Chris

Sure. I'm happy to update the image if you make a more correct one for me. However it does need to stick to the aspect ratio / dimensions of the existing flag image because it's a UI image and we expect it to be a certain size. So you'll need to bodge it a bit if necessary. Here's the existing file: If you make an updated file then please DM it to me to ensure I don't miss it.

I don't think this would be a good idea, because there's a lot of cities and the names take up a lot of screen space when you're fully zoomed out. It would look very cluttered (which is why we don't do it).

Not at the moment, no. Right now all aliens know exactly where all your soldiers are once they go into "combat mode" after sighting a hostile unit. We're looking to implement a fairer system in the next major update.

Yes, that's a nice idea. It's probably quite a complex new mechanic though (because right now the game works on the assumption a unit can see everything in their vision range) but maybe it's something we could consider post-release. Part of the issue with Stalker armour is that aliens won't take a shot unless they have a 30%+ chance of hitting. Which means if they're shooting at that soldier then they already have a good chance of hitting it. There's probably plenty of times the Stalker has prevented an alien actually firing a shot in the first place - but there's no indication that that has happened, so people don't notice. Does make we wonder if we can put the stalker check outside the normal AI calculation so it's more obvious what it's doing.

Thanks. Yes, we'll be looking at further improvements to the Colossus in the next major update!

Sorry for the delay replying here. Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I'll bear this in mind when I do my next balancing playthrough - perhaps adding fusion weapons and much tougher enemies at the same time is a bit much.

Thanks for the long post, it's always useful to read someone's detailed impressions on the game. I'm also happy to read that our updates have changed a negative review to a positive one; we've put a lot of work into the game in Early Access and it's great to hear that it has improved the player experience for you. I'll pick out a few specific points to reply to, but I think my main comment is that it sounds like you're playing the game on too hard a difficulty setting. If you're a big classic X-Com fan then really you should start on Veteran and only play on Commander if you want an insane challenge - it's for people that already know the game inside out, and if you jump straight in at that difficulty level then you'll regularly have "this feel like bullshit" moments and it's just a recipe for frustration rather than fun. Specific points: 1) The damage randomisation is 50-150% of the weapon base damage, and then armour reduction is applied. So the effect of damage randomisation is magnified against units with armour, but that's a gameplay mechanic you need to engage with - you can always strip armour from enemies using explosives if you want to make damage more reliable, or use weapon types with higher armour penetration. 2+7) In general we want to go for a feeling of nobody ever being safe, where there's a chance even your best soldier in their best armour can be one-shotted by a lucky enemy hit from a tier-equivalent enemy weapon (this is taken straight from classic X-Com). The game loses a lot of tension if you know that your soldier is definitely able to take at least one hit; it's like knowing they have an extra life. However, the actual problem here sounds like you're perhaps getting the armour a bit too late - if anything, armour can be too powerful if you unlock it early because it turns your soldiers into tanks who can take 3-4 hits each until the enemy weapons catch up. Guardian armour in particular can be unlocked off the Destroyer UFO and is very strong if you get it early. Ironically the Colossus is currently considered by far the worst armour in the game by most players. 4) I agree, we'll hopefully give the aliens a bit more individual personality with some AI adjustments in the next major update. 5) Yes, the AI currently cheats in this regard. We're planning to fix that in the next major update. 9) For new recruits, the North America region bonus is a huge bonus to their stats (+5 in each) and if you've built Training Centers, the training rate increases with the number of alien species captured and interrogated. This won't allow you to replace a whole squad overnight but if you're losing 2-3 soldiers a mission it should allow you to constantly be filling gaps in your team without losing too much effectiveness. 11) It's important to understand how overwatch actually works - it's explained in the tooltips, but a unit will only reaction fire when they have higher Initiative than their target (which is Reflexes x % of TU remaining). If you've got a wall of soldiers who are all at low TU, they won't overwatch fire until the alien drops below a certain level of TU, but if they're on full TU then they'll overwatch fire much earlier. But the same things applies to the aliens, and knowing how the system works can make assaulting UFOs easier. It's not always a good idea when breaching a UFO to spend all the TUs of your first soldier through the door, because it basically guarantees that every alien in the room will get to overwatch fire at them, etc. The system is pretty good when you understand it, but I'll admit that it's not well explained at the moment. But it's little things like this that suggest you should probably play on Veteran rather than Commander. 14) Yeah, the panic Supporters might need a slight buff. It's effectively -7 Panic per month per supporter though, so -77 Panic over an 11 month campaign, and it sounds a bit better when written out that way. Probably still the weakest ones overall though. In general, the late game has worse balance than the early game, and I think many of your later points show this. I'll be doing some more full campaign playthroughs as part of our next update so hopefully this will improve. In terms of new content, we're getting close to release now but some of the more interesting stuff (like weapon variety etc) are things we'd like to look at as post-launch content.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Gameplay Changes: Operation Points can now fall below zero and turn negative if you pay the UFO Delegation cost while not having enough OP available to cover it. Temporarily removed the air combat ambience track, as some people were complaining it contains a painful high-pitched whine that makes the air combat almost unplayable. Sadly I'm in my late thirties and I apparently lack the auditory range to be able to hear this (ouch), but we'll add the sound back in once our sound engineer has had a chance to strip out the offending whine. Added a tooltip for the UFO Delegation campaign option that explains what the system does. Removed the obsolete "Evasive Roll: Enabled / Disabled" tooltip line from the various air combat weapons. Bugfixes: Fixed an issue where you could see round a wall in the Battleship UFO. Fixed the Sentinel Module tooltip not displaying the correct vision angle increase.

This update contains the first round of stability fixes for Milestone 6. Please continue to report any issues that you encounter and we'll do our best to fix them! These hotfixes can sometimes break tactical mission saves, so if you experience unexpected crashes playing an existing tactical save immediately after the update please try restarting the mission by loading the pre-mission strategy save. Gameplay Changes: We've added a fallback trigger for the "endless war" system. This spawns endless waves of Battleships so people can continue to play the strategy layer for as long as they want, but in some cases it was not triggering correctly. We think we've fixed that bug, but it's a serious enough issue we've set up a fallback trigger that activates "endless war" at day 500 if it wasn't already active. As it's now possible to capture an Eternal without first completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission, completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission is now required to unlock the Operation Endgame research project. We've made some optimisations to the AI turn, which should mean processing civilian actions should be faster. Bugfixes: Fixed an AI hang that could occur on the alien turn. Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to close an open door that was touching an interactive object like a Cleaner data desk. Fixed a crash that could occur if you unassigned the target rescue soldiers from the dropship on the Rescue Soldiers mission using the assignment dropdown, which previous fixes had not dealt with. Fixed the tactical map randomisation being broken (it had started marking the wrong map as "played" after a tactical mission). Hopefully fixed the issue where the post-Phase 4 event sequence that is supposed to eventually unlock endless waves of Battleships can get broken. Fixed the bug where certain Project Available pop-ups that were not triggered by completing a research project (e.g. Corpse Analysis, MARS Rebuild, etc) would show a pop-up taking you to the research screen even though they only contained engineering projects. Fixed a rounding issue that could cause the player to be unable to recruit a Geoscape Supporter despite seemingly having exactly the right amount of Operations Points to do so. Fixed some z-fighting with the Pegasus dropship interior walls. Hopefully fixed the issue where the shot crosshair would sometimes become offset when hovering over enemy Sentry Guns. Removed Lock Time from various aircraft weapon tooltips, as it's not used in most cases and would show error text in the other cases.

Hello everyone - we're now into December, so it's time to wish you all a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year before filling you in on our progress during November. As I'm unlikely to write a separate development update for December due to the way the holidays fall (I'm not back in the office until 5th January), I'll also give an update on our plans for the 2-3 weeks before we shut down for the festive season. Milestone 6 Released: The big news in the last month is we finally managed to release Milestone 6 onto our public branches. We're glad this update is finally in the hands of the players after it spent a solid couple of months stuck in the final bugfixing phase - but the overall reaction to the launch has been positive, and people seem to be enjoying the new content and improvements. The launch also went relatively smoothly in stability terms, and we've not been fighting too many fires post-launch. Quite a few bug reports have come in for relatively minor gameplay issues and we've been steadily working through them, but most of the fixes for these are being rolled into Milestone 7. Performance Improvements: Although the various fixes for Milestone 6 have absorbed a fair bit of programmer time, we did also start working on performance improvements for Milestone 7. We asked the community what parts of the game they felt needed the most optimisation, and we're currently working to this list: Speeding up load times Reducing slowdown when alien UFOs spawn on the Geoscape Duration of the AI turn in tactical combat Explosions in the tactical combat causing framedrops However we didn't have too many replies on this particular topic, so if you're reading this and feel there are other areas of the game where the performance needs improving then please do let us know (remember that this should be based on playing standard builds of the game, as Experimental builds have much worse performance due to all their additional logging). We've already made some improvements to the tactical mission load times and the AI turn duration, and we'll be continuing with these during December. The goal here is to get these completely finished before we start public testing of Milestone 7, because these are the changes most likely to cause gameplay bugs! New Content: We continued to work on the new content for Milestone 7 over the past month. The strategy UI background art progression system is now fully functional (it had some teething problems when we tested it last month) and the artwork has been added to the game for the research and engineering screens, and we're now halfway through the base stores screen. The programming work to implement the aircraft paperdoll system (where the plane artwork updates as you change weapons and equip items) was also completed last month, and we finished the artwork for the Angel interceptor and all of the weapons. Work on the Phantom is now well advanced and we expect to have moved onto the Gemini by the end of December. We've also been working on various smaller content tasks, such as adding an additional tier of extra-tough Psyon / Sebillian / Wraith soldiers that accompany Eternals and appear on the hardest missions. These new aliens have claimed the "praetorian" rank, so we've added a new alien "warrior" rank and demoted the former elite / praetorian aliens down a level (the rank sequence now goes soldier / warrior / elite / praetorian). The game files for this have now been completed, and we'll be adding the 3d models for these new units after Christmas. We're also adding a new interrogation project for the Cleaner Leaders, as a few people have pointed out that it was weird that they didn't have one when the other types of Cleaner do. Again, the game files for this have been completed and we're hoping to get the research art and research text completed by the end of December. Conclusion: I think that's everything I wanted to cover. The only releases we have planned for the remainder of the month are our ongoing hotfixes for Milestone 6, with Milestone 7 not arriving on the Experimental branch until January - so I hope everyone has a good festive season and we'll see you all next year!

Yeah, you're right. These numbers are totally broken. We'll get that fixed in Milestone 7.

So the shot hitting isn't actually a bug - the enemies have a 10%-15% hit chance when shooting into that smoke, so it's not completely ridiculous that they could score a hit on a unit moving in the smoke. It's just fairly unlikely. However the one thing this has exposed is that the AI is using different thresholds for shooting at units during overwatch fire than for normal shots. It won't normally take a shot unless it has at least a 30% chance of hitting, but it'll overwatch fire at a 5% hit chance. So I think we need to unify those and make the aliens less likely to overwatch - as they will occasionally roll highly and score a lucky hit.

Players can remove those soldiers from the dropship, so you can still get in a position where you have too many soldiers and the rescued ones get left behind. But we'll reword the message.

Thanks. Yeah, doing extra crash site missions should be taking this value negative. We'll get this fixed.

Thanks. We'll take a look. I think there's a minimum accuracy threshold for the AI units to take a reaction fire shot, so I think something might be going wrong here. That much smoke should be making it impossible.