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Thanks for the long post, it's always useful to read someone's detailed impressions on the game. I'm also happy to read that our updates have changed a negative review to a positive one; we've put a lot of work into the game in Early Access and it's great to hear that it has improved the player experience for you. I'll pick out a few specific points to reply to, but I think my main comment is that it sounds like you're playing the game on too hard a difficulty setting. If you're a big classic X-Com fan then really you should start on Veteran and only play on Commander if you want an insane challenge - it's for people that already know the game inside out, and if you jump straight in at that difficulty level then you'll regularly have "this feel like bullshit" moments and it's just a recipe for frustration rather than fun. Specific points: 1) The damage randomisation is 50-150% of the weapon base damage, and then armour reduction is applied. So the effect of damage randomisation is magnified against units with armour, but that's a gameplay mechanic you need to engage with - you can always strip armour from enemies using explosives if you want to make damage more reliable, or use weapon types with higher armour penetration. 2+7) In general we want to go for a feeling of nobody ever being safe, where there's a chance even your best soldier in their best armour can be one-shotted by a lucky enemy hit from a tier-equivalent enemy weapon (this is taken straight from classic X-Com). The game loses a lot of tension if you know that your soldier is definitely able to take at least one hit; it's like knowing they have an extra life. However, the actual problem here sounds like you're perhaps getting the armour a bit too late - if anything, armour can be too powerful if you unlock it early because it turns your soldiers into tanks who can take 3-4 hits each until the enemy weapons catch up. Guardian armour in particular can be unlocked off the Destroyer UFO and is very strong if you get it early. Ironically the Colossus is currently considered by far the worst armour in the game by most players. 4) I agree, we'll hopefully give the aliens a bit more individual personality with some AI adjustments in the next major update. 5) Yes, the AI currently cheats in this regard. We're planning to fix that in the next major update. 9) For new recruits, the North America region bonus is a huge bonus to their stats (+5 in each) and if you've built Training Centers, the training rate increases with the number of alien species captured and interrogated. This won't allow you to replace a whole squad overnight but if you're losing 2-3 soldiers a mission it should allow you to constantly be filling gaps in your team without losing too much effectiveness. 11) It's important to understand how overwatch actually works - it's explained in the tooltips, but a unit will only reaction fire when they have higher Initiative than their target (which is Reflexes x % of TU remaining). If you've got a wall of soldiers who are all at low TU, they won't overwatch fire until the alien drops below a certain level of TU, but if they're on full TU then they'll overwatch fire much earlier. But the same things applies to the aliens, and knowing how the system works can make assaulting UFOs easier. It's not always a good idea when breaching a UFO to spend all the TUs of your first soldier through the door, because it basically guarantees that every alien in the room will get to overwatch fire at them, etc. The system is pretty good when you understand it, but I'll admit that it's not well explained at the moment. But it's little things like this that suggest you should probably play on Veteran rather than Commander. 14) Yeah, the panic Supporters might need a slight buff. It's effectively -7 Panic per month per supporter though, so -77 Panic over an 11 month campaign, and it sounds a bit better when written out that way. Probably still the weakest ones overall though. In general, the late game has worse balance than the early game, and I think many of your later points show this. I'll be doing some more full campaign playthroughs as part of our next update so hopefully this will improve. In terms of new content, we're getting close to release now but some of the more interesting stuff (like weapon variety etc) are things we'd like to look at as post-launch content.

Milestone 6 is now available on all public branches of Xenonauts 2, and these are the consolidated patch notes for all versions that appeared on the Experimental branches up to 6.23.2. This update will break existing saves, so if you want to continue playing your existing Milestone 5 campaign then please switch over to the Legacy branch where the older version is still available (instructions on how to do so here). This is a significant update to the game that primarily focused on completing our Early Access content roadmap. Although there will be a little more content arriving in Milestone 7 (which will be our 1.0 launch build), we'll now largely be concentrating on polishing and improving what we already have. Assuming the finished game gets a decent reception on release, we're hoping continue expanding the game through a combination of free updates and DLC afterwards. We've created an official Game Balance / Performance Feedback thread to collect feedback on anything the playerbase feels is overpowered / underpowered, and to help us identify which areas of the game are most in need of performance improvements. Please leave any thoughts you have there! As always, I'd like to thank the many people who have played the game on the Experimental branches and given gameplay feedback or reported bugs. This hopefully means that this build is relatively stable - but if you encounter bugs, please do report them in our bug forums. We'll be watching them closely over the next week or two and will make game stability our priority! The updated interface for the air combat section of the game KEY CONTENT: Ending Cinematic: the ending sequence that occurs after the final mission is completed is now more polished, and includes the new campaign victory cinematic. Research Art: all research artwork and text for the Xenopedia has now been completed. Air Combat Revamp: the interface and artwork for air combat minigame has had a major visual refresh, and we've implemented an air combat section into the existing tutorial to explain the basic mechanics for new players. Some of the gameplay mechanics have also been tweaked; those changes are explained in full further down in this post. Soviet Town Biome: the Soviet Town biome is an alternate biome used for Terror maps. This has the same number of maps as the Western Town biome does, and it is a more industrial / residential environment (contrasting with the more commercial environments of the Western Town). Defender UFO: the Defender UFO is a new alien escort craft with a more defensive configuration than the Fighter UFO. It is tougher and less agile but equipped with a powerful medium-range "missile shield" weapon that is capable of shooting down incoming missiles, which adds more variety to encounters with escorted alien capital ships. New 3D Models / Animations: there's new or updated models for a number of alien units (particularly the late-game unit variants that were previously just palette swaps). Many of these also have new animations, or have had issues in their existing animations smoothed out. New Environment Art: aside from adding an entirely new biome, we've also improved the visuals in a number of other areas of the tactical missions. New "centerpiece" terrain objects have been added in various objective missions (e.g. ATLAS Base, the Cleaner Base, UOO-1) and a set of new "industrial" maps have been added for the Tropical biome. Major Balance Pass: we did a major balance pass on the game in Milestone 6 to address some of the feedback gathered from Milestone 5. More details on what we changed below! Translation Fixes: we spent a lot of time fixing up translation issues recently, so the localisation should be significantly improved. Please do report translation issues you encounter in these builds if you play in a non-English language! A preview of our new Soviet Town terror site tactical biome KEY BALANCE CHANGES: We've made some significant balance changes for Milestone 6, so I've added a bit of commentary here to explain our thought process! The biggest change is that dropships now carry 8/10/12 soldiers (rather than 9/12/16), and the number of enemies has been reduced accordingly. We think this makes the missions that do still support 16 soldiers (such as base defence missions and the final mission) feel more special, while improving the general balance and gameplay - the dropship upgrades were previously huge power spikes for the player (granting 33% more soldiers), while having to order around 12 or 16 soldiers on every single mission could become a bit slow and ponderous. A few aliens have been rebalanced to avoid feeling unfair, most obviously toning down the amount of suppression that Servitors can apply to large areas and changing Reaper Zombies so they now only spawn a new Reaper if they survive two full turns (rather than spawning a new Reaper on death even if killed immediately). These enemies should still be dangerous, but are much less likely to start a chain reaction that wipes out your entire squad. Updates were made to Phase 1 to make it more forgiving on the easier difficulty settings, as it could end quite abruptly if you weren't familiar with the strategic mechanics. Doomsday is now gained more slowly on lower difficulty settings, and in general we've increased the weighting of tactical combat rewards so that if you concentrate on doing well in the tactical missions then Doomsday should largely take care of itself (although you'll need to pay a bit more attention to your strategic approach on Veteran and Commander). Phase 2 has been made more intense, with larger waves of UFOs and tougher aliens - previously we found it a bit anticlimactic, with the narrative telling you that the alien invasion had just begun but the gameplay actually being less pressured and less difficult than Phase 1. We also felt the research tree had some pacing issues, with too much tech coming in Phase 1 & 2 and too little afterwards, so we pushed a few projects back a bit (Gauss Weapons and Plasma / Fusion Explosives being the most important of these). As there are now significantly more UFOs to shoot down, we've re-enabled the UFO Delegation system we were testing in Milestone 5. This works by "delegating" UFOs to the local regions once you have completed two crash sites of that type, resulting in a permanent +$200,000/month funding increase in exchange for handing over responsibility for capturing that UFO type (and the resources inside). The player must then pay an Operations Point charge for any further Crash Sites of that type that they complete, which adds a cost to the resources you would gain from winning that mission - making completing these extra Crash Sites a strategic choice rather than an obligation. This system can be disabled in the campaign options if people would prefer to play without it. However, bear in mind that doing so makes the game significantly grindier - doing two missions per UFO type seemed to be the sweet spot for most players where the game isn't too repetitive. Nonetheless, we encourage players to customise their experience to their own preferences. Strategy Layer: Dropships now carry 8/10/12 soldiers, not 9/12/16. Final mission and base defence missions still allow 16 soldiers. UFO Delegation system becomes active on completion of two Crash Sites / Land Sites for a particular type of UFO. At that point, further Crash Sites of that type are "delegated" to the local government. This has the following effects: Player gains +$200,000 per month funding. Player must pay an Operations Point cost to complete further Crash Sites for that type of UFO (the cost is higher for larger UFO types). Player still receives the cash bounty for not completing a Crash Site once that UFO type has been delegated. Battleship UFOs and the various UFOs that create Wreckage rather than Crash Sites (e.g. Probe, Fighter, etc) are not affected by this system. There is a campaign option to disable this system. However, this also disables the monthly funding increase that occurs when you delegate a UFO, giving a lower monthly income in exchange for the ability to run more crash site missions. Various changes have been made that affect the Doomsday Counter in Phase 1: Doomsday now starts at 30 (Recruit/Soldier), or 40 (Veteran/Commander). The starting number of Infiltrators now varies in number based on difficulty, and each Infiltrator generates +0.5 Doomsday per day rather than +1. Elite Supporters no longer cause double the Doomsday gain of normal Supporters when in the Infiltrator state. Changed various Phase 1 missions and their rewards: Winning a Cleaner mission now grants you -25 Doomsday, which in some cases was a significant increase. The secondary rewards have been better balanced to keep the missions of similar importance: Extract VIP missions now have the VIP carrying a briefcase item that contains investigative data on the Cleaners. Successfully extracting it grants +50 OP. Capturing The General alive on the ATLAS Base mission now only grants +100 Operations Points on research (down from +150). Cleaner Data items from Data Raid / Eliminate VIP missions are now worth +5 Operation Points each (not +10). Rescue Soldiers mission has returned. The soldiers to be rescued no longer carry a Briefcase of Money, but are now equipped with a Medikit secondary item alongside their rifles. Phase 1 Abduction missions now only generate +2 Doomsday for each civilian abducted by the aliens (reduced from +3). Cleaner Base has been pushed back into Phase 2, and replaced with an Abduction mission. It now causes +1 Panic in each region per week until it is completed, and the -30 Doomsday effect has been removed (as it is no longer in Phase 1 so is irrelevant). Cleaner Leader Elimination mission has been made slightly easier by giving the enemies weaker weapons. Removed the Cleaner Soldiers from the first Abduction Site (as it occurs shortly before the Rescue Soldiers mission where you fight a whole team of Cleaner Soldiers). Replaced the Sectons in the second Abduction Site with Mantids. Fixed a bug where most Scout UFOs and Destroyer UFOs were not reducing Doomsday when shot down. Geoscape Supporters have seen various changes: Supporters now take 5 days to replace if eliminated, and cannot be recruited until they have been replaced. Infiltrators now cause +2 Panic in their local region at month end. All types of recruited Supporter now grant -1 Panic in their local region at month end. Security Supporters grant an additional -1 Panic in ALL region at month end once recruited (the Elite supporter has double this bonus). Research & Engineering Changes: Autopsy and Observation research projects now require the appropriate captured / dead alien item to complete, and if the projects will disappear from the research list if you sell those items before completing the research. Autopsies will consume 1 corpse to complete, whereas the Observation is non-lethal and does not kill the captured unit. This means you cannot now unlock the Autopsy simply by completing the Observation given the alien remains alive. Alien autopsy research projects now autocomplete once Xenobiology has been researched. Gauss Weapons research is now unlocked from Advanced Alloys (Abductor). Fusion Weapons research is now unlocked from Ultradense Alloys (Harvester). Guardian: Protection engineering project now unlocks from Advanced Alloys (Abductor). Gauss Weapons now have a +damage upgrade engineering project that unlocks from Alien Fusion Weapons (roughly Cruisers onwards). Alien Psi-Amp has been removed from Psyon Officers / Leaders. The Mind Shield now unlocks either from a captured Psyon, or a dead / captured Eternal. Fusion Autorifle upgrade now needs Gauss Autorifle as a prerequisite. Fusion Grenade upgrade now needs Alenium Grenades as a prerequisite. Increased Alenium costs in the first half of the campaign: Lasers now cost slightly more Alenium to build. Guardian Armour Protection upgrade now costs 50 Alenium and 25 Alloys (previously 30 Alloys). Tactical Module upgrade now costs 20 Alenium in addition to its 20 Alloy cost. Base Structure Changes: Medical Center - reduced survival chance bonus to 20% (from 25%) Surgical Center - reduced survival chance bonus to 30% (from 35%) The Alloys / Alenium granted by individual UFOs has been slightly reduced. North America region bonus now grants newly recruited soldiers +5 in all attributes (reduced from +10). Reduced the maximum range of the Phantom and Gemini interceptors by 15-20%. Air Combat Layer: The new "paired slot" system means different aircraft have different slots available. While all aircraft have four weapon slots, equipping a cannon / lance requires using up an entire paired slot, and Angels now only have one of them! Angel: 1 paired weapon slot, 2 unpaired weapon slots, 1 equipment slot Phantom: 2 paired weapon slots, 1 equipment slot Gemini: 2 paired weapon slots, 2 equipment slots Fuel consumption has been turned off in the air combat. We found this wasn't a very interesting mechanic - it didn't usually matter, and when it did matter there was often nothing you could do to mitigate it. The retreat mechanics have been reverted to how they were in earlier versions of Xenonauts 2, meaning human aircraft must now reach the edge of the battlefield in order to retreat (pressing the retreat button causes them to fly towards the closest edge). However, this retreat area is relative to the position of the main UFO - which means you won't be able to escape if you have a faster UFO chasing your interceptor (and vice versa). The relative retreat zones mean that UFOs can never escape by reaching the edge of the map. Enemies therefore use a "Hyperdrive charge" mechanic to retreat from combat - after a certain amount of time, they will finish charging their hyperdrives and jump away, ending the combat and respawning some distance away on the Geoscape. Given the player no longer suffers fuel constraints, this adds some element of time pressure back into the air combat. It is now possible for weapons to be able to target missiles. The only weapon capable of this is currently on the Defender UFO, but we may introduce additional weapons with this capacity in future updates. Combatants now fly more realistic paths in the air combat, maintaining their intended speed unless they are behind a target and are firing at them (this will cause them to try and match speeds with their target). Previously units would behave strangely if moving to a destination behind them - rather than maintaining speed and banking to turn around, they would attempt to slow down to their minimum speed and rotate on the spot. The new behaviour should look more natural. Size of the deployment area has been reduced in scenarios where the UFOs are attacking you, preventing the player from deploying their fighters quite so close to the attacking UFOs. Fire arc of missiles in the aerial combat has been reduced from 180 degrees to 150 degrees. Combatant Changes: Geoscape and Air Combat speeds for UFOs and interceptors have been unified, meaning many of the larger UFOs are now significantly faster in the air combat than they were previously. Gemini interceptor now equipped with a short-range teleportation device, allowing it to perform short teleport jumps instead of evasive rolls. These move the interceptor instantaneously, and travel further and recharge faster than normal evasive rolls. Added a new combat maneuver for the Gemini interceptor: the wingover (which is effectively an instant 180-degree spin). The Evasive Roll now travels 25% further on the Phantom than the Angel. Scout / Fighter UFOs now have significantly increased turn acceleration (i.e. how quickly they reach their maximum turn speed), making them much more agile in a dogfight. Tactical Combat: General: Commander difficulty: enemies now have a 1.1x Accuracy modifier (down from 1.3x). Although Commander is supposed to be difficult, this bonus felt so high that you couldn't play the game "properly" because aliens had such high hit chances they could effectively ignore key game mechanics like cover / smoke etc. We'll think up a better way to increase difficulty instead. If a soldier has reduced Time Units due to being over their carrying capacity, dropping those items now immediately refunds those lost TU. When units suffer a morale break, they now have a 50% chance of Panicking and 25% chance of Fleeing or Berserking (previously 33% each). This change has been made because it's not particularly fun to have aliens Berserking too often. Soldiers now gain progress points in Bravery if they suffer a Mind Control attack, and gain additional points if the attack was successful. Mind Controlled Xenonauts that return to your control during your turn (i.e. because you killed the psionic alien responsible) now regain all of their TU. We've made a number of fixes and improvements to the AI (it's possible this has made the game a little more difficult). The AI now considers visibility of potential targets when throwing grenades, so units they cannot see will not be factored into their decision about whether to use a grenade and where to throw it. This should stop them lobbing grenades over walls at Xenonauts they've never actually seen. The AI will no longer mind control civilians. Alien Changes: Secton - the Psyon mind link now causes Sectons to be suppressed when a Psyon is killed, rather than forcing them to panic / flee / berserk. Servitors have been nerfed a bit: They can no longer reaction fire. Their weapon is reduced from 30 Suppression to 20 Suppression. Their weapon now has 20 range and gains +1.5% hit chance for each tile closer than 20 range. Previously, the weapon had 15 range but gained +12% hit chance for each tile closer than 6 tiles, which made them absolutely lethal at very short ranges (their overall range was made a bit longer to compensate for this nerf). Additionally, they will now do one big heal at the end of a burst of shots rather than healing after each individual hit. Reaper Zombies now only spawn new Reapers if they survive the incubation period, which has been reduced to two turns. Killing the Zombie within two turns of it being spawned therefore prevents a new Reaper from spawning (previously a Reaper would always be spawned on death). Biters, Zombies and Reapers should now spawn with 0% Time Units. This means if they are spawned during the player's turn (e.g. Biters spawned from overwatch fire), you don't have to worry about them attacking your units until the end of your turn. Reaper melee attack now has doubled chance of inflicting Bleeding Wounds, and Reaper Alpha melee damage increased to 80 (from 60). Most alien species now have scaling Bravery values - noncombatants have reduced bravery, basic soldiers remain the same, higher ranks now have somewhat higher bravery. Enemies should start becoming harder to suppress from roughly the point you encounter Observer UFOs. High Eternal - HP increased to 500 (up from 200HP), and Regeneration increased to +150HP per turn (up from +100HP). Sebillians - Regeneration now scales. Soldiers remain at +50HP per turn, but elites + officers now have +75HP, and praetorians + leaders get +100HP. Sebillians - Accuracy reduced by -5. Sebillians - early game Sebillians now have +5HP. Basic Cyberdrone now only fires 2 shots (down from 3), but damage increased to 50 per shot (from 35). Heavy Cyberdrone still fires 3 shots at 55 damage per shot (up from 45). Wraith Cloaking Field ability now triggers once at the end of a burst, meaning hitting a Wraith with two or more shotgun pellets / machinegun rounds / etc will only change the cloaking state once. Cleaner Sentry Guns are now able to move. AI melee units are now more aggressive. This should make Reapers more likely to aggressively close with Xenonaut soldiers, rather than just walking around. Improved the way that the AI handles burst fire weapons, which fixes various instances where Sebillians and enemy Sentry Guns would not fire their weapons despite having a relatively good shot available. Equipment changes: Sniper Rifles have been buffed and Rifles nerfed slightly, as there were situations where the rifle was mathematically a better pick for long-range sniping. The Sniper Rifle now has a longer range, is cheaper to fire, and the penalty for moving has been reduced a bit (but it can still only fire once per turn). Rifle accuracy slightly reduced (by about 5% on a 100% accuracy shot). Sniper Rifle range increased to 26 (from 20). Fire cost of both Sniper Rifle fire modes decreased to 52 / 64 TU (from 56 / 70 TU), Reduced the "no move" accuracy bonus on the sniper rifle by about half, and added a similar amount to the standard fire modes. Essentially this means the weapon is now more accurate if the soldier has moved, and the same as before if the soldier has not moved. Shotguns have been reduced in Accuracy by about 10%, as they were deadly at quite long ranges when used by high-Accuracy soldiers (this has a negligible effect if you're fighting at eight tiles or less, as shotguns get most of their Hit Chance from their high proximity bonus rather than their Accuracy). Xenonaut Shields now only offer 100% protection in the frontal 90-degree arc. Their protection linearly drops off from 100% down to a minimum of 20% as the angle approaches the edges of the frontal 180-degree arc. Guardian Armour now provides 18 / 36 Armour, reduced from 20 / 40. Colossus Armour now provides 50 / 80 Armour, increased from 40 / 70. Colossus Armour now makes the wearer immune to suppression. Colossus Armour now has a new secondary melee weapon available called the Power Fist, which has similar stats to the Energy Knife. Stealthsuit heavy armour variant now reduces Accuracy by -3 (previously 0). Upgraded vehicle armour now has scaling Hardness values in the same way infantry armour does. This should make vehicles much more resilient in the mid / late game. Laser weapons can no longer cause Bleeding Wounds. Gauss weapons now carry 20% less ammo in each magazine. Advanced Medikit upgrade project now also reduces Medikit weight to 20 (from 25). Automed Unit is still too much of an autopick item, so the weight has been increased to 12 (from 8) and the healing amount decreased to 3 HP per turn (from 5). It's intended to stop units dying from bleeding wounds, rather than replacing conventional healing items! Increased range on Electroshock Rifle to 16 (from 12), and increased ammo capacity to 8 (from 3). Mission Changes: Abduction - turn timer increased by +1 turn. Abduction - destroyed abduction tubes no longer count as "abducted", meaning it's now more beneficial to destroy an abduction tube you can't reach rather than let the aliens abduct the person inside. VIP Elimination - the VIP is now less aggressive, and should not push forward out of his spawn building once engaged in combat. Rescue Soldiers - reduced the number of enemy spawn points near the target soldiers on Rescue Soldiers missions, as it was too common for them to start surrounded by enemies and end up dead before you could reach them. Terror Site - these now have a consistent number of aliens bombs, so grant a consistent amount of Alenium as a reward. Crash Site / Landed UFOs - significantly increased the HP of UFO doors, but set them to start damaged if the UFO has been shot down. They should therefore visually match the damaged / undamaged state of the hull better, and be much tougher to breach if the UFO has landed. Alien Base - we've removed the destructible earth tiles between rooms in the Alien Base missions, as they were causing a lot of bugs and gameplay problems (they're still used whenever we have thick wall sections inside a larger room, but you can't tunnel your way between rooms any more). Alien Base - small alien bases now have one fewer unit in the upper level of the command room, and two or three extra (mostly weak) units in the lower level of the command room. Base Defence - blast doors on this mission can be manually opened like other types of door, and do not autoclose at end of turn. Blast Doors in the Xenonaut Base Defence / ATLAS Base / Cleaner Base missions are now much tougher. UOO Sabotage Mission - we've removed the optional objective to destroy the reactor, as this was hard to track and left a lot of people confused. UOO Sabotage Mission - enemy reinforcements now arrive 2 turns later. UOO Sabotage Mission - fewer of the enemies have Fusion weapons. UOO Bridge Assault - starting alien crew increased in number, but a larger percentage of them are now alien noncombatants with plasma weapons (rather than praetorian-rank aliens with fusion weapons). The noncombatants tend to be spread round the edges of the map, while the elite enemies are with the Eternal in the main room. UOO Bridge Assault - alien reinforcements take 1 turn longer to arrive, but they now include some elite aliens. UOO Bridge Assault - at the end of the mission, items are only recovered from tiles that contain Xenonauts (living or dead) or from the inventories of Xenonaut units. Previously the mission was incorrectly recovering all items from the map on victory. ENDGAME part 1 - alien reinforcements take 1 turn longer to arrive. ENDGAME part 1 - added four extra Praetorian-ranked aliens. There's also now dedicated spawn points for the enemy noncombatants, so they always spawn inside buildings rather than out on the planet's surface. USABILITY & CONTENT UDPATES: General Options: The ending cutscene has now been added to the game. The Air Combat section of the tutorial has now been added to the existing tutorial. Added four additional strategy layer and four more tactical mission music tracks from our composer Aleksi, doubling the number of tracks in each section of the game. The graphics settings for the game have been overhauled - we've removed a number of visual settings that previously made no difference to performance and set up some new graphic quality presets based on the things that do. We've also added brightness / contrast / gamma sliders. Based on community feedback, we've split the Ambient sound volume slider into two separate sliders for Ambient Sounds (background ambience like wind, bird calls, etc) and Environmental Sounds (sound emitted from objects in the game world, like fire tiles or vehicle engines, etc). Made the keybindings for the tactical combat "Soldier Rotate" and "Interact With" editable, as currently both are bound to RMB. Strategy Layer: Geoscape: Added new research artwork for Ultradense Alloys, Cleaner Device, Biosurvey Array, Singularity Core, Operation ENDGAME and Defender UFO research projects. Geoscape: When a plane reaches a waypoint, clicking Center on Aircraft now correctly sets time to the lowest speed. Geoscape: The mission debrief panel now lists "Enemies Killed" rather than "Aliens Killed" (as not all hostile units are aliens). Geoscape: Soldiers on the post-mission debrief screen are now ordered based on their position in the strike team (previously it was random). Geoscape: There's now a dedicated "Supporter" line in the Funding Report that shows the funding received by the Geoscape Supporters. Geoscape: Added an explanatory popup when the first UOO mission is unlocked, explaining you need to click the new button to launch the mission (as people often don't notice it). Launch Aircraft: This panel has been visually updated, and now shows a pop-up when you hover over an aircraft that displays the full weapon loadout and stats of the aircraft. Launch Aircraft: You can now right-click the images of aircraft in the squadron to quickly unassign them from the squadron. Launch Aircraft: Trying to add a plane to the squadron in a different location will now clear the existing squadron and add the plane, whereas previously it simply threw an error sound and ignored the command. Engineering / Xenopedia: Added a small orange "unread" circle next to categories / projects that the player has not seen before. Engineering: Corpses are now automatically marked as Junk items once you have completed the appropriate Corpse Analysis projects. Aircraft: the existing Hardpoint system (the blue numbers on weapons) has now been replaced by a "Paired Slot" system. Aircraft weapon slots are now either individual slots (which can hold one small weapon) or paired slots, which can hold either two small weapons or one large weapon. This is much easier to understand than the Hardpoint system and allows additional differentiation between interceptor types. Aircraft: You can now edit the loadout of aircraft that are still under construction. Aircraft: Items now play a sound when equipped. Aircraft: Tooltips for aircraft / UFO weapons now display the projectile speed. Air Combat: Added the final side-on art for the aircraft weapons in the air combat UI. Hovering the mouse over an aircraft information panel will now highlight the corresponding aircraft with a selection circle, making it much faster to identify which plane is which. Evasive Roll buttons and weapon tiles now show a progress bar, giving a visual indication of how long until that weapon is reloaded or evasive roll becomes available again. We've added a "throttle lock" button that allows you to override your interceptor's automatic speed adjustments. If this is enabled, setting a manual speed will lock that speed - it will not be changed if you set a new target, or if the aircraft gets behind a target and begins shooting at them. Aircraft speed in the UI now displays the current speed of the aircraft. Previously it was displaying the intended speed (which was already shown on the throttle). During the pre-interception deployment phase, aircraft speed now updates immediately if you adjust the throttle (in actual battle it takes time to accelerate / decelerate to the new speed). Fixed an issue where multiple missiles fired from a single aircraft / UFO at the same time would just visually stack on top of each other and look like a single missile. They now correctly offset and look like a volley of missiles instead. Tactical Combat: The Soviet Town biome has been enabled, which contains five small and three large Terror maps. Role icons for your soldiers are now shown under the minitabs at the top of the UI (there's a setting to disable them if you want). All building roofs should now fully support destruction. Move paths, worldspace UI elements, projectiles and obstruction shading are no longer hidden by the shroud. The information in the shot accuracy calculation element (in the bottom right of the UI) has been standardised, making it clearer which modifiers are additive and which are multiplicative. Psyons and the Eternal now play an animation when performing a psionic attack. Improved the camera tracking during the alien turn when aliens are shooting between different height levels. Autoclose doors now close before the start-of-turn unit vision is calculated, not after it. This means you should no longer get situations where the front door of a UFO closes at the start of the turn but the aliens inside are still visible in the fog of war. Explosion logic has been optimised to prevent the game briefly locking up while calculating grenade/rocket explosions. An icon is shown underneath the soldier minitab if that soldier is mind controlled, and you can no longer click that minitab to center the camera on that soldier. Various units now have updated 3d models: MARS / ARES Sebillians Cyberdrone / Heavy Cyberdrone Heavy Servitor Heavy Mentarch Cleaner Soldier (body armour variant) Mantids (only new textures) Sectons (only new textures) Lots of animation updates: Units with jetpacks or capable of hovering now use the appropriate floating animation when jumping or falling down levels. Units that don't have run animations (MARS, Servitor, Cyberdrone, Eternal, etc) now move at a much more consistent speed when moving. Removed a lot of unnecessary pauses during animations for hovering units, e.g. Mentarch, Servitor etc. We've made various updates to the two UOO missions: There's now some "teleporter" background art shown for these missions on the soldier equip screen (in place of the dropship). UOO Sabotage mission now has a proper 3D background asset, showing the lower levels of the space station hull. UOO Sabotage mission now has unique objectives text that refers to alien consoles etc, rather than using the same text as the Cleaner Data Raid. UOO Bridge Assault mission now plays a "teleport" effect around each Xenonaut soldier at the start and end of the mission. UOO Bridge Assault mission now has a fade-out sequence and sound effect to represent the successful destruction of UOO-1. We've improved the Operation Endgame ending sequence so the camera centres on the High Eternal, before fading to black and playing a cinematic (currently starting cinematic). You no longer have to load back into strategy mid-way through the process. Game now slightly delays the mission end if you knock the final enemy unconscious, giving us time to display the corresponding popup. Objects inside the UFO no longer reveal their position and stopping chance if you do a fire path through the UFO from outside the hull. Audio is now always played for visible objects when you move the camera over them. Previously it would only be played if there was a soldier within a certain radius, but this logic is now only applied to shrouded objects (preventing players hearing unseen objects from across the map). There's now a reveal region at the back of the Pegasus dropship so you don't need to check behind it at the start of every mission. Units no longer spawn blood pools on the ground when moving through tiles of poison gas. Fixed various shadow problems that existed in the Stable version of the game, where the shadows for UFOs and a handful of other props would be hard-edged shapes rather than a gentle gradient. The non-heavy versions of the Warden Armour and Guardian Armour no longer display a helmet in the tactical combat. Symbiote Rifle now has proper 2D inventory art and a 3D model. ARES now has an appropriate UI portrait "head" rather than an old MARS image. Added new Mentarch / Servitor / Cyberdrone movement sounds. Added sound effects for units crouching / uncrouching. Vehicles no longer show their vision cone during the deployment phase, as this was old functionality from back in the days when Sentry Guns could not move. Set various glass doors to smash like windows when shot through. Updated the Boreal sawmill to have some additional window variants Added new fire sounds for the ballistic SMG. Further improved the camera tracking for long-ranged shooting / shooting between levels. BUGFIXES: General: Fixed Operation Points incorrectly being referred to as "Command Points" in the new campaign settings. Any "stuck" sound effects should now be cleared when you transition between strategy / tactical combat, or the Main Menu screen. Fixed a crash that could occur during the character conversations if you press spacebar in the frame before it properly loads. Fixed several UI issues on 5:4 screens (and other rare aspect ratios). Fixed the game completion achievement not always correctly unlocking after you win the campaign. Strategy Layer: Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a manual save made immediately after an air combat battle. Fixed a hang that would occur if you pressed the Abort Launch button on the dropship screen while the "select soldiers" panel is active. Fixed weapon upgrade projects causing airborne aircraft to lose their ammo when their weapon was upgraded. Fixed the "Iceland Incident" Xenopedia project (the one with the EXDEF interview transcript) not correctly unlocking after you complete the Cleaner Device research. Base Defence missions now correctly allow you to use Wounded soldiers (below 50% health). Fixed a bug where the hitbox for any multi-UFO squadron would become misaligned after loading a save game. Fixed the soldier list resetting its sort order after recruiting soldiers. Fixed an issue where aircraft armour plating values were sometimes not calculating correctly. Nanofabrication research should now unlock when the dropship gets home after completing an Alien Base mission, not immediately after winning the mission. Fixed the Region Bonus popup sometimes showing the incorrect information string. Fixed some locations displaying the Geoscape clock using periods rather than semicolons. Fixed the Latin America Elite Scientist supporter displaying a green icon (rather than red) when an Infiltrator. Fixed a minor typo in the Demolition Grenade tooltip. Fixed shields displaying that they could be equipped in the "Container" slot, which confused players into thinking it could be placed in the Backpack. Fixed the Sentinel System module incorrectly reporting a vision arc twice what it should be on the tooltip. Fixed the Geoscape map scrolling having a visual "jump" when you scrolled far enough to wrap on the right edge of the screen. Fixed the engineering screen UI resizing itself when you add the MARS / ARES rebuild projects to the queue. Fixed the vehicle Heavy Reinforced Armour incorrectly being called the Heavy Ceramite Armour. Air Combat: Fixed the Observer UFO getting visually deformed after performing an Evasive Roll. Fixed air combat burst-fire weapons continuing to fire the remainder of the burst at interceptors even if they escape the fire arc of the weapon. Tactical Combat: Fixed a lot of visual issues in various maps and for various terrain objects. Fixed a number of AI hangs. Fixed a crash during the AI turn that could occur when carrying an unconscious soldier. Fixed various AI behaviours. Fixed another map that would get stuck at 90% loading. Fixed an issue where stunning the High Eternal would not successfully complete Operation Endgame. Fixed an issue where the camera would sometimes forcibly continue to track a moving soldier even if you'd tried to manually take control of the camera. Fixed a bug where destroyed shipping containers would still block grenade throws (even though the grenade showed a 100% chance to hit its intended target). Fixed grenades being unable to pass through destroyed building roofs. Fixed disabling "Allow Overwatch Friendly Fire" option not working correctly. Fixed the Extract VIP mission incorrectly ending early if your soldiers are inside the dropship but the VIP is not. Fixed the bug where UFOs would be revealed from the shroud without the player having any vision on them during night missions. Fixed units being able to perform reaction fire before they fell after having the floor below them destroyed. Fixed an issue where evacuating civilians would only move one tile at a time when on the edge of the map. Fixed an issue where only 11 "enemy visible" icons would be shown, even if more enemies were visible. Fixed damage numbers sometimes being visible in the shroud. Fixed Alien Base missions not revealing the map correctly if you controlled the command room, but an alien had entered the space underneath the control room. Fixed a number of issues with the obstruction shader (shown when a unit is behind an object) not correctly drawing over the shroud. Fixed dead aliens (killed during the crash) sometimes incorrectly spawning inside the walls of UFOs. Fixed an issue where live aliens could spawn inside the wall of a Battleship UFO on a certain map. Fixed an issue where Crushing units could walk through an open alien door and crush the doorway without also destroying the door. Fixed various issues with the movement path preview UI element, including some missing / incorrectly orientated tiles. Fixed the alien mainframe on the UOO Bridge Assault mission still displaying the interact cursor on hover once it has been interacted with. Fixed zombified civilians still showing the "evacuate" interact cursor on mouse hover. Abduction tubes that have been opened or have teleported away no longer appear as cover to the mouse cursor. Fixed a few shroud tiles around the Battleship UFO not being revealable. Fixed dead Reapers continuing to play their idle audio sound. Fixed blood splatters remaining hovering in the air if the floor tiles beneath them were destroyed. Fixed the game creating a broken save game on completion of the second part of ENDGAME. Fixed soldiers being invisible in the UOO Bridge Assault mission if you load the start of mission save. Fixed a bug where Mind Controlled soldiers would be recovered after a failed mission, even if outside the extraction zone. Fixed the Tactical Vest in the tactical inventory being renamed "Belt" the first time you change soldier. Fixed another example of the Alien Base command room upper level having incorrectly destructible walls. Fixed various buildings in Ambush missions that were missing deployment regions on the upper levels. Destruction particles should now correctly fall through the gaps between the space platforms on the UOO Sabotage maps. Fixed Wraith units flickering during their injury / death animation if they had their cloak active. Fixed a bug where units transformed into Reaper Zombies would spawn a corpse (despite the zombie being their corpse). Fixed the player not getting a "VIP spotted" toast if the VIP was spotted during the enemy turn. Fixed soldiers spawning off-center from their teleport pads on the UOO Bridge Assault mission. Fixed a couple of issues that could be caused by aborting stage 1 and stage 2 of ENDGAME. Fixed a Rescue Mission map where the soldiers were incorrectly split across two buildings. Fixed a bug where using the shoot+move preview on a cloaked Wraith would show the incorrect hit chance value (it would apply the cloaking value from the current soldier location). Fixed a particular type of hair incorrectly obstruction shading. Fixed a flicker on the Colossus fire animation. Fixed the default soldier arrangement for the Pegasus dropship spawning a couple of soldiers inside diagonal wall tiles. Fixed some of the walls in the UOO Sabotage mission not visually updating their appearance when destroyed, and still looking undamaged. Various fixes to missing / incorrect tiles in various maps.

(Sorry in advance ) Bug: Accuracy is not working correctly or as expected in many cases: Crouching does not influence Range Bonus Sniper No Movement bonus is added oddly Small Enemies benefit less from Cover and Crouching than Medium enemies; Large Enemies benefit the most from Cover. Small Enemies are easier to shoot beyond max range than Large Enemies Burst Fire x3 Reaction Fire seems too accurate. Burst Fire x3 at 0 range might have an extreme hidden accuracy penalty. (I cannot prove this one yet, but it was a staple of mine in Xeno1, and I stopped using it in Xeno2) Crouching makes Armor Penalty 10% Worse / Tac Module + Laser 10% Better (Hard to explain why this one is here) Only the single highest Cover Level is used to determine accuracy. Layers of cover only come into play if the shot misses the accuracy roll. I will test Smoke later if needed. Consequences: Accelerated Cleaner Rifle is the most accurate weapon for most soldiers, only a stationary/aimed sniper is better at range. Pistols are far superior to Shotguns in all metrics Attacking (gaining ground) is primarily reliant on Strength Attribute, then TU Attribute, not Accuracy Attribute or Reflex Attribute. Smoke Grenade is the best weapon other than Strength Efficiency, making Strength the best attribute. +20 Strength is WAY stronger than +8 Accuracy Grenade Launcher is in an awkward spot as a result High Accuracy Soldiers can wear Heavy Armor for little to no downside Low Accuracy Soldiers can wear Heavy Armor for little to no downside Missed Shots are WAY more dangerous to your soldier (and enemies!) than they should be. (Hard to explain this one too) Cleaners are better at range than aliens until alien plasma. Details: I just want to be clear, this is not a 'my shots missed' post, I am somewhere around 400+ hours in total Xeno playtime across X1 and X2. Accuracy has felt 'off' the entire Milestone 6 run so far. And Xenonauts has always had its oddities with Aiming. I noticed this on each of my plays of X2 so far (I stopped them all at Phase 2 until the endgame and air was done) so this time with some tech unlocked, I set out to show what I mean. Brace yourself for math. The above picture encapsulates the broad 'look and feel' of Accuracy that most people will experience. In most cases, the non-% accuracy values listed are the value needed to hit 100% hit chance. Where they represent actual hit chance %, they are colored Red/White/Green or Red/Yellow/Green in relative scale. The 'Green' section of the chart is the area where the cleaner rifle (and alien plasma) out perform all other rifles if your accuracy is high enough. If it is low, the laser weapon is best, the red zones. Any soldier under 53 accuracy, should always use a Laser Rifle or different weapon below. Some key points: Alien Plasma Rifle is less accurate than Xeno Ballistic Sniper unless they are 5 tiles or closer. 13 tiles for Laser Snipers. If you use sniper rifles: (Move + Aimed) or (Sit+Shoot+Move) are your go-to tactics. Any other moves and a normal rifle is better. Sniper Reaction Fire is insane due to No Move bonus. At 63+ Soldier Accuracy, prioritize Time Units on your snipers. You don't need your highest accuracy soldiers to be your snipers, but it is hilarious. Beyond 63 Accuracy, additional accuracy only counters Cover and extended range shots (and size see below). So far: above 63 accuracy = elite, below 53 = rookie. So what weapon do you give your cannon fodder, I mean shield users. Spoilers, its a grenade. But really, its the Laser Pistol: If you need exactly '1 more shot' the shotgun is the best, but only out to 4 tiles. If you need '2 shots', the pistol is better. If you need 2 hits with a shogun, you can do 2 Normal shots for 17% TU left, and 85 Acc req. Or you can do 2 pistol shots for 40% TU left and 85 Acc req. This is a bit hard to read, but the only reason the shotgun looks OK in the top part of this picture is that it assumes 1 tile range, which only gives a +14 accuracy vs pistol (Crouching a pistol with a +8 Tac Mod will give you +8.36 accuracy for 4 TU, giving the shotgun +5.64 accuracy). Most Pistol + Tac setups will be lighter than a Shotgun setup (strength adv), double so for Laser Pistols. Shotguns are finishers, and Pistols are attackers. Attacking does not mean doing damage. Finishing enemies is WAY less important than 'claiming ground'. Why? Suppression and reaction fire. The best way to manage these, are Grenades and Shields. Ok, so how DO we kill the Aliens? Other than Smoke doing some of the best Damage per Turn of all weapons (and stunning while providing attack and defense) I mean... Rifles and Machine-guns and Snipers: (Higher = Better in this one) Looking towards the bottom of the chart, you might think "Didn't he just get done telling me shotguns were bad?". They are when you consider weight and TU's and Damage. The shotgun needs to hit ~1.2 times to do similar damage to a rifle and rifles have x3 Burst Fire which is very good if you get close or have high accuracy and strength (not shown). Anyways, back to the bugs: Here we see that a small target is penalized relatively speaking for using a 40% cover vs shots over 100% weapon accuracy (snipers and rifles), the higher the weapon accuracy, the better vs small targets in cover. (Red is bad for the enemy in the Rel. column) The next image can be looked at as a comparison between (Aliens - Xenos - Cleaners), Gauss represents Xeno weapons + Alien Ballistics, and Cleaner represents Alien Plasma + Accel. Cleaner: Its hard to read because its getting dense, but the take away is: Close Range advantage of Xeno/Ballistic weapons counters Small Size advantages more than it should (Green Rel. is good for the attacker) Getting closer to Aliens/Cleaners is almost always better than not unless it costs you cover. "Ok I hear you, but my shots have terrible accuracy even with 70+ soldiers, and I get killed trying to get closer...." This is what happens when TU's are spent to try to 'shoot through their cover' instead of nuking it from orbit or flanking. You can't flank if you are not suppressing the aliens, and you can't suppress them without grenades or burst or wasting TU's again. Enter the Colossus: It feels, off. I am still going through the 'blind full play-through' right now, so I am not sure if it gets better in some way, but the 100 Strength bonus is not really able to be used, meaning you are trading Auto Med+Accuracy+Grenades and Reactions just to look like a badass who crushes walls. The 14 armor advantage and 10(8) penetration advantage is a bit weak imo. If you want to maximize this suit, pick a high Accuracy person with low Strength! As a somewhat contrived example, this is another soldier on the same dropship: They both look cool, they both pack serious heat. But one guy can carry a team and the other can hold a door with a medic nearby. Some of my current load-outs: Stun Tally per Weapon total so far: Stun Rod: 1 Stun Gun: 1 Smoke: 12+ I am going to hit the post button now, and I will collect any thoughts or errors and edit them in. (There is probably more, and I also have an Air Combat Balance post to make too eventually) There is quite a bit more to add, but much of it falls under the realm of balance and choice. If there is anything that anyone wants clarified so far, let me know.

Ahh, thankyou for the clarification, this is my first campaign, and i didnt understand the significance of ops points before i started so i didnt really get the tooltip. Makes a lot more sense now so my bad.

First of all, I want apologize in advance for any and all grammar/spelling mistakes here as English in not my native language and hope I’ll be able convey what I mean. 2 years ago I rage quit the game and left a negative review on steam because I thought the game was simply not fun and extremely frustrating. And I always loved X-Com series since I was a kid. Really wanted to love this game as well. 2 weeks ago I decided to have another go at it and finished it on Commander difficulty. Did anything change? Well, I finished the game, so obviously - yes. I'm gonna change my steam review to positive and suggest the game to my friends (that is if they want to set their asses on fire). However, atm I don't think I can give it more than 7/10 (probably 6.5) (note that completely average game is 5/10, and 10/10 is an insane masterpiece). The game has very very high potential and the devs really improved it, but there are still a lot of problems to be sorted. This is my take on it and would love to hear where I’m right or wrong. Also, note that this is an opinion for Commander difficulty only and things may work differently on lower levels. Basic gameplay: 1. Freakishly insane randomness to the point where it's not even funny. And it expresses itself mostly in damage ranges which can vary anywhere between 2 and 60 even in phase 1 (strangely enough I’ve never seen damage 1, but 2 – multiple times). Why? What's the mechanic of damage calculation? I can't think of any plausible reason to valid this kind of range. And I couldn't get used to it even in the very end-game where it ranges between 2 (if you have armor) and 150. Which in turn leads to problem 2. 2. Way too many one-shots. It is a miracle if your soldiers survive even 1 hit. A lot of the time they don't, no matter what rank they are or what armor they wear. Maybe Colossus or Vanguard will forgive 1 hit on max medals Colonel, but even then I had a lot of one shots. That is not okay. I do not believe this game can be completed without getting shot at and every one of them can insta kill. I think it would benefit to double or even triple HPs. I don’t think anyone likes this mechanic because it is not skill based. If instant death mechanic is implemented in the game it should be telegraphed so players can avoid it with skill. 3. Save scumming is the only possible way to complete the game on Commander. I do not like save scumming, I always try to avoid it if possible, but as a player I just can't calculate anything. Enemies can appear from every crack - doors, corners, teleport pads - and simply kill. There is no warning and there is no real comeback mechanic. If your top squad dies - it's all downhill from here and game over. Suggestion: motion tracker, like in aliens movie. Maybe not precise location, but general direction and approximate range. Maybe to balance it - make it work only if enemies are moving certain distance or making noise (current sound effects are not enough). 4. Lack of variety. All enemies feel the same - they run around, they shoot gun. I couldn't care less what's in front of me - a lizard, a psyon or a wraith. They are all the same. The only enemy I loved and respected was the Cyberdrone (that flying roundy tanky thingy). Its design is extremely cool - you can either pour into it from the front with a lot of guys or use tactics to get behind it. Really awesome and would love to see more designs like that. All other enemies don't have anything special about them. Even eternals are dudes with guns. Suggestion: make every enemy have its own quirk. Wraiths are snipers who stay at maximum range and shoot, retreat when someone is getting close. Psyons don't have guns but can use psychic abilities that can inflict damage or induce panic (maybe soldiers’ will and psyshield will be useful then). Lizards can stay the way they are as frontline brutes. Androns can be straightforward weapons platform and have 2 different weapons but they don’t take cover or something like that. Remove reapers - they simply suck. Or at least make them feral, so they always charge player using the shortest path even if it leaves them in the open. 5. AI has maphacks. It always knows where player's soldiers are. Just remove it, please. It butchers any kind of tactical gameplay. Tactical missions: 6. The lack of variety goes for mission types as well - there is not enough of them. In my playthrough I have completed 33 missions, 5 (?) of which were plot missions, 2 alien bases, 1 base defense, 2 terror missions and 1 abduct. I think the rest were UFO related. The 2 "free" UFO crashes are fine, don't make less of them, make more of other random missions pop up. And on terror missions Alenium bombs don't even work, it's the same pew-pew-pew mission. 7. Half of the armor types are useless and need rework. Enemies are always 1 level above in terms of weapons compared to player's armor and therefore Warden and Guardian armors don’t protection. If I left soldiers in Tactical armor it would feel absolutely the same - death in 1 shot. The first armor that really provides at least something new is Stalker (not survivability though). The first REAL armor is Colossus. Don't have any meaningful suggestions, maybe integrate simple exoskeleton to Guardian armor (+strength, +accuracy)? No idea what to do with Warden though. 8. Weapons were not created equally as well. In the early game I had to use mostly shotguns and rifles because of lack of TUs. Late game - shotguns and HMGs only. Other weapons just don't have enough firepower. I tried but couldn't figure out why would I bring sniper rifle, it requires a lot of TUs, doesn't have extreme amount of damage, doesn't headshot, has penalties for cover, and most maps don't have long corridors to shoot. Maybe if it ignored cover I'd find a place for it. Same goes for a rifle in the end-game, it has no redeeming quality compared to HMG which is simply a better rifle. Shotguns are fine. 9. Recruits don’t scale with difficulty as game progresses. New recruits are viable only in the first half of the game (phases 1,2,3 max). In phases 4 and 5 recruits just don’t have enough stats to compete with aliens and always die in 1 shot regardless of anything. And late-game random missions are insane in terms of difficulty, much harder than plot missions. I was researching Endgame and had a random terror mission pop up with wraiths/andrones/servitors as enemies. Tried to do it with a squad of Lts and got owned. Managed to kill 5 enemies on turn 1, then another 12 come from every direction and just annihilate Lts (all wearing either Colossus or Vanguard). I think I could have won with save scumming, but honestly, my thought was that I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t have problems with terror and didn’t need resources. 10. Corners are confusing. Sometimes I can't shoot when standing next to a corner but the enemy can shoot me. Why? Maybe if a rifle was nimble enough to shoot around the corner (with a penalty perhaps) than it would always have a use. Also I think soldiers should be able to peak or throw grenade around a corner when standing next to it. It's just common sense (?). Corners just feel weird in this game. 11. Overwatch is very bad and needs rework. You just can't rely on it. I had a situation when I had a firing line of 10 soldiers ready to breach a UFO (5 crouched + 5 behind them), all of them had TUs for a shot. Lizard opens the door, turns around, takes a couple of steps back, turns around, murders 3 guys with a volley. No overwatch. If I can't rely on it than why would I use it? Current overwatch requires player to sacrifice precious TUs for something that might not even trigger. This is most annoying when facing reapers, which can just waltz up to you and murder. Honestly, I think if a soldier has TUs left for a shot, then overwatch should always trigger on the first enemy movement. 12. Explosives and grenades feel very underwhelming. Booms should go big and hard. Grenade thrower and regular grenades can’t kill aliens in 3 hits in the late-game so I just stopped using explosives entirely. Explosions should just get a massive damage buff. Smoke on the other hand is fantastic, really awesome. Same goes for flashbang. But grenade throwing is a bit too expensive in terms of TUs, a 10-20% reduction in price would be cool. Strategic map and aerial combat. 13. Operation points (OP) are the most valuable resource. You can buy cash, alenium and alloys, reduce panic and recruit supporters. So it seems a bit weird that most of it comes from passive income. I'd love to see more missions in which I can get OP as a reward for a job well done but less passive income. And I also thought that Cleaners got eliminated too early, it's a waste. Suggestion: Maybe more Cleaners missions in Phases 1,2,3 with more OP rewards. 14. Supporters, like weapons, are not equal, most notably the security and intelligence ones. Intelligence supporter provides valuable OP daily. And security supporter reduces panic by 1 globally +1 in a region once a month! My game lasted for 11 months, so it was ~20% panic reduction in a region over the course of the whole game, basically just 1 terror mission. It is so insignificant. Suggestion: add a passive regional bonus to security supporter which allows the first soldier to die in a mission instead survive with critical wounds. Can't say much about money, science and manufacturing supporters - they exist. 15. Way too few resources in the early game and way too many in the late game. I got the feeling that after the first alien base I was swimming in Alenium and alloys (big UFOs also helped), had enough cash to actually build bases, manufacture everything I want and didn’t feel the need to make compromises in spending resources. Also, would love to see base presets (like soldier load-outs) when constructing them. Something like a make base with 1 radar + 2 hangars + 2 queued fighters (assuming the workshop on other base is free) which are being constructed at the same time as the base is being built and then delivered when hangars finish for a total of *insert sum* cash and resources. Also, maybe lower the price of building a base but increase the price of maintaining it because it is too expensive to get another base up and running in the early- and mid-game when you have many other things to research and manufacture. 16. Air battles are fine but I can’t shake the feeling that something is missing. Maybe add pilot behaviors? “Maintain distance”, “close-up dogfight”, etc. Right now it’s just fly to the point and shoot. Micromanagement is possible but it’s not exciting: pause-resume-pause-resume. Also, the difficult fights are in the mid-game. Late-game is too easy, cruisers and battleships are just bullet sponges that don’t pose a threat. They need more escorts. 17. The Gemini fighter is a huge power spike compared to Phantom. Two Geminis can destroy any UFO group with no hull damage easily. Angels and Phantoms are very similar. Phantoms need a little buff I think, maybe to their evasion roll cooldown and speed or maybe some kind of new ability. 18. Air modules are too simple. I have never used fuel module because never had problems with range (the limiting factor is radar range rather than fuel). In comparison, armor module is a must. It’s not even a choice. Would love to see more modules (single use super afterburners and IR countermeasures for example). Very minor point - laser air canon shot has a travel time. Really? Laser? While technically it does have a travel time but it’s a laser, it travels at the speed of light. At these distances it should be instant hit when fired. It can be a laser specialty – instant hits but weather conditions (add them?) can reduce efficiency. On a bigger scale, weapon specialties can be a major thing. I would love to see weapon types as side grades rather than plain upgrades. Ground lasers had that unique thing – recharging ammo and less recoil. Too bad all other weapon types lack uniqueness and are pure upgrades. Gauss weapons can have increased range and unlimited ammo because they shoot little metal specks with a downside of fewer shots (more TUs to fire or fewer shots in a volley). Fusion weapons on the other hand have less range but are devastating at close ranges while losing efficiency the longer it travels (plasma dissipates while travelling). Why do I think that side grades are better? If you encounter a UFO with let’s say 100 HP and your basic canon deals 5 damage it takes 20 shots to shoot it down. An upgraded canon now deals 10 damage but with scaling UFOs now have 200 HP, so it’s the same 20 shots. Basically, nothing has changed, the gameplay is the same. Side grades on the other hand have their upsides and downsides and provide choices that player has to make. The game changes based on what players decide to do. Players can screw up with what weapon type they choose and they will have to own this mistake. But this wall of text doesn’t mean that everything is bad, I had a lot of funny, cool and simply memorable moments. One of which was an extremely fantastic play by the AI when it baited my planes with 3 UFO groups back-to-back without time to rearm and repair. When all planes were out of ammo and barely alive the AI launched an assault on my base. I just had to watch UFO fly towards my base with realization that I can’t do anything about it. Great job! Overall, the game definitely left an impression on me and that is a good thing, that is what all games should try to achieve. I believe Xenonaughts 2 to be a solid foundation to be built upon and really look forward to what may come of it.

Sure. I'm happy to update the image if you make a more correct one for me. However it does need to stick to the aspect ratio / dimensions of the existing flag image because it's a UI image and we expect it to be a certain size. So you'll need to bodge it a bit if necessary. Here's the existing file: If you make an updated file then please DM it to me to ensure I don't miss it.

Not at the moment, no. Right now all aliens know exactly where all your soldiers are once they go into "combat mode" after sighting a hostile unit. We're looking to implement a fairer system in the next major update.

Hello everyone - we're now into December, so it's time to wish you all a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year before filling you in on our progress during November. As I'm unlikely to write a separate development update for December due to the way the holidays fall (I'm not back in the office until 5th January), I'll also give an update on our plans for the 2-3 weeks before we shut down for the festive season. Milestone 6 Released: The big news in the last month is we finally managed to release Milestone 6 onto our public branches. We're glad this update is finally in the hands of the players after it spent a solid couple of months stuck in the final bugfixing phase - but the overall reaction to the launch has been positive, and people seem to be enjoying the new content and improvements. The launch also went relatively smoothly in stability terms, and we've not been fighting too many fires post-launch. Quite a few bug reports have come in for relatively minor gameplay issues and we've been steadily working through them, but most of the fixes for these are being rolled into Milestone 7. Performance Improvements: Although the various fixes for Milestone 6 have absorbed a fair bit of programmer time, we did also start working on performance improvements for Milestone 7. We asked the community what parts of the game they felt needed the most optimisation, and we're currently working to this list: Speeding up load times Reducing slowdown when alien UFOs spawn on the Geoscape Duration of the AI turn in tactical combat Explosions in the tactical combat causing framedrops However we didn't have too many replies on this particular topic, so if you're reading this and feel there are other areas of the game where the performance needs improving then please do let us know (remember that this should be based on playing standard builds of the game, as Experimental builds have much worse performance due to all their additional logging). We've already made some improvements to the tactical mission load times and the AI turn duration, and we'll be continuing with these during December. The goal here is to get these completely finished before we start public testing of Milestone 7, because these are the changes most likely to cause gameplay bugs! New Content: We continued to work on the new content for Milestone 7 over the past month. The strategy UI background art progression system is now fully functional (it had some teething problems when we tested it last month) and the artwork has been added to the game for the research and engineering screens, and we're now halfway through the base stores screen. The programming work to implement the aircraft paperdoll system (where the plane artwork updates as you change weapons and equip items) was also completed last month, and we finished the artwork for the Angel interceptor and all of the weapons. Work on the Phantom is now well advanced and we expect to have moved onto the Gemini by the end of December. We've also been working on various smaller content tasks, such as adding an additional tier of extra-tough Psyon / Sebillian / Wraith soldiers that accompany Eternals and appear on the hardest missions. These new aliens have claimed the "praetorian" rank, so we've added a new alien "warrior" rank and demoted the former elite / praetorian aliens down a level (the rank sequence now goes soldier / warrior / elite / praetorian). The game files for this have now been completed, and we'll be adding the 3d models for these new units after Christmas. We're also adding a new interrogation project for the Cleaner Leaders, as a few people have pointed out that it was weird that they didn't have one when the other types of Cleaner do. Again, the game files for this have been completed and we're hoping to get the research art and research text completed by the end of December. Conclusion: I think that's everything I wanted to cover. The only releases we have planned for the remainder of the month are our ongoing hotfixes for Milestone 6, with Milestone 7 not arriving on the Experimental branch until January - so I hope everyone has a good festive season and we'll see you all next year!

Yeah, you're right. These numbers are totally broken. We'll get that fixed in Milestone 7.

So the shot hitting isn't actually a bug - the enemies have a 10%-15% hit chance when shooting into that smoke, so it's not completely ridiculous that they could score a hit on a unit moving in the smoke. It's just fairly unlikely. However the one thing this has exposed is that the AI is using different thresholds for shooting at units during overwatch fire than for normal shots. It won't normally take a shot unless it has at least a 30% chance of hitting, but it'll overwatch fire at a 5% hit chance. So I think we need to unify those and make the aliens less likely to overwatch - as they will occasionally roll highly and score a lucky hit.

Players can remove those soldiers from the dropship, so you can still get in a position where you have too many soldiers and the rescued ones get left behind. But we'll reword the message.

Thanks. Yeah, doing extra crash site missions should be taking this value negative. We'll get this fixed.

Thanks, will bring it up with the rest of the team!

Thanks, will bring this up with the rest of the team

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! This update contains our first round of stability fixes for Milestone 6. I'm going to release them on this branch now so they get a few days of testing over the weekend while we wait to see if the wider playerbase encounter any stability bugs in Milestone 6. Gameplay Changes: We've added a fallback trigger for the "endless war" system. This spawns endless waves of Battleships so people can continue to play the strategy layer for as long as they want, but in some cases it was not triggering correctly. We think we've fixed this bug, but it's a serious enough issue we've set up a fallback trigger that activates "endless war" at day 500. As it's now possible to capture an Eternal without first completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission, completing the UOO Bridge Assault mission is now required to unlock the Operation Endgame research project. We've made some optimisations to the AI turn, which should mean processing civilian actions should be faster. Bugfixes: Fixed an AI hang that could occur on the alien turn. Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to close an open door that was touching an interactive object like a Cleaner data desk. Fixed a crash that could occur if you unassigned the target rescue soldiers from the dropship on the Rescue Soldiers mission using the assignment dropdown, which previous fixes had not dealt with. Fixed the tactical map randomisation being broken (it had started marking the wrong map as "played" after a tactical mission). Hopefully fixed the issue where the post-Phase 4 event sequence that is supposed to eventually unlock endless waves of Battleships can get broken. Fixed the bug where certain Project Available pop-ups that were not triggered by completing a research project (e.g. Corpse Analysis, MARS Rebuild, etc) would show a pop-up taking you to the research screen even though they only contained engineering projects. Fixed a rounding issue that could cause the player to be unable to recruit a Geoscape Supporter despite seemingly having exactly the right amount of Operations Points to do so. Fixed some z-fighting with the Pegasus dropship interior walls. Hopefully fixed the issue where the shot crosshair would sometimes become offset when hovering over enemy Sentry Guns. Removed Lock Time from various aircraft weapon tooltips, as it's not used in most cases and would show error text in the other cases.

5th milestone allowed by balancing on the panic edge to prolong the last phase of the game almost endlessly. I thought it was an unintentional side effect of balancing process, but I loved it. I would like to say Thank you for spending effort to make endless war official. Dont forget to advertisie endless war as built-in feature on Steam, it is a sale moment for certain audience.

This is still broken and so visually jarring to Canadians. The aspect ratio of the flag is wrong (not all flags are 3:2, Canada and UK are 2:1, US is 19:10, etc). Wikipedia has a nice public-domain copy of a real Canadian flag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Canada.svg Also a list of country flags, images thereof, and their correct aspect ratios: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_flags_of_sovereign_states I can even prepare you a zip file of all the correctly-formatted flags used in the game if you tell me naming convention and file format / dimensions so you can drop-in-replace your existing flag data.

Nice catch, we'll get it fixed, thanks!

This could be an excelent way for the stalker to be actually good

Thanks for the bug report! We're aware of this issue and this will be fixed on the next patch

Well keep up the good work, i enjoyed Xenonauts 1 a lot especially with mods and extra armors and items and Xenonauts 2 will be even better! Even now, not fully finished, it s a lot of fun

Thanks. I can reproduce this at my end, so don't worry about grabbing any extra files - we've got everything we need!

I appreciate the realism argument, it's just an oddity due to a combination of changes. In my campaign experience, the first encounter with the other wreckage ships (probe, fighter, bomber and interceptor) are lone enemies you shoot down, so you get their xenopedia entries on pretty much first encounter. And the capital ships you usually shoot down and loot on first encounter, so get their xenopedia entries early as well. However the defender operates a weird position as it starts out as an escort to other capital ships AND capital ships turn up unescorted initially before having escorts. Combine this with the new 'UFO Delegation' system, and the defender is likely to show up escorting a capital ship you have already shot down and Delegated, so you are encouraged to take the Bounty rather than assault (which costs OP). Combine this with fuel/speed considerations making you shoot some UFOs down over water rather tail them, and you can end up with the Defender Xenopedia entry not showing up until you have fought it many times.

Active Camo should reduce spot range by 10 tiles. Once you shoot or throw, spot range bufff is removed until next round AND your movement.

I had the same desert map for the first abduction and the first cleaner mission (soldier rescue) only few game days apart. Firstly, shouldn't the game make sure that these kinds of spawned maps weren't in the same biome back to back? (as they could easily be anywhere on the globe) Secondly, shouldn't the game make sure that the same map wasn't used until all the other available maps were used first? user_same_map_bug_1-2.json user_same_map_bug_2-1.json

Thanks. There is a randomisation system but it turns out something has got pretty fundamentally broken in it, so we'll fix that up shortly.

Iirc the funding is split and added for every region. Will bring this up with the team and see what they think.

I took these shots about 40-100+ times i think so far? (400-1000 rolls) At 100% it wont let me take the shot due to the 'AntiHack/0% system', so I use 99. I will try 99.99. I cannot tell between deaths and non-death misses. I cannot get a non-burst shot that low other than pistols, and I only have laser pistols, which stop at 32.5%. So I have to use Smoke (which works 'properly') or Range, which exacerbates deviation unless I grind out a 100 accuracy soldier. (I have a 91 acc soldier I think? so 91+8 is almost there, but all these guys have armor on). So to test means I have to run another mission and all my saves are right before a story mission I have not played yet. Attempting to make this 'situation', is where I realized with the help of the 6.24.0 change, that its related to "Soldier" vs "Rock": [ALL SHOTS are taken AT Soldiers my mouse just moved because of key-binds] The result is the people with rocks and trees behind them die: So lets try to confirm that: Now I already KNOW that a 30-50% shot will prioritize cover, so I know the front guy will die, and the target will live (5x Accurate Miss, 1x Miss that hits, 1x Deviated Miss Hit Sniper) I think 1 hit the trees, Its hard to tell sometimes, and one hit the rock at least: If we remove the cover, the shield will get incinerated: 186 Damage, 2 Misses. Inconclusive. vs We can test this many ways: Did they die and it chose a new target? Did they deviate and die? Why is death related to proximity to rock?: Conclusive proof of "Cover Bias": Every single thing other than what we aim at is pulverized. Another undeniable example of Accurate Misses Another example of cover bias (its a bad one, but the train lived several shots): Deviation and Number of Proximal 'Rocks/Walls/Etc' seem to play a factor: Save: All of this post was on this save:user_5cent-26.json Smoke I forgot to get pictures of the smoke interaction, but this is it:

29+56+45+12+49+15+57 = 263 damage on 1 soldier, through armor. Yes. I was having issues with getting screenshots because of the keybindings, so I rebound it. This is the sniper, he hits 100% pretty much everywhere in the green and orange ranges. So any misses in those 100% zones, will be Accurate Misses due to cover (or smoke, covered in other posts). I forgot I turned the setting back to 25%, so this will be 'real numbers'. At (99% StoppingChance) the shot would hit the cloaked sniper easier than shooting him directly (Ctrl Click accuracy hack). Ergo anytime shooting someone is harder than 25%, shooting behind them is a hack (I think we both know this?). The hack is possible because of the 2 rolls, and the bugs. We have 100% hit on the tile. I took the first shot at 77%, and it hit the cloaked sniper in front, but I failed to get a screenshot of it because of the key-rebinding, lol. The zip file should have some examples vs aliens (i could get those pictures easier).

This update contains our first round of balancing fixes for Milestone 6 while we work on the first stability patch. Please do continue to report any bugs you encounter while playing the game and we'll do our best to get them fixed! Gameplay Changes: Some weapon tweaks: Alien weapons (including the Cleaner Accelerated Rifle) now gain +2% hit chance per tile of proximity to the target, which matches the equivalent human weapons. Previously they only gained +1.5%. Fixed alien weapons having zero recoil, which meant burst fire from alien weapons was more effective than it should have been. The cheaper fire mode on Sniper Rifles now correctly has +20 No Move bonus, rather than +40 (which was higher than the more expensive fire mode). Laser Sniper Rifle now has the same fire mode accuracy / TU cost / No Move bonus values as other human sniper rifles (it got out of sync a few patches ago). The average missed shot in tactical combat now deviates from the target more than twice as much as before, but the maximum permissible deviation has been significantly reduced. This means missed shots will generally have a wider spread, but you should no longer see the occasional shot that flies off wildly at a crazy angle. The reason for this change is that previously miss shots would often deviate by such a small amount that many of them would still pass through the tile of the target unit - and while they were disallowed from actually hitting the target, they could still inflict suppression or take out the intervening cover, etc. Fighter UFO missiles have been reduced in speed by 25%, and the Interceptor UFO missiles have been reduced in speed by 15%, as both were harder to evade than intended. Bugfixes: Fixed a bug where AI units would sometimes ignore and not attack Xenonaut units that were clearly visible but did not start the turn directly within in their vision cone. Fixed some minor visual issues with the cliffs on a Polar Cruiser UFO crash site map.

that's it! thank you

Yeah, as alien weapons are marked as junk in general. The SMGs can be used but they're pretty bad so I don't think we want them needing to be manually sold all game.

In general, Cleaners with their deadly double burst fire feel a lot scarier than aliens at the beginning of the game. normal armed civilians (not soldiers or cops) are too good and shouldn't have rifles. Sebillian melee is good for nothing (low reflexes so it doesn't hit anything?) Most important balance issue: There's way too much OP's available at the very beginning. This effects everything (number of supporters, amount of resources, being able to do extra crash sites etc.) and makes the phase 1 doomsday completely trivial: At day 88, doomsday is averted and I have 325OP in bank with a passive gain of 15.5OP per day. I never needed to even think about using the 'reduce panic' operation. And this is me skipping 2 cleaner missions and one abduction mission resulting in - what, 90 extra doomsday damage? Doomsday feels trivial after the latest balance changes. It stayed below 50 with almost no effort, and there was always enough OP's to drop it to 0 if I ever I felt like it. (I didn't) And this was even though I skipped the intel gather mission and all those juicy OP rewards!) And I don't mean it should be super punishing, but currently, you don't even need to think about it. Accelerated weapons still feel like a trap and I'm not sure how to make them more of a choice. Making them a few days quicker to research? (not enough by itself) Manufacturing time/cost could also be lower? (not enough by itself) Only one project that upgrades all ballistics to accelerated? (not a fan) Push Lasers / alenium power research a bit later? (could work, combined with the 2 above) Add lasers' Alenium requirements a bit more? (This might be the best solution) On my current playthrough I tried to research and build accelerated weapons as soon as I could but I still got lasers available and enough Alenium for them before I had a chance to use the accelerated weapons even once. Also, laser upgrades come so fast, it further encourages going for the lasers. There're quite a few missions back to back at the beginning of the game. Making Cleaner VIP assassination and data raid missions persistent would give more flexibility and I could prepare for them better. Cleaner HQ difficulty seems now pretty much spot on! First Terror mission difficulty was pretty much spot on! First Alien base mission difficulty was a tad on easier side, but not much. Maybe add some cannon fodder units with lesser gear to fill the space. I would suggest introducing sentry guns a bit earlier (Put one in the Cleaner VIP assassination command room maybe?) First 4 months there's too much alien materials available. I shouldn't be able to build everything available unless I complete delegation crash sites or spend OP for additional materials. Increasing laser weapon cost would fix this too. Aircraft are too long in transit and are repaired too quickly. UUO and ENDGAME missions should also be played with night rules, same as alien base missions Regarding performance, things that aren't mentioned in the OP, are deployment phases and base defence missions. For some reason they feel quite sluggish at least on my system. Apart from that, the biggest performance related thing for me is the severe stuttering in geoscape that reveal the upcoming UFO waves. Loading times for me are already good enough.

Its not working fine, you are saying this should have -40% damage, and I have shown that it applies to all hits. The Laser does 23/34.5/46/92 damage, with 8 armor destruction. We are shooting vs 36 armor. All shots did 0 damage. The first target took 16 armor damage, meaning 2x8, meaning no Falloff, and No Damage Randomization. 46-36=10dmg, not 0dmg. So HP Damage and Armor Damage use different falloff. I suspected this, but only confirmed it with those screenshots. The Solder at the back who took 10 armor damage, had 40% Reduction. If each shot applies armor damage before the next one, it makes this even more bugged. (Picture of it being -40): I am not blaming the dev team, at all. I have no idea where you got that idea from. I am trying to explain that a bug with the "StoppingChanceComponent" variable and its derivatives is influencing the entire game: ALL shots roll to hit TWICE, not once. Missed Shots have 25% Accuracy Missed Shots roll cover sequentially, Accurate Shots roll cover once. Accurate shots that punch through cover, will be specially modified to hit the 'target' with the 'hit%' and not the 'miss%'. [Attempt to counter the bug/hack] Accurate shots that kill the target will not deviate as missed shots. Missed shots deviate via 'Combined Accuracy' in terms of Tiles (not fully confirmed). Smoke is the only thing that modifies 'Missed Shot Hit %' (other than modifying it directly via crouch, etc) Due to all of this, the Shot Indicator is hilariously wrong most of the time, and weapon balance is all over the place. This setting is one of the single biggest balance variables in the game right now. It is the sole reason why most weapons need range bonus. It is the only thing that causes soldier death for me. This is a 0% shot that is actually a 0% shot, but I cannot take the shot to 'prove it' because of the 'system': You can make it into a non-0 shot by getting closer, but this 'abuses the bug' to a limited degree (this is a bad shot because I did not have enough TU for a 10x): If missed shots have 0% hit, this shot can expect 1 hit if we shot a 10 round burst at it: If 'missed shots hit 25% of the time', this is actually 3.3 hits: Now its not quite 3.3, there is some smoke and other factors we can get to. So lets look at a 7% shot into 80% smoke: How many shots will hit (I have 99% hit on missed shots on for this shot)? If smoke worked like the other systems, it would hit 9/10 shots: But smoke is the only thing that works right: So when does a missed shot get better than a normal shot? Unless the shot indicator says 20% or higher, missing is better before cover. So with cover, it gets messy. An Accurate Shot, that Misses due to Cover, will hit that Cover. This is why I only throw 100% grenades. Grenades effectively ONLY miss due to cover (not really, but in practice this is the case, we will get to it). These Shots have been programmed to not use the 25% miss-hit chance, thus they will usually hit cover behind the target. Missed Shots are not subjected to this arbitration, but have to roll through 'each cover', not just the 'highest cover'. This is why Heavy Weapons other than the Laser Machine gun are bad. Cover absorbs their shots like mad, the laser does this too, but it destroyed the offending cover, in both Accurate Misses and Misses. You probably think I am crazy talking about 'accurate misses', but they exist. These are accurate misses killing the cover in-front of and behind an enemy in smoke, but missing the enemy every time. Every target here has the same 25% hit chance: We can duck the front soldiers to make them non longer valid targets for "Accurate Misses" and only valid targets for "Misses", thus they will live and the wall will get shot instead: Now this all gets really messy really quickly. This value determines so much, and it is not even behaving consistently enough for me to test it properly. This is a picture, where my setting is at 50%, but this solider has 25%, he did not move or duck or anything. I even ended the turn and it stayed the same: So ignoring why this value is so inconsistent even in controlled tests, lets look at grenades. This will always land on the square, which is expected: This one is 50% behind the solider, 50% on the solider. I think many people would assume this grenade can land somewhere other than the 2 red squares, they would be wrong. This grenade will only land in the red square, or the orange area: Basically, there are no 'missed' grenades. They will always be "accurate misses", and thus will ALWAYS hit the red cover (which is not always red). "missed" grenades will miss due to deviation, but do not deviate far enough to cause FF issues. So lets talk about Deviation. It seems to be directly related to 'Combined Accuracy'. This solider has 76 accuracy, making my estimate ~2 tiles deviation: If you increase accuracy, you lower 'Missed Shots', and thus you lower your ability to suppress since 'Accurate Misses dont deviate': If you get closer, you increase accuracy due to 'Range Bonus', again lowering missed shots, and lowering suppression: Since we are using 'Accurate Shots', they will prioritize any cover instead of the target: This is why this image exists: (I just miss-understood the root cause) This is why the gauss machine guns feel off (not bad), it shoots AT COVER, not at enemies the closer you get. Taking all this into account, this shot has a very high chance of killing your own soldier (if the wall is breakable, I don't even really fire burst inside UFOs). If you shoot enough burst to break all the cover, in this case 5 tiles of cover, but we only hit each one 40% of the time, so 10 bullets might do it. Please take the time to read this thread in its entirety once more. I have explained everything from multiple angles.

Hey there, thanks for the reply. Had a chat with the rest of the team and the plan is to basically implement a way for spawned enemies (symbiont) to be counted as kills. Captured enemies will also be changed to count as kills as well (which will give the related stat exp that come along with it)

Thanks for the bug report! Yeah this was a bug I also encountered while I was prepping for a base defence mission last weekend. We've made a fix for it that will be included in the next patch which will most likely be released on stable today or tomorrow.

You clearly have a point there, but I just unfortunately fail to get it. I hope Chris and the team are able to decipher your posts better than I am. XD

We are keeping an eye on them and fixing the issue is definitely planned for the AI rework pass.

I don't really want to get into the 'balance' side of things yet, and so this chart does not aim to show the strengths of the Laser weapons at all. The main purpose is that the Properties of the Aliens and Cleaner weapons (and thus the Xeno weapons) dictate much more than it might seem. Since the Cleaner weapons cannot be produced, and the source stops being available fairly early on (right as you are short on funds), the player may end up selling one of the best weapons in the game without knowing it. The 'Sell Junk' option even keeps these weapons because it knows they are good. This 'bug/balance' is why we saw patch notes like: Cleaners with Accelerated Rifles are now less likely to use them in burst fire mode Servitors can no longer reaction fire We've therefore equipped alien units with Plasma weapons instead of Magnetic weapons right from the start of Phase 2 The Laser Weapons are fantastically good weapons all around, even rivaling all the Gauss weapons other than the Gauss Sniper. I specifically limited the number of laser weapons I produced, which resulted in me ending up using Cleaner weaponry and realizing how 'bugged' the system really was. The Grenade Launcher's issues are not related to its accuracy, other than the 'Missed Shots are Laser Guided Homing Missiles'. As an example, lets say it was decided that the shotgun was bad, needed to be fixed by improving its close range performance without impacting its long range performance too much. Some might want more damage, or less time unit use, but both of those would be mistakes that seriously improve its all around performance to start surpassing other weapons. The counterintuitive answer in the current system is to add range to the shotgun. This ironically does not make it better at range, it makes it better in close. This is why the Grenade Launcher is more accurate than the Gauss Rifle. It might be easier to see it for some on a graph like this (Laser Bonus does not apply in this graph): (Helps if I make the graph right ><) Pistol Accuracy Range vs Size Difference: One of the single most common situations in Xenonauts is: Soldier ducked behind low cover, shooting alien in open, and alien shooting said soldier: If the Alien closes 20 tiles closer, it goes from ~65 to ~85% hit (if this alien has stacked accuracy to get 100). The lower the accuracy, in this case, the less important range becomes. Unfortunately this is a comprehensive issue, and thus I decided it was a bug that needed to be discussed. Final Graph to clarify the laser situation (graph editor has no red ) and the elite vs rookie situation. The shaded zones are 55-75 Accuracy soldiers. All lines assume crouch bonus: I just realized that all the Alien Rifles in these graphs are using the wrong slope, they should be aligned with the cleaner Green on the left side, and I am not remaking the images right now. Basically the images only show the close range advantage vs Cleaner. Play with this while I kill some more aliens: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/fgo60dqdwb (Invert Contrast top right)

Bombers don't generate crash sites. The bomber research specifically says they leave a field of smoking wreckage when shot down. Not sure which ship the fusion weapon tech comes from (I stopped at the UOO-1 sabotage mission due to the bug in experimental branch, now waiting for the fix to go to stable branch before I start a new playthrough), but its not the bomber.

I forgot the F11 button last time, so here is a proper save report, and the 'half-state' shown. Sometimes its just the top armor, other times its missing the top armor. This one did not go invisible, but I my firepower is higher in this mission. bug_report_2025-11-14-22h33_gc_6.23.0_user_f11_0.zip

Sorry for the late reply, we've made a fix for this on 6.22. The bug was basically caused by the teleporter pads on the central building sharing the same IDs as the spawn pads.

Hello everyone - October is now finished, so it's time for our monthly progress update. I'll be keeping things brief this month! Milestone 6 & 7: We had hoped to release Milestone 6 onto the public branch last month, but unfortunately we've been dealing with a couple of rather thorny UFO-related bugs in the shroud / line of sight system. These are now fixed and what we hope will be the public release of Milestone 6 has been compiled and released onto the Experimental branch. Assuming no serious bugs are found over the weekend, we'll then release it onto the standard branches next week. We'll probably continue to patch Milestone 6 for another week or two, as there's a couple of annoying visual bugs in the game that we still want to fix (such as certain tiles incorrectly drawing under the shroud, etc). We'll also make it a priority to fix any bugs that are reported by the community after the public release. Aside from the programmer working on fixing those key bugs, most of our team moved on to Milestone 7 towards the end of last month. That update will be the final launch update for Xenonauts 2, and we'll be focusing primarily on polish and performance - however, we are still planning to add some extra content to the game in the update, and we've started by working on that. Strategy UI Background Updates: The most noticeable piece of new content will be the strategy UI background illustrations changing and updating as the game progresses and the player unlocks new technology. This feature existed in the original Xenonauts and was very well received; players felt it made the game feel much more reactive and immersive to get to see how the new technology impacted the day-to-day life of the Xenonauts. We've actually been working on these in the background for several months now. The artwork is already complete for the Research and Engineering screen backgrounds / characters, but the work of integrating them into the game only began at the start of this month. We still have to finish the new background illustrations for the Base Stores and the Soldier screens (which are the other two that upgrade), but we're expecting to have everything wrapped up in the next couple of months. I've attached an example of the updated artwork above. Aircraft Equipment Visualisation: In a similar vein to the background illustrations, we've been working on a proper "paperdoll" system for the Aircraft screen. The idea here is simple - the artwork for your interceptors should accurately reflect the equipment and upgrades that you've chosen for them. If you're equipping them with missiles, you see missiles appearing under the wings. If you've run the engineering upgrade project to give it improved engines, the artwork for the interceptor updates to show a more advanced engine, etc. We started working on the art assets for this task last month, and we'll be starting on the code implementation for it this month. Balancing Playthrough: Last month I did another campaign balancing / testing session. As always, this was rather time-consuming - the campaign I completed took about 35 hours, and there were also a couple of other shorter campaigns before that that were ended by serious bugs. Nonetheless, it was time well spent. We identified a lot of minor polish and balancing issues that we were able to fix relatively quickly and roll into the Milestone 6 builds. However, we also pushed a number of tasks back into Milestone 7, and we've been busy working on those over the past couple of weeks. Some of these were bugfixes that we didn't want to include in Milestone 6 because they risked introducing new bugs or breaking save game compatibility, whereas others were larger balancing changes that we'll implement as a group before we start our Milestone 7 playthroughs. Finally, playing the game for an extended period of time has been valuable for our planning process. There's only so much development time remaining before we leave Early Access, and we're not going to have time to polish or improve everything we'd like - so having a better understanding of how much each individual issue affects gameplay makes it much easier to make sensible decisions about what we should prioritise. Additional Maps: Another thing that has become obvious after repeated playtesting campaigns is that the game needs some additional maps for the early-game UFOs. There's currently three maps per biome for the small UFOs (Scout, Destroyer, Observer), which is enough that you shouldn't see repeats within a single campaign - but many users will restart the campaign at least once, and will therefore end up playing the early-game content multiple times. We've already started work on two extra maps per biome for the small UFOs, which should hopefully address the problem. We're hoping these new maps will all be complete by the time we release the first test versions of Milestone 7, which will probably be early in the new year. I think that covers everything we did last month. As always, thanks for reading, and I'll write another update in a few weeks!

It's been a while since I posted, but I have been keeping an eye on these updates and I'm very excited to hear that we're getting close to a true release. Thank you for all the hard work, even if it has taken a long time. I'm still glad I backed this all those years ago.

Very good. Can you check these @Gijs-Jan?

Hi Doubleskulls, thank you for confirming. I think the Stalker armour's camouflage effect should work better, so it can be used for scouting for example or for avoidance of hits, as it trades off protection for camouflage. Hi devs ( @Chris) could the stalker armour be looked at perhaps, so it is more effective? Currently I believe, that more players (me including) tend to skip it, as the effect of it is not very palpable.

This post will explain what different branches are available for Xenonauts 2 and how you can switch between them. Stable / Default Branch: anyone playing the game on Steam / GOG / Epic will be on this branch by default, and it contains the most recent *stable* build. This generally means you will experience fewer bugs and better performance, but you will not have access to the latest features. Experimental Branch: the experimental branches contain special debug builds which contain additional logging and save more often so bugs can be located more easily. Unfortunately, this also means they have longer loading times and worse performance than normal builds. You're also more likely to encounter bugs in the newer versions of the game that are still being tested on Experimental! Legacy Branch: updating to a major new version of Xenonauts 2 will usually break save games. When we update the Stable Branch we move the previous version to the Legacy Branch so anyone who wants to finish playing a saved campaign can do so. Experimental Legacy Branch: this is the same concept as the standard Legacy branch, but it contains the last Experimental build instead of the last Stable build. The general pattern of development is that our new updates will be released on the Experimental Branch and will spend a few weeks there being patched and improved. Once we're happy with the stability and gameplay, we'll move this new version to the Stable branch (and send the previous Stable version to the Legacy branch). STEAM - Changing Branch: Go to your Steam Library Right-click on Xenonauts 2 in your game list Click on "Properties" Click on the "Betas" tab Click on the dropdown and select the Experimental or Legacy branch Select NONE if you want to revert back to the stable branch at any point GOG Galaxy - Changing Branch: Load up GOG Galaxy Right-click on Xenonauts 2 in your Owned Games list Click on settings menu at the top of the screen (the icon looks like two sliders) Hover over "Manage Installation" and then click on "Configure..." Use the "Beta Channels" dropdown to choose Experimental or Legacy branch If this dropdown is disabled, make sure the game isn't currently downloading or already open! Select "Disabled" if you want to revert back to the stable branch at any point