my experience

[BigityBalzworth]

playing the kickstarter demo shows a game that still needs a lot of work but is coming together nicely and shows some serious potential. If I tried to play it any longer though, I probably would have thrown my laptop out the window. enemies can apparently shoot through closed doors. trying to right click anything in the combat UI menu will cause you soldier to look towards the spot on the map behind the menu spawning reaction fire and getting him killed. I did have an enemy fire at one of my soldiers and miss, hitting a the now dead soldier i just mentioned causing him to scream "Argh!" as if he was still alive. It was awesome. Biggest gameplay issue: the unarmed chinook should not be able to attempt to intercept a ufo. if you send it out towards a grounded ufo and it takes off, it should lose it's target, stopping time and prompting the player to select new orders. otherwise when you send it out and hit the fast time button the ufo will take off and the chopper still intercepts and is instantly destroyed and you've lost your whole strike team. game over.

I hope the final game will be much harder. You should be getting slaughtered initially. after several missions on veteran i had only lost soldiers due to issues i mentioned earlier.

I am glad to see you guys using kickstarter. I have a feeling this game will be very successful there. as i'm writing this it is very close to being funded already. Any idea what will be considered if you raise, say, 100k? 250k? 1,000,000? people will want to know these things if you want them to fund past 100 percent.

keep up the good work and good luck in your kickstarter quest!

[Corporal Hicks]

I also agree that the game should be a lot harder, to the point of almost giving up.

[Kilrathi]

I think a lot of the balancing still remains to be done - this alpha build has largely focused on mechanics and getting the framework in place, then as pieces are added later in development, more attention will be paid to balancing. I can't speak for Goldhawk but I think it's largely a matter of not wanting to take the time to balance things now before the AI and other systems are in place, since then you'd just need to rebalance again. There's also probably some element of not wanting to put out a really hard version as the public demo build - killing people's soldiers off wouldn't necessarily help the Kickstarter. For me, getting a chance to play the game at an early stage and watch it develop has been part of the fun!

[Jean-Luc]

The beginning of the game is easier to help new players get to grips with the game. That's why the light scouts were introduced. They're very easy to shoot down and have small crews, it's almost a a kind of tutorial.

Eventually the different difficulty levels will be introduced and balancing changed to suit them.

[BigityBalzworth]

I remember when playing X-com on one of the harder difficulties, it wasn't uncommon to lose half your squad securing early ufos. very unforgiving. You would be replacing soldiers about as fast as you could hire them. you know very quickly that you are up against a vastly superior force. hence the need for quick research into better combat gear to level the playing field.

[jimbobfury]

Hey man, I agree with you that the game should be harder, but I'm confident it will change significantly in that regard once the AI is fully implemented and balancing has been done. In the meantime, you can mod the weapon files if you like, to increase the damage alien weapons do or to increase the number of aliens in each UFO type. I'm also looking at trying to remove the Jackal armour from the game right at the start, so you have to send your first guys out in their basic uniforms until you've researched it. That's proving tricky though...

One other thing, regarding your point about a Chinook heading to a landed UFO. I think you're supposed to provide fighter cover for it, as even if your dropship didn't continue heading to the crash when the UFO takes off, the UFOs are still too fast for you to outrun. Send a couple of fighters to hover over the crash site and then send your chinook. Hope that helps!

[Belmakor]

playing the kickstarter demo shows a game that still needs a lot of work but is coming together nicely and shows some serious potential. If I tried to play it any longer though, I probably would have thrown my laptop out the window. enemies can apparently shoot through closed doors. trying to right click anything in the combat UI menu will cause you soldier to look towards the spot on the map behind the menu spawning reaction fire and getting him killed. I did have an enemy fire at one of my soldiers and miss, hitting a the now dead soldier i just mentioned causing him to scream "Argh!" as if he was still alive. It was awesome. Biggest gameplay issue: the unarmed chinook should not be able to attempt to intercept a ufo. if you send it out towards a grounded ufo and it takes off, it should lose it's target, stopping time and prompting the player to select new orders. otherwise when you send it out and hit the fast time button the ufo will take off and the chopper still intercepts and is instantly destroyed and you've lost your whole strike team. game over.

I hope the final game will be much harder. You should be getting slaughtered initially. after several missions on veteran i had only lost soldiers due to issues i mentioned earlier.

I am glad to see you guys using kickstarter. I have a feeling this game will be very successful there. as i'm writing this it is very close to being funded already. Any idea what will be considered if you raise, say, 100k? 250k? 1,000,000? people will want to know these things if you want them to fund past 100 percent.

keep up the good work and good luck in your kickstarter quest!

The reaction fire thing is just because AI don't have cones of vision yet and can see behind themselves. So they tend to reaction fire alot more than normal. In addition i think they are all set to reserve two reaction fire shots per turn. After proper AI is implemented they will not always make this reserve so that will also help.

That UI problem is not something I have encountered. I can happily right click on the weapons, grenades etc. Perhaps it is a resolution thing?

[BigityBalzworth]

jimbob, I like the idea of not having effective armor initially. And after the fact, i had considered the fact that i could have/should have sent a fight escort, but why/how would an unarmed vehicle attempt to intercept a ufo in the first place?

[Belmakor]

jimbob, I like the idea of not having effective armor initially. And after the fact, i had considered the fact that i could have/should have sent a fight escort, but why/how would an unarmed vehicle attempt to intercept a ufo in the first place?

I think this could be classed as a bug (technically its probably outside the confines of the code as current). Maybe post it on the bug report forum also just to make sure Matthew or Chris sees it.

[Kilrathi]

jimbob, I like the idea of not having effective armor initially. And after the fact, i had considered the fact that i could have/should have sent a fight escort, but why/how would an unarmed vehicle attempt to intercept a ufo in the first place?

I picture it as you were sending the Chinook in to drop soldiers to take out the aliens who were busy doing their dastardly deeds. Then the aliens, realizing that chopper was full of crack Xenonauts who'd win a ground battle, quickly jumped back in their UFO and took to the skies to down the Chinook. Makes complete sense to me! It's sort of like when you're playing Civilzation and the enemy sends unguarded transport ships your way... of course you'll intercept them at sea and take 'em down before they can offload a bunch of rifleman next to your capital city.

[thothkins]

Biggest gameplay issue: the unarmed chinook should not be able to attempt to intercept a ufo. if you send it out towards a grounded ufo and it takes off, it should lose it's target, stopping time and prompting the player to select new orders.

Is this a hold over form EU. The Skyranger could be used to track UFOs in case they landed, prompting a mission to snatch more alien goodies.

[Stromko]

It should be possible to send the chinook along as part of a squadron of fighters. They don't have as much range as the chinook though, and it looks like the whole squadron slows down to the same speed as the chinook, which might reduce their range even further. I just hope if the UFO does take off, and your fighters are in a separate squadron, they can still intercept the UFO first instead of the chinook 'squadron' getting hit first and dying instantly.

As for air battles, my only frustration is that the Mig-32 seems to die from the very first shot 50% of the time, when going up against light scouts and the like. Sometimes it takes incremental damage, sometimes it just goes poof. Definitely not worth paying 250K for a craft that randomly dies in every dogfight. Sure you could send it in alongside some F-15's, but then you don't benefit from the increased intercept speed.

Please don't tell me that it's supposed to be that fragile. I believe faster fighters are usually quite a bit sturdier, both because of the demands on the airframe at those speeds, and the much larger size necessitated by the larger engines. Not to mention it has four hardpoints instead of two. It's clearly supposed to be a bigger fighter, so why it explodes so fast in the Kickstarter demo I do not know.

I'm planning to preorder Xenonauts soon via their site (as I don't want to wait a whole month for the kickstarter to finish so that my card can be charged and I can get a key). I'm wondering though, is there more content in the actual alpha, like is a lot of it locked away in the demo?

[Hellstormer]

I'm wondering though, is there more content in the actual alpha, like is a lot of it locked away in the demo?

The demo build was the latest alpha build so we have what you have. The rest of the stuff won't be available until beta when it's time to focus more on balancing than features.

[Gorlom]

Please don't tell me that it's supposed to be that fragile. I believe faster fighters are usually quite a bit sturdier, both because of the demands on the airframe at those speeds, and the much larger size necessitated by the larger engines. Not to mention it has four hardpoints instead of two. It's clearly supposed to be a bigger fighter, so why it explodes so fast in the Kickstarter demo I do not know.

I am afraid it is intended to be more fragile (for gameplay reasons). It's explained by the backstory that the F-16 has a special (heavier) magnesium armour coating or something that the MIG for some reason doesn't get. (Guess it would slow the MiG down too much?)

The F-16 is the dogfighter while MiG is the fragile heavy weapons platform. The aircrafts are supposed to comeplement each other so that you use both of them. The MIG isn't supposed to e a straight upgrade from the F-16.

[Commissar Pancakes]

Even if its name designates it as a "Heavy" fighter...

[Stromko]

I hope once they get together as a studio they will be able to produce content and work out bugs much quicker, and I think I'll decide to chip in to make that happen. There's plenty of time to think it over and decide, and it will be a much easier decision as the end of the month approaches. I think it's all the same to them if I think it over, since they won't get any money until the Kickstarter closes anyway.

I'm already in like three or four paid alphas right now, and it's starting to make me gunshy. I'd prefer to have a game I could really sink some time into before I put money down, but I really like the design they've got so far. Little touches like the Chinook having side doors are just excellent, but there's still little annoyances like being unable to assign designations to tell my soldiers apart without erasing their names altogether, and I really hope they don't intend the Mig-32 to spontaneously explode like it does now (though maybe there'll be an extra research like 'Self-Sealing Fuel-tanks' to fix that, who knows ).

I have the kickstarter in my bookmarks tab as 'Fund this by the end of the month', and I intend to do so.

[erutan]

@jimbob I personally like having jackal at the beginning - most soldiers still get 1-2 shot in it, and it introduces the heavy/light armor and light/heavy weapon mechanic.

@strom - yeah there are games that I was interested enough to back but not interested enough to dump time into a alpha or involved beta. for me I care more about the details of this than, say, Grim Dawn (click on things, they die, open world, have fun) as this game really is about the fine details. but this is the only one I'm involved with atm

Edited May 12, 2012 by erutan

[Gorlom]

Technically you are only changeing their callsign. The soldiers file in the soldier tab should still list their original name a bit further down... doesnt it?

[Stromko]

I am afraid it is intended to be more fragile (for gameplay reasons). It's explained by the backstory that the F-16 has a special (heavier) magnesium armour coating or something that the MIG for some reason doesn't get. (Guess it would slow the MiG down too much?)

The F-16 is the dogfighter while MiG is the fragile heavy weapons platform. The aircrafts are supposed to comeplement each other so that you use both of them. The MIG isn't supposed to e a straight upgrade from the F-16.

Doesn't the lack of a cannon already limit the MIG though? Also it seems weird that a single shot will just make it go bamf sometimes. It can't roll, so obviously it's going to take more damage regardless.

I think there's more replayability if you can choose to focus on one or the other. If I want fast, high-risk interceptions, then I'll go with MIGs. If I want maneuverable dogfighters, then the F-17's are better. It simply isn't viable to throw away 250K on an intercept, and half the time when I send out MIGs they're gonna die and I can't do anything about it (Unless I keep them out of combat range, in which case the question is why send them at all?). And if I have to send them in with F-17's, then the high speed of the MIG-32's won't achieve anything.

I should remember that balancing is later, though, and not get too bent out of shape. I'm okay with MIG-32s being fast, fragile hit-and-run type craft, so long as they don't have this 'one shot = boom' behavior that I'm noticing in the demo.

Technically you are only changeing their callsign. The soldiers file in the soldier tab should still list their original name a bit further down... doesnt it?

Ahh, you are correct. That's good, means changing their call sign doesn't destroy their differentiating info.

Edited May 12, 2012 by Stromko

[Corporal Hicks]

Another thing I noticed is that we can get the laser weapons and advanced armor really early in the game (too quickly)... I mean, it should take longer to get better equipment.

[Kaguya]

Another thing I noticed is that we can get the laser weapons and advanced armor really early in the game (too quickly)... I mean, it should take longer to get better equipment.

Compared to the "original", not really. Lasers could be researched right away in EU (it wasn't impossible to have troops with Laser Rifles before downing your first UFO), and the armor required only Alien Alloys to be researched (which you got from the first downed UFO). There's a lot of hoops to jump through in Xeno, and even then the manufacturing times (5½ days for a single precision laser+battery with 10 engineers in Xeno) are twice as long.

Researching the actual items is bit too fast, tho. The 10 scientists can churn out all the projects rather quick.

But thenagain, it's an alpha that hasn't been balanced ~at all yet.

[Leonatus]

Well, I for one don't agree at all, that the game should be generally harder. Especially with not being able to save in Battlescape.

There are several different difficulty levels to pic from and I would like to get normal difficulty when I pick it instead of having to try a mision fourteen times to even bring out half my squad.

Those of you with too much time on your hands can then chose the turbo-super-hard-bat-shit-insane level if you wish (and, of course, tell everyone on the internet) but when I get to play about three hours a week I'd like to be able to make some progress in that time.

Having to restart missions because of a plasma shot from the dark or hyper fast reaction shots that you can't do anything about isn't my idea of fun.

As for the 'Jackal' Armour, I thought it was very well implemented. Thanks to its heavy weight and the visual range restrictions there are very good reasons for some of the soldiers to not take them. If it were to be researched it should happen quite fast.

Edited May 13, 2012 by Leonatus
grammarfail

[Gauddlike]

That is pretty much what the custom difficulty will be for.

Hopefully loads of options to tweak to make it just the way you want to play.

[Corporal Hicks]

Hi!

I was just playing a terror mission right now (aliens attacked Tel'Aviv!!) and I can say that I was slaughtered by the aliens...

Also, it's really difficult to crash land the corvettes, even more when they are scorted by two fighers!! Almost impossible, wich is good!! With no alenium missiles or torpedoes it's impossible.

[Akrakorn]

Not really. Just quickly take down the fighters and if your ships didn't get killed by the corvette, they will stay behind him and the corvette won't be able to shoot back. But you need to lower your speed to do that.