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November is nearly over so it's once again time for our monthly dev update. We've had a productive month here overall, making numerous improvements to the game and adding in several new features too. Public Releases: We continued patching V24 this month, eventually releasing V24.7b onto the standard Steam / GOG branches. We got a lot of useful feedback on balancing from the community and I'm actively playtesting V25 at the moment with the intention of releasing it either later this week or some time next week. V25 is going to be our first open beta build, although it'll spend a few days with our existing community beforehand so we can find any critical bugs in it before we begin the open beta. The first (small) wave of invites will probably therefore be going out in mid-December. Alien Abilities: The biggest new feature we implemented this month were the remaining alien racial abilities. These are a bit more "active" compared to the alien powers in the first Xenonauts, with the idea being to pose interesting tactical challenges for the player. I'll give a couple of examples to show you what I mean. The first is the Wraith, which in Xenonauts 1 could teleport around the map (not particularly funny when you were trying to find the last alien in an alien base, etc). Now they instead have an ability called Cloaking Field, which reduces Accuracy by -2 for each tile of distance when shooting at a Wraith. However, Cloaking Field is disabled for the remainder of the turn when the Wraith takes damage from any source. The second is the Cyberdrone, which is a late-game alien unit which has heavy frontal armour and rotates in the direction of any sound - gunshots, footsteps, explosions, etc. Using multiple soldiers (or just throwing grenades behind it) allow you to expose the weaker rear armour and can make it easier to kill. Hopefully this illustrates what we're trying to achieve - basically to make the player think more closely about where to position their soldiers and what attacks or equipment to use. While these abilities still require quite a lot more testing and polishing, once we have them working properly the gameplay will hopefully be richer and the aliens more memorable. Soldier Equipment: In V24 soldiers have an equipment slot called the "special" slot (also known as the "undersuit" slot). This is basically an additional item slot where you can carry one item that gives the soldier a particular bonus - e.g. extra armour plates to boost survivability, a tactical visor to boost Accuracy, a mind shield to boost defence against psionics, etc. As this system hasn't added as many interesting choices to the game as I'd have liked, I've spent this month updating the soldier inventory. Soldiers now have a Primary weapon, a Secondary weapon, and a single 5x5 "vest" grid which contains all the additional items they want to carry into battle (ammo, grenades, extra weapons, etc). Importantly, all the items that previously went in the special slot are now 2x2 items that fit into the vest grid like any other item. I've been playtesting this over the past few days and I think it's a really fun change. The backpack wasn't really being used that much before, but now vest space (and the carrying capacity of the soldier) are much more important, even at the start of the game. Is it worth giving up that spare ammo magazine and two grenades for +5 Accuracy? It all depends on how you want to set up your soldiers, and it's a system I'm looking forward to discussing and balancing further during the open beta. General Development Progress: Other than my work on the two systems mentioned above, most of my time this month has been spent discussing the gameplay experience with our community and ironing out various smaller gameplay / usability pain points in the campaign. General feedback on V24 was pretty good but there's clearly quite a few aspects of the game that are interfering with people's enjoyment of it; many of these should be improved in V25. There's been several content updates to the game, too - the Engineering screen has now been re-skinned into our new UI style, the updated Arid biome is now present (with eight entirely new maps), and the dropships have been retextured in the tatical combat. We've also been busy planning out the tutorial and creating the map required for it, and we'll start work implementing that in December. Finally, we've been working on the load times for the game, and have hopefully now fixed the issue where Windows would think the game had frozen and invite you to terminate the process if you had alt+tabbed out while the game was loading. So overall a rather productive month. I'll wrap up this update there, and hopefully we'll be seeing some of you in the open beta during December! If you want to sign up for the open beta, please post in the previous update thread. I'll be DMing people Steam keys via these forums when the open beta starts.

The map variation is something we'll be looking at in Early Access, the goal for the Early Access launch is simply to have enough maps that people can do one or two playthroughs of the campaign without encountering many map repeats. I think we're on track for that (at least if we can get the script that handles it working properly). As to what the solution is to support hardcore players who want to be able to play the game over and over again, I'm not sure. There's several avenues we can explore: Continuing to expand the existing selection of maps and add more variation to the existing areas of randomness within those maps. Giving the map editor to community mappers, assuming we're able to overcome the licensing issues we have with various Unity plugins and suitably seperate it out from the rest of the game. Unfortunately at the moment any mapper would need our entire codebase and a bunch of dev knowledge to use the map editor. Implementing some kind of fallback randomised map, while being aware that the final result is going to look worse than a normal map. The map editor is much more flexible in X2 with regards to data; for instance it already has (and uses) the ability Charon outlined where sub-maps can contain other submaps and so on. Ultimately the results are just a factor of how much time people are willing to put into asset creation and how much you're willing to compromise the end product to generate randomness. Sure, XCOM2 has randomly generated maps but there's a reason their maps are all either wilderness maps or unfamiliar sci-fi cities where the player has far less feeling for what looks and feels "right". And while you can rotate maps and so forth to add more variation, all our maps are designed to have clear routes which ensure your sight lines are blocked and means you have to split up your team as you come out of the dropship (e.g. a block of trees or a building placed in front of the dropship ramp, etc). A rotated map wouldn't necessarily have this, so might be less interesting to play if you could just keep all your soldiers bunched or clear large areas of the map just by looking in that direction straight out of the dropship. Anyway, yeah, I suspect we'll end up introducing more randomisation in Early Access - but I do think you'll end up with worse maps as a result, so I'll be wanting to keep them seperated from the normal maps so that only the heavy users end up seeing them.

Hello everyone - time for our monthly update. This month we've been working hard on the tactical demo we put out for Steam's Tacticon event earlier this month (still available on our Steam page for anyone that wants to play it), and we're now concentrating on finally getting Build V24 out. If all goes to plan that will be arriving towards the end of next week. A lot of this month has been spent on testing, bugfixing and polishing, so most of the progress this month is on improvements that were already underway. Grenades in particular have continued to sap a lot of our time as we keep encountering all sorts of weird edge cases with them where the arcs go wrong or don't make sense (somewhat to be expected when you try and put a curved arc onto an abstract tile grid) but I think we're nearly there now. The main changes are: The Soldiers screen on the strategy layer has now been reskinned in the final UI screen. The Research screen comes next. We've finished the tiles for the Xenonaut Base biome, and these now need to have their destruction effects added. We're finishing up a few loose ends on the Jungle, Farm and Dockyard biomes at the moment and then we'll move onto the last two biomes that need work, the Arid and the Soviet Town. I've written another 10 or so research reports. Lots of small improvements to the ground combat that aren't technically bugfixes - for example, we've updated the fire paths so miss shots fly off up into the sky much less often, which makes grenade launchers and the MARS rocket launcher much more useful. As for our Early Access plans, they're still unchanged. We're planning for a EA release in the first quarter of 2023 with February roughly pencilled in as the date. Our goal is to have the entire basic campaign playable from start to finish by this date, although there is likely to still be a few rough edges (some research projects not having artwork, perhaps difficulty settings not enabled, etc) in the game at this point. Anway, I'm in the process of playtesting V24 now and it seems like we're on track for a release next week. There's not really much more to say beyond that; it's been almost five months since our last public release so hopefully everyone will see a big improvement!

Surprisingly, I have to agree with Solver on this one. Nothing is more fun killing than knowing exactly what the map is going to be like, and with that you dont really need to pay attention anymore, and that lessens the fun. During the development process of X-Division we took on what needed work the most, and for maps it was the terror missions. Because we added so much aliens the relatively small terror maps felt more cramped than usual. One of the things the team did was create different leveled versions of the same building. Eg: Additionally we simply alternated the vanilla layout. That was a very easy copy and paste job, as we simply copied one level as textdata and pasted it one level higher. Given that terror missions are quite hard, the added variety felt like a good reward for taking on a difficult mission. Keep in mind though that we also forbid the aliens from starting inside of a building, vanilla does not contain any spawn points on higher levels, and the more aggressive AI meant that the player never really had to search for the aliens (thus we also removed the reveal after 20 turns mechanic, and later added it with 40 turns back in again). However we could do better. All of this is based on illunaks contribution of allowing submaps to load other submaps. This technical aspect alone makes a lot possible. Want to make an asset which contains all other boxes ? We can do that. Want to make another asset that loads said box mix with 20% possibility ? Just put and add 2 of the box mix as a file, and 8 empty ones. I am familiar with all the map packs and how they work (mostly) and its not an understatement to say that without the lovely added chaotic and unpredictable maps X-Division would have never come to be. Before people would add additional unit content if no map variety would have been present the gameplay loop would have quickly burned out. Nothings more fun killing than "Been there, done that, seen everything". Imagine playing 200 hours of X-Division on the vanilla maps only, and you will see how much core the mapping scene is to the modding community. Unfortunately, Illunaks contributions came way too late. By the time the functionality was added, all the other maps had already been written, and no map content which utilises this system has been published today. The mapmakers moved on, and thats just that. It came around that that somebody actually implemented this system, and improved on other aspects of vanilla maps too, focusing on the battleship map. Here is showcase of how that could look like: More images of actual implemented variations can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bY-FRNoOYGcEpiQ4ILPaWGlFoagedOtU/view?usp=share_link Here i talk roughly 2 hours about proper game design and explain the ins and outs of the system specifically for maps. And the presented idea visualised in a CAD: This was all done with the functionality that XCE and Illunak provided and is already possible in X1. Now this shouldnt be an argument because it is possible in X1 it should be possible in X2, just showing that the concept removed from the implementation works. Put to the test the procedural generation of battleship maps increased the loading time by 50%. That sounds long, but if you realise you will play at least an hour on such a map its usually worth it. However as Solver once noted, the increased loading time fundamentally shows that something wrong happens in that system, and it should really not take more than 300 ms between a procedurally and non procedurally map generated. Performance is still a factor, and the faster a map loads the happier the players are, as you break immersion less with lower loading times. However, the system will have to be build with procedurally generated content in mind, otherwise you will just end up with scaling issues like in X1. I strongly advise follwoing points: Hire somebody that actually cares about procedurally generated maps. Whether you like it or not, randomised maps are THE factor for the longevity of a game, and a healthy modding scene. Just take a look at Wacraft 3, the public map editor kept the game alive until the game company literally killed its own modding scene, and spawned entirely new genres, like DOTA. Some programmers just really dont like to do procedurally generated maps, others do. If you cant do it yourself, hire somebody who cares for randomised maps. You will have the highest return on gains on this. Make a public map editor available on day 1. Before anything else can happen for a game, there need to be maps. That means before any other modding can happen, you need the possibility to increase the map variety by the community. Just like Illunaks technical achievements were unmatched, as unmatched was the lack of actual modders who used it. By September 2015 the community scene mostly moved on to other things. So that people feel attracted to the vanilla game, and the modding scene, you need a public map editor. The more map variety there is on day 1, and/or the possibility to make their own, the longer you will attract players. The longer you attract players, the higher the chance for them to buy the next game, the higher the chance they really like your content, and the higher the chance they will start to add to the modding community. Because people WILL move on, the question of it is just "when". Providing a bigger variety increases the time window people spend on your creative content, and therefore increase the time window you can paint yourself in a positive light. All of this is a statement about the biggest bang for the buck that the IP can get, not necessarily how possible it is to achieve it. I have not been filled in about the details of the legal issues for a public map editor, or the situation GI is in. But again i have to stress that the least amount of effort is required to implement the system I presented. The modularity of the system is fully accessible, how much effort the map creator spends on any particular asset is a free choice, assets can be reused on other maps ( additional to the "one map, different biomes" idea), and the gain of the system is exponential. By creating only 36 small submaps you can create 5 figure variations of meaningful and good looking maps. Sincerely, Charon PS: I had to chuckle at @Komandos post again, he put it, as other people would say "most expertly", in very few words. PPS: I do love handcrafted maps, but as Solver said, simply turning an asset in all 4 directions can provide immense value, with little to no effort. As a matter of fact most 4x variations i produced are the same asset rotated in 4 directions.

I played V24 to V24.6. Wasn't able to get to the time limit but after day 200 I was definitely playing on the same map, like the lumber yard, for the third time in the campaign. The maps are great. But I'm pretty sure I've seen all of them, at least on some biomes, there are a few maps I am very familiar with by now and I haven't even been able to get to the endgame yet.

You can't laugh endlessly at the same joke. A silly, but new joke is more interesting to listeners than a good, but old joke (a joke heard many times). It's the same with maps. In old and repetitive maps, there is nothing new and unexpected for the player (there is no intrigue).

This is a personal design choice of course but I really disagree with this one. Map variety (the lack thereof) was one of the biggest issues in X1 as originally released. It's a major issue in X2 now, even though more maps will surely come. But even now in X2 (and I haven't played that much), I know what the entire map is like on turn 1. Oh, terror mission and I walk out in front of a gas station? Okay, that's the one with a restaurant on the next block and the roof of the grocery store that offers great firing lines. Woods map with one car in front and a workshop to the right of the dropship? That's the lumber yard map, trains up in the corner provide good cover and another workshop building on the opposite end is tricky to clear. X1 was the same initially, I knew the farm and industrial maps like the back of my hand. The problem with hand-crafted maps is that they take a lot of time to create and you need many to get the replay value up. Xcom-style games are very replayable but that replayability requires map variety. And it's not easily addressed by adding another two maps per biome, you need an extra dozen maps per biome to make any difference. To me, the possibility of "every building is an office" sounds great! Why couldn't I have one fight in a dense office tower district? I would consider the solution that X:CE adopted. In X:CE, there are the base game maps, the wonderful community-created static maps, but also random (actually procedural) maps. The key being, random maps are only picked when there are no other maps to choose from, there's also a repeat-tracking system (it's actually a bit probabilistic IIRC but that's details). With that, map repetition is not a thing in X:CE, you're very unlikely to encounter any repeats within a single campaign. Procedural forest/desert/arctic maps work wonderfully. Yes, the procedural maps can suffer from illogical placement in urban areas and it's visible with examples like a gas station with no entrance as you mention. But I find that to be a far, far lesser violation of my immersion than heading to the third terror mission in the same city block, where I blow up the same gas station again before turning to aliens in the same diner as last time. By the way, Firaxis learned this as well. Their first Xcom had static maps, which may have had a minimal degree of randomization with how cover was placed. That was consistently pointed out as one of the game's main weaknesses. Their Xcom 2 went for procedural generation, and that was very well received despite the occasional weird placement of stuff.