kentsfield

All terror missions, alien bases, and base assaults are caused by unchecked UFOs to my knowledge, so if you're shooting everything down these are going to be pretty rare/non-existent.

Assuming you need Sentinel armor + MAG weapons to beat the final mission, quite a few I'd think. You'd need the captured aliens, the parts for research, and the materials to manufacture all the gear for your soldiers. I'd also imagine you'd need some semblance of air superiority to prevent your funding from tanking. It's hard to estimate, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were looking at 30+ ground combats at the minimum. Which is plenty for a single playthrough, in my opinion. I also think making assaults on the player's base a legitimate threat throughout the game would go a long way in ensuring the player's participation.

It's not as if time flows on the geoscape while you're in a mission, or dropship fuel is a limiting factor, or soldiers don't fully rearm between missions. Unless the crash sites are a continent apart there's plenty of time, fuel, and ammo to go from site to site with the same dropship. The only reason not to go to all of them is if you're insufficiently manned due to causalities (which can mostly be prevented with proper play) or, what is likely the more common reason, you simply don't want or feel like doing another ground mission, which is understandable since they are time consuming and largely repetitive. This means that the player is essentially forced to choose between fun and in-game bonuses. "I don't feel like doing another ground mission right now, even though it would be more fruitful, so I'll take the penalty to my cash, materials, and soldier experience instead;" that's often the decision the player is making when they click the airstrike button. Wouldn't it be more interesting to make a choice between money and materials/experience?

But why wouldn't you do every crash site that you possibly can? Every time you click the airstrike button when you're capable of getting a team there you're throwing away money, materials, and soldier experience.

Yeah, the risk-return sounds good on paper, but in practice the risk of losing soldiers on a ground mission is very manageable. This makes ground missions the better option every time. The only reason to ever click the airstrike button is if a) you can't get a proper crew there before it despawns or b) you don't feel like doing the ground mission. B happens a lot because of the sheer number of UFOs and lack of variety in the missions. By the time I gained access to the final mission, I had shot down nearly 200 UFOs. That's an absurd amount of ground missions to do, and yet I felt like I had to do them all else be penalized with opportunity costs. That's bad design. It would work much better if airstrikes were the preferred option for dealing with downed UFOs. This can be done by having them award the player significantly more money than ground missions. This way, the player only needs to do ground missions for alien materials and/or soldier experience. Considering how many materials are needed throughout the game this would still result in the player having incentive to do a fair number of ground missions, but without feeling like he's being penalized for not doing every single one.

No, but soldiers en route will take up living quarters space, so you can figure it out with some basic math.

The command center is the room with the leader and usually some others defending, similar to the control room of a UFO. And you don't need to hold it I believe, just clear the room.

As fantastic as this game is and as much as I'm enjoying it, it almost churns my stomach to think about what it could've been, and how we'll never know.

Aside from the wonky LoS/LoF and passive AI, which are biggest issues right now in my opinion, here are some quality of life improvements I'd like: -Ability to re-order soldiers, both in the soldier list and dropship -On dropship screen, display class icons (and perhaps portraits) instead of the generic soldier icon -Allow soldiers to be swapped on the dropship screen by dragging them onto one another -Ability to transfer scientists/engineers between bases -Ability to assign a class on the soldier screen -Grenades are difficult to see; perhaps make them bigger and slow down the throwing animation

Thank you for your reply. That's unfortunate, but I suspected as much. Truthfully, shots being penalized because they clip any part of the tile isn't a huge deal. It seems to be consistent, so that knowledge can be reliably factored into decision making. What still doesn't make sense to me is the "magic bullet" shots that appear to change direction mid trajectory and/or curve around corners, like my example above. Even without the ability to draw a straight line between two tiles surely there must be a better way to implement this. It's starting to feel like standing around a corner or anywhere near a door/window is more dangerous than standing out in the open.

This was from an Ironman playthrough, unfortunately. I originally took the screenshot for another reason: if you'll notice, vision of the alien is being granted by the selected xenonaut, who has no line of sight of the alien. Unless that particular xenonaut has the gift of x-ray vision, I have no idea why I'm able to see the alien. This seems to happen a lot, too. Maybe I just don't understand how line of sight works, but regardless, it's not very intuitive. Anywho, I don't mean to sound negative as I'm really enjoying the game otherwise, but it is very frustrating to be digging a session and then have it ruined by something like the above example happening. Really hope this can be fixed at some point.

Here's an example from a session I just played: As soon as I clicked end turn, the pictured alien, from the exact position he's in, turned and fired through the window toward my ship, and killed the xenonaut inside. I sat there for a few seconds, marveling at the absurdity. How am I supposed to make decisions with any sort of tactical sense when such outlandish things are possible?

Hey, I'm mostly new here so let me start out by saying great work! You have a nifty little game here that I have been enjoying very much. It's not without its flaws, as was also the case with the original, but most are easily overlooked. There is one glaring issue however, which is severely hampering my enjoyment: line of sight. The problem with the line of sight mechanic, as far as I can tell, is that the line seems to be determined using grid-based movement rather than a linear path. The result is that bullets travel in a zigzag, rather than a straight line as one would expect them to. This is quite jarring and leads to some oddities, including: Shots tend to clip objects that they wouldn't normally (one of the reasons clear shots at med-long range are so rare) Bullets have the ability to "curve" around corners Narrow-angle shots (such as shooting through windows) tend to be a lot more fruitful than they probably should be All of this is problematic because it creates a disconnect between what the player expects to happen based on the visual data he is given and what actually occurs. At best, the player simply doesn't notice or raises his eyebrow, but at worst this can mean the unexpected death of a solider or even a mission failure. Such was the case for myself earlier today, when one of my prized soldiers bit the dust after being shot through a corner that the game had given no reason to think was unsafe. I was really into the mission (and my campaign) up until that point, but the event really robbed me of my desire to keep playing, and I fear that this will be a regular thing if not fixed. The fix seems simple (and as I have little knowledge of programming I use the term "simple" loosely): calculate line of sight with a straight line from the sprite to the target, rather than with grid-based movement. In closing, I hope this fix is possible and will be implemented in the future. If there is already a mod that addresses this, please point me in that direction. Thank you for taking the time to read my post, and thanks for making this great game!