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Psionics are something I'd like to explore for Xenonauts-2, but it's something I'm not really thinking about now - it's one of those "icing on the cake" things I'd think about introducing in the final stages of development when I can afford to spend a bit of time tinkering with the ideas and see how well they work. It's notoriously hard to implement psionics as anything more interesting than purple mind bullets without breaking the game; lots of ideas sound really cool but break down a bit when you start to figure out exactly how they might work in the game. I think they need to be tied more closely into the morale system - perhaps morale could even be your "mana" for casting psionic abilities, because it's exhausting and stressful using them. But I'm going to put psionics out of my mind until all the core features are done and the game is fun to play.

I hate permanent damage... but "fix it with alien tech" is a game changer. I see lots of microamangemnt potential with this proposal, like lighter arm armour for soldiers who have already lost their arm(s) or are already using cybernatic replacements, but I pretty like the idea as a whole. Your soldiers will have more ups and downs over the course of the game, instead of simple hp flux. Keeps the scientists or engineers busy and perhaps introduce new rehab base facility. Or even a new skill tree to reflect their training on their melded body. It is also a way to make facing matters more than vision cone, which make it easier to remove that too. There is potential to make a better Meld with the moral dilemma of keeping an army of zombie soldier or firing them all in early game. And game reviewers love moral dilemmas these days.

I've been thinking about the injuries system a lot over the past few weeks. Having played X-Com, Xenonauts, XCOM: EW, XCOM 2:WotC after it went on sale and beating them all this month, I've come to a few ideas that might all be beyond scope. Injuries aren't interesting unless you can purposefully inflict them (ie, aiming for the legs to stop someone from running away) which is very Fallout and I kinda have my doubts that any such system would really be used. Save for the times when you'd want to capture an alien, you'd always just be aiming to kill rather than to maim. On the other side, for the players, an injury system is only as good as your ability to interact with it. A simple way to do this is to have individually armored locations such as helmets and leg pads. Each of these would provide some kind of trade off such as reducing aim, vision, or mobility. There is a much more interesting and difficult to do variant that I've thought of though: having injuries be effectively permanent. A soldier who got blasted in their dominant hand with superheated plasma could get nerve damage which lowers the aim of anything that uses that hand for seemingly the rest of the game. Someone could have their off hand melted by a plasma grenade meaning they could only ever use it to hold a shield effectively but take large penalties for two handed weapons. Eyes can be lost and vision can be fried. Cuts and bruises and concussions can be fixed at the beginning. Only later on, when you've stolen some sibilian stem glands that you can repair the simple things like nerve damage. Even better, and this is the real crux of this idea, is that soldiers who are downed are only rarely dead. Someone could lose both their arms because of a stray rocket or need to have one of their legs amputated because the plasma just melted too much of the limb. Not dead, but might as well be dead to you since they're no longer useful as soldiers. Enter Alien Electronics: In Xenonauts 1, there was the officer in charge of the barracks who was missing an arm. With the first range of base upgrades he got a rather basic replacement, with the second he was sporting a functional cybernetic arm. While I wouldn't want X2 to go full MELD, being able to revive 'dead' soldiers the further the along you are in the campaign would feel absolutely stellar. You may have lost your 90 Aim sniper half-way through due to an accident that stole their sight, but they're still with you. Psionics can let someone see through cameras, or better yet, be able to only see aliens while the rest of the non-blind squad gets the scouting information that lets them know where to go. Even if they can't attack robots anymore, they can be used again when the technology is there. It's just expensive is all. ... This can lead to a very silly situation where most of your squad is a ragtag bunch of raggedy anne soldiers with the worst scaring anyone has ever seen. No idea if anyone wants that.

So for roughly the next month (until late August) I'm only going to be logging onto this forum occasionally - and I'll be responding to emails and direct messages much more slowly than normal. Why? I'm getting married next week, and then I'm going to be heading off on my honeymoon for a couple of weeks a few days afterwards. The rest of the team will still be busily working away in my absence, but I won't be around to do the usual community management stuff. If you see people on the forums asking questions for the devs and getting annoyed that they're not getting a response, please point them to this thread! I'm very much looking forward to having a holiday - I'm sure those of you here who are married will know all to well how stressful it is to organise a wedding, and to do all that while also running a Kickstarter campaign and doing all the planning required to keep Goldhawk running for a month has been pretty exhausting! It'll be nice to have a couple of weeks to chill out before I come back and have to start worrying about the upcoming closed beta I don't have time to write a proper dev update unfortunately, but these are a few of the things we're planning to be working on in the next month: Finishing up the realtime Geoscape and interceptor / UFO movement etc Adding the basics of the new air combat prototype into the game Adding the soldier backpack allowing units to switch weapons in combat Making units drop their equipment on death, and allowing soldiers to pick things up from the ground Some upgrades to the ground combat AI Adding few unique weapons (e.g. combat shield) and weapon properties (lasers recharging their clips, etc) Adding explosive terrain objects / units that can explode on death Getting the MARS vehicle working properly in the ground combat (crushing things, exploding when destroyed, not screaming when shot, etc) Rewriting the unit movement logic so you can move multiple soldiers simulatenously A bunch more fixes / updates to the map editor to help us support semi-randomised maps I'm sure I'll be brimming with enthusiasm when I get back, and hopefully most / all of the above will be waiting for me when I do!

As i played and modded x-1 and openxcom for a long time, i wanted to share my ideas about how to handle all the numbers about damage/armor. 1. Damage Types: If we compare the X-1 system, there was some problems both at damage types and understanding them how they work. I think there should be no secondary damage types at all. It's confusing and makes you mad when you calculate all that resistances. Every damage type should be primary and got different ones for all real damage types used at the game.. At X-1 we got; kinetic, energy, incendiary, chemical as primary and stun, EMP as secondary. This worked at X-1 base game because the resistances did not used at the game mostly and enemies got "energy" damage type mostly as plasma weapons. For that reason, the calculations did not create much problem. BUT it became a problem when you tried to use all this damage types and resistances with a multi-weapon used battlefield. Because we got ballistic and mag weapons as kinetic damage (no problem here), laser and plasma as energy (here we got a problem because laser could be energy but plasma is something more complex and when you try to use the resistances, you need to put them into the same category), all explosives were incendiary and some gasses as chemical AND addition to that we got stun and EMP without a resistance dedicated to them, you can't plan what armor or enemy should have what resistance at all.. For that reason, we should go for Fallout/xcom method. All damage types got their same named damage types.. so for x1 we need to have; ballistic, laser, plasma, incendiary, chemical (for real chemical gasses), stun, emp. Then at weapon code we need to able to give more then one damage type.. Damage: Ballistic, 100/20; Incendiary, 20/50; Stun, 10/100. This means that this weapon got 100 ballistic damage with %20 armor penetration (ignoring resistance), 20 incendiary with %50 AP and 10 stun with %100 AP. With this options, it becomes more logical and useful to have more then one type of ammo per weapon. As you see here, you can easily read and calculate all the damage types. Note: For modders, there should be able to add totally new damage types into the game. At least there could be some reserved damage types like DT1, DT2, DT3... 2. Armor: I want to say something here about "health". Modern games like fraxis xcom and phoenix point uses armor+health as one stat at battlefield. I find this more logical, because even a commando or a sebillian can't survive after 1-2 plasma/laser/mag bullets if they don't have an armor. There is no need to calculate specially health when 2 shot can kill you. BUT we use STUN as an important damage type so the health bar is useful for this. Again for those reasons armor should have a solid HP over health. Xe-1 got a problem here as there is only resistances as armor. At Xe-1, if you got an armor of 200 energy resistance and 10 incendiary resistance, you could survive many plasma shots but a grenade could kill you even you did not get shot before.. so it's like you got different armor layers against different damage types and you can die easily if a damage layer of that type is low. You can shoot an alien for 100 ballistic bullets or just hit with one laser.. this does not make sense.. It's nearly impossible to balance if you try to use damage types. For that reason, every armor needs to have a HP and it needs to have resistances as percentage and solid numbers against every possible damage types. So we got 200 HP armor/50 hp health and %50 ballistic resistance with solid 10, and %20 laser resistance with no solid numbers.. lets hit it with bullets with 40 ballistic damage. 200 - ((40*%50)-10)) = 190, after 10 shots it will become 100... lets shoot a 30 damage laser.. 100 - ((30*%20)-0)) = 100 - 24 = 76.. after 5 laser shots, he will lose all armor. 100 - 24 - 24 - 24 - 24 = 4 (four laser shot) then health comes, 50 - (24 - 4 (left armor)) = 30 wounded... one more shot and you are dead.. As you see, it's much more simple, easy to calculate and logical. If you add STUN damage to this weapon damages, then you can capture it before it dies... You can add the "degrading" code to every armor.. at this calculation it's %100 as you see, but if you lower it, the armor can survive more but it makes the balancing calculations much more complex then needed for developer or player.. but it's good to have every possible option.. the important part here, every stat should be unique for every armor.. Xe-1 got many global stats for everything and it made impossible to create unique things. So if you make degrading same for all armors with a global stats, then you can't create unique armors with their own degrading.. this is same for everything in the game.. there should be as less global stats as it could be.. i hate global things.. 3. Weapon Stats: Every weapon should have their own editable stats for everything.. You should able to code every "fire mod" as it's own.. for example a rifle should able to fire "3" bullet at single shot fire, "8" at burst and "1" at sniping.. so a rifle is a burst weapon rather then single one. Another example is a heavy weapon single fire could have "6" bullet and more acc and burst shot could fire "20" bullet.. a sniper should have more critical damage chance at aimed like "%100 to %400" damage output but single fire mod it would drop to "%100 to %200"... Every weapon should have it's min (for snipers short range penalty) and max range (after that hit chance goes 0 or disappear). Weapons can have damage modifier for their range, like a plasma weapon could damage much more at shorter range, ballistic can lose its damage at longer range and lasers would be stable.. 4. Crouch: Kneeling should be something tactical. Every weapon should get special + aim for kneeling.. so some weapons can be used without kneeling easily but some (heavy/sniper) would need it for proper aim. Even there should be an "AIMING STANCE" like kneeling but prepared firing position.. this could add much more aim (different per weapon as i said before) and bonus to reaction fire (more overwatch like).. i say this as a different stance because kneeling would take only few TU's and could give huge bonuses to weapons.. so everybody uses that before firing.. to make it special, you need to have a stance, different then kneeling.. i know that, it's hard to implement now and maybe not necessary but i always think that it's a nice tactical addition to battlefield. I just remembered those for now.. i will add more if i release something more..

So that's what the kickstarter was really about...

Drages is right that we will be supporting multiple ammo types this time around; it's not something I think we'll make much use of beyond the grenade launcher and tazer rounds for the shotgun, but modders should be able to make more use of it. But I think the overall damage type (e.g. kinetic, laser, chemical, etc) is set on the weapon rather than the ammo at the moment; maybe we can add an override for it or something later in development. That openXCom solution for the ammo seems sensible, yeah - it's essentially what I was already planning to do, which is to make stun damage a property of the existing damage type rather than a damage type in its own right. To give a brief response to the original post you made: I'm not sure we're going to support multiple damage types for weapons out of the box; we don't have any real use for it and it might make the UI rather more complex. Possibly something to note down for the "extra modder support" feature wishlist though. For the armour stuff, I think you'll need to explain that in a bit more detail because I'm not quite following the numbers you posted. At the moment armour can be set to provide a flat HP bonus and also a % resistance against specific damage types, but it can't be set to give a flat damage reduction. Again, I think it's going to be tough to display five or six damage types and have a % reduction AND flat reduction for each. Probably not something to put in the base game but could be something we do to as part of the extra modder support. At the moment there's no support for armour degradation, because I didn't figure out a good way of handling the degradation across the different damage types. But we can just have a master condition % for the armour that gets reduced whatever type of damage you shoot the target with, so if your armour normally has 80% Ballistic and 60% Chemical resistance, at 50% condition it has only 40% Ballistic and 30% Chemical resistance. We can easily display the condition % for the armour on the ground combat inventory panel too. Regarding the weapons, you already can do pretty much all of that except for giving weapons a damage boost / drop over distance. Regarding crouching / aiming - yeah, this isn't something you can customise and I'm not sure I consider it as important as the other stuff. We can talk about it later in development but it seems more niche than the other points you've raised.

It could be a very dark and harrowing game, where you send your soldiers out to fight and they gradually lose their limbs over the campaign, only to be rejuvenated using the alien technology they are sent out to steal. I like the idea that the game is test of survival until the next medical breakthrough. Instead of worrying about making it to next month's funding, you're more concerned with how many soldiers can stand and shoot, and how many spare arms you have in cold storage. The game could be divided into phases, the first with conventional human medicine, where you are losing soldiers and not able to replace them; then you get some healing factor so you can get damaged soldiers back in a matter of days not months; finally, you research augmentation and field superhuman ubermensch.

Psi Healing: Like medkit, but can be done ranged. Upgraded skill may become AoE effect instead of doing higher heals. Psychic Surgery: A slow, costy ability that restores "unhealable" hp. Empathy: See enemy hp and/or role, if originally hidden. Scrying: A sensor probe not limited by walls. Clairvoyant: See further and/or wider. Precognition: See enemy plan. The plan may change with player action. Cue Invisible Inc. Retrocognition: Like motion tracker. Daze: Reduce or Eliminate target overwatch. Mind Trick: Make a unit immune to enemy overwatch. Psi cloak / distorion: Reduce accuracy of non-mechanic enemies agaist a target or area. Mind Shade: Same as above but used on enemy. Pyrokinetic: Remotely start fire, put out fire, or ignite grenade. Apportation / Psychokinesis Hand: Open/Close/Pickup/Move/Drop remotely. An ability to move a missed grenade would be nice, if they explode at end of turn like X1. Psychokinesis Shield: Project an energy field that reduce damage (think mass effect) Psychokinesis Push/Pull: Moving alies sounds like fun. Note: If these sounds like magic, there is a good reason. They are easier to balance than panic and mind control.

As flavor text, actual "interrogation logs" (assuming you could speak directly to an alien through one means or another) would be quite interesting. On a more mechanical view, special interrogations on specific castes (quicker to research but less valuable than full sized race interrogations a la previous games) would be interesting. For instance, a noncombatant could grant information on basic scout UFO capabilites, a soldier could give you research credit towards energy weapons/Alenium, the knowledge of what loadouts certain aliens have, and other useful tidbits related to their jobs.