New user, with a suggestion you've heard 100 times, and some feedback

[geever]

Actually, this is exactly how the team always thought about this.

Well, I would agree in almost any other code parts but this is more complicated. As the game is not yet finished, the codebase will change a lot. If we accepted patches, soon it would age, being incomplete, broken, conflicting with the upstream code. We fould find it necessary to maintain the code we agreed not maintaining to be able to make a release or simply make the software working. There is only one solution to that problem: Not accepting patches for battlescape saving. Of course anyone is free to make a fork, this is Open Source.

-geever

[hwoarangmy]

Well, I would agree in almost any other code parts but this is more complicated. As the game is not yet finished, the codebase will change a lot. If we accepted patches, soon it would age, being incomplete, broken, conflicting with the upstream code. We fould find it necessary to maintain the code we agreed not maintaining to be able to make a release or simply make the software working. There is only one solution to that problem: Not accepting patches for battlescape saving.

That's an interesting vision and I agree it would not be an easy task to maintain (and I know what we are talking about here). But IMHO, UFO AI is advanced enough to such a feature. But we all know UFO AI is a spare time project so if the team do not want to have that on its shoulders, it's understandable.

[anonymissimus]

Well, I would agree in almost any other code parts but this is more complicated. As the game is not yet finished, the codebase will change a lot. If we accepted patches, soon it would age, being incomplete, broken, conflicting with the upstream code. We fould find it necessary to maintain the code we agreed not maintaining to be able to make a release or simply make the software working. There is only one solution to that problem: Not accepting patches for battlescape saving. Of course anyone is free to make a fork, this is Open Source.

At least that's a serious point, rather than the futile attempt to force the player not to cheat. Other games I know treat the matter in a much more mature manner, they hand over the responsibility for cheating or not cheating to every player on his own. Your point implies that it does not need to be that way forever though.
I can throw in yet another argument: Even in 2.5 - stable - I occasionally was experiencing a crash or otherwise severe bug during battlescape. While they are very rare, it's a pain to restart the whole mission because of that. (And it's not cheating if done because of a bug!)

[Rodmar]

On v2.5 stable, I can report 1 or 2 crashes for 150 missions so far. It seems (but I lack data) that it was related to the last living alien on the map; well, last time, only one alien was deemed remaining but hidden (perhaps dying?) and the crash occurred during the alien turn. Next time I try and think about joining an event log.

[anonymissimus]

Well, right now you have to secure the power core and the PSI-device for some turns to win the alien base mission. As the AI actively tries to prevent the player from reaching his objectives, this plays different and thus is a nice addition

So I played my first base attack in this playthrough. The "and" condition here should be an "or" - I held the power core target zone for I think 3 turns and that won me the mission. I don't know whether you are supposed to hold both places (simultaneously or one after another ?) but conquering only one of them seems more logical, it is symmetric to what the aliens try to do when invading a Phalanx base. The aliens in an alien base seem to wander around much less randomly than they used to do, similar to how they're behaving in a Phalanx base now. They seem to be heading strongly for the target zones. This makes 'static smoke wait' tactics on the entrance ramp much less useful and reduces the need to look around for the last few aliens greatly. When attempting to win via target zone (as opposed to winning by killing all aliens), perhaps the easiest method is to head with all soldiers for a long straight hallway leading to the Psi device room (the map part file is called wormhole when opening in radiant) and then shooting from a distance onto the aliens which should frequently happen to move into shooting position. When I was about to enter the power core room, I had a hard time doing so since I had to do it around a corner and aliens were rushing out with their plasma blades.
The power core room is the one with the two rectangular light green illuminated tanks.