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Xenonauts V1.03 Released!


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Well I have been with xenonauts since before kickstarter and have played and completed every xcom, including interceptor, and I have to say that the rapid decline in monthly funding drops faster than any xcom game that I have played and this causes the game to be lost before it even starts.

XCOM did +/- if you secured the USA it went up, if you ignore ASIA it went down. For the first few months this was perfectly fine and it allowed you to get a grip on the world because the positive countered the negative to a large degree.

However, In Xenonauts I have now come to fear the end of month in V1.0 - Funding drops so fast- (seriously? We are fighting for survival here!) that by the 3rd month pay day brings results in -£300.000 due to upkeep and wages. Suddenly instead of planning that base expansion to save South America, I am forced to run 6 mission just to get back to 0.

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I agree it might appear odd but if you can't do anything about it maybe it's intended that way and that doesn't equal losing the game or admitting you suck. Makes you wonder if people are generally spoilt to the extent they cannot accept anything but a flawless, smooth transition to the end game screen. Most complaints I see are something in the lines of "I lost XX funds in month one, how does the game expect me to win?" as if that automatically is too much to swallow.

Even if you lose a region, or two regions - so what? You can't win anymore?

No. As it stands now, if you don't have coverage on a region by the end of month 2 you have lost it.

If I lose a region, it should be because I screwed up, or I had to make a hard decision about saving one region and sacrificing another.

Right now, I lose regions because I didn't put my first base nearby and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

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No. As it stands now, if you don't have coverage on a region by the end of month 2 you have lost it.

If I lose a region, it should be because I screwed up, or I had to make a hard decision about saving one region and sacrificing another.

Right now, I lose regions because I didn't put my first base nearby and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

Well if you lose a region by the end of month 2 it means you haven't covered and protected it with your second base and considering you can observe real time how every region's funding trend is going it will be your call to let that particular region unprotected for a third month in a row.

Do you have a different definition of screwing up a strategic decision? Please factor in the fact that there are no other ways to lose a region in this game meaning if you have that particular risk nullified, you would then have to screw up beyond common game logic to lose any regions after month 2. Combine the two and you get my definition of boredom.

Edit: I'm in my third month and just built a base in Indochina, still no radar coverage there. I delayed it in favor of building a base in America since I observed the funding there drop faster. Still haven't lost any nations and unless I'm real unlucky I'll be able to save even Australia. That's on Insane. So what you are stating isn't exactly true as in 100 out of 100 regions you didn't cover by end of month 2 are lost.

Edited by KevinHann
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Just funny when you consider how fast some of these continents give up. If it was world war 2 germany would control the world in 3 months :)

Lol exactly. Which is why the Xenonauts should be able to go in and "persuade" recalcitrant governments to rethink their cowardly actions. Appeasement? Here, talk to my plasma rifle :)

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Edit: I'm in my third month and just built a base in Indochina, still no radar coverage there. I delayed it in favor of building a base in America since I observed the funding there drop faster. Still haven't lost any nations and unless I'm real unlucky I'll be able to save even Australia. That's on Insane. So what you are stating isn't exactly true as in 100 out of 100 regions you didn't cover by end of month 2 are lost.

What version are you playing? In my experience, 100 times out of 100 I lose any region not covered by my first or second base. Playing on veteran 1.03.

Do you have a different definition of screwing up a strategic decision? Please factor in the fact that there are no other ways to lose a region in this game meaning if you have that particular risk nullified, you would then have to screw up beyond common game logic to lose any regions after month 2. Combine the two and you get my definition of boredom.

Losing a terror mission, losing a base defense mission, getting your interceptors shot down, not being able to shoot down enough UFOs (despite coverage) to counter the negative funding from events those UFOs generate, placing a base in the wrong place, letting an alien base exist for too long.

There are many ways to screw up. I'd like to be able to put my first base somewhere except Europe and not have that be one of those ways to screw up, thanks.

Edited by legit1337
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Edit: I'm in my third month and just built a base in Indochina, still no radar coverage there. I delayed it in favor of building a base in America since I observed the funding there drop faster. Still haven't lost any nations and unless I'm real unlucky I'll be able to save even Australia. That's on Insane. So what you are stating isn't exactly true as in 100 out of 100 regions you didn't cover by end of month 2 are lost.

How much of this game was on 1.03 (with ground attack missions) though? If those are showing up in month 2 (Oct) and they're now doing enough attacks to cause massive funding drops that might be problematic. On the other hand it's quite possible to respond to attack reports outside radar range and catch UFOs, and with the new base costs it may be possible to get 3 bases with interception capabilities up in month 2, just without the radar coverage you'd ideally want.

Honestly rather than being too hard/unfair, I'd call the strategic part relatively inflexible in the first couple months. It's necessary to spend most of your funds on bases and interceptors, and you're limited in how many bases you can build and maintain, as well as in the good locations available for those bases. I'm not sure how problematic that is though, and the base cost rebalancing does possibly open up the use of more bases with fewer radars in each, but the inflexibility does certainly add to the learning curve a bit - especially for people not pretty familiar with the original XCOM.

Further messing with the invasion ticker scaling probably wouldn't be a good idea, but it might be interesting to check how quickly regions are lost if you do nothing on the various difficulties - if Normal or Easy are losing regions before late in month 3 (ie, before bases started at the beginning of month 3 would have radar coverage online) slightly scaling down the relations hits from attacks on Normal and Easy might not be a terrible idea. As far as I can tell all the scaling of the difficulty in keeping relations up is currently in the invasion progress ticker scaling, is that right?

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I would prefer the difficulty being in larger alien numbers on ships with harder to kill aliens, and perhaps higher hitpoint on ufos. Rather then just massive rapid decline of nation funding if you don't have 3 bases up by beginning of 3rd month.

Fortunately you can tweak all this yourself in the XML so its not a major issue really. Just adjust it how you like it. But for new comers, well they may be turned off by the game or find that easy setting is the ONLY mode they can play on.

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Are you serious? If so, mechanical vehicles do not gain combat experience.

I am not talking about reflex/bravery etc but STATS just like airplanes have already. And what's the point of them not being updated and always staying at '0' missions '0' kills for vehicles. If it's intended and not a bug then It's better to just remove this info from the window (and also get rid of renaming vehicle since it all is part of same personifying a thing).

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Did a few tests of how fast you lose regions on Normal doing nothing, and then a couple on Veteran as well.

First off, the bugs/quirks: one of the Veteran tests had the XCOM base attacked on Nov 27th, which had some oddities. It wasn't particularly clear I was supposed to try to return to the geoscape when I was done equipping troops, so the text box popups should probably mention that as a quick fix. Once actually in ground combat, on the first alien turn (between deployment and the first XCOM turn) the game CTD'd. That crash didn't repeat when I loaded the autosave at the start of the mission, so no savefile that reproduces it sadly. Then when I aborted mission, it first warned me that my troops outside the deployment zone were outside the dropship and would be lost (instead of telling me all of them would be lost as well as the base), and then hung on a geoscape not responding to any inputs and showing Sep 1 and starting funds, rather than telling me I lost the game. Have a save for that one, but I think I saw mention of a crash like that already being known? I'll go check the bug forum.

As for the results, on Normal I never lost any regions in the second month, though it looked like it might be possible with major bad luck, and I saw 0-2 regions lost based on projected funding before the 20th of the 3rd month (Nov) when bases started that month would likely be online, with 1-3 actually lost at the end of that month.

On Veteran, on 1 of the 2 games a region was lost in month 2, but was fine as of the 20th when month 2 bases would have been running. 2-3 regions were lost by the 20th of the third month, with 3-4 lost by the end of the month/my base being attacked.

With the new costs, having 3 interception bases running by the 20th of the second month is at least possible, so region loss in the first 3 months looks like it's at least theoretically possible to prevent on most/all Normal games, and not impossible to prevent on Veteran unless you get fairly bad luck. I'd say it's probably not bad where it is now from a luck vs skill standpoint for games started in 1.03, but it certainly feels tougher than in 1.02.

I am not talking about reflex/bravery etc but STATS just like airplanes have already. And what's the point of them not being updated and always staying at '0' missions '0' kills for vehicles. If it's intended and not a bug then It's better to just remove this info from the window (and also get rid of renaming vehicle since it all is part of same personifying a thing).

Reflex/bravery are also referred to as stats, which is probably the source of confusion, yes. That does sound like a bug, though minor compared to the crashes.

Edited by Nethris
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If there's going to be a solution, the best one might be to increase nation starting relations but reduce funding per relations point.

That way, you get the same money, but the impact of negative events is lessened (since each negative event produces less funding damage).

As it happens, it would also reduce funding sky-rocketing once you have three bases up and running, since the bonus from shooting down UFOs would be softened, too.

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Did a few tests of how fast you lose regions on Normal doing nothing, and then a couple on Veteran as well.

With the new costs, having 3 interception bases running by the 20th of the second month is at least possible, so region loss in the first 3 months looks like it's at least theoretically possible to prevent on most/all Normal games.

The problem is that there are no game prompts pushing you to go for 3 bases in 3 months and you sacrifice so much in terms of progression that i can see large numbers of players instinctively going for lasers/wolf/interceptors. The game doesnt feel paced to get a 3rd base up by December, it feels paced for a 2nd base in October/November and a 3rd through December/January.

Ignoring the financial issues balance atm, my solution for new players would be an instructional pop-up, this is because anyone coming from the new XCOM will have no idea about base expansion.

1)

End of first month - 2 hrs before funding window is displayed. Have a popup telling players what is about to happen.

"On the first of every month you will receive funding from around the world. However, these funds will change depending on how you deal with the alien threat on each continent.

As a result you need to carefully balance the following areas to maximize success:

1) Base expansion to protect a greater proportion of funding nations.

2) Weapons and armour as you battle the extinction of mankind.

3) Development of high speed interceptors to neutralize them in the air.

Our Intelligence analyst recommend that you have 3 bases fully operational by December."

2)

Next, 2 hrs before the end of Month 2. A new popup window.

"You are about to complete the second month of your global campaign.

Look carefully at the changes in funding and identify which nations are at the greatest risk of being neutralized by the alien threat.

Plan your base expansion so that you can protect these nations before you lose them permanently!"

Edited by flashman
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Or you could just play, get your butt kicked and then change tactics second time around. The game shouldnt hold your hand for you, some players will work it out, some will look it up online & some will just fail and quit, C'est la vie.

Not a good strategy for getting people to buy your game.

The game shouldn't hold your hand, but it should at least tell you what the hell you should be doing.

The guide should say something like: "Prioritize getting more radar coverage and constructing at least 2 bases, the more UFOs you shoot down, the more funding you get."

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Not a good strategy for getting people to buy your game.

Maybe, and your probably right. I just long for the days when the expectation was frequent failure and when you finally figured out how to beat a game it created real pride in the accomplishment. Stop interfering with my rose coloured glasses dammit! ;-)

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the question has been probably asked but I don't find any information about that

How can I update the game if I don't use Steam ?

I just load the last game available on the site using the link given when I bought the game but the version downloaded is the V1.0 and not the last one V11.3.

How can I go from V1 to V 1.3, ant patch available?

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People could just read the Quickstart Guide, like the very first loading screen tip tells you to do. Or read the Explanatory tooltips, which explain that. I don't think the game is that obtuse tbh. If people aren't willing to read the documentation and / or aren't willing to spend a bit of time experimenting with the game, they probably wouldn't have enjoyed the game very much anyway.

@soloje - without Steam, you'll have to wait until closer to the proper release on the 16th to get a final updated release version. Updating every distribution service with the new patch every time we do it is a lot of hassle, particularly if we port it across to Mac / Linux too, so Steam usually gets frequent updates and then we update the other services when we have a solid stable build.

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Just registered to say this. Please, add hotkeys for TU Reserve buttons! I just started the game for the first time (v 1.0), I liked very much how tactical combat works. But I have to click at this buttons for every soldier at the beginning of every mission, and that's tedious.

I know, you said that you will only fix critical bugs from now on, and this is not it. However, it shouldn't take much time to do, but will improve experience of the first comer like myself. I looked at game resources (experienced modder myself), looks like it's not possible to do without game source code. If you leave the game as it is without releasing the source code, this might become a little but still a disappointment for years to come...

PS: OpenXCom uses F1-F4 for this by default.

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