Beagle

It'd be nice to have the intercept point for two contacts colliding on the Geoscape be larger so that you can set intercept paths to deal with these super fast scouts. As is, if you try to fly in front of them to intercept, you'll always miss the 1 pixel of combat range and it'll just fly past you.

I don't think it'll need to be a toggle, it's more an issue of pacing/maybe making some of the civilian hidden movement simultaneous even, in my view. Whenever it's time to give feedback on this, I'm confident it won't be hard to get it good.

Dogs would be sweet but I doubt they have time to drift into a big feature like that at the moment.

I was pretty suprised this wasn't in yet with the adjacent cover change, really hope to see it possible in the final game. Adds a nice layer of depth to the tactics and makes sense, plus it shouldn't be hard to do.

I don't like the idea of scaling the stats of the soldiers because it takes away from the glory of keeping your guys alive and getting their stats really high if you can just recruit good soldiers later on.

I strongly dislike the player's success/failure having an input on the stats of the soldiers. It just feels so wrong. Additionally, I'm very, very against forcing people to play a certain way by penalizing them for recruiting lots of guys, and that's coming from the biggest fan of caring for your soldiers here. If a guy wants to play human wave tactics and the game penalizes his soldiers for it, nobody is benefiting out of that. To give some more meaningful feedback on this, I never fired/rehired guys in X-Com, it felt cheesy. I strongly believe if you make this system too convenient you may as well just give all the recruits great stats and raise their prices - I think the obvious choice is, as others have said, make the 12-man or 24-man or whatever pool be finite for that month/week/whatever. This gives us a lot of interesting implications beyond just stopping stat cherry-picking - now we have to think strategically about our hiring policies from the get-go. Let's go back to our guy who wants to use lots of dudes - does this limit him? Not at all, he just needs to start hiring everyone he can as soon as possible. He can't hire 50 dudes at once, sure, but if he starts hiring every recruit presented to him from Month 1, he'll have 48 soldiers in 4 months. Maybe you have a plan in the future to use a lot of heavy weapons, but not now - you would start looking through the monthly pools for good heavy weapons troopers and you'd stockpile them for the future. Of course, to make this less fiscally punishing for people, you could make the pool be added to, not refreshed. As in, Month 1 we have 12 people in the pool, Month 2 we get 12 more and now we have 24, etc. Simulates that the applicants to Xenonauts are being told "we'll call you".

This actually sounds pretty cool. It would require extra development to handle the destroyed Chinook tiles, but fighting to your troops and then trying to make it out on the Chinook sounds like a cool, time sensitive objective. EDIT: Following on from the idea of a time sensitive objective, I feel like it's an interesting idea to consider Xenonauts missions where there aren't a set number of enemies, but continuous reinforcements and you have to push through them/cover your back while accomplishing certain objectives, like retrieving something from a UFO, blowing up a base, or evacuating civilians. This changes up the gameplay from the very methodical standard of advance slowly, kill everything, though it would certainly be a lot more challenging. Speaking of evacuating civilians, it'd also be neat if we could have them follow a guy back to the Chinook when we found them instead of them running around and ending up getting shot. This and the above are both fairly easy to explain ideas though so no point making extra threads.

Fantastic, thanks for letting us know. Very good to hear.

@Chris: I see the strength of various ammos not being in the challenge of knowing which to use at the right time but more giving people options to play the way they like. Naturally, that said, I think you have a great philosophy in letting that kind of thing be modded in instead of making everyone abide by it, and I really do think that carrying through with your suggestion on making it easy to mod in extra ammo types is a good move to accommodate everyone at once.

I think we should definitely focus on nailing down Chris's interpretation of medals first before we start suggesting custom player ones. This thread is already pretty long and unreadable

Agreed. I see the shotgun's speciality as obvious - exceptionally high damage and accuracy but you have to be close. This makes it an exciting weapon that has a high potential and also carries substantial risk. Shotguns vs Chryssalids is what always comes to my mind. I would really like to see that weapon style continued in further trees or at the very least the Shotgun remaining useful in that niche for most of the game, but it seems we have SMGs instead. Some kind of energy/plasma equivalent of the shotgun's game style would be excellent, and I hope the SMGs fulfill that.

This is a good point, I was thinking of the 2-3 turn delay only as the player having to defend, not that it would give the aliens more time to react.

What is so important about having a shot spread - from a design standpoint, not a "this is how it works in reality" standpoint? I'm a big fan of shotguns and when I first played with them I had the same thought for a brief moment - "wouldn't it be neat if there was a little spread on this shot?" Then I thought about it and, no, it wouldn't actually be that neat at all. The only time it would ever be useful is in those rare circumstances where two aliens are standing right next to each other, which will only reliably happen with crowded as hell small UFOs. Doing things because you can and because it sounds neat and because it would make sense in real life - these are never good reasons to do things in game design, you need more concrete stuff. If you try to make a game like that your design is going to become hopelessly bloated and your time and effort will be spent upon endless feature drift instead of the actual game. Unless you're going to make a concise post that really focuses on explaining why flechette/a game mechanic of shot spread is important and needed, it's hard to read your posts especially now that you're bordering on insulting Goldhawk in them. I like the idea of prolonging the lifespan of the ballistics tier, particularly the shotgun as I'm a fan of the weapon in all genres. I think if you could make a reasonable suggestion for ballistics to remain useful for the whole game in some niche fashion I'd be very supportive.

I'm not suggesting breaching charges for the purpose of "realism" and I don't know where you got that idea. I suggested them because, like I said in the post, it's a more active and exciting way of breaching UFOs than sitting on your ass for multiple turns blowtorching. A breaching charge is NOT an HE charge, otherwise I would've said "HE charge" when I suggested it. The HE charge wants to make a large and powerful area-effect explosion, where our breaching charge would be designed to be a directed explosion focusing its power onto the wall/door/obstacle in front of it. I see it as the player placing it in the right position and direction and being rewarded with 1 or at most 2 tiles in front of it being destroyed/damaged. For people discussing whether this would be too powerful for the earlygame but fine for the lategame - this could easily be tied to research with Alien Alloys/more powerful alien explosives and thus delayed until it would be suitably balanced in terms of game power. The charge/different explosives could also be designed to knock through inner walls but not outer UFO walls, much like how it worked in X-Com. Finally, a quick video which gives you an idea of what a breaching charge is in reality. Turn your sound down, the effect is quite percussive.

I think small-AoE, high-damage breaching charges would be much more fun and active than a welding torch, particularly with a timer feature. Have them only damage the wall they're placed on but have that damage be high enough to bust the wall open reliably. Maybe have some additional effects i.e. there are aliens right on the other side of the wall, in which case stun/damage/whatever them