Great remake, but few concerns

[Alpaca]

Recently, I discovered Xenonauts. I have just played a little with 21V5 + patch, and apart from a few bugs (stability issues, base building scrolling -e.g. selecting the quantum cryptology center- is really confusing, and a few weapon related ones -% to hit- that I think are already fixed in V6), a few inconveniences (e.g. not being able to see how far you can walk and still shoot, not being able to click on the soldiers in order to see their stats), and the long loading times of battles, I really enjoyed the game. A really good remake! Nevertheless, I was surprised how the scoring worked, and supposed it to be buggy.

I was even more surprised when I discovered, that it was working as intended. I really like the idea of focusing more on air combat and allowing to skip trivial missions.

Nevertheless, I think it should be worked on. It should not be easy to skip terror missions, base attacks and base defenses by shooting down the UFO. Maybe something like this would help improve the game:

-Make the ships corresponding to terror missions, base attack and base construction way stronger. So, you can't shoot them down early. Give big rewards for great successes during those missions.

-Reward conquering a landed vessel properly, because now you better wait and hope you can down it later.

-Fix the bug that 0/0 civilians being rescued leads to terrible performance rating. This really kills immersion even if it is not used.

Those small tweaks would already greatly enhance the game I guess.

Furthermore, I think it would be better if you could only airstrike the weaker ships. I think best couple it

to certain technologies (e.g. missiles etc) and maybe earlier successes. So, you always have option of airstriking, but if

insufficient power it warns you that several aliens will/might survive the strike. Maybe give half of the relationship bonus for shooting down the UFO and half for successfully airstriking. But it indeed might lead to too many mandatory missions.

Edited March 11, 2014 by Alpaca

[Skitso]

the long loading times of battles

The long loading times seem to be somehow connected to playing in a full screen mode. Try to play in a window to cut loading times in half. Also Chris has said that the final assets compression will shorten the loading times considerably.

-Make the ships corresponding to terror missions, base attack and base construction way stronger. So, you can't shoot them down early.

You are absolutely right and this is something GH is working on if I remember correctly.

-Fix the bug that 0/0 civilians being rescued leads to terrible performance rating. This really kills immersion even if it is not used.

It's a known bug and will be fixed in the next version.

Furthermore, I think it would be better if you could only airstrike the weaker ships.

I once proposed something similar and Chris shoot the idea down. I felt there should be a system that forces the player to play each ufo type at least once...

[Alpaca]

The long loading times seem to be somehow connected to playing in a full screen mode. Try to play in a window to cut loading times in half. Also Chris has said that the final assets compression will shorten the loading times considerably.

That really helps a lot. Thank you! Even better that it will improve even more.

You are absolutely right and this is something GH is working on if I remember correctly.

It's a known bug and will be fixed in the next version.

Great to hear.

I once proposed something similar and Chris shoot the idea down. I felt there should be a system that forces the player to play each ufo type at least once...

I agree, but it is probably too hard to give a good in game reason why you can't shoot down the first ship of a certain type.

Now I am curious if a few other points will be addressed as well:

No mind probes: I can see why psionics had to go, but mind probes were not only very original, but also very useful in distinguishing aliens... Probably suboptimal use of TUs though. Best is probably being able to hover over the alien and see what his most probable rank is. I did notice differences in aliens, but they are still hard to classify.

I think it would be great if you can click on a character and can see his stats in combat, and maybe also armor rating and statistics about shots, kills, spent TUs, reflection values. Allows you to game the experience system even more .

Personally I think it would be more immersive if you couldn't have a squad consisting of only Colonels. However, the original (XCOM) solution for promotion was maybe more elegant, but also extremely exploitive.

I really liked the suggestion I saw on this forum to make soldier starting stat distribution Gaussian with a minimum average for your first 8 btw. I was only wondering about bravery (and to a lesser extend reflection). Bravery seems pretty hard to raise systematically. Maybe make the standard deviation smaller for bravery and maybe the expected starting value a bit higher than the other stats.

Edited:

Maybe max number of Colonels should be equal to the number of bases (maybe with an offset). And the number of Commanders to that of Colonels (times 2?!). And Majors to Commanders etc.

Edited March 11, 2014 by Alpaca

[Chris]

Moving this to Suggestions, as it's in the wrong place at the moment.

Thanks for writing the post and I'm glad you liked the game. As people have mentioned, a number of the issues you've mentioned will be fixed in the coming builds.

We're unlikely to add mind probes (too much work at this stage) or change the rank structure (I like our current system) though.

[Skitso]

@Chris: Have you found any reasons why the GC loading times are two or even three times longer if played in fullscreen mode vs. windowed mode? I'm aware the loading times will get shorter after the final compression, but I'd be glad if the loading times were as quick in fullscreen as they are in windowed mode...

[Chris]

Whaaaa? I didn't even know until you just mentioned it. That's ridiculous.

No wonder everyone's been moaning about load times and we've all been confused as hell as to why - I always play on windowed mode and I bet everyone else in the dev team does as well...

[Gauddlike]

I always use windowed mode so I also hadn't noticed that problem.

I always thought loading times were ok and people were just being a bit sensitive

[Skitso]

Whaaaa? I didn't even know until you just mentioned it. That's ridiculous.

Ok so THAT'S why Chris didn't take my moaning in his mail so well... Yeah, I've had over 1 minute loading times since the new loading screen was added... but only in fullscreen. Windowed is like 20-30secs.

Damn, I could swear I said the fullscreen/windowed stuff in the mail conversation we had few months ago.

Edited March 11, 2014 by Skitso

[thixotrop]

...I've had over 1 minute loading times since the new loading screen was added...

One minute... uhh.

I have more and I thought that was normal.

The combat rounds can take sometimes more than 5 minutes with occasional alien movement to see and I thought that was normal too. The message "it will be faster with final release" always soothed me down, like a "no panic" button.

I always play in fullscreen (1920 x 1200; better immersion for me) and have never tried window mode.

[Amaror]

I once proposed something similar and Chris shoot the idea down. I felt there should be a system that forces the player to play each ufo type at least once...

There allready is. You miss out on technology if you don't do every ufo type at least once.

Sounds like a big enough incentive to me, there's no reason to make up a arbitrary reason why you can't just airstrike that particular ship, when the disadvantage of not doing it manually is allready more than big enough.

Edit: To the Op's point. Limiting the kind of alien vessels you can airstrike would be pretty stupid. The whole point of the system is to not force players to do every mission to prevent it getting tedious instead of exciting. It's not like airstike is op or anything, doing a mission manually always gives you way more than airstriking. (roughly double the amount of money, alien ressourses, technology and experience)

Edited March 18, 2014 by Amaror

[DNK]

Also, it's important to do UFO missions just to get the resources to build things you need (alenium/alloys).

Whaaaa? I didn't even know until you just mentioned it. That's ridiculous.

No wonder everyone's been moaning about load times and we've all been confused as hell as to why - I always play on windowed mode and I bet everyone else in the dev team does as well...

Yeah, loading times for this game are higher than any other game I have (including things like Blacklist, Arma 3, and HOI3). I have an SSD, and it can easily take a full minute to load up a GC.