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Milestone 2 is not yet ready for public consumption, but it is available in a rough form for people who want to help us experiment with a few new mechanics. To access the build, enter the branch password xenonautsproto and switch to the Prototype branch. However, please read the whole post before doing so! We're testing out a few new mechanics that we want to get people's opinions about before we commit to updating the UI and getting new artwork done etc. I'll spend a bit more time than normal explaining the logic behind the design decisions here, as that will hopefully allow people to tell us whether they think the changes achieve their intended goals or not. Panic: One of the biggest problems with Milestone 1 is that there's no easy way to reduce Panic in a specific region, which means that on harder difficulty settings you need to build additional bases and aircraft as quickly as possible otherwise you'll quickly reach the point where you start losing regions. Panic will now decrease by 10% in each region at the end of each month. However, the Panic reduction for shooting down UFOs has been halved from -2 to -1. This means that Panic generated from Cleaner activity or Alien Bases or failed tactical missions will dissipate more quickly, while making interceptor coverage *slightly* less beneficial (although it's still pretty strong). Note that due to a bug this is happening before the region loss check (which means you need ~110 Panic to lose a region) but we'll change this if the change is popular. Also, this change only solves half of the problem in Milestone 1, as the player still lacks a targeted way to reduce Panic in a region. However I think it's a useful first step. Funding: Funding is no longer dependent on Panic level. A region will grant you full funding (which increases as you progress down the storyline) unless you lose the region, in which case funding will fall to zero. This change was made to support some other experimental changes I've not put in this build. But it means that building a base in a region doesn't increase income as much. Previously you'd get extra funds from shooting down UFOs and completing the crash sites, but then also gain extra funding from the fact keeping Panic low in the region granted extra funding. This hopefully means it's less essential to rush to cover the whole world with your planes as soon as possible. Mission Order: The game now starts with a Cleaner deathmatch mission, which is then followed by a Secton Abduction site. The plan is to make the opening Cleaner mission a bit more exciting - potentially even a continuation of the base defence mission from the tutorial where you clear the base of the attacking Cleaners, then evacuate to your new base. But the goal is to add an extra Cleaner mission and use that as a way to introduce them better at the start of the game. We've then slightly slowed down the progression over the next three months, and in particular we've moved the Cleaner Intel Hub mission back a couple of weeks so it comes after the first UFO crash site. We're open to ideas about how we can make the Cleaner mission sequence a bit more interesting, as it seems like not everyone likes the Cleaner Network idea where the main way to advance is just to capture more Cleaner Data on missions. Feel free to throw ideas out on this topic. Tech Tree / Item Upgrades: One of the recurring discussion points on the forums is whether Accelerated Weapons are a "trap" or not, and I've attemped to make their purpose a bit more clear through some tech tree changes. Accelerated weapons are now an upgrade for Ballistic weapons - i.e. a one-off project that permanently upgrades all Ballistic weapons to be Accelerated weapons. The same is also now true for the Warden Armour, which is now an upgrade for Defender Armour which increases the protection offered. As such, I've moved Guardian Armour forward in the tech tree so it can be unlocked off Scout UFOs rather than Destroyers. This means the player is given the choice of two relatively quick and cheap upgrades at the start of the game, but are also given the option to research more advanced weapons (lasers) and armour (Guardian) within the first month. But you're also presented the option to pursue the story research, which increases your funding - so hopefully this presents the player some interesting choices in the early game to try different strategies. To stop this being overwhelming, I've moved the Dragonfly and Phantom to be unlocked off Destroyers rather than Scouts. Finally, I've tried to expand the item upgrade options. There's a project that allows you to reduce the weight of Defender Armour, and Laser Weapons now have two upgrades that provide Recharging Ammo and increased Damage respectively. Guardian Armour also has an upgrade that increases the protection it offers which is unlocked from Destroyers. I'd be interested to know whether people like these increased upgrade options. Soldier Module System: I've removed all the existing soldier "modules" which could be placed in the soldier tactical vest and these are now replaced by the following set up: Extra Armour: all armour now weighs less and offers less protection, but there's a Heavy Armour toggle in the bottom right that will increase protection at the cost of extra weight. This is designed to make the armour more flexible rather than "heavy" armour like the Guardian being useless for low-Strength soldiers. The only gameplay consideration is "can the soldier carry the extra weight?" Armour Module: you can now choose a single module from a second dropdown below the existing Armour dropdown. At the start you can either choose from a rebreather that provides smoke protection, a +3 Acc boost or a +5 Bravery boost, however almost all the modules from Milestone 1 reappear as you progress down the tech tree. Obviously the question is simply which one module you choose to use. Jetpack: as previously, the jetpack is another toggled option. I just don't think it's useful enough that anyone would ever use it if we made it part of the Armour Module list. My question here is simple - do you prefer this to the module system in Milestone 1 where your inventory was full of modules? There's scope to add extra artwork and improve the UI if people like the basic idea, but it'd be nice to know people's initial impression of the changes. However, from a design perspective there's some overlap with the Item Upgrade system above. Some of the modules could potentially be folded into upgrades for the armour (particularly the Jetpack) - although then the danger is that you have soldiers that can do everything, and once your armour is upgraded you no longer have to choose between say a +TU boost, or a +ACC boost, or health regeneration, etc. Let me know your thoughts on this setup and where you'd like to see the design go. Incomplete Balance Changes: These are further balance changes I expect to make prior to Milestone 2 reaching our main Steam branches: Panic will be checked for region loss before the -10% monthly decrease occurs. Abduction missions will not end when the timer expires. Instead, the tubes will be present for X turns before teleporting away, and you get rewards for each one you open. However all the aliens must still be eliminated for victory. Starting Cleaner mission will probably happen immediately after beginning the game, before you go to strategy (rather than being a mission you do on day 2 or so).

This caught my eye... jetpack would be extremely useful if the maps were just more vertical and being higher grounds provided more buffs. Changing accelerated weapons to being an upgrade to ballistics sounds like a good idea, but I'd like the upgrads to be weapon type specific. Similar upgrade path to armor doesn't sound like an improvement Item upgrades sound sweet. More the better. Regarding the module system, I kinda enjoy the Tetris mini game we have atm, where I need to balance my backpack between modules, weapons, grenades and other items. Changing the abduction missions to be one more "kill all aliens" mission feels a step in a wrong direction. Regarding the cleaner mission chain and progression: Gathering intel for intitial progress is fine and I love the mission (best map so far), but the daily automatic percentage gain after that feels somewhat gamey and boring. You should add more quick and simple cleaner missions where player could earn that progression instead, capture additional intel, capture and interrogate cleaners etc. I also suggested somewhere that cleaners could be added to crash site missions to clean the wreck and alien corpses. This would add a nice new dynamic to those missions where the more player waits before raiding the site, the more there would be cleaners. Avoiding these add-on cleaners could also push people to do these crash site missions at night, before cleaners arrive. Edit: Here's my initial suggestion

Hi folks. Late to the party. I kickstarter'd, but have not played until now as I was waiting to see what happened and more content before spolier'ing myself by playing too much. Cleaners are an interesting arc that does need more side missions. "Kill the boss," and "steal the data" are good starts, but how about "Stop the payload?" Whether the payload is a bomb (boring) or an terror mech that is being powered up but delays when you blow up an alenium reactor, do them all in 10 turns and then you get a free "stopped terror invasion" reward, if not, you have a terror site shortly after. Or defend against a base invasion. Something like that. Variable based on your performance. Things that are region specific - panic or undermining your budget. Would be nice to be able to manufacture and send aircraft, rather than having to have an empty hangar (at 100k+operating expenses) just for that. Slightly disappointed at the lack of varied stat differences between weapons other than damage. The accuracy perk on laser weapons quickly becomes moot unless you're treating your troops as disposable. Glad there is a bit more of a time gap between laser and plasma research, but lasers still quickly become useless. However, my biggest gripe is that the stun weapons are awful. Not too fussed about not getting gas grenades straight away (I overused those in Apocalypse,) but a pistol with 6 range, terrible stun, and terrible accuracy? A melee stick which requires 3 hits? Risk vs reward, please. Still can't deal with the base box room with shelves costing 100k and taking 15 days Also upgrading to Ele, sorry, Alienium reactors I'd like to have a minor upgrade the base's stock energy cap so at least you can fit in a decent defence battery. Aircraft cannons are lacking a rate of fire or DPS stat (e.g. laser lance) for us to be able to decide whether a weapon is worth the effort or not. The alloy plate upgrade should be single, cheap, but require you to refit some equipment, e.g. aircraft. Warden was an alloy upgrade to defender anyway. "Friendly" NPC AI really needs to stop running into UFOs and getting turned into gibs. And stop trying to cuddle those nasty green orbs on terror bomb missions. They literally make a beeline for them. Unsettling. Except from my time in the original UFO series, it wasn't immediately clear that corpses and weapon parts can be sold after research is complete. Newer games required you to hold onto weapon parts (or bodies) to make things - please pick one, and let us know clearly. Would still like aimed accuracy at adjacent enemies in the case of weapons designed for it to be an almost guaranteed hit, regardless of accuracy stat. Watching two out of three shotgun pellets, or pistol fire, missing something next to you, which still happens a lot at 80+ percent, is still a "why?" moment. Like UFO, I would like to recruit scientists/engineers into the base to coincide with the opening of the labs/workshops, and not have to wait 3 extra (unproductive) days after it is complete. The bleed notification happens twice. Once when the soldier is hit, once when the turn starts. Second one only would be my preference. Also, how can we tell if a soldier just got wounded rather than killed (35%)? An armour perk (or module) that has a chance of invoking incapacitate/slow bleedout, so giving you a chance of rescuing them from death with a medkit. Which you might research into a capped HP regen perk later. The amount of ankle or knee high structures that cause 40% or more block are...well, there's just a lot of them. Big stuff like cars? 60%, is fine. Waist high? Sure, 40%. Not ideal for cover, but there we go. Lower? should be 20%. Not sure if crouching behind each cover height is already factored in? Speaking of which seems crouching no longer affects accuracy? Does it still affect reducing hit chance Financial balance seems okay if the aim is to stop you having too many bases too early. Unlike the original, there aren't huge spates of 5 UFOs every couple of days that mean you lose regions for reasons that, even if you shot them all down and airstrike'd the wrecks you didn't recover, are unclear. Not sure how it affects the late endgame - at the moment I'm loathe to play through too much of the game as doing that spoiled Phoenix Point for me. Still, sometimes keyboard snappingly frustrating accuracy lies nothwithstanding, it is looking good so far. Keep up the good work!

Hi, I opened this topic for the ones that played and enjoyed them all. I don't do this often but since Xenonauts is the only one continuing this legacy and since there is some desire to bring the game to the next level I thought I would share some impressions and suggestions. Annoying stuff for all the games: - the missions are very similar and get boring. There can be many missions at times with very similar tactics and biome. the reward is very small in comparison with the collecting reward without fighting. - the interceptor planes battles are quite poorly designed - the action happens only on Earth (except the endgame in some games). Suggestions for Xenonauts 2: - less ufo missions and more diverse - mixture of races - possibility to choose to control also local forces and also recruit some after battle - possibility to just watch the battle (AI controlled battle - for the oones who get bored) - possibility to choose to increase certain skills after battles - tactical geoscape game more diverse - no limit of number of bases - some types of bases (small - only for interception, some big including research, some custom, etc) - custom design of aircrafts (number of weapons, hull thickness - of course this could influence speed, maneuvrability and range) - pilots skills maybe - possibility to send 2 squads for the same crashed UFO mission - next level game - interstellar mission aircraft - after some research you can build a spaceship with some personnel to go on another planet (first in our solar system and then in some surrounding solar systems) - possibility to recruit some alien soldiers - if you go on another solar system - the possibility to recruit some soldiers of the local race - could be sectoid (psionic power, low strength, low accuracy) - could be sebillian (high hitpoints) - could be Mentarch (high accuracy) - could be other conquered races with various strengths and weaknesses - both underwater (like UFO 2 - terror from the deep) and land game play - improved AI - I noticed that during a tactical combat, if you stand in front of a closed door the enemy does not open it (except the reaper). - also I noticed that the enemy does not use grenades unless there are more soldiers grouped together The game has many possibilities. I enjoyed every one since Alien Invasion but it has to bring something new to become playable, challenging and more enjoyable. Kind regards

I'm about the play Xenonauts 2 the real way

IDK why I'm responding to this. I must be bored The only weapons that should have any recoil are the starter ballistic weapons. Reason why is, IRL, the projectiles are propelled by rapidly expanding gasses created by exploding gunpowder. That recoil isn't that significant either since most modern weapons are engineered to mitigate recoil as much as possible and are extremely accurate in well trained/experienced hands. Recoil effecting accuracy only becomes a major issue with prolonged gunfire. Like say having a fully automatic weapon and holding the trigger down until all the bullets are gone - it becomes harder to control where the bullets go since the violently expanding gasses make the gun want to jump around. Xenonauts 2 touches on this with how it handles the light machine guns making them fire a lot of bullets inaccurately (a little too inaccurate if you ask me). This is also one of the reasons why the M-16 was revised from a fully automatic rifle to a 3-round burst IRL. None of the other weapons would have recoil based on their descriptions. Not even the gauss guns which are kinetic weapons, but whose projectiles are fired by powerful magnets. Its a facking video game, that's how just a basic concept of a shotgun: a short range weapon that makes up for poor accuracy by spraying a bunch of projectiles all at once. except the bullets are now lasers and it makes a pew-pew sound when fired

Personally, I'd just like it if my scientists wouldn't destroy their notes if I tell them to switch to a different research project midway. I think that progress should not be lost if I decide something is a higher priority at the moment than what I'm currently doing. (Admittedly, I haven't played the most recent builds for the last few weeks, so if this was added, then ignore this.)

Ahoj, fórum funguje v angličtině... kdybys nahrál save game a přidal info o verzi, kterou hraješ, pomohlo by to vývojářům. translation for the devs: this error message pops out when Soukup tries to produce gauss blaster in the engineering screen.

I started a new M2.01 campaign and played up to Day 36 without any real issue (I noticed the Ironman save bug is still present, but no CTD or anything). Research: You finally have time to complete the first research project (vehicles) before you get flooded with other research projects from the first ground missions. However, once the projects start coming in, the early ones still take far too long I think. You can't have more than 5 scientists before Day 20 at the earliest, and the early research projects take 8 days each mostly. I made a very deliberate effort to research accelerated weapons this playthrough since Laser has always become available before I get around to Accelerated in past playthroughs. I think Accelerated research should come earlier, straight off the first Cleaner mission and maybe take a bit less time. But I really like the change from Accelerated weapons being a separate buildable weapon type to now being a Workshop upgrade, that's much much better, I'm actually using them this playthrough. The unlocking of research projects seems chaotic though, I've currently got two new armour systems and two new weapons systems available in the research list at the end of the first month. Soldier Loadout: Heavy Armour checkbox: that's fine, I don't mind this in place of the armour plate system. Module dropdown: Terrible. Only picking one upgrade feels overly limiting. 2/3 starting upgrades are useless (gas mask, morale booster). No visual cue as to whether you have your soldier equipped correctly. I still much prefer the freeform previous system where I can pack as many modules as I want at the expense of other equipment. But if you do really want to go with forcing the player to pick an artificially-limited number of modules, I would suggest making a "module" section in the loadout, possibly tied to the armour. Tactical Suit gets no module slots, Defender Armor gets 1 module slot, Warden get 2, Guardian get 3, etc.

I wouldn't dismiss it as "fear of Steam refunds", because hiding away your new content so people only see it after playing for an hour or two just means a decent chunk of our playerbase might get bored and switch the game off before they ever reach that point due to feeling like they've just seen it all before. Sure, it's likely to cause Steam refunds and negative Steam reviews, and they're a bad thing - but fundamentally people not enjoying the game is a negative in itself. That's what all the design decisions we make on the project are ultimately trying to prevent. There are other reasons too - it's one of the few mission types containing aliens that doesn't involve a UFO (which would progress the player down the tech tree too fast), and it's more engaging than the current Alien Research Team mission because it does have those special rules with the abduction tubes. Seems to me like a pretty natural fit for that point in the game, really!

I agree that it isn't too difficult to get 5 tubes, you can always change the mission to make that base level success harder or easier. What I think is more interesting is the extra tubes and what you get for them vs what you risk. I played an abduction mission a few nights ago and was able to get 9 of the 10 tubes, which offered very little other than the satisfaction of playing the mission in a more difficult way. I think the player should be given exponentially better rewards for more tubes to temp them into making riskier tactical decisions. I also think this mindset can be brought into other missions in the form of temporary side objectives. For example getting inside the downed UFO in 5 turns and living till the next turn gets you a large cache of alenium. Build in an incentive to player with higher risk so the best way to play isn't WW1 trench warfare but with better weapons.

A few thoughts from a guy who has played his share of X-com games (yes, back to the 90s). First, I love this game. Thank you so much for bring back a game with turn-based combat and lots to manage. That said, I have a few questions. 1. Should doors provide cover? If not, can we tweak the graphics so they open all the way up and do not block line-of-sight? 2. I can take two jets to fight a UFO. So, why can’t I take two dropships on a mission? I feel like loads of cheap recruits is a perfectly viable (brutal) tactic. 3. Why don’t base missions start in the living quarters? Or anywhere else? It seems reasonable that some of your soldiers would be off-duty at any given moment, and having to quickly grab your gear and form a defensive line is part of the fun. 4. Where do pilots live? In the plane? It seems odd that they don’t require living space or that they cannot level up the way other recruits can.

We're just finalising some stuff at our end. Turns out supporting modding (or, rather, supporting the community making mods) requires more at our end than we thought. But we're nearly done with the extra stuff.

I had just placed matey in the circle there and set him to crouch. output.log auto_strategy_before_combat-15.json

Hi everyone - we've just released an early test build for Milestone 2. The purpose of this build is to get feedback on the gameplay mechanics before we commit to updating all the lore / writing, and adding any new artwork required to support the new features and changes. We've therefore released the game onto our new Prototype branches rather than our Experimental branches, as we only want people playing the build who have read this post and understand what the build is for! You can access the Prototype branches by using the password "xenonautsproto" in Steam. Changes: We've made a lot of gameplay changes since Milestone 1, and quite a lot since we put Milestone 2.02 out for testing two or three weeks back. Here's a few of the key features to look out for: The gameplay period is now 200 days instead of 180 days. This increase comes from expanding the opening phase of the game, where the player is taking on the Cleaners. We've involved the Cleaners more in the early storyline, tried to make them more threatening, and added more Cleaner missions. The story is now that the previous Commander was sent to present evidence of the alien invasion gathered by the Xenonauts to various world governments, but returns to base with an army of Cleaners and attempts to shut down the Xenonauts (which leads to the events of the tutorial and the loss of the original base). The first mission is now to reclaim the old base for long enough to gather all the research data and supplies needed to continue the fight at the new base. I explain this here because none of this is currently well-explained in the game. There's several new types of Cleaner mission, including an Ambush mission where you're attacking a Cleaner convoy and get to set up anywhere in the map prior to the mission, and a VIP Rescue mission where you're bringing a VIP back to the dropship to rescue them. Additionally, the Cleaner Cell and Cleaner Intel Hub missions are now just regular mission types that you may or may not encounter during the game. Note that right now there's only one test map for each of these missions. There's a new type of UFO in the early game called the Probe. This is unmanned and doesn't create a crash site, and exists just to give a few relatively easy air encounters before the manned UFOs start turning up. Each type of soldier armour now has a Light and Heavy variant, controlled by a checkbox. The heavy variant weighs more but offers more protection. This system replaces the Armour Insert soldier module, and the Defender Armour is now just the heavy variant of the basic Tactical Suit. There's now a rebreather module that makes you gas / smoke immune. Interceptors now have four Equipment slots that can hold any type of weapon or item, and each plane has a Weight and Weapon Bay limit that governs how much that plane can carry. This gives you more overall freedom about the equipment loadouts you can choose for your aircraft. All equipment (whether weapons or passive items like Armour) have a weight, and the plane cannot exceed their Weight capacity. Weapons fill a certain number of Weapon Bays, and each plane has 4 bays. Cannons and Lances fill two bays, Missiles and Torpedoes fill one bay (passive items don't fill a bay). This is to prevent the player taking more weapons than the UI can support. UFOs have been slightly rebalanced, but we'll be doing more of that in the next week or two, Monthly funding is tighter overall, as the game now takes longer so there's more monthly paydays given to the player during a campaign. Aircraft are more expensive, and their equipment is now manufactured individually rather than being global upgrades. It'd be great if you could test the game and let us know if you encounter any bugs or major balance issues, and also let us know what you think of the new mechanics. If all goes well we'll then be able to release Milestone 2 onto the Experimental branches and start polishing it up soon! Feedback should go in this thread:

I think some part of that is that you almost never need to carry ammo at all - either the magazine size of all non-laser weapons is too big, or the ammo consumption of weapons is too low. I think rifle's burst compared to aimed shot being trash is a good example, I've yet to reload a mag rifle in this game. On an unrelated note, the rebreather being in the tactical vest feels a bit silly, that's one upgrade I'd rather have a checkbox (and replace the module with the radio)

It's a bit unrelated to inventory size; the reason is so that any soldier can wear the most modern armour in the lightest variant rather than weak soldiers being unable to wear say Guardian Armour in any form. It also avoids the issue where the protection offered by the insert is unrelated to the armour it is placed in, which meant it could be relatively too weak on advanced armours and too strong on basic armour. It also means we can give the player more overall options with fewer actual suits of armour; having the first 100 days contain the Tactical Suit, Defender Armour, Warden Armour and Guardian Armour was slight overkill. Now it's just Tactical Suit >> Warden >>> Guardian, which is clearer and more manageable. If carry capacity ends up being too generous as a result I'd have thought we could just make modules larger to compensate.

I apologise if this has been mentioned previously but it I really do think an option for side stepping, maybe at double or triple TU cost, should be implemented. My unit has a shield, knows the enemy is behind the wall yet has to show his side to the aliens and potentially get shot, making the shield useless for that moment.

I agree on this! For now, a solution is to not make a step to the side, but one back and then diagonal. It's safer, but requires a lot more TU.

Hahaha crackhead! Sniffs suspicious substance, rushes to the closest Sebillian screaming "Come here Yoshi! Let's settle our differences!"

How attached are the community and developers to the game's current research system? I personally greatly prefer the first game's X-COM based one where you can allocate scientists in any way you like across different simultaneous research projects, as granting the player additional freedom creates more opportunity for strategy. While there are benefits to only having one project at a time, like the ability to more easily plan out you research order and being able to cut down on small underwhelming projects this system creates many annoyances. Only being able to research one topic at a time definitely reduces the desire to ever research smaller projects like autopsies and story projects for example, as you will feel the need to always be putting effort into the next tech that will upgrade your troops, aircraft, bases, etc. In the prior system, you could always have a few autopsies on the backburner with a tiny amount of scientists while still focusing most of your resources on the next armor or tier of weapons. Scientists have also been done really dirty, now only being worth a 5% speed bonus on top of a flat 100% rate. Individual scientists feel worthless now. I have some ideas. MY IDEA: Revert The System Just make it like the last game, multiple projects at once, and science working with man hours instead of the percentage system. While I don't believe this will be adopted due to there likely being a large amount of intent behind the current system, I do believe this would be an improvement and I want to hear the opinions of the community on the matter. COMPROMISE: Merge The Systems Remove the percentage system and make research work with man hours like engineering, making every scientist equally as important to research. While each base will still only be able to have one research project at a time, each base will still be able to choose independently, so while multiple bases can work on the same project they can also choose to work on different ones, allowing multiple projects at once. This would allow the additional freedom of the old system while still keeping a unique identity similar to what the developers have implemented so far.

Hi. I "finished" Xeno2 three times. I am a big fan of the X-COM series and Xenonauts is a proud successor of this game. I am apologice in advance for a long read, but I have many ideas. The following text is order important, so the later paragraphs may apply to some ideas described in former ones 1. Starting base layout makes me crazy, is it possible to: - make it flexible, so we can fit it to our strategy - add medic and training module at start. Medic module is very important. 2. Deployment craft arsenal. It would be nice to have an arsenal at the deployment craft, so solder can change equipment (and his role) at the mission. It is also required when two or more deployment done during the flight. Size of the arsenal should be enough to carry 3 shields, 6 primary weapons, 4 secondary weapons, 20 clips and grenades. Soldier equipment can be selected before deployment craft departure in armory at base, but also can be updated before mission start using the equipment in craft arsenal. By the way this process can hide mission loading time. 3. Deployment team size - 9 solder team is good for cleaner missions since you can separate whole troop in two teams (2 fighters, sharpshooter and machine gun), but there is a problem with UFO capture mission when you need a third team to operate inside the alien craft. Only one soldier left for shields and it is not enough. especially when you need to collect 2 UFOs without returning to base. After the first mission the shield is gone or almost destroyed. Shields are vital inside, but almost useless outside. Problem can get a workaround using arsenal described above. 4. Soldier stats 4.1 Stamina/Energy may be an additional mechanic to be used 4.2 Health may affect accuracy and recoil (and throwing range ?) 4.2 Morale may affect accuracy too. Moral should be more affected by combat situation as: 4.2.1 other soldiers proximity 4.2.2 enemies detected 4.2.3 mission progress - enemies killed, ufo located, amount of mission objectives completed 4.2.4 allies killed 4.2.5 supression state 4.2.6 stun state 4.3 May strength affect damage of stun rodes? 5. Tactical combat 5.1 it would be nice to keep soldier order to the next turn in case it was not completed during current one. It is especially good when retreating in the cleaners missions. 5.2 It would be nice so the main UFO entrance will be locked for humans. It should be breached only by dedicated explosives. This approach also provides an opportunity to make UFO capture as time based - UFO must be captured withing a limited amount of turns once main entrance is breached. 5.3 Defense of the deployment craft. Deployment craft should play more important role in the ground combat. It may not be abandoned. It must require protection. Aliens should seek to capture and destroy it. Once craft destroyed - there may be some penalties - no items recovered from crush, delay in returning to base, new craft should be constructed. 5.4 Aliens AI - For my taste closing distance with enemies is too easy. Lightly weaponed aliens should retaliate only at distance when hit is almost guaranteed. Hand-grenade throwing range should be cut to pistol-shot distance. Shock grenade - to guaranteed snap shot distance. (Shock grenade radius may be decreased?) 5.5 Capturing aliens. Capturing aliens should be a task himself. It must require planning and rewarded as a kill or even more. May be there should be a medal for it?! By my taste player should plan that in this specific mission a very special alien should be captured, for example - scientist or reaper. It may be required for research or as a bounty request from some country. 6 Team work. There would be nice to dedicate soldiers in the deployment troop to teams. For my taste a single team should be of 4 soldiers. Deployment craft should be capable to carry 2/3/4 teams. As far as I think about it - this is a tough proposition with a great potential to bring a special identity for the Xenonauts series. To expose the potential the following can be done: 6.1 Create team roles, according to the role team can have a goal. Completing a goal provide team member with experience can be invested into stats during training at base: 6.1.1 - common fight. Team goal is to kill aliens. In my vision it should contain two rifleman that keep frontline, gunner that suppress and soften targets and sharpshooter that finishes them. 6.1.2 - reconnaissance team. Team goal is to detect aliens, mission objects (collect mission objects?), save civilians. This team will require some equipment not yet exist in the game in addition to shields and secondary weapons 6.1.3 - UFO capture team. Team goal is to breach UFO and capture it. Team consists of shield carriers and shotgun fighters. Shock grenades and explosives are welcome. 6.1.4 - abductor team. Team goal is to capture specific alien (that is usually require clearing hostiles around it). Lot of stun grenade usage. 6.2 This feature will require screen in already existing layout [geoscape][base][research][manufacture][soldiers][store][armory][aircraft][archives] to manipulate with team organization and training there. 6.3 Team should be created as at the newly proposed screen. "Creation" of a team will require some time, otherwise teammate will get morale debuff. Teammates can recieve morale bonus from team leader in addition to the troop leader 6.4 This feature will require refactoring of the base armory screen to choose teams and not soldiers 6.5 Team role can either be selected at base armory screen or before mission at newly created craft arsenal screen 6.6 Team role (and equipment) can be changed from newly created craft arsenal screen (if all the teammates appear in the arsenal?) 6.7 This feature may require redesign of the deployment craft to use team structure in an optimal way. For example, Skyhawk. It is of 3x6 size and has wide door at back and narrow ones at sides. Can we change be of 2x4 size with narrow exits at sides? (Dead zone can be solved by last proposition) So the Dragonfly will be 2x6 with ide door at back and narrow ones at sides. And the ultimate will be 4x4 with exits to all sides? 7. Medals - good thing, but looks raw, here are my propositions: 7.1 following medals may have degrees - service medal, golden star, award for bravery 7.2 following medals may provide a greater bonuses - award for valor, award for courage, crux solaris, crimson heart 8 Training. It would be nice to have a separate training screen where training process may be visible and guided. For example, some soldier stats may be selected as primary and receive greater improvement then others. it would be also nice to select soldiers for training when there is no enough training room capacity instead of decreasing training efficiency. Anyway, in my eyes soldier progress should relate to its activity on the battlefield, but it be accrued at the base during training. It means that rookie never participated in the battle should progress slower then veteran that completed many mission goals. On the other hand it is difficult to explain why solder became stronger after exhausting combat. 9. Weapons. 9.1 Grenade launcher is funny, but I found it useless. Is it possible to replace it underbarrel grenade launcher? It also would be nice to have different types of shots for it - explosive, shrapnel (same effect as shotgun), phosphorous and shock. Laser rifles can lack of it, but it can be a good reason to use the accelerated rifle instead. (AFAIK there is a problem to convince player to run into this development branch) 9.2 It would be nice to have a reconissance drone (we are in XXI century, right?), same as Teledyne FLIR Black Hornet 3, sorry for advertisment. It should consist of control pad (secondary weapon) and some grenade size drones. Soldier can either move by himself, launch the drone, or control the drone (when drone moves TUs consumed for the operator too). Drone may have a limited amount for TUs (40-60). It cannot open dors, but can bypass windows (should the window be already brocken?) Can there be a larger drone with explosives/shock/smoke? Only a single drone can be controlled at once. There can also be a limit on turn the drone can be in air. 9.3 What about toxic gaz and fire grenade? 9.4 Can we get a law rocket? I hate those big drones. 10. Soldier inventory. 10.1 Idea of the belt is so attractive!!!! Belt should be able to carry a single secondary weapon (in addition to the secondary slot under the main weapon slot), pair of ammo clips (except machine gun ones). There should be an option to swap secondary weapons between belt and one being used. Manipulations with this slot should not take time, except of dropping item that should take a minimal. 10.2 Hemet slot. It would be nice to equip helmet with different accesories as long range visor/night visor/ rebreather. Any such module should not weight a lot. 10.3 Backpack slots. Maipulation with items in this slot should take a lot of time. Let say there can be 3 of them. Any one can be of following type: 10.3.1 Regular backpack. Should be able to carry a main weapon. Two (or three) slots of this type should be united in a single backpack of relevant size. Two slots should be enough to carry a body. 10.3.2 Armor plate - should be a heavy one 10.3.3 Jetpack 10.3.4 Special module for reconnaissance drones, it should carry 2 small ones and drone recharge device. Launching drone from this module should take less time. Soldier may be able to carry drones in a regular backpack and load them to this module. 11. Combat vehicle. For my taste X-Com and all its successor had poor mechanics related to combat droids. It is always better to bring a soldier instead, but can we get it in addition? If the craft was able to carry it outside and deploy it just before landing? My best regards

The separation makes sense if Xenonauts 2 is also done with the expectation of the possibility of modifying the game. You can, of course, reduce the entire Xenonauts game to "special cases" (which were found among a wide variety of classic X-COM variants), motivating this by the need to optimize the gameplay, but this will make the game too specialized (focused only on the tastes of one audience) and make the modification process more difficult, and sometimes impossible.

Age means nothing, how old is chess? You should definitely question game mechanics yeah, and try to improve on them. If there was nothing to improve there wouldn't be an Open X-Com project going on with frequent updates. Can Xeno2 attract those players? I believe it can if it goes in the right direction.

I dont know about the upgrade. Agree with you, that hand grenades are very powerful and that the HEVY should fire in an arc at a greater distance (20 tiles). However, the fixed TU cost per shot is a benefit, allowing more experienced soldiers fire 3 rounds in a turn, which you can't do with any other primary weapon (except pistols) or grenades. For direct fire I'd love to see the rocket launcher. Agree. For close range anti-personnel usage I'd love to see buckshot/flechette rounds, similar in function to shotgun, which would make the grenadier more versatile.

This would really add a holw new dimension to this game, if there were aircraft carriers in a number of oceans.

After playing a bit, I actually liked the new system for armor and options. I did used different addons for different roles. I also thing that Cleaners need more missions. I think Cleaner network discovery should be tied to mission success. As such, small missions where first you have to capture a suspect would be nice. Those missions should have different paramenters, like instead of a chopper you arrive in a car (so only 4 operatives) or a van (so only 6 operatives). And some cleaner ops might appear to defend the suspect. Another would be to add stealth missions, where you should add a tap to a phone or a computer without being detected. Doing this research might then allow finding the locations. Also, some form of interaction with UFO sightings or landings would be great. Like waiting for certain types of UFOs to land would have a chance of finding Cleaners along the aliens if you can intercept within the first 8/12hs. I also really need to be able to select interceptors and dropships from different bases than the closest one. The current system is very rigid and does not allows to swap to fully armed and healed squadrons, or worse, those airborne and returning to base due to low fuel. Also, selecting missiles vs torpedoes to target different ship types is very hard if you can't select the base for attack. I also think the number of bases should be higher. You can't really cover 100% of the world with six bases and you can't focus on high population areas with more bases (say, Europe/Africa need a single base if you want to cover the whole world.

Thanks everyone. There seems to be enough interest for us to go ahead with the project, and we're just in the process of doing final tests on the mod loader functionality. Solver is also part of this mod tool project (although he's not posted here) and he's investigating the logistics of getting a standalone editor to run based on the DLLs that are shipped with the game - which would make life a lot easier for everyone, as nobody needs to go near Unity to work on these tools. So hopefully we'll pull something more formal together this week and invite everyone interested to take a look. @Charon yes, you make a good point about modders needing to be involved in the design process. This was part of my plan, but we needed to check first whether there were programmers interested. I'm not sure if there needs to be a formal process for that though; I think as soon as people start using the tools there'll be organic requests for new features and feedback on how the UI could be improved. These tools are likely to be something that are heavily iterated on based on modder feedback. This somewhat also touches on the points made by @drages but the purpose of this initial mod tool is simple mods, and it is intended for people who have very little knowledge of programming or anything else. It should be a single program people can install on their computer and then use it to change the values in the game, and it should spit out a mod that can be easily uploaded to Steam Workshop. To my understanding (although I'm not a coder), the "modular mod" system exists in Xenonauts 2 but is handled automatically this time around. The focus is ease of use. Unfortunately, this tool is going to have limitations. The big one is the ability to add new assets to the game, because Unity locks all its assets away in Asset Bundles and a standalone program can't add new things to these Asset Bundles. At least initially, this standalone editor simply won't be able to add new art to the game in any form - e.g. if you want to create a new weapon, it has to pick from artwork that already exists in the game files. That said, this is something that can be addressed. One solution is to create a second more powerful mod editor for advanced users that works as a Unity plugin, which would allow the users to do anything that the developers can do, including making new maps etc. But this requires the modder learns (or already knows) Unity, as well as there being some technical / licensing hurdles we need to overcome. It's also possible that a standalone tool could be written that hooks into Unity and adds new artwork to Asset Bundles without the user having to have any Unity knowledge. There might be other options, too. But a lot of this depends on the skills of the programmers taking part, and how much time they're willing to put into the project. But these are discussions best had once the simple tools are in progress and people have a better idea of scope and what is / is not possible within our framework.

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone. I've now reverted prototype to the latest Experimental version while I work on the next Prototype build based on this feedback, as the bugs were taking up quite a bit of our time.

Fourth option: Panic increases funding, either based upon the maximum panic a nation has experienced, it's current level, or a mix of the two. Right near the end of the current panic curve, it drops just a little bit and the player is warned the program is at risk of being cancelled. You can probably dial back mod2 panic recovery a bit in conjunction with this. This has two main advantages: 1) It's a stabilizing mechanic, an anti-death spiral. If a player does badly at the start, they'll have more resources to be given a chance to recover. 2) On the flip side, by giving the player too few resources to defend the planet initially, you ensure things do get worse for a while which is useful for generating a compelling emotional narrative and for campaign pacing purposes. Because of #1, the player does have more room to decide how they prioritize coverage. Players that do successfully cover the planet initially have more panic runway before they start getting shut down. Players that choose less coverage or that do a bad job resisting will get more resources sooner, but be closer to losing. You give the players more agency to have different paths by not shoving them off the cliff at the end of the path, rather than adding an additional interface and thing for the player to juggle. (which isn't to knock the idea of giving the player more control over things; this is just another, less intrusive option)

The fundamental question is what strategies do the mechanics make viable. As you state, the Mod1 mechanics force players to prioritise coverage as early as possible (or risk panic getting out of control). As fast coverage is the only real viable strategy, selecting it isn't really a decision. The Mod2 ideas reduce the burden of coverage, which is positive. But doesn't go far enough. Fundamentally, it is enjoyable for the player's decisions to be the main driver of success and those decisions are only legitimate if more than one strategy could be successful. Obviously, this is very difficult to do. A concept that may be interesting to play with is the elasticity between panic and funding. You have tried two passive options. 1. Increased panic decreases funding; 2. Increased panic does not change funding. There is a third active option. The player is given the power to decide the level of funding they request from each region at the end of each month and this affects the level of panic. The logic would be that if less funding is given to the Xenonauts then more is spent on local forces who help reduce panic. The player would then have a monthly choice between panic and funding. This would make choosing to have no coverage in some regions completely viable.

Smoke doesn't block LOS, but just reduces accuracy.

Thanks for the report! We've got several reports regarding that issue and a fix is being worked on right now and should be included in the next patch.

Thank you. I will go check that out.

This is what they've been reduced to over the years... but not sure Julian Gollop strived to create a cannon-fodder-type game

Or make the globe slightly transparent? Changing the geoscape is probably out of the question at this point, but maybe a paid DLC might be a possibility?

For a globe, to see both sides of the planet at once, you could have two circular shaped maps side by side, locked so that when you “rotate” one, the other turns as well by the same amount. That way it can bypass any potential issues with the engine not being able to display a 3d sphere for an actual globe.

Noted this by mistake during a tactical mission - not sure if this is a bug, but if a weapon has certain weight including the ammo when you equip it before mission, then unloading the weapon during tactical mission ADDS the weight of the ammo to the inventory! It should not, as the clip/ammo is already carried one would say... but it does! And it actually applies to all weapons... Example: While in inventory, the HEVY has a weight of 40 during tactical mission it has the same weight loaded - so the weight probably includes the ammo (even if some rounds are already fired).... BUT, as soon as the ammo is unloaded, the ammo weight is ADDED to the overal carried weight of the soldier, resulting in TU penalty, which is totally impossible. Moreover the whole weight of the ammo (16) is added to the inventory, even if half is already "gone." It seems to me as a mistake, the initial clip is likely not included in the calculation of the total weapon weight, therefore if unloaded, its weight is added to the inventory... I would like to suggest therefore, that the weight of the weapons is reduced for the weight of the ammo (empty rifle weight of 16, clip weight of 4, weight of loaded rifle = 20). HEVY weight of 24, loaded weight of 40 (or 32 if loaded with smoke grenades) and/or calculated by each item.

Enemy within sounds interesting, like an infiltrator (impostor) into your organization, that would have to be located and eliminated (there could be more of them in the xenonaut ranks) - human collaborators. Another idea in case a region is lost. Military forces of the surrendered region could attack xenonaut base in the region or send interceptors against xenonaut planes.

I think I prefer the old module system. My issue is that the automed module feels pretty much mandatory, so I would probably never use anything else if I’m limited to only one.

Have you considered adding missions with more defend objectives within them? If you are worried that most missions will feel like they have some sort of timer in them, then would it be a decent idea to have mission objectives that intentionally slow the mission down? The problem with terror missions and base defense missions and the like for me is that they still become rout the enemy maps when the missions should feel like defending civilians or your head quarters against the alien forces. Defend objectives in those two maps might be a decent fit and add some variety to those maps. Maybe a story mission or two can also have some kind of defend objective as well. Have you seen the Fire Emblem Fates Conquest Chapter 10 map? The story mission I am thinking of could be similar to that where the objective is to defend the starting area, but the map would actually get easier if the player would go out of their way to play aggressive.

I am with Skitso that changing the abduction missions to be another flavor of 'kill everything' is a mistake. The game needs more ways to encourage different strategies and loadouts, this mission was one of the few that overwatch camping while slowly creeping forward wasn't the most effective strategy.

I personally prefer the system where you place your modules in your inventory (the initial system). The "toggle button" for armor and other modules is an interesting idea too, but I prefer "seeing" the modules in my inventory as it feels more "real" Thumbs up on abduction missions not ending straight away, and having the tubes teleporting away. (i assume i can kill the aliens even after X turns when the tubes are gone) I do prefer funding to rely on panic level. maybe instead of becoming unrelated to panic level, panic could simply carry a bit less weight in determining the funding level.

Hi all, To help me with Modding for Xenonauts 2 I've created a Mod Loader based on a forum post by asdfcyber (https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/topic/28131-first-v25-modding-impressions/#comment-192760) It uses mono.cecil to patch the Assembly-CSharp.dll and inject code that loads mods from a folder of your choosing. Essentially you run the Mod Loader exe and it'll inject the Mod Loader code if needed and then starts Xenonauts 2. It will then call a LoadMods method in the Xenonauts.XenonautsMain constructor. The repo also contains an example mod that shows how to override existing methods using Harmony (https://github.com/pardeike/Harmony) and how to format the mod so that the Mod Loader can detect it. The repo can be found here: https://github.com/38Simulated/XenonautsModding Not sure if there are that many people out there looking into modding the game, but I thought I'd post something just in case it was of any use to anyone.

multiple Labs make bigger research output, you can research faster. But always only 1 research at a time in my exp. Labs also generate income when all research is completed, but having Labs in multiple bases is impractical, as you need build living quarters, hire scientists etc, which takes respurces you coild have used elsewhere imo.

I went about three play throughs without getting a grenade lobbed at me, and then, on the fourth, had two of my guys wiped out with a grenade! I had grenades thrown at me in the next play through as well. I think they may have tweaked something in one of the updates. I don't think it is just about LOS, I think it has more to do with whether your soldiers are grouped close together. The aliens will kill in the most efficient way possible so one grenade for two or more soldiers is what they will go for.

The developers of Xenonauts-2 have been asked many times to make the size of the tactical team the same as in the classic (original) UFO: 1-2-3. The market is oversaturated with games where the player controls a tactical group of 1-2 squads. Tactics at the platoon (3-4-5) squad level are only available in old UFO games:1-2-3. And these old games are still popular. By adding several tactical missions to the game, in which twice as many soldiers will participate (not 9-10-12, as usual, but 18-20-24 soldiers), this will make the battles more diverse and unlike each other. For example: the final battles; the assault on the alien base, the anti-terrorist battle - all these battles can be made more ambitious. Xenonauts 2 has quite a lot of tactical battles, but they are very similar to each other. There are not enough battles of different scales.

I remember coming across a reaper in XCOM was terrifying (maybe it was just being a noob back in the day). But the reapers in Xenonauts are easy pickings. They have no armor and are highly susceptible to grenades. SPOILER: The autopsy says "... can move across the battlefield with inhuman speed..." But they can't. They only have 60 TU. So weak. Recommendation: 1) Increase TU from 60 to 80 2) Increase armor from 0 to 20 3) Increase HP from 60 to 70 (some Mantids have 70 HP. Goofy to imagine one of them having more HP than a reaper)

Some of the concepts described below I have seen in an open source UFO game, some are my ideas how to enhance the already very good player experience even further and I believe it would be great to have something similar in X2 as well.. Not sure if feasible in the way how the game is designed though.. Radar tower the radars in the bases cannot effectively cover the whole landmass of the Earth. Adding a few radar towers on the Geoscape in the blindspots could cover all continents.There would have to be construction time and costs as well as upkeep involved, and the coverage would be less (say half) of the basic radar and would also not upgrade to quantum. The bombers could also target it during their runs on the geoscape. UFO Dissasembly Yard For every downed UFO, you would have an option to either collect the bounty (there could be bids from the world regions - selling a UFO to them could reduce the panic in that region f.e.), or to keep it for dissasembly. For this, you would build an installation, where the downed UFOs would be transferred to (transfer time between 48 and 96 hours). Capacity of the yard would be limited, eventually you could build more. Every newly (not shot down before) downed UFO would trigger a research, in which the the tech and the stats of the UFO would be discovered. Every UFO could be dissasembled using workshops (as projects) into individual items (alloys, alenium, surgical tables, propulsion, navigation, electronics, weapons etc), which would be used for triggering research. Later, the items could be either sold or used for crafting items, planes etc. Damaged UFOs would generate less items to research/sell as opposed of undamaged ones (Landed and conquered ones). This would add another layer of gameplay, as now the items are gathered automatically after end of tactical battles. Cleaner base After defeating the base, it would be occupied by Xenonaut forces and would trigger research of the advanced structures. The player would have to transfer/hire scientists and engineers to that base to start the research. Until the research would be completed, the remnants of cleaner forces would attack the base trying to re-take it. After completing the research, the base attacks would stop and the base would be used as an additional source of research/crafting and/or income generation. The base itself would either become another regular base, or it would have to remain as is (no additional structures could be built) SAM site missile site (f.e. a modified ICBM site, provided by a region or country or built by player), used to shoot modified long range AA missiles at airborne UFOs (preferably the big ones - cruiser, harvester, battleship, carrier, bomber), helping to soften them up before they get attacked by the Xenonaut interceptors or to defend bases (or off-site installations) as an extra layer of defense. Alien moon base The aliens could have a logistical hub on the moon, used to coordinate attacks on Earth and stack up forces, represented by a base. Such base could be assaulted by the xenonaut forces (or by the SAM site with a special missile to allow the base attack) to weaken the logistics of the aliens. The ultimate Dropship and at least Exosuit equipped soldiers would have to be used for such a mission. This mission could be triggered in corelation to the orbital bombardment, which is not implemeted yet.

This is definitely the case in this game. Going from the screenshot, I'd say the AI was doing something I wouldn't expect it to do. As in, I don't see any enemy unit having sight on your unit. But I'd need the save game to give more insight. If an AI unit moves and at any point gets LOS onto units of yours, all AI units will know about this unit, and they'll retain LOS according to the game's sight rules (i.e. till end of turn)