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On the 6th of the first month, I had three consecutive missions. I was being careful with the ammo towards the end of the second, knowing the Chinook would be making another stop before returning home. Boosts to shotguns and sniper rifles seem to be making a difference in this build. I even took out an alien with 0% chance from a pistol shot. I do think that the aliens are a little easy at present. Certainly compared to earlier builds. I miss the tougher Sebillian in particular. Perhaps light scouts, with fewer and tougher of those, to differentiate them more form the Ceasians? Just a thought. Plays very well so far, and it continues to improve each release.

Firstly, if you do not know how to access the experimental branch on Steam, please read the instructions (and warnings!) in this thread. All saved games from earlier versions (including experimental versions) are incompatible, attempting to load them will cause problems. This build is simply an update to the last stable candidate with all the fixes we have made over the last few days. Here's the changelist: Fixes - Fixed crash when opening the soldier inventory while stood over a militia corpse - Fixed crash when ending a mission with smoke/gas present in the level - Fixed Geoscape crash that could happen once Battleship UFOs started appearing - Fixed rare bug with aliens being killed by reaction fire could appear to be still alive - Smoke grenades will no longer detonate C4 on the ground - Fixed and synchronised animations for Caesans, Sebillians and Harridans (if you see any of these that still look incorrectly timed let me know please!) - Reset animation delays on alien weapons to match desired animation rates - Correctly set pivot values for damaged variants of a few alien base wall sprites - Fixed order of names in the Geoscape popup when Xenonaut aircraft are intercepted - Fixed small patch of missing ground texture on one Corvette Farm map - Fixed ability to double level stength Balance - Reduced farmer shotgun damage (was unintentionally too high) - Reduced weight of combat shields to 3 - Increased suppression power of light drone weapon - Stun grenades now no longer cause stun damage on detonation, instead all stun damage is caused by the gas they release - Increased range and field of fire on Xenonaut interceptor cannons to make them more generally viable weapons - Removed armour ratings from some of the larger UFOs (they were not behaving as expected, and weren't needed anyway) - Adjusted the air combat auto-resolve scores for Xenonauts heavy missiles so they are now worth 0 against UFOs capable of evading - UFO fighter missiles now have a significant auto-resolve score value (previously 0) when resolving against non-evasive Xenonaut craft i.e. Foxtrots - Slightly reduced door opening AP from 15 to 12 - Enabled burst fire on alien heavy plasma shotgun (have fun)

My first few missions all happened on the same day. The Chinook went to all in the same flight. Because of the increased number of aliens in Light Scouts, this meant that li'l thothkins managed to notch 10 kills in those missions. I noticed that there wasn't a "killed 5 aliens" medal, but instead it went straight to the "killed 10 aliens" medal. Other soldiers got their "5 kill" medals as normal. Li'l thothkins seems to have been punished for success. Admittedly very unlikely success considering previous Let's Plays

I love smoke grenades. Let me say that again, I LOVE smoke grenades. However with the recent changes I think they feel a bit too gimmicky and granted I havent had a bunch of time to test them, it seems like you could REALLY exploit them now. Previously they seemed to work by reducing per tile the Alien's Accuracy...and if it was low enough they simply wouldnt fire at you. This however required 1-2 smoke grenades and being at long range. If you tried to use a smoke to protect yourself in close range it didnt work too well...you needed distance (Reduces accuracy) and a bunch of smoke tiles between you and the Alien (further reduced accuracy). The only problem with them was that they didnt do anything to reaction shots. The new ones block Line of Sight (LOS) and thus reaction shots, and maybe it was dumb luck but I was able to have the door open in a small scout and all of my soldiers in that tiny room with 2 Caesans and spent 2-3 turns without being shot at or reaction fire being used. It seems to create a situation of you "know" where the Aliens are and you can just force fire at that tile and it seems to be effective at killing them, although accuracy suffers. I assume this is designed around allowing you to use them to create a safer close ranged combat environment. Personally I think having an accuracy modifier per tile, and a reaction fire modifier per tile would be better though. So if you kept your distance and used 1-2 depending on the Alien's Stats/type you could greatly reduce the Alien's accuracy and their reflex skill so they would have a much smaller chance to reaction fire. However they WOULD still take shots, but they couldnt hit the broad side of a barn through smoke, and they COULD take a reaction shot, but their reflex skill would be greatly penalized making it occur much less often...not to mention their accuracy with said reaction shot would be diminished. Being 2 tiles away and not being shot at just seems a little cheesy and ripe for exploitation, there ARE pros and cons for both versions but... I still have to play test them some more (Been busy the last two weeks, and didnt try 19-7 because they were bugged) so for me the jury is still out. What are your thoughts so far with 19 SC?