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Don't you think they are incredibly hard? I mean, they are too fast and the lucky time you DO catch up to them, they just shoot 3 of your aircraft down easily

I ran a mission and shot my own guy in the back, he gained hit points in the next two missions. I should not be rewarded for shooting my own men in the back. Health should be trained in some other way. Maybe when aliens shoot my guys, but I think it would be better if it was simply tied to strength.

from mortal feeble roockie to just as mortal not that feeble slightly more experienced soldier. The question is how steep should the increase in power by all factors (experience+equipment+knowledge) be? I would like it to be quite considerable with a couple of no-clue-cannon-fodder guys that have to actually retreat from some battles evolving into badass intimidated by well-nigh nothing veterans (scarcely below blasterbomb+psi troops). This "human evolution" was quite an important part to me in the original game. Anyone got an opinion/perspective on that? The thread was triggered by some game mechanics discussions were I argued along that line seemingly as the only one who wanted "from VERY low to somewhat high" "power progression".

Hi all, so after "testing" xenonauts for about 2 weeks I finally reach my personal critical mass to actively use the forum And guess what it's a bug report (if that won't overly strain myself suggestions might follow ) So I went through this terror mission (missing tiles bug, missing weapons images bug, xenonauts looking the wrong direction inside their chinhook all good and well ). But after defeating the last of dem critters the missen debriefing informed me that 2 of my xenonauts just went to 100strength (from like 60). Both hat only been scouting the entire mission (that is running 60%ap forth 40% back, spotting aliens for the rest to snipe). Both were subsequently promoted skipping at least one rank. All in all the stat increases of my soldiers during this mission seemed much more than I am was used to. But these two clearly stood out.

From gameconfig: <braveryProgress pointsToProgress="1" maxPointsInSingleBattle="2" globalMaxProgress="100" comment="A progress point is earned whenever a soldier panics in battle" /> Right now bravery is earned by panicking in battle which I think is not the best system. It's counter-intuitive, rewards bad gameplay, doesn't come into play until later, more difficult missions (the only time my soldiers have panicked is when a terror mission goes terribly wrong) and when you get high morale it becomes increasingly hard to get your soldier to gain more. I would change it to a system where every time a soldier sees an alien, they gain a progress point, and when they get say 10 points (numbers just an approximation) they gain +1 bravery. It would make more sense, a soldier who is a veteran and has seen many aliens would be less likely to panic, rather than a guy who panicked so much he stopped panicking. Also it would give it a better risk/reward mechanic, your soldier can't just sit in the chinook and panic to gain bravery, he has to go out there and see some aliens. The only problem I can see is that people could exploit it by simply turning around and looking at the alien again. The obvious solutions would be to set the limit they can earn in a single battle low (but I would like soldiers who survived a particularly hard mission to get a good boost to bravery) or make it so you only get 1 point from each individual alien (if that's possible) What do you think?

There, I typed it. Now I realize the point of this excercise is to haul the spirit of UFO into the new millenium, but if there's one particular piece of the old game that could use redoing it's that. As is, it's rewarding the player for engaging in illogical, monotonous tasks. Examples would having the team members run circles out of sight of the enemy in order to gain AP, or adding additional never-to-be-used grenades to their backpacks in between every other mission to build strength. It's not to the point of gifting handguns to the Aliens and having them train reflexes for you, but only because knocking Aliens unconscious hasn't been implemented yet. This is not good game design, nor does it make sense from a flavor point of view. Worse, it's tedious. It replaces time spent not actually playing the game in any meaningful sense of the word with in-game stat increases. It takes time and focus away from what should be the core of gameplay - tactical combat - and replaces it with what, +2 strength? Please reimagine. Even something simple like random skill advancement would be a gigantic leap upwards from this. Hell, scrap skill advancement outside of Morale/Nerve altogether and it would be a step up. Kinda like they did with the olde Rainbow Six games -you had a rooster of guys/gals with different skillsets, some obviously superior to others and thus had an incentive to keep the better dudes alive (and having to make do with inferior replacements should they become wounded/KIA). EDIT: Basically, talking about this and why it detracts from the game.

I've been playing the game for a while now, and I love it. I went through the classic X-Com routine of naming every single soldier, customizing their loadouts, and then watching them die horribly the moment they stepped off the dropship. The only problem is that I want more. Now that every soldier has their own preset name, face, and nationality, I don't feel like I have full control over them any more. I remember that in the original game, there were plenty of editors that you could use to edit your squaddie's stats, but from what I've seen so far Xenonauts is much more moddable. Is there any way of changing a soldier's name and such within the game files, or will I have to wait for an editor post-release? P.S. I don't have a lot of modding experience. If you have any advice, please put it in "layman's" terms.

Not a feature request, but more a wistful look back at the days when X-Com Rookies were... rookies. Some poor bastard black bagged in the street, given a weapon and sent out to fight the alien menace. I miss it. I mean, I quite like the Xenonauts system, in which all the soldiers are roughly equal at the start, but I connected with my soldiers based on my stats. There'd be cannon fodder, who was just useless, and despite me expecting him/her to only survive one mission (hence the place-holder name) would inexplicably rise to become commander. There was Hawkeye, who would run at a sneeze (well, sort of walk and fall down exhausted cause he had no stamina) and could barely lift that cannon he was carrying but could take down an alien behind cover half the map away with a snap shot. And then there was steroid (I came to X-Com after JA2) - the hero of the team. All this based on my soldiers' initial stats. At the moment, the Xenonauts soldiers, based purely on their stats of course, seem a bit homogenous. So before anyone posts anything about how unrealistic the X-Com thing was, I have no problem with the Xenonauts system. It makes more sense. That said, I always figured that the thing with X-Com wasn't that the soldiers were bad, but that the aliens were so incredibly good that it made your soldiers look bad, literally. IE. the combat was at such a pace that your soldiers were obviously the best of the best for just being able to keep up. Also, Tasmania seems to have been left off the map. I'm not at all angry: I figure that: A: Western Australia gave Chris some mining money to do in the game what they'd love to do in real life. B: Chris hates the Dutch and is trying to remove their influence from the map (Tasmania of course being named after Abel Tasman). It was very English to hate the Dutch at one point (during the 17th century I believe) hence the expressions 'dutch courage', 'double dutch' etc. C: Tasmania eloped with the Philippines and are now happily married somewhere out of sight in the Arctic Circle. Of course, it couldn't have been an oversight/error of some kind Finally, this should probably go in the feature suggestions rather than at the end of a rambling post reminiscing about one of X-Com's less plausible features, but given that it is a small UI request that has probably already been made: Please make the writing bigger! I can barely read it (running a 1366/768 monitor). Oh and please make arrow keys scroll through soldiers in the soldier screen.

I had two suggestions regarding the stat modifiers. I am not sure if something similar is in use because I don't have a full view of how experience is assigned currently; other than AP gain is related to AP used, accuracy to shots fired and bravery to panic tests. Hopefully this brings something new to the table. 1. Soldiers should get an increase to bravery if they are wounded during a mission. This means that soldiers still become braver just by being on the sharp end of the stick (i.e. your shotgun/breaching soldiers). This represents the fact that they are become less afraid of taking enemy fire as they already have the belief that they can survive it. 2. Soldiers that are wounded should lose some of their strength and or/AP values. It goes without saying that coming back from an injury is a long process and they should not be able to immediately. This might mean that in the late game you have a few grizzled veterans who are fantastic shots, super brave (or indifferent) but who run with a cripple or have a damaged leg that prevents them from being a super soldier (I don't mean in animation, just in stats). Meanwhile your list of pristine soldiers who have never been injured becomes shorter and you value them even more (not wanting to risk putting them through the door first for example). If anyone is able to shed a light onto whether these things already happen within the system or are to be implemented then that would be swell.

Hey Xenonauts-Team, since this is my first post, I'd like to say you're doing an awesome job! Keep up the good work! But of course this praise is followed by complaints. Just a suggestion, actually. Looking through the "Soldier Information" screen I'm missing a visualization of their attributes. Especially when I want to compare soliders it's easier to have something like a bar in the background that is either short or long instead of only having the number. Because the layout of this screens seems pretty much finished this suggestion will be probably received as annoying. But maybe you figure something out that fits the current design and has more impact than numbers alone.

So I see that the topic of theoretical experience gain stat increase systems has been discussed to dea... er, extensively. What I'm wondering about is the current implementation of experience and stat gain. It seems clear to me that the old UFO system is not being used, just from correlating my soldiers actions in-battle and the results in the Debriefing. Anyone have any insights to share?

I don't know what the algorithm for experience gain is, but I just started my second game with v9.5, and I don't seem to be gaining any. After each of 3 battles, the soldier summary screen shows, but no soldier shows any stat gain. Each mission was a definite success: -6 Kills -Only 1 Civilian death -0 Soldier injuries Is this normal? In my first game I didn't get stat gains from every mission, but whenever there was a summary screen I did (No soldier ever received a wound in that aborted game, though I expect wounds would have brought up the summary screen, too). And after 3 missions I had definitely gained stats. EDIT: on my fifth battle I did gain some stats. Must have just been bad luck. Though now I'm wondering what the experience algorithm is. If I can't find another thread on the topic, I'll start one.

I cant seem to find the file that contains the variables for new soldiers. Or the one for the starter group you get. Does anyone know where they are?

X-COM Apocalypse had aptitude stats for each scientist and technician that you could hire, making some of your employees more valuable than others. I liked it over the way the original X-COM did it because it gave each scientist a "face" instead of having your R&D department staffed by a legion of clones. What are your thoughts on putting something similar into Xenonauts? Too much effort to implement? Needless micromanagment? If base defense missions will really have you protecting your civilian staff, wouldn't it add a little more excitement to have to choose between that physics prodigy and the two assembly line idiots who you had to hire because their daddy is one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Now I wouldn't be surprised if this has been covered in a different thread...but I've been unable to find it. I've looked through the manual and done several forum searches but to no avail. I've read through most of these two threads: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php?66-Soldiers-gaining-experience-increasing-stats http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php?15-How-experience-is-awarded I've also read a good deal of the training thread. I haven't been able to find a definitive answer on how stats increases are gained in Xenonauts. (Or perhaps I just missed it while reading about how people thought they should be gained) I would very much appreciate it if someone could link me to a thread or just tell me how each stat is increased.

I've been playing with the latest Xenonauts build a bit and while it's still got a long way to go to be really playable, in most cases I'm pretty confident that missing/bad stuff has already been considered and is in progress. However, I'm not sure whether the way stats are represented now are a placeholder or actually the real intended deal, so here's a thread about it. One of the things X-Com did really well was showing Soldier Stats. The stats viewer, showing one soldier at a time, made really good use of colour and graphical representation over plain text to differentiate the different fields well and look pretty to boot. It's a delicious rainbow of information With stats, for the full picture of a trooper, you're not just looking at a single stat, you're trying to see all of them at once, comparing one to another rapidly (he has good strength, but how is his accuracy, because if he has both I could make him a heavy weapon gunner). Having things represented so clearly and in such a well-defined manner allows quick comprehension of not only single stats, but also of multiple stats as once as we quickly remember which bar means what thanks to colour/average size/position so we can comprehend multiple things at once. With the above picture, you can look at the trooper's stats and work out what kind of skillset he has in seconds. You'll also notice that at the end of the bar, different shades are implemented to further differentiate parts of the bar, letting you see how much of that trooper's stat was with him at his recruitment and how much of that is his progress throughout missions, which is a touch I love and something very central to the fun in keeping your soldiers alive and seeing them improve. I feel this is something really lacking in the current stats representation in Xenonauts. I understand the decision for a low-key, uniform visual style that depends on official looking font and a very unified colour-scheme, but when it comes to Stats, I really suffer for it. Everything being the same colour and only represented by a number makes it next to impossible to comprehend more than one stat at once, and even that single-element comprehension is harder; its more of a strain to focus your eyes in to seperate the particular stat you want out of the same-coloured muddiness. LOST: MY STATS - $500 REWARD When I look at the picture above, I can't understand the trooper's stats quickly at all. There is no way to see his stats at a glance because everything is represented only in absolute numbers, not graphically. I have to constantly dart my eyes left and right - left to see the stat I want, then right to see the number of that stat. I have to then keep that number firmly in my mind for any kind of comparison: there's no easy way to glance back at that number that I need for the comparison I'm making, because it all blends in again as soon as you stop focusing and it takes you a second or two to narrow in on what you need again. This ends up in a train of thought for me that goes something like "okay, he has 56 strength... accuracyyyy.... uh.. there, 59... where's AP... damnit, I forgot his strength, I need to find that again". Additionally, on a purely visual level, I personally feel its a lot less fun to look at than the multi-coloured prettiness that is the X-Com graph, but that's just my opinion. My eyes hurt There was no multi-soldier stat screen in X-Com so I can't really make a direct comparison here, but I don't really need to; it suffers from the same problems as the single-soldier stat page - everything is the same colour, it's all plain numbers, it feels like I have to play Magic Letter Puzzle to hunt down a single stat let alone compare them to each other in short order. Find Strength, Accuracy, AP, and Bravery, then find each of them again for comparison to each other, and you're not allowed to mark them when you find them either so I hope you like finding them again The multi-soldier one is naturally going to be harder to find things in than the single-soldier view because there's more information, but I still believe the stuff that can be used to fix the single-view will also do wonders for the multi-view. I really like where Xenonauts is going, I just want to make sure that things like this will be up to scratch, so this thread is my bit for making sure that happens. Of course having a poor representation of the stats will not ruin the whole game, but understanding the skills and capabilities of your troops and using that information to equip them as well as possible is a huge part of this kind of game, and increasing the time and effort it takes to do that is going to take a lot of the fun out of that, not to mention making it a big time sink.

When playing I noticed that the stats for all of the xenonauts were in the 50's. Not sure if this is their starting level or if its just averaged out for the alpha but I noticed this when I was checking into how much they could carry. In one battlescape I had a xenonaut wearing armour and carrying a rocket launcher with some extra rounds. Carrying only this limited him down to a square or two of movement not to mention not having enough APs to actually fire the thing. Dropping the extra ammo didn't help much and other xenonauts had the same problem. I'm guessing the 'naut using the rocket launcher will need higher stats?

There have been many (and extensive =) threads on the old forum about how training in general could work. Pretty much everyone agrees that while some in-base training is reasonable, experience through missions should be paramount. So I've been thinking about how exactly the game should decide how much experience / stats a soldier gains from which actions during a mission. The stats we have are action points resilience strength accuracy reflexes bravery missions kills rank 'rank' experience points as a hidden stat (assumed) For some stats it's obvious which actions to assign. Firing guns increases accuracy. Duh. For other stats it's not so clear cut. While it is the obvious thing to attach reflexes to reaction fire during the alien turn, it leaves the issue of overall progression. Firing guns happens a lot in the player turn but also in combination with reaction fire. That leads to a lot more accuracy skillups than there are for reflexes. If important stats just won't go up, that is frustrating and often leads to... Gaming the system / exploits. A soldier should not gain accuracy by silly actions like firing 20 magazines worth of aimed shots at a ground tile in front of him. In JA2, the easiest way to gain strength is to overload your soldiers to several hundred percent of their carrying capacity, ordering them to travel to an adjacent tile (ideally of "difficult" terrain), and immediately canceling the order while the game is still paused. Repeat. Some considerations will certainly apply to all stats, others to particular stats or situations. I don't know what everyone will come up with or in which order so... just gunna have to play it by ear. =P

I have written up the entire concept once more... with a lot more structure and without all the half-baked ideas that lead to this version. All numbers were made up on the spot and only serve to demonstrate the intent. Too many unknowns to scale anything just yet. Of course others are invited to add summaries of their systems. (maybe use a different colour for the "headline"?) Please don't start a discussion about bits and pieces of either. I simplified several obscure mechanics from the discussion thread. More transparent and predictable now, which should make it easy for the player to balance his troopers' advancement vs the specialist abilities they acquire. Give everyone 10 special training courses and they will advance their stats more slowly - but have all the special perks. Yet, the player can build his army of universal soldiers if he so desires... Even training strategies become a possibility! "Hang on" with less educated grunts who increase their skills faster... or train them right away and get slower advancement long term. How cool is that? That is gameplay the players can and will argue about. Real choices! =) It makes replaying the game a real possibility because you could play with a different strategy. Recruiting soldiers and other personnel is in many ways related because it also takes a look at the starting stats of soldier and the potential change to the importance of training. The "Alternate Training Concept" is a far more "condensed" concept which is more suited to a strategic approach to training without micromanaging individual soldiers on a regular base.