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Hello everyone - with August now finished it's time for me to write the monthly update. I know it's been a long time since our last release but we've been hard at work on Closed Beta V21 and we're planning to release it this week (hopefully in the next few days). The biggest new feature in V21 is that we've implemented the final visual style for the Main Menu / Game Settings screen, and all the related sub-panels (Settings, Load Game, Save Game, etc). We've been working on this new UI style for quite some time now, and it's nice to finally be able to put it in the game - but there's also been a lot of time an effort spent on improving the usability and general polish of the screen too. This includes everything from adding support for mass-deletion of save games to adding new UI sounds. Overall, it's a much more slick and stylish experience and it should make a much better first impression when you first boot up the game. We'll continue to roll this new UI style out to other parts of the game as development continues. We've also worked on a number of things that haven't really made it into V21, but will be arriving in V22. We've updated the early game so the war against the aliens starts a couple of months into the game, and you begin the game fighting the infiltrator faction called the Cleaners who are intent on suppressing knowledge of the alien invasion. Because the Cleaners are spread across the planet and have numerical superiority over the Xenonauts, this allows us to have mission objectives that don't make sense when you are fighting the aliens. For example, wave survival maps, VIP escort / assassination missions, extraction missions, objective capture, etc. Some of these should arrive in V22 and make the early game a bit more varied and exciting! More work has also been done on the visual side of things. The updated Xenonaut models aren't quite ready to go in the game yet but should be fine for V22, and we're now working on modelling up a series of hairstyles for them so your units are more varied and easily recognisable. Work also continues on the tactical combat environments. The final visual pass on the Western Town tiles is now mostly complete (one of the biggest environments due to the number of different buildings in it) and we'll put them in V22, after which we'll move onto some of the other environments that need some visual upgrades. There's also been some work on wall destructibility, as once a tile is visually finished we can do the final destructibility setup on it and then put it in the game as a finished asset. The wall "frill" system is designed to ensure destroyed walls have a natural-looking irregular edge (rather than the perfectly straight-edged hole you get if you just remove the wall). However, we also don't want these "frills" floating in the air if there's no adjacent wall for them to attach to, so we needed to do some work detecting whether there was a suitable wall on either side and only placing the frills if so. Anyway, the important thing is that our destruction system should now be finished, which allows us to start doing the final destruction states on all of our finished assets. We also implemented a couple of smaller tasks this month too - difficulty settings are now complete, and there's a number of options we have to customise difficulty. However I've not done this yet because I've not balanced the full campaign yet and I think tweaking difficulty levels needs to be done once I'm happy with the "standard" difficulty. The other new system is directional sound, which is intended mostly to allow us to play sounds when certain things are on screen (fire noises, the noise of engines running on vehicles, etc). Again, this is just useful for making the game feel a bit more alive. Finally, we've made a start on the soldier dialogue / barks system. This is a simple system that generates (non-interactive) text dialogue from your soldiers based on things that happen on the battlefield. As a basic example, a soldier might say "I'm hit!" if they are shot by an alien. We're hoping to implement that in its basic form next month with some test dialogue to see if it's a good addition to the game (there's potential for it to be annoying if we get it wrong), and we'll spend some time making it as varied and natural as possible. I'm hopeful that this system is going to make the combat feel a lot more reactive to your actions, but we won't know for certain until we've had a chance to test it! That's probably enough for this update now, as I need to get back to work on V21. Thanks for reading!

X-Division has you covered on melee and 'knocking off their feet' weapons (and not only SMGs that have better suppression, but also a new "SHOCK" mechanism that reduces their next turn TU). The last point you bring is already in Xenonauts. It's called "Armour".

Shields were actually extremely viable in X1 and CE made them even better. Though it might be good to add more variety to weapons that shield carrier could use. Like melee weapons for bashing and slashing aliens in close quarters, some one handed plasma pistol designed to knock aliens off their feet (hello PEPS from Deus Ex) or maybe a grenade satchel which will allow you to trade secondary weapon slot for additional space designed to carry grenades. Actually shields could get more variety and customisation as well. Like let us mount a floodlight on its front side, so shield guy could light the area infront of him during the night missions, additional plating/coating for resistances, spikes for melee damage etc. There could be a smaller light shield which would allow trooper to use a rifle or shotgun at the cost of less protection and covering - they will not be able to cover soldier behind them and enemy fire will still have a chance to hit them in unprotected leg or head + reduced accuracy because of the shield attached to your assisting arm.

Well, I found the shields very useful in xenonauts 1 (at least until the point was reached where everyone had the best armor). The concept of a secondary weapon did not exist in the same way then, however there was one 3x2 area on the belt where either a pistol or a stun-baton would fit. You would actually have to drag the shield out of and weapon into the soldiers hands in inventory, which conts some TU, but still running up close and then stunning the alien or finishing him with the pistol was a working tactic, mainly because it was nearly a guaranteed hit. (btw. I am wondering why meelee weapons have just 40 % hit chance now?). At the beginning aliens were unarmored, so two or three pistol shots would actually kill at least the weak race, later you would develop better pistols (laser, plasma, mag-pistol), so pistols were a valid option for a great part of the game. Still yes, choosing a shield instead of a weapon would make the soldier more inefficient. But the main advantage of the shield came from the fact that it is not only protecting the soldier him/herself, but the soldier behind, too. This made it extremely useful in tight situations in bases or larger UFOs where you at some needed to open a door to some corridor with multiple aliens that would immediately reaction-fire and kill soldiers without shields. The shield-bearers would go first, then duck and the rest of the squad can shoot over their head. And paraxodically, in open areas with virtually no cover it was useful, too, so you could hide a second soldier behind the shield and keep moving, instead of crawling from one of the rare covers to the next. And Generally this was a good advantage as you would never want to find yourself in a situation where a soldier runs around a corner and spots an alien with the last TU and noone being able to help. If this was a shield-barer it would not really matter and you still had one more turn to correct the mistake. And giving the shield-bearer a grenade-heavy loadout was always an option in later stages of the game as the strength of everyone grew, however this option was taken out as a design-decision in Xenonauts 2 because it produced more fiddeling with loadouts (you could save loadouts, but always had to remove stuff if the soldier was just not strong enough after loading it). Maybe it is a little too early in the game development to discuss precise balancing issues, however I don't think that making the overall efficiency of an individual shield-bearer up-to-par with a normal soldier is a good idea. Then you could just equip the whole squad with shields. The advantage should come from working with other soldiers, ie. a shield soldier with 2 normal soldiers behind should be more efficient in storming tight spots as 3 normal soldiers.

First of all, this is obviously a spoiler. So if you want to find out the techtree yourself, don't read further. When I looked in the net for a tech tree all I found was the wiki entry over here: http://xenonauts.wikia.com/wiki/Tech_Trees But without already knowing all the technologies this overview doesn't really help too much. I was missing a structure and clear indication about what triggers it and what I get for it. So I sat down and made my own diagram, which you can find over here: http://ndnw.net/no-hp-stuff/Research.png I hope that it's of use to some folks. The main challenge, and the most time-consuming aspect was to make it fit into one screen. ^^ Things to mention: I did not play the very last steps myself yet, and dragged some information from the research.xml which comes with the game. But at some stuff I wasn't sure if they are in the game at all, and therefore left them out. e.g. Researches.ScuttlerDisassembly, as I could not find an entry in the Xenopedia. It's also the only Autopsy/Disassembly which actually gives a damage boost. Guess this is leftover from old data. Also the singularity stuff didn't make too much sense to me. The research for the singularity requires to start: the research for the singularity. Maybe that's an easteregg, but I don't see how you can reach that in the game normally. ^^ Anyways, all relevant info should be in this tech tree. The Legend can be found on the right. All UFOs are at the top. All Corpses are at the bottom. All Interrogations are nearly at the bottom. And the time runs from left to right, meaning on the right you find the highest techs (roughly, Base upgrades didn't fit further left). The Red Numers in the corner represent the effort value needed to research the item. Have fun.