Zelius

Stunned gargols and small vipers don't give any research, Delta and Omega vipers are the only ones that do.

The mod difficulty seems fine to me, though perhaps the number of starting soldiers could be increased again? I feel that the under-strength starting squad is juuuust too small, so that an unlucky player could be overwhelmed in GC and then find themselves with few/no soldiers for a while. The geoscape strategy I've used successfully is to live outside my means. Usually within month 1 or 2 my base upkeep is several hundred thousand above funding, I have 2-3 bases and I live off UFO loot. On that note, you should never airstrike when you can do a ground mission, and never do a night mission unless you are really confident. Don't take on a landed UFO unless you are experienced with that UFO class already. I keep about 5-6 interceptors each on 3 bases, and the early Cheburashka is enough to take down Corvettes in squadrons of 3 (Condors also possible, but is harder), and these are enough to win the air war consistently. Some UFOs are too far away or sometimes too many spawn in one place, but usually they all go down. Unless it's a base attack on my main base. For some reason I really enjoy those base defence missions. Probably because I can throw my rookies into the fray without having to watch them move slowly with their low TUs across crashsite maps. Unfortunately, my squads are becoming full Colonel / Commander, again. Research one thing at a time. If there is a penalty for too many researchers, I haven't seen it. Same thing with workshops. If you have no workshop projects you need to do, make low-grade armour or ballistics and sell. You can also sell some/most of the Alenium you get, you don't need that much early on. Once you start getting larger UFO cores, start disassembling them and you'll be rolling. As for GC, your first squad should have one guy equipped with a flamer. I usually give two clips to all my squaddies for their weapons, and stock up on as many grenades as possible without reducing TU to less than ~60. Grenades are your friend. Explosives allow you to kill without getting return fire. Flashbangs suppress and allow you to move in for the kill, or back off - AI doesn't seem to want to move when suppressed. Smoke is a life-saver when you suddenly come across a group of aliens with not enough TUs. But yeah, experience makes things easier. You should maybe try saving game during GC, test something out - say, seeing how much damage a Gargol can take - and then load again. Good luck!

Well, actually there's two versions of Xenonauts lying on the ground, 'Dead' ones who may survive their injuries after the battle, and if you walk over them their sprite is quite bloody, and 'Unconscious' ones who have gone down from taking too much Stun damage and can, in fact, be revived by a medikit during GC, by using a medikit on the square and ending the turn. I can't actually remember the last time I had a xenonaut's body blown up (I retrieve them before I explode the nearby area), I'm gonna try this out.

I've noticed that soldiers who are downed by bleeding wounds have a high chance of surviving, though I don't know about guaranteed.

Yep, try researching vortex weapons.

I'm pretty sure the walking viper (alpha) doesn't give any tech. After you get electroshock grenades, it's pretty easy to capture an alpha, or a delta by spamming them, though will take casualties. @Theoderich: yeah, that's what I thought after getting a few hundred batteries from my first landingship crashsite, but then got over 1000 and was pretty sure it wasn't intended. @Cortlendt: In my experience, you can capture everything except Androns, their drones, and viper egg sacs... Pretty sure you can stun gargols, though don't think there's any reason to do so. I usually just explode and/or burn all the melee aliens (a surprisingly large number of times, I've failed to kill a delta with explosives only for it to die in the fire it's standing on during its turn, haha). Edit: Yep, stunned a gargol, got a Stunned Gargol. I used... a plasma carbine. Pretty hard to do with electroshock grenades. By stun grenades, do you mean the purple gas grenades? On the alien turn, aliens that move through it take Stun damage, so just find alien(s) holed up in a room, toss in some gas and watch the doors. Some units are immune to it, should be pretty easy to work out which. Aliens become unconscious when they take Stun damage exceeding their max HP, as far as I know, not sure if that damage fades over time, though.

Yes, the delta and omega viper can be stunned and unlock a weapon and armour tech respectively, I believe. Maybe you already unlocked it? In regards to the plasma battery bug, I believe it is affected by the UFO size? In my experience corvettes might go into >100 while landingships go into the high high hundreds / low thousands. Changed it before I got to cruisers, but haven't gotten the bug in 50+ GCs.

Well, I tried it and it went from 10/3/6 to 9/3/4 every time, so definitely something there. Do you need to transfer them often? I usually set my default setups to Basic Armour + ballistic weapons, and set to default when transferring / taking off dropship team, so can't say I've encountered this before. Incidentally, adding Engineers / Scientists to a project doesn't actually decrease efficiency with each additional one, right? Pretty sure the manual is wrong about that? Couldn't help noticing you had huge amounts of different projects going at the same time...

@Alewalek Yea, that's what I've been doing, though in my pseudo-ironman I save at the beginning of each GC turn to a single savefile, so it gets a little frustrating when I can't kill an enemy because of CTD, like if I had the perfect chance to kill a Delta but can't because I have a place the C4 in a slightly different place, which means running my soldiers out of the blast radius, and thus less TUs to fire. Though the reason I don't play ironman is mainly because of the grenade pathing: "Oh, hey, you- soldier! Throw this grenade out the broken window at that alien. I know there's a dumpster kinda in the way, but I'm sure your arm strength is enough to-" *Grenade lands at the soldier's feet and explodes him into red goop* *facepalm* *Load game*.

Hey, has anyone else been getting CTDs with C4? In particular, when I drop a C4 instead of throwing it, and detonate with an electroshock grenade, I can produce a CTD every time...

You can still use attrition on Deltas/Omegas, by depleting their armour, eventually you will do massive damage and kill them. It's just a question of how many soldiers die in the process, heh. And yeah, Kirill, sometimes I also wonder whether the tooltip/thing is showing the correct accuracy ("Okay, all 6 shots missed... let's see, the chance of that is... 0.2 ^ 6, which is 1 in 15625 ?!?") On another note, it's nice that alien bases can grow on their own now, but I think they do so a bit too quickly... It's December of the first year, I left an alien base alone for ~15 days, went to do a base assault... BOOM, Dread rains down on my squad. Open the door: Caesan elites. Meanwhile, on the geoscape it's the first wave with any Cruisers. So I went into gameconfig.xml and cut the independent growth values to one-fifth, plus I temporarily upped the base size ticker thresholds, which is cheating, of course, but encountering Those Guys while I haven't met a Leader yet is a bit too much for me. Moral of the story: kill all the alien base.

- URGENT: Both Core pack and latest hotfix Researches.xml: under Researches.AdvancedLasers: have an extra space [ Rep laceItem("AV.GSZ_MARS","AV.JUPITER"); ], which is preventing the unlock of all techs / xenopedia entries after the error! - Has anyone encountered the plasma battery bug after the latest hotfix? I'm still playing without it, and haven't got it after changing Aphazer ammo from 500 -> 5, and in some missions with a lot of those weapons, I'm getting barely any plasma batteries, so they can't be unrelated? - To deal with Delta vipers in the mid-early game, I use... C4 and electroshock grenades, though you might not have the latter depending on your research path. Also, it's a good idea to help civilians... to use as human shields against vipers. But yeah, they are a bit OP right now, by which I mean that the instant I spot one, instead of sweeping my way carefully across the crashsite, I have to gather everybody to deal with that one threat. At least early on. - About the shooting through walls... I think what you're seeing is the result of the weapon... pathing? If you look carefully when your own troops fire, the projectiles can start from outside the tile they are standing on, so you can come across situations where you can fire around corners and not be fired upon from the target position, and vice versa. I actually wish this was more pronounced, so you can take cover behind building corners and not 1 tile back. Incidentally, you can totally shoot at a wider angle than the unit can actually see around corners.

Hello again, some more things for consideration: 1. Error in Researches.xml: 2. Can't unlock Heavy/Advanced Lasers due to being totally unable to find that 1 requisite weapon tech... I feel it's too rare for a rather critical tech, perhaps it could also be unlocked by having a large number of other alien weapon researches, instead of that one? > Domein: it IS still possible to equip aircraft with compatible higher-tier weapons even if lasers are missing, so it's not too bad. 3. Alien corpses sell for different values, which is great, but I think the prices are a bit too low... $1000 for a plasma battery, $25 for a Caesan corpse? A soldier earns $10,000 a month, and assuming part of that is his personal wage and not just expenses, he could buy a pile of them and prank his squadmates... I was thinking maybe a few hundred $ for even low-ranked Caesans and substantially more for live ones? The bulk of the income would still be from the weapons recovered, anyway. Additionally, the little Xenopedia footnote explaining the values of specimens is a nice touch, but I'm not a fan of the Zoos and People-who-want-to-keep-deadly-alien-invaders-as-personal-servants explanation.... ... Wellp, time to start a new game after tweaking things a bit for no. 1 and no. 2... here come the vipers!

Tileset change (http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11234-New-tile-atlases-for-testing) still doesn't get rid of the plasma cell bug for me, unfortunately. Hate to bring it up again, but the two times so far I have seen extra cells, there has been a phazer recovered (Scout, ~70 plasma cells, 1x phazer; Landingship, >500 cells, 2x phazer)... can't hurt to have a shotgun-like weapon have less ammo anyway, is what I am thinking (do the aliens even use up their ammo?) Also, about researches:

Applied the tileset, so far having been getting extra plasma cells, though I have only been through a few UFOs. Oh, on a similar note, Cruisers have been giving me 1x Cruiser Datacore + 1x Landing Ship Datacore since 5.2, is that intentional? I have also sometimes gotten 2x datacore for some of the larger UFO classes.

Tested it out, you can indeed go into negative fuel and still make it home, provided your aircraft can take down the enemy by flying straight at them, since you cannot give orders, as far as I can tell. I believe I saw it posted somewhere before as a vanilla bug, though.

> Sentelin - Vipers: Yes, this is just my preference, and honestly it hardly comes into play except for my peace of mind during ground missions (so if I see a viper run into a room I can face that way and at least it will have to run through a hail of fire). - AoE Weapons: OK, as long as there isn't some sort of bias for them during those close-quarters missions, just my bad luck. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the Sebillians were hurting themselves trying to take down my Radar Arrays of Invulnerability, the best base defence around. - Xenopedia: I dunno, it says 'Heavy Laser Weapons' with the description "Further evolution of our laser weapon designs... pulse lasers... base defence batteries." Unlocks Plasma Weaponry and Scimitar Tank researches, for me. After going further, Scimitar Tank research opens up the relevant entry, my mistake, but definitely upon completion it opens up the Xenopedia to nothing 3 times. ... So, after going through researches.xml, found that it might as well have no entries as it unlocks nothing but the Scimitar without Combat Plasma research, so I'll need to steal one. On that note, I can build a Scimitar with it's built-in Pulse Laser, but I cannot build the Pulse Laser.... Better than 5.2, where I had a Hyperion without unlocking either Scimitar or Pulse Laser, haha. - Great job with the air combat, had to look up the hotkeys for rolling left/right, alien heavy fighters decimating everything, though can autoresolve to win. Only issue is that sometimes when there are escorts, it can freeze / lag severely for quite a while at the start of battle, and at times during it, when the AI is trying to select between targets of very similar weight or something, which also causes the red line / direction indicator-thing to go haywire.

Ah, thanks Alewalek. Strange how it's popping up again now, since I never experienced it in older versions of XNT or vanilla, though I didn't play the latter for very long. I think I will just leave it be for now. A couple of thoughts: - Vipers. In my opinion forming a defensive formation should be a valid defence instead of, say, blowing up every likely hiding place or running everyone away so that the viper has less TUs to attack with. However, with their massive Reflexes stat and 1.5x reaction modifier, hardly anybody would get a shot off until all the viper's TUs are depleted. In one of my earlier UFO takedowns, against a Light Scout with 2 minor vipers inside, a viper ran out, across the field and into my half-ring of soldiers, attacking one. After which, everyone fired at that viper, resulting in huge, huge amounts of friendly fire. Anyway, end result, I reduced their weapon reaction modifiers to 1.0, so that average riflemen can get off at least one shot while waiting on full TUs, though this may have made reapers too easy to shoot... - Plasma Cannon, Combat Vortex etc. IMO there are too many of these for some mission types. Alien Base Assault and Base Defence, in particular, seem to have 50% of AoE weapons, which is bad because 1. Half my troops are bleeding everywhere and suppressed while trapped in seas of fire, and 2. Aliens really love to damage their allies and/or themselves, especially those stupid sebillians. Yeah, they regenerate, but all their armour is gone.

Found a couple of issues: 1. Alien Plasma Batteries. Occasionally, I get ~100 from a single UFO, but this latest haul of over 1000 (see attached) is really too much... On 3 of the occasions I got excessive batteries, I noticed that there were Anniliation Phazers recovered, but that could be my paranoia. 2. Heavy Lasers research xenopedia entries. I get the message about workshop unlocks, but instead of popping up entries for aircraft weapons, tank, etc. the xenopedia opens at a blank page 3 times, and those entries are not added to the xenopedia. - Also, I support the opinion that the Phazer suppression needs to be nerfed a little. The aliens often fire in a wide arc of pellets that suppresses absolutely everyone, since the range is incredible too.

Hi there, really enjoying the mod... except for the Caesans. I've rage-quit a number of times due to multiple members of my squad going berserk in the same turn while stacking together to repel Vipers, etc, and shooting each other point blank. My alien base assault tactics literally consist of sending my soldiers to stand in such a way as to have no other friendly in LOS, or, if that isn't possible, to have cover against each other. So.... I opened aiprops.xml, and found: PsionicPower="600" For Caesan Psions, Officers and Leaders, in both the 5.2 version and the 5.21 hotfix files. Interestingly, in v 5.0 the Praetor and Commander units also have 600 power, which are reduced in 5.2 to 100 and 120.....? In any case I've set the Caesan values to 60, 70 and 80 respectively, in accordance with 1.06 vanilla, which should hopefully make dropping all of my weapons all the time unnecessary - though I've found that some of the Advanced Ballistics weapons also do not do anything when the user is Berserking.