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edit: I have meanwhile been convinced by Gauddlike's arguments that my original proposal is lacking. Below is a revised version. A big thank you to everyone who provided feedback! Hi there, First of I'd like to say that as a huge fan of XCOM I greatly appreciate how close you stick to the concepts of the series. But in one way you are imo a bit to close to the classics: reserving time units in ground combat. I have only played Xenonauts for a short time up to now, but I already encountered a number of situations where I thought to myself "well, that could be done in a less click-intensive manner". I'll give you an example: Usually I reserve time units for a reaction shot. But if I then encounter an alien while using the rest of my TUs for movement, I want to shoot him. It happens rather often that the game won't let me do that, cause I don't have enough TUs left for two shots (the one I want to take and the reaction shot). This requires me to deselect the 'reserve TUs option', clicking on the alien a second time and reselecting the reserve option at the start of the next turn. That's a lot of clicking. I'd suggest to implement one of the following solutions to this: - Allow the usage of reserved TUs for aggressive actions like shooting or throwing a grenade, with one additional safety-click on the target and displaying a 'click again to use reserved TUs' overlay. - Allow the usage of reserved TUs for aggressive actions like shooting or throwing a grenade as long as a modifier key is held (© by Gazz ^^). If one of this options is used make the text of the reserve-options greyed out, so the player has visual feedback that this unit won't react during the enemies turn any more, but leave the previously selected option selected. Additional visual feedback would also be nice. By which I mean this: introduce a 4th color for the path highlighting. Green tiles = tiles that can be reached that leave enough TUs for auto reaction fire. Blue = enough TUs left for snap shot reaction. Yellow = no reaction fire possible. Red = Unreachable in this turn. Hopefully this is helpful to you! Keep up the good work! Alex

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 be nice if you could see how much AP it cost for the basic firing with the selected fire mode in the bottom-left window (the one showing the weapon, remaining ammo and fire mode). Has it is, I need to press on the weapon as if I'm firing to see how much AP it cost to fire. Having it on the bottom-left weapon window will allow for quicker reference to better manage APs.

Is there a icon/notification that tells us which squadie can see the alien? Having the alien thing on the side of the screen is good, but is there a quick way to go find the squadie that can actually shoot it? LOS isn't always perfectly obvious, sometimes i line up a shot and find out I have a 0% chance of hitting it.. then have to move the squadie a space or two and do it again. Sometimes that trial and error can use up a few AP. not a big deal, just wondering if there was a simpler method.

When you click to reserve AP's, would it be possible to keep that selection active when you change soldier? As it stands, if you set 'soldier 1' to reserve AP's for snapshot, move him, then switch to 'soldier 2', it resets to not saving AP's. This means if you want them all to reserve AP's then you have to select it for every soldier.

Am I missing something? I selected a weapon to fire... decided I couldn't or didn't want to and I couldn't unselect the option. I had to change soldiers to no longer have the fire choice

To my great chagrin, I didn't come up with the original idea. This time One question is how many classes of items are "temporarily used". One way to go about this would be: - You press "G" for grenade. - An overlay of maybe 20% transparent black covers the current weapon gfx on the main tactical UI. - The first and successive presses of "G" cycle through all types of grenades the soldier has in his inventory. - The current "temporary" grenade is displayed over the weapon gfx while you see the ghost of the original weapon - It can "cycle around" to having no grenade superimposed / selected. - No AP are spent at this time. You can cycle through this as often as you like until even the greatest klutz hits the right grenade type. Throwing the grenade spends the AP, including the AP required to move it to the mainhand. Some pockets may just be more advantageous to store grenades in. Throwing the grenade also resets this entire system to having the weapon displayed normally. The same could be done for "other equipment" like medpacks or... whatever else. Depending on how many "other equipment" there is, they could be tossed in with the grenades. This system could also be used to - reload normal weapons (only one magazine type) - reload rocket launchers with multiple types of rockets. You would use "R" to cycle through all magazine items that match your equipped weapon. Just click on it (use it) to reload that particular item or reload / switch to that particular rocket. A lot faster than rummaging through your inventory. It's not even such a great cheat with throwing grenades. Just imagine you are carrying the weapon on a sling and you would not stop to stow your rifle in your backpack before reaching for a grenade. That eliminates a lot of annoying micromanagement and the player can stay "in" the battle instead of having to leave it to shuffle items around.