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X-Com players have always been a bit immersive-driven and even masochistic, yes? Why not drive home the point that "Dude, your guy who was alive last turn is now DEAD. You failed them. You failed humanity. They're DEAD. It says right there on the screen - DEAD. Where their health and TU's and morale was - it now says DEAD, and it's your fault." Simple - replace the current gap or disappearance of the dead soldier's mini-information bar with their number on top of the "currently selected soldier information bar" - with the simple, capital letters word "DEAD". That's it. Guilt trip the players. No further suggestions, Your Honour.

I'd like to have an option to set the menus to various degrees of transparency, as they cover up all the artwork. Also, how about making the various menu windows scollable, so that they do not take up so much of the screen?

At present for windows such as interception, patrolling etc. you have three choices. 1. Ok - 5 secs 2. Select new target 3. Cancel Items ordered/manufactured pop-up (and perhaps others I have missed) only has one option. 1. Ok. It would be nice if this had 1. Ok - 5 secs 2. Cancel - i.e; continue at same speed. As an optional addition, could we have the number keys (currently shortcutted for speed control) to already to auto close any open pop-up window with the appropriate time step. Anything that stops a player having to click or shortcut more than necessary has got to be a positive thing right? (playing on a laptop using track pad has taught me how annoying this is!)

Just in case I press end turn by accident...

Being able to rename your base would be nifty, for when you screw up your naming. ATM, the only way I know how to cancel base building is by saving, loading the game and clicking 'Intercept'. There's no other way AFAIK.

just finshed my first terror mission man o man those aliens are no joke. 2 xeonauts came back home. http://flic.kr/p/dfFyhN The one was clipping with the bed(making him hard to kill) and killed all my guys, but that all right i got him. Now going to make better weapons from his alien tec and use it against his buddys. P.s is there a way to change the glow sticks/ammo to the nades i have in the belt slots seem like its not working or im not doing it right. The only way i found out is to put it in his hand slot.

One annoying thing I find with xenonauts is that in the aircraft tab when I want to re-arrange my soldiers, I have no way of knowing who is who. It'd be nice that when you click on someones portrait, their token would highlight. That, or if you make it so their names appear on the token.

OH god, just lost a huge writeup. hopefully the image is self explanatory. Long deleted post short: toggled options. Problem/solution 1 difficult to remember which squad member is assigned to which hotkey (especially for new gamers like wife and children!) Facial recognition = easy for unfamiliar players to know which soldier is on which hotkey. (this is semi implemented already, easy change?) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_perception) One of the most widely accepted theories of face perception argues that understanding faces involves several stages *...* derive details about the person *...* to being able to recall meaningful details such as their name and any relevant past experiences of the individual. Recognizing your soldiers by their faces also has the possibility of enhancing that classic xcom notion of losing much loved soldiers. Know more than their names, know their faces. Remember them. ;_; Problem/solution 2 - No quick and clear indication of who's who, when looking at any tactical situation. Soldier names above/below sprite = at a glance knowledge of who's who with no need to dig through the UI. If you've kitted out Alex Brown as your go to "breacher" you want to be able to see where he is in relation to the rest of your breach team. 'At a glance information' can vastly speed up the tactical decision making/execution. And imo, improve the flow of the game. This information is already available to players willing/capable of remembering abstract soldier statistics and their positioning within the skyranger. These small optional changes would simply help the non-savants more readily access the basic information required to manage a battle. Shame i lost my original post. silly me. Hope this makes sense and is useful.

Hi, I made this suggestion in a larger post about my first impressions but thought I would post it here in the right forum as well. Would it be possible to have an easy way of overriding the fact that you have reserved APs for reaction shooting? At the moment, you have a great way of showing, via the green/orange/red squares where I can move my men to. If I move them to a green square and then suddenly see an alien and want to duck into cover, but that would use up my reserved APs, I have to go to the slider, drag it back up to the top so I have no reserved APs and then move again. Fiddly and time-consuming, given how often you need to do it. Similarly if I wanted to shoot then and there, but don't have enough APs as they are reserved I have to do the same - go to the slider, move it back up, then shoot. How about allowing us to shift click on an orange square (to move) or alien (to fire) which would automatically disregard the reserved APs without touching the slider?

I request this feature to be implemented on the game, cause it's really annoying when you have to click and drag every item for every soldier.

Hello, First, thank you very much for this game! I played to Xcom when I was 12 or 13 years, ans it's a real pleasure to find a similar game like this one. Secondly, sorry for my poor english. I'm french, and I can make some mistakes sometimes I bought a pre-order version this morning, and the game is verry addictive. However, there is one thing which cause me problems: it's the position of the window when we must do an interception. I have two bases. One in france, and one in south of america. And when an UFO come on the map, I have the window for the intercepetion who hide me where is the spaceship. If there is just one spaceship, it's not a big deal. But sometimes, there are two spaceship which appear in the same time. One is visible, and the second is hide behind the interception's window... Just like that: Sometimes, I can see the starship "A", but the starship "B" is hidden by the window. And when the window appear, I think it's for the starship "A" whereas it's for the "B" I can't see... I engage my french planes, but when I understand I had engaged the wrong starship, it's too late, and my planes came back for fuel few seconds after. It's very frustrating, because it often append. I think if we can move the window befor clic for engage, juste for verify the position of the starship concerned, it would fix everything. However, one more time, the game is really awesome, and I thank you very much for this!

Just had a go today. An excellent update overall which over time will succeed because people like me keep playing the original x-com game which is a complicated affair now to do. So anything that is up to date, deeper and works on our modern systems will be a hit. Hope you will carry on with terror from the deep, but that is a question for another day. In the original game during a ground combat mission, you were able to press a button which centred on the selected soldier. The advantage with that button, is that you pick your guy, browse around the screen and hit a quick button to centre of him. This is a convenience feature I miss. Secondly, after you fire at an alien and miss. The screen and target should centre back on the alien, ready for the next action. Thirdly, When your turn arrives. You need some kind of message displayed. On a couple of occasions, after the aliens and civilians moved it was my turn. Although I thought it was still the civilians turn. Makes me look like a fool, if someone was watching of course. But you get my meaning. I would like to think these suggestions help in making the combat part of the game more convenient, and convenience makes the game more fun.

When increasing the amount of units you want to sell/transfer, it would be much preferable if you could just plot in a number, instead of having to press the little increase/decrease arrows. When you're selling hundreds of units at a time, it's just an annoying wait, even if you hold the arrow down.

When an aircraft is refueling or it is being repaired, in the Aircraft Equipment page no changes can be applied. It is not possible to switch weapons. If the Aircraft equipment screen is referring to a chinook, then the soldiers cannot even be repositioned in the plane! I find this feature a bit annoying, but it's no big deal. A few times I've tried to switch plane weapons or order chinook soldiers and nothing happened... Then I remembered that the plane had just returned from a mission and that it was not ready yet. A clearer indication that the plane is being rearmed/repaired coud make everything clearer. Xenonauts already overlays a big text when a plane is being built; I think the same approach could be used during plane repairs/refueling. Below there is a screenshot of a mig being built. Using similar hints could be useful: Unit is undergoing repairs Hours until completion: x Unit is being refueled Hours until completion: x Today the UI is a bit misleading. Nothing can be done on the page until repairs/refueling is complete. So the UI is not responding to clicks, but understanding why is not immediate.

Reading the first pages of the manual, I realized that maybe having the country region relations show up as a color shade on the geoscape map could be something. Some people might not like it, so make it toggleable, but it would give a very ready and obvious feedback on where you need to focus your efforts. A country could go from Green (good/starting relation) towards blue (really good), or towards red (bad relations) and finally black when "lost". Ideas?

It very often happens that incomings are behind the PopUp. So here are 2 ideas: 1. Make the PopUp transparent to have a look behing 2. Make it movable The best would be if the booth ideas could be implemented.

Maybe we could make the list not scroll to the top for everytime we click the train button? Because it is a pain to scroll down to click another soldier.

WARNING * these are more nitpicks then big things, but games that tend to be the best have the fewest things to nitpick about. Showing what weapons soldiers are using in the personal tab. -I like to have a balance of weapons, but it’s hard to keep track of 50 guys, and the only way to see what weapons they have is to go through them one by one.... So i never know who has what. Showing aircraft weapon stats in the aircraft tab. -Reason is obvious. Make the shotgun a bit more accurate... It’s kind of useless right now. -Bluntly anything that is more than 5 square’s away will almost never get hit. I stopping using them entirely and just started spamming machine guns, because at close range they deal way more damage. Have the ability to choose when we sell alien weapons -So we can stockpile up some money, its simple psychology. If you see that you have 3 mill you will spend till you have just enough to make it through the month. But then after that you don’t have enough to build a new base or something else big. Also while some people find this useless micromanagement If some of the things bellow are done it that argument will become moot. Make the click sound in the store tab when moving or selling items only go off once when you click and hold.... -So annoying. (Nitpick) when entering soldiers tab, if there is only one transport it is automatically selected instead of unassigned. -Every time I click the soldiers tab to modify my transports soldiers I have to click that transport. I am finding that I almost never have to use the unassigned tab, so it seems like an unnecessary step.

Once you close to firing range with a cannon selected off, it goes from red to green, but still does not fire. There is no change to the colour when you click it again, but it does sart firing again. Can be a pain if the cannon was turned off at the end of another combat, because as the new combat starts, it looks green (on), but it does not fire until you click it again.

Most of the time when I try to click the single fire mode button for the assault rifle, i just click the whole assault rifle button, so end up with a targetting reticule for a pointer. It seems to be random which of the boxes light up when you mouse over the single fire box.

I just wanted to throw my opinion in and let you know that I think it looks great, my compliments to the artist. P.S. I noticed the tooltip for the afterburn button is displaying #### -TW

edit: I have meanwhile been convinced by Gauddlike's arguments that my original proposal is lacking. Below is a revised version. A big thank you to everyone who provided feedback! Hi there, First of I'd like to say that as a huge fan of XCOM I greatly appreciate how close you stick to the concepts of the series. But in one way you are imo a bit to close to the classics: reserving time units in ground combat. I have only played Xenonauts for a short time up to now, but I already encountered a number of situations where I thought to myself "well, that could be done in a less click-intensive manner". I'll give you an example: Usually I reserve time units for a reaction shot. But if I then encounter an alien while using the rest of my TUs for movement, I want to shoot him. It happens rather often that the game won't let me do that, cause I don't have enough TUs left for two shots (the one I want to take and the reaction shot). This requires me to deselect the 'reserve TUs option', clicking on the alien a second time and reselecting the reserve option at the start of the next turn. That's a lot of clicking. I'd suggest to implement one of the following solutions to this: - Allow the usage of reserved TUs for aggressive actions like shooting or throwing a grenade, with one additional safety-click on the target and displaying a 'click again to use reserved TUs' overlay. - Allow the usage of reserved TUs for aggressive actions like shooting or throwing a grenade as long as a modifier key is held (© by Gazz ^^). If one of this options is used make the text of the reserve-options greyed out, so the player has visual feedback that this unit won't react during the enemies turn any more, but leave the previously selected option selected. Additional visual feedback would also be nice. By which I mean this: introduce a 4th color for the path highlighting. Green tiles = tiles that can be reached that leave enough TUs for auto reaction fire. Blue = enough TUs left for snap shot reaction. Yellow = no reaction fire possible. Red = Unreachable in this turn. Hopefully this is helpful to you! Keep up the good work! Alex

Played new build and found some things that makes tactical combat uncomfortable. 1. Hard to tell whether I am selecting soldier or ordering soldier to move to the spot near the soldier I want to select. Especially in dropship. 2. Spent 30 seconds looking for alien hunter spotted in dark place. Maybe visible alien should be hinted with something? 3. Found no way to check how much AP weapon consumes. Other than targeting something. Maybe AP cost should be written at AP reserve buttons? 4. Found no way to shoot selected spot from sniper rifle or assult rifle. It always have to be wall, alien or some other target. Maybe this has point... Actually, I tried to target empty spot to see AP cost. 5. Clicking "end turn" with cursor in shoot mode makes it should at the beginning of the next turn. Made me almost destroy Hunter with a shot from sniper rifle.

This is the update for the new GUI design, taking some of the feedback into account from the previous thread here. Unless there's anything dreadfully wrong with it, we'll probably implement it relatively soon and then start working on the aesthetics of it once the functionality is confirmed to work well. The major changes are as follows: - Grenade quickthrow slot: this allows you to throw a grenade from your inventory without opening the inventory screen. This throw costs the normal throw APs, plus an additional 12APs if the soldier does not have an empty hand. - Reload quickslot: this allows you to reload the currently equipped weapon with a single click. The number in the right-hand corner shows the number of clips available. - Squad Stat Bars - the HP, AP and morale is shown for the entire squad along the top of the GUI. If a unit is killed, their bars sink down into the GUI. On mouseover a mini-portrait pops up above the bars to let you more quickly identify the right soldier in the squad. - Camera Control - the element on the right near the End Turn button is the camera level control. The white bars show the current display level selected, in this screenshot at 2. - General Reshuffle - a bunch of the elements have been moved around. Most notably, the inventory, crouch (missing from the previous GUI) and stats have all been consolidated into a bar on the Soldier Information panel. There are three screenshots here: These show the UI with the three variations on the combat window (the grenade one is just a rough approximation at the moment). Essentially the first two are displayed depending on whether a one or two handed weapon is equipped, whereas the final one is displayed once you right-click on the grenade fast-throw box. It displays all the grenades in the soldier's inventory and details on the throw cost. Personally I think this UI should work well - it's got a lot of information on it but it's not actually that cluttered and doesn't take up too much space. Comments welcome.

We have a new coder joining the team shortly, and his role will be to implement some of the new weapons still to go in the game, and to put the new ground combat GUI in place for us. There's no guarantee that things will work out - even with the best of intentions, somewhere between half and two-thirds of the people that join the team don't stick around long enough to make a meaningful contribution. However, it means we need to have another look at the new combat GUI concept. The purpose of this thread is to help us finalise the layout and functionality of the ground combat GUI. It is not meant to provide a final visual appearence as we'll do another iteration with the finished art afterwards (though you can comment on that if you want). This GUI doesn't look very pretty at the moment and it's not meant to. If you've played the game and you have some comments about how we can make it easier to control the troops, please post them up here. A couple of suggestions like weapon reload buttons and access to grenades on the belt / backpack have been incorporated into the design, and if there are things I'm missing I'm happy to add them in too. Stylistically the final design is likely to a row of computer monitors along the bottom of a large wall-mounted screen in the Xenonaut base, from which the player is ordering his tactical team around. This should tie it into the new GUI style we're working on (as seen on the Main Menu). OK, so onto the concepts: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/CombatGUIV3_1.jpg http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/CombatGUIV3_2.jpg The PSD file is available here for people who want to tweak the design themselves: http://www.xenonauts.com/devimages/CombatGUIV3.psd These are at minimum size. They would scale with the vertical width of the screen until they are about 25% larger, then the size would be capped and they'd just fill less of the screen width as the monitors grew larger. The planned functionality is as follows (from right to left): AP RESERVE: The AP Reserve slider selects the Reserve setting for the soldier selected. The selected setting will have the slider there and will be highlighted in orange. Settings where the soldier does not have enough AP to select will be shown in a darker grey. The number on the left represents the APs required to take a shot of that kind. WEAPON: As visible in the two screenshots, this box splits in two if a 1-handed weapon is equipped and is a single block if a 2-handed weapon is. The buttons in the bottom left represent single shot and burst fire mode, and the bottom right button allows the weapon to be reloaded without opening up the inventory. The top right number is the ammo level of the weapon. GRENADES: The two slots next to the weapon are for grenades. This displays up to two grenade types in the soldier's inventory (if more than two, the two which require the least AP to throw are displayed). Clicking on them brings up the fire cursor as if they were the selected weapon. The AP cost to fire includes the cost to unequip the current weapon and equip the grenade, then throw it. Not sure whether the soldier should automatically re-equip their weapon or just drop it on the floor afterwards? SOLDIER INFO: This is unchanged from before - the three bars show HP, AP and Morale. Colours yet to be determined. BACKPACK: This button will open the soldier inventory when clicked. SOLDIER SCROLL: These two buttons allow you to scroll to the next / previous soldier in the squad. END TURN: This is the red button. It ends the turn. MAP: This is the green button. It will open the battlefield map when one is implemented. Possibly just having a minimap would be more sensible? It'd take up more space though. CAMERA LEVELS: The up and down buttons here let you cycle through the battlefield view levels (ie. the levels of a building). SOLDIER SELECT: The row of soldier portraits along the top of the UI is there to make it easier to see the situation at a glance. All living soldiers will have their portrait in colour and dead / stunned ones will have it in grey. You can also see their available HP, TU and Morale at a glance. Clicking on a portrait would select the soldier, double clicking it would centre the screen on them. That's about it. Any questions or suggestions?