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Creating this thread for posting of correct co-ordinates and names of various cities, as well as any border corrections. Don't derail it or start random discussions about minutiae. Try to keep it focused.

I know this was discussed back in 2012, but I feel I would bring it up again: The 2D map used results in some very unfortunate consequences: Normally, you'd be able, and even quite interested in flying over the North Pole. Many Russian and American bases in the cold war were specifically built because of this feature (Greenland and Alaska being two great examples). A base in Greenland should be able to cover the US, northern Europe and Northern Russia, which would make it a worthwhile location (as it should be). South America, Africa, and everywhere else along the equator is ridiculously small as a consequence of the specific type of map used. The antarctic, an otherwise great place to land if you were an alien force trying to establish a foothold, is unfortunately left-out (note the same is not true for the north pole - we humans have bases on the south pole and not on the north pole for a reason). My proposed solution is to measure distances in radians or degrees and trying to accurately project our influence onto the used 2d map, or to scrap the 2d map used because it is contrary to the setting (cold war & x-com) and either use a 3d globe or a different 2d map that is more useful from a military point of view.

I have read a bit about region funding and an idea sparked, which I think will make the game more random everytime you start it anew. What if the map of the world would be created with different continents whenever you start a new game? Maybe like in "Civilization" with different preferences for world creation. Imagine an archipelago where it will be hard to salvage ufos as they have to crash on islands. Everytime a new world with a fresh challenge to position bases. Along with the randomization of funding (in that funding thread) this would make some games really tricky. The nationalities does not have to be invented then, but maybe that too. I guess that will be a lot of work, world mapping and nation inventing with all of the "lore" of soldier background and so on behind it. I don't expect that in the standard game, just for a mod. As I am not capable to do such things, maybe some of the modders out there like the idea. If that has been discussed before, sorry.

Since the developers have chosen to place the start of the game at an actual date in the history of mankind, I think that there is a lot more work to be done with the territories. The reflecting of the actual status of each country is more important than game convenience from the perspective of development. - Having eastern Europe as Soviet Union is unacceptable. It is just like having western Europe as U.S.A. - Having Greece as part of the Middle-East is absurd. If the game was developed by someone in the U.S. it would be more understandable how you have disregarded sensitive issues that goes with what countries you include in what territory. European developers should have been more understanding about these issues. Since you have chosen a real setting, you have to have real territories. Eastern Europe should be a separate territory and Greece should be part of West Europe. I am sure there are more sensitive issues about the territories but these are the ones I can speak about. I leave the rest to be pointed out by others. EDIT: Instead of trying to have artificially made territories just to keep them roughly equally sized, you should try and adjust the funding of each territory according to size. This is more natural.

Notes on cities as they currently are on the map: Delhi in India is wrongly spelled as Dehli. Windhoek, Namibia wasn't really in Namibia in 1979 as the country became independent in 1990. It was South African territory in 1979. Likewise, Zimbabwe was called Rhodesia then, though 1979 is just before it became Zimbabwe. St Petersburg was called Leningrad, and Yekaterinburg was called Sverdlovsk in the Soviet times. XML with changes that fix these issues: www.xenonauts.com/citynames.zip

Hi everybody, First I love what you are doing and I am anxiously waiting for the game - big fan! I recently had a chance to try out Xenonauts v17.6 and one thing struck me - the Earth is flat! And I don't mean it in representation of geoscape (which is pretty nice, though Antarctic is missing for some reason, probably was not discovered back in 1979 ), I mean that curvature of the Earth is totally ignored. Correct me if wrong but you guys seam to compute distances using Euclidean geometry, rather than spherical, which does matter. Secondly, if one was to build a base in northern Canada, its radar should cover northern Russia, but in flat Earth case it becomes nonsensical. I hope you will notice this issue and address it in you final release. Best of luck and fortitude! Cheers, K.

Okay, first let me say that I like the Xenonauts geoscape form a playability standpoint. Way easier to manage than the old x-com geoscape, and it looks pretty cool too. And I like the game, so forgive me if I sound a little negative here, this is just a bothersome issue to me, and I wanted to voice my opinion and see if anything can be done. I feel like something is provably wrong with the radar distance calculations and aircraft travel speeds. I am not a map scholar, nor a radar expert, and I encourage you to correct me if I'm horribly wrong, but this is what I'm seeing, and it seems wrong to me. All of my distance calculations were done using Google Earth. I feel like the radar distances and travel speeds have not been corrected to take account for the whatever map projection was used to create the geoscape for the game. Example: Place a base in the middle of Africa. The radar covers a distance from the southern tip of Africa to the northern shore of Poland. This gives the radar detection circle a diameter of ~6,000 miles (~10,000 km). WOW! That's huge! Awesome! We've got some great radar systems here! So unless Google Earth is playing tricks on me, that means my base in the middle of Alaska with a range of 6,000 miles should be able to cover All of North and Central America, Russia, China, and even Europe (across the north pole! It's not as far as you think). Let's try it! Hmm, in the game, my Alaska radar station covers... a tiny corner of Russia, a chunk of Canada, and a tiny bit of the west coast of the US. That's... interesting. That's not even close to 6,000 miles. It's more like... maybe 1,500 - 2,500 miles? Now, this is probably more realistic, mind you - if we really had 6000 mile radar coverage, we could pretty much cover the entire planet with 2 radar stations. (The earth is only ~12,000 miles pole-to-pole). That would be silly. But I feel that the wild inconsistency between radar ranges in the two locations is equally silly. Travel speed suffers from similar issues. Example: Distance from UK to Japan: ~5,900 miles Distance from UK to southern tip of Africa: ~6,200 miles Try making a base in the UK and dispatching one F-17 to the southern tip of Africa and another to Japan. They don't make it (not enough fuel), but the one going to Africa almost gets there when it has to turn back, and the one bound for Japan is just over halfway. Yet they should be traveling similar distances at similar speeds. Again, I feel like something is wrong. I know 95% of you probably don't even care. Maybe it's just something map projection nerds care about, I don't know. But I want to save EARTH from aliens. And with the landmass distances being all wonky, it feels less like Earth to me. It's like a weird, bizarro-earth. Really. It's not Earth. Want me to prove it to you? Go find Antarctica in the game. Oh, that's right, IT'S GONE. That's actually an issue worthy of a separate post, but I'll leave it alone for now. Is there anything that can be done to adjust for these inconsistencies, or is it simply too hard and/or too late to do anything? If not, can we at least rescue Antarctica from the great Abyss?

Title says it all. Also, what do you usually put in the bases after they've been built? Personally, I like Europe for my first base. I had a base in Warsaw, called "Warsaw", in UFO:EU. In my most recent game in Xenonauts, I chose Sevastpol', in the Crimean peninsula in the Ukraine as my base. I always name my bases after cities or towns in the area that I place them. In this game, I've not really progressed much at all into the game yet, so I basically have just my starting base and another hanger. What about you guys?

Probably this has already been discussed but do you have plans to make the ocean blue? That black background is quite dismal after a while. The maps are very well done; accurate and realistic like from a satellite but I personally don't care for the black ocean. I realize this is like a last touch or refinement that there are certainly more important things to worry about with the game( namely crash bugs ) but in the end I think an aquamarine color for the ocean( greenish-blueish )would be much nicer.

We've discussed this in the ages past, but seeing how the new Geoscape is being previewed, perhaps now is a good time to raise it again. I imagine that Goldhawk are not far away now from returning to the country block question. Previously we discussed 1970s cold war country blocks. Most of the discussion in that previous thread focused on whether it was advisable or not to have blocks made up of countries in different locations. There was a strong steer from Chris that geographically dispersed countries would not play well as unified blocks. I do not want to re-open that discussion. Instead I want to illustrate that maps can work with both (a) geographically located countries and (b) maintain consistency with 1970 era political boundaries. I have included an example map below: This contains contains 11 blocks (could easily be reduced to fewer by combining say Warsaw Pack with USSR, South Asia with Pacific Rim, etc). These blocks maintain both (a) and (b) above. The only tensions that exist at all are some small stretching to geographical blocks for Nato (wraps around Warsaw Pact) and how to handle Africa. Nato: European Nato countries. Includes Turkey, Greece (very prominent Nato countries). Also includes many "neutral"/non-Nato European countries (e.g. Swiss, Sweden, etc) that would otherwise have been isolated islands of neutral states Warsaw Pact: Historic Warsaw Pact countries plus Yugoslavia (which was really one of the founding 4 of the non-Aligned movement). This maintains political leanings at least. USSR: This one is easy. Nice contiguous block. North America: USA+Canada Socialist East Asia: China, N. Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. Nice geo-located block. Could be combined with another (USSR?) if fewer blocks were desired. South American Dictatorships: Most of S. America was (or would shortly fall under) rule by military dictators. The exceptions are the 2 Guyanas and Surinam (which are grouped in the above map with Central American non-aligned countries, but could be included here if simpler blocks were prioritised) Central American Non-Aligned countries: While Cuba and, say, Mexico might have had very different political outlooks - most countries in this region had some connection with the non-align movement. I think we can therefore group them together (to satisfy criteria (a) without doing too much damage to criteria (b)). Pacific Rim: Free market orientated. S. Korea, Japan, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand and Australian leaning Papa New Guinea: Spread out but still maintaining geographical connection. South Asian Non-Aligned movement. Contains prominent countries in the non-aligned movement (e.g. India). Works both as a political grouping and as a geographical one. Non-Aligned Africa: North and West. Different politics and sympathies. Most countries in this block had (tenuous) connections to the Non-Aligned movement (most of them attended). Not too contentious as a block. Southern/Eastern Africa+Middle East: This is the only block where any significant compromise needs to happen. Most of these countries (S. Africa , Rhodesia, Uganda, Kenya, Saudia Arabia) were either Western leaning or prominent in the fighting soviet influence in the African Cold War Proxy conflict. The problems are places like Angola (east-west sponsored civil war), Mozambique and Madagascar (both Soviet leaning and supporting Zimbabwean and S. African rebels). Given Chris has already indicated that we need to maintain geographical cohesive blocks (criteria (b)) I guess these can all be grouped into a single block. The people who would most object to this are people from this block, but I imagine that they are likely to make up very little of the xenonauts playing public. This is not done in the above map, but you can see how this is could be done. What I wanted to highlight, is I think country groupings can be come up with which both (b) create geographically connected blocks and (a) maintain groups consistent with 1970s outlook that xenonauts is set in. What do you think? How would your groupings differ from the above?

Does anybody alse prefer the old globe style geoscape? I know I'm a bit anal here but it's not realistic that aircarfts go at the same speed at the equator and the pole in a planisphere...

Just wondering, because it looks like the entire state of Tasmania was abducted by Aliens and the south east part of Victoria was blown up and then flooded. This must have been what caused the city of Melbourne to panic and move a few hundred kilometers west. The rest of Australia looks pretty good. Now it takes me 3 hours to drive to work and when I get home, my house is under the pacific ocean.

Grenland was for the longest time and actually still is a territory of Denmark. Not one of America, nor Canada for that matter. Please do fix that. Yes actually I wanted to report a bug but saw someone posting it in the bug report already. Also I have a few ideas regarding Xenonauts, Since I did plan on making a similar game. Maybe not all ideas of mine can be applied here since my idea was slightly more surrealistic in nature and placed in a different time. Still some might be good.

I really like Xenonauts' 1970s cold war setting. In the turn based combat, this really comes through (and will be helped by the coming inclusion of Soviet achitecture). In the geoscape though, the country blocks feel much more like 2010 than 1970. The boundaries for Europe for example, combine NATO's UK and France with the Warsaw Pack's Romania and East Germany. IndoChina combines Western leaning Japan, with soviet leaning mongolia and Non-Aligned Indonesia. Chris, I know you said in the past that you intend to retouch the countries in the geoscape map (such as include the philipines, sort out some land sea mask issues). I think it would make a big difference to the feel of the game if the country blocks could be revisited at that time. What I would like to suggest is blocks which match power blocks that existed at that time. The easiest solution is to ensure NATO and Warsaw Pack blocks fit as they were in the 1970s - and leave the other blocks almost as they are. I think it would be fun (better) if we could take it further and include blocks based around political alignment at that time, including Non-Aligned Member countries. These new blocks could be based around a Nato block; Nato leaning block(s); WARSAW Pact block; USSR leaning block(s); Non-Aligned Members (NAM) blocks and Neutral countries. NATO: USA, Canada, many countries in Western Europe, Turkey NATO leaning group(s): Could be group geographically: Oceanania, Japan, South Africa, South American and African countries with US backed strong man governments WARSAW Pact: Boundaries of WARSAW Pact countries USSR leaning block(s): Could be grouped geographically: Could include countries like Mongolia, China, Cuba, South American and African countries with socialist backed strong man goverments. Non-Aligned Members (NAM): India, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Indonesia, Ghana. Many African and South American countries could logically be placed within this block (based on historical alignment). Neutral: Swiss, Sweden, Ireland, Iran, amoungst others. Benifits: A geoscape which does not immediately clash with the cold war setting. There has been lots of great discussion about possible Geopolitical changes. I think this one change would go along way to help set this scene (our imaginations will do the rest). Risks: Geographically seperated blocks. Yugoslavia, India and Ghana don't exactly share borders. So, unless care is taken, players may loose the sense that it is important to locate bases in certain parts to sure up block support. I think actually there is a lot that can be done to mitigate this risk by coming up with blocks which cluster nations together. Outside the core blocks (NATO, USSR and core NAM countries) almost all the other nations could be justifiably placed in one of a couple of blocks (e.g. Cuba could count as a NAM member, but more flavour might be had in placing it in a USSR leaning block, with other similar Central/South American nations). The most difficult blocks would be core-NAM (including Yugoslavia with south Asian or African nations). To some extent, I think we can get away with some mixing (beyond making the map maker's task more difficult) - while protecting most of the NAM nations - I would understand NAM member countries being upset if they percieved that Xenonauts weren't protecting fellow member Yugoslavia. As long as most of the land area for the various blocks is clustered together, I think the players can coupe with the occasional bad event that happens in the small country isolated from the main area (the small area would mean that the risk of lossing the block with you base in is small, even though the occassional event may happen in the isolated outlying country that is uncovered). In short, clustering similar countries between NATO, USSR or NAM aligned blocks should mean that we get geographically clustered blocks for most of the world (I imagine we're aiming for about 10 blocks in total). Neutral block - to include or leave out? Neutral block countries could justify their inclusion as a block due to the financial weight of their members, but I think it would be almost impossible to think of ways to geographically cluster them (as some are completely surrounded by NATO and/or Warsaw Pact countries (which can't be changed without completely jarring). While it might be interesting to have one block, whose finacial support couldn't be guarenteed by appropriate base placement - if this was thought to be a deal breaker they could always be merged into NATO or Warsaw pack neighbouring blocks. I'd be interested to hear what you, and others, think Chris? I think there is a little bit of work that would need to be done in coming up with suitable clusters (building 1 or more NAM blocks; clustering other countries into NATO leaning or USSR leaning blocks - trying to make them as geographically clustered as possible. The map would also need to be redone). If this was a go-er - I'm happy to help out with the map region drawing. I currently do not know enough about 1970s alignments in C. and S. America and Africa - so I'd need to do a little research, but I am sure that there is enough expertise on the news group that we could come up with something workable. What do you think?

For example, if certain country gets enough casualties, then during at night lights shouldn't lit up anymore. Mainly minor visual changes that happen based on how good you are doing with the game. Maybe have forests die out because of chemicals from alien warship kill them or something (totally not making reference to backstory of Apocalypse and ending of Terror from the deep) or just be unable to have terror mission in city which was nuked because you didn't win the mission.

Like the original X-COM, I think a full world Geoscape would look pretty darn good in the game. I like this one, but it's underdone, mostly just the fact that its flat as paper. Thanks for reading, - Wolfy

Not really that important issues, but here goes: How many cities there will be on the map when the game comes out? I assume that there will be more than on the current build? Just seemed a bit weird that a place like Budapest is included, but not Berlin, Paris or Rome for example. Also, I might the be the only one who cares about this, but are the borders between various areas final? Some of them seem a bit strange, like the border between Finland and Soviet Union, which seems closer to the pre-WW2 border or the "Greater Finland" border that some irredentists dreamed of during the war. Might as well mention two typos I noticed in the game, "Dehli" and "Ukranian".