A few quick suggestions

[dr_seedy]

Hi all,

First I'd like to start by saying that this game is absolutely fantastic, and has managed to do the seemingly impossible: improve upon X-COM. Since it's pretty late in the development cycle, I'll limit myself to suggestions that should be straightforward to implement and won't change the game in any fundamental way. I've only just started V19, so I apologize in advance if any of this has already been addressed.

- Grenade throwing accuracies. Sometimes the thrown grenades land *way* off from where they were intended to, to the point where it damages the immersion for me. Rather than making them more accurate overall, I'd suggest putting a cap on just how far off they can land. After all, your soldiers are all top-flight special forces operators, so they might not be able to play horseshoes at a professional level, but they shouldn't have a grenade land more than 4 or 5 tiles away from where it was intended to go, IMHO.

- Friendly fire at close range. It sometimes happens that shooting over a squadmate's shoulder results in a friendly fire incident, for instance if the 2 units are in diagonally adjacent tiles. See above comment about how these guys are all special forces, and should be able to shoot over each others' shoulders. The proposed fix would be to disable friendly fire in a 1 or 2 tile radius around the firing unit.

- Extended kneeling for heavies. The non-moving bonuses for heavy weapons (snipers & machine guns) make more sense if they only accrue when the unit starts out in, or gets into, a kneeling position. In return, kneeling for them would take a lot more TUs, say 12 or 15. Also, a sniper would seem a lot more like a proper sniper (IMHO) if they get a long (maybe 2x), but narrow cone of vision, at the cost of not being able to swivel. Ideally, there should be a separate prone position for snipers and machine gunners (those guns have little legs on the front!) but sadly that would require more animations, which appear to be a bit of a bottleneck.

- Replacing experienced KIAs. Early on it's easy to keep playing when one of your guys gets killed, but once you get a squad of battle hardened killers, it's a lot harder to not reload when one dies, the reason being that rookies absolutely suck. They can't even keep up with the rest of the squad when they have half the TUs, making it harder for them to get any kills. My proposal would be to add a few recruits to the pool just below the rank of those who are killed, so that those losses are not the end of the world. (Or maybe don't make it so baldly related to your KIAs.) This also means you would want to check the recruitment pool every so often. You still take a hit because the new recruit won't be as good, and of course, you lose the character you've grown attached to. The logic would be that as Xenonauts gain credibility, they get access to better recruits.

- Starting off face-to-face against Battleships. It almost always happens that when the air combat vs. a battleship starts, my squadron is so close to it that it simply isn't possible for my foxtrots to turn around and escape being one-shot-killed. It's odd to think that the pilots would stay on autopilot until they're so close to the enemy that they can't even turn around!

- I haven't verified, but the update post says that destroyed interceptors are recovered after 72 hours, and repaired. (yay!) Does this also apply to those that run out of fuel?

- More specific attack instructions. It would be nice if you could give the fighter instructions other than "Go to waypoint", or "Attack target", such as, "Attack this target from the rear" or, "Approach this waypoint from a specific angle", which would allow some more interesting tactical maneuvering. The way this would work is, when you click on the UFO or waypoint to designate it as a target, you could also specify an approach vector, or at least, an approach quadrant, or something like that. In such a case the fighter could follow a B-spline rather than a straight line, if that helps.

Once again, thanks a lot for a great game. I'm hoping that if this game sells well you'll do a remake of TFTD as well, though maybe we can leave that to the modders. Or who knows... DLC? I'd pay for it.