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Hi, I'm Max Caine. You might remember me from Ragequit 2: Popping the Vein and 10 Most Hilarious Ballistic Monitors. I'm here today to talk about the serious issue of playing Iron Man mode in a Beta. You hear that wailing and gnashing of teeth? That was Jimmy. Jimmy liked to play Betas. He like to contribute and support developers he felt worthy of his money. But most of all, Jimmy like to play on Iron Man. Boy oh boy, Jimmy loved Iron Man, and one day, Jimmy found a Beta that had an Iron Man mode. Jimmy jumped on that game like a beggar on a sandwich, and he was in heaven. Until the bug struck. 10 hours into the game, Jimmy got hit by a bug. "No problem", thought Jimmy, "I'll reload". Only problem was, the bug corrupted his save. and because he was playing on Iron Man mode, he didn't have any saves to fall back on. Jimmy was suddenly destitute, an electronic hoboe, panhandling at the side. So Jimmy started again. And the same bug struck! This time, Jimmy had been playing for 15 hours. After loosing his empire for the second time, Jimmy started to get the sweats. the shudders and the shakes. In his sixth playthrough, he became convinced that he was only one mouse click away from loosing it all again. Jimmy started to play recklessly. "Why not?" thought Jimmy. "I'm going to loose it all anyway". Jimmy started to hang around the wrong kind of AIs. He played fast and loose with his empire. In the end, Jimmy lost it all when he threw his monitor out the window. But Jimmy didn't have to! No sir. If Jimmy didn't play Iron Man and had made more than one save, he could have rolled back to an earlier time. So kids, don't be like Jimmy. You see an Iron Man mode in an unfinished Beta, just say no!

Per the title, I think IronMan mode should only save at the end of a turn. So, I know the intention of ironman is to add tension and make you live with unfortunate (interesting) consequences in game. That being said, in other games that have ironman, I have enjoyed exploiting ironman mode by ctrl-alt-delete quitting the game to avoid a save. I only do this when something stupidly annoying happens, like when one of my guys accidentally shoots another guy when the chance of that happening is ridiculuously low (such as 5%). Its a real bummer to lose a guy in ironman mode based on your own decision and I use this treasured exploit with care, in other situations. Anyone else do this? I'm sure that would undermine the purpose of ironman mode for some - but not for me.

What's the rational behind forcing a no save policy if the hardest difficulty level is selected? Ironman mode is available as an option for those that want it except in this case. I do enjoy extreme challenges but I seldom care to play long games that don't permit multiple saves. Inevitably, there's some bug that will corrupt a saved game or render it nearly unplayable. Power outages, cats on keyboards and external distractions also come into play here. I've lost too many games in the past to such things and decided I had enough of that. Basically as things are now, I'm either forced to play at an easier level or figure out how to mod the game to alter a feature that should probably be optional.

Some people have complained about UFO: Alien Invasion not allowing for save scumming during battles(only resetting the mission) but I was like "Pfft, game isn't even supposed to be played like that, besides save scumming is cheating so if devs think it shouldn't be allowed then it isn't allowed." Now it might sound kind of hypocritical, but I do save scumming on certain types of games on easiest difficulties just on first playthrough to get hang on the game. However, I don't really like save scumming, I like it when games prevent it or have feature to prevent it, like iron man modes. Why? Because its so tempting to save your favourite soldiers or prevent your expensive craft that took days to build to get blown up or losing 12 soldiers in lighting... Also when interceptors are blown up, ufos just fly everywhere and do their stuff without you being able to do anything about it, so it feels tempting to load previous save to prevent such things. So what about it? Well, I yesterday finally completed my beginner with save scumming playthrough of XCOM/UFO and after figuring out how to fix difficulty bug(I hope I succeeded =/ Its hard to tell and I'm not sure how to confirm it), I started game on experienced without save scumming. And holy hell, the game is much faster and much less frustrating now that I'm not save scumming to keep my best soldiers alive O_o Seriously, games feels so different now... I'm probably later on gonna learn new tactics to avoid my soldiers dying, but now it feels oddly great to send rookies into small ufo to get shot instead of reloading save for hours until sectoid misses point blank shot Plus its more atmospheric that I'm doing so badly rather than reloading saves(which breaks immersion as xcom doesn't even allow loading game during battle resulting in that I have to quit game or abort mission in order to do it) and playing "perfect game" score wise. So yeah, thank you for including the ironman mode (P.S. Is it just me or are "Easy mode" in older games not really easy, just easier than normal? Nowadays easy mode means "I can beat this game no matter what" but in old games it means "Enemy is slightly easier now, play through this to get hang of the game and still feel challenged, then try again on normal to experience game's challenge fully")

So I downloaded the latest version of xenonauts, and whenever I try to save in game, the save button is blanked out. I tried exiting the game, but it didn't even autosave... is there a bug in this version that means the save was turned off? or is that a deliberate feature of this version...? *Edit* Disregard this, I'm an idiot. I must have accidentally clicked iron man mode, and it did autosave, but I read the date on the left hand side where it said Jun 8th, which was roughly the last time I played, so I thought that was an old save... It's too late, I should go to bed...

Iron man mode is very interesting. I think you are on to something there. Here are a couple suggestions that would make it more friendly. 1. It is not re-arming my squad in between missions automatically and doesn't give me much time to do it. I dont mind doing it myself as long as there is something to let me know I need to. I was expecting my soldiers to grab ammo and grenades and then ended up on the battlefield with nothing but their good looks. 2. I like how it goes quickly from one mission to the next, however maybe something to let me the specifics of the situation. Where it is, whats going on, that kind of thing. 3. Research should be more a part of the game. What do you think about getting something tangible out of everything that is discovered. Not necessarily big new weapons but small things like training upgrades that gives all soldiers I train 1 extra accuracy. Maybe researching new base facilities such as firing ranges might be in order? 4. Also, shouldn't there be a way to change camera angle in battle mode? If not then do you think the game should automatically make walls invisible when the player has soldiers on the other side? I want to thank you all for all of your hard work. . I have been waiting what seems like decades for this game. It is going to be great. .