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Feedback, 1st time player

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xarvh:
Ok, first of all, great game.
It's rare to find such a game for free, for linux.
It worked pretty fine from the start, no tweaking, no missing libs or any other technical problem.

Then.
I've NEVER played any UFO/X-COM games, and i found the interface not really intuitive and a bit unconfortable: it wasn't easy to figure out the rules of the game.
In detail, I won't expect to go to the "aircraft" menu to change the equipement of my squad, and I'd find useful to be able to buy things right from the equipement menu, or at least close to it.

The tutorial is completely useless, as it simply states the name of the interface items, which can be found in the interface itself.
A useful device, would be to assign the right mouse button (or SHIFT+left or something else) to the description of the button/interface element.
For example, in the Reaction button, what's the difference between one and two marks? Why my men don't always react?
I know no rules other than the real world, so i expect that if an enemy appears right in front of the barrell, the actor should be able to react.

It would also be great to have, in the uppermost tab of the tactical screen, the faces of the team members instead of the numbers, even if it would be quite bigger.

I was also a bit confused by the recruit/hire menu: it wasn't straightforward to discern between hired and not-hired personnel, the x/v button was just a flag, one (I) would expect hiring someone a bit more "definitive" procedure.
Like: hired on the left side of the screen, available for hire on the right.

Not sure if a comment on the game system/balance is appropriate, but i cannot understand how do i earn money other than pillaging alien weapons: the research and production of my base is staggering slow, but i cannot afford other labs.

About the learning process, I'd like to see a learning rule based on failures: whenever the success probability is at least say 20% and the actor fails, she/he's awarded a very slight increase.
This would allow the actor to improve all his/her skills with a peaked preference for the one/two that are more used in a non-trivial way (like shooting always point-blank or whatever).
If applayable skills may be influenced, the actor may improve also when wounded.

Last thing: the "register" button on the forum is almost impossible to see, it took me like 10 minutes to find it. =)

Hey, i've been critical only because i liked the game and considered worth using my time to write here.
Is an overall impressive job, with great graphics and gameplay.
Keep up the great work!

Mattn:
thanks for your feedback.

to some points:
try to switch the hud to "althud" in game options dialog

Reenen:
Thank you very much for posting!

I think that having more people like you (people who are unpolluted by opinions created by the previous commercial games) will introduce new angles to the designers.  Critique like the "Aircraft" tab for equiping is very good, because it's easy to address, and very valuable for newcomers.

I too think that (the last version I saw) was not quite documented well enough, but documentation is some of the stuff that in open source gets done last... however the team is working on the UFOpedia at a huge speed, and even documentation is picking up nicely.

Elbenfreund:
Heya ! :)

about the documentation: this issue should be solved by tomorrow ;) I finished a quite ok beta of the manual some hours ago which i unfortunatly cant upload before this very late evening / tomorrow. I hope that does the trick on most initial problems.

on some of the points:

dont bother about the cash ;) economy isnt realy implemented yet *AFAIK*

"buy/sell  items menu to far away": at least for me this never was a problem as you hardly buy / sell stuff once your team is equiped.

ok, i will mess up the board again if i got some more time, see you soon: Eric.

xarvh:
The alternative gui is indeed better, i cast my vote for further developement of it! =)

One last remark: having the two mouse buttons do the same thing (ie, command the actor to move) is not really good.
When selecting a target to fire to, i can Rclick to cancel the action (that is Rclick does the opposite of Lclick, which fires).
Instead usually they both make the unit move... this is not really intuitive, and makes me confused.
When selecting an actor I often aim the pointer wrong (ok, you can just answer that the game is not targeted to stupid people... =) and when i click, instead of selecting the new actor i command the old one to move there...
Now, maybe i'm a RTS fan, but i'd suggest to use the two mouse buttons to do always different things like: Rclick commands, Lclick selects (StarCraft style) or Lclick commands and selects but Rclick unselects everything (Command & Conquer style).
For my TBS game I'm using the StarCraft system and it works quite good.

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