Hello and thanks for the valuable input guys. I can't stress how important it is, as one tends to lose perspective over time.
I just got Floater Commander corpse from a terror mission... is this a bug or a feature?
PS: I'm playing FMP 1.0.4
PS2: release notes to 1.0 say: "Aliens of the same race now should leave only one corpse type."
I think this change was mainly related to a certain critter,
But I suppose it would be nice if the floater leaders and such wouldn't drop a *COM_CORPSE clustering up the sell and research screen. But I don't know which impact that would have on the battlescape.
Apparently I missed this one. Sorry! Will be fixed.
In unrelated news, the alloy cannon is the most expensive thing in the entire craft arsenal now. Not that I am a raving lunatic about it, the opposite is true, but I want it to be somewhat viable. One full load or 200 shots now cost $112.000. That's 16 alloys (sell/manufacturing price $6.500 each; x16 = $104.000) + engineering time + base cost. By comparison one set of avalanches cost $27.000 which is currently in my game the least cost-efficient way to down UFOs, assuming one does not care about the repair time. To make a more fair argument, to achieve the same damage potential you would need three loads of avalanches but that's still only $81.000. If you are curious, I can attach my current craft weapon comparison calc table.
My suggestion is to either set the required alloys to 1 which would make the ammo still very expensive, remove it entirely then it is slightly more expensive than cannon ammo or make bigger clips x100 or even x200 and require only 1 alloy for them. The last suggestion, though, will most likely break savegames for people who use the alloy cannon already.
That weapon destruction on death rule has made me a real bean-counter. 
Well, I significantly lowered the monetary cost of the ammo production as well as cut the alloy cost by half, to 2 per 50 rounds. While it takes a lot of material to produce 50 Vulcan bullets, I don't think it's as much as a full body armour. Hopefully it'll help.
Having said that, the alloy cannon is an intermediate between the ballistic cannon and the gauss/laser one, so it doesn't have to be overly cost-efficient.
Also you forgot to set the clipsize for the alloy cannon's ammo.
Now, that sounds bad. I can't remember now, it was modded when I knew much less about OpenXCom, and it was mostly trial and error - and apparently this version worked.
Is there an actual problem with it?
In more positive news. Playing with standard weapons (excluding advanced weapons) I like how you balanced them. All of them have sufficient benefits and drawbacks to put them in a niche. I ended up with assault rifles with standard rounds for my grunts and rifles with alloy ammo for my snipers who would have an chance to hit >90%. Lesser snipers got the sniper rifle but they had to invest more TU. With that major nerf for the sniper rifles' TU the tactical sniper rifle also became very attractive. So good job!
Thanks, it's partially your doing.
Also that maintenance cost for the Ravens really hurts but it's a good pain. 
The Thunderstorm is pretty cool and with a higher tier cannon a beast.
I think that airforce development might actually be a bit too fast... But then again, maybe not - I think all craft are being used.
I would like to add a few pennies to the balance discussion. I hope this critique is not to harsh. I love your mod and I only intend the best and contribute in a slightly minor way as to make FMP even better.
True critique is never too harsh.
I have play tested the FMP up until rail weapons and I must say the deal breaker/unbreaker for a successful play through is a dependency on obtaining an engineer of some type. Unlocking laser/plasma/rails is a must. If you capture many navigators but miss out on engineers then you have the capacity to shoot down craft but you start to loose the capacity to deal with the ground situation. For instance once Mutons start popping up your normal weapons + alloy ammo is ineffectual. This is especially true for MIB missions. The normal soldiers can be removed fine however the heavily armored ones are ni impossible to take care of even with standard grenades. (this is pre discovery that the tactical sniper rifle came with HE ammo which I haven't tried yet. I avoid MIB missions at all costs. One because they are confusing and they don't drop that much good loot.
Well, yes. On the other hand, it's an early source of lasers and other good stuff (in limited quantities).
BTW I had a (late) MiB retaliation mission yesterday. Lost a decently defended secondary base... Wow.
As for the tactical sniper HE ammo, I don't really like it myself after all - it basically sucks, lacking the stopping power against most enemies. I'll make it a bit stronger.
Oh, and about Mutons and the like before energy weapons... Fire is pretty good. I've just won a battle against Gazers using only starting weapons and advanced firearms, mostly thanks to a flamethrower and its brave (and now quite dead) operator.
Remember that you don't have to win every battle, so it's okay if you pull out from the tougher ones. You'll get there in time.
The other issue is capturing live aliens. It takes 2-3 months to get an alien containment facility going. Live aliens captured before completion of this structure are useless. The stun weapons you get are not great. The stun pistol is worthless to start off with. It has such a low percent chance to hit, you have to get in at very close range, and if you do hit the odds that you are going to successfully stun the target are very low.
I can't really make it any more accurate, it's just a pistol-shaped wire launcher, but I can consider making it a bit more powerful.
The stun rod is good, but you do have to get very close and alien reaction fire can be quite severe. The dart gun is inaccurate as all hell and is more likely to get your soldiers killed in the process of capturing a single live alien and you have to land many many shots to capture it.
Hey, it's not that bad for a goddamn dart gun. I've actually improved it already, can't really make it even better.
I would suggest beefing up the stun equipment slightly as FMP relies heavily on capture but the stun equipment, in my opinion never really got looked at up close but was simply inserted to vary out weapon load outs. Simply giving small tweaks to the power and accuracy of existing tech would go along way to make capturing live aliens fun and enjoyable, and not a painful frustrating luck based process. Walking close to an alien and missing 4 of 6 tazer shots, not stunning it and it ends up killing 3 soldiers after the turn is over is not very fun. I would much rather set up a well placed and coordinated trap, loose 3 soldiers moving into position, and capturing a live alien with a single satisfying shot. (new video coming up demonstrating that in the LP.)
Through all this you actually have to find a live engineer which means you will be sacrificing many many troops. The chance that you will find an engineer is slim because they are one of many types and with ineffectual stun weaponry a hard catch. That coupled with the already narrow window to catch one of these engineers makes it a make or break moment for each play through.
Yes, I know all that. That's how it's supposed to be.
You see, probably the most important goal of FMP is to introduce more gameplay elements
in a meaningful way - so that the player could experience all the tech stages. It would be pointless to add more firearms to the game if they were replaced by better weapons within two in-game months. That's why I made sure you're stuck with rifles, shotguns and whatever advanced firearms you research for quite some time. This could be three months, could be a year - it's up to you to somehow get your hands on the alien knowledge. This is exactly the challenge I am aiming for, because it supports the goal I've described above. And it's quite rewarding to the player, I think - as long as you don't run out of things to research, which isn't typical. And I think it also makes each game unique, since you may get lucky and get Alien Subjugation very early, which makes things a breeze in comparison.
Does it make the game more dificult? In some ways, yes, but in a "soft" way, since you probably won't lose the game much easier than on vanilla. And there's also the option of decreasing difficulty if you feel like it.
After you get an engineer the tree opens up very very quickly. All the sudden you are breezing through the research as the tree opens up right to rail cannons.
Do you mean too quickly? I was worried about this...
This makes the heavy plasma and other plasma tier weapons not as useful because you can unlock rails quick.
Yes, and what's the problem with that? It's good for diversity to give plasma weapons some competition, right?
Besides, what competition? Plasma is overall best anyway. Maybe except for sniping.
You may disagree with some details here but I think the real issue is there is no real intermittent weapon in between standard human weapons and the rest of the tech. I think the alien laser rifle would fill this gap quite nicely. So my suggestion is a very simple one. Give players access to both alien laser rifle AND alien laser rifle clip on the same research.
And disable all human weapons straight away? Nah.
Gauss weapons are supposed to be the intermittent thing, along with alloy ammo. The alien laser rifle isn't hard to get, either, you only need one Engineer.
As it stands now, I can get to alien laser but not the clip and that is often times where I get a little stuck as I have to go hunt another engineer on an ever closing window of opportunity.
Like I said, as intended.
(Hey, if you think this is hardcore, try playing the ACM Mod for
UFO: Aftershock!
The first time you meet the Cultists is always a brutal wake-up call, and you
have to beat them, unlike in
Openxcom. Yet, I can't imagine playing
Aftershock game without this great mod.)
Alien Power Miniaturization is the keystone for the whole ground game and I think that alien rifle clip should not be tied to it so that you have at least something to answer to the monthly terror missions and large/very large UFO's. I would go further to suggest some more intermediate tech between human weapons and rail cannons and put another barrier in between them so that you can fully flush out and use all the tactical laser weapons for a while before moving on like in the air game, which is my opinion, in a much better place.
Can you please specify if it's a difficulty issue, or more of a pacing/design issue? Does the game suddenly throw too much stuff at you after a long period of fasting, or something like that?
Anyway, I can't see how the alien laser clip can not be related to the miniaturized power source. After all, it
is a miniaturized power source. If you could have this technology without having UFO Power Source Miniaturization, you wouldn't ever need UFO Power Source Miniaturization, since you could apply any laser alien laser clip-related technology that would essentially do the same thing (powerful hand weapons and armours). That's partially why the Toxigun was introduced - to offer some sort of alternative to high-voltage weapons, however narrow.
I don't mean I don't want to change anything, I just don't know what can be done, and primarily if there's even the need to do so.
There are many thing I like about the air tech. There are a lot of intermediate steps. You start out with a standard interceptor with cannons and sting rays, then you unlock the alloy cannons (which is quite expensive) then you unlock laser and gauss weapons. Along the way you get the Raven, a new Sky Ranger, then once you get a navigator you get access to the thunderstorm which is pretty awesome. Then ultimately you get the Tormentor which rules the skies. Even the endgame air game is balanced because refueling comes after a full repair so you need many of these crafts to perform well. I really love where the air game is despite the early bind small fighters can get on the player. The air games strength comes in it granular nature with an ever increasing array of tech that makes sense and can deal with upcoming and more powerful threats. This is something the ground weapons lack.
Thanks for the kind words. I think it could be because the air game is much simpler and less dependant on luck. Hmm, perhaps it would be better if there was less randomness in the ground combat research... On the other hand, I personally prefer it. I don't know, I need to think about it, and also hear more about it from you and the others.
Conversely if you only find engineers and no navigators, then shooting down ufo's from the very beginning is extremely rough because the small fighters cannot be countered by standard interceptors.
But Navigators are a dime a dozen, present on virtually any UFO. Besides, I think ground combat is more important in
Openxcom, since you can always assault landed UFOs and bases (not to mention terror sites).
This leaves to a different kind of problem with alien retaliations. If you cant shoot down small fighters you cant stop them from finding your base, and therefore larger and larger ufo's will come your way which are harder and harder to handle. This will peak to a base attack (SuperHuman) a difficulty scale that is way way out of your league. I had base attacks very early and had to contend with blaster launchers, extremely tanky terror units and mind control with machine guns sniper rifles and HE packs. This did not go well as soon as the mind control hit i was done for.
I know. I love it.
But more seriously, 1) I don't think shooting down Fighters is that hard if you have two Interceptors, and 2) Base Assaults frequency depends a lot on random dice and base location. In the vanilla, you can have an attack every week or two, or not experience any throughout the game. I don't think the FMP changes this too much.
Maybe make it so that small fighters can be downed by either several standard interceptors by making them more easily catch able (slower) but still just as dangerous, or slightly less dangerous so that you can do it solo but only by sustaining heavy damage on a single interceptor, or beef interceptors up a few notches. This would allow a player to counter a very early and severe fighter attack and prevent dangerous early escalation of alien retaliation missions with only impossible very large ufos flying around and the eventual and inevitable tomb stone engraving base defense mission.
Aren't you exaggerating a little?
Anyway, no nerfing the Fighters! They're exactly as they should be. Want to shoot them down - put your heart into it. And if you fail, well, base defense missions are rarely very bad. (Bear in mind I lost a base yesterday to an attack by MiBs, so they
are a threat, but they should be!)
For some reason I seem to be unlocking the air tech faster than the ground tech. Is this because both leaders and navigators give you access to air tech, and only engineers give access to ground tech? I would have to look at the code but I think that is right. Therefore, maybe have the leaders give access to either ground tech or air tech. That way engineers are always ground, navigators are always air, and leaders can be both.
That's how it's been since the very beginning - Leaders and Commanders give access to everything Medics and Engineers do. I'm not sure about Navigators at the moment, but I think that too.
That makes sense and may balance out the research a little. In short, add alien power miniaturization to alien leader research.
Sure, this can be done. (Though I'd be really pissed if I got this instead of, say, Fusion Explosives.)
Maybe I'm talking out of my butt, but that is my two cents (probably a quarter now that im looking at this posts size) on the balancing act that is FMP.
Great work! I Wouldn't be writing this if I didn't love the project.
See you out there
Jstank.
Thanks a lot Jstank, it was really valuable, helped me think and also offered some simple adjustments. Hopefully I'll hear more from you!
can update the avenger?
with copy and update the files is ready???
? What's wrong with the Avenger?
