A useful piece of writing advice is to murder your darlings. Well the tech tree is darling to me, but I play tested it and it just wasn't fun. Too many filler techs that add nothing. So that's getting gutted and I am considering starting over with it. Ditto for the crafting system, though I am going to try playing with alien weapon self destruction to see if that can help reduce the sheer amount of micro management a crafting system generates. Basically, those are the two big bug bears that hold this project back from even a beta release. Technically, its playable from start to finish right now. It just isn't fun.
In better news, the new UFOs near completion. After my initial series of UFOs, I did some testing and I still find like 90% of the missions involve scouts. This is partially the fault of me using the vanilla UFO deployments which use a ton of smaller craft. I still need a few more mission specific UFOs. I made a constructor ship which only shows up during the building of an alien base. I also added a destroyer which only shows up during retaliation missions. The cloner UFO is done too and it shows up on infiltration and alien base missions. I still feel like a need a few more. It would be nice if almost every mission had a two specific UFO types.
On the battlescape side of the new UFOs, I have done a bit of testing on that too. Many of the UFOs hover on the battlescape so boarding actions must take place using grav lifts. This makes the initial breach more difficult on many UFOs. The Battleship is ground level, but still a freaking death trap. Supply ships are easier to clear, but harder to approach now since aliens are constantly popping out of its side doors to take potshots.
I also think I fixed my M_range_check issue. One of my tiles reference a non existent dead tile. I haven't gotten a crash since then.
Also in good news, I finally managed to make some really good new alien weapons to replace the older more vanilla models.
Unfortunately, these new alien weapons make the XCom plasma weapons look lame, so I may end up having to replace those down the road too. I still need to replace the small launcher and blaster launcher though. I think the aliens are going to get something a little better than the small launcher, but the blaster launcher will probably just get a reskin. I also want to add some more elite weapons for the late game aliens.
