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This is more of a "feels over reals" kind of explanation, but bear with me. I wanted to show a match wih my modded stats, but Bandicam seems to hate X2 and will crash it without fear or remorse. It's the start of a new game. It's a wood map. You turn a solider in the chopper and spy a Psyon maybe slightly half a tile away. Perhaps 16 spaces or so. It's in the open. You take aim with a solider, aimed shot, 83% chance to ht. You hit, congrats! That's 26 damage. The Psyon returns fire. It hits, that's 55 damage, instant death. You sigh. You get some more soliders out of the chopper and a few more shots later, the Psyon who killed the first soldier is dead. It's now the alien turn. A Psyon appears. It targets a solider who isn't quite in position. The Psyon hits, does 67 points of damage. That soldier is dead. You grit your teeth. Another Psyon appears. One of your soliders takes an overwatch shot. She misses. The Psyon returns fire. A miss! The Psyon fires again. A hit. that's 59 points of damage. Instant death. At this point, you're ready to cinduct experiments on the terminal velocity of monitors vis. 3rd storey windows. Early game, every fight with a Psyon can go pear shaped very, very quickly. The impression, and please forgive my language, is that you don't fuck around with Psyons. If I know that I'm fighting Psyons, I'm carrying lots of smoke. I have my lines of exit clear. The third man (I never fght in twos against Psyons if I can help it) is always ready with smoke in case the other two morons manage to mess it up. I would rather spent all my TU and re-position my team to lure a Psyon to me than get into a shooting match with a Psyon, because I know I will loose that fight. That's all thanks to the plasma rifle. You learn to respect it very quickly, and the plasma rifle gives the Psyon character. Now, same situation. You're facing Sebillians. The Sebillian fires off a burst. One catches the solider. He takes 32 damage. You think "I can handle that". The Sebillian fires off another burst. Another shot hits, that's 25 damage. That's a kill. But it feels different. You feel like the Sebillian has spent a lot of effort trying to kill the solider, that it's been blasting away even though it's actually only spent the same amount of TU and effort that a Psyon does firing the same number of shots. You feel like you can take Sebillians in a shooting war, and you better be able to because Sebillians soak a hella lotta damage, so you have to be able to hold your ground against Sebillians. Shotguns are a vital weapon in the fight against Sebillians, and you need to be able to go over the top to get in close enough to kill a Sebillian. The mag rifle could give the Sebillian as much character as the plasma rifle gives the Psyon, ust based on how it feels to fight them. Or look at it like this. The mag rifle. As dangerous as the plasma rifle. In the hands of an enemy with 45% more health (100% more health for the Brute) who can regenerate. Seriously? I'd almost rather face Androns. I mean, I notice there are both modifiers for armor penetration and armor destruction in the weapon.json master file. Linear weapons are noted as much for their penetrative capabilities as their power. It's one of the common memes in computer games, that railguns typically can penetrate several enemies at once and/or terrain. Perhaps fiddling with armor penetration/destruction as easy numbers to alter would be of value? EDIT: For those interested in my edits, I append my currently edited files. You'll have to replace the current files with the edited ones, which means 1) make backups and 2) don't report bugs with edited files, because even though this is just number editing, editing numbers can have unforseen effects in-game. Xenonauts2Mods.zip

Yeah, there's some valid points here. I think the most helpful thing to do is for me to fill you in on what I'm trying to achieve with the balancing, even if it doesn't necessarily map to what is currently in the game. The basic idea is that the shape of the game is more like classic X-Com; in the early stages of the war your troops die in large numbers. You haven't developed the equipment to reliably protect your soldiers from alien weapons so many of the missions are a meatgrinder until the mid-game, where suddenly your soldiers will usually survive a shot or perhaps two before they keel over. Only a handful of your troops survived the opening stages of the war (more by luck than judgement) but they're now hardened badasses and your rookies now have a long enough lifespan to start levelling up. By the end of the game you've surpassed the aliens and only their elite units are much of a threat to you. This doesn't work in the current version of X2 for a few reasons. The biggest reason is that the aliens are extremely accurate and deadly, but the starting squad is only 8 soldiers whereas in X-Com it's 14 soldiers so you can't absorb the losses like you could in X-Com. As well as adding the updated dropship, we're also going to be updating the starting dropship so it's got a larger troop capacity and has walls like the Skyranger did in X-Com and the Charlie did in X1. I'm not sure if we'll bump the starting team up to 10 or perhaps 12, as we're planning the advanced dropship to hold 15 (or maybe 16). Problem is, the tiles aren't ready for the updated starting dropship yet so we can't put it in the builds - maybe I'll add the blockout for it to an Experimental test build after we finish V6.3 though. That should make testing the balance easier. Second thing is that the cover angles are too narrow, so there's very little you can do to protect yourself against those deadly aliens in terms of positioning (something we'll fix in an upcoming patch). Third thing is that I think in X-Com there's a much wider variety of aliens outside the UFOs, whereas in X2 the non-soldier aliens are only found inside the UFOs. This means for most of the mission you're fighting tougher aliens with better equipment. If we spawned some of the weaker aliens outside the UFOs then there would be more aliens that could be killed by a single rifle shot and carry weapons that might not instakill your troops at the start of the game. That'd probably be a sensible change. The other thing to think about is what the individual races do: Psyons - these are one of the two "easy" races you encounter in the early game, because psionic-capable Psyons don't appear for the first few weeks. After that it's generally fairly unwise to bring low-Bravery soldiers to battle against Psyons. Beyond their psionic abilities they're only standard combatants really, nothing exceptional. Sebillians - these guys are the other "easy" race at the start of the game. I'll probably give them some kind of inherent resistance to energy weapons, which obviously only comes into play later in the game and makes them harder to deal with relative to other races. Depending on how we implement psionics these guys could be weak against psionic attacks. Wraiths / Androns - these appear later in the game and are paired with Androns and Gun Drones. These guys are the most competent alien combatants, with high firing accuracy and reflexes, and Androns are resistant to kinetic weapons. However once you have energy weapons the combo becomes a bit less deadly. Mantids / Reapers - I think we'll pair the Reapers with the Mantids, who are little spider-dudes. The Reapers are obviously extremely dangerous at melee range, whereas the Mantids use ranged weapons too. They're not tough but they are small units so they are harder to hit than normal, and are reasonably effective shooteres. I think in practice these guys will end up being fairly easy to fight, but there's an extra layer of danger any time Reapers are involved in a mission so it'll probably balance out. Roughly speaking the Wraiths and Mantids start appearing when Corvettes and Fighters started appearing in X1. In the late game tougher Elite variants of each of the aliens start appearing. Hopefully that gives you some kind of vague framework to work within?

So all the UFOs that I've seen so far (with the exception of the harvester) are weird blocky things. Someone please tell me this isn't the final art design and they'll look as good as the ones from the first game.

The original Xenonauts lived up to the original XCOM and surpassed it notably in a superior air combat section and better art direction while preserving the best parts of the ground combat and discarding the chaff. I had hoped that Xenonauts 2 would surpass it even further, especially visually, in one of the biggest selling points was the new 3D game engine. What was already a beautifully realized game, I thought backing it would have resulted in something of a refinement rather than steps backwards and now I regret trusting them to stick to their original vision and instead give into a few noisy individuals. Instead we're treated to generic tetris-looking 'ships' rendered as alien storage units landing on earth. While you may have wanted UFO wall breaching, there's no reason to include it at all. It certainly does not improve the game play, despite what a vocal minority would have us believe. This is coming someone who bought the original game in 2012 when it was still in early access, played about 250+ hours of the original, CE and Xdivision combined. (Which I admit, doesn't make me the most veteran of players, but I think after that period of time I know what I like.) The original was nearly perfect. It was exactly what it needed to be and fit the vision of a spiritual remake of the original game as well as updating it to more modern mechanical and design sensibilities. The way Xenonauts 2 looks is a step backwards from the original, which I find very disappointing. There are things I like about X2, mostly the update to a modern time (I liked the Cold War thing too, but this is a fresh take on it.) and the new engine (Aside from the awful UFOs the rest looks really good. Though, to be a bit nitpicky, I kind of liked the old Ceseans. They weren't Sectoids which was a nice change, though I'm sure more visual distinction won out in the end which I fully appreciate.) Ultimately, I could have probably dealt with the air combat being boring, but what drew me to Xenonauts originally was the aesthetic. Everything worked together so well that even if there were weird LOS bugs or situations where it felt like you got shot through a wall, it wasn't a big deal because the whole experience was so put together. Now it looks like placeholder graphics were left in the game and frankly, it looks jarring and cheap when you see them in any context. Some people perhaps don't think that matters because as long as they get to explode the walls of the alien storage sheds with high explosives, they will be happy. Unfortunately, we went from very impressive looking designs to chasing down and trying to shoot down flying U-haul lots so you can invade them and play a very violent version of Storage Wars with the occupants. Aesthetics are important. That's the reason the Empire from Star Wars is so popular. Can you imagine people thinking the Empire is cool if the ships were just big rubix's cubes or flying tiles? It would probably drag down the appeal of the entire franchise. It would be like playing Doom or something and they replaced the Imps with pixelated Pac Man ghosts. No explanation for it. They're just there and you gotta kill them. Defenders come on and say that their big problem with Doom was the lack of 2D enemies because that's what was in the old game. Frankly, it just looks stupid and I'm finding myself wanting to just go play Phoenix Point or stick with CE and Xdivision. I know at some point a design decision was made to scrap the original UFO designs because you really wanted to accommodate players like stewpidbear who really wanted hull breaching and the simplest way to do that was to make flying plates of alienium brownies. I can tell you though, that there are players like me who thought the way UFOs were done in the original was perfectly fine and frankly think hull breaching is not only an unnecessary mechanic but one that reduces the enjoyment of the experience. What do I mean? When you design a dungeon (which is essentially what a UFO is) you can make decisions about cover layout, entries and exits. Enemy positions. When you allow anyone to just blow any wall down, most of that changes. If you follow a rule in which the layouts make logical sense (I.E. Do not assume your hull wall is worthless because it will be breached) then there will become an optimal entry point to any UFO, which at that point, means that you might as well just make that the assumed door for design and balance. If you chose to gamify it further than you have, then you would make the inside of a UFO equally protective towards any potential entrance, thus invalidating the entire point of breaching the hull. From a design and gameplay perspective, I just don't see any reason to include it if you have to sacrifice style and visual consistency. I want to end this by saying that I know you guys have put a lot of work into this and I do feel a bit bad tearing you down when I know you've spent the last 5 years on this. My reaction is out of love for what Xenonauts is and what Xenonauts 2 could be. I love most of what you've done, but these things, for me are dealbreakers. Who knows, maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, and if so, carry on. Thanks for making the original game and bringing me and many others so much enjoyment.

...I'll be honest, between this and the air combat changes. I want my money back. Being able to blast holes in the UFO isn't worth losing the visual aesthetic that drew me to Xenonauts in the first place.

Im sorry but i have to speak up for the truth. It is not only possible to make make any part in the late X1 system destructible, but also easily so. Option 1. Make predefined holes. This is the easiest example and looks kinda like this: Option 2: You can cut unique UFO art into a per-tile basis. This would require a manual, human eye to define where the art overlaps with which tiles. Then you can piece the art together in the submap editor. In the end this means you can make and define each and every tile to have an undamaged, damaged with hole, or completely blasted away state. This is a very work intensive option, but still only a question of manhours. All of that is so easily achievable that i can already do that in the X1 editor. Give me 2 additional men and 50 manhours and i will make all vanilla UFOs with predefined breach points. Give me 3 men and 300 manhours and i will make every single tile of every vanilla UFO breachable. The only issue i see with this is that when you hover over a UFOhull part only single parts are getting transparent and/or highlighted. This would need some hardcoded support to define UFOhull(s) as one part with a IF(UFOhull part gets highlighted,highlight connected UFOhull part, Nothing), otherwise parts highlighted look a bit "blocky". Im not desputing that the UFO art in X2 is final, and i am fond of completely destructible environments. Just pointing out that a hybrid approach is totally feasible, if decided on early enough. I realise its too late in the development to make a hybrid approach, but if the X2 editor is as powerful as the X1 one, and publicly available, modders can just make unique UFOs themself. Keep it up Chris