First impressions on 18.4

[Solver]

Greetings all,

Seeing how active the development forums are, I'd like to provide some impressions so far on Xenonauts. For background, I'm familiar with the original X-COM, and quite so with strategy games in general. Some time ago I tried UFO:AI which is definitely a good effort, but ultimately falls short for me due to several concerns, some of which that game will not address.

So I spent a bit of time with the current Xenonaut build. The best thing I can immediately say is that it feels like XCOM. It will clearly feel overwhelming to those unfamiliar with the original, but such is the nature of this game. I like how Xenonauts keeps complexity of the original in things like soldier loadouts or manufacturing, and that is in fact why I preordered. I hope the game says true to XCOM throughout development.

Pacing

I did find the pacing of the game to be somewhat off. In the first month, I did 15 or 16 crashed UFO missions. That is a bit too often and becomes a tad annoying. On the contrary, I went a week in the third month without any contacts other than alien fighters. What I would like to see is instead more of a ramping-up feeling where alien attacks increase in frequency and intensity.

Early combat

The initial impressions from the tactical combat were very positive. It feels a lot like the original game, though perhaps more forgiving - my soldiers were able to take a hit even in the first mission without any armor. Some UI issues, like how to take aimed shots, took a while to figure out. Generally though engaging in combat is nice and intuitive, with just a few exceptions. Like grenades - apparently my soldier was unable to throw a grenade over a hedgerow that visually appears to be maybe chest high, causing the grenade to explode right in front of him. Hmm.

I may have failed to figure it out so far, but it seems like there's no way to throw items anymore. I also can't figure it out with the "quick grenade" slots. If my soldier carries several types of grenades, can I choose which one becomes the quick grenade?

I was greatly annoyed by some reaction fire coming through doors and hope that's a mistake. Specifically, I've been taking reaction fire when approaching the outer doors of a UFO.

Capturing live aliens seems to be too easy. After researching stun weapons, I get stun rods, stun grenades and stun rockets? Why would I even want to use a stun rod when I could capture aliens by liberally using stun grenades? I really appreciate the idea, but capturing a live alien should be a risky proposition considerably more dangerous that just shooting him. The original XCOM did this well (until stun bombs anyhow).

And it definitely seems like the scout car is extremely good, to the point where you always want to take it instead of 2 people. It can scout ahead to reveal aliens and draw fire, and has acceptable weapons, too. It's not that vehicles should be weak, but they should feel like a tradeoff and not like a no-brainer.

Geoscape observations

The most immediate thing I could not understand is, what's up with the starting base layout? Leftmost and rightmost tile columns are empty but most useful buildings have a width of 2 so I can actually not add workshops or laboratories there?

Aside from that, so far I've been doing well in combat but absolutely stuck on the economy. Not really sure how you're supposed to make money. It should certainly not be as easy as in XCOM, and that's good, but is the money you get after UFO raids really the only source of income?

Research is actually very fast, I even managed to have some downtime with nothing to research.

I love the way various alien-related events appear on the geoscape outside your radar range, allowing you to guess where aliens are. That is a brilliant addition to the original formula.

But... what in Gollop's name is going on with resource management? Okay, I get infinite ammo for ballistics and the like. I can live with it, though it would not be bad to have to factor it into my calculations. But why do I, upon researching Elenium explosives, get an endless supply of elenium-powered grenades, aircraft missiles and rockets for the launcher? In terms of immersion, that's just silly, but it also messes with the strategy layer. The game needs to be about a careful balancing of upsides and downsides, but so far it seems like there are many things that are just plain upgrades of the earlier things. Sometimes that's good, like laser weapons should be superior to ballistics, but it would feel better if elenium weapons like aircraft torpedos were scarce at least initially, until some time when you're able to set up constant production.

And it's not just that elenium issue. I liked having individual clips for my soldiers back when I played the first XCOM, but it didn't play a large enough role. Now it's even more cosmetic, I feel. What does it really matter that rifles have clips if they are, themselves, infinite, and a soldier carrying a rifle + spare clip is guaranteed to never run dry?

Some more combat

I understand this is likely a design decision but I am not a fan of the random allied units on the maps. In addition to not quite feeling XCOM to me, it's also immersion-breaking. This is an invasion by aliens, the scariest thing in humanity's history, these aliens wield weapons that melt humans, yet some random hunter or a typical cop calmly engage a 2-meter tall alien lizard?

Seems like there's no way of getting rid of outdated ammo. After I have Elenium explosives, my rocket launcher's "quick reload" slot still expects the typical human fragmentation explosive which I no longer have.

The aliens on most missions do not appear particularly aggressive. I know the AI is always a work in progress, but they seem to randomly alternate between shooting and running.

I was not able to figure out how to "hold a UFO". I tried to on one mission, not wanting to hunt down the last alien, so I sent 3 guys into a Scout, occupying both of the UFO's compartments. Nothing happened 5 turns later. I am still none the wiser.

The technical stuff

I love the graphics. It looks hand drawn and very much in the XCOM style, and it looks great, besides, such graphics are far less prone to aging than 3D graphics. Also the sound is well done.

However, oh my, the crashes. Just stating the fact, not complaining - I know what a beta is. But my game crashed quite a lot. Occasional crashes when loading missions, a few in the battlescape, and now I am stuck on a mission that appears to always crash when loading. And I can't even find any logs that would allow me to spend 2 hours uselessly trying to avoid the crash by changing different variables

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Just wanted to get this out there, but I'll keep updating as I keep playing. So far the impressions are very positive, well done!

[erutan]

Seems like a solid / reasonable first impression - a lot of the topics you've brought up are percolating around the forums, how to deal with ammo, hunter + heavy weapons being too desireable, grenade pathing being buggy, UFO holding not working. I've personally been advocating removing stun grenades/rockets and keeping it to the rod until you can research a special grenade down the road, but no one else seems keen on that.

Originally Chris made the air weapons and explosives infinite (as he feels micromanaging the air game isn't the most exciting part of the game), then it was kind of wtf you can get infinite missiles but have to make every laser cell, so they were very recently made infinite. There are some thoughts re: making soldiers have less carry slots / smaller clips so you have to reload more, charging a restock fee after a mission, having only tier -1 being free, etc.

This build is less stable than the one before it do to compressing the resources together to get ready for steam.

[flashman]

A lot of what you mentioned is down to balance.

They are currently starting to apply balancing to the game.

including

Mission popups

Weapon stats

They have AI improvements on the way in next build I believe.

It has proven tricky with the engine.

Crashes are largely to do with the file archiving. They just brought it back to reduce the file count by half, but it is causing many issues at present.

Shoot through walls is a bug, 1 of many.

You can still lose soldiers in the first missions, all depends on what hits who and how far etc.

Stun items are designed for different strategies. The Xcom EU idea of just 1 stun gun and 2 square range was lame ass.

The friendly spawns are meant to give the maps more character, else they felt very static. And if I was a cop I would take on the beasts to save my family. Its what they do. Some AI friendlies are soldiers.

Economy and base took a massive nerf recently, to try and make it more challenging. The base layout is so because they shrunk the base size to force expansion.

The ammo is a hotly debated point by many, but I think Chris decided that the production of ammo was a pointless time sink.

[erutan]

btw, right click a building and you can build it vertically instead of horizontally. totally non-discoverable at this point, but there it is.

[Solver]

Yeah, I know many problems are just balance. In fact, this is what I like. Most of my issues with UFO:AI for instance were deeply ingrained into the game, while with Xenonauts so far I am mainly complaining about balance, and that can be fixed. I know how the process works, I've been intimately involved with balancing a couple of games over the course of several years.

With some things there are simple solutions indeed. For stunning aliens, just keeping it to the rod first and researching nades/rockets later makes perfect sense to me. It solves the actual balance problem and it also works nicely lore wise. First your scientists figure out how to shock aliens to stun them, later they develop the knock-out gas. With the highly powerful scout car, there are also several solutions possible that I'm sure have been repeatedly mentioned.

But with ammo, I feel the issue is more complicated. Here I'd like to look at the design purpose of ammo in the first place. It's a resource management constraint. So it is only meaningful if you can run out of the resource, and must weigh it against something else. The problem lies in the fact that currently neither of those is fulfilled. You can't run out of ammo which is infinite, and that in itself may be fine, but there is also no cost to it. For soldier ammo, it's impossible to run out if in the tactical mode as long as you carry one reload with you. In essence, the game would not change if ammo were removed as a concept and just worked like in Firaxis's new XCOM. That is bad.

I also agree it's too boring to produce ammo one clip at a time. But I feel there needs to be some ongoing cost that represents how your resources get drained over time. Some kind of auto-buy system would be nice perhaps, where you can automatically spend a certain amount of resources to keep your ammo replenished, but then the point would be that it's actually possible to run out if you do things wrong. It should be possible to find yourself in a dire situation when you're sending out planes or soldiers with their very last bit of ammunition. Though I can be fine with tier-1 tech being infinite, there needs to be a real, and not imaginary, constraint for higher-tier resources and not just a one-time cost for their development. I'm prepared to defend this point in an elaborate discussion should the opportunity arise

Also looking forward to learning more about the AI here, it's usually what makes or breaks a strategy game for me, and a topic I never tire of.

btw, right click a building and you can build it vertically instead of horizontally. totally non-discoverable at this point, but there it is.

Oh. You're my hero. I actually thought for a moment it might be something like that, but didn't manage to discover it.

[erutan]

I will now go from hero to villian... http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/4727-Unlimited-ammo-a-good-thing spawned http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/4754-Soldier-Carrying-Capacity-Strength

I built upon someone else's idea and came up with http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/4754-Soldier-Carrying-Capacity-Strength?p=61711&viewfull=1#post61711 to make ammo a meaningful choice in the loadout sense (coupled with clip sizes shrinking).

To summarize some ideas re: fixing unlimited ammo:

a) have tier2 be infinite, but tier 3 is only from adapted alien clips until you can research some sort of elenium regenerator or just build your own. (my idea)

b) manufacture tier2+ one time, then have your "quartermaster" replenish to set levels automatically, using up resources/money.

c) have t2+ ammo be very expensive to make, but once made is auto "recharged" after a mission at the base reactor/whatever building

d) be billed at the end of each mission for ammo used. while there is some disconnect of having infinite free ammo at base then only being charged after a mission, you could abstract it by saying "enough" clips are made with a weapon and then those are reordered/built after being used. (gaudd's idea, but I've come around to really like it).

d could also be adapted into air combat. plane maintenance costs feel a bit low for fuel/ammo, but on the otherhand missiles can cost millions of dollars each which would make any non alien resources for small arms be meaningless. if we go with all tier1 ammo being freely given, then there could be a "repurposing" cost to upgrade existing missiles to use new alien tech tiers that could be reasonable (I kind of abstract this as to why a jet is so cheap relative to other things, we get a f17 for free then soup it up ourselves).

Edited May 12, 2013 by erutan

[Solver]

More notes in progress.

Reaction fire feels a bit weird when an alien doesn't respond to movement yet responds to me shooting by reaction fire. I am also not sure what suppression does as I see suppressed aliens run or shoot on the next turn. Is it just a TU decrease or what?

I really like the maps so far. While I'd like more randomness in true XCOM style, I was pleasantly surprised by going to a terror mission in a Soviet city and finding recognizable Soviet objects there. This is good for immersion and easily beats the Firaxis game where the maps all had high quality individually, but no relation to where in the world a mission occurs. Then again, a friendly Soviet soldier killed two of my men, proving a bigger threat than any aliens on the mission.

Do I then get it right that my soldiers never fully heal from their wounds?

Speaking of terror missions, it's nice to see that they replicate the feeling of the original. In a night terror mission, thinking out I had cleaned out all the Chryssalids, whatever they are called here, but one remained where I did not expect... lots of pain ensues.

[Max_Caine]

Suppression currently does three things.

1) Halves the AP of the suppressed unit for next turn. You'll see an alien get up, but you won't see it move as far as if it were not suppressed.

2) Any unit that is suppressed cannot reaction fire. So if they didn't successfully reaction fire before, they can't now!

3) A suppressed unit will automatically crouch (if it can)

Chris has also proposed that a supressed unit looses it's LOS. This has been vigourously fought with alternatives suggested here.

Mothman and I discussed randomness within maps here and came to some depressing conclusions.

EDIT: Soliders do heal all HP over time. What makes you think otherwise?

[Solver]

Interesting with those maps. I'd have to take a look at the code or some internals at least to understand the system, but I'd hope random maps would be possible by following the general approach of splitting them into subregions and building maps out of these subregions with specified adjacency rules. I think for the game as a whole, random maps have a huge effect. It's what kept XCOM unpredictable. I understand the problem with the props as given in that thread though...

As for soldiers not healing, I just got the impression that wounded soldiers only heal up to some level of HP but never get fully restored. That may absolutely be wrong.

[Max_Caine]

Well, the conclusion is, "it can be done, you have to be careful how it's done"

EDIT: Argh, pressed enter too soon. Anyway, if you look in the personell screen, you can see the % amount of HP that a squaddie has left, if it's below 100%.

[Solver]

Well, the conclusion is, "it can be done, you have to be careful how it's done"

Which is considerably better than XCOM:EU or UFO:AI anyway.

EDIT: Note to self and other unfortunate souls, buildings can be built vertically not by right clicking anything but by rotating the mousewheel while trying to build.

Edited May 12, 2013 by Solver

[Solver]

A few more assorted thoughts I can post here since not much changed in 18.5.

On the AI, which is a specialization of sorts for me in strategy games. Alien AI, which of course needs additional work, seems to have a few recurring patterns of bad behaviour. Most notably so far:

* Spinning. An alien looks like it spins (changes direction it's looking at) multiple times on its turn without moving anywhere.

* Always reserving TUs. Aliens reserve TUs for reaction fire extremely often, possibly even always. They do it even if caught out in the open, or if some other action could be desirable.

* If they shoot, they only shoot at the beginning of their move. There's no move-shoot-move or move-shoot possible for aliens that I've noticed. Especially move-shoot-move is a powerful tactic, as you can shoot and still go back into cover. Of course if aliens insist on reserving TUs for reaction, they will not have enough to do this anyway.

* New in 18.5 is the fact that always at least one, and usually two, aliens rush out of the UFO after I've approached it with any unit. The behaviour just serves to make them easy to shoot.

I've started 3 different games so far, and in two I got elenium to research early on, and in the third I had none after 2 months in-game. I am not sure what the difference was causing this - it's one of the non-obvious things about the game.

I reiterate that stun explosives need to go later into the tech tree. I tried the stun rod to stun a lizard. It didn't even stun on the first hit, needed two! There's absolutely no advantage to getting in close with the rod as opposed to the easy way of lobbing stun grenades over.

If shotguns have a point, it's utterly lost on me. To effectively use that short-range weapon, you'd have to be fighting inside a building (doesn't really happen) or UFO (also happens rarely at least in the early stages). Just seems so very... not worth it.