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...

Sure I'll toss my name into the mix. Just stick me on any old soldier and try to get him killed in the most spectacular fashion possible please. Preferably involving numerous explosions.

Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them." Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down." Sometimes this is the only tactic left to you... ~Zero~

Truth be told I haven't delved into the relm of modding yet, though looking at those two mods (as well as some of the others on offer) I will probably be taking a look after another round or two of vanilla. ~Zero~

Ya I always wondered about this myself. If the thing was supposedly shot down why is every building around it perfectly fine? Why does the damage on the ship seem woefully insufficient to actually down it. And other stuff like that I could go on about. It's not like I have a problem with the game or whatever (it's literally been the only thing I've played in the last while). But going to crash sites is one of the things that just rips me out of the game thematically. Luckily once the bullets start flying I'm pulled right back in again so it balances out. My guess is that it was a resource/time thing. A lot easier to make a map that can be used for landing or crashes then to make maps that are one or the other. Also probably a lot easier to build a level without having to add that level of detail to it. I mean the game was already 5 years in development and from the sounds of things it was 5 years of difficult development cycles meaning that the extra time for stuff like this just wasn't feasible. Don't know for certain just speaking from my own software development experience. ~Zero~

Yes I learned this one the hard way. Tossed a frag at an alien that I just really needed dead. This was the first frag I had ever thrown and didn't realize they didn't explode until the end of your turn. But anyway I figured I had just hit a bug or the soldier had screwed up as I couldn't see the grenade anywhere. End of the turn and I realize he A) had thrown it and B) it bounced of the crate he was hiding behind and had landed at his feet. And boom goes the grenade and splat goes my best assault. As for the some of the improbable story sections of the game I find it more unlikely that at the time this game takes place any military organization working for both the US and SU could exist at all. And even if it could, the number of scientists talented enough to study something as alien as well, alien tech you can employ as well as soldiers taken from all parts of the world (including US, SU) just seems so unlikely to me given how small scale the threat is at the start of the game. I can see it being formed later on when the threat is much larger but it would have likely been way to late by that point. Though it's easy enough to suspend this disbelief when actually playing and the soldier thing I explain away as we are getting people who either left their respective armed forces to join Xenonauts or were the type of soldier that would have been discharged from their respective military organization sooner rather then later anyway. ~Zero~

Its a right click, but the soldier doing it needs the TUs to be able to close the door (5 I believe) and has to be right next to the door. If you are standing in the same space that you opened it from you should be able to close it again. Can't say as I've ever run into the situation that I couldn't close a door with the exception of those big metal loading doors you often see in warehouses and train stations. Once those are open I'm pretty sure there's no way to close them again. Not sure if that's intentional or not though. ~Zero~

I too am in the camp of finding rifles too mediocre to be of much use personally. I much rather my soldiers be really good at what ever their chosen role is and rely on their team-mates for support then have them able to do everything themselves. The rifle can suppress but not as reliably as a heavy weapon, The rifle can single shot at long range but not with the accuracy of a sniper rifle, The rifle can deal good up close damage but not as cheaply as the shotgun/carbine can. The only soldier in my current mix that carries one is my rocketeer, I find that I generally only need a couple of rockets per mission if that and the rifle offers a good balance of weight to power so that he can carry it, his rocket tube and a couple of rockets. So in this case its good because it adds a bit of versatility to a soldier that is otherwise a little over specialized. ~Zero~

I don't have enough info to say for sure but I'm pretty sure the autoresolve doesn't take into account fuel time. So when I was first learning to play and my interceptors would catch the UFO but have 0 seconds of engage time I would autoresolve just to get me past that point. I don't do that any more however as it feels way to cheaty. As far as tactics go for a lot of the earlier fights I just send my planes right into the teeth of the enemy, most times they can get away without even a scratch, occasionally having a plane take a few hits before its over. If this isn't such a good idea (say 2 condors vs 1 corvette) I use whichever plane my current target happens to be tailing as bait while my other planes come in from the sides or rear to finish him off. I can't really comment past the point where bombers show up however as I haven't gotten any further in the game then that yet. ~Zero~

I've not tried the carbine at medium range, I always just assumed it would be as useless as the shotgun was. Next chance I get to sit down and play I'll have to give that a try. I'm not sure on the reaction modifier or weight. My gut says the reaction modifier is 1.5 just from what I remember from the way I use my assaults after they have it in hand but I'm at work atm so can't check to be sure ~Zero~

The carbine is the upgrade to the shot gun (mostly because a laser shot gun makes no sense at all). So same pros and cons as with the ballistic shot gun and rifle. Carbines have better damage at close range, but drop off drastically in accuracy at longer ranges when compared to the rifles. ~Zero~