Silencer

I agree and disagree. The tracks do use lots of resources but it also adds some more strategy to things. It's not just a matter of capturing everything you can as fast as you can, you need to think about the costs and rewards of different areas and make your expansion decisions carefully. In my opinion this also gives bases a huge strategic value. Since each base brings in different types and amounts of resources and allows you to connect to bases in other areas they differ greatly in their importance. For example Paris, London, Malaga, Buenos Aires and other towns are very important either because they provide many resources or allow connections to many other bases or regions of the world. Coastal towns are especially vital. Meanwhile you have other bases like Seattle which provide few resources and don't connect to anything, but are so close to other bases that you can easily connect them for extra building space. Other bases are just too far and don't provide enough return to be worth it, and often times you are better off not connecting to certain areas of the world until much later. However I do agree with one point, and to me it is one of the most annoying aspects of the game. The bases are too small. It's not so much the size of the bases even, it's the fact that as you get more bases it becomes increasingly difficult to actually remember and keep track of what each base does. What knowledge level do your bases have? How do your have your labs and factories distributed? It become increasingly important to reorganize your bases so that you can make the most of your limited space and resources, but there are so many bases that it is impossible to keep track of this. It would be much better all the "bases" were simply capturable mines for strategic resource purposes and bases were a seperate entity that worked more like they did in the X-Com games. Players should be able to build their own bases in any political region that they fully control and is connected to the track network. Bases would be large like the X-Com bases with plenty of room to build, but limit them to one per region and have a high construction and upkeep cost to compensate. This way we can have a few large bases positions when and where we need them but still maintain the rather nice political/resource system that is already inplace for an added level of strategy. I agree it would be nice to have more interaction and trading between the you and the factions. At first I hated this. Then I kinda got used to it. Then I figured out that you can expand it to 7. Now with 7 it seems like a lot. There are still times when I wish I had more space, and I don't think it would hurt the game to have more, but I think I've been converted from my X-Com days of Avengers with 20+ troops. This also annoys me sometimes. The maps are pretty repetetive, and with only a few mission types things get very familiar very fast. I remember in X-Com each mission felt like a new experience but with this game it's more of a "which one do I get this time". I think the map size is fairly good for the smaller squads we have but we definitely need a LOT more map tilesets and they need to be better randomized. Things are just too familiar each time around to be scary.

It's a well known fact that aliens have trouble with doors. Haven't you seen Signs?

One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn't belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others By the time I finish my song? http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/9045/interestingwaytostarta1ql.th.jpg Interesting way for a cultist base assault mission to start, no? Shame it wasn't a capture mission with him being the target

Does everyone get virtually unplayable performance when line of sight mode is enabled? If I have line of sight mode enabled and the time is running (any speed besides pause) the performance drops to levels that are ridiculously slow. I can't even control the screen properly. I try to scroll the screen and nothing happens then it jumps way farther than I wanted to go, rotation is extremely jerky and does the same thing with long pauses and huge jumps, and virtually everything else including the game speed itself slows to a crawl. If I pause the game everything works fine again, and I suspect it must be the line of sight calculations for the aliens as they move around (as it happens even if my guys are standing still), but this is honestly ridiculous. Is there some setting or tweak I can do so that line of sight is actually usable? The only part of my machine that MIGHT be causing this is the fact that I only have 512mb of ram in it at the moment (new ram had a bad stick, waiting for replacements) but even that is within the requirements so I'm not sure. Is there anything I can do besides not using line of sight mode and having lots of my guys killed because I 'missed' a spot that I thought I had cleared?

I agree it doesn't make sense to lock it in 1024x768. The only reason I can imagine for not allowing this is that they made a stupid mistake and 'forgot' to make the interface scaleable, and that by the time they realized this it was far too late to fix it in time. It's unfortunate too because although the game doesn't look "bad" in 1024x768 it doesn't look that good either, it looks like it is several years old already. Hopefully they will add this ability in a patch.

Well the good news is that Aftershock will be released in the US. The bad news is that as far as I can tell it will be a few weeks before it's actually available. In the meantime I'm curious if I can mod the demo to get a little more life out of it. I don't want to do anything drastic, basically I just want to increase the quantity of ammo and guns in my inventory so I can try a few new loadouts. I'm not talking about adding new guns or anything, just giving myself more of what is already there. This may not be possible but I might simply be doing it wrong so this is what I have done... 1: Using VSFTOOL 1.3 I unpacked the gamedata.vfs to d:\UFO Aftershock Demo\unpack\ 2: I make a new folder d:\UFO Aftershock Demo\repack\ 3: I copy the folder d:\UFO Aftershock Demo\unpack\demosave\ and the files in it to d:\UFO Aftershock Demo\repack\demosave\ 4: I make no changes to these files, I'm just trying to repack it to test it out 5: I repack the files by doing "VSFTool in gamedata.vfs repack" and it packs the 3 files and says ok 6: I load the game, and after clicking NEW GAME it crashes at 44% while loading tactical data Am I doing this right? Since it always crashes at 44% while loading tactical data rather than the game not starting at all or giving an error it seems more like I'm repacking it wrong than the game rejecting a modified file, but I'm not sure. I also tried updating the MD5 but it still crashed at the same place. Does anyone have any ideas?