Troublechuter

I agree, unless the bug was that it would instantly kill an emerging Reaper regardless of HP. I don't see why a Reaper should become magically immune to bullets during the "hatching" process.

Reducing the % chance that an attack will succeed would make things a little easier, but it still wouldn't make things any more fair. A "fuck you" beam that can MC any one of my soldiers at almost any time but has a 50% chance of failure would still be extremely irritating. It really just needs to be a LOS only power.

Any chance some psi balance adjustments might sneak their way in? That's what's really killing the game for me, atm.

I actually really like the idea of a portable "psi shield". Yeah, likewise. I've restarted this one alien base attack four times now, and literally every single time one of my guys has been MCed on the first turn. There's no tactics involved at all, no input from me that can affect the outcome, its literally just a "fuck you" beam that the AI can fire once per turn. All I can do is hope its one of my shield guys and not a heavy / rocketeer.

Ah ok. What was the old regen rate then?

I think everything that needs to be said has been said. I don't think Dread is particularly overpowered, but the message spam is extremely annoying. Mind Control really needs to be line-of-sight only. Given that your soldiers regain all of their action points when MCed, it is a lot more powerful than it is in that other game, and should be balanced appropriately.

Haven't tried the new version yet, but the Sebillian thing sounds ridiculously OP. They're already the species I have the most trouble with without regeneration, I can't imagine how tough they're going to be with it. Are they supposed to be drastically more powerful than all the other species? Because they will be, after this. Otherwise, a small hitpoint reduction to compensate might be in order.

So I found myself a little overstretched in my current game, and decided that Australasia didn't really need its own base, but found I couldn't decommission the base completely. I can demolish all of the structures inside except for the command center, which is still there, being useless and costing me money every month. Is there nothing I can do to shut down a base completely?

This is exactly why I don't play Ironman anymore. I can deal with my dudes dying, even if its from some bullshit sniper shot from outside of my LOS, into a soldier standing behind a shield user. But if I mis-click and send my best sniper running off into the middle of a field to be gunned down, then damn straight I'm going to reload that.

I've also witnessed this. I can't say for sure, but it seems to happen when the ship being tailed is slightly too fast for the interceptor; I'm thinking maybe the interception popup would appear when the ship moved over land if the interceptor could actually catch up with it, but instead it lags slightly behind. However, the UFO still counts as being tailed, so you can still manually click the UFO / Interceptor and choose "engage tailed UFO" and have it work.

I have about 40 soldiers, 20-30 at one base and 12 at another. Its not their names that are repeating, but their stats. With possible stat values between 35 and 65 it seems unlikely that I'd even get two soldiers with the exact same stats by chance, but I'm regularly getting 3 or 4 with every stat the same.

Has nobody else noticed this? I'm getting it quite a lot now and its kind of bothering me. I can't really pin down what causes it, but it doesn't seem to always be related to hiring multiple soldiers at once as I'd originally thought. But I can guarantee that every time I look at the available soldiers screen in my current game, I will see at least one soldier who has a twin, or triplets with exactly the same stats.

It seems as though the "total casualties" counter in the top-right of the Geoscape only accurately counts deaths in ticker events throughout the game; it either doesn't take deaths from failed terror sites into account, or doesn't count the full number. I had a Soviet city bombed to rubble with over 100,000 killed and more missing presumed dead, yet my global casualty count is only at about 25,000. I also know for a fact I failed a terror mission in Quito, Ecuador, resulting in the city being nuked. Total casualties for Central America? 62.

However, we'll definitely need an achievement of some kind for beating Ironman/Insane.

Agreed, it annoyed me too for a while until I realized, as mentioned above, you can infer the ship type from the airstrike payout. However, it would still be nice if I could see the actual ship type by clicking the wreck.

Someone in another thread said you're supposed to get "alien base analysis" research after you take your first base, but I didn't. I just got the communications array thing. Is this a bug?

Hmm, I just assaulted my first base myself, a medium Caesan one, and only got the alien comms, too. Of course I didn't realize there's supposed to be other research available there, so I just assumed that was all I'm supposed to get! It could be as you say; that the researchables available depend on the rooms actually present. Which probably shouldn't be the case if one of them is a general analysis of the base's structure. Guess I have to go and grab another one.

I've also had this. I noticed that some of the Cruiser's floor tiles were just grass, rather than the proper material. Is it possible that some of the Cruiser's floor tiles are ending up seperate from the walls somehow?

When I recruit multiple soldiers at the same time, their replacements on the available recruits list sometimes seem to get assigned the same stats. I.e, I hire three soldiers, sort the list of available recruits by TUs, and noticed I now have three recruits available with exactly the same stats; 61TU, 35STR, 52ACC, 34RFL and 40BRV. I tried to fix this by hiring all of them so I could dismiss them and "clean up the list", but this just replaced them with another three with different (although identical) stats. It seems as though when new soldiers are added to the list, whatever function randomly generates new solider stats is only run once, regardless of how many are actually being added to the list.

Ok... I didn't actually say that flying manually should be the only option though, did I? I completely agree that you should be able to autoresolve your way through the entire game if you want to (and you can, currently), but it should also be at least possible to achieve the same results as the autoresolver gets, either by making air combat easier, or the autoresolver worse. Or at least making it smarter to consider things like Foxtrots being weak vs fighters. Having thought more, I think quiescat had a good point; combat fuel shouldn't be as much of an issue as it is now. Fuel use should either not be tied to geoscape fuel at all, or still connected, but at a much lower ratio. I.e, if 60% fuel on the geoscape currently gives you 20 seconds of fuel, it should give 40. It seems silly that you can fly for two hours on a 4 hour tank of fuel, but suddenly you hit combat and you're draining your remaining two hours of fuel in less than a minute. (Yes I know, some fuel has to be saved for the return trip but that's not the point) Typically in games like this (I'm thinking of the Total War franchise in particular) you will always get a better result fighting manually, to give you an incentive to actually do so. I'm glad the Xenonauts autoresolver has more teeth to it, but its often completely inconsistent with what actually happens in a manual air combat.

Haha, I'd literally just run into the "Reapers hang the game" bug in my current playthrough, which is funny because they've never given me problems before. This has to be like the third time I've noticed a bug only to have it fixed the next day. You guys rock!

Yeah, apparently we're calling the current version v21 stable for balancing purposes, because if there is another patch its just going to be bug fixes.

I believe this is what its intended to be for; auto-resolving easy fights that you already know you can win. The problem is when there's an aerial terror mission going on and I can either struggle to fight two heavy fighters and a bomber with two foxtrots and a condor, or just autoresolve at a 100% chance of victory, damn straight I'm going to autoresolve it, why wouldn't I? It seems like the only reason to manually fight air combats at the moment is as a self-imposed challenge, and there's no way that's how it should be.

So if you've played the game for any length of time, you've probably noticed that the air combat autoresolver is kind of wonky. As far as I can tell, it just compares the strengths of the craft involved, without considering factors like the type of craft involved, or how much fuel they have remaining. This has some interesting results, such as Foxtrots apparently being better against fighter squadrons than Condors, and enabling me to win otherwise impossible air battles. I had one last night which was a perfect example; two Condors and one Foxtrot vs a bomber and two heavy fighters, head-on. Strictly speaking, I had enough firepower to take all three down, and the game gave me 100% odds if I auto-resolved. However what that auto-resolver failed to consider was that the Condors only had about 20 seconds of fuel remaining, and heavy fighters dodge missiles. If I used the missiles on the heavy fighters, I would have to use two on each one, and then I wouldn't have enough firepower left over to take down the bomber. And while it might be possible to take down a heavy fighter with just laser cannons (I don't know for sure), with only 20 seconds of fuel I had no chance of pulling off any fancy maneuvers or doing much dodging. So there is a clear disparity between what the autoresolver thinks is possible, and what is actually possible in-game. My question is; which one is right? Should the air combat be made easier to match the autoresolver's predictions, or should the autoresolver be made less generous to better reflect the odds of victory in an actual air battle? In my opinion, it should be a bit of both. The autoresolver should definitely take fuel into account, and penalize your chances of success appropriately if you have too little. It should also take into account the types of craft involved; unescorted Foxtrots do not fare well against fighters whatever Mr Autoresolve might think! However, if these changes were implemented on their own, I probably wouldn't be winning many air combats at all. There would have to be some give and take. And on that note, I think that maybe heavy fighters are turning up a little too soon. I barely saw regular fighters for a month in my latest game before the heavies showed up, and I've seen nothing but heavies ever since. Thoughts? Opinions? Reasons I'm wrong?

I found terror missions became a lot easier once I started bringing a rocket launcher or two along. Screw recovering artifacts, I'd quite like to win, thanks. The aliens don't pull any punches in terror missions, so neither do I.