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It's now the end of October and time for our regular Xenonauts 2 development update. Here's what the development team has been busy with this month! Milestone 2: Our main focus this month has been Milestone 2, which is undergoing testing on the Experimental branches. This is now feature complete - we're concentrating on bugfixes and balance changes while we wait for a few more maps / art assets / research texts to be completed. We're expecting to be able to release it onto the default Steam / GOG branches a couple of weeks from now, about halfway through November. Milestone 2 contains a lot of updates, including several new types of tactical mission, a new UFO type, and some significant changes to the early part of the campaign to expand the role of the Cleaners (there's more details about this in our previous development update). Air Combat Rebalance: One thing worth mentioning in more detail is our rework of the air combat. We've implemented a more freeform equipment system for Xenonaut aircraft and then rebalanced the air combat itself so it rewards skillfully maneuvering your aircraft in a similar way to the original Xenonauts, while also trying to remove a few of the more abusable tactics (e.g. it's no longer possible to continually use evasive roll to circle-strafe around an enemy). This means the overall balancing pass has touched almost every part of air combat. We've tried to create distinct identities for all the different types of weapons you can fit on your interceptors, make the different UFOs pose different challenges to the player, and added some new UFO weapons and aircraft equipment to increase variety. Of course, many people prefer to simply autoresolve the air combat - and this is one of the ongoing balance issues we're aware of in Milestone 2. Making the game playable for people who only use autoresolve has led to the air combat being a little too easy for people who use only manual autoresolve, so we're going to be working to fix that over the next week or two. AI Improvements: We've also started upgrading the AI this month. We begun by focusing on the civilian AI, as they currently don't behave in a very realistic way - as MANY players have noticed! I'm not sure if we'll have a patch ready for Milestone 2, but if not then we should have noticeable improvements in place for Milestone 3. Additionally, many of the issues we've found with the civilian AI were caused by problems with the general AI model - which means fixing them will make the aliens a bit smarter too! Loading Times & Unity Upgrade: Another thing we've been actively working on is improving loading times, with the eventual goal of reducing load times by roughly 50%. The good news is that we're making steady progress here, but the bad news is that players are unlikely to see any improvements until Milestone 3. This month we experimented with stripping some further data out of our saved game format and found this sped up loading times by 25%-30% on our current (very outdated) version of Unity. However, when we tested this change in a more modern version of Unity, we found something interesting: load times were sped up by 25%-30% even if we disabled our change. It turns out recent versions of Unity have optimised that part of their loading process already. As upgrading Unity will also bring a lot of other improvements to the game (e.g. better performance, proper support for borderless window mode, etc), we're planning to do that as part of our plans for Milestone 3. In the meantime, we're working on multithreading as a way to deliver the remaining ~25% loading time reduction. Conclusion: Although there's plenty of smaller things I could talk about, I'll end things here. I think we've had a productive month overall, and personally I've particularly enjoyed seeing progress towards fixing some of the largest remaining problems raised by players at launch (slow loading times, bad civilian AI, the air combat needing more work). As always, thanks for reading - I'll write another post next month!

Just finished my test run on the version 2.08B. Here my observations during the 450 days. Overal the game feels easier, especially the air war, which felt very easy (almost too easy) until interceptors arrived. Economy wise, the lower costs for starting a base and reduced costs of aircraft allow to build up relatively quickly, but the higher upkeep cost limit the expansion and coverage of rhe globe. I was able to build 3 main bases (with fighters and drophips) in the northern hemisphere and 3 radar only bases in the southern, before the funding became negative around day 440. I believe, that the funding in the later stage should not go into negative, but rather stop, as the player in that stage can fund his operations by himself easily. There could be a new building avalable perhaps - Alien containment, to store alive and dead aliens. The base stores are getting full pretty fast if you have to stack up all the dead alien bodies to perform the corpse analyses. The alien containment unit could be also a secondary goal for the aliens during base attack, where they would try to free the captives ans escort them back to hangar or to arm them to make the attack stronger. The pattern in which the UFOs appear on the globe seems to be random. Aside of the supply missions to alien bases and retribution missions, most of the UFOs just seem to fly around, not even causing much damage (a few airliners destroyed, some damage on the ground). Out of 75 UFOs I encountered, the panic levels never got over 30 (tested on soldier diff). Last UFO appeared around day 300. Start of the game: Atlas base is in Africa. The extraction of the soldiers/survivors from the ATLAS base attack was in Canada. I was wondering, how 3 unequipped soldiers got so far...? The mission would make sense closer to Africa. The Air war - UFO nerf the initial UFO is supposed to be an easy oponent, and it is. To my surprise though, an Angel interceptor can now wreck a flight of 3 mimics at once, the scout has been an adversary not to be taken lightly for the Angel, now even with escort it does not stand a chance. Destroyer, if attacked cleverly comes down pretty easily as well. Even later combos like destroyer+mimic and destroyer+fighter fall victim to Angels as well. After the larger UFO arrive and you do have a phantom or two or combination of an Angel an a Phantom, you cannot be stopped, abductor can be taken straight on without any tactics.Abductor also comes with no sort of escort at all. The only worthy adversary are the 3 Interceptors popping out every now and then after about day 200. Weight system on the fighters: While Angel can have a load of 10, which allows for a solid loadout with 2 missiles and a cannon or a lance, the Phantom has 13, which would be plenty to carry 4 missiles in 4 hardpoints, but no. There are limitations to what is allowed to be carried, either 2 cannons/lances or a combination of a lance, 2 missiles and armour. so in the end you end up with almost the same loadouts for both fighter types, the only diff is the extra armour. There are multiple options there as well of course. Ground combat: the HEVY seesms to be useless tactically still, as the damage output is ridiculously low at 25 only. stun gun being available from the start feels good, so you have a relatively effective weapon to stun enemies. The armour values could be slightly higher by the warden armour. The rebreather was more logical to be helmet mount, than being put to the backpack imo. Research: might be just me, but I thought, that phantoms come after researching alenium power. In this playthrough I saw it popping out after UFO hull plating research. But I might be mistaken after which research it comes. Nothing that important, but it sucked for a while, as my first phantom was build around day 150 only. Lost base: If you loose a base to UFO attack and want to build it again, the game does not allow to build the new one in the same location, as if the base was still there. Assume that is a bug. It would be a nice touch, if the game actually offered you to rebuild that base in the same location for less money for example. The latest update 2.08C breaks the previous saves it seems. Thats about it. Good work devs, keep it up. Looking forward to see more content.