Search the Community

Just recently found out about this game, and went ahead with purchasing it. Been enjoying it immensely (when it hasn't been crashing on me, though I hear that will be fixed next patch). However, I'm running into one really major issue that I haven't quite figured out how to handle... Breaching into buildings, leap-frogging across open terrain, night missions where the Chinook lands right next to the UFO and I'm surrounded, no problem. I can deal with all of this without having any real casualties, maybe a wound or two, but that's it. I also don't have too many problems with breaching the 'cockpit' area (the round part between the wings, is I assume the cockpit). However, when it comes to the cargo bay (the back part)... how the heck do you guys deal with the one lone alien that holes up in there? Sometimes I get lucky that they're in a blind-spot that I can grenade spam, sometimes they're in the open and I can take them out. Most of the time... they're looking right at the door, in a spot I can't hit with grenades (unless there is a way to bounce them? ), if I move a Xenonaut through the door, I get reaction fired upon, if I'm lucky I got enough AP for a shot or two (I've tried with shotgun, assault rifle, and pistol) but I don't seem lucky enough that the AP will be enough to kill it before I run out of AP, and next turn my Xenonaut is dead. If I'm particular unlucky, the reaction fire one-shots my Xenonaut in the combat armor. One particular nasty example that I had. The alien was in that spot where I couldn't grenade it, if I try the grenades impacts on the corner of the door and blows up in the Xenonaut's face. So, I had to retreat the first one. Second one walks in pistol primed (I end turn at the door where the alien can't shoot me, then take one step to give me full APs), I got hit with reaction fire, then unloaded all pistol rounds into the Alien. It survived. Retrospect, I shouldn't have fired the third or fourth time, and retreated instead. Next round, my Xenonaut is dead due to no APs to retreat. So, I figure the alien must be near death after being hit that many times with a pistol. I march up a shotgunner, he gets reaction fired and dies instantly. I facepalm, sigh, and march up an assault rifle Xenonaut at this point (again, noting that I end turn at the door so I only pay 4 APs for a single square more before attacking with each of these Xenonauts), I get reaction fired, Xenonaut survives, but his APs for the turn goes down from the wound, and I barely have enough to full-auto, so I utilize it. Which was a three round burst I believe (First time I had used full auto with the assault rifle), of which, two shots hit and alien is still alive. Naturally, that Xenonaut is killed on the next enemy turn, so I'm down three xenonauts trying to kill one alien now. I think at this point I went "screw this", and set the rocket launcher guy to go in next, somehow the alien doesn't reaction-fire this time, I fire off the rocket-launcher finally killing the alien, and taking a little splash damage, and the combat ends as that was the last alien on the map. So, what else is there that I can try doing, except throwing the privates I now have at the sole alien in the cargo bay so that I'm not losing my veterans instead? As I understand, while the interceptors can down a UFO, and the buildings are destructible, we can't actually blow open the cargo bay with explosives, can we? After all the grenades I chuck into the cargo bay, I'd think it would have happened by now. I tried a machinegunner out, and did not like the style of that weapon at all for normal play, and it would figure the one time I deployed a machinegunner, the cargo bay was empty. And I can't really think of anything else that I can try.

Title says it all really. Clicking them is clunky and I never know which one is which ¬_¬

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?

Would it be possible to have a battle log during ground combat to show how much damage we dealt to a unit, death of a unit, unit detected etc.. ? If against the idea of showing exact damage number maybe just show how effective was a shot against a target.

Having played a bit with the little Android based Xcom alike Xenowar (http://xenowar.net) and it strikes me that their implementation of the AP reserve user interface is a fair bit more elegant than the current one in Xenonauts. You can see how it works in the first screenshot on this page: http://xenowar.net/screenshots.html Essentially it draws a coloured grid around the selected soldier, the colour of each tile representing the the units ability to fire / remaining AP when it reaches that tile i.e. green = auto shot, orange = snap shot and red = none. This approach totally eliminates the fiddly AP reserve settings and immediately shows the player if they can reach a certain tile without them having to click around looking for a that sweet spot. Adopting this system could significantly improve the flow of this basic game system. I made a quick mockup of how this could look in Xenonauts below, with X representing the current soldier location and Y representing the clicked on movement target: I'm interested to hear peoples thoughts - I suspect this system may not be original to Xenowar, but can't remember seeing it elsewhere. As an aside; are there any plans to implement multi-turn moves? I have a feeling these might not be in because of complications under the hood with destructible terrain and such, but it would be very useful when you have that one chap on the other side of the map from everybody else and just want him to run back with bothering you every turn.

Hello, I did try to find this topic somewhere, so if it has already been brought up, I'm sorry to do so again. Loving how the game is coming along so far and looking forward to seeing how it ends up. I really really don't like the way shooting through windows works in the game right now. I saw an alien through a window the other day (about 6-8 tiles away) and it took two shotgun shells to break the window while trying to kill it. Of course then I was out of AP and had to wait a turn before getting another chance. The alien actually turned around and got a shot off through the now broken window during his turn. In that instance my dude didn't get hit, but the whole thing felt really silly. I'm not going to tout realism in a game based on aliens, but windows don't feel right in the game currently. I feel like I got the jump on the alien but couldn't do anything about it. Am I alone in the opinion that store windows shouldn't stop bullets? Thanks for reading! -R