Gnawer

Thank you for listening to the players' feedbacks. May I suggest to at least bump the font in Xenopedia and ground mission briefings up to like 2x current size? It should be extremely simple and doesn't involve any other rearrangements.

I made a topic all about nitpicking the minor flaws of the game, and this is just to the level of silly. What do you want it to say? It already tells you what the soldier is. Keeping things straight forward and using the same overall title makes sense. When you see 'items Received' you already know what it is, if you have a different message for each possible object it just becomes needlessly convoluted. It would also require you to have multiple pop up boxes for scientist, soldiers, items, engineers.. It could easily say "transfer/production complete", which is just two options. It's about immersion. I have the same feeling about it I had when I first worked with Microsoft Project and discovered that people are essentially "resources", same as staplers. Well I can just as easily draw a conclusion that it's powered by a machine spirit, can't I. Google Car is also based on Prius (I believe), yet it has this automated driving system. If Hunter were manned, then the driver should have levelled, had hospital time etc. Again, immersion. If it's a drone (which essentially it is now), I wouldn't think twice about using it as a fire magnet. Its extremely obtrusive and obnoxious in the new XCOM and only works because of the extreme simplicity. Cover is the way it should be, like in real life. I'm not saying that Xenonauts' model is worse. It is however more complex and confusing, and therefore has to be presented more clearly to work well. In tabletop wargames, this system is called "true LOS" and involves lots of very annoying checks with a laser pointer. Like, what if your dude can only see another dude's sword? Does that count as a shot? There's a rule for that in Mordheim (it doesn't), so you can imagine how many other rules there is. Thankfully modern tabletop games, like Warmachine, have done away with that and are using precisely the same system used by XCOM. I don't really see this happening, but if that is a problem for you.. *shrug* It is, actually. Just yesterday I had an alien hiding behind something that looked like a waist-high crate (inside an UFO), but was apparently a full cover. I marched my entire squad past this crate and never saw him. Got plasma'd right in the side. I understand simulation as something built on well-defined principles to model a real-life situation. If you don't KNOW the principles behind a simulation, it's useless to you, because you can't tell why something went wrong. Now, part of a GAME is figuring out how underlying simulation works. You can't master it just by wild guessing, at some point you have to get down to the real math. Therefore, in both cases you need some way to access the exact parameters affecting your shot. Ideally that would be UI cues, less ideally - something in the documentation. Then, after you have the understanding, you can take "educated" guesses.

I've bought Xenonauts a couple of days ago. Let me first say that I've played original UFO, TFTD, and (somewhat related) Jagged Alliance in the 90s, and also I'm a major fan of Firaxis' XCOM. So I had a reasonably high expectations for this game. So far, I wouldn't say I'm disappointed, but I have encountered a fair share of annoyances in it. I'm going to list some of them, in hoping that maybe they can be addressed in some future patches. 1. Fonts. This is a really important one. I have a 1280x1024 monitor, and texts are unreadable, to the point where I just gave up on the Xenopedia entries. What about people with standard 1366x768 laptops? It really looks like the only intended resolution for this game is FullHD 26"+, which is ridiculous. I mean what, not a single one of the developers has any background in either web or mobile programming, where you just can't rely on any fixed screen size? 2. Random sloppiness around the UI. I'm talking about some really basic stuff, like: - when soldiers arriving to a base, the message says "Items received". That's kind of degrading for your men, isn't it? - when you click on a crash site, the option to go there says "Intercept". How do I intercept a crash site? I understand that that's a generic option to send an aircraft somewhere, still, looks funny. - there seems to be no way to delete a custom role. - when you hire soldiers, there's no way to see them in transfer, or ETA, or any of that. That was even in the original UFO. Also there's this chart with available soldiers. When I pick the good ones, I seem to be stuck with the bad ones until I hire them and make room for more. And more records keep popping up just like that, making an impression of playing some sort of slot machine. Again, I understand it's simplier that way, but it just makes them look like "items". - ok, not an UI issue, but somewhat bothered me. There's no explanation anywhere on how the hunter vehicle works. Is it remote-controlled, automatic, or is there a driver? Currently, it just looks like "it's a reskinned copy of UFO's HWP, duh". Except in HWP I bought "automatic" without much problems, and in the '79 setting I'm having trouble buying it. 3. Controls in the tactical screen. They seem to be close to what I remember from UFO, but come on, that was back in the day when mouse was considered optional. What's worse, there seems to be no way to customize mouse actions. My issues with it: - Why do I have to left-click to see TU cost of a movement? Wouldn't it be easier to just show it on hover? - There seems to be no good way to cancel out of this pathfinding mode, once I clicked somewhere. By analogy, I would expect Esc to end it, like it ends the fire mode, but it doesn't. More so, I don't even like Esc for both of them, I'd really like to do all that with the mouse. - Both movement and selecting a soldier are done with left-click. That can lead to misclicks. That's the thing I feel XCOM really done right: it does selection on left-click and actions on right-click, so they are not intermixed. - Seems weird to change soldiers with the wheel. Again, just my preference, but in this day and age it should be customizable. 4. Terrain and cover. Again, compared to UFO, it's about the same I guess. But now that I played XCOM (a lot), I want more. - In Xenonauts, cover is really unclear. I didn't even get any idea if it existed at all, until I RTFM'ed it. Come on, even Shadowrun is better at expaining cover to the player via UI, and Shadowrun is an RPG, not tactical sim. - Lots of terrain is kinda hard to size up from the first glance. Like these round UFOs have wide margins which look like empty space, but are really not, so you have to click around them to see which squares are walkable. - I'm still having trouble telling full-cover (walls) from half-cover (high crates), in some cases there's no telling which element is which, and you just have to remember them all. - Ok, adjanced-tile objects don't count as a penalty. What if an object is 2 tiles wide? Also, what counts as being behind the cover? Is it "when line from centre of the shooter to centre of the target crosses the cover tile"? Then, does the "tile" really mean "cube" for different elevations of shooter and target, and where is the centre of that cube? This all doesn't seem that important, but it actually is. Having some board game experience, I can tell that this LOS model is the most confusing of all, and at least I'd expect to see it described in the release documentation (NOT somewhere in the internet). XCOM uses a somewhat simplier model, but it also does a good job explaining all the shot modifiers in the UI (there's a detail window). I hope this feedback is constructive. I do like the game, and wouldn't care to raise the issues if I didn't.