18 hotfix 2 observations

[platypusmcdandruff]

I really wanted to support this game because I loved the original Xcom series but don't think I'll like the new one, and want to support indie developers. So far there is quite a bit to like but I'm concerned about the fact that V18 is apparently a beta candidate as I think there is still a hell of a lot to do to make it what it should be, not just leftover bugs but essential game mechanics that look likely to be left out altogether. In my current game I have shot down 12 alien craft, researched the early vehicle, heavy fighter and a couple of alien techs. I started my first game on hard but due to a few game breaking bugs and my own incompetence am currently on easy. As I'm not that far through some of my gripes may turn out to be neutralised by more research (or more updates), but having read through various forum posts I'm concerned and wanted to register my current impressions. I also have to admit that I have little or no idea of how to make some of the improvents I consider neccessary. I also don't feel I've yet seen enough to comment on AI etc.

Things I like:

Geoscape - looks and feels good, with enough to make it important but not the core of the game.

Air combat - I'm pleased that this has been included (so far I suck) and think it's about the right complexity/simplicity balance. I don't feel any need for pilots.

Base management - looks nice, interested to see how my first base defence works.

Things I don't like:

Ground combat - Personally I feel that psionics should have a mid to late game role, I understand that badly implemented they can totally unbalance the whole thing but this is ultimately just a matter if designing them right. For example psi agents could be made slow and physically weak and in need of protection while also having a tendency to catastrophic blowback in some circumstances from using their powers - inexperienced psi agents could trigger booby traps in the minds of some aliens causing soldiers near the psi agent to become stunned, revealed through the fog of war, go beserk or suffer other deleterious effects. This would leave the player with the conundrum of a fragile unit that needs protection from a distance. Fair enough if the dev team have concluded that psi powers should not have a role in order to focus on the combat, but this leads me to my biggest gripe as the rest of combat is either bady bugged or seriously substandard.

My current save is at the start of my second terror mission (I made it through the first one by saving every turn and many reloads), this time around my dropship has landed such that 4 (I think) aliens are visible by the time my troops have stepped out the doors and many more seem able to shoot me due to the nearby ones acting as spotters, or over long alien LOS/tendency to shoot through objects. This means that even when I tested what would happen if my troops cowered in the relative shelter of the chinook one had died and another was critical after the first alien turn. When I took a more traditional tactic of fanning out to the nearest points of mutually supportive cover I managed to take out one alien but 3 of my 8 troops died on the first alien turn, most of them due to fire from the still FOW enemies. I want the game to be hard but this is on easy.

Apparently the inability of troops to take cover at and fire from corners is unlikely to be changed - this is absurd, given that cover is at the core of the game, I can't find it now but I read a post suggesting that calculating LOS from each corner of tile A to each corner of tile B might resolve this. Equally absurd is the fact that all maps are flat. Not that I have personal experience of a combat zone but surely varied terrain is fundamental to a game based around different teams shooting each other with guns.

Grenades are still broken but I appreciate that this will be fixed.

I get the impression that weapon variety may be limited to tiers (ballistic, laser, plasma etc) of more effective but otherwise functionally identical choices i.e shotgun type with short range and poor accuracy but high power, sniper type with long range and good accuracy but low fire rate. I am hoping that further research will prove me wrong and lead to more variety, such as mines, flamethrowers, grenade launchers and something to reveal distant areas like binoculars or aerial surveillance.

Suggestions (some of which may render others unnessecary):

- Cover at corners.

- Variable terrain.

- More cover.

- less accurate aliens or tougher troops.

- more map variation.

- flares on night missions should illuminate more ground.

- More plausible missed shot trajectories - a shot from near point blank range should not miss by a full 45 degrees.

Suggestions for geoscape:

- Governments could interact more than I've seen so far with Xenonauts and each other.

- A bit more starter cash, lower costs, more forgiving governments, or a slightly slower ticker - I only have one base so far and already two cities have been nuked as dropships from my mid east base (chosen as a base there covers all its own region plus significant chunks of several others, base 2 will likely be Central America for similar reasons) just couldn't get to S America or New Zealand in time.

I want to like this game and I'm sure a lots of hard work has gone in already but bugs aside there are still several deficiencies, that if left unremedied will lead to me giving up and feeling glad I only paid standard pre order. Please don't make excuses about the engine not permitting varied terrain or over features fundamental to a game such as this one. I'm sure it's true but it simply means a poor choice of engine was made in the first place

Platypus

[GizmoGomez]

You said that you have read some of the forum posts. Basically all of the answers you are looking for are there. But, since they're scattered across quite a bit of time and space, I'll try to answer them as best as I can.

First off, every difficulty is the same at the moment. This makes it easier for the developers to make the game, because it's only one game, not four different ones, that they need to worry about.

The aliens are brokenly overpowered at the moment. The accuracy, range, etc of the aliens was boosted back when the AI was much more unfinished to compensate for the AI sucking, but now that it's actually decent the aliens are a complete menace due to their unbalanced weapons.

Things I don't like:

Ground combat - Personally I feel that psionics should have a mid to late game role, I understand that badly implemented they can totally unbalance the whole thing but this is ultimately just a matter if designing them right. For example psi agents could be made slow and physically weak and in need of protection while also having a tendency to catastrophic blowback in some circumstances from using their powers - inexperienced psi agents could trigger booby traps in the minds of some aliens causing soldiers near the psi agent to become stunned, revealed through the fog of war, go beserk or suffer other deleterious effects. This would leave the player with the conundrum of a fragile unit that needs protection from a distance. Fair enough if the dev team have concluded that psi powers should not have a role in order to focus on the combat, but this leads me to my biggest gripe as the rest of combat is either bady bugged or seriously substandard.

The reason psionics aren't in the game makes sense, when you think about it. It's a biologically engineered phenomenon that the aliens have "hacked" into themselves through genetic manipulation. How are we, as humans, supposed to get that ability without spending years on genetically manipulating ourselves? The other alien things, like alenium, alloys, etc. are simple in comparison, as they are simply technologically more advanced, but still simply an item or object that can be studied. However, giving a human psionic powers would take a considerable amount of research, more than we are able to allocate at the moment (from an in-game perspective). It's not necessarily that it'd be too hard to balance, because it really wouldn't be; it's just that it doesn't make sense for the humans to have psionic powers. I mean, we can already replicate most of the alien tech, there's got to be something they'll always be better at. There might be psi-blocking items or something, though, I believe Chris may have said that.

My current save is at the start of my second terror mission (I made it through the first one by saving every turn and many reloads), this time around my dropship has landed such that 4 (I think) aliens are visible by the time my troops have stepped out the doors and many more seem able to shoot me due to the nearby ones acting as spotters, or over long alien LOS/tendency to shoot through objects. This means that even when I tested what would happen if my troops cowered in the relative shelter of the chinook one had died and another was critical after the first alien turn. When I took a more traditional tactic of fanning out to the nearest points of mutually supportive cover I managed to take out one alien but 3 of my 8 troops died on the first alien turn, most of them due to fire from the still FOW enemies. I want the game to be hard but this is on easy.

Like I said, the AI is better that it used to be, so the guns haven't been nerfed to balance it yet. Also, if aliens are shooting through objects, then your game might not have the hotfixes installed correctly. When I've done terror missions (3 now) I've never had four aliens start out by shooting into my ship, you were just unlucky with their spawning arrangement there. What is your load out? How are your troops arranged in the dropship?

Apparently the inability of troops to take cover at and fire from corners is unlikely to be changed - this is absurd, given that cover is at the core of the game, I can't find it now but I read a post suggesting that calculating LOS from each corner of tile A to each corner of tile B might resolve this. Equally absurd is the fact that all maps are flat. Not that I have personal experience of a combat zone but surely varied terrain is fundamental to a game based around different teams shooting each other with guns.

The shooting from corners is not going to be coming, because it'd make the game too easy. If you aren't putting yourself in danger to shoot, then it loses some of the tension and you're going to end up putting everyone behind corners and taking potshots at aliens, and it's not meant to be played like that.

Also, flat maps aren't going away. The game engine that they chose isn't the greatest (they've realized this for a while, but as you could probably guess they're much to far to change it now) and it can't handle hills, slopes, etc. It can do multiple levels and stairs, however, so there is more than one level. Just not half-levels like little hills, etc.

I get the impression that weapon variety may be limited to tiers (ballistic, laser, plasma etc) of more effective but otherwise functionally identical choices i.e shotgun type with short range and poor accuracy but high power, sniper type with long range and good accuracy but low fire rate. I am hoping that further research will prove me wrong and lead to more variety, such as mines, flamethrowers, grenade launchers and something to reveal distant areas like binoculars or aerial surveillance.

I'd like some kind of mine, like the proximity grenades, but I don't know if it'd make it in.

The flamethrower was planned for the game, but the guy doing the animations isn't doing freelance work anymore, so we're stuck without that at the moment. It may be finished, but since there are more important things to do then to add our beloved flammenwerfer, it isn't being worked on right now (as far as I know).

Grenade launchers would allow you to attack from very long range without the risk of being attacked back. Chris wanted to avoid the "shoot but not be able to be shot" idea (like the shooting from corners) because it gets rid of tension, and it's cheap. It's for this reason that blaster bombs are out too; they were just too easy to brake and use for seeking out and killing everything on the map from the dropship alone.

Suggestions (some of which may render others unnessecary):

- Cover at corners.

- Variable terrain.

- More cover.

- less accurate aliens or tougher troops.

- more map variation.

- flares on night missions should illuminate more ground.

- More plausible missed shot trajectories - a shot from near point blank range should not miss by a full 45 degrees.

-Not going to happen

-Not going to happen

-There are maps with plenty of cover, which ones have you been playing?

-In the works

-There are more maps to be added. Also, since you've only had 12 UFOs downed, you haven't gotten to the bigger fancier maps yet, probably only light scouts and scouts so far. It gets better as time goes on.

-This, and other suggestions for flares (more of them, being able to be picked up, etc) have been suggested already.

-This is being worked on too. The problem is that if the shot goes through the tile of the alien, it counts as a hit, so it needs to miss the entire tile (if I remember correctly, it may have changed). Either way, it's being addressed.

Suggestions for geoscape:

- Governments could interact more than I've seen so far with Xenonauts and each other.

- A bit more starter cash, lower costs, more forgiving governments, or a slightly slower ticker - I only have one base so far and already two cities have been nuked as dropships from my mid east base (chosen as a base there covers all its own region plus significant chunks of several others, base 2 will likely be Central America for similar reasons) just couldn't get to S America or New Zealand in time.

I don't know about the governments doing more (there's been interest in getting that to happen as well, and I think it'd be cool), but the purchasing, cash, manufacturing, and all that still needs to be balanced.

Also, all of the dropships will have global range in upcoming builds, and if you are traveling to a terror mission it won't get nuked, so you'll be able to get there in later builds no problem. However, later in the game, you'll want to send up an escort squadron (a different squadron, not as part of the same as the chinook) to protect the dropship from UFOs, and even though the dropships have global range, your planes don't, so having at least an interceptor base/s to help protect your dropship will be very useful. (For other reasons, like ETA, simultaneous missions, etc, you'll probably want multiple troop bases, but that's up to you).

I want to like this game and I'm sure a lots of hard work has gone in already, but bugs aside there are still several deficiencies, that if left unremedied will lead to me giving up and feeling glad I only paid standard pre order. Please don't make excuses about the engine not permitting varied terrain or other features fundamental to a game such as this one. I'm sure it's true but it simply means a poor choice of engine was made in the first place.

Yes, lots of hard work has been done already; you're arriving somewhat late to the party.

My question to you is, how are any of your suggestions fundamental? Grenade launchers, binoculars, they are all add ons, really. I mean, this is a spiritual successor to UFO:EU, and I think it's doing a very good job of being just that, while adding some more cool things that don't detract from the gameplay experience.

If you want to be able to shoot from behind a wall without putting yourself in danger, then go play some other game. The Uncharted series is a favorite of mine, lots of cover and such in that game.

[Max_Caine]

Because the forum is a vast and wild jungle with many abandoned, crumbling temples, I'll refer you to several threads on which there has been considerable discussion on some of the points you raise.

The issue of shared sight. (Contributor LOS issues)

Shot miss scattering

There was going to be a flamethrower. But possibly not now.

Slopes in maps and cover.

Did you know that cover lean was once a thing? A long time ago in a galaxy dfar, far away, squaddies once automatically leaned at cover. Here's where it got scrapped. (Well, this was part 2 of the discussion that lead up to cover leaning getting scrapped). One of the first cover at corners threads

EDIT: You know how annoying it is right now that aliens always retreat, and they always reserve TUs for reaction fire. Wouldn't you find it even more annoying if they went straight for cover, peered around the corner, fired a shot then snuck back and reserved the rest of their TUs for a reaction shot without you being able to do anything about it? The knife points both ways.

Edited April 22, 2013 by Max_Caine

[platypusmcdandruff]

Hi again. Sorry if I came across as overly negative. I think what I hope for (fundamentally) is something that feels like a plausible representation of this kind of combat. Consequently I don't care about most of the specifics, I'm not obsessed with psi powers, flamethrowers or grenade launchers per se and nor do I want both sides to be effectively symmetrical in their capabilities, merely that there is a complex range of weapons/capabilities most of which can eventually be countered in some way by something else by either side. I recognise that this may well be something that unfolds as the game progresses, but thus far I've been unable to progress past terror 2.

I can no longer say this definitively as I foolishly saved over the relevant file earlier today but on the second terror mission, I have found essentially the same situation having reloaded to prior to the terror alert (on this occasion Istanbul each time) so unless the battlefield arrangement is somehow fixed already it seems odd that this situation is unique to me. I have played around with loadouts and squad arrangements, currently I have 1 soldier with a shotgun, 2 snipers, 2 LMGs and 3 ARs, each soldier has more ammo, one on his belt, more in backpack and several grenades. All those except LMGs also have a medkit or stun baton. My most recent squad arrangement is shotgun guy and 2 ARs at front who make a quick dash for the nearest cover, leaving not enough TU's to fire that turn. Behind them is an LMG and sniper who each take one step forward to the chinook ramp, crouch and fire, suppressing 2 of the 4 with the LMG, and sometimes killing one with the sniper. I've worked out where I am on the map (bottom corner) and so only need worry about one flank. I've sent one AR and the other sniper to the nearest cover on that side and used the other LMG to fire and suppress from the door. The final AR leaves via the front or other side but then heads off to the edge of the map in an attempt to flank the 3 enemies in front.

I do find the cover issue more important, including at corners - if soldiers can take advantage of the a waist high wall, why not a corner? The only real difference is that the wall is offers cover to the lower portion of the soldiers body, while the corner does so primarily for one side. And actually hiding at a corner need not make that soldier invulnerable - if an enemy at another corner can't hit whatever part of them is exposed then they can still be flanked or hit by a grenade, rockets or incendiary weapons, moreover they should lose some offensive capability by hiding as they can't see or aim so well.

[Max_Caine - thanks for the porinter to http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/136-Cover-at-corners, Teiwaz's comment is the one I was thinking of. Also your comment about alien defensive tendency is quite right, but surely sometimes the enemy should play defensively?]

Varied terrain is much less important as hopefully its absence will be compensated for by other factors (primarily cover), and in any case maps with multi level buildings effectively include terrain anyway.

As far as cover density goes - thus far I have played on an arctic desert, hot desert, farm/rural, an urban and some sort of industrial/warehouse zone map. On the arctic and hot desert maps it makes perfect sense to have little cover and on the others then once the alien LOS/range/accuracy (corner?) issue is sorted then the cover will probably be about right.

Missed shots - yes I had read that this was being addressed but felt it was important enough that no amount of reiteration was too much.

To the dev team - good job. Well done and keep at it. Issues and quibbles aside I would just like to see a good game made great.

Platypus

[platypusmcdandruff]

PS to previous comment. As far as I can tell I am correctly patched - at least my launcher says V18 Hotfix 2. Maybe I should reinstall hotfix.

And another thing (probably undoable). Could soldiers lay down? If they could then they should get an aim bonus (especially for snipers), although enemies behind walls would also need an extra cover bonus. The prostrate soldier would get a cover bonus from enemies on the same or lower level but suffer a penalty Vs any higher up.

[Gauddlike]

I do find the cover issue more important, including at corners - if soldiers can take advantage of the a waist high wall, why not a corner? The only real difference is that the wall is offers cover to the lower portion of the soldiers body, while the corner does so primarily for one side. And actually hiding at a corner need not make that soldier invulnerable - if an enemy at another corner can't hit whatever part of them is exposed then they can still be flanked or hit by a grenade, rockets or incendiary weapons, moreover they should lose some offensive capability by hiding as they can't see or aim so well.

For a game engine answer I would look to the spectre files.

A cover tile has a cover value attached.

This is a straight percentage.

So a waist high wall would have a cover percentage of 60%.

To make a corner of a building give a cover save of 60% you would need to determine which two wall sections would form that corner and assign each of them a cover value of 60%.

To also allow you to see enemies past this corner you would also need to allow those corner pieces to be transparent to your soldiers.

This would not be possible to limit though so anyone from any direction would be able to see through, and be shot through, those corners.

That includes people inside the building being attacked by those outside.

The cover percentage also is not directional (the game appears to assume it fills from the bottom) so the game would not be able to tell where the wall was positioned.

It would not know for example if the corner covered the left side or right side of the tile.

Shots that appeared to hit the corner could in fact pass straight through the wall image and hit your soldier while some shots would impact on the empty spaces not covered by the image.

Changing this could well mean rewriting the code relating to cover and reworking the ground tiles that have already been done to fit the new system.

There are quite a few other difficulties with adapting the current system to allow corners as cover which take up too much space to detail.

Get a soldier to a corner and look at the way the game works there and you will probably pick up on a few of them.

Tile sizes, entity position within the tiles and so on.

[Max_Caine]

I would say the chief difference between waist-high cover and peering out at a corner is that there is no prone position a solider/alien can go into, but there is a standing-behind-corner position that a squaddie/alien can take. A squaddie/alien cannot make himself safe from shooting attacks (which are the vast majority of attacks in the game) behind a chest-high wall, because s/he/it cannot fully hide behind it. However, a squaddie/alien can completely hide behind the corner of a wall. "But what about reaction shots!" Indeed, what about reaction shots? They would be made (if they were made) at a squaddie/alien in cover. So, we come back to the situation I presented before. An alien hugging cover, peepsing out for a shot, taking it then hugging cover again.

Now, you might think this would promote a more fluid method of fighting and it would - if the aliens and the squaddies were even vaguely matched. A grenade lobbed at a corner tickles aliens. An alien grenade does more than tickle, it bloody well hurts! Leaning around corners benefits the technologically and biologically superior aliens far more than it does squaddies.

[scorpio]

If I understood correctly about the corner thing - you mean peering around it and taking a shot whilst being in cover? If so, the Firaxis XCom does this, no wait, is ALL that game is about in some ways, so you should try that. I do not mean that in a derogatory way either, I really love the new game and it's great in so many ways. Worth a try.

This game is much more like the original X-Com, in terms of mechanics, and that would be a fairly big change, so I can see why they didn't go for it, but I do understand wanting it and many other features. Hopefully the game will make up for such things in other ways.

[platypusmcdandruff]

I think the reason the corner thing grinds my gears is that despite having the good fortune never to have been in a real combat zone, I have played paintball, other video games and watched innumerable action movies (cheesy rubbish ones and quality too) and in all contexts cover comes in many forms, therefore the fact that in Xenonauts cover seems limited to the horizontally oriented kind pricks my bubble a bit. And oh dear I'm sure I come across as super obsessed now. If by now it's impossible to implement anyway, fair enough and hopefully by the time its finished other features will more than compensate anyway.

The main resistance I have to Xcom:EU is the tendency of mainstream developers these days to charge quite a lot for what often feels like a not quite complete product and then charge more to add some of the missing bits in while also padding it out with DLC full of stuff like new skins for units which I tend not to notice much anyway. Maybe I will give it a go - in a year or something when they release a combi pack with the whole lot included.

[erutan]

One of the problems of "peeking" around corners and firing is that it's hard to show that risk in a turn based game. EU12 got around that by not having full cover actually being full cover unless there was another tile of full cover between you and the enemy - so you can consider full cover in xenonauts akin to "hunkering down" and halfcover as "being in cover".

Engine limitations are a bitch, but it's an indie game and it's nearly done, ce la vie.

[Chris]

I think there's an element of you judging this game against what you want it to be, rather than the game it is intended to be. Things you've mentioned like artillery support etc don't fit with the game we're trying to make - it's not intended to be a realistic representation of squad-level combat against alien forces, it's meant to be a remake of X-Com.

Some of the stuff you've mentioned will be added in the beta, not all of it though. And re: the engine limitations, yes, a bad engine was chosen but it's far too late to do anything about it so no point dwelling on that.

[Gauddlike]

Bet the next engine choice will be done with a lot more research than just taking a coders word for how good it is

[Sathra]

And 3d. Because oh god the sprites.

[thothkins]

Hi Platypus.

Others have already covered (um, possibly a poor choice of word) many of your points.But,

There have been a few threads on Psionics again recently. Here's mine with links to the others that should give you plenty of information on the forum opinions to the topic. Personally, I'm all for having them in too. The aliens will have them, just in case you hadn't seen that.

I sympathise regarding the terror missions. There are now a few maps where I change my approach and work my way round in a certain fashion to minimise casualties.

I've also been caught on a few larger ship maps, where a lack of cover has resulted in a slaughter of my soldiers. The latter one has been addressed to a degree now, but terror missions are a pain. I trust you're at least doing them in the day. It's carnage at night

I'll miss the terrain with slopes in them. It's not a game breaker, but would have added nicely to a lot of maps. But, they did try on this engine. Clearly no one goes up hills to get to the diner in Diner Dash.

Weapon variety is important to a lot of folks, and Chris has given us a good choice at present. A few tiers up the tech tree, and I'm still using a variety of weapons. Still want the flammenwerfer though, and pistols should see much more use when the assault shield makes a return.

There have been a number of threads as well for expanded government interaction. See here for one. There will be a few nods to that later in the game, but generally getting the battlescape fully functional is at the core of the game.