Hi,

This message is not a fake, nor an useless trolling.

I just played 2 hours of UFO:AI. It's great. I'm an XCOM fan, and I can tell it's a good start you have here.
But let me tell you a little story.

After having played (and the game crashed), I wanted to make a general feedback of my experience. Not about bugs. About UI and stuff.
I mad up a list of about 30 entries.
I got to the forum.
I read the sticky post about not making suggestions, or, before doing so, reading the proposals.
I read the proposals.
I cut down my list to about 20 entries, for the others were already taken in account.
I tried to register. Couldn't. Just couldn't. The question for registering couldn't just be answered right.
It was "In June 28th 2014, which game was born ? (red the News)" (or so).
I read the News. Found 4 names in this precise news : 'UFO: Alien Invasion' / 'UFO: Alien Invasion 2.5' / '2.5' (yes, 2.5, read the post) and finally 'ufoai'.
Tried them all. 10 times.
Couldn't create an account. Maybe it's a bug, maybe your security is ''just too high''.

So I decided I would file a bug. Discovered I had to create an account for this (so far, it's not really a surprise, although...).
Discovered I had to confirm my identity with an e-mail that gave me another password than the one I had just entered. And a very complicated one. I mean, you should just have open doors to people who want to contribute...

This story can go on with the day I wanted to play ufoai for the first time.
I got to the downloads section. Downloaded the data. Didn't understand I still had to compile the source, because there simply was no indication about this.
Saw there was a "compiling the source" link, as only other information about the installation in this very Download page, so I got there.
It linked to a wiki page of the "Coding" section, with no user-friendly information about compiling the source.
External links all pointed to hardcore dev ressources.
Finally found a a link in there about compiling the source in Ubuntu but again, it was everything but user-friendly, and knowing it came from the "Coding" section of the wiki, I didn't even want to try.
Should every user be a developer ?

I still didn't want to give up.

I got to the FAQ looking for a clear indication that I would HAVE to compile it myself, and hopefully clear information about how to do it. The first entry was about how to play it. No entry about installation, no link, no nothing.

After having run in circles in the website for about 10 minutes I found the help section, which was a tiny link in a tiny (but very classy) yellow menu, and this pointed me to the manual. Yes, I hadn't seen the Manual menu entry before - I noticed it after having found it another way.
From there I went to the Playdeb website.
No luck for you, their website isn't much clearer. It's probably not your problem, but it doesn't help the user experience.

So my message basically is : if you want people to play your game, just make it easy for them. It isn't that hard. I know it takes time and I definitely know how much you put in developing it, and in "more important" stuff about the game. Whatever. If you want to be rewarded, I beg you to consider the user-experience as a central matter.

Ok, now of the 20 entries I had (and that I'm keeping, mostly because I guess there isn't enough dev-power to listen and implement them), the most important ones are also about user experience, they are :
1. In-game tutorial.
Yes, I read the proposal about this. It's great. I would just add that creating a small scripted campaign would be the ''only'' true tutorial accepted by a wide variety of players. C'mon it can't be that complicated?
2. Statistics about weapons and stuff.
Couldn't compare any gun with another one. No pop-up about specs, no button to get info (I must admin I didn't crawl the in-game encyclopedia - it's real scary and I had read enough about the power plant and command center already). As I'm writing, I realise it may be because you want to make a realistic game, thus not giving internal stats about guns and stuff ? If this is the reason, it's great (really), but again, make a nice tutorial and let the user know about it. OR, improve the GUI so that as a player you don't have the feeling that the reason for not finding the info is just that the UI is simply crappy (hey, didn't say it was... but I may have had this feeling sometimes).

There would be hundreds of comments about the UI but again I guess you work hard and I don't want to make this sound like a troll.

Anyway, I'm indeed a bit frustrated right now, but I firstly came with good intentions that are still here ;-)

Oh, and of course, keep up the good work, 'cause it's indeed a pretty nice game you're working on.