[V3.0, V5 - Geoscape] some incorrect results, right after first ground combat

[wulf 21]

Right after the first ground combat mission, I can see some mission results being either incorrect or not correctly taken over or displayed in a confusing way.

• Mission debrief shows 3 Xenonaut corpse, but only 2 have died. Maybe one of the civilians on the map was for some reason counted as Xenonaut (are there armed civilians in the game already?)
  • Edit: after second ground mission I think it is actually the new female civilian that is counted as Xenonaut corpse. Furthermore I somehow get the impression that the civilian stats are reversed (civilians killed and not civilians survived) - there were 2 male civilians in the second ground mission alive and one female dead at the end of the mission. Screenshot of second mission result added.
• There are displayed  6 magnetic rifle + 6 alien magnetic weapon. In supply screen only the alien magnetic weapon is displayed. I suppose "alien magnetic weapon" became the category storable item (so it does not matter which type of magnetic weapon you recover) but then it should be somehow displayed in one line
• there were 3 soldiers promoted on debrief, but only one got the promotion message and was displayed as corporal in armory and soldiers tab then. I tried, if this would be another instance of the "promotion delay" but no event (second ground mission, go into and abort second construction) seems to trigger the promotion. Seems they just do not get promoted at all now.
• Replacing the lost soldiers with new recruits does now not longer automatically equip the loadout of the slot they are automatically assigned to - you have to manually go into armory and press the "equip" button again
• and at last, there is still the visual bug in there that after mission, soldiers tab displays the TU at end of mission instead of max TU that is correctly displayed on all the other screens (this was somehow forgotten since V1) - I think I've seen in V2.1 that this somehow affects the max HP value, too, will take a look if I can get this again

Debrief Screen:

Supply screen:

Promotion Message:

Soldiers Tab:

Armory Screen before replacing lost soldiers:

Armory Screen after replacing lost soldiers:

Armory Detail for replaced soldier:

Second ground mission result:

Edited May 16, 2019 by wulf 21

[Chris]

Thanks, several bugs going on here:

• The civilians do indeed seem to be dropping Xenonaut corpses. I'm not sure why because they're not set up to do that, so we'll look into it.
• The magnetic rifle / magnetic weapon thing is somewhat experimental at the moment, so ignore any weird behaviour with the "alien magnetic weapon" and "armour fragment" items for now.
• The promotion bug is a weird one - not sure if you've got any reliable reproduction steps for it at all?
• I'll card up that issue with the debrief screens showing the wrong TU / health values, it should be a simple fix.
• I'll check out the issue with the loadout slot equipment being removed when units are killed tomorrow, as we've got an error in the editor that's preventing me from doing it atm.

[wulf 21]

6 hours ago, Chris said:

• The promotion bug is a weird one - not sure if you've got any reliable reproduction steps for it at all? 

No, because to reproduce I would need to play an entire ground mission and hope that several soldiers should be promoted after that atm. Maybe this would be possible once ground combat saving is implemented, then I possibly could have a savefile from right before the end where only the last alien needs to be killed.

[Chris]

3 hours ago, wulf 21 said:

No, because to reproduce I would need to play an entire ground mission and hope that several soldiers should be promoted after that atm. Maybe this would be possible once ground combat saving is implemented, then I possibly could have a savefile from right before the end where only the last alien needs to be killed.

That's fine, I wasn't suggesting you should spend hours playing through the ground combat just to try and find the bug - I was just trying to say that it would be helpful if you could keep an eye out for anything that might explain why it is affecting certain soldiers but not others. It's not a bug that crops up when we do our dev cheat playthroughs of a mission so it's a difficult one for us to fix without more info.

If all goes well then ground combat saving may arrive in the next major build (we're working on an update to the combat UI first, and once that's done we can start implementing the saving) so maybe we can get it nailed down then.

[wulf 21]

After getting it again playing second gound mission (I replayed it because I tried to do better on loosing soldiers, turned out I didn't ), I start seeing some kind of pattern and I got some idea what might cause it. If you look at the screenshots, you see 4 soldiers getting promoted after mission and 4 soldiers getting the promotion triggered (message + promotion translated to armoury). But it were not the 4 correct soldiers. Samantha Ross got her promotion triggered again despite her aleady being at rank of corporal before the mission. Therefore the promotion for Zhao Mengjie is missing.

Regarding my idea on what might cause it: I should note I started shuffling around soldier slot assignments right after new game start (by clicking soldier portrait unassign then clicking another soldier portrait assigning the soldier I just unassigned and so on). For example I put the soldier with best accuracy on sniper slot, max strength on heavy slot, best reflexes on assault slot. Maybe you did not do such thing in your dev cheat playthroughs? The idea is that this somehow messes up the promotion triggers for the soldiers, ie. it tries to promote the soldier that originally was assigned to the slot of the soldier that actually got the promotion. If the originally assigned soldier still is private then it would just not work (no "promotion to private"). If they already are at higher rank, they would then get a second promotion message triggered.

Another note: The "surviving cilivilians" definitely is reversed. This time all the civilians were killed but it displays "surviving civilians 3/3".

Screenshots from the replay of the second ground combat:

Debrief:

Promotion messages:

Soldiers Tab:

Armoury:

Edited March 17, 2019 by wulf 21

[Chris]

On 3/17/2019 at 11:43 AM, wulf 21 said:

After getting it again playing second gound mission (I replayed it because I tried to do better on loosing soldiers, turned out I didn't ), I start seeing some kind of pattern and I got some idea what might cause it. If you look at the screenshots, you see 4 soldiers getting promoted after mission and 4 soldiers getting the promotion triggered (message + promotion translated to armoury). But it were not the 4 correct soldiers. Samantha Ross got her promotion triggered again despite her aleady being at rank of corporal before the mission. Therefore the promotion for Zhao Mengjie is missing.

Regarding my idea on what might cause it: I should note I started shuffling around soldier slot assignments right after new game start (by clicking soldier portrait unassign then clicking another soldier portrait assigning the soldier I just unassigned and so on). For example I put the soldier with best accuracy on sniper slot, max strength on heavy slot, best reflexes on assault slot. Maybe you did not do such thing in your dev cheat playthroughs? The idea is that this somehow messes up the promotion triggers for the soldiers, ie. it tries to promote the soldier that originally was assigned to the slot of the soldier that actually got the promotion. If the originally assigned soldier still is private then it would just not work (no "promotion to private"). If they already are at higher rank, they would then get a second promotion message triggered.

Another note: The "surviving cilivilians" definitely is reversed. This time all the civilians were killed but it displays "surviving civilians 3/3".

Hmmm. Yes, you're correct the surviving civilians field is reversed. Not an urgent fix but I'll log it so it can be corrected.

As to the soldier promotion issue, you're correct that I don't switch my soldiers around in the dropship when I do the dev playthrough. I just start the mission and run / teleport them around, shooting a few aliens and then autokillling the rest of them with dev cheats as required. I've done some testing on the topic though and I'm not sure shuffling your troops around in the dropship is what causes the problem. Throughout all my testing I wasn't able to reproduce the bug no matter how I shuffled or re-assigned my troops ... but just now when I was testing the surviving civilians issue, I was able to reproduce it.

What happened was a soldier gained +1 Accuracy and was listed as promoted to Corporal, but then on the strategy layer she is still a Private. Basically it seems like ground combat and strategy are using slightly different criteria to decide who gets promoted, and it's possible to earn just enough to get promoted in GC but not get enough to be promoted on strategy (although I suspect this is actually tied to the number of alien kills too). We should be able to fix it now, I've got the data the coders will need.

Thanks for the help on this, you got me to the solution even if it was indirectly!

 

[Chris]

On 3/17/2019 at 11:43 AM, wulf 21 said:

After getting it again playing second gound mission (I replayed it because I tried to do better on loosing soldiers, turned out I didn't ), I start seeing some kind of pattern and I got some idea what might cause it. If you look at the screenshots, you see 4 soldiers getting promoted after mission and 4 soldiers getting the promotion triggered (message + promotion translated to armoury). But it were not the 4 correct soldiers. Samantha Ross got her promotion triggered again despite her aleady being at rank of corporal before the mission. Therefore the promotion for Zhao Mengjie is missing.

Regarding my idea on what might cause it: I should note I started shuffling around soldier slot assignments right after new game start (by clicking soldier portrait unassign then clicking another soldier portrait assigning the soldier I just unassigned and so on). For example I put the soldier with best accuracy on sniper slot, max strength on heavy slot, best reflexes on assault slot. Maybe you did not do such thing in your dev cheat playthroughs? The idea is that this somehow messes up the promotion triggers for the soldiers, ie. it tries to promote the soldier that originally was assigned to the slot of the soldier that actually got the promotion. If the originally assigned soldier still is private then it would just not work (no "promotion to private"). If they already are at higher rank, they would then get a second promotion message triggered.

Actually, scratch that - I was able to reproduce it once but not after that, and that wasn't enough for the coders to correct the issue. Keep an eye out for any specific behaviors that might trigger this bug occurring but I suspect we're going to need the ground combat saving in before this bug can easily be fixed.

[Wyldefyre_CP]

Sorry to say, but the crash on turn 1 of Alien Base Mission is still happening to me.  The other thing is that attempting to save while doing an Alien Base Run doesn't work for some odd reason.  

[wulf 21]

28 minutes ago, Wyldefyre_CP said:

Sorry to say, but the crash on turn 1 of Alien Base Mission is still happening to me.  The other thing is that attempting to save while doing an Alien Base Run doesn't work for some odd reason.  

Hi,

1. wrong thread. If crash is really still happening in V3.1, there is this thread (make sure your game really is updated to V3.1 though):

2. Ground combat saving is not in the game, yet. That was reported and answered multiple times by the devs.

[Wyldefyre_CP]

@wulf 21  Apologies on the wrong thread bit ... I don't think I'm completely awake yet ... I saw the 'Bug Reports' header and simply clicked after the last response, assuming they all went into one 'drop-box' if you will ... as for the ground combat thing, that's good to know - I only recently started replaying the early access, and haven't been following the forum all that closely, either.

[wulf 21]

On 3/19/2019 at 1:53 PM, Chris said:

Actually, scratch that - I was able to reproduce it once but not after that, and that wasn't enough for the coders to correct the issue. Keep an eye out for any specific behaviors that might trigger this bug occurring but I suspect we're going to need the ground combat saving in before this bug can easily be fixed.

We have ground combat saving now and I already got a case where it can be reproduced with such a savefile.

Here is the file: Quicksave.zip

It is right before end of mission, with just one alien to kill that is already wounded. In my tests, I killed it with the sniper as can be seen in first screenshot (if he does not hit, simply load the savefile again and retry - or maybe you have some dev cheat that makes him always hit perfectly or it could be reproduced by using the instant win cheat even?).

The result is that according to debrief screen 5 soldiers were promoted to corporal, but in barracks and armory, only 3 of them really are corporal after that.

[Chris]

Excellent work, I knew implementing GC saving would make everyone's life easier!

I can reproduce this from that save so hopefully we can get this issue fixed up now.