Monifix

Haha, yeah better be careful or the internet forum police will come after you ;-) Consider me consoled. And yeah, you bring up a good point. This IS an indie game after all and perhaps I am expecting too much. On the other hand, I think a lot of it could have been addressed without adding costs to the development such as the decision to make UFOs appear in waves. Adding hills and more randomness to the maps and simulated UFO damage would probably come with a significant price tag though.

Thanks, I will give your maps a try ;-) I don't think that I'm really straying too much off topic if that is what you meant though. The general issue for the points I bring up is lack of randomness, which ties in to the waves of UFOs vs. having them appear sporadically. Predictablilty detracts from the enjoyment of this type of game in my opinion, and compared to the original games I think there is significantly more of it in Xenonauts.

Well I don't know if you can call it nostalgia when I've been playing the original games regularly ever since they came out and only just finished a Terror From The Deep playthrough very recently. I respect that you don't think it's that bad, but for me personally the issues I bring up are major negatives as far as enjoyment of the game goes. I also mainly use autoresolve now, simply because the air combat mini-game became such a chore and after I've gotten good at it, the outcome is also very predictable (I hate the little exploits you can use to swing the battle in your favor.) At least the autoresolve is pretty random sometimes and can screw you over even though it sometimes gives you an unexpectedly positive result as well. I understand that the maps were not completely random in the original games, I don't think we have the technology to make reasonable looking maps that are completely randomly generated for every single tile, but they were FAR more random than the ones in Xenonauts. Xenonauts doesn't even have hills in the landscape, or simulated damage to UFOs for that matter.

I think you guys are so proud of your little air combat mini-game that you are putting waaaaay too much emphasis on the challenge of shooting down UFOs, and completely ignoring that your approach leaves the geoscape a barren uninteresting wasteland for most of the game. Why did you decide that air combat should be such an important part of the game? It's as if your design philosophy doesn't understand what made the original games great. One word: Tension. You would feel tense never knowing when the next UFO would appear and if you'd be able to take it down due to the more random air combat. You'd feel tense in ground combat never knowing what the mission site would look like or where the next alien is lurking about. In Xenonauts you sit around looking at your clock while waiting for the next predictable wave of UFOs to appear. In ground combat you know the map patterns after a while, you know that only about half of the aliens will engage you outside the UFO while the rest hunker down inside, you even know that Aliens can't spawn on the second floor of buildings, so you never have to check or be wary of sniper fire from the windows. I think this is the games biggest downfall.

Well, you can play self-imposed iron man of course, that's what I've been doing. Keep 2 saves for the geoscape and alternate between them. 1 save for just before you land for a mission (I've had most crashes during the loading of ground missions) and one extra save for every time you leave the game. That way you'd have to be very unfortunate for both to corrupt, and you can always pick up after a crash. It just takes the self control not to reload when something bad happens, which isn't really a problem if you loathe yourself for doing that or think that it ruins the fun.

It was the same in the original game. So many times I'd spot an alien in hidden movement which would park itself just outside of vision. I'd take 1 step forward with my soldier in my turn, spot it and think "Got you! Time to crouch for that extra aim and to make myself a smaller target if it shoots back" *Click* - Instant reaction fire to the face and a soldier dying in agony.

You know, every time you post I get an urge for pancakes, and now I want them with raspberry jam! Alas, I have no pancakes... T.T

I admit I might be a little masochistic in this regard, haha. If I misclick I don't rage, I just call the soldier an idiot and think that he deserves to die. ;-)

Even so, losing a team doesn't equate to losing the game necessarily. One of my most memorable playthroughs of the original x-com had me losing 2 teams of 14 soldiers, and even a dropship to the 2nd and 3rd missions. As the last survivor got gunned down with a shot to the back while he scrambled to try to get inside the second time I wiped (the first time I managed to get my last guy back into the dropship) I was sure that I was completely screwed. I still managed to beat the game but it was not easy for sure. I lost a ton of soldiers because i fell so far behind, and I even had to sell an interceptor to get a new dropship, but I have such fond memories from that, and ultimately the feeling of success was so satisfying. THAT is Ironman ;-)

I don't think I've ever had a mis-click "ruin my game," might have lost me a soldier a few times though. But you get used to losing people when you play ironman.

Well, with the way i play personally, always stretching my resources to the limit, always on the edge of bankruptcy, I never quite have enough armor to go around for everyone, so I actually prefer that the armor gets removed from soldiers who are not fit for active duty.

Why not have them ricochet/deflect based on the angle of entry and the strength of the material or realistically fragment into smaller pellets as well? Surely this can't be hard to code ;-D Neat idéa though.

I personallly like that the Aliens can get a lot of reaction fire in certain situations, It's one of the few things that make them challenging. How boring it would be if Goldenhawk nerfed everything people complain about on these forums. It's supposed to be a hard challenging game people. I wish it was harder than it is now really.

Cutscenes cost a lot of money, I don't think an indie company can just get cutscenes made like the big boys.

Hmm, how does someone with 2 injured arms use the medkit to heal himself? EDIT: Or someone who got shot in the back.... hmmmmmmm

Naturally I was just in a mood to tease a bit (or maybe a lot.) You don't have to justify your playstyle to me or anyone of course. Well, you learn the hard way to be very very careful I guess. For me and others who play "ironman" mode, the thrill is in the fact that your actions have consequences, and that you can't simply take a mistake back because you feel like you should have done something else, or maybe you got unlucky. It's what keeps players like me on the edge of my seat after having played a TON of x-com style games. I know that of course I can win the game if I reload every time something bad happens, so where is the fun? If I don't allow myself to do that then beating the game becomes a real (manly) challenge ;-D

Nice, it's the only (manly) way to play ;-D Haha, I'm just kidding guys, I used to save scum too when I was a little babby.

I realize my post up there (#15) sounds very negative, so I just wanted to say that there are indeed many improvements over the original games in Xenonauts. The cover system, the ability to jump obstacles, the air combat arguably (i still like the simple version in the originals just as much tho) and the way aliens get more armored as you progress. I still don't think the AI is quite up to the same level in some respects though. Door spamming is a real issue with the game that I hope gets fixed.

Yeah I guess it would be more easy in general, but I don't think it would be completely trivial to take down every single UFO, you'd still get situations where you just fought a big UFO and got your aircraft damaged and then right after another UFO appears. I guess since nobody has said they mind the empty feeling for long periods on the geoscape besides me that it isn't really an issue then.

Sounds interesting!

Yeah I get what you're saying. If that is true with the way the game is currently designed and the UFOs were more spread out, it would be more likely that you could take them all out. I guess I'd just prefer if it wasn't the case that you could reliably take down the UFOs without losing some craft, and indeed as I said I personally often do lose aircraft or get them damaged to the point where I don't dare send them out. But if you can do it then I can accept that i might just not be very good at air combat. Yeah, I guess I just think it's a worse solution to the problem of being able to shoot down everything to clump the UFOs up so that you can't handle the volume. I'd much rather that they came in a steady stream and were tough enough to where some would only be able to be shot down if you were very good and you'd still probably lose a craft trying. Yeah, I guess fairness is subjective and not really a good word for me to use. To me it's fair when I fail in the situation I described despite there not being a solution where I could have taken down that UFO. It's like walking into a high level area in a RPG when you are a level 2 bard and getting your ass handed to you because you had no business being there in the first place. It's a bad choice that I made, and I should simply have stayed away. It doesn't seem fair to me when the game has a mechanic where it consistently overburdens me. But then again that is subjective, and I see how it's similar to throwing an enemy at me that I can't deal with. In both cases failure is being forced on me. I just prefer the geoscape to be constantly active, but certainly not to a point where I'd get interrupted every 12 hours as Chris mentioned, but that might have been an exaggeration as well. Certainly you could have UFO's be more consistently active across the globe without you getting interrupted all the time. Perhaps the aliens should trickle in during the early game, and then start tending more towards big waves as you approach the late game and have extensive radar coverage.

Okay, fair enough. I couldn't understand how that was possible But yeah, I'd still like to ask if you have actually tried it with the UFOs more spread out, and are talking from experience? Because to me it seems that if the numbers are still the same, the UFO's would still manage to inflict the same amount of damage to my interceptors to where there would be periods where I would have to let UFOs go.

Wait, so you are supposed to have like 5 interceptors pr. base? I've been going with 3 like you mention and I manage to still shoot down enough despite my lack of top gun pro air battling to where I have to airstrike some of the crash sites because I simply can't get to them all. The issue for me isn't a lack of UFOs to shoot down, I realize that it might have sounded that way when I mentioned the ability to scout for UFO's when you needed some alien materials in the original games, but it's not that I find myself lacking alien materials much. It's simply this feeling that nothing is going on most of the time that bothers me, as well as the frustration of having more to do than I can handle when 5+ UFOs arrive at the same time. I don't really understand why having them more spread out would mean that you could take down every single UFO. For instance in my recent Terror from the Deep playthrough, the second USO I detected was a battleship on the way to a terror mission. I had 2 long range torpedo launchers equipped and optimistically tried to engage it. Needless to say it blew my Barracuda craft out of the sky in 2 shots. I was not equipped to handle that and payed for it. That's a fair mechanic. Having so many UFOs arrive at the same time that you stand no chance taking them all down or doing all the ground missions is not a fair mechanic.

Umm, okay... Well in that case, if one interceptor can reliably take down everything, isn't that then the problem? It's not my experience that this is true though, but then again I admit the fault may lie with me. Edit: Honestly I can't fathom how this could be true. Some UFO's can't even be shot down with the ammo capacity that one interceptor has. And fighting a big UFO with fighter escorts is a real challenge as far as not taking any damage even when you have 3 aircraft, that just seems insanely skilled if you could do that reliably. I don't think your average player could do that, it's not how it goes down for me, and in the let's play series I'm following on youtube the youtubers often struggle a lot in air combat as well.

Okay, I can understand that reasoning, but isn't there a compromise to be had? Perhaps decreasing the huge radar range you get having 3 radar arrays slightly would help with the problem of getting constantly interrupted? I don't understand why you'd only need 1 interceptor for each base though? Maybe I'm doing something very wrong when I play but i often get craft damaged or destroyed trying to engage UFOs. I think this is intended? If I only had 1 interceptor, how would I take on a big UFO?