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At long last we've set a firm date for the launch of the Kickstarter for Xenonauts-2 - it will be happening on Wednesday 20th June, at 14:00 GMT / 14:00 UTC. We've been working on this Kickstarter for a long time and we hope you'll be willing to support us when we launch, as it really makes a huge difference to a crowdfunding campaign when you have a strong first 24 hours! Our funding target is £50,000 but we're hoping to raise more than that - the more money we have to spend during the last phase of development, the better the game will be! I should also mention that Kickstarter takes a much smaller cut than the other sites on which we sell, so if you enjoyed Xenonauts and are pretty sure you'll be buying Xenonauts-2 at some point, Kickstarter is definitely a good place to do it - about 20% more of the money ends up in our pockets compared to you buying the game on Steam for the same price. It also makes the project look more interesting and popular, which means we're more likely to get press coverage about the game in the future and the people wavering about whether to support the game on Kickstarter would probably feel more confident in doing so! We will be sending out a notification to everyone on our mailing list one week before the Kickstarter launches (13th June) and then a reminder on the day of the Kickstarter itself. Reward Tiers: These are our plans for the reward tiers, all of which (awkwardly) have to be priced in £ rather than $ because we're based in the UK. £1 - show your support, and get our project updates and notifications £18 - get a copy of Xenonauts-2 on Steam / GOG when it launches onto Early Access (the game will launch at $30 when finished). £25 - as above, but with a digital copy of the soundtrack and additional access to the three-month beta we will run on Steam / GOG prior to the Early Access launch (this tier is limited to 2000 backers) £35 Option 1 - as £25, plus your name in the credits, and you can put a soldier in the random soldier pool with a name, nationality and gender chosen by you £35 Option 2 - as £25, plus your name in the credits, and you get a second Early Access copy of Xenonauts-2 to give to a friend £50 - all of the above, including both £35 rewards £75 - all of the above, plus you can create your own unique face for the custom soldier using our portrait generator £100 - ????? £200 - all of the above, plus our portrait artist will paint you from an image you send him (tier is limited to 20 backers) £500 - all of the above, plus you'll get to work with us to create a random event that can hit the player - possibly incorporating yourself (tier is limited to 5 backers) We're expecting the beta testing period to be about three months long, and it should start 1-3 months after the end of the Kickstarter. You will have access to this if you back at the £25 tier or above. Once this beta test is complete the game will launch into Early Access and everyone who backed at the £18 tier will then get access to the game. You'll notice we've gone in very heavily on the digital rewards. The physical rewards we did for the original Kickstarter were a massive pain to organise, particularly with regards to the shipping ... and I worked out afterwards that we actually lost money on them. Things are easier these days because specialised fulfillment companies exist but unfortunately I still don't think we'd be making much money from physical rewards. The downside is that we're left a bit short on reward tiers. I honestly can't think of anything to put in at the £100 tier, and I'm open to suggestions - if we can't think of anything good then we'll just take that one out, but it's a nice round number and I'd rather include a tier at that level if I can. If you want to see how the custom portraits look, here's the Beloved Leader himself drawn from a still from the Kickstarter video. Pretty good work, no? There's a total of 25 portraits available (5 of which are at the £500 tier) so if you're interested in getting some custom art done, you might want to grab the £200 tier early As I mentioned before, we'll be starting our PR push one week before the Kickstarter on Wednesday 13 June, so we've got a bit of time to tweak the reward tiers etc before that happens. If you've got any thoughts on the rewards tiers or how well the custom portrait editor program works, please let us know! It would also be super-useful if you could spread the word about this to anyone that might be interested. Several hundred thousand people have played Xenonauts over the years but unfortunately we don't have contact details for most of them ... so we're reliant on our mailing list (and hopefully the gaming press) to reach them. Word of mouth can be a very powerful thing!

I am happy to announce the release of Xenonauts: Community Edition 0.35. What is the Community Edition? The Community Edition is a source-modified version of Xenonauts, produced to improve the stability and gameplay experience of Xenonauts, as well as to give modders access to more features. X:CE contains hundreds of bug fixes, crash fixes and quality of life improvements, while remaining very close to the vanilla gameplay. More information about X:CE in general can be read here. How do I install X:CE? Steam users - Switch to the Community branch in Steam by right-clicking on Xenonauts, selecting Properties, going to the Betas tab and selecting Community. No access code is needed. Other users (including GOG): 1. Download X:CE for manual installation. 2. Extract the X:CE archive into your game installation folder, overwriting existing files. 3. Launch the game. Answer "yes" if prompted to update load order. The game launcher should display X:CE 0.35 in the top-right corner. Can I continue a vanilla game in X:CE? Yes, X:CE can load saves from the vanilla 1.6X version of Xenonauts, and older versions. You can then continue the game with X:CE. The future of X:CE With the release of 0.35, the Community Edition is nearing the end of its development. I'm aware of a few more minor bugs, and I've received a good list of various small issues to look into. Some of those I'd like to fix, and surely something will crop up in 0.35 that necessitates a fix. But with Xenonauts 2 now entering a more mature phase in the development, I don't foresee much active work on X:CE beyond an eventual 0.35.1 with some minor fixes. Minor update 0.35.1 (May 5, 2020): A minor update was pushed to address Reapers one-shotting vehicles, and the psionic combat still sometimes using the wrong old formula. As was the original design intention, Reapers should now need 2-3 attacks to destroy a Hunter car. Changes from 0.34.3: Version 0.35 brings a lot of improvements for modders, new translations, and a few general fixes. New translations: The French translations have been updated, authored by Rodmar18. The translations are for X:CE itself, and some mods. Traduction en français Le mod communautaire X:CE 0.35 comprend une extension et une révision totale de la traduction française, à la fois du jeu de base et de la plupart des mods inclus. Le lanceur du jeu devrait automatiquement détecter la langue de votre système d'exploitation (le français), mais il vous est toujours possible de choisir votre langue dans le gestionnaire de mod de ce lanceur. Rendez-vous sur le forum de Goldhawk Interactive pour discuter de cette traduction car elle est tout à fait perfectible. Mod updates The bundled Fix Pack has been updated and renamed to [XCE] Xenonauts Fix Pack. The rename avoids a conflict with Steam workshop, which has an older (and buggier) version of the mod. Bug fixes and general changes: It's now possible to rename bases. Click the base name in the base screen. Psionic combat calculations fixed to work as originally intended in the game design. Previously it would essentially be random rolls only slightly affected by the soldier's and the alien's stats. Now the psionic strength (for aliens) and bravery (for soldiers) contributes 50% to the score calculation as intended. From a player perspective, you should actually notice higher bravery soldiers being more resistant to psionic attacks now. "Go to base" will open the workshop view after a manufacture has been completed. "Go to base" will choose a base with idle scientists after a research has been completed. Afterburner in air combat now has "A" as a keyboard shortcut. Zoom in/out shortcuts will also work in air combat. Correct alien base name will show in the dialog window when a dropship reaches the base. The "incendiary burst bug" is fixed. The bug was - if a weapon of incendiary type fires a burst, and first hits terrain and then an enemy, then the shots hitting the enemy would do extremely high damage. Fixed a rare bug where destroyed airplanes in transfer would forever occupy hangar space in the new target base. Modding enhancements: Reaper zombification is now damage-based, that is, Reapers zombify when target HP is 0. It's thus possible to have them do normal damage. The base game now just sets the Reaper weapon damage to a very high value to ensure instant zombification. Item transfer time between bases can be modded in gameconfig.xml. If Xenonaut base retake missions are enabled, they can be made to happen in the Xenonaut base tileset in gameconfig.xml. Previously only the alien base tileset was available. Morale cap for ground combat can now be customized so mods can enable morale of over 100. More flexibility for radar ranges - up to 13 are now supported. The LockManufacture command has been fixed to work reliably. Fixed escort chances for UFO missions in the AM_*.xml files. Only mods with more complicated AM_ files were affected, so this is not a base game change. It's now possible to specify alien sight range per alien rank. If rank sight range isn't specified, the race range is used instead. Base evacuation feature completed: if retaking Xenonaut bases is enabled, then personnel and planes from lost bases will evacuate to other bases. It's actually visible on the map with planes flying out, etc. New alien abilities for aiprops: Infiltrator and Ghost. Infiltrator makes the alien look like a friendly unit - green cursor, no reaction fire, and so on. Ghost makes the alien act like an object, no special cursor at all, but it can be reaction fired upon if moving. gameconfig.xml can now control the various speeds of air combat. For X:CE 0.35, I want to again offer a big special thanks to @Charon and @Rodmar18.

Too long as a reply, so migrate from Xenonauts-2: Soldiers Thread ------ The following article try to discuss how to make Bravery and Morale become a meanful & critical part in ground combat. # Thinking about Bravery and Morale System Honestly, I never like the morale system in the whole XCOM series. This system never introduce any interesting and important decisions at least for me. I think it's due to the "morale penalty curve" not continuously. Let me explain: - If your solider has 100% morale, everything is good. So go forward and attack. - If your solider has 80% morale, everything is good. So go forward and attack. - If your solider has 60% morale, everything is good. So go forward and attack. - If your solider has 40% morale and not panic yet, you may worry about next turn but everything still good in this turn. Your solider have full fire power output without any penalty. So if a alien in your weapon range, your usually do the same things like before: Attack (because if success, you will restore more morale, this is what you want). - Until your solider really panic by a dice. You see, morale not really let us do any real / interesting decisions. It more like some sudden disaster. ## Simplify the Assumptions For clarify and simplify, I using some basic assumptions for the following thinking (the detail can be tweaked if implement necessary). Include: - The maximum of morale always 100. - Morale will slight restore each turn. (for example: 5 point each turn) - Bravery affect only "how many morale down", but not about max morale. For example: soldier with high Bravery only lost small amount of morale when him be hit. Hint: I ignore "Stress" effect in following discuss but It can assembled to any factors at later easily. E.g., a modifier of real Bravery, a modifier of max morale, control how much morale restore each turn. etc. ## Phase 1: Continuous Penalty Curve Let's consider more smooth penalty curve with morale decrease. For example: real accuracy = base accuracy - (1/2 morale decreased) So... - If 20 morale decreased, will reduce 10 accuracy. - If 40 morale decreased, will reduce 20 accuracy. Now, each morale point are more and more important than before. If one of your solider feel the situation are horrible in his mind (maybe real situation not so bad in whole battlefield scope). You will have a very good reason let him (her) retreat / regroup / take a breath / use TUs to find a good cover in this turn, but not do some attacks with his (her) low accuracy. Beside, the original panic system can still working on low morale level. ## Phase 2: Enhance Morale Management If phase 1 be implemented, we can expect players will much care about how to control soldier's morale. So we can introduce more mechanism about how morale up and down. Here is some morale decreasing events (each are independently): - Be flanked by aliens. - Approaching or sudden find a alien in close range. (so a brave solider are more suitable for close range / in house combat, even they don't have good SMG skill level, and a sniper may not need too much Bravery. We can also imagine two Reapers rush to three soldiers with well armed but leak bravery.) - Bullets pass / hit ground around soldiers. - Soldiers pass through some "Dreadful Tiles" (not only when soldiers stay at there -- it's more like how we using TUs). ### "Dreadful Tiles" rules The last "Dreadful Tiles" rules maybe more interesting. Those dreadful tiles may include following: - Some tiles be consider as low visibility (dubious) area. E.g., low light area, long grass, swamp, maybe also include smoke. - Some tiles with continuous damage. E.g., fire. In all XCOM series. "Difficult tiles" only mean "Need much of TUs to walk through". So if player find a long grass area, that exact mean "No matter you walk bypass or not, you just cannot pass through this area in 2 turn". No more decisions. But If we accept the Dreadful Tiles concept. And make those tiles not need so much TUs as before. Then the question become "we can rush through this area in one turn but suffer morale (= accuracy) penalty in future few turns, or use 2 turns to bypass this area". This model can be more exciting for implicit story talk. For example, a brave hero / MARS may more suitable rush in a UFO through fire or dark backdoor, because they only receive lower / no morale penalty, and other guys should tie up most enemies on front door, although front door has harder defence. More deeply, Low morale team will keep distance with dreadful area to avoid out of control (panic). If player fighting in a dubious / dark area, all soldiers may can't even move due to mental factor (penalty by incoming bullets and dreadful tiles) except the team has a brave one who can rush out the blood road. ------ After implement those things, the Bravery are never become a secondary attribute but a critical part to build a dynamic mental battlefield which deep interact with physical battlefield. The vehicles (if exists) also become more featureful due to it immunity to morale effect. And of course, phase 1 / 2 mechanism can / should also be used on aliens side (with some modify to reflect some aliens's character like feel comfortable in darkness, etc.). So a lot of missing LMG bullets can still significant reduce aliens shot back efficiency even they are not fully suppressed. if player fire enough of bullets then even force them panic or retreat. Let a small team to flanking enemies can also offer more benefit and allow main squadron attack more aggressive (due to enemy morale down = accuracy down). Player also has more reason to avoid be flanked. So recon team are more important in here -- Btw, if a team try to flanking enemy then mean they are also easier be flanked. So brave soldiers are more suitable to do that. It's provide more sense of reality. Back a step, if phase 2 too difficult to implement, I guess phase 1 can still working independent. And may interesting than original "panic or not" system. (Actually, phase 2 contain a lot of independent things and can be implement / choice splitly) ## MAY Interesting Idea Not so sure, just logging here. ### Simplifications 1. Soldiers ONLY panic when morale reach 0, replace original % chance panic at low morale level. It allow player easier to estimate how many morale should reserved in complex environment. 2. Bravery should only affect how many morale decrease but NO affect amount of morale restore. It avoid brave soldiers has double benefit, and easier to estimate by player. - if we really want different restore efficiency for different soldiers, may consider use Stress. (it's mean: soldier with high Bravery and high Stress still can affort horrible battlefield in very short time but vulnerable when combat take longer) 3. Consider remove original Suppression System if morale decrease can do the samilar things. - I mean, the original Suppression System is a "binary" system -- If player trigger the suppression condition, she can grab huge benefit, but if just only 2 bullets go far a bit, she got nothing. It's not reality, and usually let soldiers fall in danger due to a lot of TUs / manpower was wasted by attempt to suppress enemy but failed (just not touch the suppression's threshold). It make me depressed when soldier be killed by this reason. That's not good. The penalty curve are not smoothly here. - Of course, even remove suppression system, player still need some kind of indicator to show alien's morale level, let them make decision current should assault or fallback. ### "Take a Breath" Rule If some TUs never used in action and reaction, when a turn started, those TUs can be converted to extra morale restoreing point. I consider 6 TUs == 1 morales maybe good when base morale restore is 5 each turn. For example, If a hopeless soldier has a chance to don't move, she can re-encourage herself and get about 15 point morale restore each turn. but if her busy to fight or run away, only receive 5 point morale restore each turn. This rule focus on give player much active controllability about morale by consider how team members take cover / rotate / regroup each other in tactical operation. ### Others - Dreadful tiles also decrease the amount of morale restore. (E.g., soldier hard to restore morale in darkness, player should not reorganize in this area even this location has good physical defence.) - Soldiers close with each others can enhance Bravery. - Allow player change area light level. E.g., find a light button in room. - Heavy armor provide Bravery enhancement. - Tiles around corpses be considered as a dreadful area. - Bullets from hidden enemies or behind a soldier decrease more morale. - Try to shot aliens but miss, will decrease morale slightly. - Approaching (approached by) a Reapers reduce more morale than other races. Hope can consider this or similar mental system. Bravery are not really useful in X1. I hope all attribute has similar importantment -- and surely with a lot of interesting tactical decisions & imaginations ## Appendix: Shortcoming - Morale use Real Number (E.g., 73.1) If Bravery affect how many morale down in many events, the morale may need be considered on a Real Number (I mean a number with decimal point, like 10.5, not sure how to say it in common english) and really annoying me. This effect much significant on Dreadful Tiles rule. I will try to use it to explain: - Each dreadful tiles should not decrease too much (over 10) of morale, because a soldier may walk multiple tiles (maybe 20) in one time. - We want to make some different between two soldiers with Bravery 50 and 63. Now, suppose the formula of "Real decrease morale for specific tile type" as follow: real decreased morale = (base decrease morale) * (100 - Bravery) * 0.01 Suppose, "base decrease morale" of long grass tile is 4. The soldier with bravery 50 will suffer 2 for each tiles. But the soldier with bravery 63 will suffer 1.48 for each tiles. 1.48 is not a nice number for me because too detail and hard to estimate. And we can't simple "round it" due to this only effect on single tile and the error will be accumulated to a big number if soldier walk through 20 tiles. One option is use 1000-based morale integer value, but it's may much annoying because other value like TUs are 100-based. it may make player confused. Another option is use 100-based morale decimal value and round (suggest: use floor for easier to estimate) it to first digit after decimal point. Formula here: real decreased morale = floor_to_first_digit((base decrease morale) * (100 - Bravery) * 0.01) So now the soldier with bravery 63 will suffer 1.4 for each tiles. It's relative easier to evaluate by player and not loss too much difference between Bravery 50 (2) and 63 (1.4). It's easier to understand than 1000-based version and keep consistency with other attributes as much as possible. But still need to tweak UI to display it. Or if we can not agree a number with decimal point, a alternative is make Bravery not effect with how many morale decrease but increase morale maximum, then calculate all penalty by "% morale lost", and may also restore morale by % based (example: restore 5% each turn). But It's may cause morale value over 100.

Interesting. I would have thought that the dispersion would have been stronger as it traveled through the air ... but then I don't actually know anything about lasers so perhaps that's not surprising. Is it a fairly low-powered laser? Would it disperse more if it was more powerful? Congrats on the job anyway

With such a large influx of new players experiencing Xenonauts for the first time, this post is here to explain the free additional content players can download for Xenonauts 1 and to talk a little about our plans for Xenonauts-2 (for which there will be a Kickstarter very soon!) The free content for Xenonauts 1 consists of the semi-official Xenonauts: Community Edition update and the various mods it enables - the best known being X-Division, which is a complete rework of the game that adds a LOT of additional complexity and content. A lot of experienced users recommend jumping straight into Community Edition rather than playing vanilla Xenonauts because of the usability improvements and extra mod content available for it. Xenonauts: Community Edition ("X:CE") So, what is X:CE? Shortly after we finished development on Xenonauts and released it, we made the source code of the game available to a group of professional coders within the community who wanted to continue to update and improve Xenonauts without changing the fundamental gameplay experience. Over the past few years they've made a lot of improvements to the base game with regards to usability and stability, and X:CE also includes the most popular community map pack and a community-made mod that includes additional "lore" research that appears throughout the game. Given most players do not win their first Xenonauts campaign, I recommend people play vanilla Xenonauts for their first campaign but then switch to X:CE for all future campaigns. X:CE is widely regarded as a straightforward upgrade for vanilla Xenonauts, but I personally feel it's important for the player to play a bit of the vanilla game so they have a sense of where the official content stops and the community content begins. The community content is great and adds quite a bit more variation to the game, but it's not strictly canon within the Xenonauts world. Similarly, the vast majority of people enjoy the new maps but the occasional person has a problem with them so you may not want to throw them into the mix until your second playthrough! A summary of the changes made in X:CE can be found here along with instructions of how to download it via Steam, whilst non-Steam users can download the files here. X-Division: There are lots of mods for Xenonauts, and there's several mods that are major overhauls of the game that add significant amounts of extra content. Currently the best-known conversion mod is probably X-Division (although there are others out there), which I guess could loosely be described as the Xenonauts equivalent of the Long War mod for XCOM. You can read about it in the mod release thread here, but it involves a LOT more of everything. I wouldn't recommend this as a first playthrough given it's meant to be significantly harder than the normal game, but if standard vanilla Xenonauts starts to get a bit dull then X-Division adds in 900 new research projects, 22 new aircraft, 186 new weapons, 13 new sets of armour and 9 new vehicles. If that sounds like your sort of thing then head over and check it out! Please note that X-Division requires Community Edition to be installed because of the extra mod support the community coders have added in over the years! Xenonauts-2: The last thing to mention is that Xenonauts-2 is on the way, and we're planning a Kickstarter for the game later this month and it should be hitting Early Access this year. Although we're proud of what we produced when we made Xenonauts, there are quite a few areas where we think we can improve on the game for the sequel - so if you enjoy Xenonauts 1, we hope you'll be willing to check out the sequel too! If you want to hear about our Kickstarter when it launches or get a notification when Xenonauts-2 is released, the best way is to sign up for our mailing list here. A free public alpha demo of a single ground combat mission can also be downloaded via GOG Galaxy from the post here if you want to check out how our new 3D battlefields are shaping up!