Search the Community

A few features/ items that are in the game, but I'm just not using. Does everyone else use this stuff and it's just me, is it balancing that prevents it from being as useful as it should, or is it just not very useful? Shotguns - I used to use these in industrial maps. But those have been replaced. I occasionally used them for UFO breaching. The grenades mean I don't have to any more. They used to be handy for taking out Sebillians, but the Sebillians aren't as tough any more. Pistols are far more useful for suppression. High Explosive - I've never used this, so it's not just this build. Hardly any aliens use buildings in my games and UFO hulls can't be breached. Stun Batons - I have never used these. Why would I get anywhere near an alien to stun it, when I have nifty stun grenades and stun rockets. Even in 19.4, where the stun damage looks to have been reduced, it's worth the wait, rather than get a Xenonaut shot sneaking up. Aircraft cannons - The upgrades are more useful, in that it's either use them or go back to base and rearm. But the initial cannon doesn't get used at all. Flash Bangs - I find that between normal grenades, smoke grenades (that I've used less in the last 2 builds) and definitely stun, that I never have to go near these. Vehicles - I've not used these for several builds now. In 19.4 I'm focusing on base building at first. The first few months are much more successful. Vehicles and garages are expenses that I don't have if I want to get 3 bases up and running. That's personal choice, but I've not felt the absence of extra scouting or protection in several builds. Stores - I've not looked at this tab in the first three game months (or the vehicles one as per above). I'll only start looking when I'm upgrading the cannons on the Condors for the other bases. Manufacturing - It is used, but only barely. Since early armour and laser weapons can be pretty much skipped, I've built 2 Foxtrots. I built 4 Gatling lasers (but I'll possibly skip even those next time round). Not mush for 3 months. Infinite weapons, ammo and auto upgrading missiles don;t help. But the lack of necessity to have extra weapons and armour in early combat is probably the real reason.

Hello, friends! This is a questions to developers (mostly). I'm at some point of the game. Middle March 1980. Having 8 bases, with no problem shooting down carrier with fusion torpedoes. Battleships are not shootable yet, I hope 3 Foxtrots on each base will help. But now workshop is too busy. The final Extraterrestrial technology discovered - Alien Officer Interrogation (nothing written in Xenopaedia, blank box). Assault boat D-54 developed, Sentinel Armor (not shown in Xenopaedia for some unreasonable reason) and Mag weaponry developed. What are the next steps? How I can advance in game? Any Hint, Idea or else? Thank you. Playing on Veteran, Build 18.

Here is the short version (long version in spoilers). The campaign is too difficult compared to XCOM:EU because the air combat is too difficult and the economics are equally WAY harder. Advice for the V18 build (ignoring what's happened in V19): Allow fuel/speed/AB management in the geoscape to allow Xeno craft to outrun or catch up to alien craft. Allow Xeno craft to 'ditch stores' for increased fuel efficiency and speed. Rebalance aircraft abilities, including a much reduced roll distance for all craft (but especially aliens'). Greatly increase mission rewards. Allow for resource-limited profitable production. Increase nation funding. Reduce ease of losing nations to aliens. Allow off-base landings (similar to "patrol", but you are invisible to enemies and get refueled - simulates friendly airfields you can land at throughout the world). Aaand the long version, well-written, clearly explained supporting argument for the above.

Here's a thread to discuss the first pass of the Geoscape and Air Combat balancing, which is available for play-testing in the latest build (2) on the experimental branch on Steam. The changes are far too numerous to list, I have reset pretty much every important variable in the Geoscape and Air Combat according to a systematic approach to try and give the pace and experience we want to achieve. It should work end to end, but it will probably seem a little bit flat right now - most things escalate in a fairly linear fashion, and there is no mixing of UFO types (each one just appears sequentially). Those things will be improved drastically later, but for now it is important we pin down the very basics of the progression. Just some general info: the invasion now takes around 6 months from the weakest to the most dangerous aliens appearing. Waves of UFOs are less frequent but hang around for much longer. Countries now take significantly more "damage" to their relations from UFOs missions that occur in their territory; likewise the bonus for shooting down UFOs is greater. For simplicities sake all countries are currently "worth" the same in funding terms - this will change later. Thoughts and impressions gratefully received.

Like the title implies, Here's a very easy fix that will take you all but 5 minutes to help balance out the troop carried Rocket Launcher. Simply make rockets weigh 5. Now you COULD by all means just load up all your troops with an extra rocket and drop them in the field for your launcher guy to use but that takes time and patience. And besides, patience and intuition should be rewarded in the field yes? I did this small change to my game a few patches ago and it feels about right. You'll have to make your shots count. Your rookie soldiers may even have to do some runs carrying too much weight to build up some strength before even bothering with the launcher. Although, you may want to increase effective range on it because armor is no longer an option. Well, at least until your soldiers are quite strong.

Hi everyone, First of all I'm loving the game and hugely enjoyed following the development through kickstarter, alpha up to now (ahh desura why make things complicated!) Anyway we're on steam now which is fantastic. To the meat of the post..... The fighters are hugely annoying, be it 1 fighter or a wing of 3. with trial and error I can take them all down with the right mixture of condors\falcons, usually without losing a plane. But tbh that's a lie....save scumming is the only way I've found to keep on going. If I lose: 1 plane=In trouble 2 planes=F*$£!D but maybe recoverable. 3 planes=Game over man, game over My proposal (and apologies if I should have put this in another thread): Some type of reward wouldn't hurt for taking down fighters (or even taking down scouts or whatever over the sea.) Pretty simple, but take them down and you get a message like the following "North America\Europe\Soviet Union\Judeans Peoples Front awards you 20k\30k\40k per UFO you've just shot down, and they have a more positive rating of you." So cash reward and then... +5k or whatever per monthly funding At the moment there's too many fighters and for me at least, it's ruining the game, either make the fighters worth taking down or get rid, and don't get me started on the heavy fighters and bombers! Thank you for reading.

Here's a new thread to continue the balance discussion around Ground Combat. Please only post in this thread if you are using the experimental Steam branch (information here). These are the balance changes since the first Steam version (i.e. v18.51 Hotfix 3): - Implemented new alien count per UFO type (4 for Light Scouts up to 16 for Battleships) - Grenades, Rockets and Alien Plasma Cannon shots no longer lose damage over range - Strength based maximum grenade throwing range implemented (5 tiles + 10% soldier strength) - Xenonaut vehicles made significantly tougher (x2!) - Xenonaut vehicles have slightly more AP - Shotgun BUFF! - Fairly significant reductions in the effectiveness of Xenonaut weapon suppression power across the board - Damage of all Xenonaut precision rifles boosted a little - Precision rifles no longer have their 20AP aim level, so they are now in line with other weapons in having 3 aim levels - Alien Plasma Cannons deal slightly more damage - Reaction fire potential of MGs and precision rifle doubled (MGs probably still won't react due to burst fire bug though) - Sebillians have same visual range as Xenonauts It's not a hugely long list of changes as I've been spending lots of time on the Geoscape for the last couple of weeks, but also as a couple of the changes (removing range damage scaling and fixing low accuracy shots) could have a pretty big impact on balance and I didn't want to change to much until we see how they behave. Please let me know how you find them. The next thing I intend to implement is differentiation between the alien races. Also right now it sounds like some people are experiencing a very imba crash at the end of the first mission, fix will be available as quick as I can find it.

Hi everyone I am currently past year one in the game and for the last 2 or 3 months in game I have had a constant series of terror missions and base defences and they happen so close together I need to take whatever troops I have healed and those who are the least wounded can any one help me with this because I have not had a long enough break to have every one healed or assault a UFO. Any suggestion because at this point it is becoming boring in a game I am really enjoying.

This is the thread for discussion of and balance suggestions for the strategy layer for Build V18.3. Please ensure you have Hotfix 1 from this thread before taking part: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/4744-Build-V18-3-Hotfix-1-Released%21 Please repost any opinions from the V18 thread here if they are still valid.

There as been some complaints about how fast a soldier's skill increase in the projected 50-60 missions/6 months invasion timeline. Chris has said he would think about balancing the strength gains in particular, in future builds. Now for the rest, i'm not at all sure what i propose will be fun, and or feasible given the short game duration, but here goes... food for though BTW I'm pretty cool with the way things are now, but to liven the salad a bit.. let me dive down into that, PREAMBLE: 1) Soldiers start as rookies because even if they are at the top of their games on Earth's batlefields they are new to the threat of the ET threat of invasion with grim consequences to human kind if the war goes pear shaped. So they start out scared if you will, to be simple. Conversely once they get their confidence back, they should be at the top of their game. 2) To play ironman we should have rapidly progressing rookie force to aliment the veteran fighting pools, yet curtail rapid gains when soldiers becomes an elites. GAMEPLAY MECHANICS 1) Soldiers' COURAGE could be a yard stick to measure his potential for skill gains. 1b) Courage is a soldier's resistance against loosing willpower. 1c) The more a soldier's willpower is tested in battle, the faster he gains. Why? just because as a mechanic NO RISK NO GAINS. 1d) If a soldier PANICS he will gain no skill for the remainder of the battle, i.e. Shellshocked. 2) As a soldier completes ground battles, his Courage increase over time. 2b) As a soldier's Courage increase, his post-missions skill gains start to decrease. DEFINITION OF RISK 1) Getting shot at. 2) Getting close to enemies. 3) Anything that lowers the soldier's MORAL, and conversely increases moral like the RANK of your soldiers. CONCLUSION The overall tendency for your forces would be; Rookies because of their low starting COURAGE, will naturally skill up faster Vets because of their high COURAGE, will naturally see a tapering of their skill gains, coinciding with their CAP. All that said I would love to see random GIFTED soldiers that don't taper their progression gains despite having high courage. So the end result should be that the more you put your soldiers in danger, the more they will skill up faster, i.e. NO RISK NO GAINS. Also going out with you same 12 top rank Commanders since idk the whole game will probably be tougher for the final mission, than if you started out with a much larger pool and picked the best 12 from the lot at the end.

Dear Xenonauts makers, Wow! Just wow! I read a thread on these forums a while back saying this game doesn’t have the wow factor but really they are way off mark in my opinion. I’m an avid gamer, I remember playing the playable demo of x-com: Enemy Unknown (as it was known in the UK at the time) and played that terror mission perhaps 50 times as a kid. I played the full game when I eventually got a PC that could run it (more times through than I can remember), and then Terror from the deep and loved it too (though, in my opinion it was way inferior to the original). I literally have not been so fixated with a game in the intervening 19 years until I found Xenonauts; furthermore, it’s this good whilst it’s still in Beta! There are still some big bugs, but if it didn’t have these, it wouldn’t be in Beta right? For people who want gloss this really isn’t the game for you but log onto Steam and you can choose from dozens of games that are just gloss on top of gloss with little actual content sandwiched between, (there are other good games but I’m sick of some glossy titles... though i still end up buying them, a game > no game to play). For me the ‘wow factor’ comes from the hours of game play and situations that arise naturally due to evolving situations within the game environment, rather than pre-scripted events: Xenonauts has this in spades! I’ve put in over 30 hours on the Steam release and many hours previous on the Desura version I first started with (build v.15 or something). Some of the situations that have a arisen through the game-play could never be properly emulated with a scripted event. The first build I tried frustrated me somewhat, reaction fire was king, and although you could counter the AI using a bit of strategy and a bit of metagaming, it was playable, for me at least. After a few frustrations and lost save games due to new patches I decided to leave it alone a while. I came back just before the Steam release and I love this build. As I said before, there are number of things that are bugging me and I’m sure you’re aware of the majority but since I’ve clocked quite a few hours now, some may not be well reported: 1. Door bug, this occurs in alien bases in particular if a door gets damaged at all it then won’t open. I can see this being a deliberate thing, as in the opening mechanism is damaged, (that’s the way I’m in game rationalising it) but I’m not sure if it’s intended. 2. Shooting through solid objects: I’ve noticed some posts mentioning this before, but I thought I’d mention a few places I’ve noticed it. Aliens in the control room (2nd floor) of the cruiser, shooting into the two side rooms of the lower floor; the shots do not hit the wall and have killed members of my party before. (I rationalise it by thinking of it instead as a automated weapon system to repel invaders!) Alien bases, they seem to always know exactly here I am in their base and shoot at me irrespective of 50ft of wall between us. (I can rationalise them knowing where I am but letting fly full auto, often into the back of their friends really needs to be fixed). Whenever i seem to be positioned next to a wall, they can see me through it and if they happen to auto from a rifle, chances are one shot will take the wall away and then several more have the opportunity to take me out. 3. Psionics: do they work? I’ve just recently done my first 2 missions against psionic caseans and so far I have no fear of them. Nothing has happening so far, I got a message once saying something like they know the location of one of my team and then he was shot at from half the map away, but after that and several more gold rings highlighting my players (I assume this is the psionic attack) nothing happened. 4. Airplane locked in combat. This has happened once to me, i ‘escaped’ about 8-9 times then gave up and destroyed my planes and reloaded. 5. Alien stuck in doors and walls, this happens a lot in base missions. 6. Not sure if intended but in January 1980 I had 4 assaults on my main base in the first 10 days. (2 months later I’m up to about 6 attacked on this base and 3 on my other). Whilst I guess Jan is the month in which the aliens evolved this ability, they sure were persistent. I bagged about 1.4mil from their futile attempts in January (who needs funding nations?), so no complaints here, but I do wonder if it’s not a bug. 7. Do the base defence work? I’ve got my second base with 5 plasma defense (I don’t have a good xenonaut team there, they are in training). Even when it reported them all as having hit, it did not prevent a base mission. In fact in the 9 base defences I’ve done, not once have the defence actually done anything (that I can tell). I’m on the point of removing them all and perhaps building a landing pad and welcome sign for them, as it’s a major form of income for my team at the moment. As a side note, is it intentional we can see the aliens entry points, as soon as I realised this, base defence went from a nail biting ‘holy ****’ moment to, ‘wooo i could to with another 350k right now, and I don’t even have to risk my planes for it’. 8. A couple times I’ve not been able to select a troop by clicking on him, and other players can walk through him. Selecting him by any other method (portrait, hotkey) works fine. 9. Invisible, indestructible, wormhole-shields. IIWS as I like to call them. The aliens only seem to employ them when attacking my base, (I’ve seen them in the hanger and med lab adjacent to where the aliens enter). When you move your mouse over the area it gets the two red circles, one above the other, like when you target and enemy, or like the green ones when you select a team member. If you shoot through them, sometimes the shot warps somewhere else, sometimes not, explosive shots just hit it and explode, but thankfully (and this has saved me many times) grenades go straight through. I’m guessing this is a bug rather than a powerful and devious alien device that they only seem to employ in very selective situations. 10. Finally on the same farm map, with both a landing ship and a carrier (both had landed rather than being shot down if i remember correctly) I’ve had crashes on the ‘hidden movement screen’ about 3-7 turns into it. With repeated reloads the same occurs. The first time I had to call off the mission, the second time i beat the bug by rather than dispersing, I charged all my team straight to the carrier (it’s within spitting distance of the dropship) and occupied the carrier for 5 turns for the win. I don’t know if this means the crash is caused with AI doing something within the ship which i managed to disrupt with my headlong charge. The map is the one that, as you exit the drop ship, to the right of the team, north on the map there is a concrete wall, with a gap in it about 10-15 squares away. Behind which is a huge barn and tractors+ hay in the courtyard. To the south are fields and directly opposite the exit of the drop ship (north/west) is a field then a hedgerow. As of now I can’t think of any others, but I’ll be happy to add to them later if/when i remember. If you would like further details on any of these bugs please let me know and I’ll try my best to describe them. Balance issues I think money is fine (on normal) but air-combat is hard, and I like it hard, but it seems a little too much. I understand we can never keep on top of the alien invasion, and it would break the immersion if we could. But at the moment i just don’t dare leave the base, for 2 or 3 waves at a time (April 1980 I think). I just made my first marauder and wow, how cool. But still, with 1 corsair, 1 foxtrot and 1 marauder with 2 condors back-up (all in my main base), i still have to very carefully pick my fights, more marauders are on the shopping list at the moment, but they really take too long to make. I read a thread about indestructible planes, I can see why this would be good but in honesty i like destructible planes and I think if they were indestructible it would take something away from the game. I think having some kind of evasive manoeuvre such as ‘hit the deck’ would help balance things. It takes a second or two to carry out, but the plane escapes from combat (not to re-enter.. perhaps it takes some damage too) and runs at high speed at a low altitude at which alien space ships can’t target or manoeuvre well (can create some sci-fi lore as to why). This would improve survivability whilst making air-combat not without big risks. I read somewhere that air combat isn’t meant to be a huge part of the game but something on my wish list would be to gain experience for pilots. Perhaps if the plane does crash land you can get a ground mission where you can go into recover the wreckage (which you can then ‘repair’) and rescue the pilot who is surrounded by enemy forces and sporting just his sidearm. The pilot could have an experience tree which could perhaps increase manoeuvrability of the planes, improve his combat skills/equipment or add an extra ability in combat, (e.g. roll for foxtrot pilots, hit the deck etc). You’ve got plenty of things to do I’m sure, but I would like to feel the same connection to the planes and their pilots as I do to my troops and bases. Again I put the bugs there in case they might help not to criticise. I can’t state enough how much I like the game you’ve made. It’s the best game I’ve played for a long time, and the best game of its type since X-com; which quite frankly it advances on. However I won’t say it’s better as it’s impossible to compare 2 games that are nearly 20 years apart. Thank you all who have contributed to this game, it’s a huge pleasure and genuine excitement to play, it’s great to see the constructive attitude (generally speaking) of the responses on these forums from the makers and the users and I hope it’s a great success financially and you all get very rich and fat on the profits! You deserve it. Thanks

This build contains my first pass at rationalising and balancing the ground combat system; any comments you have would be gratefully received in this thread. Pretty much every important value for weapons, armour and most other things in the ground combat have been systematically re-set to follow our intended progression. A few notes - different alien species all currently have stat parity; that is, for the most part a Caesan Guard is identical to a Sebillian Guard. The main differences come from increasing stats between the "ranks" of alien types - non-combat, guard, soldier, warrior etc... and these are gradually phased in throughout the game to ramp up the challenge. Eventually, of course, the different alien species will have different characteristics, so the player needs to adapt their tactics to fight them. This will start with stat differences (such as increased armour for Sebillians), but will eventually extend to the AI system (Androns will be single minded, never take cover and relentlessly advance on the player). EDIT: Make sure you grab Hotfix 3, this fixes several AI issues that would have caused problems testing the balance. EDIT2: To be absolutely clear - this is Ground Combat only, no structured changes have been made to Geoscape thus far

Before I say anything, I know this is early release. But, I just can't keep up. This game escalates way faster than is possible to keep up .. for me anyway, I have the top end financial support from everyone except the Americas. I had a brilliant start with my current game. 2 fully setup bases with excellent air cover, early on I can accomplish missions without any issue ( few deaths, but pvts are my cannon fodder ). I just finished outfitting most of my squads with laser tech but didn't have enough money to fully equip wolf armour, just a smattering with my higher end chaps. Within a space of a month I've gone from fighting Light scouts and scouts to fighting Cruisers with heavy fighter escorts and Aliens that shoot me well out of my range with deadly accuracy (Wolf armour does shit vs a fully auto plasma rifle) I haven't unlocked the new fighter, my condors, despite (what I think) to be some excellent micro in fights just don't do enough damage. Most of the time I send in Foxtrots to fire their torp loads then run away and hope I can re-engage quick enough again once it's returned to base and re-armed. Once I do shoot something down, the ground fights are now nigh on unwinnable. I've got everything from colonels to captains and they just can't do anything. Moving from cover to cover usually get me reaction shot into the dirt and staying in cover, despite not having any armour on my pvts with good visual range I end up getting out visual-ed and again blasted into the dirt. Either I'm missing something horribly important, or I just suck at this game. My end result, after losing all my colonels and majors I'm running around with Pvts trying to fend off an invasion I have 0% chance of winning. Like I said, I understand it's beta and I understand there's an assload of balancing happening, I just thought I'd give you the patient perspective of a steam-purchased player. (So therefore relatively new). I'm adoring the game but after my 20+ restart I just can't enjoy it. Cheers, Kel.

Hi all Now that Xenonauts has reached a stage of development where you can reasonably expect to be able to run through most of a game, I have started looking at how we are going to balance the various parts of the game. In this post I want to give a quick outline of how I plan to approach this, as I want you guys to be aware of what's happening in new builds and why. Firstly, as the majority of the players time in the game is spent in the Ground Combat I am going to work on balancing that first. To start with I am simply going to make sure equipment advancement is working smoothly, by going through the stats for all the human and alien equipment and making sure there is a gradual ramping up of effectiveness on both sides as the game advances, which is evenly distributed among the various tiers of equipment. This will deal primarily with damage values, accuracy and AP costs for weapons, and resistances for armours. Once this is done I will spend some time - and would also like to hear from you guys - investigating whether any particular type of weapon, equipment or alien is either over or under powered (or just under utilised). This would be things like making sure the pistols remain a viable option which people are likely to use, or making sure you can't just win the game with everybody carrying buckets of grenades and no gun After any tweaks from that stage are in place I will be doing a second pass on all the weapons and equipment, this time with a view to adding a bit more character to them; so different tiers of weapons could have different flavours based on their technology type, that kind of thing. After all that is done, I will move on to the balancing the Air Combat and Geoscape to support the changes made to the Ground Combat. Any thoughts on this approach or suggestions?

Hi. Im posting the tweaks in sight range I have been using recently. Please give it a try if you want and say what you think. UPDATED to 18.51 Sight range modifications to aliens & humans ONLY. Range base is 27, with changes depending on race & armor as done in vanilla game. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ek3ut3qx8mq953e/Sight%20Mod%2018.51.zip Sight range mod WITH many other tweaks I play with. https://www.dropbox.com/s/pbs02s3l9956grw/Sight%20Mod%20FULL%2018.51.zip Mod includes: - Charlie carry 10 soldiers now or 8 + tank. -New images for laser and bullets shots. -Projectiles speed increased to have a more fluid firefights. - Plasma for aliens do more damage. Long range hits will hurt a lot. -Alien plasma cannon does área damage but is less accurate (think as an alien versión of old EU heavy cannon) -Machineguns and its energy versions no longer outrange a sniper rifle. -Some alien weapons have range increased for consistency with inferior human weps. Mainly pistol and rifles. - Im sure I miss something. Both mods have a folder with a backup of vanilla game files for easy uninstall. Hope you enjoy. Note: The second mod (full) requires you to start a new game or face multiple crashes.

Here are the slides. Here's the site they came from.

This is the thread for discussion of and balance suggestions for the ground combat layer for Build V18.3. Please ensure you have Hotfix 1 from this thread before taking part: http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/f...-1-Released%21 Please repost any opinions from the V18 thread here if they are still valid.

I've played a lot of missions using build 18.3 and got up to the late parts of the game, with very big ships and powerful weapons. However I think that while the first part of the game is quite stable, and only a lot of balancing is needed, the same cannot be said for the second half. When carriers and mag weaponry start to appear, I've had a lot of ground combat crashes and freezes during the alien ground combat turns. Moreover, a lot of crashed ships with no aliens, very frequent crashes while loading ground combat saves, and so on. A few bugs are also present in the geoscape (eg an alien terror mission on a city in a continent that had already signed an alien pact), but geoscape is quite stable now. When all the issues with the archiving system will be solved, couldn't we have a developer provided savegame in the second half of the game, a few months later with a couple of bases already built? In this way testing the second half of the game could be way easier.

Opinions on the balance of the ground combat in V18 go here.

Opinions on the strategic balance for V18 go here.

With the Ground Combat Balance list currently on page 16, and the Geoscape balance list now on page 10, it can be a little difficult to keep up with everything that has been discussed so far. Therefore! I've made up a bullet-pointed list of what has been discussed in both threads, and present them here for your persual. These lists are as accurate as I can make them, but they will as off necessity lag behind the actual discussion itself. Ground Combat Balance Discussion (Up to page 20, top of page) Make flares more accurate (Page 1) Allow flares to be picked up (Page 1) Grenade arc need polishing (Page 1) Grenades hit cover they should fly over too often (Page 1) Pre-prepared crash mission too far from base (Page 1) Possbility to throw medkits+other items to soliders (Page 1) Give borders of map 1/8 black border of nothingness (Page 1) Aliens seem to be able to shoot a lot+have APs for reaction fire (Page 1) Autotarget aliens spotted within visual during night mission (Page 2) Sebillians feel too much like tanky Caesans (Page 3) Give Sebillians either poor accuracy or smaller sight range (Page 3) Make Sebillians more aggressive (Page 4/5) Buzzard armour: Vertical movement too restricted (Page 4) Buzzard armour: Make horizontal movement cheaper? (Page 4) Scimitar perhaps too strong (Page 5) Alien placement fairly predictable (Page 5) Better synergy between different racial types (Page 5/6) 8 troops in Chinook or 6+1 vehicle don't seem enough for Terror missions (Page 6) Heavy plasma too long range and too accurate for research description (Page 6/7) Plasma Cannon too accurate for an instant death weapon (Page 6/13) Tie grenade range to strength (Page 6/7/8) Improve grenade accuracy (Page 6/7/8) Too easy to skillup soliders (Page 7) Really easy to skillup soliders carrying LMGs (Page 7) Aliens all huddle in control room in base assault mission (Page 8) You get flares in a base assault mission at night, but not during the day? (Page 8) Demo charges underpowered (Page 8/9/10) Alien Alloys+Alienium should be loot from completed alien base (Page 8) Rocket launcher always has normal rocket even after upgrading rockets C4 seems to work with: 145 damage, 1.5 tiles radius, 5 tiles range, 80 accuracy. (Page 10) Predator armour dissapointing (not nearly protective enough) (Page 10/11) Teleporting wraiths a real PITA - very hard to track down. (Page 10) Rifles seem to be pea-shooters (Page 11) Increase effectiveness of stun grenades (Page 12) Decrease effective of stun effect of smoke grenades (Page 12) Smoke should apply damage for each tile walked into (Page 12) C4 should be incediary provided fire/smoke is set to 0% (Page 14) Solider survived after being turned into zombie (Page 14) Ammo usage quite low (Page 15) Androns feel the same as Sebillians (when at tier 2), but with more Plasma Cannons (Page 15) Researched Plasma weapons (tier 3) before lasers (tier 2)! (Page 16) Aliens seem to have unlimited sight range, constantly superior reactions and flawless accuracy (Page 16) Sentinel armour doesn’t seem to give superior sight range (Page 16) Aliens feel too accurate (Page 17/18) 8 different changes possible to adjust alien superiority (# aliens, weapon damage, hit points, vision range, weapon TU costs, weapon accuracy, shooting skills, dumb AI) (Page 17) Benefits of heavy weapons far outweigh cons. (Page 17) Increase weight of MG/RPG (Page 17) Updated accuracy formulae proposed to address extreme range/short range issues (Page 18/19) Aliens will shoot regardless of whether they can hit, regardless of what the percent chance to hit is (Page 19) If an alien can see one squaddie, they can see all squaddies (Page 19) Resisted reaction check, target reaction score verses shooter reaction (see Mutual Surprise and You!) (Page 20) Some expectation that aliens would reaction fire more because they are in a defensive role most missions (Page 20) Certain groups of aliens to attack in aggressive groups on dropship landing (Page 20) Geoscape Balance Discussion (Up to page 13, top of page) Adjust ticker so we see more smaller middle-sized craft (Page 1) Adjust alien waves so they appear more frequently (Page 1) Increase number of cities present on Geoscape (Page 2) Alien bases perhaps TOO influential on if you loose a country or not (Page 3) Air combat: Too many battles forgone conclusion (e.g. Scout vs. Foxtrot, light scout vs. anything) (Page 3) Air combat: Reduce hp or overkill on light scout to encourage use of autocannon (Page 3) Air combat: Introduce evade function to light scout (Page 3) Air combat: Improve AI on UFOs to incorporate more tactical thought (Page 3) Air combat: Boost speed and length of evade (fighters can't evade missiles) (Page 3) Air combat: Give heavy fighter missiles more fuel so they can complete a second pass (Page 4) Nation funding not significant enough to justify a second base (Page 4) Cruisers give too much alienium and alloys (Page 5) Smaller terror missions to start with (Page 6) Radar range shortened a little (Page 7) More global attrition (Page 7) Alien should be able to work where Xenonaut bases are from external sources rather than just flying over it (Page 7) More reasons to build bases elsewhere (Page 8) Escort fighters to keep current range (Page 8) Research times too short (Page 8) Ramp up terror missions later in game (Page 9) Crashed UFOs to generate "crashed UFO" events (Page 9) Missions to occur simultaneously more often (i.e. one base cant cover them all) (Page 9) Increase number of air superiority missions (Page 9) Squadrons to follow behind dropships rather than directly attached (Page 9) Slower speed when aircraft hits "outer band" of aircraft range (Page 9) Have multiple missions on occasion (not all the time) (Page 10) A single team should not be able to cover everywhere (Page 10) Allow instead of global range, aircraft to refuel at stopping points across map (Page 10) It should be more efficient to have multiple strike bases than just one (Page 11) By the time additional bases become available, aliens are much tougher than starting aliens. Squaddies in new bases are not as strong, or well equipped as first base. (Page 11) Decrease production time for advanced aircraft (Page 12)

Xenonauts and aliens can simply throw them too far right now. It should be based on strength. This is something that bugged me about the original series and now this game. You can literally toss a grenade past the effective range of a pistol or shotgun. This makes no sense at all. Grenades are/should be close in weapons. I'd make the maximum grenade range = 1 /tile for every 10 strength. If you try to throw the grenade ought land in the tile that's at the maximum range OR you simply shouldn't be allow to target a tile past your maximum range. For lighter objects like flares, I'd make use same formula with the final result multiplied by 2 or heavier objects the same result divided by two.

Just to make your life easier.

I've been playing a fair bit of Ground Combat, and one of my favourite uses for the machine gun is to set them up outside UFOs, wait a turn, open the door, and then burst fire whatever is on the other side. However, I don't see that as the only use for an MG. It costs a lot of AP to fire one, (45?) and that means if I move, I can't fire. I feel like the MG needs single shot options, low accuracy options, obviously, but it needs them. It's not like people don't use MGs in that capacity in real life. Second, why not an option to deploy it? It doesn't require any special animations, just get behind some cover, face the right direction and spend some TU to deploy, then next turn you get a boost to accuracy when burst firing. Maybe that'd be better instead of other firing options. Make it so that soldier can no longer move until I undeploy him. Just a though, because right now my MG is very limited when moving across terrain as he can't fire without setting up, then waiting a turn for his TU to refill.

The first three game-months of playing XCOM:EU on Classic can feel like building a sandcastle when the tide is coming in. There’s a constant struggle (at least, for me there is) on the geoscape to prevent countries from up and leaving as I feverishly crank out satellites and uplinks, all the while hoping that my squaddies don’t cack it so I can build the OTS when one of them hit elltee. At the same time, the ground combat is at times littered with the corpses of new recruits as I sacrifice the meatbags to keep my precious ranked-up squaddies safe. And then... carapace/skeleton armour comes in. And lasers start becoming available. The satellites I’ve been cranking out begin to have a beneficial effect. My squad size goes up from 4 to 5, then to 6. The tide starts to withdraw... but as the game progresses from that point, it seems like the tide withdraws too far. Once I have total coverage panic among council nations drops off sharply. When I’ve cracked plasma weapons the mutons who seemed a tough challenge with lasers are much easier to deal with. Squad sight combined with a plasma sniper rifle really wreaks havoc. Even battleships tremble before a firestorm armed with an EMP cannon and bolts-ons that I can manufacture just before I launch an intercept. It can actually become tedious to do missions while waiting for my psi-troopers to level up. So, where’s the sweet spot? Where’s the balance between too much and not enough pressure on the player? I think the level of challenge, the degree of pressure put on a player can be quantified beyond individual intuitive feelings, but I’m struggling how to describe how pressure can be describe in terms other than individual intuitive feelings. The closest I can come is in plain English, and it runs to something like: “keep me hungry”. Ensure that I never have quite enough materials to do everything that I want to do. That I don’t have quite enough quality troops, or extra lives, or special weapons so I can’t afford to spend them frivolously. That if I extend myself in one direction, it comes at the cost of being able to extend myself in another. Keep me hungry, But don’t starve me, unless I ask to be starved.