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If you wouldnt have written that statement, i would have ><.

Heh - yeah, literally all that is required to make a decent and interesting air combat system is a few hours of reading. Why did I never think of doing that?

Closed Beta Build V6 has now been released on Steam, GOG and Xsolla. Note that this build is only available on our new Experimental branch so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here). As usual, please note this closed beta is only open to Kickstarter backers and people who have pre-ordered the game via Xsolla on our website. This is a major update for the game that contains a number of significant new features. We're currently working on getting the remaining "core" systems into the game as fast as possible, so many of these new features are still largely untested. This is why we've set up the Experimental branches - this new build may well be full of game-breaking bugs, but we're extremely busy with feature implementation and so we won't be able to put out a hotfix as quickly as normal. Having V6 on an experimental branch means people can switch back to V5 if they want a more stable experience, so we're not forced to drop what we're doing to patch the game immediately if there are problems. Be aware that you're probably still not going to have any idea what's going on with the new air combat because we've not yet had time to add tooltips into the game (they're coming soon) so there's no way to view the stats of any of the combatants or the weapons. Given the air combat is now based more heavily on percentages like Hit Chance, Evade Chance, Range etc this means it's still largely unplayable unless someone has explained what is happening in advance (although reading the changelog below will help a little). Key Features: Air Combat Update: there's been a substantial update to the air combat. The new mechanics are explained below in more detail. Alien Psionics: certain ranks of Psyon now have access to the Mind War psionic ability, which they automatically use every turn. The mechanics are a bit different from the X1 psionics and are explained in full below. Soldier Assignment System: there's now a central soldier management system that ensures soldiers can only be assigned one task at a time (e.g. if they're on a Strategic Operation, you can't then deploy them in combat). Strategy Upkeep / Funding Screen: your personnel, aircraft and base structures now have upkeep costs. You can now access a preview of the Funding Screen from the Geoscape at any point, which also gives a breakdown of all of your predicted income and upkeep costs. Crash Site Airstrike: the "airstrike" functionality from X1 that allows you to receive a cash bonus in exchange for removing a crash site from the Geoscape has now returned. New Artwork: we've added new art to various screens. This includes everything from strategy screen backgrounds and new UFO artwork to additional alien combatant models and new energy weapon projectiles. More Alien Variants: the crews of alien ships are now more varied, with each alien race now have multiple unit variants like in X1 (i.e. not every alien is a generic soldier, so some of a UFO crew will be lightly-armed non-combatants that fly the UFO etc). There's also Elite aliens with better equipment that start appearing later in the game. Air Combat Update: Air combat now auto-resolves rather than requiring you to issue all commands manually, which makes interceptions much faster and less fiddly Your interceptors have AI that will automatically attempt to close to the appropriate range with the UFOs and fire weapons, but the player can also manually issue orders if they choose Weapons will auto-fire if the interceptor is range, but fire permission can be toggled off by clicking the weapon icon on the new interceptor status panels on the right of the screen. Weapons now have % hit chances, and combatants have a % evade chance. The weapon first rolls to hit, and then if a hit is scored the defender rolls to see if they can evade. Weapons also have an Evade Modifier which controls how easy they are to evade. Torpedoes are powerful but have a 2x Evade modifier, making them ineffective against Fighter UFOs that have 50% base Evade score (giving them a modified 100% Evade vs torpedoes). However, they are much more effective against cumbersome UFOs like Destroyers which have a base 0% Evade score and are unable to dodge even the slowest weapons. Alien Psionics: Alien psionics are now in the game in the form of the Mind War ability, which several types of Psyon and the Praetor-equivalent possess. Each alien with the Mind War ability will cast it against a random Xenonaut each turn. Line of sight is not required but each Xenonaut can only be hit once per turn. All Xenonauts affected by Mind War are flagged at the start of the player's turn. At the end of the player's turn, Mind War is resolved. This is done by comparing the Psionic Strength of the attacker to the Bravery of the defender, along with a random element that is added to each. If the attacker is successful, the Xenonaut is panicked and will drop their weapon and flee. If the attacker beats the defender by more than 30, the attacker scores a critical success and the Xenonaut is instead Mind Controlled. The defender will receive a bonus to their Bravery equal to their Bravery multiplied by their remaining % of TU - so if you don't spend any TU on a soldier, they will receive twice their normal Bravery in the defence roll. Strategy: General - we've added a central soldier management system that ensures soldiers can only be assigned one task at a time (e.g. if they're on a Strategic Operation, you can't then deploy them in combat). General - there are now monthly upkeep costs for your staff, aircraft and base structures. These are deducted from your monthly funding each time it is received. General - there's new strategy / air combat art for four of the early-game UFOs General - UFOs now contain a wider range of possible races, and each race has a larger number of possible variants with different weapons and armour General - we've added support for sorting items in the Research Projects / Engineering Projects / Base Stores list General - added a little more writing for some of the early-game research reports General - prevented saves occurring while the game performing tasks that would break saves (this fixes a bug where users would end up with corrupted saves) Geoscape - a preview of the funding screen can now be accessed at any time, showing your predicted funding per region and also giving you a breakdown of the upkeep costs of your organisation Geoscape - the X1 "Airstrike" functionality has been added to the game, allowing you to pass on doing a crash site mission and receive cash instead (if a Crash Site times out without you completing it, you're automatically granted the airstrike cash) Geoscape - Strategic Operations now take less time to complete if you assign more personnel to them Geoscape - clicking near multiple interactive objects will now give you a pop-up allowing you to specify which object you'd like to select, as it did in X1 Geoscape - landed UFOs now function correctly, although right now there's no difference between a crashed and landed UFO in gameplay terms (there will be in future) Geoscape - there's been some visual changes, with an updated layout more akin to X1 and some new art. Geoscape - Alien Bases now start undetected and can either be detected passively (you have an increasing % chance each day to detect the base), or can be detected by flying an interceptor over the base Geoscape - Infiltrator markers spawned onto the Geoscape by Alien Bases now spawn in same region as the base Geoscape - hovering over a region now displays the region name and the Relations score rather than the "health bar" that we had in previous versions Geoscape - lines in the log are now linked to the events on the Geoscape like it was in X1 (i.e. hovering over a log message should highlight the appropriate object on the Geoscape, etc) Geoscape - improved the performance when there are multiple UFOs flying around at high speed Geoscape - the notification you receive when completing a base structure now correctly displays the building name, not simply "." Geoscape - fixed the Bomber UFO icon being inverted Personnel - Soldiers still appear in your personnel list immediately after being hired, but their status is now set to be In Transit for 3 days. Personnel - Soldiers now have starting stats ranging from 35-65 in each attribute, rather than 45-55 Soldier Equip - soldier medals are now visible. This system needs some additional work before it is finished, but the (placeholder) medals that currently exist are working. Soldier Equip - clicking the soldier portrait now allows you to change the soldier in that slot Dropship Equip - this screen is now capable of supporting additional types of dropship with different troop capacities and so works slightly differently now: The soldier portraits are now shown in a horizontal row beneath the dropship and are numbered by hotkey, and they no longer re-order themselves when you move units around in the dropship. Holding down shift when you move a soldier icon over another soldier icon around will swap the hotkeys of those two soldiers. Hovering the mouse over a soldier portrait will light up their soldier icon, making it a little easier to see which icon belongs to which soldier. The soldier assignment menu now marks the soldiers that are already assigned to the dropship. Ground Combat: Specific ground combat items now recover items on the strategy layer (assuming they survive). The UFO power cores are now the only source of Alenium in the game, so be careful not to blow them up! UFO crash site maps are now roughly 50x50 for all UFOs rather than expanding in size as the game goes on - clearing a bigger UFO is already much more time consuming than a smaller UFO, so also enlarging the map as well made for very long missions. The Overwatch toggles on the new GC UI now work correctly for each weapon (so you can disable the Primary weapon if you want to reaction fire with the Secondary instead, etc) Reloading weapons manually in the ground combat soldier inventory should now have the same effect as the quick reload button in all instances We've redesigned several of the UFOs, updated their interior layouts and added a number of new props Two new armoured elite Psyon variants have been added to the late game Added new projectiles and impact effects for the Plasma and Fusion energy weapons Fixed a number of animation issues for the humans and Psyons (made shooting snappier, fixed some flickering in the run cycle, etc) Laser Weapons now have updated inventory artwork Alien Magnetic Pistol and Alien Fusion Pistol now have 3D models A number of visual updates on the Farm biome Civilians now have more biome-appropriate clothing, although they are still placeholder Some improvements to the roof-hiding system, although there is more to do here Some improvements to the way the camera tracks alien activity during the alien turn, although there is also more to do here Bugfix - Terror missions should no longer freeze at 99% loading Bugfix - fixed a hang where you couldn't complete a mission if one of your soldiers was stunned Bugfix - fixed several mis-set assets, including train cars that units could walk into and some windows that could not be seen through Bugfix - fixed some missing move tiles Bugfix - fixed an issue with C4 giving the player multiple detonation crosshairs with incorrect detonation costs Bugfix - fixed a bug where crouched units would appear to be standing if you loaded a save game

Yeah I don't know why multiple crash site UFOs aren't a thing. Especially if you're doing a dogfight against a three-UFO wing. I think part of the fun of ground combat is pushing onward with an injured team. Having to go through multiple breaches sounds fun!

@TrashMan If ground combat only rotated between ten different map+ alien combinations, would you play it? It would become tedious with an optimal solution for all the ten setups. The game would be solved sufficiently in hours. Ground combat has inherent variability to it because the setups are different. In air combat, they are not. In your following point you emphasize detection and range. Those are geoscape-level air combat attributes. Making the actual fight between aircraft more or less automatic as it is in UFO defense does not remove those, in fact it emphasizes them. From my point of view, the geoscape part of air combat is the actually interesting part, the actual combat itself becomes quickly solvable. As to your snobby sentence everyone is referencing: in general, thinking of a game design system is not so hard. Implementing it is not nearly as hard as it seems so long as you're willing to completely cut graphics and other such things required to make it marketable. Making it work well with every other system is damn near impossible and the reason both of us haven't made a game. Unless of course you just copy an old game. So you're not entirely wrong. But mostly.

That's actually kinda cool just to even think about ... not just in terms of a base assault, but shooting down more than one UFO and then going out to deal with more than one on the battlefield. Or, if the work to fight more than one ufo at a time in the air seems like too much of a mess, your radar could pick up 'more than one landed craft' in an area - presumably, for something like alien base construction, which might be accelerated if more than one ship was left to get it set up. I could see some interesting crossfire scenarios with having to deal with 2 separate alien ships at opposite ends of the battle map, and, as I tend to split my squad into 4 and 4 anyway, perhaps having to continue with those split formations even once the aliens ship(s) have been discovered.

Personally I'd just be fine with replacing the current rank system with a level number that represented experience or something like raw recruit, green, seasoned, veteran, etc. Maybe if they wanted to go the extra mile just add in an extra field similar to character name that the player could edit. People could use it for call signs, ranks, squad assignments or whatever other purpose they like,

Hello everyone - we've just gone into June and there's not been much news coming out of Goldhawk HQ recently, so I thought I'd write a quick forum update to keep everyone informed about our progress. We released our last update just over two weeks ago, which was a big hotfix for Closed Beta V5 and fixed quite a few of the stability issues we had in V5. Since then we've moved back to adding content and features to the game. We've already finished up a few features that will be in the next update such as the Crash Site airstrike mechanic that was in the original Xenonauts, the recovery of strategic items from specific ground combat tiles (e.g. a UFO Power Core grants you Alenium unless you destroy it), and the soldier management system that means you can no longer assign soldiers to multiple tasks that should be mutually exclusive (being in an airborne dropship, being on a Strategic Operation, being wounded, etc.) However, we're also starting work on some bigger tasks. We're updating the Air Combat to make it deeper but at the same time less fiddly - we're doing this by adding some new mechanics, but automating a lot of the clicking the current air combat requires you to do. Although you can pause the combat and issue your interceptors detailed manual orders if you choose, the new model of the air combat will automatically play itself out in the same way that the air combat in the original Xenonauts did. However, as the combat is now turn-based there's less reliance on split-second timing on your pauses. Anyway, I'll explain all the changes in more detail when the next major update arrives! As you can see from the example above, we're also working on adding new art to the game. In recent months we've brought on some new freelancers to start painting up the final art assets for the game and this is starting to bear fruit. These are some of the final art assets that are working through the pipeline: Strategic UFO Artwork Strategic UI Backgrounds (in full 21:9 glory) Weapon Inventory Art Alien Autopsy & GC Corpse Art Soviet Town terror maps This is being coupled to some new gameplay content as well. We've created some new props for the UFO interiors so they're more interesting to play through, and I've updated the UFO crews so there's a better sense of progression through the game - the alien crews get bigger and better equipped as time goes on, and once the larger UFOs start appearing you could be facing Psyons, Sebillians, Wraiths or Androns each time a combat mission spawns. The balancing isn't final by any means but it's another step closer to being finished. I've also taken some inspiration from what we did in X1 with the UFO crews, and added several new variants of each alien. For instance, there are now unarmoured Sebillian non-combatants (pilots / engineers / etc) that spawn inside UFOs and only have pistols, rather than every Sebillian being a well-equipped soldier. This process is more complete for some races than others (the Androns in particular are short on variation) but once some of the new alien variant models start appearing I think we'll have a more varied set of aliens than we did in the first game. We'll also hopefully have a bit more of the writing done by the time the next major build arrives. The tech tree is starting to solidify and I'll be starting to put more attention into the research reports now we have more idea of how things might slot together in the final game. There's some other cool things in the works but I'm starting to run out of space so I'll save them for the update announcement. Sorry for the lack of communications on the forums recently; unfortunately I've just been working too hard to spare the time!