Zerodaimaru

Had a pretty rage educing moment last night. Right at the beginning of a mission I have 2 Sebs keeping me penned up inside the dropship. Decide that its time to enact my last resort and shoot them with a rocket. So into the middle with as clear a line of fire as I can give him goes my rocketeer and he fires! At which point the rocket takes a 90 degree turn right into the wall gibbing all of my best soldiers in one fell swoop. (It might not have been 90 degrees it just felt like it. I didn't stick around with my protractor)

Okay just went and had a look in game (no mods or anything installed, just using the base non CE version available on steam) And ya I'm not sure where I got that soldiers wouldn't cause the blocked shot to appear cause they do so sorry for that! chest high walls don't but the shots I took over it didn't seem to block it either, though admittedly leaving your tanks next to chest high walls is a pretty good way to lose them on insane anyway Sorry the misinformation! I'm gonna go slink off to a corner for a little while now

You know before I commented I was 100% sure of myself. Now I'm questioning if this is something that I've just convinced myself is true. Gonna go test this right now.

It is if the thing blocking the shot is far enough away. I was referring to the situation where you have your soldiers or a wall right in front of the tank, then it doesn't seem to Or at least I cant remember ever seeing it, but to be fair after the first misfire mishap I keep my tanks far away from my soldiers and non concealing cover so perhaps its not that their missing all the time and are only absent in specific circumstances. I admit I haven't put much more research into then the one time and deciding "NOPE" from then on out Edit: Sorry for the confusion, apparently I'm not quite coherent enough on a single cup of coffee to be able to express my point properly

--The following is completely wrong and should be ignored, maintained as proof I'm an idiot -- I think the primary problem is the inconstancy though. If I have a soldier aim his gun at an alien the game will not only tell me that his buddy is in the way but the percentage change of shooting said buddy in the back. Even soldiers carrying rocket launchers are given that kind of information. However when we move up to tank level weaponry that information disappears. So either knowing that information for soldiers is a bug and should be removed in the CE (something I think no one wants) or tanks not knowing that information is the bug and should be fixed in the CE. After all it would be nice if the tanks gunner could warn me that hes only got a 20% chance to get a shell over the wall right in front of him.

Sorry OP but your making a rather large mistake. Your coming at this game thinking "This is what I think the game should be, now lets force it into my preconceived mold" and finding an unsatisfactory experience. When you should be coming at it with a mind set of "These are the games mechanics, how can I make them work for me?". As others have said the pacing was never designed around having 3 - 4 months of funding from the start, or having more then 1 or 2 squads armed and ready to go. But here's the awesome part, with enough work you could potentially turn Xenonauts into what you want it to be. Your going to have to get down in the guts of the game and alter .. well basically everything but that's not all that hard to do. And when you get it the way you want it then you can bring it back to the community and say "Hey, this is how I always thought this game should be" and allow others to enjoy your vision of xenonauts. It doesn't sound like my cup of tea personally but I'm sure there's at least a few people who would like to play a game where you have to field 5 or 6 squads of soldiers across 8 bases with a long slog through the tech tree. I mean heck look at the long war mod for XCom:EW and that's essentially what they've done and people love it.

While I agree with most of what you have say I think there's one other important aspect to deal with. Really there are two types of pirates. You have the ones who will buy games but occasionally pirate something. For whatever reason it doesn't matter but they do occasionally pirate either to demo a game before they buy it, because they really want a game but don't have the money for it ect really the reasoning is irrelevant and unimportant in a high level discussion and the above illustrates this type of consumer nicely. Then you have the other type, the type of person who never buys anything and pirates everything just because they can. again weather this person pirates because they cant think of anyone not directly connected to themselves or think they are oh so special they deserve everything for free is irrelevant to a higher level discussion. In a perfect world (at least in my opinion as a software developer) there would be no pirates. I like getting paid for what I do as does any professional really. We like to buy food and pay our mortgages/rent. And piracy is taking money from our pockets no matter what way you slice it. No its not on a 1 pirated copy = 1 loss sale but there are a subset that would probably buy it if they couldn't pirate it. But we don't live in that world and probably never will. And if we ever do it will probably come at the cost of a large portion of our consumer rights. Just look at the whole assassins creed 2 ubisoft drm thing that happened a few years back. And ultimately trying to fight the pirates is a costly and hopeless gesture that does nothing but spend what ever consumer good will the publisher/developer has built up by taking away consumer rights in exchange for delaying the pirates by a handful of hours at most. Or by completely poisoning a game before its even been developed (see the whole Sim City thing put on by EA not all that long ago). But in terms of pirating Indie games I mean come on! That's a bit much. Most cost less then a meal at a restaurant and its not like the companies who make them have a back catalog of a million games still trickling money into their pockets.

Thanks for the clarification Kabill. I knew smoke grenades helped a fair amount, and that the more smoke the enemy shot through the better just from playing (except for the damn lizard people of course) but its nice to know exactly how much each tile of smoke boosts my chances of bringing everybody home outside of plastics bags.

Ahh that makes sense. Looks like the retina displays plague more then just us web developers

What resolution are you running? I'm at 1920 X 1080 and don't have any problems reading the text. I took a quick look to see if I could find a mod that changed the font but at the time of writing there's nothing on the first 5 pages of the modding forum and Google search didn't reveal anything either I'm afraid.

Not really. I'm not talking about the whole wall or cargo container disappearing just because my mouse is over it, just the section covering whatever tile my mouse is over. if my mouse is over something then its an area I plan to interact with or want more information about and stripping away the pretty but otherwise useless fluff covering where my soldier would move I think is pretty important. I mean when I'm about to commit to a move I no longer care if its a wall, cargo container, or helicopter that my soldiers are about to hide behind. I care about getting them in the exact tile I want them to be in and currently the only way to do that in a lot of cases is to count tiles.

I just wish that if you had your mouse over a tile that would move a soldier behind a wall that the wall would go transparent around the mouse. It already does this around the soldiers when they are actually in the cover but I find myself having to count tiles on a fairly regular basis to make sure that I am indeed standing in cover and not out in the open. And even then its "hold my breath and pray" moment when I hit that end turn button most of the time. My strategy for most maps actually revolves around making sure I'm having to use as little cover like that as possible.

Oh I agree totally. There are times in my Xenonauts playthoughs I'm fairly certain most of my soldiers are turning into that bolshevik muppet.

Something tells me your character and my characters death might be related.

If I'm not mistaken it was around the same time that this game is set that the US Army (and probably a few other countries) were experimenting with LSD. Sooo maybe this whole alien invasion thing is less then it appears to be...