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Just played X2 for the first time (bought the Kickstarter way back when). In general, I loved it, which is no surprise since X1 is one of my all time favs. I like the new mission types, graphics, music, QOL fixes, being able to redo air combat manually, and the main menu screen looks great on my ultrawide. Fingers crossed for mods adding map packs & custom portraits. BALANCE I played an honestman Veteran run since I hadn't touched X1/Xcom since 2019. I lost ~1 soldier/mission in the first month, felt a little easy... and then for the next 7 months the game was exceedingly easy, ground & air, and I regretted not choosing the top difficulty. Then about day 240, there was a massive difficulty spike. The aliens were one-shotting my guys w/ their new weapons (and perhaps better aim cuz they were elites?). Then I got Vanguard armor and the game became stupid easy again. So I'd say X2 would benefit from beefing up the aliens in the early & mid-game. Make the aliens tougher so there's a real jump after fighting cleaners. And maybe smooth out the armor curve, and differentiate Xenonaut weapon tiers more (e.g. so accelerated becomes borderline useless and you NEED lasers). I'd also love if the orbital & endgame missions could be ramped up; in the orbital data raid I finished the objective with 3 turns to spare and camped my soldiers around the teleporter pads and farmed reflexes/kills until I ran out of ammo. I understand some players might rush into these missions to prevent Buenos Aires from being flattened by space bugs... can there be a balancing mechanic where the longer you delay those missions, the harder they become? Or the better your gear (e.g. running mostly guardian & stalker vs. a full squad of vanguard) the harder it is? At the very least, the amount of aliens that teleport in should grow ever greater & faster to ratchet up the tension and make it feel like a desperate underdog bid. ENEMIES The AI's real dumb. Storming UFOs was dicey in X1/X-Division cuz aliens would be behind cover or hiding in corners on overwatch. And sometimes as I was getting my team in position an alien would charge out and lob a grenade. In X2 they seem to position haphazardly in the open. I only experienced two alien grenades the whole campaign. There's visual enemy variety... but in combat they mostly feel like different flavor sprites of the same thing cuz they're so easy to kill. In X-Division and/or X1:CE (it's been 6+ years so it blurs together), when armored Sebillians or Androns were introduced, they represented big difficulty spikes cuz the Xenonauts' current guns were borderline useless against them. Also they were a lot tougher so the Sebillian regeneration was actually meaningful, and the Androns felt like terminators cuz they were near-impervious to one weapon type. Also maybe they had more TU so their ability to walk through walls and disrupt your cover/overwatch plans happened more? Mantid symbiote gun is cool - but they don't shoot nearly enough of them. Give us a zerg rush! Mentarch floating ability has no effect on gameplay because maps aren't vertical enough and very rarely have non-traversable surfaces (water, flames). And they're generally in UFOs anyway so they can't fly over things. Sectons don't seem to stick together enough/come in big enough packs to make use of their triangulation. I don't think that ability is strong enough/observable enough anyway. Wraith cloaking is... okay, but too easy to overwhelm with bullets. Maybe better if it lasted for the entire rest of the turn so you gotta do whatever it takes to one-shot them, and if that fails, use grenades or overwatch. Servitor could be great... but aliens are usually so spread out that it doesn't do its job as a support healer or suppressor Cyberdrone is very cool except it's front armor isn't strong enough, it's too easy to kill with bullets to the face. Psyon mind control ability is way too nerfed. It means they're already close by and usu in weapon sights. Everytime they mind controlled a soldier (happened maybe 4x the whole campaign), I could one-shot them in the same turn. Also means mind shield module is pointless. Reapers are not scary. Maybe it was a fluke, but I didn't see reapers until like month 8, when I saw both reapers & reaper alphas for the first time on a terror mission. By then my soldiers & their guns could handle them with ease. MAPS Not enough verticality in the maps. Why no multi-story buildings? Also, I miss vents. They added some additional tactical options in X1's alien bases. Alien base design was interesting the first time - a potential nightmare with its 1000 doors. But there weren't enough aliens, and they were too dumb, to realize the nightmare. The second base assault, I found it annoying because it took foreeeever to clear, hunting down aliens that were aimlessly wandering through dozens of little rooms. Btw it would be cool if on both base & UFO assaults, once you breach the UFO/base HQ, all the remaining aliens beeline to help defend. UFO interior layout is okay... but I missed the layouts in X1, which felt less like random assortments of rooms. The Corvette you'd enter this little central square room with 3 doors and it was 3 Card Monte from Hell figuring out which ones had an overwatched alien waiting on the other side and how to position for that. The Carrier had this massive ground floor bay/hanger that made a lot of sense for its ship design. The landing ship had this big open interior - you'd enter on the ground floor and aliens would rain down shots from behind railings on the second floor balcony/landing. Devious! MISC If I could have my druthers, I would stretch the new mission types and appearance of new aliens into the midgame. Currently after the first two months, there are no more new aliens until late game reapers & eternals, and only the classic mission types (UFO/terror/alien base) till the orbital. Could you let cleaner missions, or cleaner-style missions (sabotage/ambush/escort VIP/etc) continue? And delay the appearance of some aliens (e.g. Psyon/Wraith/Cyberdrone)? Maybe the aliens retaliate after the orbital missions by sending all their remaining Cleaners at you in a kamikaze base assault? Because another issue is that I experienced one base assault early-ish, and then never again, cuz it was too easy to shoot everything down. One CTD - randomly, when equipping a Warden armor on a female soldier on the intermediate dropship A visual glitch - when a mentarch died from bleeding on its turn, its body stayed levitating When the sloped walls in alien bases are destroyed, it looks like I should be able to stand in their spaces but I can't. I'd think either make them indestructible or let us stand in those spaces and use cover properly. Typo in the last sentence of UOO-1 Bridge Assault text - "that WE have no choice" Maybe add info to the air combat tool tip for weapons - about needing to have a UFO selected by a plane for its missiles to fire. Took me months in-game to figure that one out (didn't matter though cuz missiles are too weak to be a factor, at least on Veteran). Lol at one of the soldier names being Putt Anna, I guess that must be a personalized one. Okay, that's kind of a lot! But don't get me wrong - I had a BLAST playing the game, it's really well done, I will recommend it to others and I will definitely be playing a Commander Ironman campaign next year.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Bugfixes: Fixed a lot of crashes related to our increased error-detection in 6.27.0 Experimental being too strong. This should hopefully fix all the crashes in parts of the game that were working fine in the previous build. Fixed a genuine crash related to constructing base buildings that could occur in some rare circumstances.

Use this guide to switch back to the stable branch.