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Closed Beta Build V25 has now been released on Steam and GOG. Note that this build is only available on our Experimental branch so you'll need to switch over to get this update (instructions on how to do that here). This is a long changelog because I've made a lot of balance changes based upon the community feedback from V24 and my own playthroughs, so don't feel like you need to read it all. If you want to comment on the balance of V25 then please give us your thoughts in this dedicated balancing thread. Apologies for the late arrival of this build, we had some issues with our build server this week! General: Alien Abilities: we've implemented a number of new alien species abilities, which we're hoping will make fighting them a bit more interesting. These haven't been properly playtested yet and the AI doesn't necessarily know how to use them properly yet either. The new abilities are: Sectons (Psionic Triangulation): if another non-suppressed Secton is within 8 tiles of this secton, it will gain +100 Accuracy. Signified by glowing purple eyes, and can be removed by killing or suppressing the other Secton. Psyons (Mesmerise): if a unit in the vision cone of a non-suppressed Psyon attacks it and does not score a hit, that unit must take a morale check. If it passes it takes 0-50 morale damage (depending on Bravery). If it fails, that unit is Mind Controlled for one turn. Sebillian (Poor Eyesight): these units gain -2 Accuracy for each tile of range when shooting. Wraith (Active Camo): when shooting at a Wraith, the shooter loses -2 Accuracy for each tile of range. This effect is cancelled for the remainder of the turn as soon as the Wraith takes damage, and it has no effect on blast weapons like grenades. Currently there's no visual effect for this due to a bug, but it should be there in the next hotfix. Servitor (Auto-Heal): if an alien within 5 tiles of the Servitor takes damage and survives, the Servitor will immediately heal it for 50% of the damage taken. Cyberdrone (Acoustic Sensors): this unit is equipped with a frontal shield which grants extra armour against frontal attacks, and it will automatically rotate to face any nearby sound - footsteps, grenade explosions, gunshots, etc. Soldier Inventory / Modules: as the Backpack of soldiers usually went unused, we have merged together the Belt, Backpack and Undersuit slot into a single 5x5 equipment grid called the Tactical Vest. The modules that previously went in the Undersuit slot (e.g. extra armour, items that boost accuracy, etc) are now "proper" items that go in the vest too, and some grenades / ammo are now larger than before. Therefore you can now equip multiple stat-boosting items at once if the soldier is strong enough to carry them, but physical space in the inventory is now also a constraint. Sell Price Reduction: we now have support for the sale price of items to go down as you sell more of them, which means you get diminishing returns from grinding crashsites for money. Items cannot drop 25% of their original price, and if you sell a stack of items then all of them are sold at the higher price - so it's worth selling big stacks of items if you can! Updated Engineering Screen UI: this screen has been given a facelift. The functionality hasn't changed, but it looks better and should be easier to understand and use. Arid Biome: our reworked Arid biome is now in the game, along with three new Raid / Abduction maps, three small UFO crash sites and two Medium crashsites. I personally really like it, and I think it's gone from our ugliest biome to one of the best. Install Size: we've reduced the size of the installed game from 5.7gb to 4.6gb. Usability: General - the game should no longer appear to lock up while loading, which could cause Windows to try to terminate the process. This work has also led to somewhat increased loading speeds, and we've stripped out some unused assets to reduce the install size a bit. If you see pink textures anywhere let us know, as it means we've removed some assets we shouldn't have! Strategy - your current Research Speed bonus is shown on each Base screen, and the total value is shown on the Research screen. Strategy - the Soldier Equip screen item headers are now "Weapons", "Equipment" and "Modules" rather than Primary / Secondary / Belt. Strategy - if you position a particular soldier slot in a particular place in the dropship (e.g. soldier number 3 being by the door) then they will remain in place, even if you change the soldier assigned to slot number 3 in the dropship. Strategy - airborne dropships and the soldiers in them are now faded out on the Aircraft / Soldier Equip screen, making it obvious why you cannot interact with them Tactical - the weapons / fire modes / grenade tiles in the tactical UI have been visually reworked so it's easier to understand the different states. Tactical - weapon images are now faded out if you don't have enough TU to use any of their fire modes. Tactical - grenades that do not inflict damage (e.g. Flashbangs, Smoke Grenades) now display their blast radius correctly. Tactical - the camera is now locked during the alien turn / overwatch. Balance Changes - Strategy: Difficulty settings now do something, so please let us know what setting you are playing on when you give feedback! These are the first batch of difficulty changes, and more will be added for V26. Starting funds (Recruit: $3m / Soldier: $2.5m / Veteran: $2m / Commander: $2m) Base soldier survival chance (Recruit: 30% / Soldier: 20% / Veteran: 10% / Commander: 0%) Monthly funding from funding regions (Recruit: 1.2x / Soldier: 1.1x / Veteran: 1x / Commander: 1x) The sell price reduction system is intended to discourage the player from grinding too many crash sites for cash, which is a boring and repetive playstyle that some players felt obligated to do in Xenonauts 1 (the game is balanced around people fighting two of most types of UFO Crash Site). However if you need to fight extra battles to train soldiers up etc, you still can - you just won't get loads of monetary rewards for doing so. The game end timer has been pushed back 45 days, from day 320 to day 365. Research and Engineering project times have generally been decreased, and the rewards for recruiting new scientists and engineers are effectively twice what they were before now you start with half as many of each. Base: All structures are now faster to build. Your starting base now only starts with one Lab and Workshop, and 5 Scientists, 5 Engineers and 10 Soldiers. Monthly funding reduced to account for lower wage bills. Living Quarters now have a capacity of 12 (+2 Adjacency). Invasion: In general the first couple of months have been slowed down a little, and the Destroyer UFO appears a bit earlier. UFOs now last twice as long on the Geoscape, and most have a slightly higher chance of inflicting relations damage per hour. This means UFOs should inflict greater damage unless shot down. The first mission is now against Cleaners, the first UFO wave contains Sectons, and Psyons are introduced in the third mission (an Abduction mission). Airstrike value for bigger UFOs needs to increase with their size. Scouts remain at $100,000 and the values range up to $500,000 for a Battleship. Research: Gauss Weapons have been reintroduced into the game Removed Alenium from the Scout UFO Laser upgrade project is now available immediately after researching Laser weapons Base defence turrets now each fire a single shot that has a 100% chance of hitting, but has a damage range. They can therefore now be relied upon to defend a base against attack (provided you build enough of them that the minimum damage is enough to shoot down current tier UFOs) Increased basic soldier healing rate from 1.2hp/day to 1.5hp/day, and Medical Room healing rate increased from 1.8 hp/day to 2.5hp/day Balance Changes - Air Combat: Refuel and rearm times on interceptors have been significantly reduced, but UFOs now auto-repair damage while flying around the map (the Scout regenerates 15 HP per hour and larger UFOs regenerate proportionally more). This removes the artificially long rearm / refuel times while hopefully still making it impractical to cheese air combat encounters by repeatedly attacking the same UFO with volleys of torpedoes. All aircraft weapons cost $200k to manufacture. Torpedoes reduced in range from 8 down to 7. Missiles reduced in range from 6 down to 5.5. Cannons still have range 3. Aircraft retreat now takes 5 seconds (previously 3 seconds). Aircraft Laser Cannon removed, Aircraft Gauss Cannon added instead. This unlocks off Heavy Gauss weapons and does higher damage than the Laser Cannon did. UFO destroyer rear cannon now has 2 Armour Destruction, as previously it didn't actually inflict any damage due to having low damage and 0 armour destruction. Balance Changes - Tactical: Alien abilities The starting Skyhawk (Chinook) dropship can now only carry 9 soldiers rather than 10. I tested it at 8 but found 9 felt better (and also means each new dropship offers 1/3 more troops than its predecessor). We have merged together the Belt, Backpack and Undersuit slot into a single 5x5 equipment grid called the Tactical Vest. The modules that previously went in the Undersuit slot (e.g. extra armour, items that boost accuracy, etc) are now "proper" items that go in the vest too, and some grenades / ammo are now larger than before. Therefore you can now equip multiple stat-boosting items at once if the soldier is strong enough to carry them, but physical space in the inventory is now also a constraint. General: Fixed the AI ignoring Xenonaut soldiers when alien units encounter them while moving. Standard battlefield cover now offers 40% blocking chance rather than 30%. Battlefield terrain now has lower HP so can be more easily destroyed by gunfire. Units are now stunned if the accumulated stun damage exceeds current HP. Units no longer make a death noise if stunned. Explosions no longer demolish an extra square of walls around the edges of their exploision (notably this makes Demolition Grenades less effective) Suppression is now affected by armour again. Whatever the % of damage from the weapon would be stopped by the armour of the target is also used to reduce suppression. In practice this means enemies like Servitors (aka Gun Drones) become less of a problem as you get better armour. TU cost of reloading weapons increased by 50% Reduced suppression on alien weapons from 25 per shot to 15 per shot. Set a 20 degree minimum throw arc which limits the distance you can throw grenades indoors, or inside alien bases etc. Updated alien rifles to cost 51% for an aimed shot (up from 48%), so aliens can't hit you with an aimed shot on the first turn. Further changes to stop missed shots flying upwards. Missions: Updated the alien base command room map to be less unfair. Removed 6 extra Sentry Gun turrets that were incorrectly spawning in the Cleaner Base mission due to an error Heavy doors like the blast doors in the Xenonaut / Cleaner base are now crushable, otherwise the MARS cannot navigate them On Abduction missions, each recovered Abduction tube now grants 5 Alloys and 3 Alenium (formerly just 3 Alloys) MARS: MARS / ARES now cost $250k to build, and $125k to rebuild (up from $100k/$50k). Construction time increased. You can now shoot over the MARS from adjacent tiles, like any crouched unit. Vehicle Autorifle now has range 20 (up from 12) Increased armour destruction on the MARS rocket launcher from 5 to 10 Vehicles now gain their range bonus more gradually over the full range of their weapon (like infantry weapons do), rather than the old system of it only counting within 5 tiles of the target. Weapons: Shotguns have been granted a small accuracy bonus Boosted accuracy on LMG fire modes (from 28/30 up to 40), reduced accuracy bonus for not moving from 20 down to 10. Weight reduced from 30 to 24. Stun Baton and Stun Gun now have 999 Armour Penetration. Previously Stun Baton had 9 and Stun Gun had 0 (probably why the Stun Baton was so much more effective than the Stun Gun). Laser weapon fire modes now have the same basic TU cost / accuracy as their ballistic equivalents (they still have more accuracy overall due to their Easy Aiming special rule) Laser weapons have had their damage reduced by about 15%, but the upgraded Laser weapons get +15% damage (so the upgraded versions do the original damage values) Accelerated weapons now grant +4 damage compared to their ballistic predecessors (previously +2 damage). Increased their weight by 25%. Medikits now cost 25TU to use, and Advanced Medikits need 12TU. The upgrade project cost reduced in cost down to $100k (from $250k) and to 12 Sebillian Corpses (from 20) Assault Shield now offers 35 Armour instead of 25 Armour Aliens: Cleaner Sentry Gun armour reduced from 25 to 20, fixed a bug preventing it going below 10 Armour Cleaner Sentry Gun accuracy reduced from 60 to 50 Cleaner Sentry Gun reflexes reduced from 50 to 35 Updated the Sebillians to have 10 more HP Sebillians are now equipped with rifles rather than LMGs, which should make them more of a threat Bugfixes: MARS no longer goes into the Transit state for 3 days after being built Fixed melee attacks being possible between height levels Fixed some bugs in the map selection code that meant certain missions wouldn't spawn in regions that were nearing 100 Panic Fixed civilians sometimes spawning inside the walls of UFOs Fixed the audio sound of a burning flare being played from the point where the soldier threw it, rather than where it landed. Reduced the volume on flares. Suppression is no longer applied through floors As always, please let us know if you encounter any bugs by posting them up on the Bug Reporting subforums, as we'll be releasing hotfixes to correct any major issues you encounter.