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V19 Experimental Build 5 available!


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I never ever ( well 3-4 missions ) used the sniper in any build, I dont Think its any good ( I might be wrong ), I use 6 AR + 2 rockets and later on I have a M-60 take the Place of one rocket. Sniper has so low ammo mag and they cant burst.

So I dont realy care if snipers are nerfed :)

But I have friends that say Snipers are the best weapon, so I guess we all play different, good thing 19,5 come along, as 19,4 just bugged out on me... The "Hidden mission" screen stays up for ever in my last attack :(

Edited by ElfQueen
missed spelling the word cant as can
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And other: rookie solider haven't enough TU's to use sniper rifle in right way. He have 54 TU, but shot costs 62. Player can skip so much turns as he wishes, but soldier will never make this stupid aimed shot!

This got me thinking.. what if xenonauts could "over spend" TU's to perform actions automatically in the start of the next turn. So a rookie with 54tu could fire aimed shot (62tu) with sniper, but it would not happen until the start of the next turn where the extra 8tu's would be spent. It feels more organic and natural that different actions could flow from turn to next.

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Not to be redundant but just in case any one that complains about accuracy may have missed this thread:

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/6554-Higher-weapon-accuracy-test

The ball for accuracy rebalance is on the field, give some help with feedback so real changes can happen. Thank you.

Note: Update for beta 19.5 is on last page.

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???

In order to access the experimental build, you need to open your Steam library, right click on Xenonauts and click on properties. Click the Betas tab in the properties window that appears, enter the code "XenoExperiment" and click "Check Code". When that is validated, use the drop down box on that same page to select "Experimental - Latest changes, unstable" and then click Close. Steam will then download the updated files for the new build, and you can begin playing

???

I do just that, but nothing happens, I get the "Access code correct, private beta 'experimental' is now avaible."

But the drop down box still only show "NONE" andI cant "drop it down" ???

HELP !

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Thanks for all the feedback guys.

Low accuracy inside UFOs is a bug of some kind, but is difficult to pin down - it is one of the next fixes we will make though. Do keep in mind we prioritise fixing things like crashes over "merely" annoying issues like that, where the player can at least keep playing.

So, it sounds like people are still having the hidden movement screen bug where it stays visible all the time? But also some people seem to say it's been fixed for them? Anyone still experiencing it - please do post a saved game where it happens in the bugs forum, as I've had trouble reliably reproducing it locally.

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On the hidden movement screen -- what do you mean by "visible all the time"? Do you mean that it's always on during the enemy's turn (no matter where the movement's occurring) but off during yours? Because that's how it's been for me.

I was actually coming here to make a comment about said hidden movement screen. I really don't like it, because it just blocks the middle of your screen when fog of war already conceals the important bits. So I went and deleted that image in my assets folder so now I just have the grayed out screen and "Alien turn" at the top. And I'm liking that better so far.

I'm not going to ask you to remove that screen for all players -- but I will ask you to not make it impossible for me to delete it! Like adding something or other so the game crashes if that image isn't found. Please don't do that.

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The issue is that during the alien's turn, the image should disappear whenever your soldiers can see what is happening. However, as you've noticed, it blocks all of the actual action right now during the other turns. That is the bug; it should disappear whenever you can see what the enemy (or civilians and local forces) is doing.

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Also, a "small" Andron base (which I'm currently trying to clear) has 20-30 units inside of it. That seems quite excessive for this early in the game, since I'm still fighting Corvettes (which have 8-12 units or so). Seems a bit odd that a Corvette can disgorge over twice its normal complement into a newly-constructed base.

So maybe drop small alien bases to say 15-20? Still highly populated but not so heavily swarming.

Especially important considering that aliens still love to shoot through walls in their bases. Sometimes they hit, too.

EDIT: Just finished clearing that "small" base. 22 aliens, 20 were Andron -- 3 guards, 1 officer, and 16(!!) soldiers. Plus two light drones. FWIW, that's the number of aliens I'd find in a lightly-guarded carrier. AND I DID THIS WITH BALLISTICS. (Haven't had the cash to make lasers yet.) With only one death, so I think I did very well.

Edited by Waladil
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Gross gameplay bugs are worse than crash bugs because if the game is good but tends to crash, people will still play, enjoy and test it. If it is not fun to play, then people will not even find the crashes.

I know about myself at least. There were some builds that were very fun but crashy, and I'd play the hell out of those. The less fun builds I wouldn't play

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Gross gameplay bugs are worse than crash bugs because if the game is good but tends to crash, people will still play, enjoy and test it. If it is not fun to play, then people will not even find the crashes.

I know about myself at least. There were some builds that were very fun but crashy, and I'd play the hell out of those. The less fun builds I wouldn't play

These builds are intended as "work in progress" - they're not designed to reflect the final play experience. It's normal procedure to focus on tracking down crash bugs rather than "balance" bugs, not least because they can sometimes point to more serious flaws in the code. The idea (though not always the reality) is that you kill all of the "known" bugs before you release.

Purely from the player's point of view, it sometimes feels like a particular build is "one step forward, two steps back". A good example is 19.3, which was only live for a week or so - probably because the frequency of crash bugs made useful testing very difficult. However, this doesn't mean that it was actually a step back from other builds - it's quite normal for the process of adding features to add new bugs - and indeed for fixing one bug to trigger another to emerge.

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Enemy bases cause mixed feelings. On the one hand, they are very nicely drawn and the atmosphere of a lot better than in the original UFO. But they a totally unplayable on the other hand: it is dark, buggy and illogical Theatre of the Absurd.

1. There are same accuracy bugs as in crashed UFOs. My squad full of colonels and commanders, armed with lasers, is unable to kill reptiloid, which is sitting behind computer panel, during 10 or 15 turns! Even after computer destruction my shoots still hit the air, but not enemy. In the end I have ran out of ammo and was forced to rush enemy in close combat.

2. Reptiloid survives 5 stun grenades, two alenium rockets, alien grenade, two alenium grenades, tons of laser rays and plasma bolts. May be they are liquid metal terminators, not an organic creatures?

3. There is doors gameplay bug. My squad coming to door, opens it, fires, closes it. Room inside is full of reptiles, but no one of them opens the door from inside. If they do so, they will wipe out all of my team in one turn. But they just sitting behind their computers. I think they know about accuracy bug too :)

Prolixity is the main bug of Xenonauts. The developers said they removed the accidental soldier deaths. But along with that, they removed and accidental deaths of aliens. Now every alien is a notorious labor, "ton of coal, which you must transfer from one wagon to other". I am physically tired of Xenonauts. The game (even on insane difficulty) is not throwing me a challenge. It is making me to work hard. Please, do something with this.

Edited by Went
Sorry, rage :)
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Went - I think maybe you should take a break from playing the game for a bit, and wait for V19 Stable. Most of the major issues will have been ironed out by then and a bit longer away from the game might make it feel a bit "fresher" when you get back. Playing Xenonauts isn't meant to feel like work, so if it does then I'd stop testing it for a bit.

Have you tried running up to the aliens and shooting them? There's a major accuracy boost to shooting at close range and you'll kill them much faster if you get up close and personal rather than trying to pick them off at range,

We're aware about the accuracy bug and obviously you find it very frustrating, but it's not really helpful to complain about it in every post. The objective of the Experimental builds is to produce V19 Stable as quickly as possible, not always to make each build more playable than the previous one (the Stable builds are for playability and you can always revert to them if needed). If it's making the game unplayable for you, I'd avoid playing the Experimental builds until we've fixed it up.

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Got really frustrated while trying to clear my third alien base.

It's December, by the way. They seem to be sending way too many bases, especially considering how many aliens are in each one, see my prior post.

Weakened Foxtrots mean that the player is largely forced to get 3x Foxtrots and 3x Condors quickly, with a minimum of 2x2 at each air base.

Aliens seem to send escorts far more often, which redoubles air combat difficulty.

Nerfing soldier skill gain rates makes losing any experienced soldier a punch in the gut. At this point I'd be VERY VERY happy if you could just put in an XP-based system that allocates skill points based on the number of aliens killed. So light scout crash sites give very little XP and not many skill gains, but base clearing with 20-30 aliens gives a lot of skill bumps.

Aliens in bases constantly fire at you from outside nominal LOS. Mostly this is just an annoyance, but they also destroy doors and subsequently kill Xenonauts hiding behind said doors. Similarly, the upper floors of UFOs aren't properly sealed off, and aliens say in the command center of a landing ship can see out in front, spotting troops for aliens on the ground floor. Haven't seen enemy fire penetrate and hit from the command center, but I bet it'll happen before long.

Doors in alien bases are really whack. Sometimes they'll be destroyed, but they'll kinda respawn a couple turns later but shifted kinda downward, blocking some fire and not really entirely there. It's hard to explain.

Xenonaut accuracy is too low, even at high accuracy skill -- maximum accuracy without being in the short-range territory is about 80% (40 TU rifle shot while crouched, with 90+ accuracy). Highly skilled agents ought to be able to hit 90-100% of the time, unless there are other factors like extreme range or cover. In a related note, accuracy is too highly dependent on the number of TUs spent: Snapshots are 1/2 as accurate as regular shots, meaning they virtually never hit, seeing as expert agents will only get about 30% chance to hit.

Burst fire continues to be useless, which is (to put it bluntly) retarded, considering that it is SOP for every modern military force. In case Goldhawk isn't aware of this, the point of burst fire isn't to be "more likely" to hit an enemy. It's to be more likely to KILL an enemy. You aren't gambling that you'll hit with one shot out of the three -- (usually) either all will hit or all will miss. You're gambling that if you hit, then the extra two bullets will hit a vital point.

Upgrade burst fire so it's almost always the smartest choice if you've got enough TUs available. Simultaneously, make precision rifles... PRECISE. Up their accuracy, get rid of the heavy move penalty, and give them good range. Rifles will have much better DPS, but precision rifles will have much higher accuracy, good for suppressing as the rifles move into position, softening targets, and killing retreating foes.

Cover is probably over-important. A covered, unflanked target is virtually impossible to hit. This has a really big impact on the early game (especially when humans have ballistics/lasers against aliens holding plasma rifles/heavy plasma rifles) because aliens are much better at destroying cover than humans are. Cover ends up being a pure advantage for the aliens because of that. The best cover for humans remains not getting shot at at all, either by pulling back out of LOS or killing all nearby aliens. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that I don't bring a rocket launcher along. Some sort of HE weaponry that did lots of damage to cover but not much to aliens would be really nice.

BUGS: So f*cking many bugs. I've reported a good number of the worst ones, but there are so many, and the devs appear to pay so little attention, that it quickly becomes fatiguing to report bug after bug. Does Goldhawk have any sort of QA department? If so, then they are clearly not doing their jobs. If not, then you guys have got to pay a lot more attention to player-reported bugs. Because guess what? We aren't getting paid to report these. We paid YOU for the PRIVILEGE of reporting these bugs. At the very least, start having consolidated bug lists stickied at the top of each bug-report forum, that lists each bug into "reported," "confirmed," "needs more info," and "fixed for next version." Include links in with each of those bugs to the thread in which it was reported. That would allow for players to more easily look to see if bug X has been reported already, or if they've got something to add to another bug's discussion. Also, it would allow us to see that you're actually paying some attention.

Yes, I want to love Xenonauts. I want it to be a great game. But I am not seeing it happen. I think there are more bugs now than there were a few versions ago, and those bugs are more painful. Developers are more likely to argue with me over the existence of a bug than they are to fix it. Remember the fiasco a couple versions ago when I and other people were reporting that aliens were spending more TUs than they possibly could have... but the devs denied it? They claimed that they couldn't reproduce it. Turns out that they were only using the dev-debug mode and not actually playing the game. That should never, ever happen to volunteer QA guys. If we tell you there's a bug, that means we took time out of our personal lives to head over to the forum, log on, type up a bug report, maybe upload a screenshot or two. I don't know about most other people here... but I wouldn't go through all that work unless there's an actual goddamn bug.

<rant over>

I'm going to go play fun games for a while. Went got it right: This game remains unfun because of it's prolixity. Which, incidentally, I had to look up and discovered how incredibly appropriate it is. Each mission is a chore, not a pleasure.

tldr: Listen to your community, got it?

P.S. FWIW, I've been playing Veteran/Ironman.

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Wow, you guys are WAY too harsh. This is an experimental build. Relax. I remember the pre 18 series builds. They were the same way then Goldhawk released 18.3 as a true beta and it had very few problems comparatively and was a lot of fun to play. Wait until the final 19 build, I'm sure it will be good.

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Waladil - please list the bugs that are annoying you the most in the thread where the OP specifically asks the community to report them, so we can prioritise fixing the ones that are annoying players the most. That's more helpful than going off on a massive rant about how we're not listening to the community.

Also, please wind in the aggressive tone. You're playing an experimental build of the game. To access the experimental build, you have to read a long post explaining how it's almost certainly going to be full of bugs and balance issues and if you can't deal with it, you should stick with the Stable build.

We've not been fixing up all the infuriating bugs because that's not how development works - you implement the features you need and then you fix the bugs. In layman's terms, doing it the other way round is like trying to paint an unfinished house...your nice new paint job gets ruined when you build the rest of the house. It's wasted effort, as later code additions will likely break things again. The Stable build will be exactly that when it arrives.

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Went - I think maybe you should take a break from playing the game for a bit, and wait for V19 Stable. Most of the major issues will have been ironed out by then and a bit longer away from the game might make it feel a bit "fresher" when you get back. Playing Xenonauts isn't meant to feel like work, so if it does then I'd stop testing it for a bit.

Good idea, thx :) But you must understand my frustration too: I have played three months of game time and stuck in the problem with no solution. And this was repeated in 3-rd or 4-th time in row.

Have you tried running up to the aliens and shooting them? There's a major accuracy boost to shooting at close range and you'll kill them much faster if you get up close and personal rather than trying to pick them off at range.

It it too dangerous to come closer to a bunch of 5-6 aliens with heavy plasmas :) Even if I'll kill half of them on my turn, next turn I'll lose half of mine.

We're aware about the accuracy bug and obviously you find it very frustrating, but it's not really helpful to complain about it in every post. The objective of the Experimental builds is to produce V19 Stable as quickly as possible, not always to make each build more playable than the previous one (the Stable builds are for playability and you can always revert to them if needed). If it's making the game unplayable for you, I'd avoid playing the Experimental builds until we've fixed it up.

I want to draw your attention to the fact that this is not some small bug that can be fixed in the next build. This is a systemic gameplay problem: the game offers player labor instead of challenge. You can tune weapon stats so many times as you wish, but stationary enemies will never be dangerous. You can spawn 30, 40 androns in the city terror, but I'll easily kill them all, as I killed 20 last time, question is only time and ammo :) And when you at least make them think and attack player, you'll have to rebalance all stats again from scratch.

I really hope you'll understand my opinion as a real game analysis but not as "crying of casual game-baby". I'm turning in game development more than ten years and able to distinguish stability issues and fundamental gameplay problems.

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I really hope you'll understand my opinion as a real game analysis but not as "crying of casual game-baby". I'm turning in game development more than ten years and able to distinguish stability issues and fundamental gameplay problems.

Don't worry, we're not dismissing your opinion. I was just saying it's not worth getting worked up about the current state of the game, because right now it's probably at the lowest point in the balance / bugs cycle for V19. It will get better, don't worry.

I know Aaron is playing with a significant accuracy increase for all the weapons in the next build, which will hopefully make combat a lot more deadly. We'll also be getting GJ to come back in and improve the AI more in the near future, so we're aware of these bugs. It's just that when you're working with a large team and have an end-goal in mind (i.e. V19 Stable) then the scheduling doesn't always marry up with the mini-releases we're doing along the way.

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