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How exactly do these things work? ex this is the air superiority Alien Mission Ticker :: 150 <<▬▬Whats this mean Chance :: 20 <<▬▬ i understand this one i think Escort chance :: 500 <<▬▬Whats this mean as far as what the number Actually means Once per wave :: TRUE <<▬▬ when is a wave? m:airplane.alien.fighter :: 0 <<▬▬Whats this mean m:airplane.alien.heavyfighter :: 300 <<▬▬Whats this mean m:airplane.alien.interceptor :: 500 <<▬▬Whats this mean e:airplane.alien.fighter :: 0 <<▬▬Whats this mean e:airplane.alien.heavyfighter :: 300 <<▬▬Whats this mean e:airplane.alien.interceptor :: 500 <<▬▬Whats this mean what i'm looking for What the numbers actually mean? what kind of scale are these numbers from ex. 0-1000 or do they even have a scale? does lowering the tickers mean they show up earlier? if so does that mean that these numbers represent a certain amount of time?

So, there's often a problem where players aren't "lucky" enough to get a certain UFO for months at a time due to the random number generator gods not being favorable. Basically, progressing through research is very hit and miss. So, we already have measures in place to give the player a Sebillian light scout and a Caesan light scout so they can get the alien biology research up, why not have other grounded UFOs scripted to pop up too? Don't make them pop up so early in the "timeline" as to make the research predictable, just make them show up late enough that they don't seem too "babying" but early enough that you don't get too far behind. We could make it an easy-only, or easy and normal only mode, maybe. Anyway, thoughts?

After posting about the terror missions in the ground combat thread I got to wondering how my game progress stacks up against others experiences, certainly the perception of difficulty can be skewed by game progression so am I winning, losing or progressing as normal? Date is mid January 1980. I have 1 main base, this contains 1 charlie, 3 condors and 2 foxtrots. 1 missile defense, 1 radar and 2 research labs. 1 air base with just a radar and 3 condors 1 more air base in the build. 16 troops in the main base with about 6 laser rifles and 7 sets of jackal armor. 2 hunter scout cars. As for research I am just working on air craft lasers, the x37 fighter is available but not built yet. (just picked up 10 more researchers to speed my research up a bit). Alien wise I have been base assaulted twice have taken out a small casien base, fought 6 terror missions and am seeing a mix of scouts, corvettes (rarely now), landing ships, cruisers and heavy fighters. How does this stack up against others progress? Personally I think this is a pretty rough time for normal difficulty but about right for hard, no way near nasty enough for veteran.

Hello everybody, I have a question on the pace of the game, that is, how fast the events, research, invasion, tech etc. goes on. At the moment the game makes you have some great researching-progress within the first month. Further more, my entire surviving Squad is promoted to the rank of a Captian (within 1 month!). A tank-vehicle is build in days, so are complete bases. That does not feel right. It should be some less haste; some time to become scared by waiting; some suprises without aliens and so on. The game should have a little bit more realistic pace of the events. cheers Sherelian

I would like feedback on the following observations, taking into account that so far I have never gone further than the middle of November (Beta 19.4). 1) Forget about a second base at least until December. I have tried building a second base a few times, but each time, I cannot equip it because of lack of money, so the few buildings I have built there are useless. I did manage to get a single aircraft to the new base, but neither a single Firefox or Condor can stand up to the Heavy fighters and medium alien ships that you meet in November. In addition, the second base will bankrupt you and your manufacturing will stall. 2) By November, the aliens are tough ones that shrug off laser rifles (not to mention normal rifles), grenades and machineguns, and that can one-shot your soldiers without armor. So if like me by November, you have a couple of laser rifles, 3 or 4 poor armor and maybe one wolf armor, then you are likely to be outgunned and lose one or two soldiers on each mission, not to mention the wounded ones recovering and the 3-5 base invasions that you will hopefully have survived. 3) By this time, your Firefox planes will have alenium torpedoes, but in a fight against a medium escorted by two heavy fighters, again you are faced with alien planes that are faster, shoot further, and have unlimited ammunition, so you usually lose at least one plane in a battle with an escorted medium. I thought I had found a counter by first shooting my two firefox missiles at the medium (which cannot dodge), then turning the Fox away so that the medium chases it; in the meantime, my two condors or one Condor and one Firefox hopefully destroy the two alien fighters then chase after the medium with their machineguns. However the aliens turned the tables on me by going after a Condor instead of the Firefox which is now useless being out of ammo. A single Condor cannot down a medium with machineguns, and the Condor being chased is too slow to get away and is downed. The only alternative to this I can see is to have ONLY Firefoxes, so 3 Firefoxes in this situation can destroy the two alien escorts and damage (not down) the medium alien ship. Then the idea is to go to base, rearm and come back to finish off the unescorted alien medium ship. The hair in the soup with this strategy is that there are usually alien fighters in the area, who ambush your returning and defenseless Firefoxes and down all three... 4) By mid-November I have researched the next fighters, but as mentioned above I have no money and no time to build any new fighters. The dilemma is that if you crash research aircraft and aircraft weapons (limited by some discoveries that you have to make), then you soldiers will be equipped with popguns and have no armor to speak of. 5) If anyone has survived so far beyond December I would be interested in knowing how they did it. Right now it looks like I am on a downward spiral. Maybe I should restart from where I built the second base in early November and forego a second base. Still I am not sure that this will be enough.

In the most recent experimental build, we got a very controversial new feature (or "feature," depending on your point of view) where fighter craft will be auto-salvaged even upon death. I'm not looking to discuss that particular feature, but one of the reasons cited is that there would become large gaps in the game-states of highly skilled players (who never lost a plane) and unskilled players (who lost many planes). However, there is another way that game-states can become highly differentiated by player skill. Or, more accurately, player patience. Powerleveling. Grinding. "Training" (if you wish to be polite). Or my preferred calisthenics. All names for the same process of intentionally doing certain things in order to ensure max skill gains in each combat to result in having more skilled troops later on. As of right now, here are the things each soldier has to do in each mission to ensure max skill gains: 1.) Spend 600 APs 2.) Move 40 tiles while carrying at least 80% capacity (Note: 160-240 TUs, not counting rotating) 3.) Shoot 8 times at an alien within 1.5x effective weapon range (Note: 160-400 TUs) 4.) Be party to 6 reflex rolls (successful or not doesn't matter) 5.) Panic twice If a soldier were to do all of these, they would gain 2 points in each attribute except resilience -- they'd gain 2.5 points in that. Of course, I've never seen panicking be part of the game yet, except for psionic influence, so panicking twice is essentially off the table. Additionally, I find reflex rolls to be part of the game not worth bothering with (they clash with my central combat philosophy of "don't let the enemy take initiative") so I don't bother with those. Other people do, of course. If we assume a rookie soldier has 60 TUs (either a skilled rookie or someone with a few missions under their belt), they still have to spend 10 turns utilizing all of their TUs each turn in order to cap out on TU gains. Since I want to do well, I'm prone to trying to maximize my skill gains, even if that's not a wise tactical decision. So I might secure an area, ensure good fields of vision, and spend 4-5 turns doing nothing but ordering all of my soldiers to crouch and uncrouch repeatedly by holding 'C'. Do I have fun doing this? No. It's boring. Does it increase the amount of joy I get at the victory? No. It just wastes my time. As a game progresses, the differences between people who powerlevel and people who don't is going to become quite notable. (In fact, my last playthrough had at least 3 occasions where a soldier went down to 1 HP and lived. If I'd not powerleveled those soldiers they would have died!) I find this mechanic to be boring, wasteful, etc. I discussed this somewhat in a different thread that picked up a bit of conversation, titled "Ways to address the soldier skill gap." The general consensus seemed to be "Eh, whatever. Train the noobies up, too." What if we had a Xenonauts where powerleveling wasn't a thing? Where it became difficult to use these little tricks to get more skill points, and (this is important), balance the game around that? So, goals: 1.) Remove the boredom of powerleveling from the "skilled" players' games. 2.) Mitigate the gap in soldier competence between the games of those who powerlevel and those who don't. Assume that casualty rates are identical in both cases. Suggestions: As always in my suggestion sections, I don't necessarily think all of these suggestions are good, and I definitely don't think they all should be included. I'm just coming up with ideas, some are bound to be good, some are bound to be bad. 1.) Rework all skills so they're gained on harder-to-powerlevel things. For example, changing accuracy from "shots taken within range" to "shots hit" or "damage dealt with bullets." 2.) Institute squad-based skill gains. I mentioned this idea much earlier in a thread about how to rework the strength system specifically. The idea is to have a centrally-set "skill points per soldier per mission" value that the game is balanced around you earning. Then, individual soldiers are rated in the mission and gain skill points based on their relative usefulness in the mission. So if the game was based around you getting 4 skill points per soldier per mission, and you had 5 soldiers survive a mission, they'd all be ranked. The best soldier (no matter how good or bad he did in absolute terms) would get 6 skill points in various attributes, the one who came second would get five, etc. etc. down to the very worst soldier who'd get a single skill point. On average, you'd always get 4 points/soldier/mission. 3.) Simply lower skill requirements/institute a flat skill rate. I don't like this idea, but I include it because this idea is ESSENTIALLY the current game state for people who powerlevel. My soldiers get 2 accuracy, 2 TUs, and 2 strength (and possibly a reflex) per mission, and therefore they get 1.5 resilience as well. Unless I mess up. Switching to this system would be only a benefit for powerlevelers, because they get the same game without the wasted time. The only people actually affected then would be those not trying to powerlevel, and their soldiers would be raised to the same standard that some people already reach. Subsection: Stupid things I do to powerlevel I'm going to list here the stupid actions I take to powerlevel my troops. This only includes things I do that are actually stupid, as opposed to tactically beneficial that ALSO happen to powerlevel troops. If you guys have any stories of similar tricks, feel free to suggest them. Accuracy: Have as many troops as possible shoot wildly inaccurate 20 TU shots at an alien in cover. I don't care if I hit. Just shoot more bullets. TUs: As I mentioned above, spending entire turns having my force do nothing but squat-thrusts. Strength: Yeah, I know you guys won't be firing off 200 bullets and throwing 15 grenades in this mission. Take the extra kit anyway. Reflexes: This one isn't mine, it's someone elses, but they were discussing cornering Sebillians (with their short sight range) and having pistol-wielding troops take reaction shots each time they moved from 14-18 tiles away.

Is it based on how many kills they have? Rank? missions they have been on? A combination of all that. I really want to up the time units my warriors have to use and have no idea how to do it

Hello everyone, Xenonauts uses a very traditional stat system, where agents take damage and heal up to full health over time, as well as being able to gain stats (bravery, APs, etc.) through battle experience/promotions. I'd like to offer a suggestion on stats that very few games seem to use, which in my eyes, would offer a more realistic and flavorful approach. It would be nice to hear everyone's thoughts! Health: New soldiers start out with higher health, e.g. 80-100 compared to the ~60 that current soldiers start with. However, with each successive injury, the soldier's max health decreases. The uglier the injury, the more max health is deducted. These deductions are permanent. Injuries may be adjusted to have a higher chance of causing bleeding, and consequently must be treated sooner on the battlefield. If a soldier is left to bleed, his overall max health will decrease further than if the injury was immediately treated. This places a higher emphasis on medics and keeping your soldiers safe, especially your more accurate/higher ranking soldiers. This will also encourage more tactical use of snipers, flashbangs, reactionary fire and suppression. Slight health increases may still occur, and your max health can increase past the baseline provided your soldier never gets hurt or suffers rare, minor injuries. However for the most part, soldiers will end up with less and less max health over the course of his/her career. This is more realistic, as "fresh meat" soldiers with little to no combat experience are as healthy as they may ever be, before they lose an arm and a leg in battle. Action Points / Strength: Similar to health, soldiers will start out with more action points and strength than usual, however injuries will deduct points, simulating limb injuries. You can't exactly run as fast as you used to after taking a plasma shot to the knee, nor can you lift as much weight as before. Of course, this may not sound fun, as soldiers are inevitably going to get hurt in this game, and strength is needed to make effective use of heavier weaponry. So, I propose a new mechanic to offset this: Physical Therapy. We can send new recruits to training, preventing us from using the soldier for 10 days, however they come back a better soldier. Similarly, we can send injured soldiers to PT, which would increase the rate at which they recover, as well as giving them a better chance of recovering more of their lost max health/strength/action points. However, we lose control of the soldier (like training) for a certain number of days, depending on the severity of the injury. Wounded soldiers, however, are nursed back to an "injured" state, after which they can either be used in battle again, or sent to PT. A wounded soldier implies a severe injury, while an injured soldier implies a minor injury. Therefore, wounded soldiers suffer more unrecoverable stat decreases. Tactically, you wouldn't want soldiers falling below half health, as that would trigger a wounded state. Perhaps medkits can be used to nurse a soldier back up to 50%+ health, preventing a wounded state on mission end (and therefore less stat decreases). However, I can see this sort of being a problem when fighting the last alien. A soldier fires at an alien, triggers reactionary fire and suffers a critical injury. Meanwhile, another soldier delivers the killing blow and the mission ends, whereas if there were another alien alive, the critically wounded soldier would have had a chance for medical attention from another soldier. This can be refined. Perhaps the lowest point of health suffered in battle is used to determine the significance of stat decreases, while using medkits in the field determines how fast a soldier is nursed back to 100% health. Soldiers that are tended to immediately will spend less time in the medical bay. Soldiers that are still bleeding or have unrecovered health when the battle ends are nursed on the ride back. It would be as if they were tended to immediately. This would favor the players who spend all their APs on killing (what they think is) the last alien instead of medkitting. Bravery: Bravery's a strange stat. Some soldiers may grow scared over the course of many battles, as they rack up injuries and see their fellow comrades die. Their PTSD may cause them to panic the moment gunfire starts erupting. Others may become more brave, from becoming numb/unafraid of death, seeking revenge, and/or accepting the fact that sacrifice is sometimes necessary to win this war. Personally, I would like to see bravery increase with every successive battle that the soldier completes unscathed or with only minor injuries. Bravery would also have a chance of decreasing when the soldier gets critically injured or a fellow soldier dies within sight. The lower the soldier's rank, the higher the chance/decrease. IMO, it's realistic for soldiers with little combat experience to have a lower starting bravery than soldiers with previous combat experience. Additionally, the enemies we are fighting are never-before-seen aliens with super advanced technology. Even the most battle hardened Vietnam veterans would be a little overwhelmed at the sight, at least at first. So, baseline bravery remains unchanged for the most part. However... Some soldiers are truly braver than others, while others are only brave because their friends are still alive. This can be done through a hidden, "True Bravery" stat. A soldier with high "True Bravery" would have a lower chance of losing bravery stats. He/she may even GAIN them when seeing fellow soldiers die (as they set out for revenge). The bravery stat that we see will be the "Current Bravery" of the soldier. We do not know how truly brave the soldier is until he is battle tested. "True Bravery" can also increase as the soldier is promoted, with the thought process: "There are soldiers depending on me. I must be fearless." To compensate however, soldiers gain bravery at a much faster rate (especially so if they complete missions unscathed), as they get used to fighting these new adversaries. Also, while a soldier can bravery points from being in unfortunate situations and/or having a low "True Bravery" stat, their bravery can be nursed back up if you keep them away from from seeing friendly deaths and out of harm's way. In this way, bravery is sort of an extension of Morale. Keep a soldier's morale high, and his/her bravery will increase quite quickly. Put a soldier in unfortunate situations and his/her bravery takes a dive. Perhaps only a temporary dive if you are a careful/caring commander. I haven't read up on how rank affects combat morale yet, but promotions seem to be handed out like candy in the current versions of the game. It would be nice to have promotions occur less often or be capped (such as having only 1 Commander, 2 Captains, 3 Lieutenants, etc. per base or # of soldiers), but be more meaningful. Perhaps they more significantly increase the bravery (and thus accuracy) of soldiers around them. Morale would take a significant hit if a high ranking officer is killed. I've never been in a war myself, so I would like to hear others' thoughts on this. Accuracy: While having soldiers with low starting accuracy and having them increase with experience is the traditional way to go in many games, I propose a different approach. Aliens are invading Earth, thus the soldiers we employ should be the best of the best. A soldier's base accuracy would be a lot higher implying that the soldiers we are recruiting are some of the best sharpshooters that Earth has to offer. Accuracy would signify how well a soldier can hit still targets in a controlled environment. Accuracy gains would be minimal and small to signify weapon familiarity, instead of actual accuracy increases. Perhaps accuracy could be linked to specific weapon types, such as Sniper Rifle or Shotgun. Many real soldiers probably have a certain weapon type that they prefer. You can add a small boost in accuracy if the soldier is using his/her preferred weapon type. Enough with the rambling: the new catch is that bravery plays a much bigger role in determining a soldier's chance to hit. A soldier with low bravery would spray and pray more than a battle hardened soldier would, thus having a lower accuracy rating. A braver soldier would get more use out of his/her accuracy rating, as he takes more time to line up the shot as opposed to worrying about staying in cover. With this change, you'd favor hiring soldiers with high accuracy ratings (if you didn't already), and hope that their bravery increases to the point of being an effective soldier that patiently lines up their sights. Bravery can be seen like a "confidence" stat. Gameplay-wise, new recruits would still have lower chance to hit in the beginning. Bravery increases are not guaranteed, so some soldiers may never reach their potential, moreso if they keep getting hurt. However, keep your high-accuracy soldiers unscathed and they will do great things for you. That does not mean low-accuracy soldiers are useless. They can be used on the front lines, equipped with heavy armor, or given machine guns to lay down suppression fire. Moreover, there could be an accuracy floor (e.g. 60), because we simply do not even consider soldiers who cannot consistently hit a still target 15-yards away. Alternatively, you can have newly recruited low-accuracy soldiers increase their accuracy quite a bit with weapon familiarity training. Reflexes: Reflexes seems like a stat that could increase with every injury, at least for balance's sake. Then, at least your low-max-health soldiers could have a higher chance of defending themselves from death. It's also a bit realistic that a soldier who's constantly getting hurt will grow paranoid over time, developing faster reflexes. Of course, reflexes can still be gained normally through combat experience, injury or not. Baseline reflexes remain unchanged. Another twist that can possibly be added is to have bravery affect your reflexes as well. A low-bravery soldier may at times be a bit trigger happy and kill a civilian, as he misidentifies the target in the heat of battle. Difficulty Curve I read from the difficulty curve thread that Chris wants to increase the baseline stats of recruits over the course of the game. If soldiers start out with higher baseline stats than usual, consider reducing the recruiting costs of soldiers over the course of the game. Then you'd have more and more soldiers (with high baseline stats) as you suffer losses. The cheaper recruiting costs signifies the increasing alien threat, as more and more soldiers are willing to put their lives on the line for the survival of mankind. Summary: - Strength, health and APs start high but decrease as soldiers sustain injuries. - Reflexes start at baseline but increase at faster rates. - Accuracy doesn't improve too much. Instead, bravery becomes the pivotal factor in determining chance to hit. A brave soldier with low accuracy still wouldn't hit things very well, nor would a scared soldier with high accuracy. - Bravery fluctuates much more easily, significantly increasing or decreasing during times of high/low morale. Lots of wounded and deaths will drop overall bravery, while unscathed soldiers will increase overall bravery. - Wounded/injured soldiers can do Physical Therapy to recover some of their lost stats. - High-ranking officers play a much bigger role, due to Bravery being a key stat. Other suggestions: - Would be nice to see technologies related to these changes, such as improved medical bays (early game), stem cell research and/or synthetic body parts (late game) - It would be nice to see a "preferred weapon type" for soldiers, such as Rifle / Sniper Rifle / Shotgun / etc. which give bonus accuracy when using the preferred weapon. This is to help offset the minimal accuracy gains over the course of the soldier's career. - For balance, you can implement stat floors, where no more deductions can occur. I hope to hear what you guys have to say. Even if all this isn't fully implemented in vanilla, it might give modders some ideas. It's quite a wall of text, so thanks to anyone for taking the time!

Hi everybody. I assumed that you've noticed, as I did, that soldier can (and will) improve their differents statistics within the missions. Thus, there are, I believe, some flaws. I will split this reflexion around each single stat, to keep a clear point of view. For a better understanding of this mechanic, please report to section "soldierDevelopment" of the gameconfig.xml (line67 on v18.3) Note: PtP = Point to Progress To make my purpose clear, I will use "Rookie", wich is a... good rookie, 60 all stats, and "Commander", 80 all stats. Time Units (TU) (300 PtP, +2 max after mission) The more you the xenonaut acts, the more he can act. Something bothers me however: the progression depends on the number of UT spent. This means that an experienced soldier (80UT) can, and will, progress faster than a rookie (60UT), in this case, 33% faster. It is a shame, because I believe that the better you get, the harder it is to get even better, so this system is counter-realistic. It's not a big deal, but maybe their could be some easy improvement, such as, for instance, counting the percentage of UT spent instead of the flat number. During the mission, "Rookie" spent 300 UT. With the current system, he will gain 1 UT (300 PtP reached -> +1 UT). "Commander" spent 300 UT. He will gain 1 UT too (300 PtP reached, +1 UT). Let's assume that the threshold is not 300UT spent but 300% UT spent. Repported to his stats, rookie spent 500% of his AP. He would gain +1 UT and +200 PtP, while "Commander" would gain +1 UT too but only 75 PtP. Strength (20PtP, +2 max after mission) I love the idea, I hate the application. Let me explain: Everyone want his xenonauts to get stronger, to be able to carry/use big weaps/armors. So, everybody makes them carry as much as possible without impacting the UT pool of the soldier. This means that whenever your soldier is strong enough to carry his default gear (a shotgun, a jackal, two or three grenades for an assault for instance), you will "feed" him as much as you can with grenades, rockets, and bricks just because you want him to get stronger... It's boring, and it's not a bad design, because you do not give them the extra-gear "in case of emergency", but only to improve their strength. A sollution would be a rollback : setting the StrengthCoeff over 100% (105, 110 %?). This way, improving your xenonaut's strength would be a strategic choice... But we would behave the same way (stuffing our xenonauts) at str max + 1. Who cares losing 1 UT (over 60+) when it allows you to gain strength ? The gameplay would be the same. Another solution would be to discrease it to 0%. A xenonauts earns strength when he moves and that's it. It's a shame, but it avoids us boring minutes of brainless-grenade-gearing. Should anyone have an idea, please feel free to share it! Accuracy (4PtP, +2 max after mission) Again, I love the idea, but their are flaws. First, your machine gunner improves this skill much too fast due to the range of the LMG. Everytime I use one, he gets more accurate than my snipers! Same issue with the rocketlauncher. This could be solved by discreasing the range of LMG and Rocketlancher, but it could/would cause other balance issues. Another flaw is that (while i'm not sure of it), you can improve your skill with nonsense shoot. Let us say you've spotted an alien inside a UFO. The sniper (or gunner, or any creature of the creation!) outside, which LoS is blocked by a UFO wall, can try to shoot the alien.... So he can improve "freely" his accuracy. Moreover, does burstfire count as One or Several attempts ? A solution would be to gain PtP when the xenonauts manage to hit his target, instead of attempting, and removing the range limit. This way, a sniper succeding a shoot from far away (more than range x 1.5) would gain a PtP, and the machinegunner hitting eveything but the alien would keep a low accuracy stat. If so, the PtP must be reduced (to 3, I believe). Reflexes (3PtP, +2 max after mission) Despite hard tries to improve this skill, it grow veeeeery slowly. Maybe we should reducte the PtP to 2 ? Bravery (PtP1, +2 max after mission) I never saw any improve. Well, I never panicked. I have no comments about this. Resilience (4PtP, no max after mission) I like it as is. maybe we shoul gain PtP when hit (+1PtP when soldier get hurt). No, please, don't voluntary hit your dudes! What do you think of it ? Edit: Apologies for the topic title, a "E" snicked within!

from mortal feeble roockie to just as mortal not that feeble slightly more experienced soldier. The question is how steep should the increase in power by all factors (experience+equipment+knowledge) be? I would like it to be quite considerable with a couple of no-clue-cannon-fodder guys that have to actually retreat from some battles evolving into badass intimidated by well-nigh nothing veterans (scarcely below blasterbomb+psi troops). This "human evolution" was quite an important part to me in the original game. Anyone got an opinion/perspective on that? The thread was triggered by some game mechanics discussions were I argued along that line seemingly as the only one who wanted "from VERY low to somewhat high" "power progression".

A few questions about the replayability of the campaign: Will all alien tech be "unlocked" in a given campaign if I'm thorough about researching it? Are the attributes of alien tech fixed? As in, will plasma rifles have the same attributes each time, etc. I am wondering what the incentive is to replay a campaign once I've beaten it. Obviously I can ramp up the difficulty or turn on iron man mode, but is there any difference in the tech or the order in which I get it in subsequent playthroughs? If there is randomization/ procedural generation involved, what exactly does it apply to? (Note: I haven't played the original X-COM to its conclusion and don't know how it compares.)