Won: 142 missions
Lost: 1
Bases built: 4
Active: 4
Attacked: 10
So I finally beat your windows build from April 2014. Typically I played one battlescape game a night and did all the administrative work after the battle till I downed the next ufo. I found trying to do too many missions in one day made me tired and put my troops at risk of my fatigue.
From what I heard people have a lot of trouble exporting their saved games to a new build, where as I have played on the same build for 6 months now. I believe this has put me in a unique position to review your game. I had to use the same build because of problems I would run into on the linux build that I have written about elsewhere on this forum, but I had no trouble consistently running the windows executable of your game on a relatively 5 year old PC build running XP.
Before I start let me go into my background. I never discovered XCOM till the XCOM reboot Enemy Unknown (XCOMEU) game out a few years ago. I heard good things about the original XCOM so I went for it. I massively loved that game, particularly the shear permutations in story you could generate from each mission. I never got to finish it for reasons, but then I bought Xenonauts on GOG, the indie reboot of the original. While I was highly entertained I got really pissed when the game crashed every time I tried to invade an alien base. That's when I discovered your game. I want to point this out as I have never played the original XCOM (can't find DRM-free online, don't want to pirate) and I may make a lot of comparison to the previous versions I played.
Starting off the story seemed a bit complicated, but because of licensing stuff I can understand. It's basically a peaceful human future setting, though it's not clear how utopian or dystopian it is, or what happened to lead there. Any way I immediately became aware this game was made with lots of love when the google-world-view map opened. I would consider your view-map far superior over both XCOM EU and Xenonauts. Even the ship animations are cute, though I hope in the future you can make some areal combat animations beside the simple missile firings, like dog fights and stuff. Hell I would try to squeeze in a flight-combat simulator if I could. XCOM EU's flight-combat is annoying stupid. Xenonauts is a bit better, but usually it boils down to when to shoot and when to flee. I could never get enough money to invest in fleets in XCOM EU, but in Xenonauts they allowed you to assign squad formations so you wouldn't let an aircraft engage a UFO alone. In UFO AI you can't really assign squads unless you send your aircraft all at once, and if they aren't the same aircraft some can fall behind out of the squad as they all move at their maximum speed.
Another thing I like about this game is how much easier it is to govern funder relations. In XCOM EU it appears that the game is divided into Acts where panic keeps rising until you do something major in-game like invade an alien base, otherwise you have to constantly launch satellites in order to placate each funder. Xenonauts is similar, but from what I remember it just involved launch satellites and responding to abductions and UFO fly-overs. Both these games nearly made it impossible to keep every funder happy, but with UFO AI you can placate nations that you haven't built bases in, built radar coverage for, or responded to abduction incidences by bidding out alien spacecraft. This is great as it can placate hard to reach nations while making money. Typically I only sold damaged alien crafts and I never had a problem with selling too much alien technology as it would take so damn long for my workers to disassemble them. This is the reverse of the problem I ran into XCOM EU as I sold too soon critical alien technology to built certain things, all because I needed the money.
The macroscopic game started easily enough. I would detect UFO's in my small radar range and bring them down, gradually building up money to build more radar stations. I don't understand the logic of why my installation builds are limited to the number of bases I operate, but typically I would build a radar station with a missile silo as my aircraft could never reach a radar station in time. I also never dealt with a bombing of my installations, which would make the game more interesting. The only base invasions I ever dealt with were the ten attacks on my main base. I don't know what the conditions are for them to invade a base. Do they have to fly a Scout ship unmolested over my base to see it? I would have a lot of close-calls of ships flying over or near bases, but they never attacked them except for my main base.
The game went on well enough until the Gunships started coming out. Then I would not only lose whole squadrons but drop-ships as well. It got so bad I grounded my fleet, only responding to UFO incidences near my base. This is were funding started becoming a problem, but I weathered it until I could develop the Stingray, which seems the only human aircraft that can take on Gunships. Typically I tried to stay in the black budget wise, but I started going into the red when I grounded my fleet. However when it became evident that I had to expand my operations or watch my troops die off, I started pursuing every easy UFO I saw, and eventually I made a profit selling these UFO's. As a bonus I found this not only increased funder happiness but also increased funding as well, but again I never ran into the uncomfortable situation of needing alien technology for myself as it would take so long for my workers to disassemble UFOs. And yes I would locate my UFO depot near the base that was disassembling, though a few times I mistakingly assigned a base's disassembly of a craft for a depot at another base.
When I first encountered the battlescape, I expected poor graphics because this is a Quake engine, but I played the original Deus Ex so I know you can build a great game with poor graphics. I always felt restricted by tile-movement games, but the premise of XCOM is so accessible I managed to overlook this. XCOM EU doesn't seem to have tile-movement unless you seek cover, which the vast majority of time you had to do anyway. The user interface (at least for the April 2014 build) was intuitive, giving the camera a greater degree of freedom than in either XCOM EU or Xenonauts which still uses the fixed-camera isometric game play. The most annoy thing however was when descending the camera one floor it made the entire floor above it disappear. This makes it harder to gauge where cover is relative to enemies on higher ground. I understand the restrictions of the Quake engine, but since you allow greater freedom in camera movement it should be possible to allow an outline of the higher floor obstacles to remain.
My biggest disappointment is the visibility/fog-of-war. Xenonauts is superior in this case as the entire battlescape is black except what is illuminated by the small sight-cone of each solder's eyesight. This heightens the tension when it is discovered the aliens observe infrared and can see farther than your troops. It also doesn't make a big cut-scene every-time you encounter an alien squad like in XCOM EU. My favorite moment was when I was doing an alien terror mission and one of my guys was looking out from the drop-ship's back, only to turn around to find a Chrysalis had snuck up behind him through the ship's backdoor. In UFO AI it seems you're limited in that you have to render the entire map, so to compensate you make aliens invisible unless a solder directly spots them, but this makes it harder to tell where my solders are looking at as well as give me a false impression of the surrounding area. Another nice thing Xenonauts would do is keep the render of the previous area you looked at while graying it out, making it clear what areas you had previously explored but are not aware of alien presence at present.
Let's talk about weapons. There is a good starting selection, but they become quickly obsolete as you acquire plasma guns from the aliens. This is mainly due how light the alien weapons are. In general the game is very tight on the action points (TU points?), which makes it difficult to scout, seek cover and fire, not to mention it severely limits the amount of equipment you can arm your troops with. I couldn't even equip them with armor while having nearly no space of guns and ammo. The equip menu is nice, it feels like I'm doing a boy version of dress-up doll, but it would be nice if the game could let you auto assign custom classes.
For instance my typical support class included a laser rifle, two magazines, a med kit, and as many smoke grenades they could carry, with a few plasma grenades thrown in, otherwise it was just two smoke grenades. I call this a support class because this type of solder was very good at holding their own, both in being lethal while being able to take care and cover their squad mates.
After that there were my snipers. As I've said else where in this forum I found the sniper rifle the only human weapon I would continue to use well into the advanced stages of the game. I tried replacing it with the electro-magnetic rifle, but it was just too heavy and had to little ammo, plus the learning curve for my troops seemed kind of high with it (they would suck with it at first, but after two or three kills they became a deadly marksman). I never got to try the coil gun or any of the other advance magazines for the electromagnetic rifle.
After these two main classes, I would try something different with solders that looked like clones of each other (really you guys should have more character designs. Perhaps give them distinguishing characteristics like which of the seven countries they are from. Have you made flags for the new countries of this 2050 century?). Typically I would use heavy weapons, but this greatly restricted their range in both their walking and firing distance. Typically they were good for close quarter combat and surprises, otherwise their inability to carry any additional equipment made them useless in everything else. I'd also try throwing armor on some of them, but this would reduce them to holding just a laser rifle. If I was really strapped for space I'd through a particle pistol on them, but this rarely made them effective. I didn't notice much of a difference when upgrading from the combat armor to the nano-armor, though I'm a bit annoyed that the armor covers there face, which a usually what I rely on to distinguish them from each other. It's a quicker visual key than their name. Maybe you can allow an option where the character can choose to randomly customize their armor with flames or skulls.
After the laser rifle I tried upgrading to the particle rifle, but this rarely out performed the laser rifle. It's lighter but its magazine is so small you have to pack extra. It's aiming is also a bit wacky and doesn't have the precision or damage area the laser-rifle has, though I noticed it could take out an org occasionally with one 3-burst shot.
I don't remember much of the other human weapons because they became obsolete so fast. The submachine gun was useful in that it was lighter, but was risky as it never had much of a punch in close quarters. I typically avoided the rocket launcher as I do in all video games due to its low magazine and high suicide rate. The latter is the same reason I found the grenade launcher unattractive. Again though this maybe just the battlescape's fault as it isn't clear what's and obstacle and what could be shot past.
Anyway this post is starting to get more scattered brained and there are more details I'll add latter, but if I don't post this now I'll never finish it. If you have any specific questions I'd be more than happy to answer them.
