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My ambition to play a campaign all the way through the end has probably been thwarted by the aliens deploying savegame-corrupting technology, but I do have a few more comments on gameplay. The late game needs an upgrade to medical centers that increases healing speed further. As your soldiers level up, they get more HP so there's a scaling effect to their wounds and, correspondingly, recovery times. Late-game soldiers routinely require over a month to recover after a hit, which is a bit too long. Air combat balance is essentially broken. The only right choice is to equip all planes with the best torpedoes you can build. They have a long range and hit hard, so the strategy is to hit UFOs with torpedoes and take them down in one go, while staying out of their weapons range. With the long rearm/refuel times, you may not have the time for a second sortie so that makes torpedoes even more important. A couple cannons are useful to keep around in case of Fighters but even that's optional. And they cost too much anyway, a Laser Cannon for a plane is 250k. The MARS laser cannon (or whatever it's called) was a letdown. I've come to really like the MARS after recent bug fixes, it's a nice mobile unit that I can use to scout ahead, draw reaction fire and do some damage. The rocket launcher is nice, I can blow an entire area up to remove cover and expose enemies while damaging them (the rocket is super-powerful in base defence missions, I fire a 3-rocket salvo at a cluster of 5-6 sebillians in a hangar and it was glorious). But the laser upgrade was, contrary to expectation, not explosive. It just fires a single high-damage bolt, much like a sniper rifle, leaving the MARS without its terrain-destroying ability. It felt like a downgrade. Speaking of destruction, is the building collapse mechanism not implemented yet? I've shot a couple buildings up very badly but they did not collapse. The morale system is currently irrelevant. I think I had one instance of a wounder soldier panicking and skipping the next turn. There's never any need to look at morale bars and I mostly forget the system exists. I'm not really sure what its goal is anyway, morale provides a good way for things to spiral out of control if you take too many casualties, but is that the only purpose of the system? Related to morale (probably) is Mind War. I have no idea what it does once again. On some later missions vs psionic aliens, the only effect I noticed was having endless messages every turn, "X is under mind war" or "X resisted mind war". In some ancient build a couple years ago Mind War had a tooltip, now it doesn't, and I failed to notice any effect whatsoever. Not sure if it's bugged, not implemented or not balanced. Very strangely, Mantids and Reapers were absent from my game except for a base attack at one point where a Reaper paid me a visit with a few Mantids. Other than that, I saw neither Reapers nor Mantids in any crash sites, landing sites or terror missions. Could be a coincidence but I played enough missions that it seems statistically unlikely. There's a silly exploit with base defences and power. You don't need enough generators to power your defence batteries, you can just power something else down and power the batteries once you see a UFO heading for the base.

Hi everyone - time for the monthly progress update. The big news this month has been the release of V24, which is now coming to the end of its testing period and should be released onto the default Steam branches in the next week or two (rather than being on the Experimental branches). General Progress: V24 seems to have been received well by our community. It's the first time the community has seen large chunks of our new UI and some of our improved combat environments, and the game has generally been tightened up in a lot of ways. It's now feeling increasingly solid - although there's still a lot of balancing and polishing left to do to make it a genuinely good strategy game that really rewards the time you put into it! However, as the first public release we've put out in about five months, V24 had some stability issues and we've spent much of the month fixing them up. Although this is obviously very important work, it means we've not really been working on big new features on the coding side of things. However here's some of the things we managed to get in anyway: The Research screen has now been skinned in the final UI style. The Engineering screen is next and I've spent quite a bit of time this month with our UI artist trying to finalise the design for that screen. We're pretty close to that being done. Most of the tiles for the Arid biome for the tactical combat are now largely done, so the only remaining work on the environment art is the remainder of the Soviet Town biome and then a final visual pass on the dropships and UFOs. I'm working on the level design for the Arid biome at the moment so hopefully it'll be in V25. I've written another ~8 research projects or so. We've added a system so that the sell value of items can gradually decline as you sell more and more of them. I'm going to be using this as soft pressure to discourage players from grinding too many crash sites (doing so makes the game very repetitive), as the returns will eventually fall below the Airstrike / Bounty value of the crashsite. We're working on smoothing the loading process so the game doesn't keep throwing the annoying "This game isn't responding" messages in Windows if you are playing in a window. We're planning to start work on V25 relatively soon after V24 is released onto the standard Steam branches. The main feature I'm hoping to include will be the racial abilities for the various types of alien in the tactical combat, but beyond that we'll just be focusing on content and general balancing / polish. Playtest / Open Beta: As we want to expand the number of people playing the game and giving feedback / reporting bugs in preparation for our Early Access launch next year, we're going to be launching our Playtest branches when we release V25. These Playtest branches will be using the Steam Playtest function, which allows us to give users access to a free temporary version of Xenonauts 2 that will be deleted once the game enters Early Access. This isn't going to be a proper open beta, as we'll only be inviting a few hundred people to join the Playtest with each update. We want a mix of fresh players and experienced players giving feedback on each update (as they tend to look for different things), and we know a lot of players will only want to play once and give some quick impressions / feedback and then come back and play properly when the game is done. Unfortunately this means it's unlikely everyone who applies will get into the Playtest, as we've had quite a lot of signups already. However the picking is done randomly by Steam so if you're signed up you've got as much chance as anyone else - and if you're not signed up already, I've reenabled the signup button for the next two weeks. Just click the green button on the Xenonauts 2 Steam store page! (I will however be making special exceptions for forum regulars. If you're someone who posts here semi-often and you'd like access to the Playtest, just post in this thread and I'll send you a Steam key when we do the first batch.) That's everything from me until next month - thanks for reading! Just to be clear - if you want to get into the playtest, please just post something here saying that you're interested. Please don't post any of your personal details up, as I'll be DMing you a Steam key here on the forums when the time comes!

Quick slots (pockets) are just a way to visualize the basic tactical functions of soldiers on the main control screen. If there are a lot of tactical functions: (throwing a grenade, first aid kit treatment, hand-to-hand combat, machine gun shooting, dragging objects) then there will be a lot of icons (on the main control screen) to quickly control these functions. For example, all the main functions of a magician are visualized here, with the help of which he interacts with the surrounding world and other characters. I also don't like how the system of "fast functions" is implemented. I don't like that the left-hand slot is used for this, as if a soldier is holding two objects at the same time. Ideally: everything that a soldier has "on his belt" and in his hands; everything that can be used on himself or on others should be added to the "quick control functions (slots)". The belt width should be increased. Using grenades, reloading weapons: already added to the quick control functions. (Back in X1).

At the end of the game, soldiers have no problem with personal strength. At the end of the game, the problem is that the soldiers are not able to use all their strength effectively, as there are not enough pockets for equipment that they could take with them. Some types of tactics are impossible to apply, since soldiers must wear more of the necessary equipment to use them. A strong soldier has no advantage over a weak soldier, since the number of items they can take with them is limited not by strength, but by pockets (slots). This is very noticeable in the final of the game, when the strength of the soldiers reaches the limit values.

It was removed because Chris didn't think it was needed after the secondary slot was added, so you would be holding the pistol in your hand instead of extra slots on your belt. And being able to hold a secondary weapon for free and have another one on your belt sounds a little bit overkill imo. I don't think that adding extra battle harnesses is very necessary. It's doubtful that a soldier will make much use of it because of strength problems, and it feels like it it overcomplicating the soldier screen too much. I'd probably fill those extra slots with more grenades anyways, so I definitely would not be using it to bring more pistols, stun buttons, combat knifes, or whatever.

Ref Komandos: this screen should change as you develop better battle harness, if this could be upgraded as you learn more about the tech from the aliens. The lay out really does need to be improved as you advance in the game, and also the weights of some objects need to be adjusted, so they are more like modern equipment, plus they should be lighter with the new materials. There should be a holster and a combat knife at each end of the belt, or a place for the stun baton, and the weapon should be able to be slung over the shoulder for easy availability.with a sling. There seams to be enough room on the screen for this, as it looks, but I know there will be some coding problems, but that is what programmers do!!!