skitso's feelings on 20.8

I broke my hand last friday (damn icey, slippery walkway) and had to undergo a small surgigal procedure so I've had a lot of free time to play Xenonauts. I'm now a bionic man with titanium in my hand!

I started a brand new 20.8 game with easy difficulty setting (as I've had a bit of trouble with earlier builds) I had much better time this time around and the game felt FUN! The game never felt underwhelmingly hard (as it should be on easy difficulty setting) and it progressed quite nicely until corvettes.

Geoscape balance felt great and I had plenty of resources to found new bases and buy additional condors and foxtrots.

Ground combat still suffers from map repetition at least on scouts and small scouts. I also felt I got too few industrial tile set maps. AI is super great(!!) but seems to suffer some kind of bug that makes aliens strangely passive at least in crash sites. They rarely move towards my units or shoot on their own turn, but rather pull back to reserve TU's for reaction fire. This wasn't the case in previous versions.

Also one AI suggestion to GJ: when an alien unit dies in a spot that AI thinks is a good cover, other nearby aliens tend to move to that same position and take cover. If I happen to have a good line of fire in that sqaure, this often leads to a pile of bodies in same spot. So I think a dead unit should signal the AI that this isn't a safe spot for other units, so they would move somewhere else, even though this seems the safest place.

While the start of the game feels almost perfect, the main problem atm for me was that the game plot stuck to "interrogate alien officer" I had the same objective until I quit the game in march (I fast forwared a lot as I found out the game wouldn't progress). I never once had alien bases or base attacks and the game started to feel tedious, as all the missions I had was crash/landing sites and a few terror sites.

This is the first time I really enjoyed the game, so you guys are definitely going in right direction. I just feel that the game lost it's structure after first two months and started to repeat itself too much. One or two small and easy alien bases (with officers) and maybe one tougher after three months would have made the game progression perfect in my mind at least.

Thanks for reading.

Also one AI suggestion to GJ: when an alien unit dies in a spot that AI thinks is a good cover, other nearby aliens tend to move to that same position and take cover. If I happen to have a good line of fire in that sqaure, this often leads to a pile of bodies in same spot. So I think a dead unit should signal the AI that this isn't a safe spot for other units, so they would move somewhere else, even though this seems the safest place.

I think the AI needs more randomization in general when choosing where to hide. They favor one sweetspot so strongly that you can pretty much predict where the aliens hide if playing the same level more than once.. which you'll do a lot at the moment, unfortunately. I really hope GH people reads this

Also one AI suggestion to GJ: when an alien unit dies in a spot that AI thinks is a good cover, other nearby aliens tend to move to that same position and take cover. If I happen to have a good line of fire in that sqaure, this often leads to a pile of bodies in same spot. So I think a dead unit should signal the AI that this isn't a safe spot for other units, so they would move somewhere else, even though this seems the safest place.

Yeah. Also, even when the AI's not passive, they don't seem to "know" if they're in danger despite no-one being in LoS. It's possible to scout out an alien with a hunter and then shoot at it safely. Even if the alien takes damage, chances are he'll stay put, or at best move sideways to a different bit of cover. While other aliens should still come and help out, the damaged alien should try to move to the nearest LoS block (or even simply run away from the gunfire) if there are no visible Xenonauts on the aliens' turn. Sebilians might instead go out in a blaze of glory and run towards the Xenonauts. He's going to die if he stays put anyway.

Thinking about StellarRat's comment, I'm guessing assigning a strong negative weight to a tile in which an alien dies in that fades over time would help aliens to keep out of danger hotspots.

Yeah, this build is definitely more fun than the last one.