Leaderboard

The Xenonauts-2 Kickstarter page is now live and can be accessed here! We've been talking about this Kickstarter for so long that it's a little bit surreal to finally press the button and see it go live ... but it's out there now, and everyone here at Goldhawk HQ has their fingers crossed that the next 30 days goes well! We'd hugely appreciate any support you guys were willing to give us, particularly if you're willing to help us get off to a strong start by backing us in the first 24 hours! All the information you need is on the Kickstarter page, but if you want to help us by spreading the word then please: Tell any friends you think might be interested in the game! Mention our Kickstarter campaign in any gaming communities that you are part of! Upvote our announcement on Reddit! Retweet our Twitter announcement! Anything else you can think of! Anyone that backs the Kickstarter is eligible to vote for the ordering of the stretch goals on our Google Forms poll during the first week of the Kickstarter. If you want to vote, the poll can be accessed here. A few brief points of interest to anyone that has been following the Kickstarter planning: Every custom soldier (£35+) is now eligible for a custom portrait created through the Portrait Editor, rather than this being limited to the £75 tier I decided to remove the £75 and £100 tiers entirely We fixed a couple of bugs in the Portrait Editor that meant red hair was not working, and certain skin tones did not show eyes if you switched immediately to them If you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask them here. I suspect I'll be pretty active on the forums and the Kickstarter page over the next couple of days

First off, I love the demo and thought it was pretty good for a work in progress, so much so that I bought in on Kickstarter at the $65.00 level. The one thing I would like to see introduced into the game, which was in the original XCOM series (and Fallout Tactics), is the ability to lay prone. This would assist with minimizing the profile of your Squaddie in combat. For example, I place my designated marksman on the roof to provide cover but I want them to go prone versus only kneeling, to minimize their exposure to enemy fire. I always enjoyed this aspect of the original series and have been disappointed that the reboots failed to include it. Another place it would be beneficial is when moving your Squaddie through open terrain, such as the desert, fields, vacant lots, arctic tundras, etc, where cover is sparse or to attempt to lessen the damage of enemy explosives detonating. Please give some serious thought to adding this feature and have a great day :) BTW, thank you all for creating Xenonauts and Xenonauts 2 so that those of us who wasted hours/years of our lives playing Xcom for its tactical brilliance, can still have a game that follows so closely in its footsteps (and thank you for not adding an instruction manual that's as thick as a War & Peace novel, such as the original Xcom's instruction manual...lol!).

@Skitso To be honest, I'd refrain from blaming anything on your end before I really start on the optimizations! And when I do and you still have issue, and you have the time, we can probably take a look at what specifically it is on your machine that might be bottlenecking it. :-)

Chris, in terms of X2, you could think of this "squad cohesion" mechanics as the other side of the stress mechanic. You have stress that soldiers accumulate from fighting in general, and traumatic events in particular. Squad cohesion could essentially be a factor in the stress mechanic - soldiers are more likely to trust other soldiers that they've already fought together with. Send a soldier on a mission surrounded by familiar faces, and they are less stressed by the combat. Have 6 people fight together for the first time and everyone is more stressed.

Have you guys ever heard of Xcom2 "Grimmy's Morale Mod"? His description kinda says it all: "We Darkest Dungeon Now" It really takes the morale factor (i.e "Will") and enhances its importance. Not only now your troops will begin to fail when friends drop or things go south, but if the combat takes too long, they morale will wear out (even by enemy missed shots. Who likes to get shot, eh?) and become a real issue. Coupled with S.P.A.R.K.S that isn't affected by morale (And become THE most important troop in long engagements) and by rookies with low morale that will panick real damn quickly and sometimes you will have very interesting scenarios in your hand, and by interesting I mean "GOD DAMMIT ROOKIE, I WAS COUNTING ON YOU TO SAVE MY MAJOR!" and things of the sort.

Yeah this is a good point. Morale wasn't very interesting in the original XCOM because as you say, either everything was fine and dandy until one too many of your guys dies, and then suddenly everyone starts panicking and it's a downward spiral from there. And when your squad members do start to panic, you can't really do much about it. I think that the morale system might be more interesting if its effects weren't so pronounced. Like maybe a panicking soldier would not lose all of his TUs, but be impaired more slightly (like he is unable to run towards the aliens, he's unable to throw a grenade but can still shoot a gun, and so forth).

Thanks guys - this is all pretty crazy for me and the rest of the team. We were expecting to hit the target and hopefully go beyond it, but I didn't think I'd be have to post a "100% Funded!" update after eight and a half hours! For comparison, the Kickstarter for Xenonauts 1 made $28,000 in its first full day. I was honestly thinking that we'd make less on our Kickstarter this time around because there's far more competition in the genre than there used to be, Kickstarter isn't the new and cool thing that it used to be six years ago, and we've made a conscious decision to have a digital-only Kickstarter despite knowing we'll have a smaller cash total at the end of it compared to one with physcial rewards. So I'm pretty amazed that everything's gone this well! The only problem is that the Kickstarter seems so popular it keeps taking our servers down (and our forums with it!)

Backed! As a former member of the team, I know personally how much passion Chris and the whole team at Goldhawk are putting into the making of Xenonauts.. I sincerely hope that the general public will be able to feel it too and reward you guys with a solid pledge! Let's go get funded now!