien race to these aliens so for all they know we may indeed have the ability to disappear in a puff of smoke.....like a race of magicians.

1. Soldiers injured in battle can be healed back up to max hp in the next battle. From a flavour stand point it makes it look as if your medical bay and the staff (I assume) that are working there are completely useless since when your soldier gets hurt and it says it will take him 20 days to recover you can actually get him back up to full hp in the same day by just taking him into the next mission whereby his full hp bar will be visible (as opposed to it being blacked out to a point as occurs in the mission where the soldier takes the injury) and all their health will be healable with medkits. Not sure if I explained this well, let me know if you want clarification and I'll write up steps to reproduce it. 2.Can make the soldiers shield disappear from the game. This is very specific and only seems to work when using the medkit, not a revolver, but it's possible when switching out a medkit (with a shield held in the other hand) to make the shield disappear from the game by switching the medkit out with a 2-handed weapon. I'll take you through the steps: A) Load out a soldier with a medkit in one hand and a shield in the other then put two 2-handed weapons in their inventory (you only need one 2-h weapon but the inventory of the soldier needs to have enough space filled that the shield has no place to fit). B) Take the soldier into a combat mission. C) Open up the soldiers inventory and start by click dragging on the medkit in one of the soldiers hands and swap it out for one of the 2h weapons in that soldiers inventory. Result: The 2h weapon is in the soldiers hands, the medkits in the inventory but the shield has completely vanished from the game. 3. Aliens shooting through a wall or shooting through an unintentional window. I tried to take a screen of this but I'm unable to, all the screen shots I take only display my desktop and not the game and I have no idea why so I'll try to explain/describe it. In the Arabic/Middle Eastern maps there is a particular building which you commonly see which is a 2 story building with some sort of balcony outside it on the top of the building. The stairs for it go from east to north west at a 135 degree angle and I'm pretty sure that building always looks the same so hopefully you know which one I'm talking about. One of my soldiers ran up the stairs and the moment they hit the top of the stairs an alien shot them through the north-eastern wall adjacent to the stairs which seems to be completely windowless so it doesn't seem like it should of happened. On closer inspection though it seems like there may be a window on the bottom floor looking right at the stairs though it doesn't really appear as a window due to the lack of an actual window tile around it, it just seems to be a hole. I'm not 100% certain if the alien shot my dude through that i.e if it actually did function as a window or if it's supposed to be one at all but the angle of the shot didn't seem to actually come from there and if she was shot from there she should of been hit when passing it as opposed to when she got to the top of the stairs as I can't see any way she could have been visible to anyone from that 45 degree angle. So in conclusion it seems either: - there's an intentional but very dodgily placed window next to the stairs of that building -an unintentional gap working as a window (at least for the aliens) -or it had nothing to do with that gap and there's something else dodgy about the wall adjacent to those stairs in that building. I could add a save file if you would rather see it for yourself but I'm not sure how to attach it. Thanks Edit: OK the third bug is a lot more straightforward then I thought. You can simply see through the wall. If you go into the building I described (arabic tileset, 2 story building with a large balcony at the top of it in the south western area) the moment you have a soldier run to the top of those stairs turn them to the north east (45 degrees) and you can see straight through the wall.

I'm not sure if the game is supposed to be this way, I'm assuming it isn't, (stable V20 with nothing else added by the way) but currently if an interceptor is below 100% health they can't change their ammo type though it may just be Foxtrots since I haven't got to the better interceptors yet but it seems pretty odd an interceptor at 99% health and 100% ammo and fuel can do missions but isn't allowed to change it's ammo type.

This might be a crap idea but what about limiting soldiers to only being able to take up to their max strength limits worth of equipment into battle and once in battle they can go over it at the expense of ap's and do whatever. It'd at least knock the incentive to overload people in the first place since you currently can and therefore probably should (since humanities future is on the line and all that) and the idea of simply hiring someone because they have a high strength should go up in value.

To add to the whole smoke grenade thing I agree with something somebody has already said regarding how the enemy react to smokes and that is that the aliens should fire blindly into the smoke with the knowledge that a smoke wall can only exist because soldiers are in the area and if it's laid down it's probably a response to whatever you're currently doing so if your sitting there behind a fence and smoke comes up in front of you not doing anything until the smoke clears will almost certainly lead to you dieing. Firing blindly doesn't have to be their only response though, they could move towards it in the hope of getting an opportunistic reaction shot on someone who comes out of it possibly with a greater good mentality i.e trying to kill anyone in the full knowledge he'll get shot down the moment the smoke clears but whilst it's up he may drop a few people or force the squad to rethink their plans or just entirely mess them up which could in turn help other nearby aliens to to enact their own plan. Or they could do the opposite and retreat backwards not allowing the enemy a free kill and possibly meeting up with other aliens or just finding new and unexpected cover to suddenly ambush appoaching xenos from which would also work for them with regards to the xeno strength stats being re-done (so they can't equip so much of everything) meaning each smoke grenade seemingly wasted actually means at least a little something to the player. And It'd be great if they did actually have a choice rather then having every alien always do one of those things though maybe it's wishful thinking, I have no idea about the difficulty involved in programming AI. Whatever it is though I strongly think they need to take some sort of clear reaction towards smoke being thrown in their vicinity which is likely to blind fire into it (can the enemy force fire on tiles the way the player can I have no idea?), aggressively push forward or conservatively withdraw. Sitting there in overwatch is probably the worst thing they can do since people already expect/hope they'll do that and are putting that smoke in front of them the vast majority of the time as a hard counter to them doing just that. I say I'd like to see these things and it'd probably equate to a game being so hard I'd smash my laptop but I think anything goes in the realms of difficulty (aside from straight up cheating by the cpu) when the game is set to it's hardest mode.