Akavit

Congratulations. I was here early on but dropped off as the game started to become more complete. Lacking time for serious bug-testing, I chose to stop playing so the content would be fresh and the first play-through more fun. I'll give the game a couple more weeks for further bug-eradication then start up a nice new game. Oh by the way, I recommend that people stop playing iron man mode until the game is totally bug free. I've made that mistake too many times in the past to do it again. Actually, I'll never play iron man on any game for that reason.

Hmm. Regarding door abuse, I think it would work better to have it take 6 AP to open the door and 15 to close it.

If that is the case, it would be handy if the AI's distance calculations for triggering aggression were done as percentages of the total sight range instead of using hard numbers.

I know. I've used them in a terror mission to get some badly needed light close to the aliens. They aren't very good for this purpose though. They are heavy weapons, slow to fire and have very limited ammo. Since fires never spread, the light dies out fast too. It's not like having an autocannon loaded with 14 rounds of flaming goodness plus two extra magazines in the pack.

Incendiary rounds in X-Com were perfect for lighting up the night missions. It would be nice to have some.

This is kind of the point. Preventing a problem is usually better than fixing one. If getting rookies up to a decent level is faster, it's no longer necessary for players to send the same squad on every mission in order to get an elite squad capable of beating the aliens. Instead, players can send 100mission Joe out with a bunch of 5mission soldiers and a couple rookies and put up a good fight. 100mission Jane can be left at base with a handful of 5mission troopers as backups. Rotating troopers for ground strikes is a good tactic and one that most X-Com players who play iron-man mode use. It's only when a game puts undue emphasis upon the continual need for a full squad of elite soldier that the risk of losing them in one mission comes into play. Assuming that a player did lose everything (shouldn't happen often if troop rotations were used) getting a new start would be very tough but not nearly as impossible as before. If greenhorns became passable soldiers in about 5 missions there's some chance of success for rebuilding. If it takes 15 missions there's not much chance at all. The main reason I don't like training is because it's in UFO:ET (at least in the modded version I play) and it hasn't added any fun to the game. I just end up hiring large numbers of recruits then automatically stick them in training for a month before they are strong enough to put on basic gear. New soldiers don't need to be very skilled but they should be usable when they are recruited.

Yes, Stellar Rat did say it first. I only read the first page before making my post though so I missed his input on that topic. All I can say is that great minds think alike. I can't remember for sure on the all-rookie team but I seem to think they were armed with heavy plasma. I've also heard of players defeating the last mission with just heavy cannons but I don't think that was a rookie squad. I haven't played enough Xenonauts yet to have a good sense for the underlying numbers but properly balanced, the xp curve system should permit soldiers with just a few missions of experience to use the heavier armor. I don't mind losing soldiers and I don't mind the fact that a rookie team has a harder time winning than a crack team. I do however, find it counter-productive to expect a player to maintain a squad of soldiers with 100 missions of experience to have a chance of winning yet also balance the game so that it's hard to survive more than 20. The curved XP system allows players a chance to recoup losses. Another idea would be to redo the weight of gear a bit and make armors lighter and weapons and ammo a little heavier. Armor is kind of a staple piece of equipment in the later stages of the game but it's not necessary for rookies to have heavy weapons and backpacks full of ammo for them. The latter is nice but not mandatory for survival.

If I remember correctly, people have managed to complete the final mission in X-Com with all rookie squads. That means while it was a hard game, it wasn't mandatory to have veteran squads to compete against the aliens. Recently I've been playing a modded version of UFO:ET. In that game there are several tiers of aliens but unfortunately, the last 4 tiers are just better armed, armored and more accurate versions of their predecessors. By the latter half of the game this ends up putting the player in a situation that is no fun at all. Aliens require 6-9 hits to kill, they kill a soldier in 2-5 hits and they have 90% chance of hitting the player at maximum range. Using the latest and most accurate weaponry, the player will have about 60% chance of scoring a hit with a super elite soldier. A rookie will have about a 15% chance. Did I mention that the aliens outnumber the player troops? Given the above situation, there's not much a player can do besides resort to save/load to protect the experienced troops from death because it takes 100+ missions to get an elite soldier. Games like X-Com and Xenonauts are designed in such a way that the player is expected to lose soldiers. It therefore makes no sense to balance gameplay based upon the assumption that the player should have a full team of veterans. Given the fact that death rates will likely be high in the game, the big gap between rookies and veterans should be closed but not necessarily in all aspects. I have some suggestions in this area. 1. Rookies should start with better stats in two areas: accuracy and strength. At least allow the player to give a rookie a decent equipment loadout. Soldiers shouldn't have to survive a dozen missions just to gain the ability to wear basic armor and carry a heavy weapon and some magazines without becoming turtles. Regarding accuracy, green soldiers don't need to be snipers but it's nice if they can get their fire close to the target instead of spraying it it willy nilly around the map. This means they can suppress or hurt aliens with AoE weaponry at the very least. 2. Skill progression should be fast for green troops but become slower as they gain experience. This way, a soldier with 100 missions wouldn't have 90% more skill progression than one with 10 missions. 3. Use the percentage of AP system for using weapons. This was in X-Com and it helped tone the gap alot. Rookies couldn't move as far but standing still, they could still shoot just as fast. As a side note, please don't make all the late game aliens like those in UFO:ET(deadly accurate to the point where they all hit with every shot). It's yawn-inducing when the player knows how the dice will roll before clicking the end turn button. Plus, it's fun to see the terrain damage caused by missed shots.

If losing an aircraft is an automatic endgame event then the aircraft should simply be cheaper. If cheap aircraft seem strange because they are cheaper than vehicles I think the vehicles are likely too expensive. I'd expect that it's just about as easy for the aliens to destroy a vehicle as it is for them to down an aircraft in this game. I don't like invincible soldiers, vehicles or airplanes at all. I'd rather see their prices tweaked until they are nicely balanced.

This sort of mod is pretty much what I planned to do myself when the game is complete and I start my first real play-through. After playing other games such as Silent Storm, Jagged Alliance, Wages of War and UFO: ET (with mods) which either had long sight ranges or moddable sight ranges, I've known that it contributes to more intense tactical play. Uncovering the fog of war doesn't seem exciting or suspenseful to me. It's more of an exercise in tedium that takes many turns of leapfrogging until that last alien is finally flushed out. UFO: ET in particular is quite good when using mods that extend the sight range beyond the effective range of weaponry. Running out of ammo is a real possibility if one does not make the effort to find ways to close the distance safely before engaging. The danger of shooting up all the ammo after an extended firefight is far more exciting than the threat of being killed by reaction fire from the alien standing in the FoW on the opposite end of an empty field.

They've finally updated their website with some new images plus a new release date. No doubt the release date will be missed but apparently they are still working on the project. http://www.ufo2extraterrestrials.com/

It helps the game a lot to play it with the Grayfiend mod. That puts the setting back on earth plus adds a lot of extra content and gameplay options.

Thanks for the tip. I will have to give it a try.

Speaking of ET... Grayfiend just released his latest version of the UNIMod for the game. I played it last night and the game is starting to balance out nicely now. He's also just a couple versions away from turning UFO:ET into a game that has nearly all the features of X-Com plus extra features and an improved UI. The next two versions of UNIMod are slated to implement bodies that can be carried and allow all bases to have full functionality. And yes, I think that UFO:ET did a very good job on the equipment/dropship aspect.

I've done two terror missions at night thus far and I agree that two flares per soldier isn't cutting it. I was lucky in the first mission that the aliens were missing me and that I killed them all after covering just half the map. I was out of flares and explosive rockets though by the end of the mission and if more aliens were out there, killing them would have been near impossible. In the original XCom I'd give my first troops out of the dropship about 8 flares each. Currently there's no method of creating light outside of explosive rockets and flares. There aren't any incendiary devices to use, rockets are heavy and consume a lot of space (and are risky to use around civilians) and flares are rationed out. What I think would work the best is to have flares put into the equipment screen for the players to choose if they like. On night missions, the game would also add 2 more flares to every soldier's inventory as long as free slots existed. This would be enough to get by on minor missions or help out the players that forget to equip their soldiers with them. Having the option to take more allows the players to make provisions for the longer and more dangerous night missions.

A couple times while playing the aliens launched a terror mission while I was flying my Chinook to a downed alien ship. I tried switching the dropship's target to the terror site but when I selected it as the new destination I got the intercept selection window instead. In that window I couldn't pick the Chinook since it was already flying.

I thought it was released over a year ago. Just shows how much attention I've been paying to it.

I'm doing most of my alien killing with sniper rifles, machine guns and rocket launchers. Rocket Launchers are the primary weapon of choice. Whenever I spot an alien I simply try to blow it away along with the surrounding cover. Currently I have two launchers plus a hunter with the rocket turret. I'll probably have to get rid of the hunter once I encounter cruisers because 4 rockets isn't enough to go far. Yesterday I spotted some movement inside a building and chose to take out a wall with a rocket rather than entering through the door to clear the room. It turned out to be a human and the impact was close enough to leave nothing but the remains. The collateral damage was within acceptable limits and I haven't reformed my trigger happy ways yet. At least the aliens haven't killed a single one of my soldiers yet and I've run about 5 missions.

Okay. I'm just wondering why it's even in at all if that is the case. Unlike most other facilities, there's no real choices to make here. Defense systems, hangers, living quarters, labs and manufacturing facilities all have significant impact upon gameplay. It sounds like with general stores one is always needed and two is always overkill. The only situation I can imagine where a player might refrain from building one would be in the case of a radar base that is built solely for the radar systems. It would probably be better to pull general stores out of the game and simply factor the cost into building the initial base. Otherwise, it'll likely be a future source of confusion for players.

I'm using them now and they seem to work for me. Thanks.

In UFO ET I used pistols quite a bit because soldiers got a move bonus if they didn't have a rifle in their inventory. Heavy weapons gave a move penalty to soldiers even if the weapon was in the backpack. That was one good method to differentiate between the weapons. All my scouts and grenadiers were given pistols so they could cover ground faster. So far in Xenonauts I've not found a reason to give anyone a pistol with the possible exception of those carrying rocket launchers. Snipers never get close to the enemy and machine gunners tend to stay back as well. Even then, I prefer to load them out with as many rockets as I can instead of giving them a pistol which would probably never get used. We'll see how the combat shields change the game when they're in.

I see that the general stores facility is in Xenonauts but I'm having difficulty determining what it is exactly that it does. I would assume that one is needed before items can be purchased or manufactured but would two be better than one? Is there a limit to how much stuff can be stored in a single facility? XCom had charts showing the amount of available storage space a base had and how much of it was in use. I'm not seeing anything of the sort in Xenonauts. So do we ever need to build more than one in a single base? If so, how do we know when to build additional facilities?

Hopefully the flamer gets in eventually because incendiary ammo was always my favorite in XCom regardless of its relative lack of effectiveness.

I too would appreciate being able to see what roles each soldier has in the dropship equip screen. I spent some time the other day creating a specialized role for the men I wanted to have secure the landing zone. These soldiers are given smoke grenades and weaponry well-suited to quickly take down a single enemy. They are also fast. The soldiers coming behind them are usually the big gunners. These guys are too slow to do much shooting after reaching their positions outside the dropship but on round 2 they are able to inflict devastation upon the aliens.

I was playing a ground mission on a farm map and put a ballistic shotgun from a dead farmer into one of my soldier's hand slots. When I tried to leave the inventory screen it crashed to the desktop.