Nethris

Line of Fire isn't symmetrical, the alien was probably shooting from a corner of his tile, while both sides have to aim at the center of their target. Note that I'd agree that being able to shoot through that isn't ideal either way, but I suspect KevinHann was wondering if it's an annoying oddity of the LoF system the AI managed to use, or a straight up bug. To figure that out we'd have to know what the LoF system reports from the alien's end. Edit: oh, loaded up the save and looked at it, I was assuming there was more distance involved for some reason. The alien was adjacent to the dumpster (and the window), that dumpster is reporting as a 67% block (I don't recall if that's normal), and shooters can ignore non-100% cover in any of the 8 spaces around them. The wall the alien was next to blocks fire from where your soldier was, while a soldier standing where the alien was has an easy shot to where your soldier got shot. Also for some reason I thought dumpsters were 100% blocking cover, but I may just be crazy on that.

Giving the player info they need to react to, but making them go digging to find it is generally not a great design. UFO attacks generating reports on the geoscape here is massively better than having to repeatedly go check the graphs in the original XCOM to see where aliens were active for instance, as it cuts out a ton of tedium otherwise present in "optimal" play. Having to search for bases is a very interesting idea, but a slow funding drain that's visible but not announced isn't a good way to handle it. A visible warning that an alien base is suspected to be present in X region, or replacing the funding drain with occasional attacks in that general area with text stating that there was no airborne alien presence and that local forces want XCOM to search for the source might be more interesting. However, changing the auto-detect to 100% is just an XML file change rather than something that needs development and testing. Speaking of which, if you want to have the old mechanics, go change it locally! Looking at it, I'm pretty certain it's alienBaseDiscoveryChance in gameconfig.xml, under the <!-- ALIEN BASE AUTOMATIC DISCOVERY --> header. You can set auto-detection to be as unlikely as you want. As has been said, that's intentional in the current system. Not necessarily ideal by any means, but center to center LoF made it hard to use 100% cover because you severely limit your own firing angles, and letting the LoF system target corners of the target made most cover very limited in usefulness as it could be shot around if the attacker was even slightly to the side, at which point the cover does almost nothing. Personally I've found I can usually use one or more of suppression, explosives, wall destruction via lots of bullets, and not leaving any soldiers in places the alien has a good shot at to handle situations like that. Sadly "the shot should be about as hard as it looks" takes a pretty complicated ruleset and careful tweaking to even come close to. The biggest issue here is that as far as I know this LoF stuff isn't mentioned in-game, and glancing through the quick-start guide I'm not seeing it there either. The full explanation probably just belongs in the manual you're trying to get together, but it would be helpful for the quick start guide to mention that units have some freedom in where they fire from, often allowing them to shoot around cover close to them without return fire being able to, or something to that effect. Oh, and I think LoS is still more or less center based rather than matching LoF? There's certainly shots I can take where that soldier can't see the alien despite facing the same direction they use to fire the shot.

Did a few tests of how fast you lose regions on Normal doing nothing, and then a couple on Veteran as well. First off, the bugs/quirks: one of the Veteran tests had the XCOM base attacked on Nov 27th, which had some oddities. It wasn't particularly clear I was supposed to try to return to the geoscape when I was done equipping troops, so the text box popups should probably mention that as a quick fix. Once actually in ground combat, on the first alien turn (between deployment and the first XCOM turn) the game CTD'd. That crash didn't repeat when I loaded the autosave at the start of the mission, so no savefile that reproduces it sadly. Then when I aborted mission, it first warned me that my troops outside the deployment zone were outside the dropship and would be lost (instead of telling me all of them would be lost as well as the base), and then hung on a geoscape not responding to any inputs and showing Sep 1 and starting funds, rather than telling me I lost the game. Have a save for that one, but I think I saw mention of a crash like that already being known? I'll go check the bug forum. As for the results, on Normal I never lost any regions in the second month, though it looked like it might be possible with major bad luck, and I saw 0-2 regions lost based on projected funding before the 20th of the 3rd month (Nov) when bases started that month would likely be online, with 1-3 actually lost at the end of that month. On Veteran, on 1 of the 2 games a region was lost in month 2, but was fine as of the 20th when month 2 bases would have been running. 2-3 regions were lost by the 20th of the third month, with 3-4 lost by the end of the month/my base being attacked. With the new costs, having 3 interception bases running by the 20th of the second month is at least possible, so region loss in the first 3 months looks like it's at least theoretically possible to prevent on most/all Normal games, and not impossible to prevent on Veteran unless you get fairly bad luck. I'd say it's probably not bad where it is now from a luck vs skill standpoint for games started in 1.03, but it certainly feels tougher than in 1.02. Reflex/bravery are also referred to as stats, which is probably the source of confusion, yes. That does sound like a bug, though minor compared to the crashes.

How much of this game was on 1.03 (with ground attack missions) though? If those are showing up in month 2 (Oct) and they're now doing enough attacks to cause massive funding drops that might be problematic. On the other hand it's quite possible to respond to attack reports outside radar range and catch UFOs, and with the new base costs it may be possible to get 3 bases with interception capabilities up in month 2, just without the radar coverage you'd ideally want. Honestly rather than being too hard/unfair, I'd call the strategic part relatively inflexible in the first couple months. It's necessary to spend most of your funds on bases and interceptors, and you're limited in how many bases you can build and maintain, as well as in the good locations available for those bases. I'm not sure how problematic that is though, and the base cost rebalancing does possibly open up the use of more bases with fewer radars in each, but the inflexibility does certainly add to the learning curve a bit - especially for people not pretty familiar with the original XCOM. Further messing with the invasion ticker scaling probably wouldn't be a good idea, but it might be interesting to check how quickly regions are lost if you do nothing on the various difficulties - if Normal or Easy are losing regions before late in month 3 (ie, before bases started at the beginning of month 3 would have radar coverage online) slightly scaling down the relations hits from attacks on Normal and Easy might not be a terrible idea. As far as I can tell all the scaling of the difficulty in keeping relations up is currently in the invasion progress ticker scaling, is that right?

The easy way to handle this is to just tell Steam to turn off auto-updates for Xenonauts (right-click -> Properties, under Updates). Do note that neither 1.01 nor 1.02 broke saves for me, and that 1.0 was stated to hopefully be the last version that needed to break them.

3 days seems about right for hiring, yeah, would match the time for ordering Condors which is actually displayed. I think transfers are about 1 day? A central list of when all the non-research stuff will finish would be nice, but the strategic layer here doesn't really feel like it favors precise timing to me the way the strategic layer of the new XCOM does, so such a list isn't a necessity like it is there.

I've observed it crashing shortly after saving I'm pretty sure, so I'm not sure saving has anything to do with it. It DOES seem to mostly show up for me when I've been playing for a decent stretch, but I save often enough to not be losing progress to the crashes and they still happen.

I've seen a 0 hp shield as well, impossible to tell in-game if a 0/80 shield actually absorbs any more damage at that point though, my guess would be it doesn't, but the destruction is only triggered when at least 1 damage passes through it. As for the blocking angles, 100% block on frontal attacks isn't exactly overpowered in my experience, 45 degrees should be the same squares you count as facing for shooting at. The combination of low range on your only 1 handed weapons, the small cone for full effectiveness, and the maximum damage blocked makes them feel relatively balanced to me as-is. I haven't seen any non-blocks from stuff that was clearly in front facing yet, but that's probably not been that many shots this version.

For this to be true, the mesas/buildings would have to not occupy their entire tiles (and not be symmetrical in what parts of the tile they cover) - is this the case? Otherwise that looks like it might be an inconsistency with how paths are being rounded onto subtiles, but it's hard to tell as the shot selection seems to be not ideal when there's no shot above 0%: The selection of which of the 0% options is displayed, or presumably used if a 0% shot is attempted anyway, is important - shooting the cover your target is behind rather than your cover is much more effective for suppressing them or attempting to destroy their cover. I'm guessing there's no metric for ranking 0% shots against each other currently implemented, ranking them by how close they get to the target before being blocked would be pretty decent most of the time. Would also make it clearer for checking to see if there is an actual bug/inconsistency here, as the "best" 0% shot by that metric would usually correspond to the shot that works in the other direction. An oddity is certainly present in this situation though: I recreated something similar, and the full corner the top guy is next to blocks shots from the bottom guy, but if you take out the wall section of that that's farther away from the top guy (that shouldn't be able to block anything that the wall directly next to him wouldn't) he can be hit like the bottom guy can be, at least in the setup I ended up with. Saves: In both of these, Rolf Brown (#4) can hit Lucas Hansen (#6), but 6 can only hit 4 in the second save, where one of the walls has been removed by shooting it. [ATTACH]3761[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]3762[/ATTACH] Pictures of the relevant area (entire shot doesn't all fit on one screen): one way.sav two way.sav one way.sav two way.sav