Jump to content

V19 Experimental Build 7 available!


Recommended Posts

Firstly, if you do not know how to access the experimental branch on Steam, please read the instructions (and warnings!) in this thread. All saved games from earlier versions (including experimental versions) are incompatible, attempting to load them will cause problems.

There are quite a number of changes in this build, and lots of long standing bug have been vanquished. The downside of this is all the changes are likely to have introduced new (hopefully minor) issues we have not found yet, so be on the lookout and please report any new problems you encounter. The fix for aliens trying to shoot through walls in particular is pretty hot off the presses and required a fairly large set of changes, so look out for other untoward AI behaviours.

In terms of balance changes most of the focus has been on ground combat - a major overhaul has been made on both Xenonaut vehicles and the carbine (now shotgun) weapon type. I wanted to more Geoscape economic changes but just ran out of time, perhaps next week - the one (rather big) geoscape change I did make was doubling the length of all research projects; this may seem extreme but the intention is to introduce a bit of pressure in the science side of the game, where before now it was very easy to complete every project quickly without having to choose between two you might want.

Here is the changelog:

Fixes

- Fixed aliens attempting to shoot through walls(!)

- Fixed crash when intercepting escorted UFOs

- Fixed a couple of incorrectly set sight ranges: Androns are now 18, Sebillians 16

- Increased ground combat damage variance from +/- 20% to 50% (this may seem high, but original XCOM had the equivalent of 100%)

- Increased TU cost of opening doors from 4 to 15 to discourage door open/close abuse

- Fixed certain explosives props (Alien reactors were one) which exploded when hit by even a single point of damage; they now take much more punishment to destroy

- Fixed throwing grenades inside a multi-storey UFO being blocked in certain circumstances (this still needs more work to prevent throwing grenades between floors etc...)

- Fixed alien corpses (primarily Androns) changing into Caesans on save/load

- Tweaked Cruisers submap to prevent ground props from sometimes being left inside the UFO

- Fixed jagged edges of scout UFO ground overlay

- Fixed reloading in the inventory screen not costing any TUs

- Fixed crash bug related to non-set human civilian corpse items

- Fixed inventory graphics for a few edge case corpse types e.g. drones and dead civilians

- Fixed doors in the alien base becoming "locked" when damaged (See additions for a feature inspired by this however)

- Fixed Buzzard armour + ballistic shotgun having incorrect sprites

- Set various sloped roof tiles as solid blocks, this is to prevent some strange behaviour when they interact with jet pack troops

- Fixed some tiles in alien base command rooms being being missing

- Fixed Xenonaut vehicles not triggering the "hide UFO hull" function when they can see the UFO interior

- Vehicles now correcly face their target when firing at something they were not initially facing

- The fog of war will now be updated immediately for the relevant units whenever a piece of terrain they can see is destroyed

- The lighting in alien bases should now be much more consistent, and wall based lights are all set to be destructible (remember certain rooms are intended to be dark)

- FPS counter is now only displayed in debug mode

Additions

- All the maps for the Farm tileset have been overhauled, and multiple new maps added

-- There are now 3 maps each for small (light scout, scout and corvette) medium (corvette, landing ship and cruiser) and large (cruiser, carrier and battleship) map types

-- Each map has more variety in randomised UFO and dropship placement

-- A number of new farm submaps have also been added for additional level variety

-- This represents the standard style we are going to use for all tilesets going forward, so please give feedback on how you find them!

- Animated flare ground sprite

- A large number of newly painted over tiles have been added for the Soviet town and alien base

- Battleships now have external teleporter panels providing two alternate entrances to the ship

- Huge number of new soldier names, nationalities and backgrounds added (Chris had a lot of fun doing all this data entry so please send him ideas for more soldier names, he'll love it)

- Xenonaut vehicles now have long range headlights during night missions, helping make them a bit more useful

- Alien bases now include strong locked doors which can be blasted through, usually allowing shortcuts

- There is another new structural feature of aliens bases, but I'd rather people find it for themselves

Balance

- Xenonaut vehicles significantly buffed

-- Vehicles all reduced to baseline 100 HP, but armour values vastly improved (60, 90, 120 for Hunter, Scimitar, Hyperion respectively)

-- Vehicles are still highly vulnerable to incendiary weapons (the alien Plasma Cannon being the main one)

-- Vehicle laser/plasma/MAG weapons are now single shot, area of effect weapons that do decent damage, a great deal of suppression and cause overdamage

-- Vehicle ammo load for above weapons reduced to 10

-- Vehicle sight range increased to 20

-- Vehicle AP increased (tiers go: 70, 85, 100)

-- Vehicle weapons now have new projectile/explosion graphics where needed

- The "carbine" class of weapon has been totally reworked into a "shotgun" class

-- They are now a more direct upgrade to the normal ballistic shotgun in terms of range and damage

-- Additionally all shotguns now fire multiple small "pellets" per shot, instead of the original single powerful shot

-- Damage, magazine size, TU costs etc... have all been rebalanced taking into account the above

-- The names of the carbines have all been updated to be "XXX Shotgun" (if you spot one I missed let me know please)

- Sniper rifles no longer benfit from the "close range" accuracy bonus

- Alien races now have different vulnerabilities to suppression, Sebillians are 50% resistant to it and Androns and Reapers are outright immune

- Smoke from smoke grenades now blocks line of sight (still also reduces accuracy of shots through it)

- Armour degradation increased from 10% to 25% (that means armour loses strength equal to 25% of the damage it blocked)

- Xenonaut soldier armour buffed slightly to account for above change

- Increased alien count in light scouts from 4-6 to 6-9

- The light from flares and the smoke from smoke grenades is no longer "trapped" inside a prop if they should land on one

- All ground tiles now take twice as much damage (60 up from 30) before they switch to damaged/destroyed state (this is graphical only)

- Alien sniper rifles have been rebalanced so they now do less damage but have a very high armour mitigation, so later armoured troops cannot ignore them!

- The alien heavy plasma rifle has been converted into a shotgun style weapon, for a little more variety

- The alien battle rifle has received a large damage buff, as it was too weak for the very late stage of the game it showed up in

- Grenades (except flares, flashbangs and smoke) now detonate at the end of the turn they were thrown in (so you can escape a bad throw!)

- All human weapons have had their damage increases across various tiers smoothed out somewhat, this has generally resulted in slightly lower damage for plasmas and slightly higher damage for MAGs

- Reapers will now appear in Sebillian UFOs performing ground attack missions instead of Harridans, this should make them much more common

- Stun grenades/rockets now produce more gas, but the gas is slightly weaker and disapates faster

- The length of all research projects has been DOUBLED (this might seem insane, but the intention is to find the limit at which length of research becomes untenable so we can balance down to the sane number from there)

Please post your comments on the build here. If you encounter any bugs please post them in the experimental build sub-forum of the bugs forum. I will post new threads in the beta forum shortly for in-depth discussion of the current Geoscape and Ground Combat balance, but feel free to post brief opinions here too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

- Increased TU cost of opening doors from 4 to 15 to discourage door open/close abuse

Not yay but I understand it. (That's probably a bit TOO high. Maybe 8-10 or so?)

- Fixed certain explosives props (Alien reactors were one) which exploded when hit by even a single point of damage; they now take much more punishment to destroy

Yay! Now our aliens managed to invent the concept of keeping your gunpowder AWAY from lit fuses if you don't want it to 'splode.

- The length of all research projects has been DOUBLED (this might seem insane, but the intention is to find the limit at which length of research becomes untenable so we can balance down to the sane number from there)

New build strategy. Old strategy was start with 5x scientists, 1 living quarters and 2x workshops for 45 engineers later. New strategy: 5x scientists from the get-go, 1 living quarters and 2x labs for 45 scientists. Add workshops later. Longer research times + shorter production times (esp. on planes) makes this plan probably wise.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The big changes in my mind are to armour degradation and random damage - the wider range of possible damage done by each weapon means that it'll be more X-Com like, with some shots doing a LOT of damage and some doing much less. It means you should feel a bit less safe at any given time...but you might have some lucky escapes too.

The armour degradation means that armour can be fairly likely to save your men's lives, but will rapidly lose its effectiveness after taking a few hits. This means the Predator will be very powerful initially but even weak aliens will bring one down if they hit it enough.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Also, yeah - the new shotguns are good fun too.

We're expecting to be arriving at the final V19 Stable fairly quickly now that GJ and Giovanni are both back at work fixing the bugs in their relevant areas.

V20 Experimentals are going to be where the new UI arrives. We've finished the basics of all of the new UI screens and we're at the stage of polishing the formatting on them now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Looking forward to getting this downloaded and installed this evening. Have the "eras" of been slowed down to compensate? Or am I going to be researching laser weapons when battleships arrive?
It sounds like you might be. ;-( All I can suggest is build more living quarters, labs and hire a bunch of scientists.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

- Increased ground combat damage variance from +/- 20% to 50% (this may seem high, but original XCOM had the equivalent of 100%)

That explains why sectoids would sometimes live through 2 laser shots. It added a nice bit of unpredictability.

- Huge number of new soldier names, nationalities and backgrounds added (Chris had a lot of fun doing all this data entry so please send him ideas for more soldier names, he'll love it)

Are you trying to get fired? :P

-- Additionally all shotguns now fire multiple small "pellets" per shot, instead of the original single powerful shot

So they actually spread out and can potentially damage multiple (adjacent?) targets?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

*The sniper rifle will hit an alien but the animation of the bullet goes way to the right or left of the target.

*The shotgun pellets spread out way to quickly in the beginning, so much so its dangerous for a soldier to stand 1 square ahead to the right or left of the line of fire while standing.

*Aliens are a little TOO smart now... OK, maybe that's not an issue; maybe I just need to be a bit smarter. :)

*Doors take to long to open. Can it be dialed down to 10?

*Bullets seem to cluster better which is a nice effect.

*Research time seems spot on at least when starting from the beginning.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...